Tech, Teamwork, and Smarter Membership Builds with Vic Dorfman from MemberFix

[00:00] Micah: Hey, everybody, it's Micah Mitchell, CEO of Memberium, and I have with us Vic Dorfman, and it's Vic's on the other side of the planet, so bless him for coming at this time. It's early Saturday, I think, for you, Vic, Friday afternoon for me, but Vic runs a company called MemberFix, and they are membership experts. They are a Memberium-certified partner for a little over a year now, and so I just wanted to kind of showcase him and help people understand, Vic, what it is you guys do, kind of why you're different, so yeah, let's jump into it. When

[00:33] Vic: people come to you, what are they usually looking for? Like, let's say it's a membership site owner.

[00:39] Micah: Are they coming because their tech is broken? Are they coming in a startup mode? Are they pretty far along? What would you say? Yeah, thanks for having me, Micah. Very,

[00:48] Vic: very pleased to be speaking with you again, and to answer your question, I think most of the time people come to us, they already have some kind of membership site, and I use the term membership very loosely to mean it could be a community-oriented business, it could be an e-learning business, it could be courses, but it's a site that uses a common type of technology which you have to log in to access whatever it is, and so usually people either need help fixing an issue, or they might be trying to build the site out to take it to the next level or realize some kind of vision or functionality that they want for the site. For example, one of our clients, he wanted us to implement gifting for him for his relationship courses, and that was kind of an interesting business idea that he had, and it actually did wind up working out really well for him, and sometimes it's custom development, or hosting as well. That's another big thing that we help people with through our sister company, MemberHost. Sometimes, although I would say it's rarer that people come to us starting from scratch, but we have built quite a lot of what we call done-for-you memberships, which is basically just a templatized stack of different apps, so people will typically use some kind of membership plugin, could be memberium, could be something else, some kind of e-learning plugin like LearnDash to serve courses, and typically some kind of community plugin, usually BuddyBoss, and they'll sort of plug their content and their business into this structure, and the benefit of that versus building everything custom or from scratch is that it just saves a lot of time and money. It's a proven stack, and why reinvent the wheel? So those are the most common scenarios.

[02:51] Micah: So you do custom stuff, but it sounds like you also kind of have a stack that you use to make things quicker and more economical for people, right?

[03:01] Vic: Yeah, and a good example of that would be that if somebody comes to us and asks us for help with design, or design in general is a good example, it's not even specific to us, that you can hire a designer, right? And you can collaborate with them and sort of conceptualize what it is that you want or what they think that you want. Then the designer goes off and does the design, you go through however many revisions, and then you take that design and you hand it over to the person who actually implements it on your website. So this is a long, expensive, highly subjective, by the way, process. Whereas you can just show people some templates and say, well, look, we can go that long design route, or you can just pick from these 10 different templates. Tell me which one that you like the most. And we can just customize it to fit your brand. It'll cost a 10th of what it would normally cost you. So it's not that one is better than the other, but there are trade-offs with each approach. And similarly, we can build things from scratch, and we can do things completely custom, and we do and we have. But a lot of times, people don't have unlimited budgets, and they don't actually need something that's highly, highly custom. They just need a good foundation. And then if they want certain functionality or certain features, we can build on top of that foundation, knowing that it's a solid

[04:26] Micah: stack. I agree with you. I think not everybody needs custom design. And that project usually spirals out of control because you make the design, and then you make it more pretty. And then, like I said, somebody technical then goes to implement it. And it may not, you know, fit in exactly the way it should. So there's a lot of customization. And I would just agree that most people need a basic membership site. Like they need what everyone else has, kind of. They need to kind of fit into the herd. And then after that, then maybe they want something custom or something special, right, to make their business stick out. What would you say, Vic, differentiates you guys from other agencies who might be doing, you know, I don't know many of you are focused completely on membership sites, like you have the name MemberFix, but there are a lot of agencies who do it. So how do you describe the differences between you guys and other agencies? Yeah, that's a great question, Micah.

[05:19] Vic: I would say that there are at least two big differentiators. One is that we are focused on, again, broadly speaking, membership sites. So that's where we've been working for over 10 years. And so that includes all of the common tech you'd encounter in WordPress and third-party tech as well, like, you know, keep high level, that kind of thing, all of the satellite tech that would normally play

[05:46] Micah: into any kind of business. So CRM, payment processor, et cetera. And so we kind of specialize in this,

[05:56] Vic: I don't even want to call it a niche. It's very large, it's a market. And of course we can do things that are more, what would you say, pedestrian type of a WordPress site. But generally people want to come and work with the membership site experts, you know, or like, for example, we have a lot of qualified contractor status with various different tech, with you guys, with Mbarium, with LearnDash. And the reason is, is because we're quite agnostic as to what tech we work with. We just want to help the client get the best result. It just so happens that most of our clients have, you know, membership sites or e-learning sites or their associations, or they have some kind of membership functionality, or they sell corporate seats to their trainings, or to a community, or what have you. And the other really big differentiator, I would say, and I suppose this is not the time for false modesty, is the quality of our team. So hiring is by far our most well-developed process. And we hire the best talent that we

[07:05] Micah: could possibly afford. And we pay people really as well as we can. Typically in our business,

[07:11] Vic: right, in a services type business, the economic model is you charge some amount for work, and then you have either contractors or a team that you pay them some other amount for the work. And then you, the difference is the profit, right? Minus whatever fixed costs. That's fairly obvious to everybody. But what is maybe not as obvious, especially from the client side, is that a lot of

[07:38] Micah: times in pursuit of that profit, agencies will hire, let's say, less expensive talent, which doesn't

[07:49] Vic: necessarily mean it's worse talent, but there is some kind of correlation there. A players do expect to be compensated well. Although, and also this is apropos to your question, Micah, is that while the best type of talent, the people that you really want to work with, and our team works directly with our clients, that's another big differentiator, is there isn't some project management layer where you're kind of getting the runaround or being gaslit or deftly maneuvered, and then the developers are doing something and you have no visibility into that. All of our team members are interacting directly with our clients within our project management system, which is ClickUp, and directly on Zoom calls. And so they build a personal relationship with the clients over whose work they have ownership, and that creates a relationship. So our clients are often writing us emails or telling us, hey, you know, I was working with Trim, or I was working with Risto,

[08:49] Micah: and he's fantastic, or Dennis is amazing. So that also creates a sense of accountability for the team

[08:56] Vic: that the clients aren't just this faceless avatar, they're real human beings. I have to answer to them physically, directly. And so it creates a sort of accountability, reduces bureaucracy. So it's also the way that we manage the organization, I would say, is we try to keep it very flat organization-wise, and we try to keep the bureaucracy and drama to zero. And so I would say, just circling back, because I'm kind of rambling a little bit, is that, yes, A players want good money, but that's sort of table stakes. What they really want is they want to be challenged, and they want growth in their career and opportunities. And so just as a small example, one of the things that we've provided to our team members is an opportunity to co-found a

[09:45] Micah: company. So Memberhost, which is our sister hosting company, was co-founded by myself, by our technical

[09:52] Vic: co-founder, Denny Cave, who we met through some other means, and through two of our team members, Costi and Risto. And so that was an opportunity that they got to actually have ownership over

[10:05] Micah: something because they earned it. They deserved, they came in, they worked their butt off,

[10:10] Vic: they got results in their respective roles. And I said, hey, you know what? Of course, we're going to keep trying to bring up your salary and give you opportunities within MemberFix, but how about this other opportunity where you actually get to participate in a startup and put in some sweat equity and potentially in the future have an exit and have some kind of serious liquidity

[10:31] Micah: event because salary is nice. A good salary is nicer, but we want to provide a career path and

[10:40] Vic: opportunities to team members. So we basically, long story short is we hire the best people that we can. We train them really well. We immediately get rid of people who do any kind of politicking. And I think this isn't even my subjective opinion, but it's the opinion of all of our clients. They absolutely love working with our team. Like it's just a stellar, stellar, highly competent, highly technical team. So I'm not knocking anybody else's team because I don't know what that looks like, but I can just say for our team, that's our superpower. And that's really in a market like ours, which is a commoditized type of a market. The unique selling proposition is how well can we help you get your result and how pleasant and engaging is the actual collaboration process. And our customers really love to work with us and they get great results. So I think that speaks for

[11:38] Micah: itself. Yeah. That makes sense that your selection process, your training process, you know, just the fact that they are face-to-face with customers and have ownership over that account or that work, right? That makes a big difference versus there are shops and I'm not saying any of our certified partners, but I'm saying a lot of agencies who we deal with via support, meaning some agency has a client using Membarium and they send their agency staff to us for support. And it's like, yeah, they don't, they don't know what they're doing, right? We're training them. We're doing some of the work for them, which is okay. Like we're happy to help them get going. Oh, there goes the light. But, uh, it's got very intimate all of a sudden. I know it's very, very nice. Uh, I'll turn it back on in a sec, but, um, those, those types of businesses where they are trying to charge an amount and then pay as little as possible to get the labor done often are more costly in time and mistakes and just lack of quality, lack of conversion. Right. So I get where you're coming from having people for the long term, having them bought in, having them care right about the client, be well-trained and competent. And just like you said, get the job done, but do it in a pleasant way, right? That they're going to

[12:47] Vic: enjoy. Uh, let me flip this light back on real quick. Oh, I just had to move. I was holding too still, I guess. I didn't realize. All right. Um, so some other questions, how quickly would you say

[13:00] Micah: you guys work? Is, are you guys like slow methodical or you kind of sprinters somewhere in the middle?

[13:06] Vic: How would you say you guys approach work? I suppose it depends on how you define quickly.

[13:11] Micah: Basically we, we don't like, we'll take rush jobs, but we'll, we'll charge a lot more money

[13:17] Vic: for them. So I think slow and steady wins the race, right? So the whole thing here is the expectations that we set with our clients and the amount of, uh, resource allocation that we have available. Right. So what we also don't want to do is we, we want to be respectful to our team members and not burn them out. Sometimes that just happens. You know, sometimes there's some urgent issues that come up and people have to interrupt what they're doing and go solve that and then get back on track, which is also something we tried to streamline and avoid in various ways. But we, uh, we don't want to run around with our hair on fire. So if, for example, if a prospective customer approaches us and says, Hey, I want to do this thing and I want it done in a month, what we'll

[14:06] Micah: say to them is we'll say, okay, we're going to follow our process. And our process is that we perform a

[14:12] Vic: discovery phase, particularly pretty much on any type of set of requirements, but particularly on a larger set of requirements where it's really impossible to eyeball it. You need to actually go do some research, maybe go do some testing, maybe even go reach out to some third-party vendors, depending on the nature of the requirements. And so we'll say, we don't know how long this is going to take. We don't know how much it's going to cost. We need to discover that we need to perform our discovery process. It's a paid process as it ought to be a paid process in my very strong opinion. And then having some kind of data, we'll be able to give you a data backed estimate. And it's an estimate. It's not a fixed quantity of approximately how many hours this might take, approximately how much it will cost based on our hourly rate, because we, we stopped doing fixed price projects. We work on an hourly basis strictly, which we can get into if you, if you'd like.

[15:16] Micah: And so in that way, what we're doing is where we're, we're working at an ambitious pace,

[15:23] Vic: as far as all of that goes, but we're not rushing to try to get some kind of concocted estimate out the door to get people to sign on the dotted line so that we can get their money. We'd prefer to take our time, do the work well, methodically, if you will, but at a good pace and set realistic expectations, you always want to under promise and over deliver. And certainly when you're working with tech and with WordPress in particular, which is an open source ecosystem, you just don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what plugin conflicts are going to encounter. And so you need a budget for that. And you need to, you know, a big part of our job as a, as an agency or any kind

[16:07] Micah: of really business interactions is managing, managing expectations. And so if some, it's

[16:15] Vic: actually quite rare that people come to us saying, Hey, I need, we need this done yesterday.

[16:19] Micah: People are generally understanding of the realities of, of working on something. And I suppose

[16:27] Vic: sometimes, especially if, if folks have a bit of knowledge in this area, they could be knowledgeable enough to be dangerous. And they might say, well, we think this should take this long, or it shouldn't take more than. And as soon as I see that, that that's a sign to me that I need to politely push back on that because that's most folks aren't in a position. We're not even in a position to make that kind of judgment without doing discovery, right? Because you actually don't know what you don't know in advance. So maybe more on the slow and methodical side, but I should say maybe on more on the methodical slide side, but not necessarily on the slow side, we work at an ambitious pace, but we're not, we're not sprinting. You know, we're just, we're running at a,

[17:15] Micah: we're in zone two all the time. Let's put it that way. Gotcha. Yeah. I think rushing usually creates mistakes. I like, I think it's in the Navy. They say, be quick, but don't hurry. Like, cause hurrying can actually cause a way bigger problem. Right.

[17:30] Vic: Slow is fast. Precise. What is it? Slow is fast. No. Precise is fast. Precise is slow. Slow is fast. Precise is slow. Slow is fast. Something like that.

[17:46] Micah: That's interesting. I've not heard that one. Interesting. Yeah. It's from jujitsu. Size is slow. Slow is fast. I like it. Tell me a little bit about, you mentioned you don't, you do hourly instead of project based. I'm sure there's a story or many stories there. I can guess cause I've also been doing this work for a long time, but I don't think clients often understand that. Can you kind of explain why that is? Well, when we, when we got started in this business,

[18:11] Vic: there was a lot of the cliche from the, I don't know, influencers or the thought leaders that I was

[18:17] Micah: following is that you want to get away from hourly. Right. And you want to charge based on value,

[18:23] Vic: which if you're selling something like lead gen or something where you can tie your results to ROI makes perfect sense. We, we can't really do that. We can sort of do that, but it's, we can tie ROI to opportunity cost of time that a client would spend administering their website, doing all their updates, potentially crashing their site, or in, in, let's say in the case of hosting, we could tie ROI to things like how much speed affects engagement of your members or, or conversion rates of your, of your cart. Right. But these are all kind of very hard to prove definitively because there are many factors at work. So at the end of the day, we're selling labor and we're selling a, a, a dependability of a relationship that, Hey, you've got time and you've got resources reserved with member fix. And anytime you need it, we are there for you. And where our guys are on top of it all the time, urgent messages going directly to Slack, et cetera. So to answer your question, Micah, initially we, I started out hourly when it was just me member fix was just me for, for many years. And then we brought on a team and eventually we graduated. I thought to doing projects based on a fixed fee and the logic there is not hard to figure out, right? You, you know, your costs, you think, you know, your costs, and that's the key problem. And then you make up some kind of number that you think the client would be willing to pay. And then they pay it and you pocket the difference, except that has a number of problems. First, you don't actually know what your costs are going to be. It's it's unless it's a very, very specific thing that you've done many, many times before. It's very likely that you're going to encounter unexpected scenarios. Number one, and number two, it's very common that the client is going to want to add or even remove elements of a scope. And so now you're getting into an issue where any kind of change or change request is this big bureaucratic headache. Whereas if you're going on an hourly basis, you can just say, yeah, no problem. We were estimating a hundred hours. Oh, you want to remove this, this requirement for a community? No problem. Let's get rid of that. And now it's only 60 hours or, Oh, you want to add a directory for all of your, for your, for your members, like a searchable directory. No problem. That adds approximately this much. And so what we try to do is we try to provide maximum transparency and visibility into our time sheets, into our time tracking exactly what we're spending time on, but we're, we're just telling them that, Hey, it'll take however long it'll take. And you can audit or question any of our timesheet entries or, or, you know, we can have a conversation about how we're using your time specifically. We're happy to do that. Well, we just charge a rate, an hourly rate, which is our standard rate is $150 an hour that makes it worthwhile for us that we can be profitable and, uh, makes it so that we're able to cut a bad client loose, which frankly, that almost has never happened. I mean, there's maybe been one or two scenarios like that, and they have

[21:36] Micah: the flexibility to pivot as they see fit. They have the flexibility to add and remove requirements.

[21:42] Vic: And also there's no kind of lingering thought in the back of their minds, which I don't even really know if it's a thing that, ah, am I overpaying for this? Like how much does this really cost? You know, cause it's, we're telling you how much it costs. Like this is what we value our time at. And you're like, Oh, 150 bucks an hour. Okay. That's either too expensive or not, or, you know,

[22:05] Micah: whatever the case may be relative to the particular client situation. Yeah. Especially the, the quick changes and things make sense versus having to re quote the project when somebody changes stuff or just let it slide. Right. That's even worse. Oh yeah, we can do that for you. Oh, Oh yeah. And then pretty soon. Yeah. It's not the same project. You know, um, I had a partner reach out to me recently and they were basically like, well, we're treating this person, you know, very nicely, but due to scope creep, you know, we're no longer making money on this project. We're going to finish it, take care of everybody. But, but yeah, that got out of hand basically. Right. And, and that's, that's horrible for the partner makes it unsustainable. Right. Um,

[22:46] Vic: that's a really good point. Pardon? Oh, nothing. I was, I was just going to say that client might

[22:51] Micah: be happy for a minute, but it's, it's not going to last, you know?

[22:54] Vic: Oh, so they were reaching out to you to kind of preempt any fallout from.

[22:59] Micah: Um, no, no, I think they'll make the client happy, but they were just kind of, uh, they were kind of sharing that, oh yeah, that we thought was going to go well for us ultimately. No, because of, because of some changes, but I think your idea of the discovery process being heavier probably gets rid of a lot of that and just the hourly rate. Right. So it is interesting that you talk about how that was all the, the big rage was no do do project based pricing and all this. And I know some people made some money on those things, but I also feel like if you've priced it so well on a project basis that you're never losing any money, probably the clients are paying too much. And so there's like some balance in there, you know, where the clients may not come back cause it was expensive or whatever the value wasn't there. Uh, and I'm just kind of guessing at some of this. Uh, one of the questions that I have for you, Vic is you guys are very technical. So what do you do about creative stuff, right? Is it the same hourly rate and then you, you pass it off? Do you recommend them to people? Uh, do you have creative staff? Yeah. What would you say to that?

[24:07] Vic: Yeah. Great question, Micah. And I just want to really quickly wrap up the previous one with, with a very important point, which is that you mentioned that one of your partners reached back out and said, Hey, we might not really make money on this thing because, because of scope creep, meaning that the client was probably either adding requirements, trying to fit them under the umbrella of the scope document or the contract or whatever, or the actual nature of the requirements was not clear. Like how, how can we objectively agree that a particular requirement is complete, which requires something called acceptance criteria, which are the conditions, which must be true. The objective in here on earth, in reality conditions, which must be true

[24:51] Micah: that we can both agree upon that make this requirement complete. Right. And if you don't

[24:57] Vic: have that kind of objective way to agree that something is in fact done, then you're always going to get into subjective territory. And some clients will be unscrupulous and try to take advantage. And, and then you're going to wind up not making any money. And, and then there's also huge opportunity. Not only did you not make money, you didn't make money that you could have made servicing somebody else profitably. So I just wanted to touch on that because these are very technical points from the perspective of an agency that I think most clients maybe not, are not aware of that are, it's important to share because then that makes it clearer to a prospective client, why it's actually in their interest to pay for something like a discovery. Like, why would I pay for a quote? You're not paying for a quote. You're paying for us to do the blueprints of the house we're going to build. Or do you want us to just start building

[25:48] Micah: because that house isn't going to look very nice? Yeah. So sorry, bit, bit of a quick departure, but. I appreciate that. Yeah. Let me, let me just frame up this, the next question a little bit better. You guys are obviously very technical and competent. Are you also creatively competent or is that not

[26:07] Vic: your focus? Do you outsource? Do you, you know, how do you, how do you manage that if somebody comes in and they need everything, not just the tech? That's a great business question. And just a great question in general. I think we try to stay in our lane of being the go-to highly technical tech

[26:24] Micah: experts in, in WordPress and in membership tech. Having said that, of course, if a, if a particular job is largely a backend or a tech thing and they have some small design element, we handle that one

[26:39] Vic: of two ways. Honestly, now with the advent of AI or with, with its sort of rapidly accelerating usability, we're looking at ways to do things like design with AI. And there's some pretty crazy stuff that you could do like with cloud code, et cetera, that you can have something like Figma make, create the, you know, use the brand colors, the typography, et cetera, the brand guidelines to create a website or particular elements. And then you can convert that into WordPress blocks. So there's, we're looking at the different processes. We're trying to innovate so that we can actually cut out having the need for a dedicated design partner, which is what we do currently, right? So somebody needs design that is beyond our Ken, we'll say, well, okay, we, we can't actually do this level of design. This is, this is proper design. This isn't just styling buttons. We have a great design partner. Here's some of the work they've done for our mutual clients. We can either refer you to them or we can manage everything. We can white label them and you'll just deal with us and we'll deal with them. And similarly for mobile apps, we don't do

[27:50] Micah: mobile apps, but we have a wonderful partner who, who makes custom apps out of membership sites,

[27:56] Vic: like WordPress sites. And so, and, and one of the reasons for that Micah too, is that something like design is very subjective because it's almost like you enlist the expertise of a design expert. And then you're like, oh, I don't like that. And, but you, again, this is a similar scenario. You don't really have the basis or the knowledge. And I'm not saying a client is stupid. Don't

[28:19] Micah: misunderstand me, but we often don't know what we don't know. And of course, you know,

[28:24] Vic: when something looks good to you, but that's not necessarily the, the end goal of design. It's to actually drive engagement, conversion, usability, ugly stuff converts better than beautiful stuff. You know, this from, you know, from the sales and copy world. So it's one of those things where I just don't have the patience to argue over subjective things because I'm not an expert either. So I'd rather have somebody who deals with that specifically, and we can stick to doing what we do better than almost anybody else. I mean, I'm sure there are people who do things at a very high level alongside us, but I just know what we can do. And so, yeah, I would say it's a combination of tiptoeing and trying to innovate into doing certain things ourselves via AI, provided that we could do a really good job and that we're not just hashing stuff together or referring people onto a partner or white labeling that partner, that partner services

[29:22] Micah: on behalf of our clients. It's cool, man. Yeah. The, the idea of design for AI makes a lot of sense

[29:27] Vic: to me, especially because I've always thought design, like they don't need to speak English,

[29:32] Micah: even it just needs to like look good. Right. And so AI doesn't really need to, yeah, understand what's going on as long as it looks great. I know that's only a piece of it looking good. It does have to be strategic, like you're saying, get the results. But I think what you just said is, is a brilliant use for somebody like you to be like, oh yeah, we can, we can do that with AI. And it's also, it's subjective for sure. But that also makes it great because if AI makes it and they accept it, it's like, yeah, we didn't need a person for that. They like it. Like it doesn't have to be human, you know? That's cool. I like all that. So what, I know you've been doing membership sites for a long time and I'm sure you've seen a lot of stuff and probably most of it is the same old, like I got a protect and gate content and have a community and so on. What are just for fun, what are some kind of very different things that you've seen or, Oh man, we've seen a lot of cool

[30:26] Vic: stuff. You mean as far as technically or the topic of the membership or what? Just like things membership

[30:32] Micah: site owners are doing where it's like, Oh, that's, that's cool. You know, I hadn't quite heard of that. And maybe if you want to explain how the tech works, but more like, what are some ideas that if somebody does have a big kind of classic membership site and it's boring or it's, it's just, there are no bells and whistles. What are some things that sometimes work out? Like you

[30:52] Vic: mentioned a client who you're like, Oh yeah, that gifting worked, you know, worked really well.

[30:57] Micah: What are some, some things like that that you can think of?

[31:00] Vic: Yeah, for sure. Well, for example, we work with an association that is a, a, an online dog kennel, which is essentially like an organization that verifies the, the, the breed, the pedigree of dogs in, in their local region, which is Australia and internationally. And it's a really interesting project. It's not a, it does have a membership component in that you log in and you interact with certain resources, but it's not, it's not about training. It's not about consuming

[31:34] Micah: courses. It's more that you log in. There's something really interesting. We were able to do.

[31:40] Vic: This is really exciting for us because we, we, nowadays we work with larger organizations more. So we were not enterprise because that, that has a whole slew of headaches associated with it, but larger organizations. So we're talking like five to 20 to $30 million a year organizations, nonprofits, et cetera. And what that really allows us to do is use WordPress and use these membership solutions to solve very real sort of mundane business problems. So for example, with this online dog kennel, they had a very manual approval flow for new applicants, right? So we built this whole huge registration flow using gravity forms, gravity perks, gravity flow. Whereas something used to take a lot of manual time and effort from, from human beings, we were able to just create a moderation center for one team member to be notified on every step of the registration process that requires their input. So the human in the loop factor. And so once that whole process is done, then the member is either accepted or rejected. And what's cool is we're using the membership functionality to give the moderator, the administrator access to a pared down dashboard where they don't see the whole WordPress mumbo jumbo. They just see what they need to see. And we use a really cool plugin called WP frontend

[33:02] Micah: admin for that, which allows you to essentially take the backend of any WordPress plugin and embed it on

[33:09] Vic: the front end and then customize what is accessible and visible to that front end user or to that logged in user with different set of permissions. So in this way, we're able to reduce the noise, increase the signal and to decrease the manual labor for this organization, which we haven't quantified it, but certainly it saves them a lot of money and time. And similarly, we're doing similar things with

[33:37] Micah: other organizations where we're not necessarily like the membership tech is just what allows you into

[33:44] Vic: the site. But then again, right. So similar, similar with memberium, we might do something like allow access to certain members of the team or certain clients based on tags that are exist in their keep account. Right. And so that allows us, especially for these larger organizations to have base layers of membership protection that like, Hey, you, you, you log in your client or you log in, you're an administrator. Okay. Those are your two big membership tiers, but then how do you control access to all these little minute things that like, okay, these two people in the company need to be able to see this. And the, these two clients are VIP clients that they need to have access to this membership round table in our community. Okay, great. That's where memberium comes into play where we can just pull that data from keep and, and have this really granular access so that it becomes not just a membership site, but an actual fully fledged platform to conduct the business of the organization.

[34:49] Micah: That's a great use case. Actually, the team members coming in with different permissions and levels and having a custom view partially. So it doesn't confuse them. I think partially also, so they don't screw

[35:00] Vic: anything up. Yes. I like that. So let me, if it's okay, I want to ask your opinion on mobile apps.

[35:08] Micah: Cause you mentioned you guys sometimes have people who want a mobile app and you'll refer them over. Personally, I'm not sure if I saw anybody's custom mobile app or heard somebody say like, Oh, the crux of our business is our custom mobile app. I'm not saying don't make them, but I have seen people, for example, put their community on mobile or put like parts of it. So I'm just kind of curious, what is your opinion on, on mobile? It seems to me, and I'd love your opinion. I could be, you know, in my own head here that when it came out, everyone thought, Oh, there's going to replace the membership sites going to replace websites. And then it kind of just became a little bit of a companion, maybe for some sites, it's the whole deal, but I, it didn't materialize as big as I thought it would. Um, do you

[35:47] Vic: feel that way or do you disagree? I don't know that much about that whole area, which is why we have a partner who helps us with it. But what I do know is this is, um, a lot of buddy boss users, they want to take advantage of the buddy boss mobile app because they rightly assume that their

[36:04] Micah: users are probably largely on mobile. And so they want to be able to provide a mobile first experience

[36:10] Vic: or like an app experience that feels native, but it's essentially their site. This is the same as you would experience it on a desktop, except it's refabbed for mobile. So, okay, that's understandable. You just essentially, as you say, it's a companion in the sense that it just makes it easier to access what you would access anyway, just by clicking a little icon on your phone. As far as the utility of it beyond, beyond that part, what, uh, what our partner told me when we were having these similar conversations is that the, the big sell for mobile apps for membership type sites is the access to the push notifications. So you're essentially able to engage your members and you have an additional marketing channel that if you think of it, it's kind of like your email list, except it's a notification that pops up on your phone. Anytime you push a notification out so you can run promos, you can run a, you can get people back into the, cause engagement is really a big part of, um, running a membership is keeping your, your, uh, uh, retention high. How do you keep retention high? You people need to be engaged or otherwise getting some kind of value on a recurring basis on an ongoing basis, which justifies paying a recurring fee. And there's a lot of ways to sort of do that. Um, but certainly, uh, attention farming is, uh, is kind of the, the whole game these days anyway. So may as well get good at it.

[38:00] Micah: That makes sense that the push notifications would be one of the bigger draws rather than

[38:04] Vic: like, I'm going to go watch a video on my phone, you know, um, like consume the membership content

[38:10] Micah: there. Right. I do watch videos on the phone, but I don't know if I'd go into most of the trainings on my phone rather than a computer a lot of the time, especially if it's, you know, I have to do something about it. Uh, let's talk about community for a second. So what, what would you say is your go-to for setting up a community and, and, uh, to frame it up a little bit, most people are always asking me like, well, do we build a internal with buddy boss or do we put them on Facebook or do we buy some SAS like circle, you know, what's the, and maybe there's not like a main one, but yeah,

[38:41] Vic: what do you see going on in that arena? So there's kind of like two ways that, that I see people using communities. They use it for lead gen or they use it as their, as their business model or as a part of

[38:53] Micah: their business model. So for example, if you, uh, you know, school is huge. So a lot of people use

[38:58] Vic: free school groups as a means to, to provide value to people for, for free and sort of indoctrinate them. I mean that in the marketing sense and not in the prop propagandistic sense to indoctrinate them into their sort of ecosystem, um, and either sell them onto their paid school group, right? So that's a very simple two-step funnel or sell them to whatever other products or services that they have. Similarly, we can have, I've seen many times where a client will use a Facebook group and, and which platform you use is probably going to depend on the type of market you're in as well, right? Facebook is great for certain things. Instagram, not, not so great for most things, unless you're like a fitness coach, it's great for that kind of thing. So the, the platform you choose to use for lead generation, right? For giving people free value, for cultivating a community, and then bringing those people onto your paid products or services is going to depend on your particular market and niche, uh, and demographics that you, that you're working with. Then, uh, for the actual community paid community, what I'm seeing most of all in our world, which is WordPress is buddy boss is still the old, um,

[40:17] Micah: um, the old sort of curmudgeon King of, uh, of community software. It's great. There's a lot of

[40:26] Vic: problems with it. It's not perfect. So I'm actually really encouraged to see that there is a lot of

[40:32] Micah: competition because if somebody can come in and create a, a worthy competitor to buddy boss that has

[40:41] Vic: the modularity, the functionality, uh, that's faster, that's has a good code base that's well documented with good support. Uh, I'm not, I'm not saying buddy boss doesn't have these things, but it does have problems in those areas, but it's still by far the best solution. Uh, although I think that

[41:01] Micah: won't be the case for very much longer. And so, yeah, those are the two big use cases. Buddy boss is

[41:07] Vic: definitely the, the most common one. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done. Yeah. From

[41:12] Micah: your perspective, as somebody who also does hosting, I've heard buddy boss is kind of a hog on hosting.

[41:18] Vic: Is that what you see as well or not so much? Yeah. It kicks off a lot of, a lot of, uh, PHP requests and, but on the hosting side, it's more about like how many concurrent users you have. It's not, it is about your stack as well, but you can have a fairly modest tech stack and still max out your resources very quickly. Um, if, if you're not set up properly to handle that concurrency.

[41:44] Micah: Gotcha. So you mentioned earlier about kind of some of these projects where if you're reducing somebody's labor, there's an obvious ROI, right? To the reduction labor, like, Oh, you were doing this manually. We're going to save you that. What, what would you say is maybe kind of a guess at the split between the work you're doing that enables somebody's potential to sell some stuff or the

[42:07] Vic: work that you're doing that actually just saves them money? Well, I think we kind of have two main ways that we help people. We either do projects for them or we support them on an ongoing basis, right? So if we do a project for somebody, presumably it's to, uh, create the platform or the functionality that allows them to do whatever that it is they want to do, whether it's to sell

[42:29] Micah: something or to better service their members. So that's a little bit hard to quantify unless it's

[42:36] Vic: something like we don't have a shopping cart. We want you to build us a shopping cart. Okay. Well, now you can accept payments or we don't have a funnel. We want you to build us a funnel.

[42:45] Micah: You can, you can sort of quantify that, but on the support side for the people that we support on a

[42:53] Vic: retainer basis, I think the main thing that we're saving them is the mental bandwidth. Uh, well, I mean, in addition, obviously to being their go-to tech team for any tech problems or requests they may have, not having to think about that, knowing it's taken care of, knowing that you can rely on us. Um, it's, and a lot of people don't realize this when, when starting like a membership type of a

[43:18] Micah: business, especially before your revenue, you know, climbs to something, something appreciable,

[43:25] Vic: which that's subjective, but, uh, there, there are a lot of costs in operating this kind of business.

[43:30] Micah: And one of the costs is support and doing it yourself is a really poor use of your time as a

[43:39] Vic: founder. And not that you couldn't, you're, it's actually, you're actually at a disadvantage if you could, and you try if you're better off if you, if you can't, and you just say, you know what, I'm not even going to, I'm not going to go there. I'm going to hire member fixer. I'm going to hire another

[43:52] Micah: certified developer because, uh, your time is very limited. You should focus on servicing your clients,

[44:01] Vic: making sure that they're happy and getting new business and managing your organization, right? Whatever your, your functions are in the business. So we basically provide them peace of mind and competent technical support and, uh, a pleasant collaboration experience. Um, you know, knowing that our team really cares, our team really like gives a crap, you know, like if, if some urgent thing kicks off in the middle of the night, somebody is waking up and on it.

[44:28] Micah: And it's not something that we expect or, or demand of our team to do that, that that's just,

[44:34] Vic: they just can't let things go wrong. You know, that's awesome. So if somebody is,

[44:40] Micah: is looking to work with you guys, how should they, how should they contact you? I know you have a discovery process, but is there, you know, somebody they can talk to initially to kind of

[44:51] Vic: get a feel for it or see if they're a good fit? Yeah, for sure. So our head of technical sales is Risto and you can book a call with him through, through content contacting us on our website, which is memberfix.rocks memberfixrocks. Just fill out the contact form and Risto will hop on a call with you. He'll hear you out here, what your needs are, what your difficulties and challenges are, and we'll try to help you try to give value upfront. That's also another big tenant of ours from that we got from Alex Hormozzi. Although I suppose it's kind of common sense in a way. We just try to give as much value as we can, even if it means referring somebody on to somebody who's better able to help that client because we can't help everybody, right? And we can't help everybody equally well either. That's another big thing. We can actually help people better who have larger organizations with more legacy tech because, you know, the interesting thing is, this is a bit of a paradox, is that somebody who's just starting out, you know, sort of like the solopreneur, they're still not making very much money. They're doing a lot of the stuff themselves.

[46:01] Micah: They're going to know about all the latest tech because they're right there on the ground floor.

[46:07] Vic: But, you know, a $5 million nonprofit in the US might be using tech from like 1999. That is just, and we show them like something like Membarium or WooCommerce, and it just blows them the hell away, you know, because it's so far advanced there. They can see how much it's going to help their business and how much time it's going to save, how many processes it's going to automate, like, you know, customers like had to manually make their monthly payments, like just crazy stuff that just from a business perspective, like Hormozy would just like drop over dead if he heard some of these things, you know? And so we're able to help those folks way better than somebody who, you know, is like a solo. It doesn't mean we can't help those people. We can and we do, but it's just an interesting kind of paradox that, an interesting business insight that you really can't help everyone equally and you probably shouldn't try to. So anyway, yeah, get in touch with us. We'll do our best to give you value. And if we can help you, we'll endeavor to help you. If we can't, we'll endeavor to send you some resources or refer you on to somebody who can.

[47:13] Micah: That's awesome. I appreciate it. Well, any other membership wisdom you want to share with people

[47:17] Vic: out there? I mean, I guess if, uh, if you're going to do this kind of business, if you're going to do this kind of model, just realize that it's a business like any other business, it's going to be really, really hard and it's not going to get not hard as time goes on. It's just, it's, it's always hard. And the membership component, it's just your delivery vehicle for your value. You're not just going to put a paywall and automagically, uh, you know, make a hundred thousand

[47:45] Micah: dollars recurring per year. You have to, um, keep those folks engaged. You have to keep giving them

[47:52] Vic: value or else they're going to cancel and you're just going to end up where you started. So, um, just enter, enter into it with the appropriate expectations that it's a business that's hard work. You got to give value and it's just going to keep, keep being hard forever. So very real,

[48:10] Micah: but, and, and very encouraging. No, I'm just kidding. It is very real. And I'll add onto that and say, it's very, very true. It is, it is just like any other business. It's difficult. You got to earn your money. It is though one of those special businesses where when it goes really right,

[48:23] Vic: it goes really right. You know, totally. Some people can, can struggle for a while and then they, they hit something, right. They hit some scale or something and everything opens up. So it is exciting, but you're right. It is also, um, being practical, you know, you got to work, you got to,

[48:40] Micah: you got to provide a lot of value and keep people engaged to make the thing work. So, well, we appreciate you, Vic. Uh, this was fun to talk to you. I know, um, you know, we're half a world apart, but it's so cool that we get to just kind of chat. And I think you and I are, are kindred spirits in the membership space as far as kind of how we understand and think about a lot of the principles. So thanks so much for those of you watching memberfix.rocks is the site to go to. We'll put a link under this, of course, but thanks again for coming on Vic and we'll talk to you again soon. Thanks Mike. I talk soon. Thanks Mike. I talk soon.