Weekly updates: comments coming this week, our notification task force and behind-the-scenes info

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey, hey, Erin Kelly, CEO and co founder of MemberVault.

So, today, I wanted to give you an update on the comments feature, because I know we have been talking about that for a while now. And we are finally, to the point where I can tell you with confidence that it will be landing in your account no later than this Sunday. So our goal is to get it pushed to all accounts probably Friday.

And just for some behind the scenes, we're pretty much done with the feature, it is in our bug testing early access group. So they're, they're kicking it around and testing and giving us feedback. And the other thing that we've really made a commitment to, you know, as a team over a lot of experience and pushing features is that we don't want to push features until we also have associated knowledge base and, you know, help articles that go along with feature unless it's something that's like, really, really simple, where we really don't think that anyone's going to have a specific question about how the feature works, or how to use the feature.

You know, any any kind of like, things that touch on that feature. You know, that's the only time that we push it without having the help docs, you know, created ahead of time. And so that is something that our team is definitely still, like, we're still kind of like finding our groove on how that works. I know early earlier in the early days of MemberVault, that was basically like, when Mike got a feature done, he would immediately just push it.

And then because it was like, oh, it's done, it's done. Let's get it out as soon as possible. We didn't have an early access bug testing group. And we we pushed it live before, you know, we were able to do the help docs, which probably not like the best customer experience in terms of people being like, Oh, how do I use this. And, you know, having to sort of figure it out on the fly.

I do think that our community really, especially people that have been around for a long time, they almost like that experience, because it's like you're you're definitely like CO creating with us. And, you know, I think we have a lot of early adopters that are early MemberVault users. And so that that was that was a comfortable place for them to just poke around and test things out and figure out on their own without a lot of supporting guidance from us. But as we have grown our user base, I think that there's quite a few more people that they they like to have an article, they like to have some insights about how to use it, and certainly have some some answers about how things work.

And so we have really been evolving how we do that, because, you know, it's we we currently, although our goal is to have more than one developer, we currently have one developer, who is Mike, our CTO. And he is incredibly fast and very, very talented, we've actually hired, we've tried several different developer solutions at this point. And none of them have really been up to the quality, the code quality that Mike puts out. And so, you know, because we are aiming to keep a very small, agile, like, really, really good at their jobs team. You know, we haven't kept any of those developers around. And so we're actually, we're actually in talks with a developer right now to join potentially join our team.

But what that means is that we have one developer who handles everything. So he Mike is always the one that is doing the features. He's the one that's handling any bug reports that come in, he's always you know, working with, we do have a server company that we work with, that helps keep our server really secure and optimized, and they have 24/7 support. And so he works with them to make sure that the back end is working as well as possible. And that MemberVault It's as fast as we can have it and you know, all that good stuff. So he has a very full plate.

And so what that means is when we have these features that we're working on, and other things come up that feature then gets pushed back a little bit. And so from a project management standpoint, it can be a little difficult to plan around like, okay, like we need to have the feature in early access so that we can write the knowledgebase articles and then they need to be stayed, they need to stay in draft mode because the feature is not live yet. And then we need to have someone review it to make sure that there aren't any, like obvious glaring holes.

And especially has Steve or me and I have been working on this podcast and kind of getting into working on getting into a schedule of like, okay, let's make sure that the podcast episodes are actually talking about the features that are coming up and have a podcast episode actually land when the feature is released.

That can be kind of like we haven't we haven't figured that quite out yet. But I'm really proud of our team because I think that you know, all of us are not only early adopters, but we're definitely flexible and Yeah. So kudos to to Remy and Steve, because we are still definitely figuring that out. And but that is our goal is that, you know, if you're a podcast listener like you are definitely in the know, and like as stuff happens, like you're finding out about it really quickly, definitely the people that are in the collaborative on Facebook hear about things very, very quickly as well. So yeah, so that some of the behind the scenes may or may not have been interesting to you. But the comments feature is definitely a place where it's such a big feature, we have been releasing it to the Early Access, bug testers kind of in parts. And so there's a few little things left that will be going out to them early this week, so that they can test it and so that we can start working on our help documents. And so having all of that, finished and ready, so that we can push publish on all of those help documents and podcast episodes. And that might I think the podcast episodes probably happened next week.

But just have everything available and ready to support you once the feature goes live in your account. And again, that's probably going to be Friday. But it potentially depending on what comes up once we push the rest of the comments feature to our bug testers, if anything comes up that needs to really be changed or updated in might push it into this weekend. So if you have been waiting to add comments to your pages, posts or products, inside of MemberVault, I don't know that that is going to happen this week. So that is really exciting. I know I am really excited. I am obviously the member of MV's site is included in early access. And I have gotten to see the comments. And so I will actually be publishing this past podcast transcript on our blog. And so it will have comments enabled. So if you want to get a sneak peek at it, you can go to the link in the show notes.

So I'm thinking let's go with like membervault.co forward slash blog example. And so it'll just be like all one word smushed together. So blog example. So if you want to check out what comments look like, you can definitely go look at that, and then know that it will be live in your account. The ability to have comments will be live in your account, by this weekend at the latest. So very exciting.

This is also so I've talked about this before on the on the podcast. But as with everything that we do, this is a minimum viable feature. So we kind of we look at like, okay, what are the things that have to be included to be able to use this feature? And what are the things that can be added after the fact once we get feedback from people about how they're using it, what they want it to look like all of that kind of stuff. And so, you know, just like with any, especially these really big features that we do, there's definitely going to be some things that are not in there. Obviously, live streaming is not going to be in there. That is something that's very advanced, I'm sort of laughing when I say that, because I know we've had a few people say, Well, it's good, but like it's not as robust as as Facebook groups. And it's like, well, yeah, Facebook has been around for a long time.

And they definitely have more than one developer. And so you know, this is not going to have a lot of the bells and whistles that you get inside of, let's say, for example, obviously Facebook or like Circle, which is a community tool, you know, or mighty networks, because that's what they do. I mean, that's what that tool does. And so this is just a this is a element that is inside of the member vaults ecosystem of features. It's not the only thing that we do. And so we are going to be optimizing it over time. But what our goal is, is always to add features that are really simple to use. They just work. And it lets us get feedback from you about what would you change? What do you want to add, you know, all of these things. And so one of the thing that is not going to be inside the first release of this feature is email notifications for people when they leave a comment so or when they get a reply to the comment, I should say.

So you as the admin can send yourself notifications, to let you know when someone has commented on wherever you have comments enabled, so whether it's pages posts or products, but the people that are commenting on your blog, for example, will not get an email notification now, they will get an in app notification. So when they go to your member vault account, there's going to be a little like bell icon, just like with pretty much anything that we use these days, these days. It has like some kind of engagement element to it. And so they'll be able to click on that and see like, oh, so and so, you know, reply to this and so and so replied to this, right? And so they'll be able to engage with it there, but you need to remind them to get back into your MemberVault.

So the reason we did this is because there's a lot of kind of dark corners when it comes to email notifications. There's a lot of customizations that I believe people are going to want to be able to have. So it's not like that you know, we do it one way, and everyone that's using comments now has to, you know, be okay with that many email notifications going out to their people whenever they get a reply. This is also something that I do a lot of research on in terms of ethical notifications.

So this is this is like an industry term for the responsibility of software designers to not create software like Facebook that results in a negative impact in people's lives. And so it's a balance, right? Because it's like, okay, I don't want to do what Facebook does, which is like when someone starts to take time away from Facebook, Facebook, like start sending you a bunch of emails about like, hey, so and so just commented on your thing, you might want to come back over and see what it is like, that's not really according to ethical notification standards, like that's not really an ethical notification. It's not super important. They're very much making it so that you go back into Facebook, so that you can see it.

And of course, you get caught in the dooms roll, right, so or the just the endless scroll. And so there is a increasing interest among software developers to create ethical notifications. But the balance of that is you also want to have really strong user engagement and and customer experience, right. So you want to make sure that people are like, getting reminders to come back into your MemberVault. And I know that most of our users are not super comfortable with email marketing. They want to be more comfortable, but they're not quite there yet. And so the idea of like having to come up with like really customized email solutions to get people to get back into their MemberVault, it might feel a little heavy. And so we absolutely our goal here is to get a lot of feedback from people like do you want it to be something that you as admin can set up so that your users get like a once a week, kind of like digest and know that circle allows you to do that? And it actually like curates it for you. Do you want people to be able to opt in to email notifications at a like comment thread level. So it's like, you know, they don't want to get email notifications for every comment that someone replies to of theirs. But maybe they really care about this particular one. And there's lots of other kind of in depth conversations that we want to have about how notifications work. So for right now, the way that it will work is that, you know, I highly recommend that you're sending nurture emails anyway, to people that it's not necessarily relevant to blog posts, I mean, it is for people that are in your audience. But the blog post comments don't matter as much as the comments that are you're putting inside of your products. And so I definitely recommend sending nurture emails to people who have purchased your products, especially if it's like a live program or something that's happening right now. And you want to have a lot of engagement.

And, you know, we're going to be talking a lot about all of this stuff, beyond just notifications, just because this is all customer engagement, customer experience stuff. And one of the things I really want to start playing around with is text notifications as well that people opt into obviously, that are supportive, rather than like, hey, come buy this thing. It's 50% off, if you buy it today, like not promotional, but instead supportive, nurturing type text messages that help people actually take action and feel motivated and like all of that stuff and resurfacing the links to your member vault product that they signed up for our purchase. So this is something that we're going to be continually talking about. This is a very long winded way of me saying that one of the things that we want to do, and I will have more information on this, probably not in next week's podcast, but we are going to actually form a task force in Notifications Task Force.

And Mike and I were having our morning meeting this morning. And we were we were talking about this. And he's like, can we call it a task force? And if it's really important, you'd call it a task for yes, we can. So we're gonna call it a notifications tax task force. So this is not comments Task Force, where we're talking about the entire feature, where it's like, oh, I want to have live streaming. And I want to have all I want to be able to do gifts, like obviously, we want to do gifts, right? That will definitely be an optimization that we make. This is just for notifications. And so far, it's for people that are going to be heavily using comments that want to be really involved in the conversation about how this particular part of the feature evolves over time and what we add in.

And so if that is something that interests you know that a next week's podcast episode, obviously, I'll be sharing it in email as well and inside the collaborative, but we are going to be opening up a notifications task force that it's probably going to be I'm thinking it's going to be a telegram group. And it will be sort of like, okay, give us your feedback. And then we'll let you know what we're doing. It'll be similar to how we run our early access group where it's like, we're not posting a bunch of stuff in there. It's more an open channel of conversation.

Question for you and our team. And then we'll be recording all of the information that we get, and then reviewing it as a team, and then kind of bringing it back to the channel and be like, okay, like, this is what we've decided based on all of the feedback from from everyone in here. So the link to join that channel is going to be something that I share next week. And again, inside of email, and the collaborative and all that good stuff. But yeah, I am really excited because this is comments is the first step into having a lot of back and forth.

Conversations, obviously, we had quiz answers, which is really, really powerful and actually had something happened last week where I was going through our quiz answers, and someone was like, Oh, my gosh, like, I didn't even know that this was available. Like you should be sharing this more. And I'm like, Yeah, I know, thank you for the reminder, it's so easy to forget to remind people about certain pieces of comment content that they have access to. And so I shared it in the collaborative and everyone was like, Oh, my gosh, like, I didn't even know I had this.

So I just, I love the power of, of having these conversations with your people. And so comments is going to be just another way to do that. And so I will have the links, which I've totally already forgotten what I think I said blog

blog example, was the link that I gave you. So I will listen back to this, when I do, do the show notes, and put the correct link in there. And also, you know, if you want to be a part of that task force for notifications, just keep an ear out or an eye out. For for the link there. And again, we'll be we'll be sharing that.

Pretty much everywhere we have conversations, and, and the comments feature will be live in your account no later than Sunday. So of this week, so very exciting. And I would love to know if you want to post in the collaborative or if you want to drop it into the comments of the blog example, the link that I gave you for this transcript, and say like, what are you what are you going to use comments for like, what are you most excited about? Like what are what are things that are really important to you, like, let's have an open conversation about this feature and your hopes and goals and dreams for it. Because this really is like going to be such a fun thing for us to play with.

And it's not going to be included in the first phase but like we're gonna have EP you're gonna be able to have people earn EP and do badges and you know, unlock things and have more insights about your hot leads and like it's just gonna be so so powerful to have everything in one place. And be getting that much more information about individual individual users and just so much good stuff. So, so much good stuff coming. Great episodes coming up this week from Remy and Steve. And then next week, we will be dropping even more good stuff about the comments which again, you're gonna be able to add inside of your member vault to pages posts and products. So yeah, pretty exciting week.

What are you going to use comments for? What are you most excited about with comments? What are things that are really important to you?