Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:06
Smart passive whatever income or whatever site is com slash you know, hosting company or whatever the hosting company is. What, I’m curious you mentioned, you know, the affiliate stuff. What conferences do you go to? Do you go to like the affiliate summits of the world and what are your favorite conferences over the years?
Blair Williams: 18:27
Well, I haven’t been to an affiliate summit in a while, I think like after, you know, during Covid, I kind of got, you know, I didn’t go to a lot of conferences during that time, of course, but I haven’t really been back yet. But I have gone to several different affiliate summits back in the day. I think the last time I went to one was probably just right before the pandemic, but yeah, and they’re close to me. I’m in southern Utah, so I just they have one in Vegas, you know, a lot of the time. So I can drive down there and just enjoy it.
But you know yeah I think Affiliate Summit’s a really good conference.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:07
What other ones from maybe on the coding aspect like WordPress?
Blair Williams: 19:12
We do a lot of. So I go to Wordcamps every year. I just went to WordCamp Europe back in June and, you know, didn’t make it to WordCamp US this year but did last year. And a big one that I went to. You know, again, I think, you know, pre-pandemic was trafficking conversion.
I’m not even sure if they’re doing them anymore. There’s another great WordPress conference. PressNomics that I think they just barely rebooted that as a great conference, you know, for like the WordPress economy kind of a thing. And so that’s one that I would, I would definitely recommend.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:00
Who are some of I’m curious about, the plugins and the people you respect in the WordPress community? Because you have a lot of, in my mind, very well known brands like with MemberPress and WishList members and being around for a long time, Easy Affiliate. What are some of the ones that you remember most? What are some of the ones that you respect the plugins and people?
Blair Williams: 20:25
Well, I’ll start with the plugins that I install on every single site. One of those is All in One SEO that’s headed by Ben Rojas. He’s a great guy. He’s part of the Awesome Motive group of plugins. You know you know Syed Balkhi is the CEO over there.
And so I look up to him a lot. And Ben is awesome. I would also say MonsterInsights which PrettyLinks and MemberPress both integrate with seamlessly. But MonsterInsights is a valuable tool. You know the CEO over there is Zach Kwarta. Or he’s the general manager. And so great great folks over there. I would say Formidable Forms. So Steve Wells is the CEO over there that is a very amazing form building plugin. I would even push it to like a rapid prototyping tool set. It’s phenomenal.
And you know, and I also love Jared Atchison over at WPForms. That is a great product as well. So if you’re looking for more you know I would say you know he calls it stupid simple contact forms. You know you go over there. It’s great.
And these are all, you know, WordPress based you know, plugins. So I would definitely recommend any of those. One, that’s not a, you know, OptinMonster is a great one that we install on all of our sites. It’s got a WordPress.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:11
Yep. We have OptinMonster.
Blair Williams: 22:11
Yeah. It’s basically like you just kind of have to have it in my opinion. I mean, if you’re running promotions or doing anything like that, it’s just it’s just critical. And another one that we’ve used, I think, in the last couple of Black Fridays has been the RafflePress from seed prod the guys, SeedPod, John Turner, he’s awesome and he’s, he’s got this RafflePress basically. You know it’s a raffle so you can do a giveaway or something like that.
I think last year we gave away a MacBook Pro and, and the idea is that you get your, you know, the entries for the, you know, you people have to go through some actions in order to get, you know, entries. So like they can share.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:01
It’s kind of like a gamified type of thing.
Blair Williams: 23:02
Yeah, it’s totally gamified. And the first year I used it, it basically just blew my mind. I was like, oh wow. Like we got a lot of like engagement and a lot of traction on this. And you have to be careful because, you know, sometimes you’ll get like the people just looking for deals kind of a thing and they’re not maybe that interested in the product or whatever.
But we’ve kind of dialed it in now where, you know, we can get the right kind of engagement. It’s really great. So those are some that I think are great. I would say on the services side, I always have to give a shout out to Pixel Jar, you know, Brandon Dove and Jeff Zinn, they’re serious experts and we’ve had well, we’ve referred, you know, people to them in the past and they just they know what they’re doing. They also have a really cool plugin called AdSanity that they use.
That is it basically allows you to put ads on your WordPress site and you can rotate ads. And we use AdSanity extensively through our efforts as well. So and I could just keep going.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:13
Keep going. I’m great. Keep going if you have them.
Blair Williams: 24:17
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:18
So the whole 60 minutes just rattle off.
Blair Williams: 24:22
Yeah. The whole the whole thing. I’m like, okay.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:24
Plugins. Yeah. They should be using 100%.
Blair Williams: 24:26
Okay, I’ll give one more plug here for seed products. SeedProd is a phenomenal page builder. Like it started off as like a maintenance. That’s John Turner. It started off as like a maintenance page kind of a thing.
And now they actually have like an AI site builder with WordPress. It’s pretty wild what they’re doing right now on seed prod. But yeah it’s phenomenal.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:57
What about themes? Do you have a like, what kind of theme companies do you look at? Because I’m sure you, I don’t know if you have to. That affects the integration and how you build things with the different themes coming out.
Blair Williams: 25:11
Yeah. Well I will say that like we historically with MemberPress, we had kind of an issue with themes just because MemberPress is a plugin and then you know, your membership pages would kind of look a little janky unless you had a designer or a developer who could, like, work with it. So we’ve actually created our own technology called ReadyLaunch that is featured in MemberPress that it actually can bypass the theme for.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:43
So whatever theme a site has they can use ready launch and they won’t mess with your thing. They can have whatever theme it is.
Blair Williams: 25:50
Yeah. And they’re just guaranteed. So you can basically it is kind of like a SaaS experience I would say like you have like you can you can change the color and the and there’s different configuration based on the page. But like you can upload your logo and that sort of thing. And so because you know, if you think about it, if you’re using WordPress as your kind of brochure site and then you went, you had a SaaS on like Kajabi or some other kind of like platform, The theme would change.
You know, it would. It would change. But we’re making it. And so, you know, they don’t have to worry about their theme. You can turn ready lunch off if you really do want to customize it to your heart’s content, as you can with WordPress.
And MemberPress has a million different what are called actions and hooks that make it easy for a developer to go in and, and, you know, modify things, actions and filters rather. Sorry. But anyway. And so it’s really, I think a really phenomenal technology. But as far as like, you know, I would say our customers use Elementor a lot. So Elementor is a really big one. Divi is a really big one. We’ve got good relationship with Divi.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:00
We use Divi. We like Divi.
Blair Williams: 27:02
Yeah, yeah. Divi is phenomenal. And so we have a good relationship with them. Beaver Builder is actually really great too. I’m really good friends with you know the guys over there.
You know those guys are great. And so I mean you know there are other, you know, kind of themes out there. I think most of our customers prefer, you know, kind of like a builder. You know, page builder kind of a theme. And so that works out for them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:32
So we’ll talk about your plugin journey. It sounded like it started with PrettyLinks. What was next?
Blair Williams: 27:41
So right after that was a plugin called Affiliate Royale, which turned out to not be a very great name for it, but it’s a full affiliate program for for.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:55
Is Easy Affiliate, like is that, did that transition from Easy Affiliate?
Blair Williams: 27:58
We basically rewrote the whole thing and then rebranded like just completely.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:02
Why wasn’t that a good name?
Blair Williams: 28:05
You’re gambling with your affiliate program.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:08
Oh I gotcha.
Blair Williams: 28:09
That was kind of the gist that we got from like our customers and the old website wasn’t that great either. It kind of looked like the carpet from a Vegas casino or something. You know, like it literally.
It literally looked like that. I was like, there was like a carpet pattern up at the top, and it looks like you’re on a casino website or something. And so I, I don’t know, I mean, I just had a crazy idea like, oh, we’re going to call it Affiliate Royale.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:34
You know, it’s funny you say that because like we did a podcast for the Prosper Show, which is like an e-commerce, it’s Amazon seller conference and James Thompson Johansen, like started it. And so, you know, they were putting us all up in a hotel. And so I, you know, treated their money like mine. So I just chose like a really inexpensive hotel in Vegas. And they’re like, Jeremy, why don’t you stay somewhere nicer?
I’m like, no, James. Like, I know you’re footing it for us. Like we’ll stay somewhere economical. We’re not going to be in the room that much. And literally it’s exactly what you described.
Just like I didn’t even want to. I slept on my clothes, on the bed. Like that’s how I’m like. I made a big mistake, James, you were right. Like I should have stayed somewhere nicer.
I felt like if I got under the covers, I would get bedbugs. So I slept in my clothes on top of the covers so I can picture. That’s probably what your site was like. So yeah.
Blair Williams: 29:33
It was bad. It didn’t smell like cigarette smoke though, like a lot of those stated.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:41
So that was what was next after that?
Blair Williams: 29:43
So then it was MemberPress. So like I basically yeah I wrote Affiliate Royale. And because I thought, oh, an affiliate program might be a little bit easier than a membership because I had had the idea for MemberPress a while ago, and ironically, it was because I had used WishList and I didn’t like it. So I was like, this thing doesn’t even protect, you know? And I’m like, I’m a developer. I should be able to do this, you know? And, you know, it’s kind of like one of those things where.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:11
It’s harder than you think”?
Blair Williams: 30:11
Yeah. You just think everything’s going to be easy when you start. And I actually appreciate.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:17
By the way, Affiliate Royale. You can see here the Easy Affiliate does come up.
Blair Williams: 30:22
So yeah yeah yeah. So we basically just transitioned anyone who was using Affiliate Royale over to the new affiliate and.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:33
But MemberPress was next?
Blair Williams: 30:36
MemberPress was next. Yeah. I had actually written kind of a proto version.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:41
What were you trying to do with it though? because you were using another tool, now you run WishList. But like at the time you weren’t. What were you needing? You know, you experienced a pain point.
Blair Williams: 30:54
I was doing client sites at the time. I still was doing client work up until probably six months into MemberPress when I was able to just go full time. So like even through PrettyLinks and, and Affiliate Royale. I was still, you know, in the grind, man. I mean, I was contracting with various, you know, kind of, you know, outfits and just started writing MemberPress on the side because I was like, you know, I can do better than this.
And I which, by the way, WishList Member was totally rewritten and it’s a phenomenal product. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bought it, you know, but like, it’s. Yeah, so so so but back in the day it was a totally different kind of technology stack and stuff. And so and so I was kind of like looking over, you know, like building it for client sites basically. So but yeah.
And I had written the first version of MemberPress. It actually sold Affiliate Royale when it came out in 20, it was 2011 when Affiliate Royale came out and it was running just kind of a bare bones version of MemberPress. That’s what was selling it. And then and then, you know, basically I was contracting and I had MemberPress almost complete in 2012, and I was working as a contractor for this.
It was like a newspaper, newspaper tech, which is a very temporary job. It was a very. But they basically were.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:29
It’s kinda like an oxymoron?
Blair Williams: 32:31
Yeah. They came to me. They came to me in like I remember it was the day after Halloween. It was November 1st, 2012. And they’re like, hey, there’s a new you know, the company’s been acquired because, you know, they were struggling, of course.
And the new owner says that if you don’t come into work because I was working from home, that you know, that you’re going to that you’re that we’re going to have to let you go. And I was like, okay, well, I guess, I guess I’m done here. Then I was like, I’m not going to go in there because I was, you know, doing all this other plugging stuff too. So I had to have contracts that were flexible. And so I remember going upstairs and telling my wife, I’m like, hey, we don’t have any income. We got to make this thing work.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:14
I hope you didn’t present it like that.
Blair Williams: 33:17
Yeah, I did.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:19
We don’t have any more income, You don’t want to start lead with that?
Blair Williams: 33:21
Yeah. I’m like. I’m like, we’re broke.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:23
You want to lead with. We’re fine. I have figured out we don’t have income. Don’t lead.
Blair Williams: 33:29
Yeah, I think I probably did, you know, say, hey, it’s going to be all right. It’ll be all right. I’m going to get this thing out and it’s going to be very successful. And by. And that was a huge motivator, man, because like by January, you know, we had it out and it was, it almost immediately started you know getting some traction which was nice.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:51
Yeah. And we’ll talk about, you know, MemberPress, you know, some of the things that work because I mean, obviously you and in all the different plugins with the members, you power a lot of different memberships. You learn a thing or two about memberships. What are some of the big mistakes people make with their memberships?
And by the way, we’re a customer. And that’s how we met actually through MemberMouse. Right. And Matt and so, you know, we’ve had various courses and everything throughout the years. And we love it. So what are some of the mistakes people you find people make with their membership sites?
Blair Williams: 34:37
Yeah, I believe that there are a lot of avoidable mistakes that people make very avoidable. One is I think people overthink their offering. You know, they overthink it. They think like, I gotta well, first of all, okay, I would say the first mistake that they make is they don’t get started soon enough. You know, like when they have an idea and they think, oh, they think, oh, I can’t do it.
It’s like, well, actually, I believe especially nowadays with AI and everything. I mean, WordPress has never been more accessible ever, you know, and so, like, you can definitely do it. But I think then people kind of overthink it. So like they’ll either overthink their offering. So like, oh, I gotta charge this amount here and then this amount there.
And then they make it complicated when it could just be like, hey, you know, I don’t know, $19 a month to get my courses or, you know, something like that and then drip them out over time. Easy peasy. Right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:41
And here’s the feature that you’ll see. So like they don’t have access to everything because people like well why you know how you charge monthly. Well yeah that’s one way people do it is they you could do like a probably here it is yearly if people want to keep creating content.
But if you don’t and you want it to drip out one from digestibility perspective from a customer. But also, you know, people can just go in and download everything and then just turn off your platform too.
Blair Williams: 36:11
Yeah. And I think drip is a really good way to avoid that happening. And we actually have some very advanced drip controls. I mean we initially when we launched MemberPress, we didn’t have courses. We just figured, hey, you can lock down anything in WordPress.
And, you know, there’s courses or whatever. And, you know, we worked with, you know, major LMS plugins as well. And it worked out great. And in 2020, we launched our own courses, you know, feature set. So MemberPress is actually also a full fledged LMS as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:44
A course creator right here.
Blair Williams: 36:45
Yeah. It’s got you can build courses, quizzes, you know, there’s grading and assignments and downloads. I mean, there’s all kinds of different, you know, things going on in or in MemberPress now And so really, you know, dripping, you know, you can drip just like random content, but you can also drip through courses as well, right? Like you can say, you know, unlock, you know, this, you know, course once they’ve finished this course kind of a thing. And so it kind of, you know, helps people to stay longer on the site for one.
And you can also, you know, lock them down basically like, so hey, unlock this next course next month or whatever. And there’s a, you know, now a new pay cycle. You can also, you know, charge based on, you know, like one time only. So if you want to do courses I’ll cart. You can charge that way.
But it’s really quite flexible at this point. And I would say if you looked at MemberPress years ago, I mean we’ve, we’ve done so much work. The product is like it’s just it’s really usable now. It’s very robust. We’ve got, I would say, the best onboarding that I’ve seen in, you know, in a WordPress plugin like this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:10
Talk about onboarding for a second. Yeah. Because onboarding in any business, you know, it could be a software, it could be a plugin, it could be an agency. What have you found that it really works well to streamline the onboarding.
Blair Williams: 38:25
Well, I mean, there’s all the off, you know, outside of plugin kind of, you know, activities like emailing. Hey, here’s a welcome email. Here’s a thank you page, that sort of thing. And so like there’s that. But there’s also like in, you know, in product onboarding I mean when we first launched MemberPress, we just basically like you’d install the plugin and have at it, we don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing or anything, but, you know, have at it.
And somehow, you know, people figured it out. It was great. But like, now, you know we have a system that walks people through it, shows them videos, short videos, by the way, not, you know, ten minute videos on what they’re doing. And it allows you to get started very quickly. And so, you know, even somebody coming, you know, we’ve had many you know, if you go to Trustpilot, you can see all of the great reviews.
But like, you know, and if you run into problems we have, we have kind of a 24 over seven AI chat. We have great support, we have a great knowledge base that we really keep up to date pretty aggressively. We have people dedicated doing that sort of thing. And so, you know, you can always get the help that you need. You know, no matter what you’re doing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:50
So is the MemberPress search. Is this a part of what is that? Do you have a plugin for that or does that need it?
Blair Williams: 39:59
Yeah. So WordPress has their own native search. But we use another. This is another product that we love. Okay.
So WP Search it will improve, it improves member or WordPress search quite dramatically actually. So I think we use Swiftype.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:20
Okay I think that’s what we use. But I’ll check out WP search too.
Blair Williams: 40:24
Yeah yeah WP Search is good. And then for our knowledge base we have a really good search in our knowledge base that is called hero or Heroic Knowledge Base and Heroic, I would recommend that to anybody who is trying to amass a knowledge base for people to search through. It’s really phenomenal.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:45
Those are huge. Yeah, yeah. So mistakes people make. They complicate the offer, right? Confused buyers don’t buy. What other mistakes do people make when they’re creating their membership or products?
Blair Williams: 41:02
Well, you know, one that I would say is that they build their entire business on a hosted platform. So like I, you know, I, I think that hosted platforms are great, you know, for people getting started. But like sometimes they run into, you know, like a bottleneck, you know, at some point. So, you know, like we have brought the SaaS experience to WordPress because it’s easy to get up and running. But like if somebody needs to, you know, change their theme or customize things in a certain way or they want to install, you know, PrettyLinks or whatever, you know, that, you know, they’re kind of limited if they’re in a, in a sandbox environment.
And so we’ve actually had a lot of people that we’ve seen in the last few years migrating over from, you know, these, these platforms, you know, not to mention, you know, the, the some of the onerous policies that you’ll see on some of them, like and and by the way, I do love the SaaS model. I think it’s, I think it’s a really phenomenal model. But like when you’re, when your entire business is running on, you know, a hosted platform, it can cause some problems, you know, like data lock in sometimes, you know, sometimes the data isn’t as easy to get out as you’d like. And some of them are actually training their eyes on your data, which we can’t even do. I, you know, when we just provide the plug in and we do provide support for it and that sort of thing, but we don’t have access to your data, you know, we don’t have access to, you know, any of that kind of stuff.
And so we’re just kind of like a partner for you rather than, you know, we’re not training our eyes on anything. Trust me, we’re good.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 42:50
Yeah. I want to talk through some examples and how people are using it, because I love getting these ideas. Before we do that, I want to, you know, talk about just how at what point did you decide, you know what, maybe it’d be interesting if I acquired a few of these other plugins as well. What was your thought around that?
Blair Williams: 43:11
Yeh. So basically, you know, I, I’ve always been a big fan of you know, Tracy and Stu over on WishList even though, you know, early on I was like, I can do better than this. But I met them later on and I was like, these are good guys. I like these guys. And so I followed, you know, WishList for many years. And basically, you know, the opportunities just kind of came up, you know, like it turns out that they were, you know, looking to sell and, and I, you know, and, and I was able to.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:43
It’s a small world and people then go, hey, I think you’d be a fit as a buyer for this.
Blair Williams: 43:49
Yeah. And, I mean, I have to give you know credit to, you know, Syed Balkhi who’s like, you know, he’s always got his pulse on the market and if you know Syed Balkhi bulky from Awesome Motive he’s acquired a lot of different companies through his growth fund. In fact MemberPress is actually part of the growth fund as well. So we’re kind of part of that group. But like you know some of these deals have kind of basically come to us.
And now we’ve kind of acquired, you know, a portfolio of different membership companies. And it’s phenomenal. So, you know, and like you talked early on, you know, I think the trickier part is like operationally, you know, like how to integrate them and that sort of thing. But you know, I feel like we’ve gotten really great, you know, resources from, from these companies. So you know, Matt Brown is one he works for us. And he’s you know, he came over from MemberMouse. And you know, just a phenomenal resource.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:49
He’s great. I love Matt.
Blair Williams: 44:50
You know yeah he’s great. But it’s been a learning process for sure. You know like you know the last thing you want to do when you acquire a company is, you know, put everyone on notice or make them think that they’re on notice, you know, because that, you know, in the big corporate world that happens a lot. But, you know, suffice it to say, you know, like Matt’s been with us, you know, for years now. He’s been with us, you know, since, you know, I guess we acquired it in 2020, the beginning of 2023.
And so, like, you know, we’ve integrated pretty well I think. And, and and we’ve got a lot of expertise in the membership space. So like I feel like we’ve pushed a lot of you know I think really great improvements to, to, you know, wish list and to MemberMouse. And we’re continuing to, you know, push the envelope on that and even AccessAlly that’s our newest kind of acquisition that happened last year and, you know, great, great people.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:51
So I mean, it seemed the reason I ask, it just seems like an obvious playbook, like you literally probably acquire every member. I mean, anyone that you want. And obviously people have to agree on, you know, value and whatever. But it seems obvious you already own a number of the biggest ones member plugins out there, right?
Blair Williams: 46:14
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think the reason it makes sense and the reason why these deals have worked is that, you know, operationally, we know what we’re doing, you know, and so, like, and we don’t have a culture of just, you know, what is it the churn and burn kind of mentality. We, we want to and we want to see these brands survive. We don’t want to see them, you know, just falter and go away. You know?
I mean, I think sometimes people have a, you know, the mentality of like, hey, I’m going to acquire my competitor. And then we’ll just, you know, get rid of it or whatever. It’s like, no, I mean, every brand appeals to a different audience. And, you know, there’s and so like, you know, we want to serve as many membership site customers as we can. We mean, the reason that we’re in this is for really the entrepreneur, for the person who is, you know, trying to get, you know, some movement and make a living off of, you know, what they know.
And it is, in my opinion, that’s one of the greatest, you know, things that we can take advantage of in our time is that, hey, I can I can sit at my, at my home office and I can make a living, or I can even sit on my couch and make a living, you know, selling what I know. And we want to facilitate that. You know, and, you know, even if it’s not if it’s not MemberPress, that’s fine. You know, we’re going to help someone through MemberMouse or AccessAlly or any other way that we can.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:51
Yeah. And I want to break down a few ways people are using these memberships, because there’s a lot of ways people use it. But you mentioned, you know, sometimes people are practitioners, like they’re Pilates or they’re yoga or they’re a doctor or they’re something it’s it’s a one. It’s you’re trading time for dollars even. It could be high time for dollars.
And the membership sites allow you to do one to many and make money without necessarily interfacing with someone. I’m sure people have, you know, things that are integrated with, oh, if you upgrade, you get my once a month group call or whatever. But I want to talk about some examples. I know we’re right at the hour. I don’t want to make you late for the next appointment. If you have a couple extra minutes. I would love to talk about shredding your body. 40 Alpha, maybe start with 40 Alpha
Blair Williams: 48:42
Yeah, 40 Alpha. That’s Funk Roberts and he has developed. He’s on WishList I think he’s been on WishList I think he told me since 2011 so much longer. You know he was there with, you know, Stu and Tracy and you know making it happen back then. But he’s got a really phenomenal fitness website that he’s run on there for years.
And he loves WishList. And he’s got kind of a really, I would say fanatical following. They have a lot of like, you know, kind of it’s a he calls it like a tribe that he has there. But the results speak for themselves. If you go, you know, look he’s got a bunch of videos on YouTube as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:30
Oh, I see. Is that him?
Blair Williams: 49:32
Yeah yeah yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:34
Oh my God. Is that him? He’s ripped. My god.
Blair Williams: 49:37
Yeah he is very ripped and you couldn’t ask for a nicer guy. Either.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:46
Easily what they did is they photoshopped Blair’s body and put this guy’s head. Let’s be honest.
Blair Williams: 49:51
That’s right. That’s that’s me, that’s me. I mean, he’s got more than a six pack. That’s like a 20 pack or something.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:00
Oh my god, that’s crazy.
Blair Williams: 50:02
Yeah, but he’s got a large, you know, kind of group and like, even to the point where I think that some of them have actually, like, tattooed his logo on their body.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:14
Wow.
Blair Williams: 50:15
Like, that’s the level of like, you know, he’s just crushing it. And he has other, you know, membership site properties out there as well. But like, yeah, this is something that people are doing right here. And you know, the thing that I would want to showcase about this is that, you know, membership sites, they don’t always like there’s a lot of content here that he has produced. But like the real stickiness comes from the community through the association with other people.
In a lot of these membership sites, you know, some of them are, I guess, purely about content. But like, you know, the community can really make a really big difference as well. And, and you know, this, these guys are doing it really well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:04
I love it. Check that out. I don’t know, there’s a couple we talked about. There’s thinking cap Pilates ology, McCance Method, which would be the best one to talk about on the MemberPress front.
Blair Williams: 51:20
Well I would say that we already talked about a fitness one. Let’s talk about The McCance Method. So McCance Method is, you know, this is a former therapist. Well, I’m sure she’s still a therapist, but she has developed a system for therapists to make more money. And so she runs her operation on MemberPress.
And I can say that they’re quite successful doing this and I’m and so and I’ve had the opportunity to, you know, have some calls with her and and chat and so they’re wanting to look at you know like I look at these sites a lot of times and I really don’t understand really what they’re doing all the time with my own product, you know, and we have limited insight into like, their data even because we’re not we’re not a hosted platform. So I learn a lot through my own customers, you know, and I would say Nicole is one of these people that, you know, she’s figured some stuff out. And so she would be a really great one to look at, you know, for her, you know, she’s got a podcast, she’s got courses, and she’s got a whole system really for helping therapists. And they’re making more money. So it’s a win-win for everyone, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:51
Is there, is there like one that sticks out is like the weirdest use case. Because you mentioned there’s a lot of ones that you would not even expect. There’s a membership community. Obviously we see there’s a fitness. This is someone coaching therapists to make more money.
The, you know, the Pilates one. I can see the health niche. Are there any just weird ones that you’re like how? I have no idea. Someone would start a membership site about this.
Blair Williams: 53:26
There’s one, so there’s one. There’s some that are like, you know, music related. I mean, we had a guy that was giving ukulele lessons. I forget the guy’s name, but there’s another one that I.
I actually met this guy last month, Joe Lieberman. He’s got a site called For Bass Players Only and it’s phenomenal. So it’s specifically targeted for people who want to learn how to play the bass and they are over the age of 50. And I mean, this guy is like an unbelievable pro like he has. He used to play with the Miami Sound machine all through the 80s, and he’s traveled all over the world, you know, playing the bass.
And he uses AccessAlly actually. But he is really fun. And the thing that is kind of it’s interesting to me because like they’re targeting this, it’s it’s a pretty specific niche, you know, like like bass players that are over 50, you know, or like, you know Funk Roberts, you know, you know, men who want to improve their body after the age of 40. So these niches are really kind of interesting to me because, I mean, you can’t really know every market in the world, but like there’s somebody out there that knows their own market, they know what they’re talking about, you know, and the way that, you know, John described it to me, he was like he was saying that he he’s like, this isn’t even for people that really want to, you know, like most of them don’t really want to perform. They just want to jam.
They just want to, like, go just jam or like, maybe they have some buddies that they can get together with and just jam out, you know? And I’m like, that is pretty cool. Like, he’s built this really successful business. You know, he’s got employees. He’s like, you know, he’s making it happen.
And it’s a pretty targeted niche. And the guy is a phenomenal expert, so it makes sense. But I would never have thought that would be, you know, like a, you know, a real you know, I mean, I didn’t I didn’t know there was a market for that. But I think it’s phenomenal. And it kind of makes me want to start playing the bass. But I’m not quite 50 yet. Okay, I’m getting there.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 55:51
You have a little gray there. You’re not quite there.
Blair Williams: 55:53
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 55:54
Yeah, I grow mine out gray too, but that’s why.
Blair Williams: 55:58
Oh, okay.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 55:58
I have one last question, Blair. First of all, thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey. This has been fantastic.
And people should check out I mean, we’ve mentioned a bunch of the sites, but if you want to go to caseproof.com and go to the products they have a list of all the ones MemberPress, Member Mouse, WishList Member, Easy Affiliate, PrettyLinks, ThirstyAffiliates, Buy Now Plus and probably they’ll add more when they start acquiring all the other member sites out there. So if you have a member site and you’re like, I don’t want to run anymore, contact Blair. Maybe they’ll buy it from you. Who knows?
But I’m curious. Some of your favorite books of all time. You know, I know I’ve heard you mention 37signals before. Are there any, like, business entrepreneur leadership books over the years that are some of your favorites?
Blair Williams: 56:54
Oh, yeah, I’ve got several. I would say that probably the granddaddy of them all is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That’s a really great one. You know, another great one that I, we use pretty heavily. You know the Traction by Gino Wickman.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 57:15
Yeah he’s been on the podcast.
Blair Williams: 57:16
Has he? He is phenomenal. We run, we use EOS at our company and it’s been and that’s been great. We’ve really gotten a handle on you know what we’re doing. So that’s a really great you know, book as well. And so yeah I would say in investing I have a really great book, The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing.
It’s pretty straightforward. But if you want, if you’re looking at like you know, you’re like, I don’t know anything about stocks or bonds or anything. And you know, you think that you have to know you have to be like an extreme expert on this to get started investing. I would recommend going to get Bogleheads’. I basically I have like a whole bunch of copies of Bogleheads, and I have a whole bunch of copies of Traction that I give out to people. So if I meet you and maybe I’ll have an extra copy for you, you know so.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 58:17
Well, I have some extra audible credits, so I’m gonna have.
Blair Williams: 58:20
There you go.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 58:21
I have Traction, I have 7 Habits in my account. The Bogleheads I do not have. So I’m going to, hopefully that’s an audible since I listen to everything.
Blair Williams: 58:29
Oh, it is okay. I just listen to these. I have the hard copy of The Bogleheads because there were some materials in there and I, I’ve kind of got through it a few times. I’m going to make one more recommendation. I know this is a lot of recommendations.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 58:43
Keep them coming.
Blair Williams: 58:43
Yeah. There’s a book called this is more of a I would call it a, like a, a mental health kind of a book. But I love listening to it on Audible particularly. It’s called Feeling Good and it’s the first book that I guess introduced cognitive behavioral therapy.
So like if you go to a, you know, a psychologist, you know, you’re going to probably do CBT. But this book has been clinically proven that it is at least as effective as like an antidepressant. So just reading the book and I would say listening to it, the guy who.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 59:27
It says David Burns. David Burns is the person?
Blair Williams: 59:30
Yes. Yes. And it’s just a really great way to look at your life. You know, we all start I know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 59:41
It’s 17 hours.
Blair Williams: 59:41
Yeah, totally. It’s a good. But here’s the thing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 59:46
There’s two of them. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. And so that must be the newer version or something. And then Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety.
Blair Williams: 59:56
Yeah that’s the one. So I haven’t read anything. You know, I know that there are a couple of other ones, but the thing that’s really great about this book is that you can just listen to a chapter and you don’t have to go necessarily in order, although maybe the first time you listen to it, but like, you know, I’ll listen to it, like if I’m out on a walk or something like that, if I’m, you know, if I’m stressed or whatever, and it really does, it’s really amazing. It’s basically, you know, don’t be so hard on yourself. Kind of a kind of a philosophy.
And, and I think we could all use some of that, you know, especially, you know, you work from home and you’re just trapped indoors all day, maybe. Or you’re, you know, I don’t know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:00:35
I mean, a lot of the people that are running companies or CEOs, founders, I mean, talk about stress, you know? So I love that I just bought both of them as you were talking. So Feeling Good and Boggleheads’ Guide. So I appreciate those recommendations. Yeah.
I want to encourage people to check out everything they’re doing at Caseproof.com products. And Blair I just want to thank you so much. This was great.
Blair Williams: 1:00:59
Yeah, it was great. Thanks for having me on.
