How to Start a Membership Without an Audience or Content

Nadine: So I'm at the very beginnings of, of thinking about memberships. I'm in my 30 day window of launching my course and the membership is going to be part of the course. So my question is, you know, what do you do when there's nobody in the room?
Like there's no one there yet. And I hope that it'll get populated with some people. I wanted to know is it okay or weird if I have relatives in there just to fill the space and to start to contribute? That was one of my questions. And also how much content do you have to kind of preload or do you need to preload content? So when they get in there they're like, oh, look at this cool free thing that I'm getting as part of this.
And just kind of how you really at the very, very beginning set it up so that it's something that they want to continue to be part of. And my thought is that they'll, the people who enroll in the course will have access to it for a couple of, you know, maybe have a bonus, give them some extra months as I sell here, as sell the course. But then after that have that be like a, like a lower cost kind of a monthly charge so I don't have to keep adding a lot of extra content to it and what the price point would be for that.
So that's my whole like list of questions, which is a lot I know. So if you can't answer them all, I get it. But that's kind of where my head is with memberships. Awesome, awesome.
Paul: Actually isolate the like one question first and then we probably be able to have more clarity and be able to handle it and then we can go to the, a couple of the follow ups.
Melissa (2): So the, the first one you said what you do if there's like no one in the room and is it okay to have like relatives in the room? That was your, it's just brand new. So how do you. Yeah, okay,
Paul: so has Anybody started at 0 with a membership and kind of pre filled the room a little. Pre filled the room a little bit. Yeah. Michael, can
Melissa (2): you talk a little bit more?
I'm not sure if Nadine was here when you were talking a little bit for. But
Michael (2): yeah, sure. My, my wife has bought all of my memberships and my courses. She hasn't participated. I go to people who are safe, who I tell them straight up, you may, may or may not be interested, but can you just participate and then just give me feedback what worked, what didn't work. I purposely try to find the people who I think might enjoy it.
And I'll tell them, here's what I think you'll like. I had no lists when I started this. I really didn't have anybody when, when I started my memberships. Now I think this will be valuable for you and here's how. But can you just tell me. And I just do it that way. And both of my memberships, my first one that I started and then stopped, and then my second one, I started with like three, four people and that was it.
And I was like, look, there's only three of us. I'm hoping to grow this, but you guys get to tell me how this is better. And I want to know more about you and what you want to get out of this. I have done so many live casts with nobody. I've done so many videos with nobody, and I don't care. I record them and now they're part of my library.
And I love what Nicole said earlier. Then who cares? You've got it recorded. You can just make a little snippet of it and use it as part of your stuff. So it's really hard to swallow down the. Oh, I'm a failure. I'm an impostor. I can't do this because at least that's what I felt. And I still get dejected two years into this journey where I see nobody is coming to my live cast, but who the hell cares?
So I just reach out to anybody, find at least two or three people, And then go from there. And then I asked them too, like, okay, if you like this and you're getting some value out of this, do you know somebody else who might. Could you bring them on?
Guest 13: Yep. I have a comment a little Bit different. I haven't done a membership yet, but in my course I had Weekly Q&As and sometimes people don't have the time to come to a Q and A and they want to watch the recording. So having a. I had one live Q and A with no one there, but I knew people might watch the recording. So I had followed what I saw in my friend's class that she did and every Q and A she had.
I don't know if that's the nature of what you might be. You probably have a presentation, but if you don't. In the Q and A, I did a presentation. So I had added value in my Q and A every week, like about a half an hour of a presentation and I had it ready to go and then if people showed up and we had questions, I didn't really use it.
But if they didn't or I had time to fill, I went over the presentation and I recorded it and then they could watch it later. And I got feedback from people that watched the replay saying that that was really valuable to them because it added even more content to my course. So, you know, the fear of no one showing up and then having nothing to talk about it was mitigated by having that presentation ready to go.
That's a great tip. Thank
Melissa (2): you. Yep. I know your other question was like, how much content do you need to preload into the membership to have that? Does anyone have anything that you'd like to add with that?
Michael (2): I started with nothing, absolutely goose egg on my first one. And I told them that I started with just one thing per month. And then after six months I actually ended up having time to be able to do a little bit more.
I got some ideas and hanging out in this, this group, I'm like, oh, I can do this little thing, I can do that little thing. Honestly, they love like a half page worksheet or something. Or something. Or like a three line tip on, on stuff. They ate that up. They thought that was fabulous and they just liked getting together to talk. I found that too. honestly, you don't have to start with very much of anything.
In fact, right now I've got a big library and some of my, my biggest members tell me that the library is too big now. They don't know where to go find stuff. so now I'm thinking, oh my gosh, now I've got too much and how do I organize it and all of that. So you can absolutely start with nothing, don't fill. They'll stay with you you're doing something that's valuable, even if it's just a little bit.
At least that's been my experience.
Paul: seven, eight years ago when we started our inner circle coaching program membership. It, we sunsetted it. Now we, we reinvented as our, our higher end mastermind that we have. it was several hundred dollars a month that people paid in advance. We didn't have a sales page, we just had a Cart page on ThriveCart at the time and we had a promise that there was one call per week and there was no other core content or anything.
The, the value proposition was getting on those live calls every week. Since then over eight years it evolved into us having 13 coaches doing over 51 hours of calls a month, having like five copywriters, two digital marketers, blah blah blah blah blah, all the way down. Plus all of our course deliverables and everything else that's evolved into our adaptive marketing program. We've made a lot of changes over the years.
So somebody comes in today it's different than on day one and day one that offer was again no sales page. It was just a promise. each week we just gave a different name to the Zoom call. It really was a one hour Zoom call. That's really what it was. But it's just like we just gave it a different name, you know so it had like a different value proposition to like the purpose of what the call was.
But we started with zero, zero content. And coming back to your first thing also we're, we're all about priming the engine and you know a lot of people don't know. Part of my story is I was a co owner of a nightclub years ago so that was one of my million dollar year businesses that I owned that I took from the ground up.
And we always made sure like everybody that paid cover charge after 10 o' clock, you know, if they walked into an empty room they would turn right back around, ask for the 10 bucks back to leave. So we created incentives against certain groups of people purposely in the room to pre. So it was like different drink specials, different you know, incentives, zero cover charge. Other pre event, you know, if you had a birthday party that night, like we were going to like buy the birthday person their drinks or whatever, like whatever we could do to get a block of people in the room.
So Then when the first person that paid the 10 bucks to come in the door, when they came in, they're like, oh, okay, this is the place to be tonight. Because there's a bunch of people already here. So all of us should look at different ways. Our first membership we did in photographer space nine years ago.
We went all to our past clients and the people that bought courses from us, and we gave them a special opportunity offer to come into our membership. So if you have past clients and customers or anything that you sold, if you're still in that same niche, you can go to them and give them a unique offer that is not a public offer. And they're kind of like you're priming the engine type people.
So they're the people that are in the room before you make. You start making your public offer. It's easier to get them to say yes. And for us, we. We started our first membership. we had well over 100 people that came into our members because we sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of courses. And we created such a ridiculous offer.
It was like 97 a year or something like that for. At the time for people to come into this photography membership we created. And we just went to all the people that bought courses from us, you know, over the years. And enough of them took us up on that deal because the moment we went public, it was like three times the amount of money. But it gave us a nice group of people to To begin with.
Yeah. You don't need a lot to get started.
Paul: Thank you.