Proof: The Academy

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Who are you, and what do you do now?

My name is Austin Distel, and I lead marketing at the personalization software company, Proof.

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Who uses Proof?

We help B2B SaaS companies increase leads and sales by personalizing their site for every visitor.

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How do you use Memberstack?

We use Memberstack to create a free course that teaches personalization. What Memberstack allows us to do is gate our course content and only grant access to folks who create an account/opt-in.

Once they opt-in, they can access course material at any time with their email and password. It creates a better, more personalized experience as well.

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How did you solve this problem before Memberstack?

We had our courses on landing pages that, if you knew the link directly, you could access without opting in. Memberstack allows us to redirect back to the sales page if a visitor hasn't opted in before.

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Why does Memberstack work for you?

We already had a product and a website, and we wanted all of the new course assets to live on our website. That way, we could keep the same footer, the same navigation, and to be able to reference our existing marketing resources right from the course.

For example, we have a call-to-action that's exactly the same across our entire site including within the members area. And with our product, Proof Experiences, we're able to personalize our onboarding flow with information we collect when they sign up and when they complete lessons in the course.

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What other tools do you use with Memberstack?

We use quite a few tools.

We use Segment to tag events across our sites and to send that data everywhere. We use Amplitude as our primary analytics dashboard. Every event is fired via Segment using their visual tag manager, which lets us say, "Hey, when a member visits this page or when they click on this button, fire a tag." From there we can send that event data anywhere.

For example, whenever somebody opts in for our Personalization course, Memberstack automatically gives them access to certain pages, and it also sends an event to all of our other apps. This includes Facebook advertising to say, "Hey, somebody that you just did an advertisement to logged in or signed up for the Academy."

We also use that data to track where leads are in our customer journey and to update every call to action on our blog, Hubspot, in our emails, etc.

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Have you recommended Memberstack to anyone and why?

I'm involved in a bunch of membership owner communities, so I think about this quite a bit. And I think that Memberstack is great if:

• You're a Wordpress fanatic, a Webflow fanatic, etc.
• You want to own your site.
• You want to own your experiences.
• You want to use all of the branding & design that you've put work into creating.
• You want to be able to easily integrate with your tech stack.

I think that that's why you would want to use Memberstack.

If you want a complete package that is totally separate from your website/product, then maybe a different solution would be right. But if you use Segment, if you use a website builder, and you use Stripe as your payment processor, then Memberstack is the obvious choice.

Memberstack was an obvious choice for Proof because it fit neatly in our tech stack. I don't have to relearn really anything. It was super easy to set up.

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Anything else you want to tell folks?

Yeah. I think the biggest benefit that we've received is creating an on-brand freemium membership that we use for lead generation.

We've integrated Memberstack into our whole resources section to ensure a user only has to opt in once. After opting in, they should be able to get access to everything at anytime.

That's my vision for what we're doing. All of Proof's content will be put into a single hub. Whether that's our podcast, case studies, blog posts or courses, all of that will go in one member's area, which for us is free.

I can also see Memberstack as a valuable asset if you wanted to create quick paid content. You'd be able to upsell or add a gateway to your business with paid content. And I think that's really cool.