The Design Business Show 248: An Inside Look with MemberVault Co-Founder, Mike Kelly

Mike Kelly is the CTO and Co-Founder of MemberVault, living in Olympia Washington with CEO Wife, 3 kids, and a giant dog.

 

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

 

The Creation of MemberVault 

• Mike shares that he started writing code in the 5th grade and has been a developer his whole life - before MemberVault, he was a freelance developer

• At one point, Mike and his wife Erin started a business where she would design websites, and he would build them, but shared that it was a disaster 

• Mike took time off to be a stay-at-home dad after having their first child, where he started building MemberVault as a side project that came as a need from one of Erin's clients

• After getting enough interest in the platform, Mike and Erin created a beta, and it slowly started to gain momentum

• In 2019, Erin reached a crossroads in her business and joined Mike at MemberVault full-time

• Mike shares some mistakes he and Erin first made when they started MemberVault

• Early on, Mike and Erin realized the demand was for more than courses; people wanted to sell digital ebooks, one-on-one service, etc, which made it hard to identify the platform at first

• Leaning into what they were good at set them apart from other big platforms in the market

• Mike explains the difficult decisions he and Erin had to make about their business model so they could scale but continue helping individual customers on a personal level

• MemberVault is rolling out a new tiered system for membership that Mike explains

• Mike is the only full-time developer but brings in people on contract to help - they also use a company that monitors their servers 24/7

• MemberVault has evolved from just selling digital products to having pages, navigation, blogs, comments, file uploads, questions, and so much more because they listen to their users and can implement their ideas quickly

• As a freelance developer, companies push for the fastest and cheapest option, so Mike felt he couldn't do his best work and take care of the finished product, which bothered him

• Mike talks about how it is to run a business from home and homeschool their 3 children

How To Use MemberVault + Updates

• MemberVault wants to be your central hub for all your services and products so people can go to one place to find all your offerings

• 88% of people who enter your MemberVault for a freebie will click around to see what else you offer 

• In MemberVault, you can see what people are clicking on so you can meet them where they're at and start a conversation instead of having a fixed automated funnel

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