Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig, hello,
Speaker 1 00:00:19 Come back to another episode of the rogue startups podcast. And this episode I'm joined by ward Sandler co founder of member space. Remember space is a really interesting tool and the kind of membership site and community building a world online and ward in this interview, you'll hear that he and women member space have experienced really kind of hockey stick hypergrowth here in the last really this year, I guess, or in the last 12 months. And COVID has positively impacted the growth of their business and this interview, uh, ward and I chat through a lot of, kind of how they work. It's something that I'm more and more fascinated by is how other successful entrepreneurs and businesses run their business. I think that in some respects that could be what defines and separates us from some of our competition is, is how we work, how we're organized, how we communicate and how we're all aligned towards the same goals and warden.
Speaker 1 00:01:12 I'd jump into a lot of the really nitty gritty details of how he works specifically and how the different groups inside member space work. We wrap up by talking through a little bit of kind of what he sees from the front lines of, of membership sites and online communities and the value that those provide for businesses of all sorts. So there's a really interesting and wide ranging discussion. I hope you enjoy this chat with ward Sandler from member space ward. Welcome to the show, man. Hey Craig, thanks for having me. Yeah, man. My pleasure. Yeah. So I, I'm excited to talk to you specifically about like, just start with, um, you mentioned in like an email before we started talking that you've done a lot of kind of customer calls and I assume that's like customer discovery, customer success kind of like once somebody starts a trial or like a presales kind of discussion, can you share like what that scope has kind of looked like for you kind of recently?
Speaker 1 00:02:11 Yeah, so, um, basically I do adult very, very recently, which we can get into, but I do basically two to three calls, uh, small group calls, Z like up to people or want to do people. I do two to three of these calls every day of the week besides the weekends. So I'm talking to a lot of folks each week, you know, 10 to 15 different people, um, every week a combination of prospects and customers and it's something I've got to schedule, so it's not like ad hoc, but see, do you have to cut it? We have like a Calendly link that integrates with zoom basically. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, it's prospects and people that have purchased and are trying to get up to speed and get everything integrated. Right. Is, is that like, is it a pretty even mix of the two or does it lean one way or the other? Yeah, I mean, I don't really keep of like the stats
Speaker 2 00:03:00 Of like what percentage is prospects and clients? I'd say it's about 50 50 though. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's really interesting. Cause like it's, open-ended, it's not a canned presentation. So some folks want me to literally help them, you know, install a member space on their site. Some folks have very specific nuance questions about their use case that they want me to help them figure out or think through some people use it as like a business coaching call. Really. Um, some people ask it as like a theoretical, like our organization is thinking about it, but then we have all these different questions we would need to figure out first. And so it's like a strategy session or like a, how are we going to migrate all a thousand of our current members over to this new member space system. So I really, it really varies. And it's interesting. So it's not the same old, same old every day at all, for me, for sure.
Speaker 1 00:03:46 Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people that are listening are developers and would say like, Oh my my time is way too valuable. Aren't even not developers. I shouldn't say just developers, but like CEOs and founders say, Oh, my time is too valuable to be spending two or three hours every day talking to clients. How do you feel about that and how to view kind of justified your time investment into this for so long because you guys are not a small company, right?
Speaker 2 00:04:10 No, I mean, we're like, I think we're like, I don't like 11 full time people at this point. Um, but uh, yeah, I mean, I don't think you can make a good argument that talking to your customers or prospects is a waste of time. If you run a business, it's like, to me, that sounds like a crazy like that your business is your customers, your customers are your business. So like to say, I don't want to talk to the, the, the whole, the fundamental part of my business, my customers, that seems crazy to me and completely backwards. Um, and I think it's also a really good way to lose touch with the, you know, the reality of how people feel about your business, the reality of what things are confusing about your marketing site, what things are confusing about your software. Cause if you're not talking to people directly, um, then all you're hearing is second hand, right?
Speaker 2 00:05:00 From your support team or from developers or, you know, whatever. Uh, and not, not that people have bad intentions, but just like, you know, the game of telephone things get lost in translation details are missed nuances. Aren't, aren't quite covered. Um, and you can't get that kind of raw data unless you're talking to your actual people. So yeah, I tend to, I think it's the best use of time I could possibly be doing now. Does that mean I should be talking to customers all day every day? No, obviously there's other things that I need to do, but, uh, I don't plan to stop talking to customers every day, um, ever is, is the current plan.
Speaker 1 00:05:38 That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. I talked to, I have a couple of calls almost every day as well. Um, most of them are, are it's like sales calls for our podcast motor business. Um, but do get on the phone with customers for, <inaudible> mostly in like a success role. Like, Hey, I want to do this thing. It's really complicated. Don't see any help around this. Can we get on the phone and talk? And I do that, but I probably don't talk to as many presales people as it sounds like you are. And you mentioned like it's informing like your marketing copy and your UX and, and a lot of these things that all customers see. What does the process look like for you guys for, because you have a lot of people talking to the customers, right? You're talking to customers in an actual zoom call, your customer support. People are talking to people in help scout or Entercom or whatever, and then you probably even have like product people talking to customers. How do you guys bring all that together and distill it down into actionable information that, that gets deployed onto the marketing side or in the, in the tool or something like that?
Speaker 2 00:06:40 Yeah. I mean, this is the tough part, right? This is kinda like the squishy part of running a product. There's no like good answer, simple system for this. So like for example, anything, anything to do with the marketing site? Like if someone's like, Oh, I saw on your features list, it said X, but does it do Y and then I'm like, Oh, I should just adjust a couple of words to make that more obvious. Um, and so then I'll just, I'll just do that. Right. I'll just hop on the marketing side and do that. I don't need to talk to the team about that. I can just fix it or change it or whatever. Um, you know, if there is a cost for, in the software and you know, we're talking about how to add a recurring plan in someone's like, how do I, you know, change this part?
Speaker 2 00:07:20 And then I'm like, Oh, I should just make the word more obvious. Or the button texts a little different, I'll just do that stuff. But when it comes to, you know, more like general trends, like our support team, if they're like, Hey, everybody keeps getting tripped up about this one integration. Or there are like, they're not quite sure how to white label, then I can go in and update the help doc, or I empower them to go do it themselves. Uh, I mean, we have a weekly call me and the support team and, and my co founder, Ryan, the CTO. And so we all talk and then kind of just, you know, it's really from the gut, like, you know, Hey, this is what I'm hearing. And this is kind of seems to be a common issue right now. And we just sort of talk about it and what the solution is.
Speaker 2 00:07:55 Um, yeah, on top of that, our support team keeps like a prioritized list of must haves and nice to haves in terms of features or enhancements that they're hearing on the ground from customers and prospects that are, that are messaging in. And so that's kind of their way to sort of have like a codified version of what they're hearing, uh, from, from the, from the front lines. And then me and Ryan also have a list like that. And then when it comes to how do we plan out the product and new features, Ryan and I are at the end of the day, the ones who make the decision for this. And we take what the support team's list. We take that into account, and then we also take into account our own list. And then we also take into account things like technical debt or just general product vision, where we, where we want the product to be, you know, not necessarily what everyone's telling us it needs to be. So we just kind of look at all of that and just have a discussion and just make a decision. We don't have any kind of like fancy system or Excel, uh, thing with like numbers. Not, it's really not that complicated. It's just talking about it, you know?
Speaker 1 00:08:59 Yeah, yeah, no, I asked because we, we run a similar, uh, kind of process and we're, you know, we're only half the size of you guys were five full time people. Um, but yeah, it involves, you know, feedback. I have a weekly call with Eileen, the, the gal who handles, uh, customer support for us, I am in help. Scout is what we use for customer support. I'm in there a little bit every day. I'm seeing what people are, are writing in about. I, I check a lot of the close tickets just to try to keep a pulse on, on things and see are people having the same problem over and over. And then her and I talk every Friday about like, Hey, this week I saw a lot of this. We don't keep a document about that. That's a really good idea to try to, because I think it, it keeps it objective. I don't think the term is objectified, but cause that's the, that's like a negative word, but like it keeps it objective to say like, yeah, I had a really bad day and I felt like a lot of people were talking about this thing, but maybe it wasn't really true, but if you kind of write it down, maybe it keeps it things more black and white.
Speaker 2 00:09:58 Well, just to touch on that, I'm sure a lot of folks listening are familiar with the whole shape bop development methodology and the base campus, um, which we did try to do for a while. It didn't quite fit for us, but there were some elements from it that we're still using. So like the whole idea of like that list, I'm talking about the, the word they use is as like a pitch. So you create a pitch for an enhancement or a new feature that you think the company should work on soon. And so that's what we're really doing is these are just like pitches of ideas that could be worked on. We don't see it as like a, to do list that we need to get done in this order. It's more of here are some current issues or current thing, new features that we really want to get in there.
Speaker 2 00:10:41 And then we have a debate about what should be done. Um, but nothing's sacred. So just because something was in the list last week, doesn't mean it's going to be in the list next week. Right. So we kind of move them in between, uh, you know, is this something where they want to work on or let's put it back into the, into, into the archive. We can maybe look at it later, but the nice thing about making a pitch and anyone who's not really familiar with what I'm saying, I would just look that up. Uh, the, the, the ebook is free for, for the ShapeUp methodology and look up how to create a pitch. Um, cause it's a good way to think through features. Cause you can't just like write a paragraph of, you know, we should integrate with Zapier. It's like, okay, well then why, you know, what are the problems that you're currently having?
Speaker 2 00:11:21 You know, what, what, how much time what's your appetite? How much time do you want to spend on this integration? What's the solution look like? Which screenshots, uh, what, what is it including? What doesn't it include? I know w w so for example, you're right. What are the actions? What are the triggers? So it's making you really think through what you want to do. And that alone creates a really nice, I guess, barrier. So you can't just like, whenever it comes into your head and just blurt it out and then kind of pollute the waters with too much things that could be done. So by this like work that you have to do for yourself and have to actually think about it, that alone will kind of limit a lot of the low quality or not thought through ideas, especially if you're like, Oh, I want to do this feature.
Speaker 2 00:12:04 And then you start creating the pitch for it. And you're like, and this doesn't actually make sense. And that's like, cool. I didn't waste anyone's time with this yet. And I didn't, I didn't derail development to go work on something that was half baked or half half thought through idea in my head, um, which I'm sure, you know, right. As, as the co founder, we, as the CEO, we, we, we have a lot of power and you don't want to abuse that by like making your dev team go off on these tangent or these side quests, uh, for your pet feature or enhancement that maybe actually doesn't make a lot of sense, but it just something you want to do or a client just happened to talk to you about it. It doesn't make it more important than what support her. You know what I mean? Um,
Speaker 1 00:12:41 Oh, that's, that's been one of the biggest, that's one of the biggest learning lessons for me in the last year, going back a year, I guess, is keeping things to myself until they're really well formed so that I don't go to Jonathan, our lead developer and say, Hey, how long would it take to build this thing? And I give him a sentence and he's like, you can't tell me that you can't ask me that kind of question. Cause there's, there's no answer to that. Uh, and then he's going to be thinking about it. That's and that's really where like this falls down is, is he'll come back like two days later and be like, Hey, I started working on this thing and I'm like, Whoa, this was just a random question. This was not like a, Hey, can you go do this thing? And it's just the mental space.
Speaker 1 00:13:20 Like, I, I don't need his mental space being occupied by my, you know, weird ideas about things. So I like that idea of like having a barrier to entry for you or for the folks in support or for, you know, people running product to, to not get to developers before something is really kind of well baked. It reminds me of like the, uh, the Amazon, like what at the two page document that Bezos re requires from everybody. Like, sit down, write it out, think about it before you bring this to anybody. Um, yeah, I like it. I like it. How about, um, from like a, a workflow perspective, like when going back to these calls, when do people, when are people able to schedule time on your calendar, like in the customer buying journey or the onboarding workflow, when does that introduce itself?
Speaker 2 00:14:07 So right on our website, we have a link to the Calendly to schedule a call. It is a group call, but it's a literally a two person group. So me and then two other people. And that's it. So it's relatively small. And I did that because I found that there was a decent amount of people that don't show up to the call. And so if you're just doing one on one and then someone doesn't show up, it's like, great. So that time slot just got wasted and no one showed up. So that's stupid. Um, so having two people, you know, if one doesn't show up, it's a one on one call and if two show up, it's totally manageable. Cause it's like 30 minutes. That's enough time usually to get through two people's worth of questions. Yeah. And so that that's been like an efficient way to do it, uh, in terms of timing, uh, like an arc in my calendar, I have it's, uh, between 11:00 AM Eastern time and 5:00 PM Eastern time, you can book a call anytime between then.
Speaker 2 00:14:55 And we had, I had like two slots, so you can pick any, any 30 minute slot on that, but I recently changed it to make it only Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then I have four slots now. So it's like heavy Tuesday, heavy Thursday. And then, then Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I don't have any scheduled customer calls. Or if I do, it's like a special one-on-one link that we send out in certain emergency situations. Okay. But this way I can really kind of eliminate, cause I found I was getting a little overextended, to be honest, like about doing, doing calls all day, every day, or like costly being interrupted and then having to go get on a call. And it's, it's just, it's a little tricky to kind of get into the flow and the deep work stuff, if you're, you're a random kind of calls throughout the day. So by limiting it to two days, I think that'll be a better way to kind of batch it, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:15:42 I do. I do a similar kind of batching thing for our sales calls for podcast motor. I do them Monday, Tuesday and Thursday just because, and I have, I live in Europe, so like I have European time zones and I have East coast, like morning and East coast, like early afternoon that gets into my evening a little bit, which is kind of the unique thing for me that I try to not work at night too much, but, but I do every once in a while. Yeah. I think that's the, one of the big limiting factors for me is just like the overlap with, especially like the West coast in the U S is pretty small. That keeps me from doing more calls. Probably. How, like how far out are you booked if somebody went to a member space right now, could they book a call for this week?
Speaker 2 00:16:20 Yeah. So that's another thing I changed recently. So I used to be book like out, like I think up to three months or something, which is stupid. Oh, well, yeah, because, uh, it would, it would, I think exacerbate the no show problem. So if someone books on a call two months, two months from now two months, you know, at that point either, maybe they're already a customer, they don't need the call. Maybe they don't need, maybe they don't need, need any help at that point. I figured things out, like it's all just kind of a waste of everyone's time. So now I make it. So you can only book a call up to seven days out. So this way it's like, it's tight, it's a window. It's, it's it's current. And I think that's going to help with, you know, making sure when you sign up, you're going to be there.
Speaker 1 00:16:56 Hmm. Hmm. Interesting. You mentioned that you guys are 11 people and you have like several people in support, I would guess. What does the team look like? So it's you and your co founder, Ryan, and then what does the rest of the team look like?
Speaker 2 00:17:08 Yeah, then we have a four, five, six full time developers. Um, uh, we have three support folks. Um, and we have a dev ops. We have a full time dev ops and a half time dev ops person. Um, then we have, uh, our head of marketing as well. So yeah, we're pretty decent, pretty decent sized team.
Speaker 1 00:17:31 That's cool. That's cool. We are, uh, like I said, he we're half the size or lower, less than half or five full time. Um, it's me full time support person, marketing person and to kind of full stack developers. And we have a CIS admin dev ops guy that just works a couple hours month. Really. We're really fortunate in that respect that we did a lot of work upfront to get everything kind of tuned and he doesn't need to go in and adjust things that much, everything kind of works. Knock on wood with a lot of rules in place and auto adjustments. But you always think it's interesting to talk to founders like you at, at this kind of scale to see like, what does the team look like? Obviously like with software products and SAS, like it's developer heavy, but I'm always curious, like what, what do you spend your time on? Because like, you're not a lot of what you do is like super mission critical. Like you don't, you shouldn't be like the only one that's doing a thing in the business, you know, like had 11 people, you should have other folks that can handle things. So I'm curious, like what not, what is everyday look like? Some sure they're all different, but like what are the top like five or eight things that you do on a regular basis?
Speaker 2 00:18:41 Yeah, I mean, so like art, just to back up for a sec, like our first hires were all were, were support people like, um, like we, we had Ryan, the CTO, you know, technical cofounder, he wrote the core of everything. So like he was like the only developer for, for awhile for, I think at least, you know, maybe two years or something. Um, yeah. And you know, we hired support people first, cause that's always been our thing is, you know, member spaces, uh, for regular folks and the ability to turn, you know, a website, any website and into members only to make any party website members only. And we wanted to make it for people that weren't necessarily technical. And so to do that, and you'd have a lot of handholding, like you, you can design good software, but you still need to have people there to answer questions.
Speaker 2 00:19:23 And so that's what I was doing at first and I still help with that. So I, I'm generally not doing the day to day support at all. Like, um, but I'm, um, I'm kind of there as like the support needs to escalate an issue. I'll kind of be the first barrier, uh, before we kind of escalated to the dev team to see if it's like an actual blog or something like that. So I'm pretty involved with the sport team, talk with them every day. And like I said, I do, I do customer calls sometimes they're support related customer calls. Like someone had couldn't configure something or whatever. But yeah, I mean that, that's really where a lot of my time is spent, you know, how do I make the software easier for people? How do I help our support? How do I support our support team?
Speaker 2 00:19:58 And in a sense, um, how do I make their job easier? What tools can we, can we implement? How do I make the help talks better? And then the other, the rest of the day really is marketing. Right? Cause at the end of the day, that's kind of a big part of the, of the CEO doing things like this, right? Getting on a podcast, uh, doing webinars, doing collaborations, uh, writing articles here and there, things like that. Uh, cause you got, you gotta do marketing. Um, but in my mind we were, we, we always were and always have been a support first and our people are who recommend us to other folks. We have really good organic SEO. So that's always been our main marketing channel is SEO and word of mouth. And so I don't want to lose that because that's really what we're known for. Like if you Google member space reviews, you'll see just lists of how of people praising our support. So like that's what I wanna, that's like our number one feature is our support team. That's awesome. That's awesome.
Speaker 1 00:20:48 How does that, like when you guys went from just you and Ryan to hiring your first support person, I always have, have thought and still do. This is like one of the most difficult transitions to make in a business is to take this thing that at the beginning only I know how to do and like put my brain in someone else's to say like you are empowered and you're educated and trained in the ways of the force to do this. Like, like I do and hopefully better, but, but I've found like getting 80% of the way there are 50% of the way there is, is pretty easy with a decent like knowledge base. But then the rest of the way is just so hard. Like there's so many edge cases and tribal knowledge is like a term that I've heard you to like things that you just know, how, like, how does that process work for you guys? Like at the beginning and now like if you're going to bring on someone else, how do you bring that person up to speed and support to say like they can go in and hit the ground running and really well for them be happy, but also like, you know, support your customers.
Speaker 2 00:21:50 Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, we haven't hired a new support person and I think like close to three years. So, um, we kind of overhired we had like, we ramped up to like three full time support people pretty quickly and then just kind of stayed there. And a lot of times there was downtime for them and now it's okay. It's been good because we've been growing a lot recently, so they've been able to handle the increased capacity. So we haven't really had to think about, okay, what's it going to be like to onboard a new support person? It's something that's in the back of my mind that I've started to work on here and there, but the way I've seen it is create really good help docs. Right. So support can help himself. Cause I'm sure with most software almost, you know, 95% plus of the answers are in the health docs, right.
Speaker 2 00:22:31 People don't want to search for it. They don't want to read through it, but our support team. So making sure we have really good UpToDate help docs is a big thing. Um, on top of that, we have like our own internal project management system base camp. Um, we have, uh, like a document that just kind of lists out little nuance things that a customer doesn't need to know, but it would be good for sport to know. So that's all listed there and that kind of covers a lot of little edge cases here and there. Uh, but to be honest, it's something I'm trying to think through. Maybe making an internal health doc, right. Internal health docs for support only. So it's just kind of talking through all of that stuff in a nice searchable, easy to read format is something that I'm sort of noodling over. Um, because yeah, I think once you bring a new person on you, can't just force three years of, of member space, knowledge onto them. That's impossible. Right. It's gonna take a lot of time. So I don't have a good answer for it yet, but it is something that we are actively trying to think through.
Speaker 1 00:23:25 Yeah. We, we tried the internal help doc route and honestly just found that it was not utilized as much as like it would be in an ideal situation and that, you know, the person that should be using it, wasn't looking. And then once they learned new things that maybe weren't in there, they updating it and we've had a couple of support people and it was consistent across, across all of them. So I don't think it was like a person thing. It was like a process thing on our end, we use help scout for support. And like there are built in search. The knowledge base thing is great, but that's only internal, I guess you can have, or that's only like the public facing when I don't know how their internal help doc thing works. But yeah, I would want it to be really convenient to the workflow of a customer support team member, talking to customers and, and kind of, you know, trying to handle these issues. Cause I think if you try, if you go too far out outside of that normal routine, uh, and workflow for them is where that falls down. And like, if you, if the adoption is low, then the utility of it suffers. I think,
Speaker 2 00:24:33 Yeah. It's hard to like create or proactively kind of keep systems updated if you're in the thick of it. Right. Especially for support, right? Like, especially in the mornings that you're dealing with backlog of tickets, it's like, okay, there's this thing I just noticed that we don't make clear anywhere. I should add that to our internal help doc. And it's like, okay, but that involves me stopping what I'm doing to go do that. And then coming back. And so a lot of people just say, Oh, I'll do it later. And then you never do it later. So I can totally see what you're saying about an internal health doc. Maybe not being the, uh, the magical solution. I'm hoping it would be. Yeah, I don't, I don't know, aside from just, you know, putting in the reps and showing up every day and, and learning the system, talking to customers, reading over the help docs and just getting that innate knowledge of the system.
Speaker 2 00:25:19 I don't know if there is a, I don't think there is a shortcut and there might not be, which is part of why. I think a lot of support people are completely undervalued and underpaid, to be honest, like if you have a support person that's been with you for three, four, five, six years, that is so valuable, you could argue that that's as valuable as a developer, um, in terms of what they're doing to help with retention, uh, with helping clients and prospects start using the software and be happy using the software depending on the client they save, right? Like for us, for example, we charge a small transaction fee for when someone has a membership. If our support person figures out a bunch of problems or something for one of a large client, who's processing a million dollars through member space, you know that that's, that's a client who's paying us, you know, uh, four figures a year. So that alone, you know, thousands of dollars of revenue, they just saved us if that person were to cancel. So that's a direct impact. That's similar to like, you know, a marketing person who grows your revenue by 20% in a year. Right? Like that's. Yeah. So I think support is almost criminally underpaid and undervalued. Um, cause I think they're one of, if not the most important person on the team.
Speaker 1 00:26:31 Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's, it's, uh, in a lot of ways, a difficult role to, to hire and defined good people for, and then to train them and get them up to speed, super difficult so that when you do find somebody get them up to speed, retaining them is really important. And I agree, like you think of, you need to think of both sides of like the economics of it too, is like, what do you pay this person for? What value do they bring in converting or retaining clients and not, what do you pay a marketing person for bringing new eyeballs to the business because that's a harder sell the pun intended for the marketing person to bring somebody new, see your things, start a trial, convert to a bank customer or make the one time purchase or whatever it is then to keep that customer and not to mention the word of mouth impact that that has that you can't measure. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:27:19 Yeah. I mean, there's a corporate natural front line that that's, who's like talking to your customers all day, every day, you support people are interacting with more customers than anyone else on the team. And like we talked about customers are your business, your business are, is your customers. So like the fact that they're, you know, touching metaphorically, um, more customers than anyone else, that's how I, you could argue that they're incredibly valuable to the company.
Speaker 1 00:27:46 Yeah. Yep. So you're in a unique position to get really like frontline perspective on where the kind of membership economy is. I hate to use that term. That sounds, it sounds so cheesy, but yeah. Where membership sites and, and communities are currently like here June of 2020 and, and kind of where, where you might see them going into the kind of medium term future, I'd love to hear kind of your thoughts on that.
Speaker 2 00:28:15 Yeah. I mean, I think it's no big secret that, you know, subscription businesses and that business model recurring revenue is something that almost all companies are sort of moving towards, um, big and small. Uh, so to be a company like us, that's essentially like an eCommerce platform that enables businesses to do that. You know, we're, we're definitely in the right place at the right time. I'll put it that way. Um, cause we're seeing a lot of growth from all kinds of different businesses. So especially given the recent events with like, you know, COBIT and everything, a lot of gyms, yoga studios, anyone who was doing like live events for things like all that's stopped or on pause and those businesses and their clients and customers still exist, but they need a different way to deliver the service or the product. And so the only way to do that right now is online.
Speaker 2 00:29:07 So I think the, what Kobe has done in terms of, you know, the destruction, um, but also the innovation that some businesses are gonna have to go through and have gone through. I think it's going to continue. I like, for example, let's say in some magical world a year from now, everyone has a vaccine and COVID is a thing of the past that we talk about. I don't think anyone is going to create a business going forward that doesn't have an online component, right? Like it shouldn't create a gym, um, in the, in the year 2023. Um, if you create a gym and don't have an online component, I think that'd be, people would call you crazy. Like, don't you remember what happened a few years ago? Like you need to have an online side of this. Um, so I think things are going to kind of permanently be sort of geared towards memberships and subscriptions going forward.
Speaker 2 00:29:51 And I think that's just going to continue. Um, I think that's eventually going to be kind of like the main thing and the live in person thing is going to be like the special events you get to do. Right. Um, cause you know, who knows how this COBIT situation is going to affect everybody. If we never get back to the, to, to a normal life, yet every day I go to the gym in person with other people and work out like maybe that's not something you do anymore. I don't know. I hope, I hope that's not the case, but I just think a lot more businesses are going to be hedged by making sure they have a very serious growing online component. Um, so yeah, that's, that's my, my thoughts generally. Yeah. For like,
Speaker 1 00:30:27 For companies that aren't already there or like, hear you say that and say, I don't know what that means to me. How can, like, how do, how do you coach people to, to think about that? I mean, say, okay. A previous podcast guest has a tool that is a, an add on for Trello. Uh, and he sells these kind of add ons for Trello as like a SAS business. How does he think about how does Robin Warren think about a membership site for his business?
Speaker 2 00:30:55 Well, I guess just to be clear in his case, maybe he doesn't need a membership site, maybe, maybe selling a one off, add on tool or whatever. That's fine. I'm not saying that that needs to move to membership. I'm I'm he might in the future provide some version of a subscription. So it's like including, you know, just like most SAS would. Right. So, cause it includes updates and support and blah, blah, blah. It's not a onetime charge. I think most businesses want to have recurring revenue because it gives you predictable predictability, right. To plan cashflow, et cetera, et cetera. So I think every business, if they could choose, would love to have recurring revenue. Um, that doesn't mean that every business should have recurring revenue, not all business models make sense for that. Especially if, like, for example, if what you're offering is more of like a one off thing, like, okay, I'm, you know, I want to take, I want to do like a three week diet plan or something like that.
Speaker 2 00:31:46 It's like, okay, I don't know. It doesn't need to be recurring revenue that could just be a one off purchase or an ebook. Right. It's like you can't force it in. Um, but I think it's what most businesses want. Um, when I was talking about though is more about the brick and mortar businesses or the businesses that only have like maybe like e-commerce like for example, um, my sister, she, she, uh, owns a company called house of blooms and it's a florist, right? So she did a weddings and events. So as you can imagine, weddings and events are not happening right now. So she's pivoting to provide a pickup only service where she creates these really nice event, ready flowers that people can put in their homes. And you just been, so now that's going to be a recurring revenue. So she's going to be paying charging like a hundred dollars a month for people to pick up flowers from her studio.
Speaker 2 00:32:31 She brings into their car then, and then it's just ready to go. And this is just a new model. So she's still able to use her infrastructure of her upper studio. She's still going to, uh, you know, leverage her network. Uh, she's still able to do things she loves, which is, you know, arrange and, and, and, and purchase flowers. And she's still able to help people, um, and do that as a business without collapsing, because you have to pivot weddings and events. Aren't a thing right now. And that might be end up being the new model for her. So that's, I think kind of the quintessential example of someone who wasn't doing anything online and now everything is kind of hybrid online and in person for her, it needs to be, there's no other way to do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:33:08 Yeah. I think it is that the transfer of value, like where the customer gets the value from your product or service that might've only been in person before. Like you're talking about with your sister to make it partly online or starts online and is delivered in person maybe. Um, I think about grocery delivery a lot just in general. I think that like, it is so backwards that we get in a car and drive to a thing to get the same thing every week. And I mean, maybe it's the fact that we live in the middle of nowhere, France, but grocery delivery is just not a thing here. And even, I know, like in the U S like, it just sucks from what I hear talking to my friends that like, they, they have not mastered this. It seems like the perfect kind of thing to say, like, I get milk and flour and beer and pizza and chicken every week. Why are they not delivered to my house? And that, that just seems like the perfect kind of pivot for those folks. And it might not even be groceries, grocery stores. It might be the actual, like manufacturers of the stuff that start getting that stuff to you on a subscription basis. I dunno. Kind of like Amazon,
Speaker 2 00:34:14 I think they might skip the middle man or middle woman of, of the grocery store and just say, go right to the consumer and be like to sign up for a recurring subscription of lettuce or whatever. I don't know. Like, yeah. It might be a different way to think through it. Or maybe it's a collaboration of different PR you know, producers or farmers kind of like a digital co-op of some kind. So like, I don't know, there's lots of ways this can go, but I think, like I said, in the eye COVID, I think is going to be one of those things in the back of everyone's mind, from a business perspective where it's like, we can't be caught with our pants down again, like we can't be relying on people in person purchasing our thing as the main source of revenue ever again. Um, it can, I think it'll be something that'll be maybe supplemental or something that can be special. Um, but I, I don't think people will want to rely on it or B they'll kind of have PTSD from it to, to rely on that as the main way to make money. I think everyone's going to say we need to have a significant portion of the business that's digital or some kind of recurring service just to help hedge for the future.
Speaker 1 00:35:16 Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's probably going to be a challenge for some people. I mean, I think a lot of, especially these in person, businesses have been affected most. And so they are the ones that need to think about this the most. But I think in some respects, the fact that they haven't already gone online means that they might have the most difficulty with kind of figuring out how transfer that value from all in person to, in some way online, in some way, recurring and subway delivering some kind of digital value. And that might be the difficulty for some folks of making that move.
Speaker 2 00:35:49 Yeah. Yeah, no, there's good. There's going to be a lot of, a lot, a lot of damage and, you know, collateral, collateral damage that goes on. So the ones that I think they're going to survive are the ones that are able to quickly innovate are the ones that had some digital component and now they're just need to kind of beef it up. Um, but yeah, it, it, there's definitely gonna be some, some loss businesses out there that, I mean, there already are so
Speaker 1 00:36:08 Specific to like membership sites and communities. What are you guys seeing that your most successful customers are doing well right now?
Speaker 2 00:36:17 Uh, in terms of like the business model or like the, the industry. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:36:20 Just how they, how they implement, what kinds of communities and sites they're, they're running like those kind of common threads.
Speaker 2 00:36:28 Yeah. I mean, it's tricky to answer because we have so many different kinds of businesses that use us. We have like, not for profit, you know, uh, business groups at like meet to like discuss the like rotary club kind of thing. And they, they use member space to protect the meeting minutes, nothing crazy. We have real estate, uh, companies that do like real estate marketing and like protect use member space to protect various digital assets for people to download. If they're part of the membership, we have people that have courses where they teach fitness classes or whatever, and there's like five different modules. So it's all over the place and they're all successful in different ways. But one like kind of unifying thread, I'd say that we've seen is the vast majority of our most successful customers have some kind of community aspect, which isn't that surprising when you think of it, right.
Speaker 2 00:37:16 Especially since we're all being more isolated these days. Um, so some kind of online community forum, that kind of a thing, sometimes a Facebook group, but something where people are able to connect with each other, um, around some theme, right. Um, that we found is really what keeps people retained and keeps them interested. Right? So like, for example, if you have a course on how to, how to bake bread or something like that, there's a lot of people that can teach you how to bake bread, right. That's not like some magical thing that only, you know, how to do. And that's true of almost every kind of business. Right. But what, what keeps you ball around in your particular bread making class, or course is the community of other bread makers. Like if it's a thriving community where people are always sharing recipes, sharing images, talking about family dinners or tweaking recipes, whatever, if that's engaging, they're going to stay around and keep paying the membership.
Speaker 2 00:38:05 If that's what gives them access to the community, the content you provide becomes sort of supplemental or like, Oh, that's nice to have. It's cool that, you know, Craig posts these videos about a new recipe, but what I'm really here for is talking to all my friends about making bread. That's what I'm paying for and what you're providing as the service almost fades to the background. And so, um, I think, but the tricky part with the community is you can't just force it, right? It's something that needs to be nurtured. It's kind of like a plant. You have to, it's really hard to grow in the beginning and then you got to it, it has to blossom. Then you have to keep it healthy. Um, so it's not easy to run a community or to get one started, but once you have it going, I think it's a huge differentiator in terms of keeping people retained and keeping people evangelical about your brand or your business.
Speaker 1 00:38:47 Mm Hmm. I promise, I didn't pay you to say that ahead of time. Cause if anybody listens to our audience podcast for gastros, I go off on this soap box in almost every episode talking about like what we see make a successful podcast. And it's funny thing is that like podcast is a community of sorts, but yeah, people having Facebook groups or Slack channels or discord channels or discourse groups or whatever is almost entirely the common thread between every successful podcasts that we see where customers have hundreds of thousands of downloads, there is something other than the podcast that bring all those fields together. Yeah. And it, it's not surprising that you're seeing the same thing in community, you know, membership sites and communities is having someplace for people to connect in addition to, or on top of whatever you're providing them, whether it's a podcast or a membership site. Yeah. I agree. Especially, especially now. And I think that will continue to carry forward in the future is we will all go back to our normal social lives at some point too, to a pretty large extent I hope. But I do think that the way we've connected with people will carry over, uh, and that being online, um, do you find Facebook, is the preferred Avenue for that for most people or does it vary based on kind of the topic and the audience that they're communicating with?
Speaker 2 00:40:08 Yeah. I mean, definitely bias. I'm not a big fan of Facebook and what they do and what they stand for or don't stand for. Um, so I, I don't want to give, you know, I'm all about throwing shade at them, but, uh, for sure they're definitely a popular option because they're Facebook, right? So it's relatively easy to get a group started there. Every, a lot of people are there already, so it's not some new system they have to learn. So there are advantages for sure if you're okay with all those other downsides of being on Facebook, strings attached, right. Definitely strings attached. And one of the strings outs, you know, regardless of their, you know, their privacy policies and like their, whatever, the problem with Facebook, with a group on Facebook, especially is that you're on Facebook. So that means there are lots of other things that could distract the person to bring them to a different group or go watch some video or go to their newsfeed or whatever.
Speaker 2 00:40:55 So you're gonna, they're there there's ways for them to leave the group and not be engaged anymore because they're on Facebook. Your new notifications could come in. Whereas if someone's on your website and you have a community like a third party, a forum embedded on a page, that's where people are living, they're in your website, within your community. You're kind of in control of the garden, if that makes sense. So that's kind of what we encourage. Cause we, for example, member space, we integrate, uh, with circle and moot, uh, are two different third party like forum community tools that you can embed right on the page and that's where your members can interact. And this way you can kind of really keep everything brand, keep
Speaker 1 00:41:34 Them in your world and have them really focused on, on, on the community instead of on Facebook plus the community. Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, we, we have our podcast hackers group on Facebook because it's the lowest barrier to entry for me to create. And also for customer, you know, new community members to, to get in there and, and, you know, get engaged and check back on a regular basis. I think Facebook, you know, understandably is good at bringing you back to the platform, uh, which I think, you know, your, your comment about building a thriving autonomous community is hard. Especially at first, we are just seeing after about a year of pretty solid work on it, that it's really starting to have a voice of its own, which is super cool. You know, people are starting threads and other people responding and I'm going in and adding my 2 cents a couple of times a week.
Speaker 1 00:42:21 But, but nothing like I was having to poke and prod previously. Yeah. It takes a lot of hard work, but at this point I'm really glad that we put the effort into really sticking with it. Cause it's turning out to be a nice asset. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. A ward for folks who want to kind of check out more about what you guys do, that member space, what's the obviously member space.com is the best place to check you guys out. You remember space.com and then on social media, we're at memory space. So it should be pretty easy to
Speaker 0 00:42:49 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
