Alura

Who are you, and what do you do now?

I'm actually doing my masters in business analytics.

I'm not really that technical, and Alura is a new part-time project. I also own an e-commerce company selling on Amazon and on Etsy, which is how I know the platforms.

What's Alura, and what does it do?

Alura is a product research tool for Etsy.

That's what it is right now, and then we're looking to expand to provide more tools in general for Etsy sellers.

Who uses Alura, and why do they love it?

It's mainly Etsy sellers at the moment.

It's useful as a product research tool and for finding keywords because it allows you to inspect any product on Etsy to see how many sales it has. Or at least how many sales it's had for the past 30-days. We built an algorithm that allows you to inspect the product and look behind the scenes to see what keywords a product is using.

What was the biggest problem you were trying to solve with Memberstack?

So we had the entire extension built out and set up with payments, but then we pivoted to Memberstack instead because we needed another way to capture payments.

We tried setting this up with Google payments first, but that was horrible.

With Google payments, we had to set individual prices for each country, and there was a cap for some countries for how much we could charge.

We also knew we wanted to add more features down the line, and Memberstack would make it super easy to add additional features to our website or extension. Lastly, because it was super easy to get set up.

How big is your team, and how did you build the Chrome Extension?

It's really just my friend and I doing this.

Neither of us is technical (my friend is doing a coding boot camp right now, so he's getting there). We've been working with a developer from India for the last six months. He built the extension for us and installed Memberstack.

Without Memberstack, do you know how you would have addressed this problem?

Yeah, we looked into Firebase, but that was too complicated to set up ourselves. We found a YouTube series, but it looked messy. Memberstack was 100x easier.

Did you have any hesitations before you got started?

Not really. We were able to sign up for a free account and test everything. We tried setting it up on our website and then on the actual extension itself. So we got everything working there and only had to pay when it was time to launch.

It's pretty smooth.

Do you remember how long it took to set up?

It took us less than a day to set up the website. Super easy.

The chrome extension took about a week. Mainly because we had everything set up, and then we needed to change the payment process.

What kind of person would you recommend Memberstack to?

If you're a developer or a more technical-type, I'd say it's beneficial because it saves you time. You can just get it setup and go.  For me, it was super easy to set up on our website itself. Yeah. So for no-code folks, it's definitely recommended. Memberstack's a simple, easy way to set up memberships on your website.