A conversational interview (recorded Oct 19, 2022) describing how an organization pivoted to a paid membership model during the pandemic. James explains they rapidly built a minimum-viable paywall and subscription offering (roughly 8–10 weeks to first launch), using WordPress and Paddle for payments, led by staff including Martin, Emily Tate (managing director), and a developer named Sean. The team iterated on technology and product features to serve individual and corporate customers, receiving requests for bulk seat purchases (example: 200 seats) and growing to over 2,000 paying customers.
Questions this video answers
October 19, 2022.
About 8–10 weeks.
Paddle.
WordPress.
A developer named Sean.
Chapters
We've got fantastic content online because this one we had, best part, 10 years worth of web and written sort of video and written content on the site. And we'd always noodled around with the idea of this, of doing some sort of membership program, what might that look like? But just never. It was never a priority, you know, and all of a sudden we've got absolutely no money coming in and we're not running events anywhere. Well, I guess we're going to take a look at that idea on the backlog, then. That could be a thing. And it was. It was Martin and our now managing director, Emily Tate, who took a huge load on leading that. And fundamentally it was a case of, here's a hypothesis, but we don't know. Classic product management thinking. What's the smallest thing we can do to test this idea? Now, if I ask you, would you pay for a thing? Chances are you're going to be nice to say, yeah, that's a nice idea. You should build that. I would definitely buy it. That's very different to you actually turning up and giving me a check. Right, right. We wanted to do something in earnest to test what's the smallest thing we can do to prove that Ricardo will enter his credit card details on this site and give us some money. So the first launch on that was maybe eight, 10 weeks work, something of that sort of order. It was incredibly fast that a single dev here, a guy called Sean, who's been. It, was an absolute hero through this. So he cranked out the first version of our paywall and subscription packages, which was partially using our WordPress platform, but then also integrating things like Paddle for powering the payment side of things, that first version launched, it got out there okay. It proved it worked. So that when we can start testing more and more, like, what are the other things that people might find valuable? What are the parts we need to fine tune? And then looking more at the platform and saying, we launched this in a real hurry, there are undoubtedly some bad technology decisions in here. Let's start unpacking those and see which things we need to build better. One of the things that we're looking at is we're actually getting more and more customers coming to us from a corporate perspective and saying, we want all of our product management and all of our design people to have access to that resource. Can we buy 200 seats, please? Wow. Absolutely. That's a fantastic position for us to do, of course. Absolutely. It then brings with it the. As an organization, we want to be able to manage which of our staff have access and we want to be able to see whether or not they're making use of the online training courses and things like that. So we're starting to get a higher level of tooling required and we're looking into what kind of development is needed there, there now. It's an iterative process. It's far from done, but we've got north of 2000 paying customers on there now from a. Wow. Amazing. Wow. Congratulations, James. That's a very good result.
