How Entrepreneur’s Journey Makes Money

RichardBy Richard
| 3 minutes read

I’m focusing here on Yaro’s first product launch, but before I get into that, let me be upfront about this; this is a case study of how to make money online by teaching other people how to make money online.

Since Yaro had already made decent money online from non-MMO niches(essay editing, blog editing, card game website etc), I feel good about including this case study.

So Yaro’s first product, Blog Mastermind, was a membership site on making money from your blog.

He had two options for pricing, being the big up front $2000 style payment or the monthly membership payment of around $50. He went with the latter, but then later regretted it.

His reasoning behind the regret was that his 400 customers who signed up at launch could have brought in $400,000 (or more if he priced higher than $1000), whereas his membership take was $20,000 in the first month and then a little less each month as attrition kicked in – later leveling out at around $14,000 a month (not bad!!).

But I have a couple problems with most of us applying this thinking.

For one, most of us won’t have such epic products or loyal audiences to charge so high a price. And two, I think of the 400 who signed up at $47, maybe only 80-100 would have done a huge upfront fee of say $1,000 (ie bringing in total $80,000 to $100,000, without any future recurring fees).

Let me show you why I think the monthly membership fee can be great.

Well, as I mentioned with the $1000 one-off fee you lock out so many people from giving it a go. ie you lose the chance to give them a taste and hope they get addicted (hello drug dealer model!).

The other big reason for thinking about a membership model (eg like Corbett Barr’s recently launched Fizzle), is that you don’t need to completely finish the product before you can start selling it. I love this point.

I mean, think about how many of us have a cool information product idea, but the epic mountain we have to climb to produce it just forces us to procrastinate and never get around to it.

I know with the recruiting site I launched, that creating a beta phase where people could join for half price, whilst I was still adding content, getting feedback on what people wanted more of etc, was the best decision ever.

It made the impossible, possible.

Plus you get a big bonus from this approach; you get to test out whether people will pay money for what you’re selling, before you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into it.

If you find out after a couple months that they aren’t that into it, you just stop producing the content and refund those early beta members that bought in. You didn’t waste 3-6 more months making a course or info product no one wanted to pay for!

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