How To Build Recurring Revenue Using Memberships with Mike Morrison (The Membership Guys) (Ep. 215)

hey everyone welcome to the authority hacker podcast today i'm pleased to welcome mike morrison to the show mike is one half of the membership guys a membership site about membership sites they have over 3000 members run a large blog have a podcast and i believe they're on youtube as well uh prior to that mike did freelance agency work for clients often in the membership site space as well and last year they ran their first conference retain live which i went to here in the uk and i have to say it was by far the best run conference i've ever been to they literally had an ice cream truck in the middle of the lobby during the break so welcome to the show mike thanks for having me on that that's an awesome reduction can we take notes and give them to any other podcast i go on because you've like really picked me up now i like to do my research so yeah today we're going to talk obviously about membership sites can you give us a few examples of successful membership sites to give give us an idea of what kind of topics work well with with a membership site yeah i mean um technically sites like netflix and stuff like that are memberships but in the online space that's not what we think of when we think of memberships i would say that the most successful ones are sites like masterclass.com which is just a phenomenally successful membership website uh where all the content is is created by celebrities and kind of the the biggest names in any given field of kind of creative arts music and stuff like that um you have lynda.com which was brought out by linkedin again that's kind of an e-learning type membership site um and kind of getting sort of smaller but still really successful you've got a lot of great sites in the music industry like scottsbasslessons.com which has got about 30 000 base guitarists as uh as their member base drumeo.com which is a phenomenally successful drumming membership you have um fitness memberships like joe wicks and people like that have their membership programs and yeah the crafting space the art space um the education space as well there's a couple of great memberships that are part of our community there's jordy clark from empowered educators she has a membership kind of catering towards early learning um you've got teaching pacs which has got tens of thousands of members again they literally provide pre-made packs of educational materials for teachers pretty much anything where there's some sort of knowledge transfer or where someone would need support and community and accountability and access to an influencer or an expert pretty much any field in which you have that you will find memberships and you will find memberships that are doing very well so if i have an idea for a membership site how do i know how do i validate that how do i tell if that's going to going to work as a membership a membership site you need in addition to an idea you need an audience um and what people tend to do is they skip validating the idea and they skip building the audience and then they wonder why their membership never takes off if you've already got an audience of following people on your email list people in a facebook group people have taken a micro commitment to to getting more from you then that's really the place you start when it comes to validating your idea so you want to be surveying and having conversations with people in your audience to firstly validate that they have the problems that you think they have so they have the the challenges they have the pain points that you think they have secondly to validate that the solution you're thinking of in terms of your membership and what what what the purpose of that membership will be and what sort of content and features and support you'll provide so you want to validate that that solution actually fits up with that problem but then you also want to validate whether the the connection of the two is so compelling that people will put their hand in their pocket and pay you money to solve those problems because you can have people who whose problems are just minor annoyances and they'll read blogs and they'll watch videos on youtube to solve them but they're not such big pain points that they'll they'll spend money right so you need to validate that and the easiest way to validate whether someone will spend money is to try and get them to spend money so to sell them something before you create your membership now that could be kind of an mvp version of your membership like a watered-down barest possible set of features and content version of your membership or the the approach that i always like is actually selling a one-off webinar so in most cases memberships will feature like live training or they'll feature courses they'll feature educational premium content and so selling a one-off webinar for around the price that you would probably be looking to charge monthly is a great way to validate the existence of a problem the appeal of a solution and the likelihood that someone will pay the sort of price point you're thinking of charging for your membership in order to connect the dots between problem and solution so those paid webinars i think it's the easiest way to validate because it's just a one-time thing you don't have to you don't have to go all in on a business model of creating paid webinars in order to do a one-time test as a means of validating a membership idea and would you suggest doing that like as a live webinar or pre-recorded i'll do it as a live webinar and you know if you're thinking of having a high-end membership so most memberships generally the price point depending on whether it's b to b b to c is it's gonna fall between about 20 to 60 bucks a month in most cases b2c usually it's it's lower b2b usually you charge a bit more but if you all think so if you're in that kind of price point 50 bucks for a one-off um webinar do it live because again it reduces how much work you need to put in because yes you still need to prepare the material but you'll know when when you deliver something live versus pre-recording it and editing it you get too perfectionist when it comes to like pre-making content versus doing it live where you can't be a perfectionist right you kind of you you just go with the flow a little more so there's a little less overhead involved um i i would say if you're looking at setting up a higher end membership where you're over the 100 a month mark then maybe you do a series of webinars so you do a three-part masterclass series that is delivered live over the space of two weeks and you space these webinars out um but still do them live as opposed to creating them as a as a course because the great thing is once you've done them and you've got them recorded then you can edit them then you can polish them then you chop them up into a course that you could either decide to sell separately or you then put into your membership later on once um you're ready to go so it sounds like with that approach you kind of hit a fork in the road where you can go with the membership option or you can go with the info product course option um why would why should someone go with a membership at that at that point memberships are awesome that's not enough of an answer i just i love memberships you know you don't call your business the membership guys running membership on memberships write books on memberships podcasts unless you love memberships i just love the model for so many reasons one it's generally more affordable and accessible to a higher proportion of your audience so a membership will typically enable you to serve more people secondly um there's more flexibility when you're selling a course you are selling a finished article right you you create the best course you can possibly create you try to get everything you can possibly get about a subject into that course and then you take this finished product out into the world and sell it with a membership it's never finished your you'll see your membership will always be changing and adapting and evolving you don't have to have all of the content you'll ever have on the topic inside your membership from day one and people understand when they're joining a membership that they're going to be getting something regularly there's going to be more stuff added to it um as opposed to buying a finished product where they're going to look at it and say okay well this doesn't take all the boxes this doesn't have as much as i would i would have thought so here that makes it a little easier to sell a little easier to market but b it reduces the the pressure on you to get it right because it's not all or nothing it's not do or die and if you get something wrong in your membership it's okay you can correct it you would just course and you do better next time if you release a workshop one month in your membership that you think is going to be insanely popular but actually no one gives gives two hoots about then you haven't totally wasted all of your time going all in on this standalone thing you just learn that lesson incorporate that into your strategy going forward and that applies to marketing you know how many stories you hear of people who spend months slaving over a course and trying to get their loan strategy right and then they launch and it just flops and they've they're screwed because they haven't been earning anything for the last three months while they've been preparing for this launch and everything rested on this launch being successful and they don't have the breathing room they don't have the the cliff to walk back on if things don't work out how they project that they might so memberships for me give you all of that plus i haven't even got on to the recurring revenue aspect which is the thing that attracts most people to memberships in the first place recurring revenue isn't as sexy as that one-time big cash injection that you'll get from a from a course launch but when you go launch to launch you you go through this feast and farming cycle that's similar to to working with clients one-on-one right if you have a bad launch that can mess up your entire year if you have a bad a bad month in your membership you've still got this compounded revenue that's built up over time from your previous months right and so you have more stability you have more predictability you have more reliability in your income and your business isn't the one that is is built on two or three dual dial course launches every single year yeah so it sounds like there's a lot more risk in uh big high ticket course launches which i can certainly attest attest to it sounds like with membership sites it's more predictable more stable more forgiving maybe um do you think all things being equal a membership site will make more money than the same site if it positions itself as a course yeah potentially i mean the the earning potential i don't think um is higher for one versus the other if you have an amazing course and you line up the right affiliates and um you genuinely help people get results and all that sort of stuff then you're going to do well from it if you have a membership that does the same thing you'll you'll learn a lot of money from that it's just the time to reach the lifetime value of each customer is a is is over a longer period with the membership versus of course this is it's always interesting when people talk about memberships and courses or maybe they've tried a membership and they've kind of maybe they've not nailed down their retention strategy and so they've come away and there's a well-known marketer who i remember reading an article where basically he said i'm moving away from memberships because i find it pointless attracting customers who are only going to stay for 10 months i might as well just sell a course right but that's such a bizarre mindset because the only number in all of this really that matters is is lifetime value if you're selling a thousand dollar course then your lifetime value of that customer is one thousand dollars and the time to maturity for that lifetime value is one day if you're selling a hundred dollar a month membership and someone stays for ten months then the lifetime value of that customer is a thousand dollars it's the same it's just the time to maturity is 10 months versus one day and so not only does that little extra bit of time give you more space to kind of move the knobs and pull the levers to potentially increase the customer lifetime value and extend the amount of time that they remain a customer but also by breaking down the i suppose you can say the installments that someone pays towards that lifetime value you make your product more accessible to more people so yeah recurring revenue is great and you talk about this business model about business model but end of the day it comes down to customer lifetime a customer lifetime value you can have uh not advocating having terrible churn but you know if you if you've got a 50 a month membership and your churn rate is rubbish so people leave after three months so you're only making 150 dollars per customer then switching to selling a course for 100 isn't a better a better option but i see people doing that because they get too wrapped up in well this business model will make me more successful this business model will make more successful when you actually zoom out and look at the the numbers that matter then um it's a different picture i think there's maybe an element of the grass is always greener on the other other side yeah i know as someone who sells courses like looking at this recurring revenue from memberships it always seems like really attractive uh but i'm i'm sure the the other is the flip side of that is is also true uh you mentioned you mentioned previously about the type of content in membership so you mentioned about having courses i think workshops webinars what is typically inside a a typical membership that you got you guys see it it depends it is usually e-learning content so um courses typically shorter courses than you'll see people charging a thousand dollars two thousand dollars for so they'll usually be um narrower in scope and shorter in length so for example with our own membership our courses are generally about two hours um but they're they're more specific than if we were to go out and just do one grand unifying course on can you give a few examples of the courses in your membership yeah we've got a course on facebook remarketing strategies for memberships which that might be a module in a in a larger course if we were the course model rather than membership model um we have courses on um managing your membership site so the actual day-to-day management processes the logistical side of um kind of creating and putting out content or sops and stuff like that um and then we've got a whole bunch of like the technical walkthrough courses as well which again 90 minutes or two hours of us literally doing a screencast click by click this is how you set up this membership plugin um so in in terms of the scope and the specificity having the membership if you're putting courses into it will be more along those kind of lines um workshops which are generally often live webinars some people pre-record them because they're just they're just not comfortable going live where you're looking at anywhere from 45 minutes to 90 minutes single topic um essentially kind of covering the same grounds you might do in the course but maybe it doesn't require that course type structure of breaking things down into separate lessons and so on um you'll often get things like um worksheets cheat sheets quick reference guides um anything like that which is kind of going to make people's lives easier and help them solve their problems so that type of of e-learning content um again it's going to differ depending on on topic we've got people in our community with memberships on um choreography so they've got memphis for choreography teachers so their content they've got a huge library of 10 minute long videos so it's all kind of videos that are just short exercises as opposed to one big course or anything like that um so that's kind of the content side we always talk about the three c's current end coaching community so the content's always generally always e-learning um courses workshops and also things like live q as and stuff like that the community side typically um will be either a facebook group or an on-site forum i prefer the latter because i'm old school i i came up on online forums um in the 90s so i still prefer the forum discussion format over a facebook group for a whole bunch of reasons that are probably too boring to to go too far into right now we've had we've had this debate as well stuff in our community we use facebook groups uh not because they're better to use just because more people use them well this is a thing it that is true to an extent although the last couple of years we've seen more more of an anti-facebook um trend so you i certainly now compared to even five years ago when we started our academy and started our facebook group which is our free facebook group as part of our funnel um certainly now there's a lot more people who just flat out refuse to use facebook which is always a a consideration but while there are more people generally who are going to be logging onto facebook on a day-to-day basis your group is then competing with cat pictures looking at checking in to see whether your ex-girlfriend has gotten fat or not um you know like it's competing with rubbish and i swore it's competing with rubbish and so you also have to consider signal versus noise engagement is is like all engagement is not created equal you'll get a lot more noise and we know this we've got a free facebook group with 15 000 people in there and we put a lot of effort into making sure that it's not rubbish like a lot of other large facebook groups can be there's no spamming there's no self-promotion but i can i can predict with with almost pinpoint accuracy the same 20 questions that will get asked every week because facebook's don't facebook groups don't really have any any legacy value they don't have a good memory it's all real time um and that's okay for a free group but i think in a paid group it wears thin i remember being in ryan leves um that won the earliest versions of his membership man 2013 2014 and he had a facebook group and i think at one point he had about 15 to 20 000 people in there and it was just like being blasted in the face with a fire hose anytime you went in there it was just so hectic so busy and this was his paid group and that just wasn't an experience i wanted to replicate but it does depend on your topic it depends on what the point of your group is if it's somewhere if you just want to give people a place to chat and connect then yes a facebook group is is probably going to be better if you're going to have something where actually you want kind of more serious in-depth discussions or when maybe someone might ask a question today and you want to be able to pull up a related discussion from two or three years ago that is still relevant forums make that so much easier than something what what tech do you use for your forum actually um yeah yeah we use envision community otherwise known as it used to be known as ip board it's the best um forum software there is like um second place is a one called zenforo with an x um but after that there's a big big gap between um that software and other forum solutions on the market envision communities is just awesome it's kind of got the the best stuff from a community layout but also a lot of the social media type features like liking and followers and profiles and user tagging which is is a very important feature to have so yeah envision community hands down best forum software is out there and since you're operating in a membership on a retention model i guess the community plays a much bigger asp is much more important in getting people to to keep getting people retained i guess because that you know maybe they go through your content but are they really paying for your content after that or is that more like they're buying the content at the start they stay for the community that that's kind of it um there's there's uh a lady who's like one of the the biggest experts in kind of community dynamics and she was the one who coined the term people come for the content and stay for the community a lady by the name of vanessa demaro um and that's true for memberships they'll come for the continent they stay for the community now that doesn't mean that they'll watch your courses for a couple of weeks and then afterwards your content is meaningless because they'll still consume content but that's often not the main driver once someone has solved their immediate problems um or even you know kind of reached the outcome that they were looking for during their time in your membership if they've been in your community they'll be creating connections building relationships and and getting so many other benefits in terms of accountability and support and camaraderie that you just can't you can't give them in a course right it's it's it's the stuff that's kind of going to kind of maslow's hierarchy of needs and kind of where we're kind of belonging and and kind of safety and and stuff comes into that your community takes a lot of those boxes and when i talked before about the three cs content coaching community the the coaching element is is often something that the community takes the box for as well because if you're running a membership where you're the expert you're the figurehead you're the influencer when people join they're gonna have an expectation that you'll be inside the community too and that you'll be weighing in on their discussions and giving your insight and advice so in that way you kind of get to provide a little bit of that coaching element as well um which again is is another reason to be in your community rather than just in jaw blogs random facebook group if they know that that's where you're hanging out too do you think it takes a certain type of person to to run a membership sort of continuously to be involved to to interact with with people like that does it tend to be more extroverts or introverts or is there a profile here i don't think so we've got all shapes and sizes of personalities and um and experiences and backgrounds and cultures i think you have to find something that that fits what you want to do day to day um i don't think extrovert introvert is a factor myself and kelly are huge huge introverts but we also have raging extroverts who are running successful memberships as well i think it's more about the answer to the question of in five years time your job 100 of your job is talking to people about memberships is answering questions about memberships a lot of the time the same questions have been asked before it's creating content just about memberships it's answering customer support queries about memberships how does that sound some people boom not for me i don't like the idea of doing that is the most boring thing that i can imagine for some people that sounds like heaven that sounds like their perfect job to just be able day in day out to eat sleep live and breathe this singular topic and serve this singular community if the idea of being that person doing that needing to show up and serve on a day-to-day basis if that puts you off if that terrifies you if you get bored easily if you if you want to be you know finger in all different kind of paths you don't want to be in a particular niche or anything like that you don't like getting locked down memberships aren't for you memberships are a long-term commitment for you and for your members so if they're not something you get into lightly they're not something that you get into because they're the flavor of the month or because your business coach told you or some guy with a strange northern accent on a podcast made them sound awesome like you've got to know what you're getting into you've got to love the idea of this being your world um and it's not a bad thing if you don't but if you don't don't get into memberships because um it's not something you just you know pack up your shop and go home after six months because you're bored because the whole idea of membership is you want people to stick with you for months and years to come but if you're not in it for the long haul then you're probably not going to attract the right people anyway and even if you do then you're screwing them over if you kind of leave them in the lurch a few months in because does that happen a lot then it doesn't like it doesn't happen it doesn't happen as as much and i like to think that we have a part and that because i spend more time talking people out of starting memberships than i do talking them into them because they're not easy and they're partic they can be real difficult at the beginning it's kind of you've got to push that boulder before it builds up momentum and you know financially we talk about recurring revenue recurring revenue compounds over time but that does mean that for the first three to six months you're probably not going to be making enough money right so they are difficult in that initial uh initial period um and i think we we do quite a good job of of kind of putting the putting the reality of memberships out there unfortunately there's one or two others in the space and where we're blessed to be kind of in a in a in a space where there's not there's not really that many big players with pedigree there's there's only one or two of us in the space others in the space paint a quite a cheery aspirational picture of memberships and they kind of gloss over the work and they you know they talk about you know how amazing will it be when you're making more money than you've ever made you're working less than you'll you've ever worked and your life has just changed and you're having so much impact in the world so well yeah but the reality is it's work business grind it's a grind like and actually no i'm gonna i'm not gonna say grind it can be a grind but it's just a business it's a business it's like any business it takes work it takes time it takes effort yes the the work you do is better leveraged you know you're not training time for money um the the stuff you create everything you add to your membership adds value to it versus if you're working with clients you do the work that works gone you get paid once with a membership you do the work you get paid over and over again so it's a different kind of work the output of those inputs is is different and yes like right now we make more in in a month probably more in a couple of weeks than than we ever did in a salary job um and we work less than we ever had but we're five years in and you know it's it's the whole thing of the overnight success that takes 10 years to get to yeah um you know so we we got a great lens and make sure people understand this isn't a gimmick it's not a get rich quick it's not a flash in the pan it's not what it's not with these people with the cheesy aspirational videos of people running up a hill and you can do it and all it takes is the right idea like it's it's work right like anything you've got to work at it um and it's it's it's a business you've got to approach it as a business run it as a business but if if you love what you do and if the answer the question that we talked about before whether the idea of just having this this thing be your world excites you then it can it can be the the most rewarding um most profitable most enjoyable work that you'll ever do let's talk about some of those business aspects then because you mentioned churn you mentioned retention rate lifetime value what are some of the tactics you use to to influence those those metrics yeah i mean churn and retention churn it's it's crucial like memberships are a retention business it starts day one minute one like the second someone joins your membership site the clock is ticking so the most important thing for retention is new member onboarding so the the experience someone has when they first join your site what they see on the thank you page once you've taken their money um what they get in their inbox over their first few weeks so we we always kind of advise at the bare minimum there's four parts to to remember onboarding that everyone needs to have you need to have a warm welcome on a thank you page usually that's a welcome video from you from your team that kind of just immediately gets rid of any potential for buyer's remorse because you'll know and it's anytime you buy something online there's always that little window immediately after where you get those little niggling doubts running through your brain about whether you've made the right call should you wait it are you going to get what you paid for so you need to squash those right away and usually a friendly warm welcome video that thanks someone for joining let them know they're in the right place let them know that they belong and point them to what happens next that's the first thing everything needs second you need some form of orientation you need to you need to induct people into your site and show them around show them where everything is that can again it can be a video or there are interactive um tools these days that'll actually take you click by click through a website and show you where the courses are where the community is what to do if you have a problem how to manage your account the less time someone has to spend trying to figure all this stuff out and trying to orient orientate themselves the more time or the more likely it is that they're actually going to get stuck into using your site because if someone doesn't actually use your site and start getting results they're not going to use it for very long and if their initial experiences of your site are frustrating ones because they can't quite figure out where they're meant to go then that's going to sour their impression of your membership throughout the probably very short time that they'll they'll remain remember so you need that orientation as a second step third thing you need is a set of actions that you need that you want them to take first so break down the the ideal steps that you would if you could control every member if it would be sat next to them what would be the first four or five things you would have everyone do in order to get them into the habits that are conducive to them staying long-term so that might be setting up their profile on your site it might be introducing themselves in your community again we talk about community being so important if you get people to make that first step and get off that hurdle of actually posting then again that is conducive to them remaining a member it might be getting them to consume kind of a foundation course maybe a short course that every new member should take so what those first steps should be will depend it'll be different for every sort of site we need to look at what are the habits you want people to get into and what actions should they take on day one that make it more likely that will do that so boil down four or five of those steps and present them as an activity for people to complete so that might be a checklist a downloadable pdf it might be a a new member course that you have everyone watch give it as an activity that they need to complete and then from there you need kind of a follow-up series uh follow-up email series as well so a new member autoresponder series where you're checking in with them via email throughout their first couple of weeks you're opening that dialogue you're pointing them towards maybe features or sections of your membership that they might not be aware of um you're just jim just making sure everything's okay giving them little bonus tips on how to get the most out of your site or maybe an unexpected piece of bonus content like everyone likes getting a little extra freebie right if you deliver to them something they weren't expecting and it's a value then again that's going to go a long way towards um forming those positive first impressions and then as you get towards the end of that initial we also the initial billing period the initial commitment period so the end of their two-week trial or the end of their first month so you're coming to that point where they're going to make that initial decision should i stay should i go then the emails that you're sending to them in your follow-up series they need to start talking a bit more about what's coming up so you need to start future pacing um the the communication so telling them what courses are in the pipeline telling them which experts are coming in next month giving them a link to book on to next month's live member q a that creates a little bit of fear of disconnect a little bit of pain of disconnect because without that without talking about what's coming up someone's initial decision on whether they want to stay or go is going to be entirely about what they've had so far but if you start signposting the future value of your membership that decision then also needs to consider what they'll miss out on if they leave and that can be the difference maker if someone's on the fence of whether to stick around so for you for retention that onboarding pieces is so so critical what i've talked about there's the bare minimum every membership should have those four elements the the warm welcome so usually a welcome video um the orientation the first action steps and the the follow-up email series and then you build on that so hours now um for membership academy is a lot more sophisticated so we include a new member a dynamic new member questionnaire that essentially is a recommendation engine on where they should start out we send personal welcome videos so you build on that to make sure that those first 30 60 90 days are positive ones that initial experience is a memorable one that stands out um and also more importantly gets them into the habits that are conducive to people staying long-term consuming content posting in your community getting results sharing those results uh all those kind of things make them more likely someone will stick around so would you say that when you start a membership you can't have to wait for a period of time to judge whether it's successful or not because of those retention metrics being what sounds like the key to determining whether successful or not yeah definitely um you know it's it it's kind of that frustrating thing churn is a lagging indicator so if you if if you start a membership and then six months in you realize that you have a shocking churn rate and people are leaving after three or four months then the cause of that churn is something that probably started the problem start the three or four months prior so that lagging indicator does kind of present a little bit of a chicken and egg situation the truth is though in more in in all but the most extreme cases you're not going to have um such horrendous churn that it can't kind of be fixed um you know broadly speaking on average uh when people talk memberships you often hear that the myth that people leave on average after three months that's nonsense the average is closer about nine to ten months um and uh it's very very rare that you'll see a situation where someone um wouldn't be able to reasonably expect that their retention rate would be around that ballpark uh but even even if you're hitting 910 months on average there's still a lot of room for improvement so um unless and this is why we're going back to what we talked about the beginning validating your idea if you validate your idea if you have um marketed your membership the right way so you haven't made it out to be something it isn't you haven't over promised an underdelivered um you haven't used over-the-top false scarcity tactics to pressure people into joining before they're ready like if you've done i don't even want to say if you've done things right but if you've if you've avoided doing things that are just so clearly wrong then um you'll extremely rarely find a situation where you you're going to get two months in and you've all your members are just disappearing and of course you're going to be marketing your membership on an ongoing basis as well so the idea is always to be bringing in more new members then you you lose but at the same time you want to be bringing down the the number of members who are leaving as well so you guys have done a number of surveys of your your members who have membership sites and industry surveys um what's the website people can go check them out i was going to say i was i was hoping you weren't going to ask me for stats there because you'll really be testing my memory i'm pushing 40 now yeah if they go to membershipbenchmarks.com then that will redirect them to a page where they can download last year's industry report there's no email opt-in there's none of that where we're purely just interested in getting the numbers out there and increasing the understanding of this this market because we see people beating themselves up because they've got seven percent churn in their membership and they think they're doing something terribly wrong um and that that comes from just a lack of understanding of of how online memberships perform because actually seven percent churn you're doing a lot of things right um so yes it's membershipbenchmarks.com download that for free and uh yeah there's a lot of a lot of real interesting stuff in there um a lot of stuff that kind of took us a little by surprise a few things but also a lot that kind of added credence to the stuff we've been saying all along to so it's um yeah some really good facts and figures there you guys should uh should check it out for sure um let's talk now about tech setup uh so it's my understanding that there's basically two approaches to this there's the the kind of all-in-one done-for-you tool uh and then there's this of self-hosted wordpress with a bunch of plugins meshed together uh approach um is that correct which which is best yeah the the third way is completely custom which um is very expensive and you want to be sure that what gets built is um is going to sustain your needs for a long long time because we've seen people spend six figures on a membership and then a year later decide that they want a whole bunch of new features and that costs them another six figures so um yeah that's the third way we usually don't touch that one because um yeah it can get very expensive but yeah broadly speaking to the average person you're either going to go with an all-in-one um what we call a hosted platform like kajabi or simplero um or 10x pro cartra these are its software as a service where they have a set amount of features and you pay them a monthly fee and you don't need to install anything you don't need to worry about anything you just bring your content send your your traffic and hopefully they join um they're good i mean you know platforms like kajabi is great simplero is is fantastic to play role simpleros a little more geared towards memberships than kajabi is kajabi's sways a little more towards courses um but they're both both solid platforms what you get in um the the alleviation of tech headaches you have to balance out with a loss of control and flexibility so you need to understand when you use something like one of those platforms that you don't decide what features your website is going to have the feature set the look the feel is all controlled and you if you decide you want to add gamification so you want to add badges and stuff and the platform you've chosen doesn't have it you can't just send a quick mess and say could you do me a favor could you add this feature in because not even nine times out of ten like 999 thousand times like they're going to say no because any sort of changes to that platform they need to consider the thousands of other people running sites on that platform whereas if you're going down the self build route which generally means wordpress wordpress is the most popular content management system in the world so it generally means wordpress with a membership plugin usually a learning management system plugin like liftor lms or learndash if you want community that's another piece of software if you want gamification that's another piece so you have a lot more flexibility because it's a lot more modular if you don't want gamification you don't have the gamification plug-in installed if you don't want a community you don't install that plug-in if you're not having courses you don't need to have a plugin installed for that so it's a lot more modular you've got a lot more control but with that means a lot more moving parts um if you're setting up yourself rather than having the developer doing there for you then it requires you to be a little more a lot more tech savvy but what you get in exchange for that is control security in terms of knowing that um some third party's not going to decide actually you know what we don't want to run this service anymore or we don't have this feature anymore so as of this increase their price yeah yeah i mean um there was a platform called rainmaker from the guys a copyblogger i love those guys copy blogger were great one of the first uh one of the earlier kind of online business online marketing um blogs there was but they had this platform called rainmaker which was a a hosted membership platform and um it wasn't a cheap one either and they just decided after a couple of years that they just didn't want to do any more and so if you had if you built your membership you built your business on their rented land then you were screwed you had like a few months to to like just go away um and they another company since bought it and then brought it back several years later but like it's just been a non-starter because the trust is gone but anyway so there's always that risk when you're building on someone else's land it's called digital sharecropping that someone's just going to pull the rug out from under you whereas if you're self-building with wordpress or what have you you've got control the database you've got access to the files you can move to a different host if your current one is is letting you down you can hire a developer to bring something in to add something custom to fix something that's broken whereas you know if if you're using kajabi and kajabi has a bug you've got to wait until they fix it you can't just call up your developer friend and say hey i'll give you a few hundred bucks if you go in and fix that for me now because it's causing me problems in my business so there's tru there's there's trade-offs and the trade-offs are usually control versus ease and speed of execution um security versus playing by someone else's rules and yeah it's it's i always lean towards self build with wordpress and and plugins just because i'm not a fan of building on someone else's land i've seen too many too many instances where it's gone wrong but if you have the resources to get a developer to do it for you go down that route if you can simply because you know i'll see people spending like a week trying to figure out this little problem on their website and they have no chance of figuring it out because like it's it's too advanced for them um whereas if they paid you know 40 bucks to a service like wpfixit.com they would have gone in there and got it sorted within five minutes but that week of someone whose time was better spent elsewhere like if they if they just paid the money to get someone who knows what they're doing to sort out then how much better could they have used that time that they're trying to uh figure it out so yeah anyway is there any kind of exit plan for memberships i mean can do people sell their membership sites it seems a type of business model that's quite dependent on the the owner in a way death that's that's an extra plan death um no that's um i need to i need to kind of stop saying that it's a little too flippant we've actually had members kind of say what's your extra plan like death are we gone won't matter no um you do have people selling their memberships we've um one of our members actually has literally just come the end of a quite a lengthy process of selling her membership um it's it's a cake decorating membership but that one that's like a seven-figure membership and she sold um she was originally it was a competitor of hers who um wanted to buy her out um and that fell through because he by all accounts was a bit of a dick um and just kept moving the goal posts but from that she um she hadn't had the intention to sell but that actually moved her to a place where she decided that's what she wanted to do and she found someone else who's bought it and now has taken it over um the fact that when you've created content that content is then it's done it's added to an archive it's it it'll hold as much value to someone today as it might have done three years ago when you first released it that that kind of does make a content-based membership probably a little easier to sell because even if you're gone the the outputs of what you did in your time here are still there um the big difference is obviously you're not then going to be in the membership anymore so it's there's a lot more to take care of if you do want to sell a membership in terms of communication and kind of expectation shaping with your community sometimes we see some people they they'll either sell a membership or take on a partner and there's an arrangement for kind of an overlap period where you essentially the the founder remains kind of almost employed or obligated for a certain period of time to kind of have the transition from them being the figurehead to someone else being the figurehead but i would i they're harder to sell in terms of delivery the more the more the membership is centered around you and your presence and not not every membership is like that so i would say it's easier to sell if you knew that that was the exit play going in if you know that that's the extra player going in factor for it don't don't rest too much of your value proposition on your own shoulders if you want to make a feature of your membership access to an expert on this topic consider having two or three other people or guest experts that you you bring in you pay to create content so again it's not it's not about i'm joined this membership to get access to to mike and it's it's the mike morrison membership and then if i disappear well why the hell am i still a member um so factor factor that in and and have a thought about is this something you would want to exit or is this something where you are actually creating it essentially as a lifestyle business as a business where you will be happy for years on end creating content serving this community um if you don't if if you don't want to do that or if you want to make sure that the score for you to sell then you would definitely want to design your value proposition to to better facilitate you not being uh in the mix and and cynthia save your branding and stuff like that one of our one of our old clients one of the most successful past clients um guy called scott devine's got scottsbasslessons.com um we've had this conversation so many times about about his name in in the title of uh of of the membership at scottsbasslessons.com so if scott wasn't there anymore then that's that's obviously going to affect the value proposition now his membership does have a faculty of um of educators and teachers who create courses and do workshops but his name is still on the marquee and it can be that can't hamper uh an exit although that said you know you got tony robbins like how much of tony robbins output and product actually has tony robbins like in the mix so you can you can't balance it but it can be a little tricky uh okay thanks this has been really really interesting actually i feel like i really learned a lot um doing this interview uh is there anything that i haven't asked you that i should have asked you oh man this is not literally only the second time i've been asked this question on a podcast and i was as stumped then as i am now um no you know what i think we've covered i think we've covered enough for anyone who's listening who is considering going into the membership world i think any anything else is going to distract from the important things of a understanding what type of business model this is it's a retention business model and it's one way you've got to be in it for the long run so you need to know that before you go in because that'll affect um the the likelihood of whether this is the right model for you and the stuff about make sure you build a following making sure you've built an audience and validated your idea i think they're the most important things for people who are making that decision going in i'm so glad we've not talked about sales or marketing so so glad because that's the stuff that actually is much further down the list um than than all the things we've already talked about but unfortunately it's the thing that people usually focus on the most like how do i get new members how do you sell anything how do you market anything um so yeah i think we've i think we've covered the right stuff we've done a good job okay so mike's website is the membershipguys.com are there any particularly interesting blog posts piece of content lead magnets videos you guys have on your website that you think people listening to this show should go and check out yeah so if you've got the website you'll be able to kind of filter down some of the hand-picked content according to where you are on your journey um i would say download our membership roadmap which is kind of our sort of almost high-end um overview of all the steps you need to take to get a membership up and running and running well um that will give you it will give you enough to kind of work with to to get far enough into this um to start making some progress so yeah all that's on the homepage and um also if i may one of the best places to be is our free facebook group uh we've got about i think we're closing in on 16 000 uh people in that group now um membership site owners myself cali the team people from our paid membership they're still in the facebook group and you can reach that by going to talkmemberships.com i love these uh dot com redirects got it gotta be done man it's gotta be dirty honestly i'm totally stealing this idea i stole it i've gotta give credit i stole it from jill stanton from um screw the nine to five um she gave me that time oh we we had uh um her husband yeah josh yeah years ago jill gave me that tip back in like 2015 2016 and that was very much same with you i'm stealing that i'm taking that we do that for all them so our podcast is membershippodcast.com uh the facebook group talkmemberships.com um yeah it's you've gotta be when you're doing podcasts when you're doing video um you've gotta have a good verbal call to action that's memorable uh versus me saying go to facebook.com groups slash i don't even know what it is now um yeah that was uh i'd love to take credit for it but that was that was jill if you are driving to work in your car listening to this we will put all of those links on the show notes for this episode so you can always find them later uh thank you mike very much for coming on the show great great to have you on here yeah my absolute pleasure thanks for having me on thanks for being a great uh podcast host and uh yeah maybe we can do this again further down the road well i'm sure you'll think of some more questions uh sure sounds good uh thanks to everyone for listening or watching if you're watching on youtube if you enjoyed this don't forget to give us a thumbs up like subscribe all that fun stuff we'll be back next monday with another episode see you then [Music] [Music] you