[SaaS Series] Unlock the Secrets of Successful Membership Sites With Micah Mitchell of Memberium

Micah Mitchell is Co-founder of Memberium, a software solution that empowers entrepreneurs and leaders to build automated membership sites deeply integrated with their CRMs. With over a decade of experience in membership site strategy, he has worked with high-profile clients helping them strategize and succeed with website models. A pioneer in the membership space, Micah continues to innovate and share his insights on creating engaging and profitable online communities. He is passionate about improving user experience through gamification, community-building, and seamless content protection.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:41] Micah Mitchell discusses how Memberium serves various user groups
• [05:48] The evolution of Memberium and the features it’s incorporated over the years
• [09:47] Gamification techniques used within Memberium-powered sites for user engagement
• [14:50] How communities and social learning are becoming integral parts of membership sites
• [16:06] The shift from offline to online business models facilitated by Memberium
• [20:30] Micah discusses the four stages of building a successful membership site
• [26:56] Customer retention and the value of over-the-top support
• [35:13] How to structure beneficial and impactful partnerships to grow a SaaS business
• [47:52] How the company structure at Memberium operates and the benefits of a lean team
• [52:50] Memberium’s customer success stories
• [56:00] Micah shares his favorite tools and software for managing a SaaS company and personal productivity

In this episode…

Are you searching for a seamless way to transform your expertise or content into a lucrative online venture? Do you ever wonder how some companies manage to create online communities that not only engage users, but also drive consistent revenue? Could there be well-guarded formulas for constructing a prosperous membership platform that transcends from a modest user base to encompass thousands of members?

Membership sites and marketing automation expert Micah Mitchell explores the transformative journey of offering membership sites, taking Memberium from its inception to a well-known software solution in the industry. He discusses the challenges and successes along the way, including how Memberium approaches product development, customer support, and strategic partnerships. He shares insights into the gamification of online content, the power of community building, and the importance of properly staging business growth when tackling membership models. Moreover, Micah opens up about the unique structure of his partnership with his co-founder, highlighting the benefits and hurdles they’ve encountered as they scaled Memberium to new heights.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Micah Mitchell, Co-founder of Memberium, about building successful and automated membership sites. Micah talks about Memberium and how it serves various user groups, gamification techniques to maximize user engagement, the four stages of building a successful membership site, and tips for structuring beneficial and impactful partnerships to grow a SaaS business.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Micah Mitchell on LinkedIn
• Memberium

Special Mention(s):

• David Bullock on LinkedIn
• ActiveCampaign
• Keap
• LearnDash

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Building a Powerhouse Agency With Dobbin Buck of GetUWired” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Putting the Customer Experience First with Jason VandeBoom Founder of ActiveCampaign” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Memberium is about content protection and experience control.”
• “Even with one-tenth of your members in a VIP program, you can create a highly profitable product.”
• “The community is not just about buying the course, but about interacting with others on the same journey.”
• “Retention is not just customer service, it’s about building something that naturally makes customers want to stay.”
• “Taking online relationships offline can create bonds that elevate your brand’s community and advocacy.”

Action Steps:

1. Start simple: Build a minimum viable product and get feedback from early adopters to help you validate your idea and iterate quickly, addressing initial challenges.
2. Focus on sales: Once you’ve reached at least ten members, concentrate on selling through leveraged channels such as webinars or podcasts until you surpass 100 members.
3. Implement gamification: Integrate elements like progress bars, quizzes, and badges to enhance user engagement.
4. Cultivate a community: Build a sense of togetherness and peer support among members to have a successful membership site.
5. Leverage strategic partnerships: Seek partnerships that align with your business goals and invest in relationships and collaboration to fuel growth.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Micah Mitchell of Memberium and Micah, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. I just want to give a big shout to Dobbin Buck of GetUWired who introduced us. Actually, Micah and I, I think, had dinner, maybe, I don’t know, eight years ago with Kim Walsh Phillips, Sean Buck at the Traffic and Conversion Conference but Dobbin Buck interview was great. He’s really a knowledgeable guy and some interesting thoughts and cultural leadership. Another one. Since this is part of the SAS series, Wade Foster was a good one — co-founder of Zapier. That was a really good episode.

Also Jason VandeBoom, who founded ActiveCampaign, and Micah and Memberium do work on the ActiveCampaign for membership. So we’ll talk a little about that and many more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, we do the accountability, do the strategy and the full execution.

So we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host, so they can create amazing relationships and great content, and then, most importantly, run their business. Now, if it’s an automated membership site on Memberium, maybe they have a little more time than usual, but for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. So I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce Micah Mitchell. He’s co-founder of Memberium. It started back in 2014 they provide the software solution to help you build an automated membership site that is deeply integrated with your CRM. By the way, this is without custom coding or expensive developers. They’ve done work with Tony Robbins, Dean Graciosi, Tyler Garns, Digital Marketer, John Assaraf, probably half the cast, if you’ve seen The Secret, Hay House Publishing and many more. He’s actually trained 1000s of business owners on membership site strategy, and his company really prides itself on over the top support and advanced functionality to help people get stuff done online. They kind of one of your first clients. I don’t know if it’s the first, but John Assaraf, I think going back basically, you could tell the story, but you just said, we’ll move you. And then just did it right. It’s not typical for a software company.

Micah Mitchell  3:24 

Yeah, definitely not. So when we got started, John needed the software really bad. And he’s got 10s of thousands of people coming through there every day. So we, my partner and I, who developed Memberium, the developer, coder, David Bullock, we stayed up all through one night, basically doing a hot swap on the back end of the membership system on a live site, and made it totally seamless, and switched him over. And John, we’ve both known him a long time. He’s a good friend, and so we wanted to do that for him, to help him out, because he was mid-launch and having issues with this other system. But to be honest, it was a little bit like, well, we’d love to have him as a star client.

Jeremy Weisz  4:08 

Well, with that type of thing, there’s always just a pain in switching. And when you take, you just are the easy button for that. It just, why not? You know what I mean. Early on, we’ll just start off with not everyone knows what Memberium is or does. Just talk a little bit about Memberium, and as we’re doing that, I’m going to share my screen. There’s a video piece, if you’re listening to the audio only, and we’re going to check out Micah’s site.

Micah Mitchell  4:41 

Yeah, so Memberium is a plugin for WordPress. WordPress is a website building system, a content management system. So basically you have your content management system or your website, and then you have your CRM, which is where your customer data lives, and Memberium links those two together, so it’s basically able to say, hey, you have paid, therefore you get access to this area of the website, or you haven’t paid, we should try to sell you access to this area of the website. So it’s pretty much membership control, but it’s not like a standalone system. It’s middleware between WordPress websites and a few of the popular CRMs Keap and Active Campaign.

Jeremy Weisz  5:22 

And we’ll talk about some of the use cases you can see here, obviously, course, creators, authors, service, businesses, internal training. Talk about the evolution a little bit, like right now, it’s over a decade old. Talk about the start of it, and then we can walk through a little bit of some of those, the evolution and steps along the way.

Micah Mitchell  5:48 

Yeah, in the beginning, it was kind of funny, because people just needed basic protection, really. You could do fancier things, but it wasn’t like everybody was doing it. You just needed to put your content behind a paywall, be sure that the right people are getting access and the other people weren’t. And then the evolution has kind of been toward more and more community features and then more and more gamification and learning management. So for example, progress bars, check marks, Percent Complete, Completion goals, where you might earn a badge or some points. So the user experience has gotten better in terms of the way they consume content. And instead of just going and finding like a two hour video recording that they’re going to consume, that two hours is broken down into, let’s say, 20 small chunks, right?

And they’re all labeled and chaptered and so people have gone a long way toward taking the content or the ideas that they were delivering and making that user experience gamified. And like I said, the community piece as well, where more and more those groups weren’t just about buying the course, but about interacting with other people who are along the same journey. And kind of where it’s at today is, the game, the content itself, the gamification, the community, and then a lot of people are also deploying it on mobile, right? They’re doing live events, they’re doing coaching, they’re doing online events. And so the membership site becomes this control hub where you’re saying, okay, you got to log in to get to the online event. Even at a live event, you might log in to get the resources for the event and the replays of the events afterward, and so on. So that’s where it’s at today, where people are more wanting to integrate this where, for example, if somebody completes a course and they earn a badge, it prompts them to go celebrate that course completion in the community with other members, to encourage the other members to continue.

Or it prompts them to go put that badge on their website, or their resume or wherever, as kind of word of mouth branding and so on. So that’s kind of where I see it is. It used to be just content protection, and now it’s really about experience control as well as content protection and trying to deliver, I think, from a content perspective, a peer to peer perspective, with community, and then even a coaching perspective, where maybe the leader of the site has some way to either group, coach the people together or individually, on like a VIP basis, coach some of the people who are willing to pay a little more. So, I know that was a mouthful. I hope that’s all right.

Jeremy Weisz  8:20 

That’s perfect. It’s funny. You say that because I join things like that. Like, if it was a digital course or learning, I’ll join also because of the community. Like, oftentimes there’s a Slack community or Facebook community, and sometimes I’m like, great. That content is great. But actually I’m paying you because I would love to be in a like-minded group of people. So for me, that’s like, you’ve heard of like, direct response sometimes the bullets is why people buy just like, some feature, and that for me, just what you said is, I may buy just for that alone.

Micah Mitchell  8:59 

Yeah, definitely. I feel like often the content is great, but the content is only from one perspective or context. And then you go into the community, and you’re like, hey, how are you implementing this thing that we all learn together? And what about you? And they’re like, well, I found it was a little bit too much for me, so I scaled it down this way. And you’re like, oh, that would work perfect for me. So the community is huge.

Jeremy Weisz  9:21 

Talk about gamification. I think many businesses, no matter what business you’re in, it could be online, offline. You can always incorporate different elements of gamification. What have you seen some of the cool things you have a unique perspective. You’ve seen 1000s and 1000s of these. What are some of the cool things people are doing with gamification? You mentioned badges. What are some other things people do to gamify?

Micah Mitchell  9:47 

Yeah, so let me share kind of a little story first of all, that’s kind of funny. So one of my friends, he’s a case study on the site, and kind of an interesting story there with him. But he talks about, for example, how he added gamification. It’s Tyler Garns, and he told people right up front, hey, these points don’t mean anything, there may be no prizes, basically, but people still work for the points. They still wanted to be on the leaderboard, be recognized, maybe for their own sake, maybe for whatever, public recognition. So first of all, there’s something about gamification that’s just a little strange. My kids use the app Duolingo some of the time to learn another language, and it’s so gamified, right? It hooks them. They have streaks. They’re competing against other people.

There’s leaderboards, it’ll be time for bed, and they’ll be like arguing, fighting to get their phone to go do Duolingo because they’re on a streak and they don’t want to mess up their streak. And it’s like, well, how did this app get kids to want to learn a foreign language to that level? Right? And it’s gamification. So in inside content, a good example is digital marketer, who we have with us, where initially they’d been teaching, and just were such experts that they had this library of knowledge. But you know what it’s like to walk into a library, it’s kind of like, wow, it’s kind of overwhelming. And so they took their library of knowledge and turned it into a variety of certifications, and the certification so instead of like, here’s a training on email marketing, here’s a training on paid ads, they said, here’s an email marketing certification, here’s a paid ad certification.

And then later they went further. Here’s a Google Ad certification, a Facebook ad certification. And one, there being a goal to consuming the content of becoming certified is kind of gamifying it, right? There’s something you win. Two along the way for that certification to happen, they are pausing and quizzing and asking questions, making sure the person is understanding what they’re consuming. And then part of the gamification, to me, is even just a simple progress bar. If you’re going through a four video series, every time you complete a video, the percent should jump up, the progress bar should move. Points, maybe you get 10 points because you watch the video, or a bonus 50 points, because you just hit your fifth day in a row, right?

The more people do that stuff, and it’s not hard. Now, it used to be, when I was first being asked to do this. It was custom programming, that stuff. And so people, they really wanted it because they spent money to make it happen. Now it’s actually so easy. It’s almost like, why would you not do that? Systems like LearnDash is one you can check out that Memberium works really well with. I know the founder, he actually sold that company. But anyways…

Jeremy Weisz  12:36 

Who started LearnDash?

Micah Mitchell  12:38 

Justin Fairman. Yeah, they’re cool because they kind of pioneered this online content consumption gamification craze. They were pioneering a lot of the quizzing and stuff like that. They had universities using their software early on, because the online testing capabilities. But I could probably go on and on about it, what I will say is, so there’s the certification is kind of a high level, and you can also just do badges. So you don’t even have to go as far as, hey, let’s do a certification. But you can just have a fun little design made up. And every time they do something, give them a badge of some sort. For those familiar with Khan Academy, it’s another thing that my kids have used over the years, and I remember my oldest, when he first got on it, he just became obsessed with earning these badges and all these different badges, right? And I thought I was gonna have to push him to consume the content.

Jeremy Weisz  13:37 

Like now, he’s graduated from college and he’s 10.

Micah Mitchell  13:39 

I wish. No, not quite, but it was just cool to see, right? And all of us adults are just little kids. So, I’m giving these as examples of little kids to say, if it can get somebody who isn’t normally incentivized to do these things to do them for the sake of a pointless badge, the feeling I get, I guess, that they feel from earning those things. It’s pretty cool. And then one of my friends, Mike Weiss, talks about the social viral loop, where, when you get a badge, have that auto shared with other people who are at the same part in the course, right? Because if I’m, let’s say, taking a course on how to build out a perfect webinar. And I’m constantly hearing about how my peers are like, hey, I just did my first webinar. It was awesome. I just finished my slides. I just recorded my draft, whatever it is, that definitely helps the other members see that it’s possible. If they can do it, I can do it, it kind of makes…

Jeremy Weisz  14:44 

It kind of incorporates gamification and the content and community all in one.

Micah Mitchell  14:50 

Exactly, yeah. And there are some platforms that do this in an all-in-one sense, SaaS, true SaaS platforms, but you give up some control to achieve that. What a lot of people are doing with Memberium, for example, is they want all that, but they want to really finely tune it. They have certain fun little things in their community. Let’s say that they’ve maybe done offline, that they want to move online, and it’s a little quirky. What you can do in person versus now you’re in these technologies that have limits. So Memberium kind of takes those limits away, which is why I think a lot of people move to it. Because I’ll be upfront, it’s not necessarily easy. We’re always trying to make it easier to use, but it just has the functionality they need.

Jeremy Weisz  15:34 

What are some interesting things Micah, from offline to online, you mentioned some of the things people are doing. I don’t know if you got a big influx, I imagine during the COVID years, when people were forced to go online, but some unique things that you’ve seen, or not unique, what people are doing to add value to their clients community, from offline to online.

Micah Mitchell  16:06 

Yeah, there are so many people right who, when COVID happened, were forced to make that switch or go out of business. One of the case studies on there, my friend John from London, he talks about that, they were events only. They were just selling events. And they were selling the events from the previous event, right? They have an event of some sort. They sell those people into the next event, plus some others and whatnot. So what I’m saying is the event was his delivery mechanism. It was his sales mechanism. It was like his whole business, and they pivoted that into zoom. And I guess, lucky for them, their audience was also on zoom with nowhere to go.

And honestly, a lot of people had somewhat smooth transitions when they didn’t over complicate it, when they just said, okay, we were doing that. Let’s move it to zoom and try as hard as we can to do the same thing, because I think there was a lot of uncertainty at the time. And so if they could provide continuity, people were into that. There’s, I guess, in his case, he stands out to me because, like I said, he basically didn’t have anything online. He had, like, an order-taking website, and now he’s got this robust membership site, and they hardly do any events anymore. So it’s not like when events became available again, he had to go back offline. He’s like, why would I.

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