Membership Economy

If you are developing cloud software, your goal should be to find super users. To start, let’s begin with a few definitions. The membership economy started with companies like Netflix. Rather than treating people like customers, companies treat people like members. People feel like they belong to something. There’s a difference between just offering subscriptions and providing a support network where customers can engage with one another and share ideas and work with one another. For chemical industry software, like ours, this might be just having a discussion page on LinkedIn or a shared gitHub page where customers who use our software can share open source code or machine learning models, or post free-lance jobs for medical writing or coding. By joining the community you can enjoy recurring benefits only members could have.

Another benefit of a membership model is it’s a way to retain customers long term. It makes them feel engaged when you interact with them rather than just offering a product to sell. It’s a process. When you on board customers, you want to do three things — 1.remove friction — free trial, 2. deliver immediate value, 3. reward desired behavior. Welcome the user to make sure they know what they signed up for and thank them. Connect them to others in the community and ask for feedback. Call within the first 30 days to see how things are going. Then, continue to provide info and connect as they use your software. Be sure to check in with them on a regular basis. It’s important to make achievement of customer goals a part of your onboarding so that you can…