I joined Memberstack as the first hire pre-incorporation, and helped build the company from a side project to a product that has processed $180M+ (and counting) globally.

As of Jan 2026, Memberstack has processed $180M+ in payments, has had 100K+ users, 50K+ agency and freelancers using it, and 10M+ members managed. It's hard to fathom how far we've come since being a tiny project, and I'm really proud of not only what we built, but how we built it and how we showed up for each other throughout the company's journey.

Joining as the first hire

I joined Memberstack through a cold message. In early 2019, I was one of the early users for a prototype that Duncan and Tyler had launched, and was instantly in love with the product. Later that same year, when I decided to stop working on NextBillion, I reflected on all the tools that had recently felt magical to use, and Memberstack topped that list.

So, as your average excited user, I cold messaged Duncan and Tyler on Slack about the potential I saw in Memberstack, and my vision for where it could go in the future. Turns out, we were thinking along similar lines. While I was recovering from my previous startup and taking a surfing break in Portugal, I volunteered some part-time hours to generally help and take anything off their plate for the of fun it.

Eventually, part-time hours turned into a potential for a full-time role, and we were off to the races.

This was very early in the whole 'no code' movement that eventually took the Internet by storm and led to some behemoth startups like Retool, Notion, Webflow, and Airtable. As we'd soon find out, Memberstack was ideally positioned as the authentication solution for this wave of no code tools.

Throughout my time, my focus had always been to tackle the biggest bottlenecks to get us to the next stage of growth.

Tackling Bottlenecks

I'll try to outline some of the bottlenecks we solved for over time:

1. Answering support tickets

Initially, when we had a few hundred users, our primary bottleneck was customer support. We were drowning in answering support tickets, and literally didn't have time to build more features. Operationalizing this meant putting together systems to answer FAQs, reduce one-off queries, picking the right tools to scale on, and hiring additional support to free up bandwidth for the product.

2. Understanding our user base

Another big bottleneck early on, especially for a product that was growing through word of mouth, is that we didn't have a 360º view on who was using our product and why. Yes, we tried our best to stay close to users via customer support, 1:1 conversations, socials, a Slack community, etc but we didn't have this data easily accessible to scan over time. Some questions we had but couldn't easily answer were: who are our main customers? Where are they coming from? Why do the sign up? What they were building with Memberstack?

To address this, we operationalized various parts of the journey. Our signup flows, organizing where/how we stored user information, designing onboarding flows to learn more about who was signing up and why, and automated email workflows to talk to various segments of users (new signups, power users, churned users, etc). This led to a barrage of inbound intel and user conversations that gave us a lot more visibility into how our product fit into our users' worldviews.

This work laid the foundation for us to have better long-term visibility into our user base.

3. Systemizing growth channels

On the growth front, we had anecdotal indicators of channels that were bringing us users (eg: the Webflow forum), but this wasn't a concentrated bet. We would sporadically answer user queries, and this long-tail of helpful responses over time helped people find out about Memberstack. When I saw this working anecdotally, I set up social listening systems across forums on the Internet. Anytime user auth or logins were mentioned on the Internet, we were the first ones to the conversation. We also started making small optimizations to the website, product, etc and continued building for what our users asked for.

Raising $1M+

After the first 3-4 months of cranking on this, we had a crisper vision for who we were building for, and where we could go. We still weren't paying ourselves anything, but we knew we were onto something special. It felt like a boulder rolling down the hill and what I would describe as early signs of strong product-market fit.

So, around ~$10K MRR, we started exploring what the future of Memberstack could look like, and decided that raising a small round could enable all three of us to go full-time for the next year on building a company.

Even though we picked the worst time to fundraise (mid-December through the holiday season), the momentum was so strong that we closed our round by early Jan 2020. We raised $1M+ from investors like Gradient (Google's Venture Fund), Village Global, 1517Fund, and awesome angels like the co-founder of Firebase, etc.

We incorporated as a company and went back to product-building.

COVID + growth hacking to $1M+ ARR

Early 2020 was a wild time. It was early days of COVID, before the world was about to be taken by storm. We had no idea what was coming. In a few months, there was a global pandemic, countries were locking off borders, and the world had to adapt to a remote-first environment.

I remember hearing about a lot of startups within the community that were dropping like flies; going from high-growth to zero overnight through these changes. Being an early-stage startup was an already risky endeavour, and COVID through a big wrench into a lot of companies.

For Memberstack, however, we noticed our growth rates were spiking up. I remember when we thought our data pipelines were literally broken since it was a sudden influx of revenue and customers. Turns out, we were mistaken. Tons of offline businesses were forced to move online, and many of them ended up discovering/using Memberstack to power add logins and payments to their websites quickly. We had bakeries, zoos, gyms, teachers, and more using our product to offer value online as the world navigated the pandemic.

We continued scaling quickly with a very lean team (about ~5 people).

Joining Y Combinator

Through that process, we decided to aim big and applied for Y Combinator. We got through, and learned a lot about company building. We even skipped demo day since we were profitable and didn't want to raise more money. With the explosive growth, we hadn't needed to use the money we had in the bank; in fact, in most parts of our journey, we often had more money in the bank than we were using.

This taught me about the value and leverage that comes from building companies with strong fundamentals: a valuable product, strong user community, and profitability.

After YC, we continued to scale the team on the engineering side. For the longest time, Tyler was the only engineer and he heavy-lifted the technical side to bring us this far. We kept making incremental improvements to the product, and were at thousands of customers at this point. We decided to start hiring a few engineers.

Rebuilding from scratch

At some point, with over 1,000+ businesses using Memberstack, we realized that we were hitting serious scale. We were processing millions of dollars in payments, and we had to consider the long-term viability of our product and company.

In the spirit of moving fast, one of the tradeoffs we had made early on, was to build our application frontend on Webflow. Instead of using React/Vue that would make frontend engineering a whole job to be done, Tyler and Duncan had leveraged this as a genius hack. We built the frontend in Webflow, so Duncan could be the designer/frontend person, while Tyler built the backend and connected the components.

But over time, once we realized how much people loved building with Memberstack, this stack had its downsides:

• We had no version history (the Webflow 'publish' version was our entire CI/CD pipeline)
• Using Webflow meant that cross-team collaboration wasn't always easy (branching, etc)

Around the same time, we were also seeing increased use from technical users. While we initially built Memberstack as a no-code tool, as our users' businesses grew, they often involved developers who had to work with and build on top of the auth/payments stack we offered. Usually, this meant that developers wanted to and had to use Memberstack, but we weren't developer-friendly. We had no APIs, no documentation, and everything had to be done via dashboard.

Realizing that we have be hitting a ceiling in terms of our local maximum, we decided to entertain the idea of a new 2.0 product that was:

• Built on a solid technical stack for the longer term
• Designed for both technical and non-technical users
• Set a solid foundation for the next 3-5 years of building

Validating a new product

In order to explore this, we had to make a calculated bet. Building an entirely new product meant taking away the limited engineering resources we had on the current product. It meant splitting the team's energy into two parts 1) maintaining the 1.0 product and supporting customers, while 2) building a new product from the ground up.

As a startup, we were already resource-constrained. Sticking to our current path meant that we would hit a growth ceiling both from a technical standpoint and from a market size standpoint. Building a new product meant addressing both of these constraints, but having to do that with the same amount of resources.

At this point, we had 1K+ customers and $10M+ of our customers' money being processed on 1.0, so switching to a new product had to be a deeply calculated bet. If we failed, we would lose the trust and momentum we had, and there was no going back to an older product if we failed. We were juggling a glass ball that we couldn't afford to drop.

To validate, we focused on:

• Prototyping technical features to get a feel for what a developer-first Memberstack product could look like
• Talking to 100s of technical users before building
• Pre-selling $3-5K of the new product with developers before ever writing a line of code on the new build
• Deep market research of other tools in the space and how we could position

After deep deliberation, we designed a gameplan and start building 2.0. We knew this was a bet we had to make in order to weather-proof the company for the next few years.

When the platform becomes a competitor

The entire Memberstack product was built on top of Webflow's momentum — our customers, community, growth channels, and even product was 100% build into Webflow ecosystem.

Soon after we started building Memberstack 2.0, Webflow eventually announced an in-house membership system. Most people thought our business would be wiped out.

But we stood our ground, and we knew that:

• Auth/payments was 100% of our company's focus, while it was a small team within Webflow trying to catch up with us. We were moving faster than Webflow ever could.
• Memberstack was years ahead in its depth and execution of features, while Webflow's product would not have parity for a long time

Update: 2 years later, Webflow has now shut down its membership product and decided to route its users to Memberstack as an officially recommended solution. We persevered and made it through the other side.

Reflections on the journey

Shortly after the 2.0 launch, I decided that it was a good stopping point to branch out and pursue my dreams of founding my own company from 0 again.

I cried the day I left the team, and I'm forever grateful to the team for taking a bet on me. I was a one-time founder with no prior success when I wrote Duncan and Tyler a cold message. Since Day 1, they trusted me with what became the most challenging work of my life up till then. In the process of building a company, we navigated countless ups and downs together, and I realized that the process of building a company is an extension of ourselves. It led us to ask deep questions about each of our visions for not only the company, but for ourselves.

Three years later, many of those early conversations have come to life. Memberstack now fully runs on the 2.0 version. It successfully built on top of what we had in 1.0, and people still rave about the product. The team is absolutely crushing it, and I'm proud of everything we built together.

Memberstack has processed $180M in payments. $180M facilitated to small businesses and apps on the Internet. I'm glad to have played a role in this journey, and I'll always cheer the team on as we make our way to the $1B mark.

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I also led the design for the Memberstack 2.0 product rebuild. You can read about that in my Memberstack design case study.