THE TRIBEPUB DIFFERENCE
A Platform Unified Business Empowers You To Monetize & Grow
For 22+ years the team at TribePUB have been building Membership Platforms for all types of individuals, businesses and organizations. In the early 2000s you had to have your online business unified because we were in a Web 1.0 world and there were very few teams like ours that were building what we now call SaaS (Software As A Service) Platforms during the early years of the internet pre Web 2.0 and 3.0.
Everyone during those early days had to build all the components of a successful enterprise level platform. Back then there were not the thousands of options of SaaS solutions available that there are today. So we got really good at knowing exactly what an online membership site needed and we architected, built and deployed it to 200 plus clients between 2000 and 2010.
So we developed over time more than 4.5 Million lines of code to create our own custom CMS, CRM, eCommerce System, LMS, Autoresponder, Affiliate software, gamification engine and much much more. We had created a centralized fully contained membership site system.
As the early 2000s progressed more and more SaaS solutions and ultimately social platforms came online. These came in the form of CRMs, marketing systems like sales funnels, LMS systems, online conferencing, online events and much more. Online entrepreneurs and membership site owners began to experiment and utilize these solutions to help grow, service and monetize their members.
But, what they did not foresee is that their member experience, data and business processes were progressively getting strung across the internet with very little connective tissue in the user experience, data management or admin systems. Zapier and other systems began to rise to try to address this problem but it did not solve the problem it just added more complexity and points of failure.
So today, almost every single client comes to TribePUB to solve this problem. This may be in the form of an Enterprise Client who is at scale in sales volume and membership level but their processes are breaking down and the system is becoming unmanageable by them and unusable by their members. It may be a membership platform that has hit a growth plateau due to the complexity. Or it could be a startup that has done enough research that they already know they want to start out on a unified system.
Another major driver that has really risen over the past five years or so is a realization that membership site owners don’t own their data or control the user experience if all of their fulfillment is sitting on third party SaaS systems and large social and other platforms. Many are coming to the realization that their business is at tremendous risk if just one of these platforms fails, changes policy or features.
Around 2015 my team and I began to progressively retire the more than 4.5 Million lines of custom code and progressively migrated our systems to the WordPress ecosystem. This was a long thought through, deeply weighed and not an easy decision. We were “custom developers” and have a strong worldview toward the power and flexibility of custom coding. And we had shared many of the concerns that are commonly raised about WordPress.
But, we could not deny that the WordPress Ecosystem had come a long way over the years since its inception and now had come of age. It had matured far beyond just a simple blog CMS and had morphed into a robust publishing platform. And if configured properly could even rise to the challenges and scale of Enterprise Level Clients.
A core premise we had as we considered the transition was that it still had to provide the centralized platform experience … what we now call a Platform Unified Business (“PUB”). As we explored and tested the core WordPress CMS and the key plugin configurations we would need to fully replicate our custom system we found that the WordPress Ecosystem could deliver all but one key part of the functionality that our custom solution could do for startups and at scale.
So we configured our first WordPress PUB and began to transition our clients to it. They were happy, we were happy and we have never looked back. It was a great decision and has served us and our clients well.
By moving all the core CMS, CRM, LMS, Social, Gamification, Affiliate, Commerce, Event Management and more functionality from custom code to the WordPress Ecosystem we were able to dramatically cut our costs of maintaining millions of lines of code and we were able to pass those cost savings onto our clients. A platform that used to cost 100s of thousands can now cost 10s of thousands. We were not only able to mitigate cost for us and our clients but we were able to mitigate risk and complexity. I talk more about that here (Link to that page).
We are now able to affordably service startups and have a price range this is manageable for them. We are able to quickly reconfigure clients’ platforms that are having growing pains because we don’t have to unwind and rebuild a bunch of custom code from previous developers … we simply reconfigure the existing systems we are extremely familiar with. An for our Enterprise Clients we are able to prove to them that a WordPress based system can scale as far as they want to go without all the normal fears of a WordPress system while tremendously saving them on cost, risk and complexity.
There remained only one area in which the WordPress Ecosystem could not provide a solution and that is unified reporting and dashboards. Our clients were very used to and reliant upon our reporting and dashboards and wer could not find a solution to solve this issue. Because the WordPress Ecosystem is a well organized yet dispersed grouping of plugins each plugin has its own standalone reporting. Those plugins reporting is often not sufficient or exactly what our clients need and they need unified reporting across all of the elements of the stack.
So as part of our TribePUB System we also have our TribePOD system which is our Platform Operations Dashboard. This is are where key reporting, UX tracking and other key metrics are made available to the platform owners so they can have full display of their members’ experience. This allows them to monitor sales, onboarding, engagement and much more. You can learn more about our POD here.
So today TribePUB finds itself as one of the handful of teams who can architect, build and deploy WordPress Ecosystem based Membership Platforms at any scale. From Startups through Growth into Enterprise. And we can do this all while decreasing Cost, Risk and Complexity.
For 22 plus years we have helped Tribes (Membership Sites) and Tribe Leaders (Membership Site Owners) grow and monetize their content, community and commerce. We empower these Tribes to accomplish that via a PUB (Platform Unified Business). Thus our name TribePUB. We look forward to working with you and your Tribe.
To learn more about our PUB Technology Stack click here.
