Webflow Conf 2023

"I discovered memberstack in the early days of memberstack, just as this craving of how can we add authentication on top of webflow sites in a pretty easy, flexible and powerful way. Memberstack was amazing right out the gate." 

"Every year Webflow have this annual conference called Webflow conf, traditionally we've always used a very typical events management platform or software that deals with all the registration forms and payments, authenticating and gating content. Knowing that our own tool was very powerful and could connect with other tools like Memberstack, we really wanted to strive to build it all ourselves this year, to prioritize the user experience as the number one thing that we wanted. As well as consistentency, branding, flexibility and powerful and Memberstack was a great fit to be able to do that.

So we integrated Memberstack on top of the Webflow Conf marketing end of the site and then used a lot of functionality, especially that comes along with Memberstack 2.0, things like the DOM package and certain technical code based approaches that you can really customize the way you use emberstack and read and write data back and forth for all kinds of things, like certain ways that people can interact and register, as well as storing information, notifying people, verifying things along the way. So it was incredibly powerful as this fundamental base set of tooling that we could modify and really react to pretty often changing requirements that came along the way of building the Webflow Conf site and also be flexible enough to work for the complexities of four different locations.

So we had a lot of different plan types, both waitlisted and confirmed. We also had another use case of people that were kind of pre vetted or RSVP'd and Memberstack was so powerful to flex with all of those things along the way. So we knew that based on metric of previous years of Webflow comp that we could have upwards of 30,000 or more people registering for the virtual event, as well as a combination of people that were registering for in person events. And knowing that we could have that scalability all the way up to even 50,000 or more was huge. And Memberstack came through very well with that, we ended up just shy of 30,000 members.

A couple of my favorite things about Memberstack was that it's mostly no code, changing settings like redirects and automations, even things that happen automatically, like if somebody gets this plan, then they get these two plans, for example, all of that happens in the Memberstack dashboard pretty seamlessly and quickly, and it's very easy to navigate and understand what's going on the other side.

I would say that by far my favorite was with Membersack 2.0 came a lot of more technical functionality, like the DOM package that allowed us to use javascript on the front end to essentially create data back and forth with the Webflow frontend and the Memberstack backend. So we could extend the functionality. Between that and just custom field creation in Memberstack was beyond, honestly, what I originally had even anticipated, when myself and another team member were vetting what tools were out there and the best approach really when it came down to it, we knew this would have the core fundamentals, but once we got into it, there was so much more uncovered and the whole Memberstack team was so incredible collaborating and supporting any kind of unexpected requests we had along the way, and just giving us that reassurance of again, scalability, performance, reliability through the whole lifecycle of the conference.

I think what surprised me the most on Memberstack was again kind of the accessibility of doing operations with Memberstack data on the front end using JavaScript via that DOM package and how performant it really was. We were doing some operations on page load with data, a little bit of logic, and then show or hide content or even making calculations. There was also instances where people would be making an update to some value that would go back to Memberstack and back, and it was much more performant than I ever would have expected. Simply just out of the scale and sheer amount of data that was being exchanged. It was really, really exciting to just have that confidence and really have like an app like experience all happening in real time in the browser.

Some of the things that Memberstack came through with was security, fexibility and really just this idea that I really personally believe that if you pair different tools together that each do a specific thing really, really well, you end up having a lot better outcome than trying to find one tool that does all the things just kind of okay. Memberstack really deep focuses on member management, authentication, gating content and all those things that come with it. And the fact that we could so easily pair it with Webflow, which arguably does incredible, incredible work on the frontend and controlling brand and visual development and interactions and all those things that come along with it. It was really just a great pairing that made that outcome.

I would absolutely use Memberstack again!