You are going to be talking to us.
Purple Pushpin is two people. That is not a stage we are passing through on the way to a sales team — it is the reason the price is what it is, and the reason you can email the person who wrote the code.
About
Why this exists
Mike Andersen spent a career on the other side of this. Twenty-five years in corporate events — nationally televised sporting events down to a ten-person board dinner — and, running alongside it since the early 2000s, building websites and doing SEO.
Then he worked at an association management company, learned several membership platforms from the inside, and spent a lot of time thinking there had to be a better way. He tried building member sites on Squarespace and Wix, which are genuinely good at design, carts and email — and which fall apart the moment you need events, sponsorship sales and a member backend. Bolt on a tool for each gap and you get four subscriptions that do not talk to each other, on a platform you cannot open up and fix.
Meanwhile the same complaints kept coming back from other association staff, chamber directors and board members. Not different complaints. The same four.
- Why does it cost this much? For software a volunteer board uses a few hours a week.
- Why is there a fee on top of my card processing? The processor already took its cut. Who is the second hand for?
- Why am I priced by contacts? Not members — contacts. Everyone who ever bought a ticket.
- Why am I punished for growing the list? Growing it is the entire job. It should not raise the invoice.
So we stopped trying to assemble it out of parts and built the whole thing — on WordPress, which Mike started on twenty years ago and which runs something like four in ten websites on the internet. One price, whether you have 100 contacts or 10,000. Payments land in your own Stripe account, and we never touch them.
The two of us
Who you are actually hiring.
Mike Andersen
Builds it. Sets up your site. Answers the hard questions.
- Twenty-five years in corporate events — televised sporting events at one end, ten-person board dinners at the other. He has run the door at both.
- Worked at an association management company, learning several membership platforms from the staff side. Every complaint on this site is one he had first.
- Building websites since the early 2000s and doing SEO since 2006 — more than 200 sites and counting.
- Runs a professional association chapter day to day — the admin, the event planning, the marketing, and the diplomacy of keeping a volunteer board moving. He is a customer of this problem every week, not only the person who built it.
Andrea Argy
Onboarding, training, demos, and the person on the other end of the help desk.
- Spa director for most of her career — a business that lives on bookings, memberships, packages and staff schedules. If that sounds like running a chamber office, it is because it is.
- She has done the scary part before. When her brand switched point-of-sale platforms, she was the one who trained the other spas through the migration. She has personally walked organizations off one system and onto another.
- Started out in sales at CDW back when the hot new product was a BlackBerry. She has been explaining technology to people who do not want a lecture ever since.
Yes, we are married.
Partners in the company and on each other’s emergency contact forms. Practically, it means the person who builds the software and the person who supports it eat dinner together most nights — which is a considerably shorter feedback loop than most software companies manage. If something annoys you on a Tuesday, it has usually been discussed by Wednesday.
Small on purpose.
We are not raising money and we are not hiring a floor of account managers, because every one of those would end up on your invoice. Staying small is how the price stays the price.
The obvious question
“What happens to us if you two disappear?” Fair, and here is the honest answer: your site is WordPress, on hosting in your name, with your own Stripe account and your own data. Any WordPress developer on earth can pick it up. We built the exit before we built the sales page — not because we plan to go anywhere, but because a company that locks you in has stopped having to earn you.
Where we are
Metro Detroit. The office is in Ferndale, though most days we are at home in Madison Heights or at a coffee shop somewhere along the Woodward corridor. Mike still runs events for our agency, Purple Wave Creative, so some weeks the desk is a hotel ballroom. When the laptops shut it is usually a happy hour downtown — we like it here, and we are not planning on being anywhere else. Nobody is handing you off to a support queue three time zones away.
Go look at it before you talk to us.
That is the order we would want it in if we were you.
See the demo Get in touch