WHO'S BEHIND MEMBERSHIP BUILD
Built by someone who learned everything from the same kind of platform she now builds for others.
Membership Build is led by Danica Louwe. Thirteen-plus years building, operating, and obsessing over membership businesses — because she knows firsthand what they can do for people.
I started building websites in 2010 — freelancing on Upwork, teaching myself design, CRM, and automation as I went. No formal training. No agency background. Just the internet, the work, and the compounding of doing it over and over until I understood it deeply.
I specialized in membership platforms not because someone told me it was a good market, but because I've lived on the other side of them. Almost everything I know — about design, about systems, about running a business — I learned through online education. Courses, communities, mentors, YouTube channels. Not a classroom. The internet.
That experience is why I care so much about how these platforms are built. A great membership isn't just a login page and a course library. It's the onboarding sequence that makes a new member feel like they belong. It's the community structure that keeps them coming back. It's the moment someone decides to stay — or leave — and knowing that the platform either supported that decision or made it harder.
I've been that member. I design for that person first.
More than thirteen years and dozens of membership platforms later, the work I do isn't really about websites anymore. It's about being the partner a founder trusts to operate their membership business as carefully as they would themselves. The clients who hire Membership Build stay for years because we're embedded inside the operation — not a vendor on the outside hoping they renew.
That's what Membership Build is built for.
THE NAME
The name has changed twice. The work has only narrowed. It started as WP Membership Designs — building membership sites on WordPress. It became Custom Membership when the work outgrew templates. It's Membership Build now because the job was never really the website; it's the business running behind it.
FORMERLY WP MEMBERSHIP DESIGNS, THEN CUSTOM MEMBERSHIP
WHY MEMBERSHIP
I'm obsessed with this niche because I know it works.
Online education changed my life. Not in a general sense — specifically. The YouTube channels I watched, the online courses I took, the communities I joined, the mentors I found through the internet. That's where I built my skills, my thinking, my career.
So when I build a membership platform, I'm not just delivering a project. I'm building something I believe in. I know what a well-run membership can do for someone's growth — because it did it for me. That's the conviction behind every decision we make for our clients.
Online courses
The structured learning that turned curiosity into craft. Skills I couldn't have gotten any other way.
Communities
The rooms full of people doing the same thing — asking questions, sharing wins, holding each other to a standard.
YouTube & mentors
The creators who taught everything they knew publicly. That model shaped how Membership Build approaches its own YouTube channel.
ON YOUTUBE
We teach everything we know — publicly.
The Membership Build YouTube channel is where we share what we've learned about building and operating membership businesses — tutorials, stack walkthroughs, strategy breakdowns. No gatekeeping.
If you can watch enough to do this yourself, do it. The clients who hire us have decided they don't want to. That's the only kind of client relationship worth having.
WHAT WE COVER
BuddyBoss & LearnDash deep dives
WP Fusion + Go High Level walkthroughs
Membership platform comparisons
Onboarding and UX breakdowns
Stack migrations and infrastructure
Community design and gamification
HOW WE OPERATE
Four principles that shape every engagement.
Embedded, not engaged
We operate inside your business as if it were our own. Not a vendor passing through on a project — a team you keep for years because the work compounds with depth.
Vision into infrastructure
Founders bring the vision. We translate it into the systems, stacks, and flows that make it real. We scan the market for what's next and lead the migrations before you have to ask. When the tool a founder needed didn't exist, we built it — that's where our clients' custom dashboards and command centers come from.
Stack-fluent by design
We've gone deep on the precise tool intersections that win in membership: BuddyBoss + LearnDash, WP Fusion + Go High Level, Memberium, custom dashboards on top of WordPress. Not generalists. Specialists by design.
Reliability is the product
Always-on for emergencies. Mistakes owned, never deflected. Quiet competence over loud claims. Clients describe us as "part of our core operation" — that's the bar we hold every week.
THE HONEST FIRST STEP
Want to see if we'd operate well together?
$1,500 FIXED FEE · 2 WEEKS · WRITTEN ROADMAP · REFUNDABLE IN WEEK ONE IF WE CAN'T HELP