Enterprise level membership agency
One Of Only Four Certified Agency Partners In The World
TribePUB was selected as one of the four founding and currently only Memberium Certified Agency Partners. We were selected due to our work with Enterprise Level Clients who have 250k to 1 Million+ contacts in their CRMs.
Memberium is the leading Membership Plugin in the WordPress Ecosystem. There is no comparison to its powerful and robust functionality and integration with some of the top CRMs in the industry.
What Memberium Says About TribePub
Kyle Newton, with TribePub, one of Memerium’s Platinum Agency Partners, shares with you his strategy around combining the business and technical aspects of running a membership site. He has worked with top thought leaders and entrepreneurs such as John Assaraf from NeuroGym in helping them architect their entire business platform (you’ll get a look at that in the video).
His vision for membership sites is astonishingly clear because of his exposure to both huge enterprises and the startups. Kyle started out back in 2000 building websites with custom code. Kyle’s team eventually convinced him that the advanced functionality they were building that required 4 million lines of code could be replaced with WordPress.
In this video, you’ll learn invaluable lessons that will save you thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours if you’re a startup and planning to scale. If you’re already an established business, Kyle has some surprising advice for you too in terms of creating business processes.
- How you can and should use Memberium as the core system (within WordPress) to develop enterprise level platforms
- How Kyle migrated enterprise level clients from complex custom coded systems to a more sustainable WordPress Ecosystem
- The importance of understanding the BIG PICTURE vs just the technical aspect
- An overview of the sophisticated community area created for ultimate influencer & entrepreneur, John Assaraf from NeuroGym
Video Transcript
Micah Mitchell: Hey everybody, it’s Micah Mitchell with Memberium. I have with me Kyle Newton, of TribePub. Kyle is one of our new platinum partners. I’m really excited because he’s got some information to share with us.First of all, Kyle, thank you for being here, hello.
Kyle Newton: It’s great to be here, wonderful to be with you Micah.
Micah Mitchell: You and I had a lengthy conversation the other day and I was blown away just by how broad your knowledge is. Today, for a minute, I think we’re going to be focusing in on some of what you do specifically with Memberium and for people who want a membership site or a course. So, why don’t you just go ahead and introduce yourself, a little bit of a background about you and then dive right into it, if you don’t mind.
Kyle Newton: I’ll certainly do it. Micah, it’s been a lot of fun using Memberium. We’ve been using it for about seven or so years. What I thought I’d do is to share a little bit of a slide deck that I think will be helpful. What I want to make sure is that people not only get to know me, but more importantly, they get value from this presentation. What I was thinking is I would focus on why a Memberium agency partner, like myself, would use Memberium to build enterprise level platforms.I’m going to go through a quick set of slides and we’ll take a look at the benefits of that.
The key takeaway that I'd like for people to have is that they can, and should, use Memberium as a core system within the WordPress ecosystem to develop an enterprise level platform
That’ll make more sense in just a few minutes…what’s interesting about me is that I don’t really come out of the email marketing automation space. I come out of the early development platform space where we were developing platforms way back in the early 2000s. So I come more from what happens when someone arrives on the website. We’ve been developing those enterprise level platforms long before WordPress was around so I had to actually go through the process of transitioning from four and a half million lines of code to a WordPress centric ecosystem with Memberium really at the core of that. So, it gives me a unique experience in using Memberium because I’ve been doing this in a lot of different ways. There’s really three types of people I think that would be watching this video and that would get value out of it
- It’s the Memberium developer. I’ve got Memberium developers working for me, I’m a Memberium developer. Albeit, the guys who work for me are a little bit more technical savvy… Nevertheless, it’s the average developer that’s developing either for startups themselves or for clients all the way up to agency levels.
- It would be the startup and growth user that’s using Memberium. Whether they’re just starting out, starting their coaching or learning site.
- Then there would be the enterprise user. That would be an organization or business that’s already using Memberium at scale and they may be interested in learning a little bit more about how they can really expand into enterprise level.
Really, there's three outcomes of what I want to share today
For the Memberium developer, hopefully this video will stimulate them to take their use of Memberium to the next level. I think that’s one of the things that I’ve found in the Memberium community is that people don’t really take it to its extent. There’s a lot under the hood that people really don’t use and maybe even don’t visualize what can be done with Memberium.
To the startup growth user, hopefully this will help answer some questions whether Memberium is a right fit for them and whether they want to expand their business using Memberium and using WordPress and the whole ecosystem to facilitate their growth.
Then to the enterprise user, as these enterprise users come to me, they’re always nervous like, ‘do you think WordPress will handle this?’ ‘do you think Memberium will handle this?’ ‘can we really scale up?’ Hopefully it’ll answer some of those questions for them.
I think it’s important for us to find what is an enterprise level platform, especially when we’re talking about the WordPress ecosystem. A WordPress powered enterprise level platform is one which the software empowers and drives every aspect and department of the business from one unified hub. In short, the platform for all intents and purpose, is the business. That’s the business we’re in, we’re in the business of actually automating the business. Not just automating the marketing but automating the business as well.What separates an enterprise platform from a standard running platform are two things.
- It’s the level of architecture that’s needed to build out the full ecosystem. We’re going to look at that in just a few minutes. Memberium is at the core of that. When you think about enterprise level architecture that membership experience is key. If you don’t have a strong membership experience that can scale and expand over time everything’s going to fail.
- It’s just literally the number of contacts and members that are using the platforms but then that also corresponds with how many people are actually in the organization running the platform itself.
As an example, a typical platform with 100k to 1 million contacts is what I define as an enterprise level platform
They’ve got a successful monetization model that’s attached to whatever they’re selling and they typically have 10 or 20 different systems running inside that WordPress ecosystem with Memberium at the core of that. They typically have five to fifty people that are working in the business from marketing, to customer service, to support.
So when you think about an enterprise level platform, you’re not just working with one guy who’s got a course or one coach who wants to scale up, you’re you’re thinking departmentally, you’re thinking business systems, you’re thinking biz dev, and you’re thinking 20 or 30 core components that goes into running an online business. When you look at your WordPress ecosystem from that lens that’s really what begins to separate an enterprise level platform, is the complexity that goes into it. Obviously we want to minimize complexity but complexity is really key.
Why consider enterprise level and when to consider it? There’s people watching this video like, ‘I’m not enterprise level, this really isn’t for me’ but here’s the point, I have never had a startup customer come to me and say, ‘well we hope to grow to 100 members.’ ‘Or, we hope to grow to a thousand members.’ They all are like, ‘we want to be a million members within 60 days from now.’ Most of them are ready to go from zero to a million. So, when do you consider it? Most every client needs to consider that. The beautiful thing is, they lay a foundation for enterprise level early on and then everything else goes from there.
Let’s jump in a little bit about my company, TribePub. The name means something to me and we’re all about helping organizations grow, monetize, and serve their community. When we talk about ‘tribe’ we’re talking about the tribe leader. That’s the person that’s leading it up. That can be anybody from organizations, to brands, to authors, to coaches, to consultants, to speakers, creatives, influencers, anyone can be a tribe leader. Then when we talk about a pub we’re talking about a platform unified business. That’s the key, is how do you create a complete WordPress Memberium at the core that brings all of these dispersed business processes into one unified operating system. into one dashboard where your clients can actually bring their business into one place.
I'm going to share why I'm qualified in talking about enterprise level platforms
- I’ve been in this for now 20 plus years
- I’ve had over 100,000 paying members, those are actually subscriptions that I’ve had to my own SaaS over the years
- Hundreds of thousands if not millions of paying members for my clients. We’ve had over five million contacts in our various CRMS that we’ve used over the years for our clients,
- 260 plus organizations
- We’ve built four and a half million lines of code to really build our own custom CMS and CRMs. We’ll unpack that in just a minute.
My whole foray into building membership sites started way back in year 2000, us I.T guys were a little bit worried about y2k back in the day. At the turn of the millennial is when it started. It started in a really unusual way, it started in a living room with a group of people. The reason my career started in the living room is because I got pulled into a family member’s presentation of a network marketing company. I’d been a pastor, I’d been a golf pro, everybody wants to recruit a pastor and golf pro into their network marketing. So, I got hit up with a lot of opportunities but I was always able to say no. This time, it was a close family member who begged me to come sit in the living room for them to push play and watch a video and so I said yes just to honor that relationship. This whole thing isn’t going to be about network marketing, what it’s going to be about is that network marketing was really the first industry that had a distributed group of member that needed a centralized hub to grow and monetize their business, their content, their community, and their commerce.
By getting involved in that industry in the late 90s early 2000s it actually catapulted me into the membership space in an early adopter kind of way.
I became that guy in front of hotel rooms and in living rooms drawing out compensation plans and all of that. I did that for about three to six months where I was actually presenting the business opportunity because I fell in love with the concept that an entrepreneur could start a business for a few hundred bucks and build it online and do different things like that. Very quickly I fell out of love with the direct sales network marketing industry because I found out that 97 out of 100 people actually failed at the business. I just couldn’t really morally stand up and present this business opportunity with that level of failure rate.
I had two options, either leave the industry or work to fix it.
The decision I went down was to try to fix it. I went way deep in learning everything about direct selling, what it was to build online, what it was to build a network marketing and direct sales business and I came across this statement that really resonated with me from robert kiyosakI that says, ‘The richest people in the world build networks’ membership sites right, or some form of network, ‘and everyone else is trained to look for work.’ I already had made the decision I want to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t have the concept of building a networked business or a business that really built other networks. That really stood out to me. So, the way that network marketing worked at that time is you got a bunch of people in your living room, and you played a video. What I originally found was that people were not successful because they had to like ship out these, like physically mail, if you can remember that Micah VHS tapes or dvds to their neighbors and then pick up a phone, ‘hey did you watch the video?” ‘did you watch the video?’ ‘did you watch the video?’ and that was really ineffective and it cost a lot of money to buy all of those and mail all of that. My first innovation was the idea of let’s move away from the concept of tapes and let’s move this whole presentation online. Let’s actually create an in flash media.
We were one of the first companies in the early 2000s to begin to stream flash media over dial up modems
Dial-up modems back in the day, at least where I’m at right now, I’m already struggling with the fixed internet even in the year 2022. Here where I’m at in Kentucky visiting my in-laws today, we only have about 14.4 kilobytes per second on a 56k modem because the lines are so bad. We were able to actually stream these videos over a 14.4 kilobyte per second modem and that was awesome, it was like just the most breakthrough thing ever. So we had tons of companies coming to us wanting us to make their videos. Well, that then led to the whole concept of me needing to put together a team of developers. One of which is still with me today, my senior programmer after 22 years. We started creating our first, what we called back in the day, replicating website or personal web page. We now call them membership sites. Think amway.com forward slash kyle or whatever network marketing company you were part of, you’d have this forward slash so it would be your little slice of it. Once we had the video we had to actually put it in a personal web page, we had to create a paywall for people to pay to be able to distribute these videos to people, and we had to do all this in the early 2000s when there were no merchant accounts, when people were making membership sites based on directory structures versus dynamic data tables and different things like that. In February 20th 2001 we actually launched our very first site. It actually was a pretty clean looking site for 2000. If you remember back those sites back in the day looked like yard sales blown up, just stuff everywhere. Our sites were really clean, really nice, we were really into it. The main point was we were actually sending these videos out.
We built our own content management system, our own replicating system and our own membership databases
Hundreds of thousands of lines of code in, we got to where we could create a replicating website or a membership site. Then came the idea that if we’re sending these videos out we need to create a CRM. Not just any CRM, we needed to create a one-to-one crm. So in 2002 I filed a patent on what we called a teamwork communication system. It was a one-to-one CRM and there’s some interesting words in this abstract. I won’t get too geeky on it but the whole concept was, when we think of an Infusionsoft, that’s a one-to-many. Even though we can use Memberium now and these types of tools to create a one-to-one experience on the platform, typically it’s a one-to-many type platform. This was a one-to-one crm. Then it would pass data upline and downline. The co-patenter Willard Barth was one of the first Anthony Robbins coaches. I had Anthony Robbins organization coming to me early in the 2000s because we created what we call the neurodynamic profile. When I sent a link to these videos
What my CRM would do is not only track that I sent out the video it would track when someone came, what pages they watched, what videos they watched, how long they were on the site, and then we'd create a neurodynamic profile that would dynamically begin to change the text to their decision strategy, their communication strategy, and create not only a psychometric profile but a demographic profile and a neurodynamic profile as well
It’s really advanced stuff for the early 2000s. That added another million or so lines of code as we began to build the CRM, the autoresponder, all of those types of things were really really powerful. In 2003, I wrote a book on actually building network marketing with systems with platforms. Then in 2003 I came across this book even though it was originally published in 2000 and this book changed my whole paradigm of the internet. This was one of the first books that really saw the future of what the internet was going to be, which was going to be more of a media company, that literally organizations need to organize themselves less hierarchically like traditional businesses and more like movie productions where you have a director, you have a you have an executive producer, and you look at the story and how you’re telling the story and how you’re building a community. So I really started applying a lot of those principles and community building principles to the platforms that we were building. By 2005 we were doing these long sales form sales letters and and we’d grown to about 200 or so companies. I started speaking all across the country at different events to large audiences.
By 2008 we were into gamification, doing points levels and badges, we had e-learning, our own social media platform, and our own coaching system
we just really had everything by that point. It was roughly around 2008 that I realized that my dream had come true, that I was actually building networks and not just my own networks but networks for other people. I learned that back in the day the gold miners heading out to strike their fortune you won’t remember that guy’s name there but you’ll remember who sold them the picks the shovels, the wells fargo’s, the levI strauss, and all of that. So I decided for the rest of my life I’m going to sell picks and shovels to those business owners and entrepreneurs who really want to go out and really build a business. To bring this in the context,
We launched our first platform in 2001, our first patent on a one-to-one CRM in 2002, published a book on the whole concept in 2003
We’re looking at WordPress wasn’t even around in 2003. Myspace 2003, Facebook 2004, this was the very early days.We were cutting our teeth on some really cool stuff. By 2008 we had reached 100,000 paying customers, one million contacts 200 organizations, and had achieved that four and a half million lines of code. At that same year in 2008 I read this book (Tribes) now you maybe get an idea of why I call my company TribePub, this whole concept of tribes, what Seth laid out because I was a big fan of Seth Godin from 2000-2002 when he was writing permission marketing and idea virus and purple cow and all of that. I love the way Seth looks at marketing and telling stories. When he came out with this book Tribes, it really resonated with me. Also in 2008, I read this book The Dream Giver which really talks about the threat of your destiny. I began to realize because we were really doing super well as a company at that time how can I go beyond just servicing network marketing and direct sales companies, how can I go into serving all different types of networks. By this time, people in 2008 are used to social media, they’re looking to build their hubs more and more people online and so we really began to branch out and go beyond just network marketing into missionary organizations. Anybody who had a distributed network that really wanted that centralized hub.
I am an enterprise architect that uses system thinking to develop online software platforms for networked organizations
Because I could choose the types of organizations I would work with, I would only work with ones with a clear moral operating field. You can have a lot of customers that are doing things you really don’t want to support so I really began to work with just customers that did that. So, 2008 I was fortunate enough I could retire, and so I experimented I did a lot of personal coaching and development just to really grow that area, I farmed I married a farmer and so we did a lot of organic farming, we did a lot of aquaponics, hydroponic,s we were homeschooling our kids, we just had a lot of fun- kept a few select clients developed some systems and models and spent time with my family and those little kids who were little in 2000 had grown up roughly by the time we got to 2015. They started showing interest in really working in the business.
In 2015 I began to retire that four and a half million lines of code and transition to the WordPress ecosystem
My developers were saying we are tired of maintaining four and a half million lines of code let’s move over to the WordPress ecosystem and I was not a fan of that. I was a big custom development only guy and I went into this whole process absolutely kicking and screaming but we were able to map it out. We were able to take a look at the WordPress ecosystem and really find a way to make it work for us. Obviously, we were already using digitalocean and and the different hosting providers that were available out there, we really looked at WordPress, can that really be a CMS, can it have the security, can it have the seo, uncanny automator, can it have all the different automations that we need inside of it, can the CRM work for us and we work with all all the major CRMS out there obviously, Memberium Infusionsoft is the primary one that we use but we work with them all. Then we looked into all the different elements inside of the WordPress ecosystem, can it have an affiliate system, if AWP can even go into network marketing and multi-tiered systems so we can use it for that, there’s woocommerce subscriptions and memberships, there’s BuddyBoss for the social. So, we replaced all of this 4.5 million lines of code as well as all the data lakes reaching outside and we decided that we’re going to put all of our custom code when needed in a platform operations dashboard. That’s where we then do the reporting, the data metrics, the engagement tracking, all of that that can’t be done in one individual plug-in we put all that there. This diagram for this purposes looks more like this – typically I say when I’m showing all the different CRMS I put that here but this one is actually the more accurate one for how our platform works where Memberium is also at that core. Because Memberium is really driving the membership experience, it’s driving the complete -how we interact with customers, how we move them forward, how we move them through the engagement process and really then how we push back to the CRM and nurture all of that.
If Memberium wasn't at the core, then all of this would break down and we would have a tremendous amount of custom code
So, we started with a few of our large enterprise level clients began to move them over- this is David Barton, he’s got about a quarter million contacts in his database, he had a very complex system and again we have to look at more than just a WordPress ecosystem. So we had to work on unifying his system but we brought him into Memberium. This is Jim Cockrum, the largest- ninety thousand Amazon sellers take his courses we switched him to Infusionsoft and moved him over to BuddyBoss social learner back in the early 2015-2016’s when the full BuddyBoss platform wasn’t available redid over 90 courses several hundred hours of education material. We took TerrI Savelle Foy, a personal development type person, retooled all of her courses moved her into a multi-threaded Infusionsoft Memberium- a partner care center, this is a not-for-profit organization so we used all of the auto logins just a ton of sophisticated Memberium configurations to really thread a very unique partner care center for her that really helped her track donations her sales and threaded all the different sites that she had available. A lot of work we did for Glenn Beck and his archives. A lot of things we did for The Shack movie and 29 million copies of the book sold 100 million in the revenue at the at the box office very successful. More recently, John Assaraf with Neurogym which I think is really close to the Memberium story I came to find out a meeting with you Micah and Ben that actually Memberium started because David and the team was building for John Assaraf. So he’s now one of our clients and we brought him over to a BuddyBoss platform, moved all of his learning material, did a lot of really sophisticated things with Memberium how we delivered the material and even how we converted all the memberships over- we can talk a little bit more about that later. Now that the kids are fully engaged in the business, an Upwork profile about a year and a half ago and now we’re ranked number one and Upwork for BuddyBoss and the top three for Learndash Memberium one for GammI Press top Three for membership sites in the US. In conclusion of this part, I define myself as an architect. My parents have really never known what I’ve done all these 20 years they really can’t explain it but they my dad would always say he’s got to be selling drugs on the internet you can’t make that much money making websites, that’s about the best he could do. But for those who care, I like to say that I’m an architect. At the core of that is architecting enterprise level platforms.
How to solve the problem of a very large organization that needs to scale
There’s just been no way that we could possibly do that without Memberium it would have left- well I don’t know how many lines of code or Memberium- but it would have left a similar amount of lines of code in our platform operations dashboard if we had to replace everything that you and your team have done. So, I’ll stop the share there, that’s a little bit of an introduction what we want to do. I want to end by just thanking you, Ben, David and the whole team there at Memberium because you made my transition from four and a half million lines of code into the WordPress ecosystem so smooth there’s no way we could have done it without Memberium there’s not another comparable membership plugin or system out there, so when I saw the agency certified partnership opportunity I jumped right on it because I’m a Memberium Fan for sure.
There's very little that we can't do with Memberium
Micah Mitchell: Dude, Kyle, there’s so much there. I’m not sure where to start into it but first of all I think it’s so cool that you are one of those people who did make the transition because I still know people who are old school developers who are like I don’t want to use WordPress I want to build it myself I want to own it I want to whatever and I know there’s trade-offs to both but it’s interesting to me that your developers pulled you into WordPress because they were experiencing the headache it wasn’t you, trying to push them that way, so that’s really cool. Have you found things you can’t do? Or do you just pretty much jimmy rig whatever you want?
Kyle Newton: There’s very little that we can’t do with Memberium. As far as the core membership concepts and what you need to do in your user experience and moving a person in from the funnel into the landing page through the user experience because we create heavy gamification engagement and we really use the short codes and the content restrictions very heavily to create a very custom user experience through the process there’s nothing of that that we can’t do with Memberium. Most of our our current custom code is really what we call in our platform operations dashboard and it really has to do with just reporting. The reports we can’t get from just Woo or just GamI Press or just whatever so we have to bring that data in and present it in a different way but as far as just the membership aspect of it and really creating a really smooth and awesome user experience there’s very little that we have to do. Matter of fact, you’ve added a lot from the standpoint of the auto logins and what we can do whether that client is on a custom solution as long as they’re connected to Infusionsoft obviously campaign would be the same but as long as they’re connected to Infusionsoft and Keap that transition process is becoming so much easier than what we have to use to do custom wise because of your auto logins and different elements of that so it’s actually made our job much easier without any downside.
Micah Mitchell: Gotcha, that’s cool, one thing that also intrigues me quite a bit is how you think of Memberium the core of your system even though I’m about Memberium would think of the CRM as the core of my system but I’m kind of rethinking it based on what you’re saying. Why do you believe it’s the core versus some other piece?
Kyle Newton: I come more from the platform space, I’m a big fan of Michael Gerber and his book E-myth and in E-myth he breaks down all business processes into three processes. Lead generation, lead conversion, lead fulfillment. Because I came out of the direct sales space I never had to worry about lead generation, everyone else did the lead generation- all the network marketers and whatever. So I never really developed that skill, I developed the skill of lead conversion and lead fulfillment. Conversion meaning what happens when they hit the platform. I’m not that interested in all the funnels that get them there, I’m interested in once they come there what are they experiencing and how do we convert them long tail and how then do we move into that fulfillment. Because I came at it from that paradigm versus a marketing automation paradigm I look at it more from a platform-centric lens than a marketing-centric lens. So I think it’s just a bent from where I came from. Then secondarily the the CRM obviously is important but I don’t find that most of my clients spend most their time in the CRM itself, they spend their time actually engaging in the social communities, developing the courses, looking at the user experience, and monitoring that user experience from the platform lens. Now, obviously they do spend time with their marketing, they track all their conversions they do all of that, but the larger enterprise clients are doing both. They’re not just interested in that front of funnel metrics, they’re interested in what happens when they’re on platform and all of the retention aspects that have to happen on platform, well past the funnel.
Engagement and social community is really the way to create that long tail subscription retention
Micah Mitchell: That makes a lot of sense actually, especially like with the fulfillment end of it, that being Memberium. It does have a lot of the sorting rules, but that’s really interesting how you talked about how marketing wasn’t or the lead generation process wasn’t as big of a focus that makes a lot of sense. So you talked a lot about the enterprise end of this right, for the person who’s more just getting started like let’s say they’re an expert but they haven’t developed the following, so they know their stuff, they should be making content but they haven’t really made it and developed a following yet is that somebody that you can help? If so how?
Kyle Newton: That’s a great question, we work with organizations from startups all the way up to enterprise level organizations so we help all different types. A lot of the basics of building out the platform is the same whether you’re doing a startup or whether you’re doing an enterprise meaning you’re going to have your WordPress you’re going to have BuddyBoss you’re going to have Learn Dash-in my world, I really focus heavy on BuddyBoss. I do have clients that don’t have BuddyBoss but it’s really a niche that we focused on because engagement and social community is really the way to create that long tail subscription retention. Churn was something I’ve had to deal with for 22 years, how do you keep a monthly recurring member monthly recurring and that’s delivering ongoing value. As you think about that new content creator, new influencer who’s looking to develop a platform they’re going to need a CRM, they’re going to need a membership tool, they’re going to need a place to deliver their learning and their their social community, and they’re going to need that all to be unified in one place. The beautiful thing about what we’re doing is you basically got Infusionsoft Keap and then you get your WordPress ecosystem and if we build the WordPress ecosystem correctly there’s nothing outside of that ecosystem that you need. You don’t need to go to teachable Kajabi and do 20 other things and try to Zap Year it all together and send it into an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet- the crazy stuff that clients come to us with, the number of things they’ve done to duct tape things together- we can start you out in that right place. That’s kind of where I talked about on that slide, why enterprise, why now. You need to think enterprise when you start, doesn’t mean you have to have an enterprise budget but you at least need to lay your foundation correctly and it’s not too expensive to lay that foundation correctly. The as you scale you haven’t created data leaks, process leaks, and other things are going to cost you way down the line. So, we help them with all scale but we make sure that we put them on a really good foundation
Micah Mitchell: That makes a lot of sense, I think it’s like the economics of somebody just starting and saying well I’m gonna buy a cheaper platform or I’m gonna save money by doing this and that it’s like well a couple hundred bucks a month for better systems like the systems we’re talking about even if it does cost a few hundred dollars a month is a lot cheaper than moving it even if you pay a couple hundred bucks a month even for a year and a half it’s still cheaper than the move from the crappy system to the real one.
Kyle Newton: One hundred percent, the switching costs are really what gets you in this business. It’s not just the cost of the software, it’s all the business processes, the time waste that most of our clients are in right now, they have to hire a whole another admin, they have to focus their time on operations versus marketing sales and fulfillment of whatever their primary product service or training is- it just- you’re tripping over pennies today to save and to make hundreds and thousands of dollars per client in the future- I really just don’t recommend someone who’s got any plan of scale or growth at all to not start with Memberium Infusionsoft and Keap. We do have obviously some members that are there and they just they’re very sold on that concept but I do put my hand up and I warn them remember you said you want to be this many members by this amount of time if you go down this route and you’re being a little chintzy now this is going to cost you later you’re deferring and that cost is going to be much greater than laying in a good foundation now so I try to warn them not everybody listens but I try to warn them as best I can.
I took out the complexity and risk
Micah Mitchell: Yes it’s interesting how you are framing this because the more I’m thinking about it it’s like well whoever designs content that’s not for the masses-like nobody.
Kyle Newton: One caveat to that Micah, I think it’s important, is that I’ve not really had too many clients that have the problem with the price point of Memberium. It’s not because I just have large enterprise level clients, all my clients were coming through referrals and we went on Upwork to give my kids a place to kind of test out their skills in a safe place not with a large enterprise level client. So that was the first time I’ve had smaller clients come to me, I haven’t had a non-enterprise level client come to me in years. Upwork has kind of given us a taste of that and so when I would interview these startup clients it wasn’t the 100 a month or 89 a month or this or that and the other it was their concern of the complexity in the future now and in the future and when I could show them the system and show them how easy it was to operate and then the level of automation that it can give them and the trade-off of those automations versus manual processes if we didn’t go down this route that was really the objection it wasn’t a price objection it was a complexity objection. Once I took complexity and de-risked it made it less complex for them in their minds and they could see it, it was not a problem at all for them to make that step.
Micah Mitchell: Is that is that de-risking and taking out the complexity is that your operations dashboard doing most of that or how do you do that for people?
Kyle Newton: It’s a great question, it’s a combination of both, yes it’s the dashboard and it’s all of that, it’s me showing them examples. I use the powerpoint slides when I was doing it, when I’m selling, or introducing a new client I use slides very heavily, I give them the visuals. What I found was even myself coming into the WordPress ecosystem it was intimidating to me a guy that had built a company that had 4.5 million lines of code and a SaaS that touched every aspect of the business, right? Because there were just so many unknown unknowns and I didn’t know there’s this level of just fear that people have coming in and transitioning. What I’ve done, and what I encourage all people, all developers, and all agencies listening to this is our job is to take the fear out, is to take that concern out, so when I can show them and come and speak very confidently about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to lay this out, and how simple it is going to be once they get into it, and use it, that really just kind of settles them down. It’s really just being confident with the tools and expressing that level of confidence to them and showing them, letting them see, because that’s the number one thing people come in and whether it’s BuddyBoss or Learndash or Infusionsoft Keap or Memberium, they’re just like snow blind because there’s all these buttons and all these things to click and I really narrow it down to them and show them okay these are the few four or five things you’re going to be doing on a daily basis, if you do this outside of Infusionsoft and Keap, here’s the complexity all the other plugins I have to give you to accomplish what these two things can do for you, and now all of a sudden they’re like oh okay I got it.
I have seven roles inside of my inside of my agency
Micah Mitchell: Yeah that makes sense because it is it is overall a simplification if you can get over the initial learning curve right. So, are you still recruiting so I know your your business is growing stuff are you still recruiting looking for people who know Memberium to come join your team?
Kyle Newton: We are actually. I had two interviews today of people, and thank you for the referrals. We are because my skill set is sales sales and marketing of platforms and those types of things and so since we’ve even outside of Upwork the level of referrals that we just get and then the things are actually- I had no expectation that Upwork was going to be as awesome as it was- and we’re now expanding out to in the next month out to three other freelancer platforms we’re developing our profiles out there. So, yes, we’re looking for really good technicians people that feel very comfortable with Memberium, Infusionsoft, Keap, an active campaign because we’re getting more and more clients, wanting to go that route. What I find, like even in the interviews today, Micah is that each person has their own skill set, like I interviewed one person and they come actually more from a developer custom bent and so I gave them this 26-page scope document to take a look at and it’s interesting to see where each of these develop each of these Memberium developers are coming from. Some of them come more from a custom bent and others really look at it from a marketing bent. Others come at it with a good blend. I need actually all three because we do a lot of custom development things, sometimes we have to make Memberium do things it can’t do or the ecosystem connect with other things in the ecosystem. So, I’ll definitely be working with one of the one of your referrals when I’m thinking from a custom standpoint. Another person is really process oriented and you need that when you’re running an agency, you need all of those roles. I actually have seven roles inside of my inside of my agency: platform architect, platform developer, platform technician, platform specialist, platform support, platform marketing and platform sales.
Each one of those is a different role with a different skill set so we’re looking to fill all of those. All of those people have to have a Memberium and Infusionsoft and active campaign experience to to play and architect and to build and develop and support in those roles. So if anybody’s interested in helping me, we’re always looking for for great talent in any of those areas.
Micah Mitchell: Cool cool yeah and I know people are out there who do know how to build a lot and they don’t really love marketing and selling and so hopefully there’s a good fit out there multiple good fits. So, what have we not talked about that you think would be good as part of the introduction to the Memberium community for you?
Kyle Newton: I think we’ve hit a lot, I I think the main thing, and I had a really great Memberium Infusionsoft technician working with me has taken me- this is one reason why we’re hiring- I had one guy that was just super phenomenal he’s in the community really great guy and he really brought this point up, which I thought was really good, is that when we look at the Memberium community, when we talk with other Memberium Developers, when I talk with my clients, because a lot of my enterprise clients actually come to us actually already using Infusionsoft Memberium, I get to hear what their experience is, what I find is that it, there’s a gap that I hope that we’re gonna kind of close over this next year or two which is how do you apply business logic and business processes to Memberium. Memberium has given us so many tools inside the toolbox that I find that my clients aren’t using those tools, or not using them in proper ways and other consultants- because obviously I’m receiving their work- the people who who built it and they’re not using it to its full extent. So one of the things I really want to encourage people to do is really kind of put on their business development hat and their business logic hat and really start solving problems. It’s typically what I day in a day out is I’m solving problems I’m listening to a client and they’re telling me they want this and this and this to happen and this user and that user experience to happen and I’m keeping my mind open to the complete toolbox but my I always go back to simplicity, if I can do it with Memberium, I can do it with the core tools, I don’t want to add to that. What I see is that people don’t use Memberium then they kind of band-aid and approach or whatever when there was a much more direct approach. I think it’s just really leveling up in our skills of Memberium and using Memberium for all that it can be done, that is really where those listening to this that are Memberium Developer agencies really want to kind of hone their skills, is that level of logic business logic business process connection. Final point, when I’m talking to clients I think that’s really what they like,I want to encourage all of our agency people out there to really think about it from a biz dev. Most of my job is also business development. When you’re dealing with enterprise level clients you have to think about their business process, let me give you an example, I have tons of contractors and some of them, they can only see their slice of the pie, their slice of the platform so I’m talking about a solution and they’ll just go off on this long rant about how this process will solve the problem. They don’t see that how this is going to tie into the operations of their enterprise level client. They don’t really understand how that trickles through the business of actually running an online business and so one of the greatest skill sets I think people can also do is really understanding how to interact with clients to be empathetic with their processes to be empathetic with their fears and where they are in their process and don’t build or push them beyond that. Don’t do bad processes to support a bad paradigm but learn how to communicate well with them and guide them into better processes and be aware that those processes affect multiple departments and you’ve got to take that into context. That’s one of the things that in working with multiple different contractors is I’ve always had the hard time of not being the communication person with the client because you’ve got to learn that rhythm of a client. I oversold undersold confused got way too geeky and nerdy in the early years with clients and I’ve just worked with enough clients now I know how to get into that rhythm with them of their comfortability where they are and communicate with them and that that’s a big area of growth that people can step into as well
Micah Mitchell: That’s such a interesting point as far as not overselling the client because it’s so easy in thinking you’re gonna help to suggest oh well we did this for this other client it might work for you versus getting down to the their core needs the business logic and and solving those problems so that they can free up people’s time use less systems become more efficient I love all of this. Well, thank you so much how do people whether they’re a prospective client for you or a contractor or even just another technology partner who wants to maybe work with your company, what’s the best way for them to connect with you Kyle?
Kyle Newton: Just to www.TribePub.com platform unified business tripub.com is the best place. We got contact forms you can learn more about us there on our website
Micah: Alright perfect well thank you so much for joining us I’m so so so grateful you’re in the program I look forward to talking with you more about a bunch of things I know we have a lot of common interests and getting really really nerdy with the membership sites as well so thanks so much.
Kyle Newton: I‘m looking forward to it, thanks Mic
