by: AskPat 776 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 776 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
All right, now here is today's question from Cynthia.
Cynthia: Hi Pat, this is Cynthia with www.SignBabySign.org. Thank you so much for all you do in investing in us. Currently I have joined the mastermind group of Flipped Lifestyle because they were on your podcast recently. And I am looking to create a membership site. I'm also trying to gather together a pilot team of those who work with children in teaching them sign language, for both deaf and hearing children. And I'm trying to figure out exactly how I go about setting up this membership site, and what educators are wanting on the membership site, and how often. And again my question is two-fold. What advice do you have for setting up a membership site with different levels and pricing and what would be in each level? And the second question is, what do you recommend I do in getting a pilot group together to make sure what I am giving them is exactly meeting their needs.
Thanks again, Pat. Again this is Cynthia from www.SignBabySign.org.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Cynthia. Thank you so much for the question, I really appreciate it. You know there are a lot of tools out there that you can use to help set up your membership site. There are things like Rainmaker which is sort of the complete package, which includes the blogging platform, the membership platform, and courses you want to create, that sort of thing. That's sort of higher end but it's more done for you so you can check that out. Rainmaker from Copyblogger. And there's also things like MemberMouse, which I know a lot of people use. Zippy courses which is course software which you can use to set up a membership like setup. Where people login to get access to things. And you can, with all these, create different price levels, and then one of the classic ones out there if you use a WordPress website is WPWishList. That was founded by Stu McLaren, a good friend of mine, who since has sold that business, but it's still up and running and doing very well.
Now I will say before you even start looking at the technology you want to ask yourself, is this something that is actually something that these people would actually be into? So what I would do is similar to along the lines of what you said with the pilot group, I would actually see if even before you can even get a pilot group to start paying for things, see if a membership is something people would be interested in. So what I would do Cynthia is actually pull back a little bit and ask people who might benefit from this if they would. Talk to them about what they need help with and that way you're not kinda shooting randomly. You are going based off of conversations that you've had with real people. You are understanding exactly what the needs are, the problems, and the pains you're solving for this particular audience.
And, what I would also recommend is make sure when you get to the point at which you're going to launch, launch with an MVP, and that is a Minimum Viable Product. What that means is, as you have these conversations, understand what is necessary. You know, a lot of people are going to be asking for: “You know it would be cool if it had this, and what if it had this, and what if it had this too.” And those may or may not be great ideas, and you want to vet those ideas with the community and whatnot, but there are going to be some things and patterns that you realize after these conversations that you have, that are going to be obvious that they have to be in there. And so you want to launch with an MVP, and that is a Minimum Viable Product, the minimum amount of features and things that need to be in there in order to launch it.
You should also definitely check out my book Will It Fly? if you haven't yet done so already, so you make sure that you can stand out from the crowd in the marketplace that you're getting into, so that you can again dive deeper into those conversations with your audience and understand truly what their pains, problems, and needs are. So you can give them the right solution, and to be honest, maybe a membership website isn't the right solution. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But you're gonna have to talk to people first and kind of get that initial gut reaction on how they would feel.
Another thing you can do is setup either a webinar or even better yet and much easier to do, a live streaming where you're talking about this and you're able to interact. So Facebook Live, even Instagram live, YouTube live, Google Hangouts, all those kinds of things. It allows you to communicate with your audience in real-time, and share with them in a very casual kind of way, what your idea might be and what you're thinking of doing, and actually collect feedback at the same time from multiple people too. So in addition to one on one conversations that you'd be having with your potential customer, have these one to many interactions too. It's a great way to test the waters before you even start to spend money, and start looking for these tools. And you'll find that the tools will start to align themselves up with whatever that need becomes.
So, Cynthia, that's what I would recommend you do. And then yes I would launch with a pilot group before you sort of launch to the general public. That's what I did with my course, Smart From Scratch at www.SmartFromScratch.com. I launched with a pilot group, and what's nice about that is you're able to work with them and make sure that the MVP is what it should be. That it has everything it needs, you can then make sure then after take feedback, and as you're going collect feedback. What I would do is also have sort of office hours, use a tool like Zoom. Use to be able to communicate one to many with you're customers and your members, so that you can collect feedback along the way, see what's working, see what's not working in the current membership site that you have going on. Or solution.
And then go from there, then you can actually tweak it, make it better which is then—at the time of this recording that's the stage I'm at right now—and then in February I'm going to be relaunching it after re shooting a couple videos. After taking a lot of the feedback from the initial studio that's then launching it to my email list.
So yeah, I hope that makes sense Cynthia. Thank you so much for the question, I appreciate it. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to www.AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by H.P. Liddon: “What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are. And what we already are will be the result of previous years of self discipline.” Work it H.P.
Thanks guys, take care, and I will see you in the next episode. Bye.