Stefan Stefansson is the co-founder of WithSara, a membership that supports women and provides fun, effective, and quick workouts from home. In this episode, he joins Ward to discuss which are the No-Code tools you should be using to grow your membership.

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📄 Show Transcript

This transcript is computer generated, please excuse any errors :)

Ward Sandler: Welcome, everyone! Today I'm interviewing Stefan Stefansson, the co-founder of WithSara, a platform supporting women to get a fun, effective, and quick workout from home, featuring his wife, Sara Olasfdottir. Stefan is also the CEO of Sensivo, a venture-backed startup in Stockholm; he has been on the founding teams of many successful software startups and has held various key positions in Icelandic companies. Stefan, welcome to the Membership Maker Podcast; we're thrilled to have you here.

Stefan Stefansson: Thank you, Ward. I'm very excited to talk to you about all things membership,

Ward Sandler: Every day, non-technical users have more no-code tools available to enhance their memberships. What is your experience combining MemberSpace and third-party tools to make WithSara grow?

Stefan Stefansson: Yes. I mean, for me, the most fun part of building this membership with Sarah is a, you know, being able to create all these nice features that all these big companies have that used to be small, long stumped. And that's the magic of MemberSpace. It's the magic of a Squarespace and allow you to stitch together these different platforms. Before we start the membership, we all go and look at the, you know, potential competitors or top subscription companies, and we see what they're doing well, and you know, what we could use or utilize on our own platforms. And at least we did, and we found many things that we wanted to have on WithSara. And that's not necessarily something that comes by default on the Squarespace platform or on MemberSpace. But if you search and if you utilize a community like the MemberSpace community, you slowly start to figure out that somebody has, you know, solved this before for the platform that you're building on. And just, you know, for example, I recently really wanted to figure out which headlines on our website led to the highest conversions. And, you know, by doing a little bit of research, we found that there's this third party solution that integrates with Squarespace, which allows you to measure an AB test up to six different headlines for free. I'm in no way affiliated with that company, but it's an AB testing ai, and it's very nice. And now we have a headline that is outperforming the rest, and we're going to continue to use that so slowly but surely improving in all the experience. And then, of course, you know, we want to have a great member review set up, and there's this company called elf site that allows you to do this quite efficiently. And then, you know, recently more connected to MemberSpace, it's maybe it's my favourite add-on, which is a Zapier. And I think it's a tool that is probably slowly becoming everybody's favorite. And what I love about that and what it's helping me with is, you know, or maybe it's better to explain maybe how things were prior to the Zapier. You know, every month when we calculated how many people were added to the MemberSpace community, our MemberSpace community, and how many members canceled. We had to retag or tag people in, you know, various different solutions to state their status. Have they canceled members? Are they not paying? Have they just created accounts, etc.? And that was a very time-consuming task. And then, of course, Zapier came in, and we were able to automate that, you know, integrating it into MemberSpace in allowing us to, you know, fetch this data from you guys and automatically do those things for me. So there's so much that the third-party solutions that are out there supporting all these platforms can do to help a membership.

Ward Sandler: Yeah, 100%, and we got some good enhancements coming down the pipeline for Zapier, too, in the future. So that'll get even better. So I think one thing with the world of no-code tools, there are a lot of them, right? Some better than others. I think for a lot of folks, though, it can be a little overwhelming, right? There are so many options. It's kind of hard to figure out. Well, which one do I use in my situation? So you had said that you had done some research and, you know, some thinking about this, where did you kind of start, though? Like, did you start by mapping out? Okay. For, WithSara, our website and the platform we want here, like 'the must haves here are'; 'the nice to have' like how did you actually think through the architecting of what you needed before you found the tool?

Stefan Stefansson: Okay. You know, it's good to categorize your user journey into three different lanes; it varies between platforms, but in our example, one lane is acquiring customers and then the second lane is maybe, you know, how do you, how do you serve those users once they're on the site and how do you explain a proper story to them? So they convert that. So when they convert, how do you create the best experience possible so they don't churn? And it just like I said before because everything has been done before; usually, you don't have to rebuild the wheel. You can just go to a platform that you like or a platform that has a lot of resources to do testing, usability testing, or great people working there doing these things, and you can just see how they're solving it. And what do you usually figure out is that there are certain trends in all these areas, and there are solutions that you need to have in place when it comes to acquiring customers. And then there are things that you have to have in mind when you are tried to convert them. And then, when you are trying to increase the happiness of your members or your subscribers, there are things that you have to keep in mind. I don't know if that answers the question, but it's, it's very good to structure the journey a little bit, then try to map out what elements are needed to make that journey the most pleasant.

Ward Sandler: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Stefan; we really appreciate it. Would you like to share any resources or recommendations for folks trying to learn more about WithSara?

Stefan Stefansson: Just a recommendation, if you're interested in what we're doing, and I want to see examples of what we talked about, you can go to WithSara.co to learn more about us! And also, I really recommend reading a little bit about the things that Jacob Nielsen has published on Usability and User Experience.

Ward Sandler: Excellent. Thank you.