How Keap Uses Memberium to Train Customers, Employees and Partners on Their Software Memberium

[00:00] Micah: Hey, everybody. It's Micah Mitchell with Membarium. And today we have a special guest and a very cool membership site story, a lot of different angles and kind of plots in here. Our guest is Tyler Garns. Tyler, welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here.

[00:15] Tyler: Yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time. So this is going to be an interesting story because

[00:20] Micah: there's kind of some twists and turns ultimately, and you can kind of correct anything I say here, but ultimately you have been an entrepreneur, you built a membership site, and then you've actually now sold that membership site to another company and are kind of going through that whole post-sale process. So I see that as a huge success story just because of the exit at the end, right? You know, making money along the way, using that membership site to support and supplement your service business, events, all these things. So you've kind of, I feel, done it from so many angles and done it really, really well. So again, welcome to the show and let's get started. Tyler, tell me where did this whole thing get started? If you want to kind of give us the high level view of the story and then jump in wherever you'd like. Yeah, great. Well, let's back up then about 16 years.

[01:14] Tyler: I started at Infusionsoft as an employee in the marketing team 16 years ago. And I worked my way up to becoming the VP of marketing. And when I left, you know, I had told Clay, the CEO, when I first started, hey, I'm not going to be here forever. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I'm eventually going to need to do my own thing. So in 2012, I said, hey, it's time. I got to go. And I walked out the door without a plan, which probably is not the smartest thing to do. But because of the situation at Keep, I was able to kind of go out and say, hey, look, I can help you with Keep. And it worked. I started building an agency a year or so later. And that agency was designed to help people with Keep and do the implementation and all that kind of stuff. And shortly thereafter, I realized like, hey, there's a lot of education that people need in order to get the most out of our agency services. And so we started building a bunch of courses about Keep, you know, just teaching people how to use Keep and some strategy related things and stuff like that. And we actually did kind of a big launch of it at Keep's big event that they used to have called Icon. And the launch was successful by all measures, it was successful, but it wasn't as big as I had hoped, right? Like as entrepreneurs, we always have these massive hopes and dreams. And I was like, hey, this is gonna be like a million dollar launch, whatever. And it wasn't even close to that. And so in my mind, it was like, ah, well, just kind of put it on the back burner and really focused my time on the agency. Well, a couple of years later, I look at inside of my Keep account and I realized, wow, this membership has generated like a million dollars. And we don't even, we don't market it. We don't, we don't do anything like it. It's just running on its own. And that's when like the light bulb went off for me. I was like, wait, okay, there's, there's something happening here. It's pretty exciting. And we need to figure out how to leverage it more. And that's when we started putting some more resources behind it and really developing a good strategy with it and things like that. But that's, that's really how it started. It was, you know, a success by accident, really. I mean, not by accident, we did it on purpose, but then we just left it and, and it continued to grow and provide revenue for the company.

[03:27] Micah: Yeah. There's a lot there to me that is interesting. One of them is I've had the same experience of doing a membership and kind of thinking that wasn't quite what I thought,

[03:37] Tyler: but then checking back in on it and being like, that was still some of the most profitable effort

[03:41] Micah: I've ever put in, you know, cause the time for money ratio over time is great. Totally. Recurring income wise. Let's talk about that. Not necessarily in the membership site, but you also took the service business you had and you made it a membership or positioned it kind

[03:57] Tyler: of as a membership, right? Yeah. Yeah. So for those that are listening, that are in a service-based business, you know, that every month I call it slaying the beast every month, you got to go slay the beast, right? I mean, when you build up a, an agency or a service team or whatever, you know, your, your biggest expense is payroll. And once you have a lot of people on payroll, that payroll burden is big. And every month you got to hit that payroll number. And if you're selling, you know, one-time services, then every month you got to go find those customers and sell them and close the deals and collect the money so you can make payroll. And it becomes this just like, you know, huge weight on your shoulders. And, um, and so we had started to toy with the idea of how can we get away from that? How can we turn our service-based business into a subscription? And a few years back, we, um, we started to do that. We, we moved it more towards a subscription model. And it was kind of weird, truthfully, the first effort, um, we, we created a service that was very similar to our one-time services, but we said, Hey, look, each month you're going to pay, you know, $3,000 as you know, you got your subscription fee in exchange for your $3,000, you get credits, you get a certain number of credits. And then we had this like chart, you know, and, and on the chart, you could see what you could get for your credits. You basically redeem those credits for work that we do, right? So you say, okay, we've got 15 credits this month. We can use five of them to get a lead generation campaign. We can use three of them to get this other campaign. We can use, you know, six of them to do this other thing. And they could just basically pick off the menu and utilize the credits. So that was the start of it. And that was better. That started to even out the revenue and relieve the pressure a little bit. Um, but the next piece where it really got exciting was we said, Hey, look, let's see if we can actually move this into our membership site and start to, you know, and we, we had to build some software as well. We built, we built our own kind of software platforming embedded with the membership site that allowed our customers to go in and instead of like, you know, emailing us and say, Hey, I want to use my five credits for this thing. We built a platform where the customers could go in and basically just submit requests. We got rid of the whole credit idea. We said, look, you can submit as many requests as you want every month. We'll work on one at a time. We'll just burn down that list and we'll work fast. And, uh, that's what

[06:23] Micah: we turned it into. And, um, it totally changed, changed everything for me personally, like as a business

[06:30] Tyler: owner, like that stress of hitting that number every month is just gone. Uh, cause we have subscription, uh, members who are, you know, paying for services through that platform, that recurring revenue, just, you know, totally stabilized all the stress and all the work. And it really, it really changed the whole perspective of the business. The other thing that's exciting about that too, is it changed the valuation of the business. Um, you know, I was looking a few years back at like, okay, what if I built up this agency and sold it and you do some research and you realize, well, agencies sell for one times revenue usually, but if it's like a really good growing business,

[07:07] Micah: maybe two times revenue, if you're really lucky, but a subscription-based business can sell for

[07:12] Tyler: anywhere from four to 10 times revenue, depending on the type of business and the model, you know, if it's software, it's more, and it's growing, it's more like eight to 10 times, um, service-based

[07:22] Micah: businesses are a little bit less, but I'm like, Hey, you know, if we made that shift, we can sell

[07:27] Tyler: the business for a lot more. And so that was part of the driving force, but also just the fact that I wanted to get away from having to slay that beast every month.

[07:36] Micah: Dude, it's so interesting to think about a business selling one time versus subscription. You might remember you and I were on a panel, there's like 10 years ago in San Diego, the, uh, claim your life back event. And there were smart, you know, wealthy business owners in the audience. And one of them asked, well, why are all you guys up on the panel and we're not, and kind of the answer came up and everybody realized, oh, it's cause everyone up on stage has recurring income and everyone in the audience doesn't. So they had these high ticket, good businesses, but it was all, you know, so they were there essentially to learn recurring income, cause that's what was going to help them, you know, get back their time and energy and everything for you with a service business. I seem to remember that what you're talking about when you first made that shift, you were either the first or one of the first to make it. And like you said, it was awkward at first, but it seems like you had to overwork yourself to make that shift, like to make up for the gaps. Is there some truth to that?

[08:37] Tyler: As we were making the shift you're saying?

[08:39] Micah: Yeah.

[08:42] Tyler: Yeah, maybe a little bit. And that's partly because I, I put myself back in the fulfillment role, right? Like I had been running the agency as the CEO. I wasn't interacting with clients at all. Our team was doing all that work, but as we shifted the model, I wanted to get, I wanted to make sure we got it right. And so I put myself back in that fulfillment role. And so I was handling clients directly and managing all of that kind of stuff, um, to figure out that model. Like, how do we do this? Cause it's totally, it's totally different mindset and totally different approach for the customers. And the customers are still in the mindset of like paying for projects, even though you tell them, Hey, this is a subscription and you try and help them understand what they're doing. Um, they're in a different mindset. And so trying to just work all that out and get the expectations aligned and make sure we were able to deliver on the service. I put myself back in that role and, and that put a little, little extra stress on me, but truthfully that was far less stress than having to slay the beast every month. Um, and so it was, it was an investment of my time and my energy that was well worth it. And then once we got that up and running and I was able to train other people and get them into that role, kind of step back again. Oh man, it was a thousand times better.

[09:57] Micah: Gotcha. So let's, let's write out the story from maybe your perspective as the membership site owner and then talk about, you know, what the membership site does and who it's for a little bit. But as I'm understanding it, you had a, a regular service-based business. And I know for you, it was an agency building websites and things, but I could see this being really any service business. Right. And then you switched to subscription. Um, the service is now a subscription and then you added the membership site. I'm guessing initially it was like a supplement to the subscription or was it in the beginning, like a new product that they bought?

[10:33] Tyler: Yeah. The, the initial membership site with the education courses and stuff was really intended to be a supplement to the service, but also a lead generation tool. Um, you know, there were a lot of people that would come, they would hear about our services and be like, oh, wow, that sounds great, but I just can't afford that right now. Well, great. Here's how you can do it on your own. Get into our membership site, learn the techniques and the strategies and stuff that we employ, go work on it, get your business growing. And then once you can afford it, you can jump into our service. And then on the other hand, there were people that signed up for the service that didn't have any clue what we were actually doing. And so we wanted to get them educated. So they understood what, what we were doing and they could get their teams trained to be able to maintain the things that we built over

[11:15] Micah: time. So let's talk more about it as a marketing tool, because I think that's a, an overlooked angle for sure. When you say that you were using it for lead generation, were you still

[11:28] Tyler: selling it or was it free? Uh, it would, we were selling it. Um, we did toy with a free trial for a time, but that wasn't working out well. Conversion was bad and things like that. So, uh, most of the time we just sold it $97 a month, straight up right in. Um, we did have a, a $1 trial, um, that we ran for quite some time. Um, that worked okay. Again, conversion isn't always great when people don't have much skin in the game. Uh, but financially it worked out for us to, you know, you put in a whole bunch of people in a $1 trial and some people convert and some people don't, and that's fine.

[12:04] Micah: So, um, yeah, that's, that's how we did it. Okay. So you, you have clients coming in, you're trying to sell them a bigger package and I'm, I'm contextualizing this for somebody listening. Sure. You're trying to sell them a bigger package, but once you have the membership site, now you can downsell them something that probably to them seems very inexpensive, $97 for the, the information and like how far through the process they might be able to get. Right. Yeah. Um, versus paying you. Uh, so that's awesome. Uh, like you said, the trial and I'm kind of interested in the, and you don't have

[12:40] Tyler: to be exact with, uh, amounts of revenue, but did the membership revenue become a significant

[12:47] Micah: amount or was it always really the service and the membership revenue was a little chunk? How did that go for you? And, and, and maybe the real question there is what's a sensible way to

[12:56] Tyler: prioritize your effort, you know, around that. Yeah. For us, the membership site was always supplementary revenue to the main chunk of revenue, which was from this, from the services. Um, but like I said, it wasn't insignificant and it took me a couple of years to, to look back and look at the numbers and realize like, oh, wow, that's actually providing some good revenue for us. Um, and I don't remember the exact numbers. It was probably 20% of our revenue or something like that. But like you said earlier, when you realize that that's basically just pure profit, um, you know, the service revenue costs us, you know, we got to pay people to deliver those services. Um, you know, that, that extra profit is really, really nice. And again, helps with the valuation of the

[13:40] Micah: business, uh, in a, in a big way. Yeah. And I think you sold to, you know, of course the exact right target. So let's talk about that for a moment, just meaning let's say that instead you tried to sell the business to a competitor of yours or, you know, any other random person, but your membership site that was helping you to do those things, it was a big value to you. You could sell it. You could onboard clients. You ended up selling it though, to back to the company, keep who you had worked for, who the membership site is kind of about. Um, so what is the value of that site then to them? Why did

[14:16] Tyler: they buy it? Yeah. Uh, far more valuable to them than to another agency or just some other buyer. Um, their core reason for buying, uh, our membership site and service-based business was to improve

[14:32] Micah: retention, right? When you realize a software company, uh, they, they get real value and profit

[14:39] Tyler: from a customer, the longer a customer stays, right? And they know, um, after years and years and years of running that business that when people are, are, um, you know, trying to get value out of the software and they may be struggling because they either just don't have the time to dedicate, to really learn the software or they don't have the technical expertise or the marketing expertise to really figure all that stuff out. Uh, they'll end up canceling the software, right? But if they engage with someone who can help them to get the value out of the software, you know, someone providing those services, then they'll stay much longer. And so for keep, uh, it's more of a retention strategy and that's extremely valuable to them, right? They want those services and that platform that we built to be able to serve as many key customers as possible to help them get the value out of the software. So they stay on the software. Um, of course the revenue is, is nice, but you know, their goal is not to build this massive service-based business for the revenue. The goal is really to retain customers on the software and make sure that they get value out of the software. And, you know, as you think about it, you realize like another buyer wouldn't have had that same perspective or incentive. They would just want the service-based revenue, right? That, that would be the only value to them. There wouldn't be additional

[15:52] Micah: value in your retention on a software product. Yeah. And I, I think of some of the other membership sites that I've run into like a silly example, maybe somebody doing sewing or quilting or whatever, the value of that site to a manufacturer of that type of equipment or to, you know, essentially to a bigger bit, bigger business, you know, you're making X with it, but if somebody is already this big, like your business is worth more to them, um, I'm only pointing it out again, so that people at least have that seed planted up. Oh, there might be a target buyer for this. So as I move along, I need to not just design it for me, not just design with my name and face all over it. Cause it wasn't the Tyler Garnes is awesome.com site, right? Um, what was the exact URL? What's the brand if people

[16:39] Tyler: want to check it out? Yeah. So, uh, the agency was built at boxoutmarketing.com, which, uh, still exists, but, uh, keep acquired the service and the membership site. They didn't acquire the business. So you can go to boxoutmarketing.com and see some of that stuff there. But, um, the, the service that we built, we called the factory is, you know, campaign factory. We just crank out, you know, uh, automation campaigns and automation tools and stuff with keep. And the, the initial membership site was called success lab and fusion soft success lab, which was, would now be keep success

[17:14] Micah: lab. Gotcha. Nice. So, uh, and obviously you were, you were kind of the face of that people know you, can you share some kind of tips and your thought process around, around co-branding? Like how do you imprint your personal brand onto a brand and, and all of that? Yeah. I'm not sure I have all the

[17:33] Tyler: answers for that. It's always a tricky thing, right? It's a, there's a fine line. Uh, I mentioned earlier as part of my story that when I, I left keep or I left infusion soft, uh, in 2012, it was fairly easy for me to go out and say, Hey, I'm for hire and people, you know, we're, we're ready to hire me. And so that, that made the transition easy. And that was because I was a very, um, I don't know what you call it. A very public, uh, VP of marketing. I was doing webinars. I was speaking at events. I was just out in the community quite a bit. So people knew me and that was the initial brand, right? It was me, but I realized from the beginning, as soon as I started box out marketing, that I didn't want it to be about me. I wanted to build a business that I could eventually sell. And so the company was not about me. The membership site was not about me. The service was not about me, but at the same time, we certainly leveraged the fact that I had, you know, uh, uh, a face in the market, um, that, that we could, that we could, um, that we could market. Right. So, uh, I didn't, I didn't shy away from that. Um, although I don't, I don't love being in the spotlight. I don't, I mean, you, you've been with me in social situations. I'm usually like the guy standing in the corner, you know, I'm not a super social person. Um, but I, I just recognized from a marketing perspective that there, there was a reputation there and people knew me. And so we may as well leverage that. And so I continue to do a lot of webinars and, you know, YouTube videos and stuff like that to keep my presence in the market there, but all of it drove to box out marketing. Right. And you buy from box out marketing. You don't buy from Tyler Garns. So I, I, like I said, I don't know if I have all the right answers. I'm not even sure if I did it right, but it worked out okay for us. Yeah, it is. Uh, I'm not sure there's a

[19:20] Micah: perfect way to do it, but you did it successfully. It seems to me. And I think your reputation helped to the business. And I'm sure even when they were buying, because really keep was buying a system, a site, all these things, you know, it's not like you were integral to the whole process. And just since we've been in the same industry and talk to the same people, I know that when somebody went to box out, they weren't saying, well, I'm, I'm only going because of Tyler, right? They were, they were okay with box out as a brand, you know? Um, let's, let's, uh, if you have the site pulled up, let's kind of show it. And I think what is interesting here is you have a methodology for using keep. So it's not like just here's basic user instructions that you could get anywhere else. It was in part your methodology that you had developed. And I think that's common to most people creating a membership site or of course they have kind of a, a unique way to do it. So tell me about, um, you know, how your methodology came to be and then how did you package it? Yeah. Uh, I assume you're talking about the way I think so. Yeah.

[20:30] Tyler: Okay. Um, well, one of the things that we realized with Infusionsoft back in the day and now keep is that, um, what makes it so powerful is that it's very, very flexible, right? And you can get in there and really bend the software to your will. Uh, but with that flexibility comes a challenge. And that is that you can just go in and like, there's not a whole lot of, you know, guide rails, uh, per se, you can, you know, you go open up the campaign builder and keep, and it's, it's a blank canvas. You can build whatever the heck you want. And so when you're creating tags and building campaigns and all that kind of stuff, you're going to do it differently than the guy next door and differently than some consultant and differently than another agency and whatever. And so there's, there's a million different ways to do things. And so what we created was, uh, a process or a system for naming tags and organizing campaigns and utilizing the features. And we called that the way, uh, in my opinion, it's the, the, the very simple rules that should come with keep, uh, when you sign up for it. And in fact, that's one of the things that keep purchased from us is all the IP behind the way. And we've been in the process now of creating the keep way, which is essentially a simplified, modified version of, of what we created at box out as the way. And that was one of the key components of our membership site, of course, is to get in and get educated on that first, before you get in and start building stuff inside of keep so that you do it in a systematic way that will keep you organized and make sure you get the most value out of the software. And that kind of extent, it started to extend beyond just, you know, tags and campaign organization into really everything that we did, the way that we use memberium, the way that we build membership sites, you know, all became very systematic, uh, from, from that process. Gotcha. And I like that by the way, the keep way that's,

[22:23] Micah: that should work. I think that's a great marketing fit. So when they bought the membership site, they bought your IP, what did you need to do to protect it, to make that valuable during the sale? Meaning what did you do along the way? Did you trademark it? Did you do any of that? Or did you just go along the way and do it and then just sell the business with that IP to them?

[22:42] Tyler: Yeah, it's a great question. I, um, I truthfully am like, I don't know anything about legal stuff and, uh, probably did not consult attorneys as much as I should have in the process of building and growing my business. So, uh, I don't think most of the stuff that we created over the years was trademarked in any way, uh, shape or form. Um, so the other probably wasn't any great protection there. I think part of what gave me some assurance though, is usually when I did stuff, I was fairly confident that I was the first person doing it and I would be pretty aggressive and putting it out there, you know, YouTube videos and whatnot. So my understanding anyways, again, I'm not, I'm no legal mind, so I could be totally wrong on this, but my understanding with copyright laws is like, if you've got stuff documented out there that, you know, you were the first person that put it out there, then you've got pretty good legal standing. I think, um, if someone came and tried to copy it. So, um, that was, that was the way I approached it, which is super loosey goosey and probably not the best way.

[23:51] Micah: You know, I'm happy to hear it. I'm happy you didn't say, well, I went and spent, you know, all this money on attorneys because I don't want people to get distracted doing that if they don't have to, you know, if they can just prove first use and all that kind of stuff. Um, and I ask partially to, because I have seen some sites that make a point of putting that on a bunch of their concepts. Uh, and so I was just wondering if you, if that was something that came up in the process of selling or not, you know, it doesn't sound like it did, which is totally cool. Uh, let's go ahead and show the site. Um, and I kind of want people to see your onboarding process, because that's one of the things, you know, keep, like you said, it's, it's very flexible. It can do whatever. What came to mind for me is it's almost like a machine gun with a flamethrower attached. It's like, you're enabling people to do basically anything. Um, and that can be good and bad. So I guess what I'm getting at is the keep has this, you know, like you said, it should come with it. Keep should come with this thing. It sounds like in the future, it will come with this rule book and this training, whatever, because of you. So what is it that you're helping them to do there? You mentioned kind of naming and stuff, but for somebody who's not in the weeds of that, like you and I have been, what does that really do for people? How does it benefit them? And, and the people who follow the way, how is their experience different than people

[25:16] Tyler: who don't? Yeah. The, the, there's two major benefits that I see. One is when you're, when you're learning keep it, it gives you a path to follow, right. Versus that blank canvas. Um, you know, we've all had writers blocking and you sit down to write that college essay or whatever. And you're like, where the heck do I start? You know, or if you're, if you're an artist and you do painting or drawing or whatever, sometimes you're just looking at that blank canvas. You're like, ah, man, I'm not even sure where to start. You just get stuck. Um, and people do the same thing inside of keep, they get in there and it was just so many things and you just don't even know where to start. So the keep way gives you kind of a path to follow. And, um, and it, and it makes it, you know, very understandable and gives you kind of bite-sized things to, to do versus just being overwhelmed and getting stuck. So that's, that's first benefit. Second benefit is, uh, you know, six months down the road, a year down the road, five years down the road of using this software, there's going to be a time when something breaks and you need to go troubleshoot it. Um, and you're like, okay, this person has this tag. Where did they get the tag? How, you know, what's going on here and need to go like untangle the mess that's there. Well, if you followed the way, then there really isn't any mess. And it's very, very easy to look at the tag and based on the name of the tag, know exactly which campaign it was used in, which sequence, which goal, like exactly how it all works. It's just intuitive. You know, you know, where all the pieces are and how to go fix it. Uh, versus if you just name things willy nilly along the way and you don't have any systematic way of doing it. Sometimes it's hours, days of like digging through the campaigns, trying to figure out what happened and why did it happen and how do we fix it? So those are the two big benefits I see.

[27:02] Micah: That makes sense. Initially you get them kind of started, take away procrastination, give them, you know, a path. And then in the long run, it keeps it clean and stable. They develop

[27:12] Tyler: less technical debt basically. Absolutely. And, you know, having seen in a lot of apps,

[27:19] Micah: it's mostly technical debt, right? There's so many good ideas that get abandoned and things switch.

[27:24] Tyler: My, I'm guilty of that too. So, um, go ahead and share your screen if you don't mind. Yeah, let's do it. So, so since, um, since keep acquired the business, um, what I'm going to do is just start from the keep website now. Um, so this is, uh, keep.com slash the factory. This is where keep offers these membership services. And so there's, you know, three different tiers. You can purchase monthly, or you can go month to month, changes the price a little bit, hit, get started. Uh, when you hit, get started, it takes you to a keep order form, which is here. And I'm just going to be, instead of navigating and like actually filling out forms and clicking on stuff, I'm just going to switch from tab to tab a little bit here. So there's the order form, you know, purchase 99, 97 a month or whatever. Now, when you place the order, here's where it gets fun with memberium in my opinion. So I absolutely love keep. And one of the reasons I love keep is because you can just build whatever, like you want. It's the same reason why I love memberium. It just gives you that like creative power to just go crazy and do, do whatever you want. And you can start with something really simple and it's very easy to get going, but you could also get really wild and just let your imagination go nuts. Right. So, uh, from the order form, when someone fills this out, it's going to then automatically log them into the membership site. But what we don't want yet is we don't want them getting right into the courses and all that stuff and have them get lost. We want to take them through an onboarding process. We want that experience for them to be great. And for us to be able to collect the information that we need and make sure that certain things happen as they become members. And so when they fill out this form, they don't go to a thank you page. It's like, Hey, thanks. Go check your email. We don't want to send them away. We keep them involved in the process. So the very first step that they land on is this. So you can see that we've got this, you know, visual path up here of, Hey, you're going to go through these steps before you get access to the membership site. And, you know, to welcome to the factory, there's a video here, there's the terms and conditions they have to agree to. And the video walks them through, Hey, welcome. You're going to go through this onboarding process. First thing is, you know, sign the terms and conditions. So I will e-signature thing here and they submit and continue. So that's the first step. And, um, I don't know if you want me to go through all the other steps, Micah, but, um, the next step is set your password. So this is one of the most common, like friction points with membership sites, right? I sign up, I pay, I go to my email and I didn't get the email with the password. Oh no, I can't get access to the thing I just paid for. Then I call someone or I email customer support and customer support is like, well, it sent, it was sent to you automatically. And they're like, well, no, I didn't get it. Well, check your spam folder. Well, it's not there either. It's like somehow that email likes to go missing all the time. And so we figured, hey, let's, since they're already logged in and we know who they are, we'll let them set their password on step two. We'll see if I can just navigate to it. We have some actual, yeah, we have some protections on some of these pages to make sure that they, they don't navigate the wrong way. But, um, but it's a simple form, right? Hey, set your password. That's step two. Step three is, is more of a training step. We're educating them on the complete customer lifecycle. We're trying to teach them the, the customer experience that they should be providing and what they can do with keep next is marking automation plan. That's again, it's education. There's another video teaching them about how we plan out marking automation before you even get into keep, you want to have a plan. You want to have a strategy. And so there's an educational video. No, step number five is a, uh, is a questionnaire. I think we can just jump to that one as well. Um, and this is us just collecting a bunch of information so that we can support them better, right? Tell us about your business. How long you've been in business, what industry, what do you sell, blah, blah, blah. And it's a multi-step form. As you can see here. Um, the last step is, Hey, we have a Facebook group specifically for our members. Here's the button, make sure you join it. Um, and then we actually track that inside of our keep account. We keep track of who's joined and who hasn't joined and who is yet to join and things like that so that we can make sure they get the right follow-ups. Um, but it's only after they go to that last step. So we'll just, we'll navigate there real quick and they go here and they can go join the Facebook group. They have to tell us their Facebook name here so that when we get that request, we can approve it. Um, and then they can either submit that or they can hit, let's get started. And that takes them then finally into the membership site. And so memberium is great because it allows us this ability to, um, when they, when they first purchase, they actually get two memberships. They get the regular membership and they get this onboarding membership, but the onboarding membership takes priority. So if the person leaves, let's say they're watching video number three here, they're on step number three, the video is a little too long and they got busy and they're like, Oh shoot, I got to come back to this. They leave, they come back later and they log into the membership site. The login priority for that membership overrides the main one. So they still don't get access to the main membership. It'll take them straight back to step number three. They have to finish it. They finished four, they finished five, finished six. Then it removes that onboarding membership. And then now they have access to the regular membership. So that's, that's how that whole thing works. Um, and then I'll just navigate to the, uh, the homepage of the main membership. So once they finish, they end up here, those that have access to the factory, excuse me, uh, which is our service. Uh, they have this button here. If they don't have access to the factory and they're just a success lab member, then they have access to our courses and our live calls and resources and recordings and all the other stuff. And those, you know, just dive into typical membership content. So that's a quick overview, Mike. I'm not sure where you want to go

[33:15] Micah: with this from here. Yeah, that's great though. Showing the onboard and how you're able to kind of control and keep them linear, at least at the beginning. And I think, or at least I see there that once they get past that, then they probably have a little more choose your own adventure. But in the beginning you're saying, Hey, let's stay in the structure for a sec, get that taken care of.

[33:34] Tyler: Right. Yeah, absolutely. We just, we want to make sure that they're successful in the membership site. And so a lot of that, you know, the, the education that we're doing, there is orientation to know what their plan is and what their, what value they're going to get out of the membership site and what they should be doing. Um, one of those videos actually walks them through the membership site. Hey, here's where you access the courses. Here's where you do this. If you want to join our live calls, here's how you do it. Um, it reduces customer service burden on our side when people are like, Hey, how do I get this thing? Whatever. Like they've already been educated on all that, but it

[34:04] Micah: also helps them get a lot more value out of it. Perfect. What other channels do you kind of integrate? So you mentioned Facebook and I'm not sure how much that integrates versus it's just part of it that you guys manage, but yeah, what are you texting as part of the memberships or calls? Is it all just email and website? Is there, you know, what do you do for multi-channel? Yeah, it's mostly

[34:29] Tyler: email and website. Uh, we do some, some texting inside there. Um, so there's, uh, a weekly live call that we do. Uh, historically it's been pretty much open Q and a, uh, type of call now that keep is running it. Um, they're bringing a little more structure to it, which is great. It's one of the

[34:45] Micah: things I always wanted to do and never got around to. Um, so that's great, but there's, you know, text,

[34:50] Tyler: text message reminders for those. And then occasionally, you know, if we were going to do, maybe launch a new product or, or, you know, as you know, we ran some events for a couple of years, um, you know, if there was something special going on, we might text people, but otherwise, uh, we generally just communicated through email and, uh, the website and the Facebook group. And you're right. The Facebook group doesn't integrate in any special way. It's just, that's where the members can all interact with each other. And I've done it both ways. You know, I have another membership site, uh, using memberium where we set it up with, um, buddy press and we want them all interacting there with the forums and everything. And there's pros and cons, right? I, I, I really don't like Facebook. Um, but people are there. So they tend to engage more, um, in, in the other membership site where we use buddy press. Uh, I like it better because we have more control of the experience and there's no ads and people don't get distracted and whatnot, but they're just not there. You know, they, it's not like they're logged in there interacting with their friends all day long, like they are on Facebook. And so we get a little bit less interaction there.

[36:02] Micah: Yeah. I am in a group with, um, scalable and they mentioned how they kind of pulled their users and put the group on Slack rather than Facebook, but their other company has it on Facebook. Cause those are like different user groups. And I think about that all the time. Like you mentioned buddy press, which you can totally customize it and it's beautiful, but people just don't, you know,

[36:22] Tyler: they're kind of trained to do something. And it seems like just getting in line with whatever

[36:27] Micah: they're doing. It sounds like your market is similar where, yeah, there's a lot of marketers

[36:31] Tyler: they're managing ads on Facebook. Probably they're on Facebook. Right. Um, all right. So I think

[36:38] Micah: one other angle here that is interesting for the consultants out there is that you've been a keep partner, kind of a, you know, consult for anybody using keep for years and years. I wonder what, you know, somebody doing that sort of business, any type of consulting, what's a sensible path for them in regards to membership? Cause I think you had a pretty strong vision of, Hey, I'm, you know, I kind of came from this company. I'm already seen as an expert. I, I have a strong idea of what it should look like. Were you, do you think you invested quite a bit in the membership site? Uh, should people be going for, uh, you know, something super small? Uh, and I know you give this type of advice to people or, or have in the past, cause you built, I think hundreds of membership sites, your company. So how do you walk or walk somebody through or think through that? Um, starting point, because in my mind, most people have some sort of revenue stream, some sort of business and they've got to like work this into it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question.

[37:45] Tyler: Um, like, like most really good questions. Uh, the answer is it depends, right? There's many different answers depending on the situation. Um, but I think for me, it all, it all starts with like, what's the end goal in mind, right? Like, what are you trying to actually achieve? And, um, the, the answers to that question vary, right? Well, I'm trying to create community. Great. Well, if you're trying to create community, then we're going to take a different approach with the membership site. Then if you're just trying to, uh, generate revenue, or if you're trying to educate customers or whatever. So back to your original question, the average consultant out there, let's say you're a consultant, you don't have a massive team. Uh, you're doing some, some kind of high-end consulting. What most people in that situation, I think, uh, are wanting to do is they want to get more consulting clients. They want to make more money as a consultant. Well, the way to do that easier is to have a really good ascension path, right? Uh, you can open up the top of the funnel really, really big and get a bunch of leads in, but most of those leads aren't going to jump to a, you know, $10,000 a month or, you know, $20,000 a year consulting package, right? There's a big gap from opt-in to the high end. And so the way you bridge that is through this, you know, this ascension path. So you have a, you know, a $9 tripwire, and then you've got a, you know, $47 course, and then you've got a, you know, $50 a month membership. And then there's a, you know, whatever it is, $300 a month, you know, group coaching type thing. And it goes on and on from there. And so you leverage the membership site to help you ascend those customers from that starting point all the way up. And, and the reason that's important, if you're a consultant and particularly a, you know, one, one man show, one woman show consulting situation is if you don't do that and you don't do it well, then you're stuck in the cycle. And the cycle is I'm really busy serving my consulting clients. And so I don't have any time to do marketing and sales. And so when those contracts end, I'm then now going back to slay the beast, right? I got to go cold call and do marketing and, you know, have sales conversations and go to events or whatever it is that I do to get customers. And while I'm doing that, I can't be fulfilling, right? So I'm doing that, but then I get full again. And it's like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and it's never really stable. But if you've got this Ascension path, it's, you know, mostly automated to, to ascend customers from opt-in all the way up to that high level. And basically you just sit there and take, take, you know, qualification calls that are bubbling up from that whole process and close them into your high end membership or consulting or whatever it is. And you don't have to stress over, you know, getting stuck in that cycle. So that that's the big benefit I think there is for consultants to leverage a membership site in that fashion.

[40:48] Micah: That's fantastic. Follow-up question, more detail on that. So you mentioned, you know, have this low dollar, like $9, whatever, $7 tripwire product of some sort, and then this upper level product. Where do you start? I mean, let's say your package is for simplicity, 5,000 a month or something. And then, you know, do you start with that $9 thing? Do you start somewhere in the middle? Like I got to develop something for a thousand dollars. Any thoughts on that?

[41:18] Tyler: Again, I don't know if there's a right, right answer on this. Start either where you just feel most comfortable. Like maybe you got some great ideas for a mini series and you just want to go and you can go create it right now. Cause it's already like baked in your head. Go create it, go do it. You know? Other times I think it probably depends on where the people are. Right. So what I mean by that is, let's say I've got a fair amount of leads from a high end consulting, but as I talk to people, just a lot of them aren't ready. They're like, Oh, that's either too expensive or I'm just not at that point yet or whatever. What's a good downsell, right? Is there a downsell that you can create right now to capture those people? They're just, you know, they're sitting there, they're ready. They just, they just can't quite get there. Or on the other hand, maybe you just have a bunch of traffic and you're not doing a good job capturing that traffic. Maybe you should start with the opt-in to the, to the tripwire type thing. So wherever that opportunity is, I think is where I would focus first, or if you've just got an idea that's burning a hole in your brain and you just need to go

[42:22] Micah: get it out. Cool. I like that. I want to also ask, so we asked kind of from a consultant's perspective and you kind of laid out that plan to, to feed that service funnel. Let's say it's a product company of some sort rather than a service company. And they're looking to build a membership site. You know, like you said, keep maybe somebody like that might want it for retention or another company might want it for onboard of a physical product just to reduce,

[42:51] Tyler: you know, refunds and increase satisfaction. What are your thoughts if a product company comes to you?

[42:57] Micah: And to give you kind of a weird example, let's even say it's some sort of physical product.

[43:03] Tyler: How could you pair a membership site with that? Yeah, it's a good question. Again, it all comes back to what's the purpose, what's the goal, right? So you pointed out a couple of potential goals. If the goal is retention, then let's make sure we build something that is going to deliver on that goal. If the goal is onboarding, then make sure we deliver on that goal. If it's just onboarding, I would question then, well, what's the point of onboarding? Is it so that then we have happy customers so that we get referrals? If so, let's bake that into the, the, the membership site, that onboarding process, have them onboarded and then have a way for them to give referrals. You know, there's probably another end other than just onboarding. And so, you know, I'd be trying to figure out what, what is the business reason for us to have this membership site and then work

[43:52] Micah: backwards from there. Okay. So let's say, uh, I'm going to, if it's okay, keep throwing these situations at you. Let's say it's somebody who is, is that consultant person of some sort, they could be an attorney, whatever. Right. But their goal isn't to necessarily get more service work. Their goal is to try to replace their income and get back some of their time. Let's say they want a

[44:15] Tyler: vacation. They've got kids, grandkids, something. Um, what might be a strategy for that person?

[44:21] Micah: Who's, who's really trying to swap out income, you know, service for recurring. Yeah. I've seen this a

[44:27] Tyler: lot. Um, and there's, there's one caution that I will give, uh, to people in, in this boat. And I guess it's not a caution. It's more just advice. Um, you need to realize that your current flow of customers is not generally, generally not the same as what you're going to need for the membership site to work. So again, let's say I'm an attorney and I'm like, man, I've just been grinding for 20 years. And I just want to be able to relax a little bit. I'll keep a few, uh, clients, but I want to be able to replace my income. Well, the clients that are coming to you now, they don't want a membership site. They want an attorney. And so you're going to have to go generate a new source of traffic. So that's just, that's my word of caution or my, or my piece of advice is just realize that the people that are coming to you now, if you said, Hey, you know what, you should just go sign up for my membership site. They're going to go to a different attorney because they're, they're at a place and you probably have a reputation in your business to attract customers who need an attorney, not education. Right. And so, um, they're, they're two different things now that I'm not saying that to deter you from doing it. Um, it's a great idea and I've seen it done very, very successfully. I worked with some clients of mine a few years back that did, um, college planning, right. And they did high end college planning. They charged thousands of dollars for their consulting service, but it was a similar situation. They just realized, Hey, look, we're getting towards retirement age. We want to be able to enjoy that retirement. And, uh, we're stuck in this grind of consulting and they built a membership site and they transitioned, uh, and they had to transition their marketing, the marketing shifted and it changed to attract a different customer who wanted to get in and spend less and do more of the work themselves. Uh, but they created a very cool systematic membership site to educate people on, Hey, here are the, I can't remember what it was. It was like the eight success steps or whatever to, you know, getting into the college of your dreams. And if you got in and you went through those steps, then you could be very, very successful. Um, and they did, they ran that site. I don't know how many years, four or five years and they retired and it was like wonderful. Um, and so it's, it's definitely doable. Um, but just realize that you have to go generate a new source of traffic or a different source of traffic to make that work. I don't know if I even answered your question,

[46:54] Micah: Micah, I think I just went off on a tangent. That's definitely the right answer. Let's talk about kind of the, that process or the middle ground, because I think you're totally right. Most people who want to make that transition, they think like, Oh, I'm going to build this site, 2000 bucks a pop. People are, you know, I'm going to be a millionaire in no time. I got a thousand people on my email, 1000 times the sale price. Right. And it's like, well, slow down, uh, in that transition, I guess what I've, what I've done sometimes myself correctly and incorrectly, and also seen done is people will either almost like drop the service business and go think they're a membership person now. Um, and so I guess what's the healthy way to keep both of those sources of traffic. So for example, the couple you're talking about, you know, did they keep that high in traffic and like slowly taper off? Was there a jumping off point? Uh, did they add the two together for a while and make even more money? What's I've seen it done a bunch of ways. I'm curious as to, as to

[47:56] Tyler: your thoughts and advice you would give people. Yeah. I mean, I, I hesitate to give people advice on that. Um, I think you just got to do whatever's smart. And the reason I hesitate to do, to, to give people advice is because I did the unsafe thing. Like when I left infusion soft and I just left without a plan and started a business like the next day, you know, and it, and it worked, but that won't work in most people's situations. Like most people would say, okay, keep your job, start working nights and weekends and until you generate enough revenue to, to make that transition. And same thing with this, I'd probably for most people say, Hey, look, you know, you got to keep the, the service business going to fund this new business. And, you know, once it's generating enough revenue, then you can start making that transition. That's what these people did that I was referring to. You know, they, they kept delivering their service for a while until the revenue from the membership was, was generating enough. And then they, then they started to switch. Um, but I think it's, you know, everyone, everyone's situation is a little bit different and just do

[48:59] Micah: what's smart. Makes sense. I know for myself, when I was building up memberiums subscription, I thought of it almost as two jobs. Like I got to have my job as a consultant and get a second job as a guy building a subscription company, because that money is not coming in, in any sizable amount in the beginning, you know?

[49:20] Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. Generally memberships, at least the monthly payment is a whole lot less than what you're charging for your service. Right. And so it takes, you know, you got to get to critical mass over there before you can make that transition. And, and it takes often much longer than we would hope. And so I think you're right in that, you know, you got to manage both those jobs for a while until

[49:44] Micah: you get to that critical mass. Yeah. What I, and I, you know, hesitate to ask too broad a question, but kind of to wrap up here, what's some advice that you would give people who are, let's say we'll start backwards and we'll say they're kind of toward the exit process, but they haven't really had it in mind from the beginning. You know, what are some steps they should be taking? Should they be writing down all their processes and procedures? Should they be courting by, or should they be talking to a banker? So let's kind of start there. If somebody has just kind of a, let's say a hundred thousand dollar a year membership site that they're looking to sell, what kind of steps might you point out for them to check out?

[50:31] Tyler: Yeah. So the thing that I learned over the last few years in preparing for this, and then actually going through it, that is that businesses are always, no matter what kind of business,

[50:44] Micah: they're always valued on the predictability of future revenue. That's essentially what it all comes

[50:52] Tyler: down to. Right. And so that's why recurring revenue businesses are valued at a higher multiple than, you know, typical service-based businesses or one-time revenue businesses, because that revenue, you can predict out for a certain amount of months. You know, if you just look at your current churn rate, you can say, okay, yeah, look, we've got this revenue in the bank. If nothing else changes for the next X number of months or years or, or whatever it looks like. And so understanding that is, is key. And then with that thought in mind, you should go back to every aspect of your business and look at how can we make this more predictable, right? So if we're looking at current memberships, how can we reduce churn? We want to make future revenue more stable, more predictable, right? Churn, churn becomes far more important than anything else. When your membership grows to, a certain point, right? Once you have hundreds or thousands of members, churn is far more important. And so I'd be looking there. And another thing to be looking at is, you know, how, how does this business grow? Does it require me, you know, the business owner to go out and do webinars or whatever? If it's dependent on me, then that reduces the value for a buyer, right? Because now the predictability of that revenue, it's dependent on me and, you know, I don't want to keep working for them forever.

[52:15] Micah: And they probably don't want to pay me forever, right? So it reduces the value. So how can you

[52:19] Tyler: start swapping out pieces that are, that create unpredictability or create a problem in the, in the revenue model? And then, you know, I think the third thing for me is what you alluded to, Micah, which is, you know, how can I make this as systematic and turnkey as possible for them? So it's just less dependent on people in general, so they can go and hire, you know, untrained people, plug them in, follow the instructions and the business still works. But I would focus on the, the predictability of the future revenue as first priority, because that's, what's going to increase the valuation of your business.

[52:57] Micah: Gotcha. And I think that all of that is valuable advice, even if you hold the business, obviously, right? If, even if you don't sell it now, it's better for you. So working backwards, a step ahead

[53:06] Tyler: of that, let's say you are, you know, your focus is retention. You've been good at selling members,

[53:15] Micah: whatnot. What are some kind of principles in your mind of retention for most membership sites?

[53:23] Tyler: Yeah, that's a good question. I think it does change depending on the membership site and the, you know, what's being offered, maybe the industry a little bit, but there's probably a few basic principles. One of course is, is just value, you know, are they getting value out of the membership and that value comes in different ways, of course. It's one of the reasons we had the, that weekly call in our membership site. Because for whatever reason, you know, we've got all these courses in there and all the hours and hours and hours of training for whatever reason, a lot of people just don't engage with that stuff, even though they signed up for it. That's what they signed up for initially. But they would hop on that weekly call and maybe they just felt more comfortable being able to get like immediate answers on, on the call, whatever. So we, we added that as a way to retain people.

[54:17] Micah: Right. I think another thing is in some way you need to measure engagement. And so we do that through

[54:27] Tyler: the courses, you know, when they're completing lessons in the course, it triggers a loop inside of keep. And if that, if that loop doesn't get triggered every so often, then we get reminders and the customer gets reminders of, Hey, you need to log back in and keep going on your courses, whatever. So you want to measure and, um, and react to engagement. Uh, the last thing I'd recommend is, um, figuring out ways to keep people excited about stuff that's coming in the future. And so, uh, particularly in a situation where you have new members coming in, that's fairly easy to do because you can say, Hey, at month three of your membership, you get X, Y, Z bonus. And then once they pass that one, Hey, month six includes whatever bonus, and you can kind of lay out this path, as long as they know what's coming, then they can be looking forward to it. And, you know, ideally they're pretty exciting bonuses so that, you know, if they're considering quitting after month two, they, they want to hang on just another month to get that, that bonus. Um, it gets a little harder after they've been in for a while, and maybe you have a year's worth of content, but what happens in year two or, you know, year three or whatever. Um, so I think that that's a, a constant thought that membership site owners should have is what can we be providing as new value to our members to keep them around? Um, maybe it's just an occasional, you know, event, you know, webinar type thing, or even a live event where you get your members together. Um, oh, the last thing I was

[55:52] Micah: going to mention earlier, and I forgot was, uh, focus, and this doesn't work in every membership

[55:59] Tyler: site situation, but if you can focus on really trying to create a community, um, people will stick around for the community if it's awesome, uh, even if they've already gotten the value out of your content. Uh, and so that's, that's an important factor in all of this to consider as well.

[56:16] Micah: Yeah. To that point, I'm in a group, uh, that I recently decided to, to cancel at no fault of the group. I've just been in there two years and it's like, yeah, I really absorbed everything. And even the last while of it, I was really just in there for the community. I knew I had absorbed everything, but it's, Hey, I like going to these things, seeing these people, you know, networking and so on. It's amazing. Um, how consistent that is, right. Come for the content, stay for the community. And but after a few years, yeah, it's, it's hard. You can, you can keep doing all the tricks you want, but yeah, you know, there might be a life cycle there. Uh, so let's go one step ahead of retention. Let's say sales where you've built what you think is the best product ever. And, or your client has, and they're having trouble selling it. Uh, and I know these are

[57:04] Tyler: open-ended questions, but you can jump off wherever you'd like. How do you approach selling a membership?

[57:10] Micah: Uh, as you know, cause I know you can sell lots of different products, but what's unique about selling a membership or course and how do you do that successfully?

[57:20] Tyler: Yeah, it's a good question. I w I wouldn't say I'm necessarily an expert at that. Um, I'm probably

[57:24] Micah: the wrong person to ask, but, but I would say that, um, no matter what you're selling, if you're trying to sell it and people aren't buying it's cause the offer isn't right. And so, um, I think it's very,

[57:39] Tyler: very common in membership sites that people get caught up in people get caught up too much in

[57:47] Micah: the membership site itself. And this is probably common everywhere, right? With any product,

[57:52] Tyler: particularly when you're the one who built it, like you love that thing. It's your, it's your baby that you created and you know, every little feature about it and how amazing that feature is. Could you built it with your own hands or your own keyboard or whatever? And, um, and so you, you love telling people about it and you want to rave about it. And, uh, that's not what, what people buy. They don't, they're not buying, no one wants another membership, right? What people want is a problem solved or a pain relief or, or whatever. So, um, I would just make sure that you, you remain focused on the problem you're trying to solve and keep your language focused on that. Uh, and the offer focused on, on how, you know, their exchange for money gets them relief of the pain. Um, I think that's just the key to, to, to selling anything. And, uh, I don't think that's, it's not unique with, with membership sites. I mean, you're, I don't know why you're interviewing me, Micah, you're the membership site expert. So you probably know much better than I do, you know, how to answer this question. There probably are some, some unique specific, you know, ways to sell membership sites, but to me, it just always comes down to the offer and making sure you're selling the value that people want, not the membership site itself.

[59:14] Micah: Well, I ask you because I think you are like the sales and marketing expert and your answers are always nuanced. You know, it's not just like, well, run a Facebook ad, um, which I appreciate. So, uh, thank you actually. That's, I think it's helpful. And also I, you know, I only have one perspective. And so getting your perspective too, I really enjoy doing this. So, so let's keep, let's take one step

[59:36] Tyler: backwards to the building of the site. How do you recommend people build a site? Do they

[59:42] Micah: buy a new camera? Do they buy lights? You know, how, how important is production value versus be scrappy? Um, and let's say your average, uh, you know, keep user. And for anybody listening to this, who, who doesn't know what we've been talking about this whole time with keep, it's just a CRM. People are paying, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month for. So typically they have some sort of business or at least they're semi-serious. Um, but yeah, an average keep user, what kind of site should they build initially? Like what level of quality, how big should it be? Yeah. Uh, that's a good

[1:00:16] Tyler: question. So I'm a big fan of doing a couple of things that probably feel risky to some people. And one is selling stuff before you built it. Um, I love that because I don't want to go build a whole big thing and then go try and sell it and no one wants it. Um, and as much as you think everyone's going to love your stuff, uh, it's just not always true. So I've, I've put a lot of things out there that people don't want to buy. I've failed at it plenty of times. Um, so don't as sure as you might be, I just would be really hesitant to put a lot of effort and a lot of money into building out a membership site before, you know, people will actually buy it. Um, so that's, that's one thing to go sell it and, uh, or pre-sell it or however you want to do it, but you know, get, get people committed financially before you actually build stuff, um, or build a very, um, you know, very simple MVP, minimum viable product, right? When we launched success lab, I had, I think eight or nine courses planned, but only two of them were actually built and in there when we first launched it and sold it. And the, it was just like, Hey, sign up. Now you'll get these two courses and you'll get one course a month for the next six months or whatever. And I just, you know, had to keep, had to stay on that, that schedule for the first little bit until we got them all built out. So I, I just think that's the way to go. I think people would be shocked if they knew, um,

[1:01:45] Micah: how little I've spent on equipment and technology and stuff like that to, to record the videos and

[1:01:53] Tyler: things like that. I had one simple advantage and that is my dad was a photographer and I worked for him for many years. So I understood very well, uh, lighting and composition and stuff like that. But that doesn't mean I used good equipment for it. I just knew how to, I just knew how to set it up. So, um, you know, I literally, it's like, I'm, I'm trying to, I'm trying to like add up in my head, what it, you know, over even over the years, what it has cost me. Uh, I think nowadays, by the way, like you don't need to buy a camera, just use your iPhone. Like everyone's iPhone is good enough. Um, at that point, sound quality is probably most important. Just make sure you're not in a room that's like super echoey and your iPhone will probably pick up the audio well enough as well. If you're concerned about that, you can get a simple, you know, Bluetooth mic that connects to your, to your phone for like a hundred bucks or something like that. Um, you know, open the windows to let some natural light in. You only need to go buy lights,

[1:02:50] Micah: you know, have a simple background. That's not distracting. It's really, it really shouldn't cost

[1:02:55] Tyler: you that much. Now I know everyone wants to have like the sexiest, most amazing, you know, videos and site ever. But again, in the beginning, I would not invest in that stuff. You know, once you've got members and it's, and it's paying you good money and you want to go back and redo the videos,

[1:03:11] Micah: by all means go for it. But, um, to get started, you know, good, good in focus video, clear audio, undistracting background. You're good to go. All right. Well, we're, we're about out of time. So any other thoughts in your mind right now, you know, we kind of started off your whole journey of your life cycle of your site in this situation. And then, you know, obviously you've built sites for so many people. You have, I think a treasure trove of great advice and ideas. So what else is on your mind that you might want to share with an audience of, you know, membership site and course enthusiasts?

[1:03:48] Tyler: Yeah. One of the things that I would just encourage everyone to do is think about the idea that the membership site knows who the customer is and knows everything about them. And because of that, what can you do? Because I promise you, like, there's a lot of things that you could do with your membership site, like really cool stuff that you're not doing, uh, that are really easy to do with a membership site because it knows everything about that customer when they're logged in. Um, so for example, but recently ran this offer where it was, um, uh, we're, we're calling it 30 day marketer. So it's a 30 day, you know, learn marketing program. And, um, the black Friday offer was if you buy now, then when you buy it, you get one free that you can give to a friend. And so in that process, um, here, I'm actually, I'm going to share my screen for just a sec. If you don't mind, this will help. Yeah. When, um, when people, when people buy, we use that auto login process again, right? We didn't quite build out that same extensive, uh, onboarding, but we just brought them right into this, um, right into this page and I'm logged in as an admin. So it shows extra buttons and things that shouldn't be there. So for example, the, the Facebook group, if they've already joined, it just has a, the Facebook group button. If they haven't joined yet, then it shows this one, right? So they'll see one or the other welcome video. So we did do the songboarding process, but it's all on one page. Welcome videos here. When they're done watching it, they hit this button. Now, again, the membership site knows who they are and what they've done and everything about them. So as soon as they hit this button, that video disappears because the membership site knows now, oh, they watched the video. We don't need that. Step two is set your password. It's not showing up because I'm logged in as an admin, but that has the form for setting the password, Facebook group where we talked about, but here's the give 30 day marketer to a friend. So they fill it out and they can schedule it for the future. Like if they wanted to give it for Christmas or whatever, they could schedule it on Christmas day. So the person gets an email. So this just basically creates a new contact record for their friend and sends them an email, gives that person the right tag so that when they get the email and they log in, they're already set with the whole 30 day marketer program. But here's what's cool. You can do this basic thing with keep outside of a membership site. The problem is when you fill out this form, it creates a new contact record for the new person. So all your automation is now triggered on the new person on the friend. We don't know that the original purchaser has already given the gift. So we can't automate follow up to that person and we can't tag them for having given the gift because this form triggers automation on the new contact. Right. But since we're logged into the membership site, if I fill out this form and I hit send a gift and I go to the thank you page, then the thank you page inside the membership site knows who I am. And now I can apply a tag on that contact to say, okay, this person who purchased and got the

[1:06:51] Micah: BOGO, the buy one gift one, they have now delivered it. They've given it away. So then therefore this form,

[1:06:58] Tyler: when they come back to this page is gone, they can't keep filling it out and giving it away to more friends. Right. And so we can control the experience a little bit better. We can also have follow up. Hey, you haven't sent your gift to a friend yet. We can keep sending those types of communications until they do it. And once they do it, we can tag them and send follow ups after that and that kind of stuff. So I just think that there are so many possibilities with this technology that it just gets really, really exciting. So I just encourage people to, to just step back and just think like, if I were sitting, if I were watching them on the membership site, like when they log in, what would I do like in, in person almost, you know, what would I do? And then realize like, oh, since the membership site knows who they are and knows everything about them, the membership site could then automate that experience. And it just, it gets super exciting. I'm, I'm a big, huge fat tech nerd. And so I just like geek out over this stuff all the time. But that's, that's just my advice is just realize that that membership site could act as you, if you were sitting there. And so what do you want it to do? It knows everything about the customer. It knows every tag they have and is knows every purchase they've ever made. It knows what they do right now. Like I just showed you when they click that button and they say, I've watched the welcome video. Okay. Then I can take away the welcome video. It doesn't need to be there anymore. And just realize that it can be that personal and that interactive. So just take a step back and think about that and see what comes to mind.

[1:08:21] Micah: I really like that frame. Cause I picture sitting over my customer's shoulder saying like, now click here, now go in and you're right. The site can know what to tell them to do and then

[1:08:32] Tyler: visually show them, Hey, here we are. Yeah. Let's talk for a sec about the technology. Cause we didn't

[1:08:38] Micah: mention it very much along the way here, but we're basically talking about, uh, kind of the, the site, for example, that you sold to keep that they're now using for, I believe they're using it for their, their customers, their partners, and their employees, right? They train everybody using the membership site you built and it's a WordPress site connected to keep through memberium, right?

[1:08:59] Tyler: Mm-hmm. That's right.

[1:09:01] Micah: So, and, and I believe you've built a ton of other sites like that. What, uh, what is it about that combination? You know, memberium keep, you mentioned flexibility and whatnot, but maybe can you give an example of something that you couldn't do without it?

[1:09:18] Tyler: Um, yeah, so there, there's, you know, a lot of membership site technology out there, of course. Um, there's, in, in my opinion, uh, again, you're the expert on this stuff, but the way I see it is there's kind of two different routes that they take. One is standalone platform. And of course, there's benefits to that is, is they can really just make it super, super simple. Um, and then there's, there are those that, uh, attached to some CMS like memberium does with WordPress. And the benefit to that is, um, there's just total flexibility, right? WordPress being an open source platform allows you to get into the, to the code if you want to, and just modify anything and everything or utilize other, you know, open source or paid plugins to, uh, extend the functionality. So, you know, that's, that's something to consider. I think when you're getting into membership sites is do, am I, am I techie enough that I want to get into that kind of open source world and really make it exciting? Or do I have a vision for where this is going? That's going to require some of that stuff, or do I just have a really simple vision and I'm not techie. And so I just need the simple, you know, kind of done for me, uh, type situation. Um, now what's cool is memberium has like templates, essentially that make it super easy anyways. Um, even in that open source platform, uh, make it, makes it super easy to get started. You just hit the button all of a sudden, all the pages are built for you and you just get going. Um, so that's cool. But, um, where am I going with this Micah? I'm, I'm rambling now. What was the question?

[1:10:54] Micah: You're good. I was just wondering, and I think you, you hit kind of what the real question was, is how do people make a choice of platform? So there's the, I only need something simple and I, you know, might go to some standalone platform. But I think one of the things you mentioned in there is, is kind of the key point. Cause you said either they have the needs now or their vision includes those needs in the future, because what will happen sometimes from my perspective is somebody will start with the easy platform, even though they know they have a bigger vision, it's not going to fit. That transition is, is more painful than they realize there's loss of data and time and things.

[1:11:30] Tyler: So you don't want to, you don't want to have to migrate systems and, and the cost of these platforms is pretty nominal considering, you know, what the potential is. And so it just doesn't make sense to try and say, oh, well, I'm going to save 10 bucks a month and go on this other platform instead of getting memberium or whatever. It's like, no, if you know that your vision is going to require, you know, all the bells and whistles, then just go with memberium.

[1:11:53] Micah: I appreciate that. Well, anything else nice that you want to say about memberium for the recording?

[1:11:59] Tyler: Um, I mean, yeah, I, it's not, it's not me trying to be nice. It's just the truth. Uh, like you alluded to in our agency, we literally build hundreds of membership sites and, um, by far our preferred platform to serve our customers is memberium. And it's because of that power and that flexibility. Uh, it just, I always, I always say, if you can dream it, you can build it. Um, and with, with the combination of keep and its power and flexibility and memberium and its power and flexibility, it literally is true. Like if you can dream it, you can build it. It's just phenomenal. So that is, that is my recommendation. Not, not me just being nice.

[1:12:41] Micah: Well, I appreciate that. And I appreciate all your, your time and energy and ideas on this. And I think other people are going to love it. So thank you so much, Tyler.

[1:12:48] Tyler: Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.