How to Choose the Right Focus and Platform for Your Membership

Natalie: so, my question is, I'm considering a membership. I have a course and it's on digital photography the easy way without all the tech. So it's more the soft skills and good for beginners who are kind of like afraid of the tech and all of that. But anyway, I have that course. I don't like launching.

I've done it. I didn't, it made me so stressed out. I didn't even know what day it was. so I was thinking, I keep hearing community is really big right now, so I thought is there a way that I can leverage, not exactly the course, but like things that are maybe in the course, but maybe in more detail as a membership, a monthly membership.

I'm an artist and I'm a photographer and a painter, so I feel like I am like a split personality and I really wanna help people with both. And so at first I thought art club and have little bits of both, but then I thought, well no, my real business thing is the course and that's photography. So I dunno if I should just focus on that.

And then the part two is I've been looking at Patreon and Kajabi and Chachi. PT loves Kajabi. Over Patreon. so I'm not sure where to actually put my membership. I do have Kajabi for my course, so I'm wondering what should my focus of the membership be?

Should I stick with photography or try to do what I also love painting or try two different ones? I don't know if I could handle that. Thank you. Yeah,

Paul: thank you. Great. And, and thanks for the compliment and it was great to see you, virtually. Mm-hmm. number one, she said, you know, definitely, I think a lot of people can relate to that.

Anybody else cringe? Like, oh, the, the whole idea of launching is like,

Julia: yeah, anybody else

Paul: can relate to that. does anybody have any input or advice or perspective that you would like to lend, in?

Yeah. Julia, Julie, I'll

Julia: chime in. One of my favorite questions to ask people when they're debating between two different topics or two different avenues to go down is like, which one excites you more? And sometimes we get caught up in the logical, like, oh, my business is focused on this.

So this is like the smart, like quote unquote right path to go down. But I'm really excited about this other idea over here. But we kind of talk ourselves out of it because it's not quite so logical. And so I guess my encouragement for you would just be, you know, which one kind of lights you up more and which one would you enjoy doing?

'cause memberships are, you know, not one and done. And so which one are you gonna be able to stick with and enjoy long term?

Melissa: Thank you, Julia. Sustainability. Yes. I love it. And, Robert, go ahead.

Robert: Yeah, and I, I, I have, no major expertise in this area, but just if you're thinking about a membership because you're tired of launching, you already have a course.

I know that you're multi-passionate, you've got different areas that you're looking at. But I'm gonna go back to the same idea that many of us developed when we, or get learned when we started developing courses or memberships or doing whatever it is that we're doing, is that you probably wanna stick with one thing, make that work, get that up and running, and then if you want to expand out from there, I think it makes sense.

It's logical, right? The sort of artist club thing. But if you've already got a course set up, you've got material there that you can use for a membership that can help. Get that up and running. And once it's there, then you can start to build out, instead of trying to juggle multiple things at the same time and try and pitch it to different groups that might get confused.

you know, the, the sort of Donald Miller, if you confuse, you lose. so if you're looking for a, to set up a membership, the idea that you want that to be very clear what that membership's all about. So that's just my 2 cents.

Paul: Great. Love it. Thank you. Fantastic. Any, anyone else have any, input? So Melissa, do you have, any thoughts?

Melissa: well, I, like, I, I actually, I, it's like a combination between,Julia and Robert said like, yes, you want it to light you up, but then also too, thinking, I always like to think of the path of least resistance. So what is gonna be the path of least resistance to, to get this going with the membership?

And then how can I find that joy and excitement and variety within Path. So it might be the same thing that you're doing, but is there, elements that you can bring into the membership that's gonna light you up, that's gonna get you excited, that's gonna motivate you? and I do believe that like if by focusing on a topic and if it's, especially if you're already established with the course and it's just another natural step, it's another offer, it's another flywheel, what we like to call poll.

And I, it's like it's another way for an entry point for people to, to work with you. So I think it's like kind of that combination of looking at it from a logical perspective of like, what's gonna be the path resistance to get this up, to get this going, to get this rock and rolling. But then also how can I find that joy and that variety and then excitement?

'cause we all need to do that 'cause all of us do something really, really well. But at some point we get bored or we go to the next shiny object over there. And one of the things that Paul and I really work on ourselves is trying to find the variety and the excitement within the thing that we're already doing.

Yeah.

Paul: That's the, the curse of the creative entrepreneur. Variety and excitement. We get bored. If we're in routine and we do something over and over again, then we wanna go create something new and anybody else have, have that issue or problem. Yeah. so as Melissa just said, we call it [00:06:00] inside out, so it's like take all the creativity that you think is in the outside world and do ultimately all the creativity.

Inside. The one thing, itself, and 'cause where most of us don't succeed is because we're bouncing. You know, we, we buy somebody's new offer, somebody's new whizzbang thing, somebody has a new shiny object and like this is a new trending idea. And then we dink dink dink dink dink. What I will say is that courses in general with the info product world courses are easier to sell because you're making, it's, it's normal like psychology of buying.

It's like we're all used to going to the grocery store or buying a car or a house or anything in life, and we give money and we give a very specific promise transformation back and we understand the exchange of goods in that moment with a, with a membership. The reason why it's typically harder to sell at the front end is because people are like, when does the transformation happen?

Does it happen on month one? Does it happen on month 12? Like, when am I getting the promise that you're [00:07:00] making of, the membership itself? And a lot of us don't think or realize that even, friends of ours that are really dug into the messaging of everything being memberships, they also sell you a $2,000 course in the front end before they bring you into a membership.

You know, so, 'cause it is a little bit of a heavier lift to bring somebody into continuity. We all needed the pain of going to Blockbuster and being charged a late fee and forgetting to rewind and walking in and not having it for us to appreciate the value what Netflix brought to us, you know, in these streaming services.

So we had to live through the transactional element. Streaming would not have happened really well years ago because we would not have just jumped right in to give monthly, you know, fees. because we didn't have the pain to, to relate it to. So I recommend that you, you know, definitely the variety and the, the variations of what was said.

Now. When it comes to the, the platform question that you have. Patreon is a great resource just to test the water and figure things out, and it's very low commitment. So you're not paying exorbitant amount of money and getting really complicated. Melissa belongs to several different Patreon memberships mm-hmm.

As a consumer, of different influencers. And they just chose to go all in on Patreon and she receives her content. we tested it out when we were traveling full-time, and we built a membership one, even though we have very advanced memberships on, on higher end platforms, just so we could experience like what it was.

And it's a very low friction thing to at least get started. You do get your members' emails and contact information, so if in the future you decide to go to a Kajabi. Or to another platform, you can just send out an email to everybody and give them new logins and, and move them over, in the future.

So, most of us get stuck on the tech and it stops us from moving forward. And as long as your customer can get to the content that you promised, they don't care the platform that they're, look, we all get caught up in it because we see all these different choices and the cool whizzbang things they can do.

And at the end of the day, the consumer doesn't care. Can they just access the content? Yeah. so, and you can always outgrow and we've been probably, I. In the last decade, together, probably five different platforms. Yeah. We've been on. it's never fun when you go to move, because they all make the platforms and they make it what's called sticky, which means they make it so you purposely feel pain if you go to move.

but it can be done. and there's a lot of VAs out there that'll do it for pennies on the dollar and move everything for you.

Melissa: I recommend that rather. Yeah. If, if you have the ability, because I have moved quite a few.

Paul: Yeah. but when you're, outgrowing your current platform, you're making the money to be able to afford somebody to do it for you.

Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So, cool.

Melissa: Awesome. Great question. Thank you Natalie.