Who you are, what does your project do, and why did you build it?

Hey! I'm Brandon. I'm a digital marketing consultant, web developer, and founder at TestBest—an LMS for the LSAT student ballin' on a budget.

I built TestBest for 2 main reasons:

(1) The test prep industry is full of takers—to them, you're a profit center. At TestBest, we're givers. We're here to help you maximize your test scores so you can minimize your higher education costs.

(2) Differentiated standardized test scores remain the leading indicator of merit scholarship. That was my story. My standardized test performance got me out of poverty, got me into numerous colleges for free, and afforded me full-ride scholarships to law school I probably didn't deserve. I'm on a mission to deliver the same opportunities I had to as many students as possible.

‍What problems did Memberstack help you solve?

Memberstack made it easy for me to adhere to the content licensing requirements imposed by my content providers. I have to meticulously gate certain content, and Memberstack made it a breeze.

It was also incredibly simple to configure plans and workflows to onboard my students. I didn't have to learn backend development (or hire a backend engineer) to get my MVP to market. Talk about valuable to a bootstrapped founder.

What are your favourite things about Memberstack? Why are those your favourites?

I love Memberstack's simplicity and the obvious investment the Memberstack team has made in support and community.

Let's start with simplicity. I think it took me maybe two hours to get my initial plans configured in Memberstack—no joke. To be clear, that was ideation to test-mode-ready in 2 hours. Unheard of. When shopping competitor solutions, I spent just as long researching their platforms as I did getting up and running with Memberstack. I could move fast and break things (figuratively 😅). And I could accomplish all of this without any additional overhead. Huge.

I'm not even sure where to begin re: support and community. The team is wonderful. From the Slack community to the docs and developer tools to the guided Loom walkthroughs... everything support-wise is simply first-rate. Huge shoutout to Julian and Duncan for the added support when my team and I hit a small but painful hiccup during development. They got us back up and running in no time.

How I built this...

It all started by scoping my MVP. I was my customer only a few years ago, so I pushed myself to distill my project down to the most critical things I'd need to have something sellable. That's what I built with Memberstack.

Next came design. I'll be the first to admit I have 0 design chops 😂 so I leaned heavily on component libraries like Relume (as well as Memberstack's components) to craft something functional that was easy to navigate.

I tied everything together using Webflow's CMS. Anything I could use the CMS for, I did. Anything I couldn't? That's where Memberstack came into play.