Chris Benetti - Reinventing The Membership Site

Like, having, like a paywall in there as well makes people more invested to you as a creator. And therefore they're going to go and be above and beyond to be reputable representatives of your brand, like I am for you guys. As an example, Like, I'll tell everyone you're awesome. Go listen to this podcast. I'll rep your shirt. I'll talk about your paid newsletter. Like, I'll do whatever I can to prop you guys up. Yeah, it's a collaboration of value at the end of the day. Free customers, people who just listen to free content, you know, they might not be around for 10 years, but a paying customer who gets consistent value, consistent support, like, they're gonna not only buy more from you, but they're gonna be a bigger voice to rep your brand and everything that you do.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float. Shark with your boy. My boy, Matt Wolf.

Joe.

Hey, yo.

Hi there.

Yo. I already said yo.

Yes, you did. And I acknowledged your presence.

You acknowledged my yo.

Yes. I've only been sitting in this room with you all day long. Stink.

Yeah, we left and ate salads.

Those salads came to us and do delivery. And then we sat back in this room and watch baseball.

That is true.

We did turn it off for this interview, actually.

We were eating salads, watching baseball.

Don't lie to me, sir. Don't lie in front of everyone.

Isn't it kind of weird to be watching baseball, though, right now? It's like.

Yeah, it's really weird when there's no fans in the freaking crowd and there's weird AI noise or someone on a punch pad with sound effects going, oh, we just hit a double.

They have cardboard cutouts of fans behind the batter, though.

Hey, it's a pretty good business to be in, though, if they're just going to be printing off people.

I know. I want to be in the cardboard printout business right now.

Telling you, man, there's an opportunity and everything. Face mask business, crushing it. Yeah. I mean, hey, there's always opportunity wherever you look. It's true. That's true. It's very true.

So today, one opportunity.

This is a new one, right?

Membership sites.

Damn right. Well, if you haven't thought a membership site is for you or if you have one guarantee, you're going to walk away with at least one idea to profit severely. No, greatly from membership sites. Like, even if it's not super obvious. Yeah. There's so many ways to integrate that. So we. We're talking to Chris Benetti today and I would say he's probably in the top five of our super fans for this show, this podcast, and I mean, you'll hear his words, so I'll leave it to him. But it's really cool to bring him on the show. But not only that, Matthew, we've actually.

Partnered up with him on a software platform. So over the past several months, on a few different episodes, we sort of teased at the fact that we're kind of getting into software. Well, this episode is essentially our unveiling of one of those platforms. You heard the episode recently with Unicorn Equity. That's one software involved with. This is the other software platform that we were involved with. And so we're going to talk a little bit about. We're going to talk about Chris's story, we're going to talk about the various outside the box ways to use membership sites, some of the ways we're using membership sites that other people aren't a.

Whole, like, revolutionary way that any podcast or influencer creative on like Instagram, YouTube, podcast, or how they can now use this and save a boatload of money, but have, like, actually give way more away too and make more money. There's so many use cases for a membership site, even if it's not obvious, this is one you want to listen to.

Yeah. And then at the end of the episode, we sort of nerd out about all the features that are in there and all the upcoming features to it and sort of give a little tease to the roadmap of where the software is going. But the software is called Members Pro, and it's what we've been talking about. It's a membership platform. And Chris and us and the team at Members Pro are actually hooking you up with a sweet little deal. Not actually going to reveal the deal.

Let's not reveal the deal. You got to do a little digging to reveal this deal.

Yeah. But if you go to memberspro.com, there's a coupon box at checkout, enter the word hustle. And we're hooking you up because we're partnering with these guys. This is part of our business now.

This is like, you don't know how much excitement. I mean, Chris has heard it on multiple calls. But I'm not shitting you. We've been wanting to get a. Into the software game for probably about 10 years. Yeah, you. Probably longer because you came from like a programming kind of thing. But. But then let alone a membership site, like something that you also have. I mean, we both have been around membership sites For a long time. But you literally created the WordPress classroom.

Yeah, I've been running memberships for 13 years now.

Yeah, like that was your first product. That was your first thing that like once you quit your day job, remember you sold this friggin membership site for like I don't know, seven or five dollars a month or seven dollars one time.

Stupid.

Yeah, yeah, it was like way under price.

I think it was $10 flat fee baller.

But it was, that was your first, you know, entry into that space. And you know, things have evolved massively in 13 years but at the same time kind of not so like the typical membership platforms out there. Yes. I'll name names like Teachable and Think IFIC and all these other things. Like great. Like they have the market appeal, they have the marketing dollars. Thinkific just aren't teachable, just got acquired. So they have a lot more money now. But they're slow moving to evolve. Yeah. And that's the beautiful thing with being in this company as partners at Members Pro. It's really fricking cool because shit's moving fast and it's innovative. There's features that none of these guys are doing. They're not thinking of like strategy behind the scenes too. So it's perfect timing for you as a listener to get in there.

Yeah. So let's dive in. This is our Members Pro coming out party.

So memberspro.com and use the co word hustle. You're going to get hooked up with some bonuses. And as always, we're also taking notes on this episode for you. Another call to action, go to hustleandflowchart.com comp that's hustleandflowchart.com Comp within two weeks, get the notes or text 38470 and the word comp to 38470.

Yes.

I think that's it. Covered all bases.

I think we covered all of the bases.

Let's go down under Mr. Chris. We are live. Welcome to the show. Finally.

What's up guys? It's great to be here.

Yeah. Well you woke up early for us too, huh?

I did, I did. My fiance has been getting up at 6am and usually I'll just sleep through and wake up whenever the f I want.

You've heard this show, you know you can swear, right?

I know, yeah.

So like I was like, okay, I'll get up because I have to and I'll make you a coffee and you know, I'll do all the nice things and then get ready for the show.

So Come on, it's your fiance. You said you're supposed to get up and make coffee and be all the nice stuff, the sleeping in parts when you're married, and you just. No, I'm just kidding.

Give me a break. We just came back from holiday, so.

I know, I know, I know.

Thank you for. I mean, we've been chatting for a while now, but, yeah, you're out in Australia and, yeah, you've been listening to the show for, like, a long time too, right?

I'm like one of your first fanboys.

No shit. You definitely have sent many Instagram pictures over. And I know we've used you in some of our presentations with your shirt on and stuff. Actually, we were making that presentation last week or two weeks ago to War Room, I think, Digital Marketer, and we're talking about the swag, and we're like, oh, yeah, that guy. We just. Actually.

Getting ahead of yourself.

I know, but basically.

I'm like, yeah, that's Chris. I totally forgot he was even in the slideshow.

Did we send you a second shirt? I think you sent a picture of one, had a hole in it, and I thought we sent you a second one when you sent it to us.

I posted that photo to see if I could get a second shirt, but I never got one, so I thought.

I actually sent you one.

Send me another shirt.

We meant to send you one. So I either sent one and it didn't make it to you, or I, like, blanked and forgot to write it down.

Right.

We can either do two things. We can blame 2020 or we can blame coronavirus.

Or both. Yeah, I mean, really, they're kind of the same thing, right? Same problem.

All right, I just wrote it. So it's official. You'll get a shirt in the mail. Maybe. I don't know if it gets to.

You, but send me an XL now instead because, like, I've. I've been trying to beef up a little bit.

Oh, you're bulking up. Oh, okay. No more schmediums.

Not from the gym. Just, like, been eating a lot of food.

Yeah.

You've been bulking up with donuts. That's fine.

No judgment. All right, so this is rad that you're on the show, though. And thank you for listening for, like, I think, like, for real, you've been one of the most active listeners. You've reached out. You've been super. I know you bought a lot of the stuff that we put out training, and you actually implement the shit, like, massively in a lot of ways, even sometimes when you can't implement it fully. You're telling us like it was like A Beautiful Mind for the affiliate program. Then you're like, ah, crap, I can't really go any further.

I'll send you the plug that never win anyway.

That's awesome. Well, today we're talking about, we're going to talk about memberships today and you know, some, some creative ways to use memberships. We're going to talk about some creative ways to in increase retention on memberships. But the.

Everyone should have a membership.

Everyone should have a membership. But the reason we're talking about memberships. Well, one of the reasons we talk about memberships is because we've recently partnered up with you on the platform that you're working on, Members Pro, which is a membership platform. So we're going to talk a lot about really cool ways to leverage a membership and then we're also going to talk about all the cool stuff that we're working on with the software that you guys are developing over there and just sort of nerd out everything membership for the next, you know, 45 minutes, hour or so. But before we do, let's talk about your story a little bit. Let's dive into kind of what were you doing before, what you're doing now and how did you get into what you're doing now?

Yeah, So I am 26 at the moment of this recording. 2020. I was sort of was never one of the classic lemonade stand entrepreneurs. Always love money though. I've sort of always had an affinity for like, how can I do a little bit more to make a lot more. Like in high school I was that kid that had a full time job and worked every single day to make more money to save up. By the time I left high school I had already saved 20 grand in the bank, which is pretty cool for a 17 year old.

Nice.

And then I went into an apprenticeship for mechanical fitting. And so 17 to 18, I actually in the first year of my apprenticeship saved up another 30 grand. So I had $50,000 at the age of 15 saved in the bank and I went and bought the house that I'm in right now at 18 and moved from like grew up in from the age of 13 to 18 in a mining town up north in Western Australia called Port Hedland and I moved down to Perth, which is the main city of Western Australia.

So throughout that process, like I bought this house and then a couple of Years later, ages 21, I bought a second house. Like I pretty much refinanced this property and a loan to put a down payment on a second house. And then I was like, I should probably start learning about property investing if I'm going to start doing these things. I was just prompted doing this because I thought I had to, or whatever the case may be. That led me down a path of reading property investing books and also led me down a path of understanding that property investing is probably a bit of a slow game for me. It's like I have to have stable income to be able to invest more money into property and then it might be 10 years or so before I'm able to actually replace my income from a job with cash flow or selling of properties and so on. So it sort of quickly became this crutch where I was like, I've sort of one foot tried to do some stuff, but then I'm like, it's probably going to be too much effort, too much work. And so at that point I was like, what's a better way? And in one of the books that I was reading, like I learned about Robert Kiyosaki and read Rich Dad, Poor dad.

Right about when I qualified for my apprenticeship, I just started reading, you know, those sort of entrepreneur books.

That's dangerous timing.

Yeah. So I like just qualified. I'd like literally just spent four years on an apprenticeship and you know, working full time, saved up quite a bit of money, but was just like this, this sort of sucks. Like it's not really where I want to be. It's not the mindset. The, like the iron ore industry in general, the people there are really like negative and toxic and like they're just like. Because we used to like work two weeks away from home on a site and then fly back to Perth for one week and then we'd sort of just do that cycle. We get paid a lot of money, but it was like we're away from home two thirds of the time and with people that we didn't necessarily enjoy being with.

Right.

So I was just like, you know, I'm not going to try and focus on the environment. I literally spent all of my lunch breaks reading books and after work I was trying to do some of the strategies that I learned in the books. So Robert Kiyosaki was like massive for just like shifting my mindset and sort of allowing me to see what's possible.

Four hour workweek was sort of like one of those, like strategic, but also like, here's even further, what's possible because it was like from a different angle. Tim Ferriss is amazing like that. And then like that sort of led me down like a whole range of different other authors and people to learn from. And I actually bought my first course, proper course from Onyx Single, which I'm sure you guys know Onyx Single.

He's another show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he came on the show for copywriting. What I actually learned from him.

First about was affiliate marketing with emails. He actually launched a product probably about six years ago called. It was like Launchpad Blueprint or something or Blueprint Launchpad or something like that. And it was like a software with a training program. And I literally every moment I got at work would go log onto the computer at work and watch these videos in his membership site. And then I'd come back after work was finished. I was working 14 hour days almost come back and like spend the hour or two on the training and like, how can I implement this? And you know, I never ended up getting anything to work. I like, I tried that and then I tried ebay, dropshipping and I tried a few other things around those and I was just like, none of this is working. So it was probably about July of 2016 where I was like, you know, I just need to put it out there that if I can't get things to work, like I just need to tell people that I am committed to doing this instead of what I'm doing right now. Like I'm committed to becoming an entrepreneur. I'm committed to just trying to be better and all these things. So I actually wrote myself a note and said that I was going to quit on December 23rd of 2016 if I wasn't able to succeed. So I could go at it full time. And so I wrote that note and then I told people about it. And a month later I somehow just got fired. Like it just magically happened. I missed a flight to work and that ended up making me get fired.

Wow.

So I think it was September was the official date that I got fired. And then like I literally at that same time miraculously started finding out about Russell Brunson and ClickFunnels and that whole world. And like that was like my new thing. Like I was gonna try and be an affiliate marketer for clickfunnels. And that led me to learning the software, becoming pretty interested in the funnel game. And then from there I was like, again I didn't have any luck because I was sort of in and out like half assing trying to do the things literally like people were doing training on this. I was Going to implement the exact strategy, no creativity, because I didn't have any experience. Right. Like I was just like, you're taught.

Me a bad way to learn.

Yeah, yeah. So it was a really good way to learn, but it wasn't a good way to have much success.

Right.

So I noticed that and that like I pretty much went down the path of going like, who, who else in my area, you know, has the skills that I can learn from? Who else has had success? How can I learn from them? And you know, a couple months after I started doing full time affiliate marketing for ClickFunnels. Yeah, I didn't make any money in the two months, but I found an internship opportunity with a local digital marketing agency in Perth and I interned for them full time for like two months, two, three months almost. And at the start of 2017 I started becoming a paid employee and I was working for their clients on funnels. It was a really cool way for me to get quickly up to scratch with building for clients, but also testing on other people's dimes and also allowing me to introduce and meet higher level players. Like the people that I was literally reading about in the books, I was now working for them as like a funnel builder. Yeah, like the million dollar business owners that I was like fantasizing over. I was now working with them and connected with them and invited to their villas in Bali and all of these really cool things. Right. So it was a really cool, just like jump kick into like here's successful people. And I was able to just very quickly go from like toxic, negative, sad fuckers to, you know, happy, energetic, you know, people who were like loving serving people, people who had made millions of dollars doing that and like people who just had an awesome mindset. So I went really quickly from, you know, the average of five people being crap, the average of five people being like amazing dude, all the way from.

The, yeah, like the whole environment thing. Like you freaking had your head in the game in the right spot because most people never even, you know, allow to get yourself out of that like toxic environment, you know, and people get stuck, man.

And there were people there like, you know, they were questioning. I was, I was always like, how can I get out of this place? And they're like, no, you've done your time, you've done your apprenticeship. Like you should work here until you're retired. And I'm like, I don't want to fucking, you know, be in this environment for the next 50 years because you think it's the right thing to do. Like, that's not my vision. And you shouldn't think like that either. Like, if you don't like doing this, why are you committing yourself to doing it for the sake of doing it? Because other people say that or you think it's the right thing to do. It's like, fuck that shit. I'm gonna go, like, I'm gonna go do what I want to do and I'm gonna be passionate about what I do. And so that's like. Was a massive crutch for me in making the switch and the jump and, like, committing and telling people and all of that sort of stuff. And so in 2017, it was a pretty cool year. At the end of 2017, I actually was invited to ClickFunnels HQ and I became the number one funnel designer in the southern hemisphere for clickfunnels Funnels at that event that they were hosting. It was called the ClickFunnels Designathon. And then the start of next year in 2018, I actually launched my own business. And that was like, sort of me. Like, I got back into the mindset of an employee whilst I was working for a marketing agency and it was just like, started becoming negative again because I don't like being an employee. And so I was like, I just need to do my own thing and have my own control and be able to do what I want. I would say that, like, 2018, the first half was, like, really tough. And going into business for the first time is pretty stressful.

Yeah.

But I did. I did pretty good job at, like, connecting with the right people, like you guys have and do. And I was able to score some pretty big clients that helped me, like, levitate my authority. And I think, like, one of the.

Best things that you can do is connect yourself or align yourself with people who are at higher levels because.

It'S easier to borrow authority than create authority.

That's actually very. Yeah, I've had that in my mind. Someone said that maybe it was in one of those two books you mentioned, Rich Dad, Poor dad, or Tim Ferriss. Probably not. They might. Those are the same books that we read literally in that same order. That got us started on our path too. But, like, what you said, I think it's like, no, it's Josh Bartlett. I think he said, always, like, partner with someone either equal or above you. And obviously above is better. And we've done that same thing. And like, yeah, you just. It's not even the connections or authority, but it's just, like the knowledge, like, you get to see behind the under the hood, the stuff that's not talked about, like the shitty moments or the weird things that happen to get a deal done that like, you typically see the finish line to something but you don't have the whole story. But like, yeah, that's the best way to get in there.

People who have, like, spent the time building authority usually also have the experience of business or like building something successful. Like, they don't generally just get authority for nothing. Like, so if you can connect and align yourself with them, but not only it raises your status, but you can also see behind the doors of what works for them and how they've become successful. And like, that's why, like, I'm a huge fan of even just like Roland Frazier as an example. I know you guys are partnered with him and you do a ton of projects with him. It's like listening to his podcast is almost like, man, I'm like sitting in a seat next to them talking about business and things and I'm like, I feel like I am behind the scenes talking with like, you know, infusionsoft CEO and like, like all these really crazy high level entrepreneurs that Roland's able to interview. Like, I'm there, like, with them. And that's why, like, honestly, I just saw and congratulations to Roland if you listen to this. But I just saw that he crossed a million downloads for Business Lunch.

Oh, I didn't even see that.

But I'll just post it like an hour ago, I think or two hours ago. But like, yeah, like, just there's a reason why like, his authority is so, like leveraged because not only does he interview other people, but yeah, he himself, like, just shares so much value and like behind the scenes and it's like, it's almost like you're just connecting with Roland at like a personal level in a way. It's like just the same with your podcast as well. It's like there's so many, like, cool, like, high level conversations and behind the scenes things and you guys get into the weeds. You don't just ask five generic questions or whatever. It's like you get into the story, you get into behind the Weeds and you're able to like levitate yourself, but also your guests and get into all of that stuff and it's such a powerful thing to do.

Yeah, man. No, I think it's. Well, it's obviously worked for you too, man. And what you started your agency, the Funnel agency, but also at the same time. So how did software come into the picture with you? That's What I'm curious here.

So I pretty much built like a small audience in the ClickFunnels space. And it was about six months after launching my funnel agency. I actually was looking for different ways on how I can improve ClickFunnels membership with an additional add on. And I found this guy just through the ClickFunnels group. And he like, you know, he's a developer and he was offering a solution and he wanted to sell it to me for like $10,000. And I'm like, okay, let me think about that. Because I was like, I was like weighing up if it would be actually valuable enough for my customers if I could sell it as an add on to my services and recoup my investment or whatever. And he came back two more times asking me about if I was interested. And I think the third or the fourth time he came back is like, do you want to partner on this? And I'm like, okay, cool, let's do it. Let's just have a go. And so that was the first iteration of Members Pro is actually a plugin for ClickFunnels because ClickFunnels sucks with their memberships. So we're just like, how can we make it better? How can we actually show student reporting? How can we send emails on certain actions? How can we date release content? How can we show content that's been complete, like with progress and gamification sort of stuff? So it's like we just, we went in above and beyond to try and make ClickFunnels a better solution for people with our platform. We quickly saw that ClickFunnels turned around and integrated the features that we were fixing. They pretty much as quickly as possible implemented the date release and the check marks and the progress statistics. It's pretty basic. They literally did a first iteration of let's get Members Pro off our ass and then they stopped there. But it was enough for us to realize we can't rely on building a business off the back of someone else's business. We need to think outside the box. What is ClickFunnels doing.

That is not a good customer experience? And how can we improve that with Members Pro? And so we actually decided to go down the path of allowing you to sync Your content from ClickFunnels into members pro and from there develop a really awesome mobile app that is optimized for any device that people want to sort of use to consume your content. So we started as like a mobile app platform for memberships and allowed you to sync content from.

ClickFunnels and Thinkific and a few other major platforms. And then we went down the path of like, if people are gonna go to the effort of creating content in Members Pro, it's like let's give them the best possible desktop experience as well. And so we went down the path of developing that and it's sort of just been like, we've been looking at like a creative way of how can we be one step ahead of the game and like how can we implement things that are just going to be game changing for the industry and the membership business as a whole. And so it's sort of been like that progress of like, you know, what's the next thing? How can we be proactive about it? How can we implement this stuff as fast as possible? Because we're not 10 year old Kajabi, we don't have funding, but we're agile and we can move fast and we can implement shit at record fast speeds. And we're the people's business, we listen to feedback, we implement feedback as soon as we can, as fast as we can, so long as it's right for the community and the people. That's sort of like how Members Pro sort of started and developed into becoming. We've still got a few steps now, but like we're going to be the best platform in 12 months, easy, hands down, we're going to be the best platform.

We know it because we've seen the roadmap.

No, we believe it. That's why we, that's why we figure out a way to partner up and work closer together, because we truly believe that for sure. But let's leave that as an open loop and we'll talk about some of the features and, and the roadmap and stuff in a few minutes. But before we go there, let's talk about some of the like. One of the topics that we thought would be a cool thing to discuss on this episode is some of the more creative ways, some of the more outside the box ways that people might use memberships, right? You've got the sort of standard obvious ones, right? You can make a very linear course that's like, here's seven modules, watch them in order. Go buy my course. Right? That's kind of like the standard, real basic way that you could kind of do with almost any of the platforms. So let's dig into some of the more outside the box ways that you might be able to use a platform like this.

Yeah, so I mean from my perspective, everyone generally is in a content business and I think when it comes down to public and membership hidden content. It's like you can do quite a few things that you can still give amazing value on the front end and the public facing end, like on YouTube or podcasts or whatever the case may be. But so any of those platforms, you can also tie in a level of.

Behind the scenes or a level of additional value if people come over to support you. And so it's not like a question of like, how can this specifically be done for this or that or that. I mean, there's obviously specific strategies for all of those, but the general strategy, like if you're a podcaster, if you're a blogger, if you're a YouTuber, if you're on Twitch streaming games, it's like, if people want to continue to support you, how can you provide additional value? That's just not something for something sake. So a lot of people will just go like, oh, you get my videos two days before everyone else does. That's pretty much BS. No one really cares. I'll just wait two days and see it on YouTube. Why would I pay you? So my perspective is how can you give additional content that people would otherwise pay for or would be willing to pay for that is going to create massive value. So if you're a gamer, maybe you might allow someone to come in and do private chats with you every month. Maybe you might provide additional behind the scenes bloopers or content around publishing that you otherwise already do that's more polished on the public facing end. So it's like thinking about like, you know, if you're a podcaster, you know, you guys do show notes that are like massively in depth, like amazing. I've actually got a whole like a stack of like the evergreen profits things back here.

I've been a subscriber for like two years.

You what? I know, yeah, you rock.

But it's like, how can you, how can you provide that information? How you guys pretty much give away all of your paid shit, like in a, in a membership as long as well as, you know, a monthly printed newsletter. Like, heck yeah, I'm gonna pay $15 a month for that. You know, and members pro. Like we tie into, you know, how you can deliver those things on a consistent basis. How can you consistently engage people who are in there and how can you provide an amazing experience so that people always want to continue to pay you? They always feel like they want to, you know, be included in this community, in this additional behind the scenes access, essentially.

Yeah. And that's, that's where I think we said at the top of the episode why everyone really should have a membership site. Even if that's not your core business model, if you're not selling into this specific thing, it's a, it's a great way to give away free content that's like behind the scenes, like you said. Like we chatted with Ryan Moran recently and he's like one of the best strategies you can do is just like record, like document your process and share that and people just love that stuff and you can give that away for free for an opt in and like boom. Third in Members Pro is a membership site now you have this captive audience and then you can do, you know, maybe cross sell some other stuff from there. Upgrade bonuses. Yeah, I think like marketers too. It's, there's so many cool things.

Yeah, totally. And I think you know those sort of things as well. It's like if people might not necessarily care about a vlog if they aren't a customer of yours as well. So it's like having like a paywall in there as well. Makes people more invested to you as a creator and therefore they're going to go and be above and beyond to be reputable, you know, represents representatives of your brand. Like I am for you guys as an example, like I'll tell everyone you're awesome. Go listen to this podcast, I'll rep your shirt, I'll talk about your paid newsletter. Like I'll do whatever I can to prop you guys up. Yeah, it's, it's not because like I just listen to your podcast. It's like I'm a fucking customer of yours, I'm a supporter of yours. Like, you know, you guys are awesome.

Yeah.

And so like having a paywall, it's not like you're just, you're asking for money from people, it's also a way of like co communicating value to people, you know, it's like how can you. They become committed and supported to my brand as well as me doing the same to them. It's a collaboration of value at the end of the day. And free customers.

Free people, people who just listen to free content. They might not be around for 10 years, but a paying customer who gets consistent value, consistent support, they're going to not only buy more from you, but they're going to be a bigger voice to rep your brand. Oh yeah. And everything that you do, evangelists and.

Super fans, all that stuff. Yeah, you like money. Can't really buy that stuff. It's value. It's the relationship. Buys that stuff.

Yeah, we've tried. We've tried.

Definitely. We tried everything.

We've tried to buy audiences. It doesn't work.

Don't do that. Yeah, don't do that anymore.

There's no. There's no reason for people to care, you know, they're not invested. Exactly.

Yeah. That they're not relevant. There's so many other bad reasons why you don't. Shouldn't buy an audience unless there really is. Yeah. Well, what other. Let's. Let's spat out, like, from your side. I know, like, talk about some membership. I just want to throw around some different ideas and, like, creative ways for people to use membership sites.

Yeah, well, there's. There's sort of two concepts that we've discussed that, that I think would be kind of interesting ways to use a membership. One is for. For podcasters.

Right.

Like, everybody seems to go to Patreon as like, here's my podcast membership. But, you know, we all kind of. I made like a little calculator to sort of break down the math on it. You'd be stupid to use Patreon if you have more than like, 30 people subscribe to your membership because they takers.

Don'T like money, obviously.

Yeah.

They take like 8% plus a 3% transaction fee. I mean, the 3% transaction fee is going to happen pretty much no matter what. Right. But they take it 8% on top of the 3% transaction fee. Yeah. So you're giving up 8, 9, 10, 11% per sale by using Patreon. And like, if, let's say you have a membership that charges 25 bucks a month, if you get over like, 30 members, it becomes like, way cheaper to just pay for a monthly membership platform. So to me, like, I love the idea of Patreon, but I never understood why people use that to have their, you know, additional creative content behind the podcast. Why do they put it there?

Basically, what you're saying is, like, people pay in Patreon to get access to bonus content, like exclusive, exclusive stuff that's behind a paywall. Patreon basically houses that. Yeah.

So, for example, if you have a podcast and you want a way for fans to support the podcast, you can say, you can support me by signing up for my. My Patreon account. And if you sign up for my Patreon account, I'm going to give you these additional bonuses every month.

Right.

And then it's essentially a glorified membership site. Once you're signed up to somebody's Patreon.

Pretty much, yes.

I mean, so, like, that Perspective mean you're at the end of the day. Like, again, if you have anything substantial, Matt's calculators, freaking awesome. We're gonna release that, by the way, like, so you guys can like see if you're a podcast or if you're a YouTuber and you're like, I'm gonna use Patreon. Because this guy uses Patreon. It's like no one cares about the platform that they're subscribing to. Like, Patreon is just a brand and it's the only reason why it's popular is because it's a well known brand. Like there's no other reason. Like, what other benefit does Patreon provide.

Besides, I would say it just solved a need that's kind of easy for people that aren't techie, they're not marketers, they just wanted to collect some cash and exchange value. But you're right, Patreon's just a name and they happen to solve that need. And they were kind of like the first ones on scene to do it. But it's your best option. No way.

At the end of the day, you're going to end up paying Patreon tens of thousands of dollars. Whereas if you get a membership platform a year, that is, if you have anything substantial. And I think Matt, your calculator almost went up to like six figures.

Yeah, I mean, I think you could plug any number in. The only numbers it didn't factor in is like, you know, on Members Pro, once you get past a certain level, then you know, it's more customized plans. So it doesn't account for any sort of like customized plans. But like, yeah, up to like, I think I made it so you could factor it up to like 50,000 members or something like that.

It becomes ridiculous at that point anyway, is like what we're trying to say. Whereas you can get a platform like Members Pro, which can do the same thing and a lot more other beneficial things that engage your customers, that provide support and allow you to follow up with them, provide a community and so on. Members Pro, it's going to cost you 1/10, maybe 1/5 of the price of what Patreon would at scale. As an example, it might be more expensive to begin because we're not taking a cut of your revenue, we're just asking for a subscription fee. But it doesn't make sense at that point to go above and beyond and go like, I'm going to build everything in Patreon because it's a brand, but there's no other real benefit there. It's like, let's get creative. And we're going to probably put some case studies together around podcasts and YouTubers and how you can actually think about outside of the box on how you can create your membership in a platform like Members Pro versus Patreon so that you can save money but earn more and have more freedom in regards to the things that you do. It just doesn't make sense at the end of the day. And if you just think a little bit outside the box and a little bit creatively, then you're able to sort of get much better results with a standalone system like members pro versus I'm going to take 10% of your revenue forever, Patreon, you know?

Yeah, no, it's just, it's crazy to me that, like, when you start comparing the numbers, it just does not make sense.

No. Well, the problem is like, a lot of them just don't know an option. Like, there hasn't really been another really good option out there.

So Joe and I, we're actually, we're in the podcasting circles. We go to all the various podcasting events. We know a lot of the big name podcasters and stuff. And when you're going to these events, that sort of thing is very underrepresented. Like the only booth there if you want to have like a membership site is Patreon. Like that's, that's who's there. There's. They're the ones who are putting themselves out there saying like, hey, if you have a podcast, we're the guys you come to to monetize it.

Right?

But most podcasters aren't in the Internet marketing world. They're not. They don't know things like click funnels and, you know, Members Pro and these various other platforms even exist because that's not the world they operate in. They operate in the podcast world. And in the podcast world, the only person putting themselves in front of that audience right now is Patreon.

Right now.

Yeah. Wait for next Pod Fest when we're allowed to be in person again.

Exactly.

We'll be there.

This is our job and our opportunity. It is exactly.

What are some of their. Maybe some quick use cases because I want to give the listener just like here's a small Borg of options of how to use a membership site. Well, really first I kind of said it quickly. Affiliate marketing bonus delivery.

Yeah, that was the one I was going to say is like, there's no platforms out there that are designed to deliver bonuses. If you're an affiliate marketer. So if, if you go and promote a product and you offer like, hey, you get these five bonuses if you buy through my link. You know, most people will just make like a page on WordPress and send them an unsecured, unprotected page, right? Where something like Members Pro. If you're already, you know, you're already paying the monthly fee for other stuff anyway, might as well put all your bonuses in there. We use teachable for that right now. But we're in the process of migrating all of our bonus stuff over to Members Pro and actually having a legit protected members area. So only people who bought through our links get access to it with some.

Other cool features that we won't say yet, but there's other implications of ways to cross sell and do all these other, like, actually sell more affiliate products within that once they're in the Members Pro platform. But let's put a pause on that until.

Yeah, so I mean, the thing I love about affiliate marketing as well, it's like you're sort of in that realm of like, these guys are almost your customers, but they're not. So it's like, it's a sense of like, I supported Matt and Joe to the product that they're promoting because I believe in them and I believe what they're saying is true. And so even though they didn't directly buy from you, they're still indoctrinated to becoming customers of yours. And so putting them in an environment that actually gives them an awesome experience and engages them in the content that you're delivering, you know, as bonuses or whatever, is just a really simple way to help them see that you guys care about them. You care about their success, you care about their experience, and you care about the future steps that you can help them take as well. And so.

We'Re sort of the only company that does think about the marketing side of once someone's actually bought, what's next? We can get into that now, but other platforms, really, they'll just have shopping stores of here's all the other courses and shit that you can buy. Pretty much it's sort of not really relevant in regards to what customers have actually bought. And it doesn't actually provide any relevance of, you know, you bought this, you know, thrive cart through me. We've given our Facebook ads course as a bonus or a traffic.

Yeah.

What's called traffic. Traffic. Yeah, Traffic hacks, as an example, like traffic hacks. You bought your traffic hacks course. Like, maybe you're interested on how to increase funnel conversion. If you're interested in ads, you know, the next logical thing is like, once you get ads working, how can you increase the performance of your funnel conversion? And that can be, you know, shown specifically as an additional product or upsell to that person. And it's not just like a generic list of here's all the shit that I produced ever, like all the other platforms do. It's actually like a tangible marketing next step on like, how can I show them and educate them on why this product is going to be the best thing for them to take next so that they continue their success path?

That's what. Yeah, because that's why, like when you described all these things and some of these features we'll get into, because what you're describing as a customer journey, like, you're straight up, like giving them the next best option in that they're kind of choosing themselves. And that's why I think, like members Pro. And you're describing it. When we first started getting to know each other in the platform, I was like, holy shit, this is like the smartest membership platform out there. Because it's literally the smartest. And like, we'll get into the features and just like the logic and the triggers and all these things, but it's like building this customized journey that kind of takes the marketing pressures off you. You don't have to be a wizard at all this shit. You just provide really good value to a community that trusts you. And it could even be, yeah, like an affiliate kind of customer that you can then sell into other kind of customer things, like affiliate stuff or in your own product.

Yeah, well, when it comes to like affiliate marketing, that is really where I think most affiliates miss the boat. Right? Is they. They don't see somebody who bought an affiliate product through you as their customer, so they don't treat them like your customer. And I think that is one of the places that I think a lot of people screw it up. It's like you buy an affiliate product, they say, hey, you're get these bonuses you buy through my link. Maybe they email you a couple days later to a Dropbox link with a bunch of shit in it and you're like, cool, thanks for just dumping some shit on me to try to go through and organize. Right? But if somebody buys an affiliate product through you and then you give them access to like a member's area that has like a specific journey that they want you to go through, people go, okay, these, like, this is actually a legit thing that they gave me when I bought this product. These guys really care about my success based on what I'm seeing here. And I think that is one of the differentiators that makes what we do with affiliate marketing work a little bit better. And I just, I don't think people think that way. They think of affiliate marketing is just like a quick, I'm going to put this out there, make some money and move on to the next thing. But, you know, I think Members Pro offers the ability to give them that customer journey, that customer experience, even if they're not technically directly your customer.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, like, even from that perspective, you know, it might be a good opportunity for you to offer additional bonus content for a small cost. But you can also position other affiliate offers. I know you guys have like, your core set of programs that you offer and believe in. Like, that's a, that's, that's a prime opportunity for you to go like, hey, I know that you're doing this. I know that with ThriveCart, you need a really solid email marketing platform. If you don't have that yet, here's all the training I've done on ActiveCampaign that's gonna help you succeed. If you want ActiveCampaign, you can sign up right here. And it just provides a next step to allow them to see you guys actually give a shit about their success and you're showing them solutions that are gonna be right. Not for them. It's not just like, here's generic solutions for every problem under the sun. It's like, no, I know that you guys now have a CART platform that has an awesome affiliate program built into it. I know that every person who sells something online needs a successful and a really smart email marketing system. Here's a solution for you. Here's training that we've done on it. Here's some strategies that we use in our own business to help get more sales and leads or whatever. And here's some training that's going to be super relevant to where you're at right now. And then, you know, here's a small offer, by the way. So it's like, it's selling so easy, tangible next step. And I mean, like most people, like, they're like, okay, cool, I sold a customer, or, you know, I've got this lead, like, I now have to follow up with them with ads, retargeting ads. I need to now follow up with them with email. No one's like really going above and beyond and like doing direct PMs unless they have a team of people, whatever the case may be, like, that's too much. And so having Members Pro, it allows you to have that other touch point that has community built into it, that has email marketing built into it for specific things that they do inside your membership. It also has. It will have push notifications and such built into it as well, which just allows multiple different touch points so that you can just give your customers the attention that they need and quite frankly deserve because they're, you know, paying you money again. It's a value exchange. It's not just like you sell this thing once and you're like, okay, cool, you know, you bought from me. See ya. It's like, no, if you nurture that relationship, it's always gonna result in more revenue, more sales, more referrals, whatever. You know, it's gonna always be there as something that's valuable for everyone.

Wasn't there? Like one of your big missions, like, was to get people to actually be successful with the content that they create and consume it and actually give them like a really good journey. But you're also providing them, like you said, with all these other ways that they can see their progress or get notifications, like their phone. Like, just the fact that you can get a app with Members Pro, you know, like actually on your phone, it's like, dude, friggin. No one else is doing that where you can send push notifications. And like, that was actually my favorite.

Feature when I first, when I first came across it. That was the one feature that I was like, the most excited about was the ability to send push notifications to somebody's phone if they signed up for your membership.

Think I mean, that I, I don't have a single course. I mean, actually James Schramko has an app, like, he's the only one that I. But like, and that's cool. Like, bravo to James. I know you're a member of James stuff too, so. But like, I. It's tough to keep track of all these courses you purchase. I mean, I don't even purchase many, but still, it's hard to keep track and like, keep top of mind. Okay, I want to keep moving forward or like, oh, shit, got distracted in something. But this gives the product owner the ability to ping someone and then get them on multiple devices. Because now you can consume everywhere and it's just another audience to really.

Yeah, I think we've officially shifted into, like, let's nerd out about some of these features.

Let's just go there.

Yeah, well, the retention thing Chris, I remember you brought it up. You use Bonjoro for a lot of stuff. I use Loom a lot, you know, for this. I've talked about it. But talk about like some.

I don't think Bonjour is what you think it is. I think you're thinking of Bomb. Bomb.

Well, Bonjouro had.

Same thing. Same.

Bonjour is the same thing.

It's basically. Yeah, same thing.

Yes. So I mean Bonjour also has like a Loom thing as well. So it's like they've gone into that realm of like having a chrome extension that you can record yourself with as well. That sort of ties into their system. So essentially, you know, customer engagement and initial retention, it's like the touch points are what matters the most. It's like if you show you care and you really are invested in success of your customers, especially if you have a membership site that is actually results based or tangible results that someone can expect. It's like if you send them a personalized video from your phone as soon as they sign up or a day after they sign up and just say, hey, look, if you guys need anything, here's our email support. You can click the button below to join our community. Please tag me, ask me any questions that you want. I'm here to support you. I'm here to help you. I really care about your success. If you have any problems or if there's content that we didn't discuss or go through, please send me a message or an email. I'm here to help and I'm here to continuously support you. Someone that receives that versus an email and then never hears from you again. Mean, who's gonna be the better customer, who's gonna be more committed in the long run and who's probably gonna be less likely to send you a refund request? Like, I've been through your course, I've completed everything. It's shit, you know, Like I don't care, you know, and there's really been no support. It's like if you don't hear from anyone or if you like pretty much sold something and then they drop off the face of the earth, it's like you're gonna feel pretty ripped off.

Yeah.

Having that initial, like let's set some initial relationship points and set that straight away or as soon as possible, they're going to be like, holy crap, these guys care. Holy crap, these guys are people that I want to learn from and continue being customers of no matter what.

So you're doing that with members, pro folks that join.

But also we're doing it for even podcast guests. I shoot a loom video and send it to them people that join, you know, as customers or any questions. And yeah, you're right. Like it's like these thank you letters come or it's like I made you made my week, my day. Or you know, you might have a customer. Like holy crap, I didn't expect that. But it's like it's no more difficult. But the fact that you're doing it for software, anybody could do that. But then like retention in general. Back to Members Pro. You have all these things that like those push notifications and apps. Yeah, yeah.

Like as far as features built into the platform to make sure people stick around. Like let's, let's talk about some of the stuff that's baked into the platform or even stuff that's kind of on the roadmap that's going to help keep your customers in the membership.

Yeah. So I mean straight away, like as soon as someone joins your program, we have like this whole automation sort of thing built out in the system where like if someone does a certain trigger then they're going to get a certain action. Whether it be like them getting a new permission for a different program or getting access to a different course, or them getting an email or an email sequence, a series of emails, or them getting a push notification or a push notification sequence or a series of push notifications, whether they're web based or browser based or in the app. But essentially that enables us to do basically anything that you can think of someone like.

They get access to your course in Members Pro and they don't do anything for 10 days. That first 10 days is pretty prime for you to actually get them in and engaged so that they can actually commit themselves to getting a result. But if someone doesn't do something in that period, it's like you should either be alerted about that or you should have something in place so you can do some touch points to get them back in track. A lot of people drop off and they just forget about doing things. We're all busy, we're all doing stuff. But if you are there consistently reminding them and, or letting them know that you're here to help or you're just sending them notifications or stuff to just bring them back to the content itself, then that's going to re engage someone into the content and the community and you know, all of the things essentially. And so, and you know, if someone even gets access and doesn't log in as an Example at all. It's like you want to hit those people up, you want to send them a notification, you want to send them an email, you want to do those things so that they can be reminded that, you know, you're here to help, your content's here to help, everything's in place to help them succeed.

I wish we had that right now for our site. Yeah. Because we know for a fact we have a lot of customers in the EGP membership, but a lot of them also don't log in. And like, we're like, what are you doing? You're missing out on like half the things, you know, like, yeah, you might get the physical newsletter in the mail, but it's like there's all this online stuff and it's tough to re engage people, man. Like you can send all the emails in the world and even send, yeah, you don't want to do personalized messages to, you know, whatever amount of customers. But like, I would kill for freaking having all these touchpoints, pushing notifications, mobile app to get people in there because I know it's going to keep our retention higher. People are probably going to buy more. They're definitely going to get more value out of the experience. It's just going to be a better thing for everybody.

So I mean, let's use that Bonjour thing as an example. Imagine someone doesn't log into your system after buying for you for 10 or 14 days, two weeks. Right. Imagine being able to put those people in a specific queue in Bonjour so that you're notified to send them a personal video to bring them back in track. And that shit can happen on automation with what Members Pro is releasing soon.

That is so powerful right there.

Well, even if you just had more of like a generic video where maybe you don't mention the person's name, you can have like a zap fire off where the link just automatically goes to them.

Right?

Yeah. Or like you can add them to a tag. You can add them into activecampaign as a customer, you know, who has a specific automation attached to them because they've got this tag. Or you can do like those sort of things where you follow up with them and in a specific way continue to give value or remind them that you're there to help.

Yeah.

And I really think this is kind of getting into what is probably the most sexiest proposition around Members Pro is all of the automation that you can do. All of the. If they do this, then trigger this. If this triggers, then make sure this happens and all of the sort of intuitive lock logic that's going to happen based on actions taken inside of the members area. So maybe let's talk about some of that kind of stuff. Like let's say somebody goes through like a module and then they complete that module. What kind of things will be able to happen after they finish a module?

So any, pretty much anything you want. Like essentially our vision, really it's not yet in place, but it's on the roadmap. But essentially our vision, if someone does a certain action like, like completing a module, completing a lesson, completing a course, we want that to then be a trigger of them being able to do anything else in the system. So whether it's granting additional access to bonus modules or giving them a certain amount of gamification points so that they get a discount on another product that you have, or even showing another product that you have as an additional upsell, but only until they've actually completed the first one. Adding them to an email list in activecampaigns so that you can follow up there or have that in your CRM over there. So just thinking about pretty much anything that you want to be able to do in the system or with other integrations, it's like we want you to be able to just go that step further and grant those things or do those actions so that people feel like, holy shit, I've just completed this course. Now I get this bonus module because I've done that. That bonus module can be designed to help them, but then also upsell them into what's next.

Yeah.

And just a really good strategic way on how to continue the customer's journey.

Yeah. And then also I was going to say just think about the implications of connecting Members Pro to Zapier. Then it's like the sky's the limit on what you could do. Right. It's like they complete this module and it's like you can then send them a text message and a direct mail piece if you wanted to. Like, this is the limit.

You know, this is where the content we're going to start creating around Members Pro will get fun because there's so many creative strategic marketing strategies for every single business owner out there.

Yeah.

That aren't thinking of this, but this is like untapped gold. I feel like for every business, like most businesses just want more new customers, but it's like think about the customers you're sitting on. Yeah. This members are this customer list. You have put them into a membership program like Members Pro or not, like go to Members Pro and not like.

Members Pro use Members Pro use it.

Because you'll actually have the smartest membership site where even if they didn't, I mean it could be a free. Yeah, subscriber, but give them bonus content that gives them value and then that branches them off into this crazy journey that's like not that hard to set up at all. It's just kind of thinking out the process basically.

Well, you could even have them like finish a course and send them a certificate of completion in the mail through, I mean like really anything. A shirt.

Yeah, send them a shirt Gamify at certain points, you know, you win a shirt.

Well, speaking of Gamify, you touched really quickly on like a point system. Can you, can you sort of go a little more in depth on what you mean there?

Yes, I mean at the end of the day, like Members Pro, we want to have the experience platform. Like we want people to feel like they're being rewarded. They're, you know, they're able to actually see tangible results for the actions that they're taking. And so whether that's completing content, courses, modules, lessons, the vault style membership stuff, like completing that stuff, or we're going to have a community aspect to the platform as well.

If it's them actually going and engaging in the community, leaving helpful replies, getting thumbs ups on the replies that they leave, we want them to be actually getting rewarded for those things. And then when certain amount of points have been reached, unlocking additional bonuses or unlocking additional discounts to products that you currently have in Members Pro. And so just thinking about it that way, where you can go like cool, this person's actually taking action, actually giving value, then how can I reward them on the back end? And maybe a certain amount of points might actually trigger a zapier notification to actually send them something in the mail. It could go to that extent. Like we're basically opening up the playing field to like you can do pretty much anything you want from certain actions in the system, whether it's points based, whether it's actions based, whatever comes to mind.

I think what's really exciting about that and one of the most difficult things about having a membership site in like a community is getting people to come back and engage. Anybody who's ever run like a membership style form forum or anything like that knows how difficult it is to get people to consistently come back. Right? Like if, if there's new threads in there, people come back and check on the thread where they asked a question, but they're not really diving in and Looking at other questions and trying to help a lot of people out. They're, you know, most people use these membership sites as a very sort of self serving. I'm gonna ask my question, come back to see if it's answered and then I'm not gonna check into the forum again. That's been our experience at least. Well, if you have like a gamification thing, you can gamify the engagement as well and sort of start to build a habit for your customers.

Right.

Start to build the habit of coming back, answering questions. Every time I answer a question inside of this membership community, I get points. These points actually can be converted into something that has real world value for.

Me or I can unlock something maybe as another course or Certain points unlock.

A bonus, certain points unlock discounts, certain points, points can be redeemed for T shirts or books or whatever. I mean it's limitless possibilities.

Yeah. And I mean we can show those journeys as well. And you can represent to your customers that this amount of points is going to equal this reward. And maybe you have a few tiers of different rewards, but then also like a hidden bonus at the end. So it's like an open loop of like, holy fuck, I want to go for that big bonus.

You call that the mystery box? Yeah, Rich Shefford, he's a. Yeah, yeah.

He'S like, I got that mystery box, don't worry.

Yeah, it was pretty good.

I haven't, I actually haven't received it in the mail, but.

It'Ll come, I'll.

Make sure of it. I'll tell Rich next time I speak to him. But yeah, no, that's a like, that's a pretty sweet. That's a. I love it.

Yeah, well, I mean just the ability to sort of artificially stimulate a community, but eventually it becomes a real community that doesn't need the artificial stimulation. You just need that sort of point injection to kick it off and get it going.

Well, I think the thing like with Members Pro as well, it's like we're going to tie all of the forum community stuff to actual content as well. And so someone asks a question in the lesson itself can always tie back to the actual community area so people can see those questions, answer those questions not only in the lessons, but in the community. And so there's always a reference point of like people helping each other no matter what. And so it doesn't matter if they don't even go into the community. They can see the questions, they can help and be helpful in the actual content itself. If it pops up, you know, that's huge. That's probably the biggest. It's not just like content or forum or posts for the sake of it, it's actually like referenced material or additional bonus material that is being added to the community. It's not just like is content for content's sake again, it's tangible stuff.

Yeah. It's integrated together and something that. Matt and I used to have a forum inside our members area, but that was custom built by you, like strung. Well, I guess a whole bunch of.

Plugins smashed to make it work.

Yeah, like that's kind of the site as it is now. It used to be way more complicated with the forum in there, but we wanted a community where we can house our customers and give them support and all that stuff. And we had issues with. Yeah, just complicated tech. Obviously Engagement was the biggest one though. But the fact like Teachable and all, like all these other platforms out there, like almost none of them have a community element built.

They have comments below the videos. That's it.

Yeah. And it's like, yeah, that's cool. But you're probably not gonna, like you said, there's probably not really an engagement there, like in terms of interaction back and forth, helping people through some issue, but like the fact that you even just have a community but then have that and then mashing them together so they speak to each other, that's already huge. I mean there's, there's a lot of big pillars here. You got that, you got the mobile app, you have all this crazy logic that's happening in the background. There's even import features, right. Like there's some easy ways to import it.

I gotta touch on that because it's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. So like when I, when I went and signed up for Teachable, we already had our membership site, right? And it had, I don't know, 500 members in it or something like that. And I went to Teachable and I said I want to move all my content to Teachable and I want to import all of my members over. And they did not have an import function at any level but their highest tier. So like you had to go buy their $300 a month plan or whatever it was to get the ability to import customers.

Right.

But every plan, no matter what level you're on, has an export feature where you can export all of your customers into a CSV if you want. So I actually emailed them, I'm like, so let me get this straight. You're Making it easier for me to bring my customers away from teachable than to actually bring customers into teachable. And they're like, well, I guess if you put it that way. It sounds a little weird, but yes, that's the way it's set up right now. You can always sign up for the $300 a month plan, import everybody out over and then downgrade your plan. And I'm like, this is stupid.

And then hope you forget to downgrade.

That's probably what they're hoping, but yeah, that is absolutely like such a ridiculous way of doing it. So Members Pro, you can import your members over and that's actually a feature that's in there right now. It's not even like a roadmap feature.

Well, the thing is like you can import people with CSVs, but you can actually import with integrations. Like you can have an automation and activecampaign set up where if you add a specific tag to a set customer list, then that's gonna run an import functionality into Members Pro, send them a specific email with their login credentials, all of that stuff. And so you can sort of start getting a bit smarter about like how people get access as well beyond just importing. And not only that, like we offer one click migration of content, not just members, but actual content from click funnels, from Teachable, from Thinkific, from Kajabi, pretty much the major platforms. You can use our Chrome extension and sync across all of the content that you have into members probably. And anyone who signs up for our yearly plans and occasionally our monthly plans, we will actually, if you don't have those platforms, if you've got something like on WordPress, we'll just migrate your stuff for you. I've got a team member that's just set on doing that. It'll log into your members area and actually move your content away from the old platform to the new platform. And it's not doing this yourself, no extra cost.

I don't know.

Well, I'm doing it myself because I want to dig in and learn more about the platform.

It's more for my own education, but that's huge.

Well, that alone both of these. But the content. I'm listening to my wife right now work with teachable.

That's your first problem.

Oh, whoa.

She listens.

That was a joke. Sorry, Heather.

Don't hurt me. She will hurt me. I know she's dangerous, but I'm scared of his wife.

Everyone is.

That's a different story.

But the fact that she's dealing with this platform and it's like there's just a lot of work to go into content like organization and just uploading and da da da da writing all this, the descriptions and stuff, the journey, uploading. And that's a point where people just are like, fuck it, I'm just going to stay there and just stick with my crappy solution over here, continue to pay my hundreds to 150amonth or whatever it is and just be like, yeah, but it's like, no, you don't have to do that. There are other ways and this is stupid. Easy.

Yeah, well, actually, sorry, I actually had a friend in. She's really well known in the clickfunnels space. She hosted all of their content on clickfunnels and they literally had to have a separate member's area for each individual product that they had because that's how clickfunnels work. Now. Not only that, like, they actually spent like three whole months migrating all of their Click Funnel stuff to Teachable. And I hit her up like at the end of the process. I'm like, why? Like, I didn't real. I didn't realize she was doing that, but I was like, why didn't you reach out? Like, we would have done migration for you to Members Pro for nothing. Like, I would have helped you out. Yeah, we literally did the same process for probably the same amount of membership areas for Steve Larson. I'm wearing a shirt right now. And we literally did it in less than a week. All of his content, from Click Funnels to Members Pro to importing all of his new customers and them having success in their new platform. That's much better mobile, optimized, faster, amazing search functionality. Like, it's just like worlds apart. And we did it in less than a week versus three months of you going out there paying people as well thousands of dollars to migrate for you just so that your customers can have a somewhat better experience. But it's not going to be the same level as your Members Pro in the next six to 12 months.

I imagine that's going to be most people who are already on a membership platform. That's going to be. Their objection is like, is the pain of moving more or less painful than the pain of sticking with my current solution?

And it just went away. Yeah.

So if that's your objection, it's gone. There is one last thing and then we can go ahead and start to wrap this thing up. One of the cool roadmap features that we've all sort of discussed, it's not in there yet, but it's something we're talking about is this concept of like a vault style membership. Right. So you've got like teachable and thinkific and these platforms that most people know, but they're very designed to consume content in a linear fashion. So module one, module two, module three, just kind of go through the list in the list they gave you. It doesn't seem like there's any membership platforms out there that I'm aware of that are designed to be sort of a vault of content, just kind of like a hub of where I keep all of my premium content, which is the type of membership site that a lot of podcasters, a lot of YouTubers, a lot of, a lot of the, more like creative marketers out there, they use that style membership and they're forced to hack together a shit ton of plugins like we do on things like WordPress because there's no hosted platforms out there that, that have more of that style. So that's another thing that we've talked about that's kind of on the roadmap that I think some people could get real excited about because I don't know if there's anything else that exists that does that.

Yeah. So I think we've got two parts to that and Matt's been really helpful for providing some, I guess, insights to how things could be set up in a different way that is beneficial to Bolt Style customers. But essentially your Members Pro wants to.

Release.

A navigational system that allows people to refine their searches for the specific content that they want to search. It's called topical navigation or faceted navigation. And basically you can set categories that people, if they want to learn about email marketing or if they want to learn about cooking vegan meals or things like that, they can click on that, refine their search and then there could be a secondary thing to the refinement that allows them to refine and just find the five videos that are really relevant to what they need to learn right now. And so vault style memberships are usually thrown out there as like the bee's knees. But in all reality it's just, it's overwhelming, it's complicated, it's too much content for people to actually try and distill and go through. And so if you can put solutions in place like Members Pro is going to be putting for you to be able to refine and just help people get to their own conclusions of what they need right now, just in time learning, then they're going to be more likely to actually get the success and the content that they need to win with you. And so we're going to be doing that as like a first step. And then we're actually going to be releasing more from like the experiential side, a version of a course that allows them to scroll through videos like you would on Netflix. So you can like just find things that are going to be specifically relevant to you. You can search through the different categories that you have. You might have a few videos in each category. They can just scroll through that stuff, whether it's linear or generically placed, they can just scroll through that stuff as they would love to, just on Netflix directly in your membership. So you can put the right video in front of them. It's going to be engaging for them to find that stuff. You can do the faceted navigation at the same time as well. And so there's like a win win of like all these different solutions.

And based on just like the fact that there's going to be triggers and various things in there, you can essentially build like a recommendation engine off of that. So, like, if they've watched these videos, recommend these videos and you know, just based on the logic that's already being baked into the platform, I would imagine you can reference that logic to make recommendations on. Like, here's the video you should watch next inside of the members area.

See, that's another thing that you hacked together is like with all these companions we have, you know, members of the EGP membership have all the companions back there. And there's a sorter kind of feature that Matt built. And it's based off of a bunch of criteria like categories like Facebook advertising, SEO, whatever. And then you have the guest names so someone who went on the show, you could filter by or you can combine things, but it's like, yeah, think about like you do that and then you have these recommended, not recommended, recommended videos, like, oh, more traffic. Like videos based off of your consumption up here. And it's totally like Netflix or Hulu. Hulu is like part of Netflix's engine though, so let's say Netflix. But it's like there's nothing out there for that right now. And there's a lot of people that are creating kind of generally content, especially podcasters and creatives in general that just like want to house the content, just make it easy to find. And right now it's kind of tough again for us. It's like we're having to hack shit together, train people to go here, like this is how you use it. It's like just it's going to be easy pretty soon with Members Pro.

Yeah, yeah. I think the best way I could sort of give a visual of what the sort of faceted navigation looks like is if you go to Amazon and you search for like anything on Amazon, then over on the left sidebar, you can actually narrow down that search. Like there'll be a list of brand names. You can select a brand name and it'll narrow down your search to only things with that brand name. And then there's like price between 1 and $25, price between 26 and $50 and you can click that. It'll narrow down your search even more. That's essentially what faceted navigation is, is you click the little boxes on the left and it further narrows down your search until you get the exact videos that are perfect for you right now. And I've never seen that in any other sort of membership platform. So I think that's something that's going to make Members Pro just blow every other option out of the water because nobody else can do that kind of thing.

And Matt, you, Matt, you guys basically pay like 47 bucks a month or something just to have that functionality alone, right?

Yeah, I mean, all in, we're paying a lot more than that. I'd say our membership just to, just because of the plugins we have. This is not even including our hosting costs, just the plugins that we use to keep our membership going. We're probably paying like 200 bucks a month for all of them to keep the thing going.

That's just the cluster of tools right there.

I just, I keep on adding functionality to the members area and every single time I think of a new feature I want to add to our members area, I have to go buy another like premium plugin to make it happen.

Whereas you could just become a customer. Members Pro make a request and we'll probably have it done in like six weeks.

Yeah, here's the thing too is Matt spends a lot of time building this stuff out as do other techie type people building at membership places. Or they just go to a place like, you know, like a teachable or something that's just. But again, you're kind of Big compromise. Yeah, huge compromise. Yeah. And then you got guys like me who, who work with a guy who's techie like Matt and then sometimes gets confused with the tech and I'm like, shit, I don't know what I'm doing back here. I need to add this customer to this thing. And I'm like, ah, I gotta like Bug mad again for this or look at some detailed sop. It's like, ah, I want Members Pro. I just want something easy, man.

For the most part, I'm kind of the only one who could backend, like, you know, manage the back end of the admin because of all, like, one wrong move and a plugin will break or something like that.

So, like, business shouldn't hinge on that one small move.

Half the time for our membership site, it's just like me making sure, like, okay, I just updated a plugin and that over there broke. So what now? Now how do I make this plugin that broke? Where goes your afternoon? And it's like, I'll spend a half a day just fixing something stupid like that, you know, and let's stop that.

Why?

There's better options out there.

All right, so unless you have anything else, let's wrap it up and give folks a chance to try it out and give them, like, a special deal to do. So. So what are you thinking, Chris?

Yeah, so you guys can head over to memberspro.com and you'll see the pricing plans page. We've actually put together a special coupon for Matt and Joe. We're not going to disclose what you're going to get. It's like a mystery coupon offer. But if you use the coupon Hustle over on the order forms over there, you can do a trial, but you'll also get an additional bonus for joining with or from this podcast as well.

Sweet. Thanks, man. Yeah, so memberspro.com select whatever looks good and then use the code word Hustle. And that'll unlock some cool stuff over there. But either way, it's a win even without the Hustle code in there. Just because you're like, you just heard this episode and it's really freaking cool. So I'm excited and.

I think in the future we got to have you back on and nerd out even further once we're really in the thick of it. All of our stuff's moved over. It's almost like a case study. I bet this guy will have a lot more free time on his hand. Matt is this guy, the guy tinkering with all of our tech.

What would be cool? Anyone who joins from here? We can have a trio episode or interview even with the people who specifically join Members Pro. And we can maybe even do a special masterclass for anyone who joins Members Pro using Hustle code. And then that's really specific for you. We can help you out on anything technical or even just show you some new strategies within the platform itself.

So we're kind of off the cuff right now, but saying like little, like kind of AMA strategies and all that stuff. Like a little special bonus thing we'll throw in there for folks once they join.

Yeah, I like, we'll have a list of people who use Hustle and we can, in probably a month or two or three, whatever, we can literally just hold a special, you know, our session with everyone and let's help you explode your membership, engage more customers, you know, increase your retention, whatever.

Like, we can nerd out with us. Yeah, man. And make the most of Members Pro and your business in general. I like it. Let's do it.

Yeah, Sounds good to me.

Sweet. All right, Members Pro. Com use Hustle as a code word. You're just going to be wowed, no doubt, by what this thing is. But, Chris, any. Anywhere else you want, you know, anything else, people should know where to check you out. Personally.

Personally, everything I do is in Members Pro. Like, that's my baby right now. So Members Pro is the place if you guys want to connect with me on Facebook. I love connecting. Just send me a message as well when you try to connect or add me as a friend just because there's like 300, 400 friend requests that I don't know who any of them are unless you send me a message these days, like, I'm not going to connect. Really?

You're big time, bro. You're big time. That's why.

But you guys are more than welcome to join the Members Pro community as well on Facebook. That's where we're hosting ours right now. We're in there every single day helping out our customers, providing new training and additional bonuses in there. That's going to become more of like an open group, not just Members Pro as customers. And so we're going to be pumping out a crap ton of content on how to actually grow and engage a membership as well. I'm starting up a podcast and also a special training series for Members Pro customers. So a lot of that content will be driven towards the Members Pro Community Facebook group. And yeah, that's where I hang out these days.

Sweet. All right, well, go check them out on Facebook. Go to memberspro.com and this has been great, man. Thank you.

No, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys.

Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that. And Matt is not here right now, but I'm. I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much. And I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time. And Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of EZ Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zeman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software, Soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle, that's H, U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle, you can go grab a free trial. And Easy Webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars, I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times, and all these crazy features in between, I can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're gonna make more money and you're gonna work less with this thing and you're gonna create better relationships with the folks that are listening because it's a good experience. You wanna give that good experience along with some great content. Of. Of course. And a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle. That's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. Alrighty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully. You did. I'm pretty sure you did. If you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance and we will talk to you next time. Bye Bye.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to listen to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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