Full Episode Transcript

Hey, this is Mike, if you don't know me, I am the CTO and co founder of MemberVault. And I wanted to pop on to give you an update. And I wanted to start doing this weekly, this is kind of a new thing for me to do, we do in our Facebook group all the time. But I'd like to start doing it like this as well. And to be able to give a little behind the scenes on how we work and how the technology actually works. And like how we plan this stuff out.

So it was really interesting. There's a couple other like little refinements that we did accounts that had a lot of users in it, the pagination on the bottom would get kind of crazy. So where it says like, it only shows you like 50 users per page when you go to your users view. And if you had a lot of users, there could be quite a few pages. So we cleaned that up as well. And this is just kind of the interesting and fun thing I think about MemberVault where I've been coding MemberVault for about five years now. And they're still constantly these really cool things that we can get in and we can refine, and we can like keep building on and keep making better.

And I think that's, you know, a nice view on like, how we do things behind the scenes, we're just always like tweaking and innovating and adjusting stuff. And you know, this week was a lot of those types of changes where you might not even notice it, but it's just the quality of life improvement.

So this week, we had we pushed up, it's a little bit of a slow week, and I'll explain why. But this week, we pushed up brand new uploader. So used to be when you had a big file or something like that big image or big attachment, big lesson file, you'd go ahead and you would select it and click Add. And it would take possibly a long time, depending on how fast your internet connection was.

And you didn't really know how much time you had left the wait there. So what we did is we we replaced all of the uploaders with these nice fancy ones that show you the progress and stuff like that and give you a preview of what you're about to upload. So we think that's going to be really nice, too. Users who go on to their MemberVault admin from their phone, which I know a lot of us do, we'll notice that there are some nice improvements there as well. So used to not really be able to see the full navigation, when you slid out the nav, the top activity part used to be hidden, that's been fixed.

And then when you go to your products list, it's almost always way too long, horizontally, and so it overflows and things will get cut off and stuff like that. So it still overflows we can't fix, we can't make your phone bigger. But we did make it so that you can scroll horizontally and still see all of that content. So those are just some tweaks that happened. Now, what we were supposed to upload this week was a big update to actions, that is just taking a little bit longer than we had anticipated. And so instead of trying to push it out the door and potentially have bugs, we're keeping it we're holding it back for another week, just for some more internal testing and tweaking to it.

And so I just you know how we like to work, we try not to do too big of a roadmap and promise too much by certain exact times. But we really do like release stuff when it's ready. Not too soon. Not too late, though. And so that is rolling over to this week. So actions, if you don't know actions, actions is inside of MemberVault is a way that you can do pretty much anything. They're really simple, but really powerful. It's basically like mini automations, that run inside of your MemberVault account.

Now, recently, last week, we pushed an update, where you could name your different payment methods. And so this is another one of those interesting behind the scenes thing that happened at number four, where we never know how people are going to use things until we put it out there. So we always had the ability for you to have multiple payment options for a product.

So let's say you had a product and you say, Alright, it's, you know, $100, or you can do four payments of $20. Or, you know, whatever. Or even if you serve multiple audiences in currency, you can say, hey, you can offer in US dollars and Canadian dollars or British pounds or whatever you want. And so we always have that ability, but we assumed we always assumed that that was they were just going to be payment options for the same product, right for the same thing.

What we found is that users were using payment options to basically sell different tiers of that product. So they said okay, you can buy course, for you know, 100 bucks, you can buy the course plus coaching and my, you know, private podcast or whatever for, you know, $300. And so they had different versions of it. And because of that people wanted to be able to label Okay, well what payment option is which. So we never intended for that. So that was a really interesting, cool thing that we saw how our users were using MemberVault.

And again, we could have said, well, we never intended for payment options to be used like that, and don't do it. But instead, we thought, well, that's kind of cool. All right, let's lean into that. And so last week, we released an update, where you could finally label those payment options. So you can say, you know, course, only course plus coaching, whatever. And you can really lean into that. Now, the second half of that is great.

Now that you can label and you can sell different things. Well, how do you get that signal up to your email? Like, how do you onboard them differently, right? So if somebody buys just the course, or if they buy the course, plus coaching or something like that, right, the different payment options, you need to be able to discern that from your email onboarding, you need to be able to say, Hey, we need to send them, you know, XY and Z information because they bought this. And that is where actions comes in.

And up until now, actions, you can just say, hey, if a user gets added to a product, you know, tag them or, you know, do whatever, in actions, right, it's usually tagged, usually sending a tag up to your email service. And so what we're doing now is we're extending our actions, we're doing a big overhaul of actions where now instead of just user added to product as the trigger, now you you'll say user added the product, and there'll be a second drop down that says, how are they added.

And that's going to open up a whole host of cool things that you can do. Because now you can say, hey, I want this tag, to go up to my Active Campaign, or ConvertKit, or MailChimp or whatever, when somebody buys this payment option, and then you can have a different tag for a different payment option. You can even have different tagging and onboarding for people that you manually add. So maybe, you know, free products, or ones that they you know, you just manually add it in the back end. So this is going to open up a lot of new doors. And it's going to be really, really cool.

While we're in actions, this is kind of a fun thing that we do is whenever we're working on an area of MemberVault, like an area of the application, we always look at like "Okay, what else have we wanted to do here?." And we always, this is why the feature requests are so important. Because if you ever have an idea for MemberVault, you're like, I wish I could do X, Y, and Z, go to help, and then request a feature. And that we actually take all those very seriously. And we go ahead and we like line them up.

Now there's a lot of them, right. And we can't guarantee any of them we're going to be done or at a certain time. But we can look at like, Okay, what other actions type things have we been wanting to do, this is an opportunity to do those as well. So inside of that, now, we're going to have these new user added triggers, which is going to be really exciting. But we're also going to add in the ability to tag people or whatever you want to do with actions, right?

You can trigger actions based on hot leads. So right now you can say, Okay, this user viewed, viewed a product they didn't own that's like a, just a repeatable, warm lead type of thing. But in the dashboard, you can see hot leads. And that's when people view multiple products, you know, view a product, they don't own multiple times over multiple days, it's a really strong signal that somebody is really interested in your product. And so that's a good time to reach out and to nurture that lead. Right.

So this goes into a lot of the sales stuff that we talked about. And so but up until now, you haven't been able to actually trigger an action based off a hot lead. So now you're going to be able to, which is really cool. So you're going to be able to say, hey, I want to tag any user that views this product. And you will be able to select how many times right? Say if they look at it three times, tagged them because I want to get them into a different email. Or you can say, from actions, you can say, hey, if a user is looking at my coaching package, like three or more times, I want to get an email notification that I should reach out to that person.

You can do all that now you know, with actions will you be will be able to this week. And so that's going to be really, really cool. And then finally, we're going to add the ability to call out to a web hook. This is going to be a little techie. This is something that we've been kind of playing with in the back end for a while.

This is really going to come in handy for people that don't use one of the standard integrations so if you're using like flow desk, I forget with some of the other popular like non natively supported ones. Right now the path to that is Zapier, and that's great. Zapier works great, we will always have and maintain our Zapier application. However, a lot of people either don't like Zapier, or find Zapier too expensive or want to do something more custom than what Zapier can offer.

And so we're giving those people on escape hatch, so they can actually use some other thing. And I know there's another, there's a number of Zapier competitors out there now, too. And so this is going to let you use a lot of those things. So, you know, we've talked about the user added and hot leads are triggers for an action, but then the actual action that you take, right on the other side of the equation is like, what do you do when somebody does whatever, we're going to allow you to call out to a web hook. So don't worry, we'll have documentation around it. And you can see like, you know, who it's for, who it's not for, and stuff like that.

So just really exciting stuff and a little background on like, how we do this, right? So I know a lot of people probably wonder why put in a feature requests, like what happens after that. And, and so this, this is kind of what happens, right? It goes into, you know, the big idea board and gets organized and sorted. And believe it or not, the feature that you request often is requested by other people as well. And so it kind of gets weighted up. And and then you know, the opportunity comes along like this, and we go ahead and do it.

The other thing that we're working on this week, and I don't know if it's going to be live this week, but it is something that we're actively working on is more with integrations. And our first new integration that we're working on is one with Hello Audio. So I know this is something that people have been excited about for a while, you know, Lindsay and Derek Padilla. They, you know, they have this Hello audio, which is private podcasting feeds. And it's just it's it's a really cool service. And, you know, they use MemberVault. And they've been wanting to like marry the two for a while. And so we've been hatching out an idea of what this could look like for months now. And now we're finally actually building it. So this is really, really cool.

So there's going to be a new section inside your MemberVault I've been called integrations. And the hope is that we can add a lot more different kinds of integrations, native integrations, so you don't have to mess with Zapier if you don't want to or to do different stuff. So I don't have all of the details yet. But in this Hello audio integration, you will be able to connect your Hello Audio account and be able to show your podcast feed.

So let's say you have a course. And then you have a podcast feed that goes along with that course, you'll be able to show them showcase those two things together right inside your MemberVault, which is so nice. You can also be able to add people, Hello Audio is going to be wrapped into actions as well. Right. So this is another action that we're going to be able to add. So if somebody buys, let's say, somebody buys your course, the gold package of your course, which comes with the private podcast feed, we're going to be able to hook into Hello audio and automatically assign.

So let's say somebody buys that gold package, they get the product, of course, but then they also get the Hello audio private feed. And so that will automatically happen in the back end. And so that's just really cool. So exciting stuff on that, again, more details to come. And then yeah, just real quick, like, since this is my first time doing this, too. I wanted to let everyone know kind of how we do dev schedule, right, like, how does this all work?

You know, I always want to know how things work behind the scenes of my favorite tools. Right. And so if you're curious, I mean, this is just something we've been working on the schedule for quite a while. And and we're really happy with where things are right now. So, you know, basically Erin and myself meet. We meet every day, right? But once a week, we have like a big meeting, where we kind of sketch out okay, what are we doing this upcoming week? You know, what kind of features will come the tweaks are, you know, on the plate, and we work on them all week.

And as I'm sure you're, you're aware from Erin, we are parenting as well. Right now I'm hiding in a closet recording this while Erin is downstairs with the kids. And so time can be tough right? Time to actually work on this stuff can be tough. And so and then of course if bugs come up, or if my attention is pulled elsewhere. So actually once a week, right, I do it on Thursday nights, I have what's called my hackathon night. So I put the kids to bed, right. And then I say goodnight to Erin, and then I go into my office. And I kind of have a late night, right?

It's like, where I get, I get myself a, you know, a nice tea or coffee or drinkers, you know, something like that. And, and I'll just go ahead and have a late night of work where it's actually kind of nice, no one's disturbing me. And I can kind of put the finishing touches on things. Now, the idea is that, by the time I get to the hackathon, they, the features that we want to push are kind of half done already, or at least half done. And then I can really finish them up and test them out.

So that's on Thursday night, then on Friday, what I do is I push it to our secret beta site, where we kind of have like, we can test it, I release it to our internal team here, right, so we can test it here on our team. And then with our Certified Partners, we let them know like what's coming down the pipe as well. And everybody can get in there, and they can kind of use it and test it. So we can catch some last minute bugs like that, too. Again, this is on Friday. So Friday and Saturday, people are in there kind of playing with it. And we can kind of give it you know, a look to make sure everything's okay.

And then what we do on Sunday, on Sunday, early afternoon, is when I will go ahead and I will make the push to live. So our reports show that MemberVault usage is the lowest on Sunday. And that's why we do pushes on Sunday, because you know, it's the effect the least amount of people.

Our code pushes are really good, really fast and really seamless. There's almost never any kind of downtime whatsoever. But if you are in the middle of editing something, and there's an update that affects that page, there could be some wonkiness where you need to refresh and you'd be like, Oh, that's weird. That just changed. So we want to reduce the amount of that. So that's why we always do code pushes on Sunday.

And also uniquely how we're set up here, right, is we're such a global distributed team, that Sunday morning slash afternoon here in Seattle, Olympia, Washington, West Coast of the US, is right before Ira, her morning because she's in Malaysia. So it's just kind of an interesting thing, too. That was one of the things that we've tried to figure out like, okay, we want to do a code push when it's slow.

But we also don't want to do a code push and then have no support available. And so that's why we did it like this. So on Sunday, we can push the update, right? And we don't announce it or anything like that. And then, you know, right after that your comes online, and she can go ahead and she can support users if they have questions about that new update. And of course, I always see in the Collaborative, somebody always kind of finds out our update before we announce it.

So we officially announced stuff on Monday. And if you're in the Collaborative, you know, you've seen me, I do my Monday post where I post about, you know, what's happened this past week, and what we're looking forward to all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, that's how we roll.

You know, that's how the development cycle goes here. And so it's really cool. It's a really slick way to do things. And again, if you're ever kind of curious about my wonder what's new, if you go in there, later on Sunday, you might see the update before anybody sees it, or if it's announced, so, you know, if you're one of those people that always wants to see like, the fresh stuff, and you know, something's coming down the pipeline. Check it out on Sunday afternoon. And actually, you'll you'll you might see it in there. And then of course, we always do the update on Monday, where we let everybody know.

So, yeah, that's just a little behind the scenes, how we're doing stuff, what we've done this week, and, and what we're doing this upcoming week. And so yeah, we've just we've got a lot of really exciting things happening. And, you know, just keep those great ideas coming, keep using MemberVault. You know, keep just keep that feedback loop going. Because this is this is great.

I always tell people, we are literally building this together. Like all of us, I don't see it as me or our team is just like in a silo somewhere building this and you all just kind of deal with it. You know, I genuinely look at it as MemberVault as a big, big community project. And we get a lot of input and feedback from you. So stay engaged, stay vocal and really exciting.

So I'll see you back here next week with the next update and we can talk about how the actions update when You know the status of the Hello Audio update and and then what to look forward to next. Alright, thanks a lot.

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• [Transcript] Monday update with Mike - 2/8