Platform University

01. The situation

Michael Hyatt, the former Thomas Nelson CEO and New York Times bestselling author of Platform, was launching Platform University, a membership program teaching authors, speakers, and leaders how to build their own platforms. A program like that lives or dies on its membership site: it is the product.

02. What I did

I built the membership site end to end: the opt-in pages that turned readers into members, the protected members area where the program content lived, and the community forum where members talked to each other.

Underneath it, I built a custom theme framework of my own, so the site could be extended and maintained instead of rebuilt every time the program grew.

03. What happened

The finished build carried the whole program in one place: sign-ups, member content, and community, all behind one login. Platform University became one of the best-known platform-building programs of its era, and the site was the front door and the classroom at the same time.

That is the level of build a membership program needs when the website is the product itself, and it is the level I bring to every project now, whatever its size.