How I “Accidentally” Created the Premier Reporting Plugin for Membership Sites
When I first left my job and ventured out into the freelance world, I was eager to take any project I could get.
One of my long-time friends (a freelance copywriter) knew I was available and he began referring some of his clients to me when they needed programming help.
One of those early clients had a membership site with about 400 paying members. I ended up doing a lot of custom programming for his site, including building entirely new membership modules.
Of course, one of the things that my client REALLY wanted was better reporting capabilities. He wanted to be able to see the lifetime value of each member, how long they’d been members for, when they were canceling, and a whole bunch of other data.
At first, I wasn’t sure if I’d even be able to program what my client was asking for.
But after hunkering down for a few days, I was able to figure out how to do it. It took quite a bit of programming to get all those reports working on his site. But that work is what laid the foundation for the creation of this service: Membership Site Analytics.
Later on, I began doing a lot of work with aMember. Not just setting up new aMember sites, but also integrating aMember with WordPress and creating a bunch of aMember plugins to streamline ordering processes and help membership site owners to get more members.
Dozens of clients were coming to me for help. And it didn’t take long for other well-respected people in the aMember community to begin paying attention to my work.
That’s when the creator of Membership Academy, David Moskowitz, approached me and said,
“You know what you should do, Ken? You should create better reporting capabilities for aMember. The built-in reports are too simple, and I know this is something a lot of people want.”
Hmmm… My client had wanted reports for his membership site and I had already done a lot of the work. And I now had an expert-level knowledge of aMember and the code that runs it. So it was easy to put two and two together…
“That’s a great idea, David.”
And the rest, as they say, is history.
You see, I never intended to create amReports. That’s why I say I “accidentally” created this plugin. It just naturally came about because of programming background and extensive work with aMember membership sites.
I’ve now been working on amReports for well over 6 months and have been adding new reports and just making everything better every single month.
amReports now provides you with all your key metrics so you can attract more members, allocate advertising dollars more effectively, and discover where to focus your energy to keep members longer.
It is, quite literally, the premier reporting plugin for membership sites.
- Ken Gary