Premium Membership - A Personal Journey to Fun Filled Features

This is a personal post by Nick Wilkins, Make Me a Cocktail CEO. In it he dives deep into his thoughts and reasons behind the journey of Make Me a Cocktail, and why he created Premium Membership. It outlines some of the cool features on the site and apps, but also the reasoning behind them all. It’s a love story to a cocktail website.

Most of these features are currently only accessible on the website, but will be rolling out to our apps over time. All users have the same login on the apps and websites.

A personal journey - the beginnings of an adventure

For around 12 years I ran and operated Make Me a Cocktail completely free of charge; no subscriptions, no adverts, no sponsored posts, just a passion project that I loved working on. I had over 3000 recipes, users could create lists, have a MyBar, figure out what to buy next and what they could make. An account, some simple blog posts. “Can we have a collection of the classics”, sure lets build that. “How about filtering by hot cocktails”. Yep lets build that too - no problem. And so it went; the site grew, more people came, and the larger the data became.

It was fun, it was chaotic, it was fast paced and cutting edge.

A longer more descriptive history of Make Me a Cocktail can be seen on the About Page.

And then it started to cost me. Like, actually cost me. More than a passion project should do. More and more people came and I had to start investing in servers, CDN’s, load balancers and more. A lot of geeky stuff that all adds up that I needed to ensure the site could cope with demand at weekends and holidays, as well as being secure, fast and still enjoyable for the end user.

I loved the site, I loved the community I had built up, and I loved that it was all free for the end user. The original ethos of the site was to give users, just like you, access to a host of cocktail information, presented in a beautiful, enjoyable way, and help users create, explore and have fun with cocktails. I didn’t want to lose sight of that ethos, but I also didn’t want to start remortgaging my house to keep the site alive and kicking.

Pivoting the passion - lets rebuild this

It was then that I made a decision to try and pivot Make Me a Cocktail to something that could sustain its running costs, and if I was lucky, generate a modest income on the side. But at all times I didn’t want to lose focus that the end user was key. Enjoyment, creativity, fun, and most of all, access for all users on how to create great tasting cocktails with what they have at home.

And so Premium membership was born. I didn’t want to start putting everything behind a paywall and knew I needed to create worthwhile content married with features that people would be willing to pay for.

However the current content I wanted to keep free - all the recipes, the methods, the background information, the ability to have a MyBar, find out what you can make, filter cocktails by a host of options relevant to what you are after, create lists, share it all with friends and most importantly show that a heap of love and enjoyment has gone into the building of it all. All that, I didn’t want to stop users getting. At the heart of it I wanted to ensure anyone can create better cocktails and have fun in the process.

So I started to brainstorm. I threw out a questionnaire to all current subscribers on what they would want more of, what is the site missing, what would they be willing to pay for and more. I chatted to a host of users, spoke to friends in the industry and had a look at what all my competitors were doing. From that I started to formulate the key cornerstones of Premium membership, as well as a few gems that people had thought of that hadn’t even crossed my mind. It was invaluable (and fun) research.

We have a dedicated page that highlights all our Premium Features succinctly and in less long form. You can find out more here.

The Features, fun and functionality

I knew that Premium membership needed to offer a few different avenues of functionality, and not just some surface level frivolities that would just be a nicety (although there’s room for those as well), but essentially be hollow in providing users with new skills or extra abilities. Features needed weight, they needed substance, they needed to be worthwhile and really offer users extra benefits that went above and beyond.

Lets Level Up

Firstly it needed to offer a levelling up mechanism that Premium members would get access to; help them take their cocktail making skills to the next level. I wanted to give Premium members access to more information on cocktails - if they are making a cocktail, what are the top mixologist tips or tricks that changes an ‘it’s a cosmo, sure’ into a ‘mmmm that is a DAMN good Cosmo’.

And so Power Tips were born.

This was a real biggie, but 100% worthwhile once it was completed; for those long term members you would have noticed that it came slightly later on in the Premium membership benefit release as it took us so long.

Every single cocktail has 3-5 power tips that can elevate that cocktail based on the ingredients, the techniques, the flavour profiles, the garnishes and more. Here’s just a few of some of the master tips we gathered from mixologists and top bartenders the world over:

• “Use a rich simple syrup made with 2:1 sugar to water ratio for a more luxurious mouthfeel.”

• “Chill your soda water before using it for maximum fizz and to prevent additional dilution of the cocktail. Cold soda water will maintain the refreshing nature of the drink.”

• “Always use a high-quality vermouth and store it in the refrigerator to maintain its freshness. Vermouth can oxidize quickly, losing its nuanced flavors.”

• “For a slightly creamier texture, consider adding a bar spoon of orgeat syrup. This will add subtle almond notes and a rich mouthfeel.”

• And a heap more subtle tips. On every cocktail!

Along with the Cocktail Power Tips we also enhanced the What To Buy Next section on the MyBar. One of our most overlooked features on the site (we think), the What To Buy Next allows users to get a personalized recommendation on what ingredients would be most beneficial to get in stock next, to make the most great cocktails. We don’t just take into account the most cocktails, but also weight this with how good the cocktails are - and give you recommendations based on that.

Premium members get access to more recommendations, and more information on each recommendation to help inform their decision.

Time is Money …

Our next stop on our Premium member journey was all about speed and efficiency in giving premium users the ability to add some power-ups to their already amazing premium vehicle. Firstly we allow the upgraded member to say to their MyBar - “Hey, just assume I’ve got all the home ingredients so I don’t need to add them all will you”. In which we reply “Why yes of course you adventurer you!”.

Lets Ignore Home Ingredients!

This is an amazing time saver as the home cupboard section can be fairly large and can involve a bit of clicking, yet we need to know if you’ve got star anise or not as this is an essential (and potentially quite opinionated flavour) to the cocktail that it is in. But (and here’s the kicker) it’s also not as expensive or hard to find as a bottle of Amaro, or Limoncello, and so toggling this on means that more cocktails are surfaced for the user, knowing that if they don’t have a small herb or spice, someone they know might do, or a quick pop to the local shops can probably fill this up for them.

Alongside this efficiency we also integrated quite a complex serving size change algorithm for all cocktails that Premium members get access to. And it doesn’;t involve a page refresh. Instant change. You want to know what the serving sizes should be for 2, 3 or 4 cocktails? No problem, we’ve got you! This may seem trivial on the surface but to get it right, whilst preserving some form of nuanced English was a lot harder than we originally thought. But boy is this a useful little tool.

You haven’t mentioned A.I.

Good spot! And it’s such a buzz word at the moment (words?). But next up on the power features that Premium members receive is our beautiful, intelligent, ‘this was our dream 10 years ago’ feature of being able to Photo your bar, and we’ll surface what you can make! Take that in for a second …..

…..

Yep! That’s right. You can photo your bottles and we’ll try and categorise them all for you, and then show you what you can make with what’s in front of you right now. This is still in beta right now, but already available and being used by all our Premium members. It does a whole host of clever stuff and also has a lovely little interface to ensure we get the matching right. To say we’ve got some big plans for this would be an understatement, and our Premium members will get access to every little enhancement along the way (did someone say separate MyBar’s for when you are at a friends house? Shhhh!

Alongside that you also get enhanced search results when using our A.I. search, with extra FAQ’s, more contextual results, and a deeper understanding of your question. To be honest, the ability to already search in plain English (or French, or German, or any language you want in fact) and ask “What are some great cocktails for use at my friends house. They like prosecco and sweet drinks” and get back the best 10 drinks for that already blows my mind, but the enhanced version is just another level. 

Let’s get our creative juices flowing

If you haven’t played with our cocktail creator or menu creator yet, please do take a look, you get some great defaults out of the box completely free even if you’re not logged in. You can create a completely bespoke cocktail, even asking us to include some information such as “Can you call the cocktail 'Three Boats Length', and pay homage to Simon on his birthday. Use Rum as the main ingredient”.

However Premium members get access to not only 6 completely new themes, but also the ability to set a style for their drink, from a fizz, a cobbler or a smash. You get all those extras and ability to fine tune the cocktail to your needs, making a cocktail World themed, Love, Mythology, Flora orientated and more.

And then up steps our Menu Creator. For standard members you get access to quite a bit of this power house of a feature already; creating a cocktail menu that is not only printable, but also shareable with its own unique URL that you can send around to friends and family before an event, getting their juices flowing. But Premium membership just takes that Menu Creation up to 11.

Not only can you create separate cocktail groups, giving you the ability to create menus that are broken up by categories (fizz’s mocktails, new age, Dan’s favourites, Simon’s favourites), but you also get access to all our premium themes from Gothic Noir to Futuristic Neon, from Rustic Charm to Art Deco Glam. The extra tools and features here just give Premium members the ability to fine tune and really create their own personalized menu of choice. We love it.

Oh, and to just throw some icing on the cake, we also don’t rate-limit any Premium member creations, so they can create (almost) as many menus or cocktails as they like. Go go go!

Niceties, clean lines, and beautiful extras

It wouldn’t be a Premium membership without just some lovely little touches to go alongside the power ups and fantastical features.

Premium members bars are all displayed in a beautiful little visual with every ingredient they have shown as a unique icon, to create a virtual visual bar of their own. It’s visually beautiful, and visually shareable!

We remove all ad’s, upsells, or any other content that is surplus to just showing you great content. You’re already giving us some love so we don’t need to bombard you with more.

We also give you beta access to all our upcoming features and content, before we roll anything out to the public.

Is the journey complete?

Not on your nelly. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a lot of our competitors start to copy us, trying to recreate some of our amazing features, but none of them seem to have done it as well as us (in our humble opinion), and we’ll keep on striving to add purpose and usefulness to all our membership levels, not just premium.

Our roadmap over the next year is big, we’ve got some big exciting features we want to get out to you as soon as we can. We’re so excited for the future of our site and app’s, and we hope you’ll stick with us on our journey.

We’re a small company with big dreams, and we do read and respond to all emails that hit our inbox. So if there is anything you think we can do better, you’d love to see, or you want more of, please do drop us a line. We’re all ears!

Find out more about Premium and upgrade your account today.