Jeremy Weisz 17:27
How many create continuity? So they were going event to event, then how did he shift the model so it’s now continuity as opposed to just selling the next event?
Micah Mitchell 17:38
Yeah. So all of the event recordings he has in there, and he did kind of what we’re talking about, where he did a good job of getting them sorted into the right topics, so that somebody who has whichever need doesn’t have to spend forever right they can just find their spot. One kind of fascinating thing, this is kind of a sidebar that I remembered about his site that I thought was interesting, is when you log in, it starts a 20-minute timer, and then it automatically logs you out. And he basically said, because it’s financial education, and he’s really clear about his market. He’s saying, these aren’t professional day traders. These people have a primary income from somewhere else, and they’re doing some trading on the side. And therefore, I don’t want them over consuming I don’t want them sitting on here looking at stock charts all day. It’s all day. It’s actually bad for them, right? I want them to come in learn.
Jeremy Weisz 18:25
It’s like, Oh, I do with my kids iPad. It’s like, yeah, if you’re consuming more than 30 minutes, gonna shut off.
Micah Mitchell 18:32
Yeah. And it’s so interesting because it makes it’s almost like a little bit of gamification to his membership site.
Jeremy Weisz 18:40
It’s like a scarcity, like, you like, oh God, I got to get this done, or you can’t mess around.
Micah Mitchell 18:46
Exactly, yeah. And I thought that was just such a I’d never seen it before, but just such a unique idea. And it’s one of those things they were doing at their events where they would get the people in a room, give them a bunch of data to analyze, set a timer, right? And he would talk about that, like, hey, if you sit in this too long, you can only consume so much. You make the right decision. If you keep consuming, you’re going to start second-guessing and get lost, etc. And so I just thought that was such a unique and it’s like, big in the upper right corner the membership site. When you come in, it’s like clocks ticking. Pay attention.
Jeremy Weisz 19:19
I have found sites like Eventbrite and some other sites will also put a clock on me. And I’m like, I know that they’re not going to shut it off, but I’m still, like, looking at the clock countdown, and so psychologically, even though I know that, I’m still like, okay, I got to get this done. So it’s interesting, but I love what you’re saying about gamification. I made a bunch of notes, and I love the certification and badges stuff. And I just remember, even I mean, it’s just a universal principle, like, I remember I was using Fitbit. I don’t use it anymore, but when at the community feature, and I saw, like, someone leap ahead of me in the leaderboard.
I think one night was, like midnight, and I’m like, hopping on the elliptical, like, why am I doing this? It’s because someone just hopped ahead of me, and I need to get the last steps in at like, 11:59 for the day. So definitely my competitive nature came out. So I love that, the gamification, the community. I know you talk about four stages in the model. Can you break that down?
Micah Mitchell 20:30
Yeah, I’ve been doing live events, teaching membership sites. And the main problem I noticed from, let’s say, my presenter perspective, is that people are just getting ahead of themselves. They come in saying, I’m at a membership side event. It’s time to get going. And they’re like, I want to be the Tony Robbins of sewing. I need a $2,500 program and live event in Fiji. And I’m like, why? And they’re like, Well, that’s what Tony does. And they just try to transfer something they’ve seen, especially from stage, somebody shiny, who they want to be like, understandable. And so the four stages is kind of to help them say, or realize, okay, that perfect, great, big vision. Love it. Well, here’s where you’re at today, and some of the actions you can take now to kind of get on the road, versus that feeling of overwhelm. I got to write my book. I got to et cetera, et cetera.
So the four stages in simple terms, stage one is when you have one digit of members, so basically between zero and nine, and your focus is on building. So instead of dreaming, for example, instead of trying to plan out your mastermind group or your product ladder of all the things somebody could buy in the future, no, you’re just building an MVP in stage one. And this is why I tell people, hey, you know this, if you have one digital members, how many members do you have? Well, none now, but I’m going to have millions, right? And it’s like, well, okay, but how many do you have? You’re in stage one, okay? And so that pushes them to build, build a product, test a product, and until you can get more than 10 users, meaning you’re typically signing them up one on one. They might be people you know, you might be doing zoom calls or something.
That’s all you do. And so it’s kind of like you make a small product, you really talk to people to try to sell it, so that you have a quick feedback loop. And that’s stage one is about speed. You’re just trying to get out of stage one create some product that a couple people like enough to give you a couple bucks for once you’re into the two digits. Okay, I got at least 10 members. Stage two is all about sales. So most people would think, Oh, product improvement. You got 10 members. It’s proven. Let’s improve. And no, no, no, 10 doesn’t prove anything. You need to go sell till you get at least 100 typically, this means you switch the way you’re selling from zoom and phone to something online, maybe if you have access to stages or webinars or podcasts, right?
One to many sales, basically. And so the idea is, okay, you could sell it one-on-one to people you know, great, at least you pass that hurdle. Now let’s get you over 100 members using leveraged sales, or one-to-many sales. Because, frankly, if you can’t get over 100 members, the economics of the business probably fail. It’s not worth building, putting in all the hours to make a course to sell to 20 people, you’d make a little bit of money, but it’s difficult to create content, like good course-level content. So I tell people, Look, stage two is about sales. That’s all you do. And most membership site creators, course creators, author speakers, they don’t want to do that. They want to gamify. They want to add a community. They want to build a mobile app, right? Because they’re in their mind, if they have all these features, people would just buy it, no problem.
And I’m saying no, no, you actually have to do sales. You have to write, copy, test, whatever. Get above 100 members. Once you’re above 100 sorry, 99 members to 100 now you have three digits, stage three. Now it’s all about retention, and this is where it’s fun. Yeah, go gamify. Go do the live event to get your members together. Virtual event, online, great, but maybe even in person, bite the bullet, invest some money, get them together, all those things where you’re building a community, you are focusing on improving your products, you might go refilm some of the videos in that first product that got you to where you are now that you’ve had some feedback and know more, and have a little bit of money because of the 100 members.
So it’s kind of this self-funding, lean startup methodology as well, where, okay, finally, in stage three, you get a retain. And the beauty is, because you have that leveraged sales system into place that keeps feeding what you’re building up retention in. Again, that’s stage three to 999 members. Then once you hit 1000 and go into stage four. Stage four is all about ascension. So this is where you do start a mastermind. You do start gold, silver, bronze, whatever you want to call that VIP, VIP elite kind of stuff, because now you have a big enough pool of paying customers, even if they’re only paying you a little bit to say, hey, if 1% of you joined my mastermind for 1000 bucks a month. I’ve got 10 people. You don’t need big conversion percentages to launch new products and make them profitable. And so now you head into ascension knowing that I already solved retention.
That’s not a problem. That’s solid. I have my leverage sales. And not that you can’t go back to the previous stages and continue to iterate and work on them. But that’s kind of the four stages in a nutshell. And I’ll give you an example or two of where people screw this up. Hey, I have nine members. Let me launch a community. Well, no one’s there to interact with. I have 20 members. Let me launch mastermind. Well, even if you get a high percentage of those 20 members, it’s not enough people to make that those economics work out, but if you do follow this model and I’ve Dobbin, who you mentioned, he’s told me that they have this printed out and taped to the sides of the monitors of all of his project managers, because this is where all of their clients were having trouble. And I went and kind of taught their company this, and they were like, Oh, that would be useful.
And I found it useful in talking to a client, because at least the client can see, now, okay, there’s a real number. Do I have more than what number of digits of members do I have? Where am I? So I hope that all makes sense. Short version.
Jeremy Weisz 26:17
Yeah, I love that. I want to talk about the retention piece in a second. So Don’t let me forget, because you’ve been doing this for a decade, and some of the things that you, your company has done from a retention standpoint, but I do you said something about the sewing for Tony Robbins, and I thought you’ve probably seen so many unique ways people have made money. And maybe shockingly, so, what are some of the niches that you’ve seen that just, I love getting the creative juices flowing throughout people creating membership sites for whatever?
Micah Mitchell 26:56
Yeah. So the one that comes to mind immediately, that I always thought, like, is this? How is there so much money here? Because when I was doing a lot of this, I was also working on their CRM, so I saw all of their data, right? And it was bird tricks. So basically a membership site just to teach people to teach their bird, their pet bird tricks. And he was making like, a half million a year off of bird tricks. And this is a few years ago. I think it’s probably less likely to do that now, but when it was, when these sites were new, that was one that I’m just like, I wouldn’t have never thought anybody would pay a dime for that. And he’s just killing it. Let’s see, what are some other kind of funny ones? There’s been a lot of woo, woo kind of sites, right? There’s been a lot of and by that…
Jeremy Weisz 27:54
What is that? Like reading horoscopes or what?
Micah Mitchell 27:58
People have a following for whatever reason and ton of respect to them, and they’re following, like, whatever they’re into. But I’ll look at something and just not understand it at all, right? And I’m thinking, Is this a real business owner? Is this a wannabe? And then I realize, oh, they’ve got like, 10,000 people in their community actively singing their praises. I don’t get it, but somebody does. You know, there’s a market here. There’s been a lot of church groups that will use it. We’ve had a lot of sports and some interesting ones there where they have a physical facility, and then they’ll rig up cameras all over their facility, and then they’ll start basically streaming their facility. It takes them a minute to mic up their instructors and things like that, but there’s been some very successful businesses doing that, and those are always fun, because…
Jeremy Weisz 28:55
That’s really bridging the online and offline. That’s a cool use case.
Micah Mitchell 28:59
Yeah, and those people are just so passionate, like, I love sports and all that, and so seeing them, what’s cool about it too, is they have students in the class, right? It’s not just them in a camera, the social proof of, hey, I’ve got a jam in live class here. It’s almost like Peloton and things like that. We’ve had some companies incubate software. So GoSpiffy is a website. The software is called Spiffy, but it makes Spiffy order forms. And they incubated their product out of Memberium, which just means, when they were getting started, they decided, hey, we don’t need to figure out all the log and log out of our software platform. We’ll just use Memberium and we’ll put the functionality behind it. And so that was kind of cool. And they’ve grown way past us.
Jeremy Weisz 29:44
So it helps them, like, avoid custom coding and things like that. And they can use you as a back end while worrying about whatever the content or whatever the creation is going to be.
Micah Mitchell 29:55
Yeah, you think of any online product you got to manage payments. You got to manage. Logins, right? And so people are using us for those things and putting whatever behind it because of the flexibility. I think one thing we haven’t talked about that is kind of interesting I think evolution in these is the idea of group accounts or corporate accounts, where you have whichever training. And now somebody’s not just buying a membership, but they’re saying, I want five seats. I want 10 seats. And the advantage of having separate seats versus just sharing a login is now you have separate testing, right? And the admin who bought those 10 seats, they can actually see, hey, where is Sally? Did she do the training? Did she pass the quiz? Did she not?
So there’s some of that going on, and that can become pretty highly leveraged, because people will sell into I have one client, for example, who’s selling a lot into Asian countries, and they’re buying a couple 100 seats. And he had an interesting thing he did where he made the videos. We’ve tried different ranges, but for example, you can only view it five times, because otherwise he could sell them 10 seats, and they would just rotate the seats and have different people use the 10 seats, right? So that’s something out of the box, no custom coding, that we just wrapped in some Memberium short codes and said, hey, every time they watch a video set of custom like this, particular…
Jeremy Weisz 31:16
People find a way around paying for a seat.
Micah Mitchell 31:20
I know. And at the end of the day, just a side note on security, I don’t believe in online security, meaning, no matter what you do, they can just screen grab what they’re watching and share it, right? So it’s almost like you’re trying to deter the more honest, to stay honest.
Jeremy Weisz 31:37
Yeah, so thanks for sharing that. I love those examples, retention. What are the some of the things you’ve done throughout the past decade, because you’ve had customers for probably 10-plus years at this point?
Micah Mitchell 31:55
Yeah, yeah. And what’s kind of funny to me, a little bit nerdy, but they’re on the same subscription from 10 years ago, meaning they didn’t even move plans like it’s the same like thing that happened 10 years ago, and that is just billing all the way through, right? Never even talked to some of them. And I’m saying that in a good way, meaning they didn’t need help, hopefully, right? If they did, we’d help them, but doing some live events. So our first live event I actually did out in your area in Chicago, because I had a friend slash client out there with a space and that just, I had been to some of my clients live events before, but when I made myself do a live event, it was kind of a leap of faith. It was scary. The whole time I’m like, I’m never doing this again, leading up to it, right?
This is the worst. Why did I do this? And just the stress and anxiety, but having people come together and then meet with one another, and out of that first live event, we also, I basically, kind of last minute, on good advice of a different client, decided to make that live event a certification event. And so they all came and they did the event. And basically the only difference with it being a certification event is I said, hey, anybody wants to stay longer and take a test and become certified, you can do that for free here only, basically right, because it was a first-time thing. And I made the test up, like on the plane, right out and like the night before, and different things just putting down questions. So it wasn’t like, you know, it didn’t take a lot of time and energy.
And sometimes it’s great that circumstances force you, because otherwise I would have probably overthought it. So that, though it brought in these partners, and, for example, we have certified partners now for I forget when that first event was probably eight years now, we’ve had these same partners who, because they were there, they met each other, they met me, they met the other people in person, right hand to hand, face to face. There’s a totally different bond. So it may not be the, I’m talking about all this online stuff, but I’ll say taking online to offline definitely creates a much stronger bond, and then those same people online are your biggest advocates and supporters and social proof, for the other people online, who you may not get a chance to meet. So I feel like that is a big deal. We’ve always gone just over the top on support, so I don’t think anybody’s ever left us because of a lack of support in any way, shape or form.
What we normally get is people saying, we reach out to you instead of the other products, because we know you’ll help us with those other products faster than they would. It’s not even our product, but we’ll do it. And that, I think, builds a lot of trust and a lot of longevity, because they know that when, especially these clients, when it’s really important, like, let’s say, mid-launch, and you need help, you really want that support to be there. You don’t want to call and talk to a bot and be pushed off or wait 24 hours for a response to your ticket.
Jeremy Weisz 34:57
Talk about the partnerships for a second, and I know a lot of people really grow through partnerships. Very leveraged. What have you incorporated in your partnership program that’s been helpful?
Micah Mitchell 35:13
Yeah, so partnerships are kind of the core, I feel, of our marketing strategy, the term we use is sell the sellers. So there’s layers to it. I mentioned certified partners. We also have, yeah, there you go, agency partners, up at the top, they’re kind of a higher level partner. And then down the page is the certified partners. We have referral partners, normal affiliates. Yeah, and then we have our, I would say, strategic partners. So my mentor, I’ve been doing weekly, monthly calls with for now about the same 10 years. He’s always told me, take your top whatever partners and just always be there for them. So Keap, for example, I will do everything I can to sponsor any event they have, you know, to support whatever they’re trying to do, right?
And same thing for ActiveCampaign. When they did their first event, we bought up every sponsorship they would let us, yeah, we’ll sponsor every meal. We’ll sponsor the bags and so that’s in terms of partnership. The purpose of that, by the way, is just to be there when they think, hey, we have this idea. Who could we kick it around with? Hey, Memberium. These guys are supportive. Let’s talk to them, right? So I would say, the Strategic Partners is a big part of it. And then plus this that you were just hovered on there. They’re a perfect example of we look at everybody in our ecosystem as strategic partners, and so we’ve done a lot of webinars and work with plus this over the years, where we’re trying to say, hey, who is a mutual client who uses both of our products, let’s get them on and do a case study and talk about, how do they use them together in combination to make things better. And our user base is kind of more tech-savvy.
And so they’re okay using multiple products and integrating them. And when they do that, they get these cool results, right? They get these really complex, awesome automations. With these partners here. So these are mostly our certified partners. But I’d say it’s, it’s a lot more than just certified partners, meaning that when I go to these events, I hang out with these people. We go to dinner, we’ll shut things down, just kind of hanging out. And we’re such goofy, introverted nerds that we get together in person. And we’re not doing much, but we’re all enjoying it. And after all these years, I think just looking at these people on here, it’s like, I know all these people are diehards. I’ve known them for a long time, so, yeah, I think the offline is probably been one of the best things we’ve done for our partner category.
Keap for example, two months ago, I went down and I bought their customer service team lunch, like 60 people had food catered in and taught them during lunch about Memberium at my expense. All of it. It’s a great opportunity for me, right? But that’s an example of, hey, well, we’d be happy to come and teach your customer service team about Memberium, so that when people are trying to buy or get help with your product, and we can be part of that equation, you’re aware of it, right? So those are just a couple examples, but yeah, to me, I don’t want to be running around on stages all over and spending a million dollars on ads. Not that I’m against those activities by themselves, but I love having a big partner ecosystem, where if I want to do something, I can reach out to them and get support, and get access to their list and their resources and that sort of thing. And I don’t take that lightly. I don’t use it often, but it’s there when I need it.
Jeremy Weisz 38:59
I feel like Micah in that example with Keap or ActiveCampaign, you also make their software stickier, and you help with retention, because if they’re making money using that, they’re also probably less likely to switch that like Well, we already have a Memberium. It’s already integrated with our Keap, got to keep it. So I feel like there’s a symbiotic relationship there,
Micah Mitchell 39:30
Yeah, for sure, my mentor calls it a sucker fish relationship. He’s like, you’re just cleaning up all this stuff on the outside of the big fish, and they’re happy to have you, and you’re happy to be there.
Jeremy Weisz 39:43
At what point, because I always early on we talked about this before you hit record, pigeonholed you as functioning and helping with a WordPress site that uses Keap but at what point did you start working in the ActiveCampaign ecosystem too.
Micah Mitchell 40:03
Yeah, I don’t remember the exact dates. Probably something I should figure out.
Jeremy Weisz 40:07
In dates I don’t care about. It’s just interesting because I’m sure it takes a lot of coding time energy. It’s not so easy to flip a switch and like, okay, we’re gonna start integrating and helping people on Keap, I mean, on ActiveCampaign.
Micah Mitchell 40:22
Yeah. So Keap was really dominant for a long time, and then we started having this for a long time, we had just nobody leaving us, like for the first year, I don’t think we had anybody cancel at all, even, right? And we’re thinking, based on SaaS metrics, we’re killing it. Part of it was just Keap was doing really well. We’re in this nice, growing market, and at some point, as we were losing customers and pulling them on the way out, exit survey, where are you going? Oh, well, why are you canceling Memberium, because we’re canceling Keap, that was the main reason. Okay, well, within the canceling Keap reason, what’s the main reason people are canceling, they’re moving the ActiveCampaign. So we basically found this is happening.
If we don’t have some place for them to stay with us, they’re leaving us for no reason. Meaning, these people were saying, hey, if you worked with anything else, I’d do it. You know, I love Memberium, etc. It was a lot of positive feedback there. So you’re right. It wasn’t a small consideration, because, especially in my mind at the time, that was one of our best points was we worked only with Keap so when people worked with us, we didn’t have any frills. We didn’t have any extra load on your server, nothing. It was as streamlined as it could be. Just why these million-plus member sites were there. So when we went to ActiveCampaign, it was very different. We saw that, okay, this is happening. People are going there, but it’s a different kind of tool. It’s a totally different paradigm. Keap us all in one as much as possible, right?
And ActiveCampaign was no, we just want to be excellent at the campaigns and the emails and the deliverability. And I think that’s why people were going there, right? But then they had to say, well, what am I going to use for my shopping cart now? Because Keap was a shopping cart. What am I going to use for affiliates? Because Keap was the affiliates. So they — it was a little bit different. Today, we have something called Memberium Pay that we built into Memberium, because there is no built in shopping cart to ActiveCampaign, and it’s kind of a simplified payment processor, but it was a need that we built there.
Jeremy Weisz 42:25
Yeah, with ActiveCampaign came other things you needed to develop, because it wasn’t as much of an all-in-one solution.
Micah Mitchell 42:33
Exactly, yeah, and it took us a while to learn, well, what are people naturally buying? What do they want us to provide, or expect us to provide versus not, you know. And that was one of them that was just kind of a low-hanging fruit where, yeah, if we give them basic payment processing, then they just need Memberium, an ActiveCampaign, and they can run.
Jeremy Weisz 42:52
And that’s when David started to hate you, because you sold more active campaigns, which meant more development that he had to do. But how did that? And we have to talk about this, because we talk about partnership, certified partnerships with Memberium, but you have a very unique partnership, I think, model with your co-founder. So talk about that.
Micah Mitchell 43:19
Yeah. So I’ll tell you the initiation story. I was sitting in a weird little place in Belize, of all things, and David reached out to me, saying, hey, I finished this thing. I’m calling it Memberium. And he got that name from like, a domain name generator or something, and digital marketer wanted to license it. And so he said, and I’m debating between you and Digital Marketer on what to do here. And at the time, I was just doing services, and I wanted to get into products have that leverage, build SaaS and whatnot, pseudo SaaS. And so I was like, hey, man, don’t do that. Do this with me. You know, you’ll be kind of a little fish over there, but Right? And I said, and I’ll, you know, push my energy into it to grow it and make it big. And the initial contract we had together, he said, well, if we can at least make 10,000 in revenue a year, I’m happy. And we can keep doing this, right?
And I kind of told him we’re going to do more than that. I was all enthusiastic. But he’s like, no, no, no, this is great. 10,000 a year was the minimum, essentially. And so I guess, to back up and state how it works. It’s a royalty agreement. So he built and owns the product, and I have a master license and all the rights to it and pay my royalty back. And that’s had its own challenges and its own opportunities. So, obviously any siloing in the business can be a bit of a challenge. I think the opportunity actually was that because we didn’t control the product, I felt we had to overdo support, meaning, I might want him to make a change to make it more user friendly. He might not agree with that, or have time to implement it right away or whatever. And so what’s the workaround we do on the support side? And so we just became very proactive.
Tons of workarounds, tons of videos and documentation, office hours, schedule calls with us, all these things, so that the product would never be a hindrance, and that, I think had we had control the product, I don’t think I would have, not for any lack of caring, I just wouldn’t have put the same energy into support that we did, and it ended up becoming a major differentiating factor. We’ve looked at all of our five-star reviews and there’s hundreds of them, and the majority of them mentioned support. And so it’s kind of become part of our brand, semi accidentally, kind of got off in the weeds there.
Jeremy Weisz 46:01
You were saying kind of the challenges and the opportunities of this agreement, this type of agreement.
Micah Mitchell 46:09
Right. So, for example, in December, I went out to his new house in Pennsylvania just to coordinate, right, to talk about ideas in the future and all of this, especially with our 10th anniversary. So we still coordinate. We meet, we have a set monthly call. We pay a consultant to actually attend that call and help us coordinate and manage tasks and things. I think like I said, the advantage is each of us on the separate sides are trying to do our best in our own world, right? I guess the advantage is we stay in our lanes. The disadvantage is the siloing. And then some of the things that have come up as a result is we have a lot more robust processes for testing, for quality assurance, for support, or all the things surrounding the software.
And I told the team for years, we probably have the best soft skills of any software company in our space. And it became evident, like people started telling us back. But prior to that, I was telling them, none of our competitors are doing this. None of them are doing that because they think they can solve the problem through the product, which maybe they can, but having him trying to solve it through the product from his paradigm and us solve it through everything else, through ours, it was kind of just like extra energy, going into that customer experience.
Jeremy Weisz 47:30
You’re coming at it from kind of two different perspectives and two different angles. So it kind of adds to the solution. What does a company structure look like from like a team?
Micah Mitchell 47:52
So Dave and I kind of do our own thing, and then we use Upwork for everyone else, and we have forever. So right now I’ve got my two main guys have been with me about seven years. Came into the same cohort, and we used to about a year ago we were bigger. We had almost 10 on the team. And having dealt with the ongoing economic stuff, my mentors told me a few times, don’t fight the Fed, essentially saying when they want to slow things down, they’re going to slow things down eventually, right? And so seeing that happen, also seeing AI and all of those possibilities, and then also seeing where our market was, we downsized.
And it really, it hurt. It sucked. I cried. These are people I’d worked with a long time and loved and loved working with, but I was just like, yeah, this is crazy for the future of what we’re doing. And what was a surprise to me, because I thought it was going to cause the rest of us to have to grind. Everything got easier. Everything just became our service is faster, like meaning by metrics, we are doing better. I think it’s because there was a lot of middle management discussion going on, like my thought was always to overstaff So we’d never be our response times would always be a lickety split, right? But it added this extra mid layer of complexity, which once I removed. Now the three of we’re just perfectly in sync. Customers come in, like said, the first response time is actually down. We’re faster, and we’re getting more reviews from people. So and it was my mismanagement for sure and my pre hiring over hiring and putting too much into operations.
One thing I realized this was kind of another tidbit from a mentor, was, if you want to be a growth company, you have to have at least two thirds of the positions growth focused, and 1/3 operation focused. And I was like, 90% operation focused and just taking the sales as they came in, because I was lucky to be in a good market, but then I’m realizing, oh, I’ve just added all these redundancies and layers and it just wasn’t necessary. And I thought I was going to have to rehire and retrain some new people, which, again, I’d never in this company fired anyone before. So it’s not my normal thing, but the writing was on the wall, and I made that I’d heard also to make it kind of deep and decisive and all those things. And so I did, I went deep, and I did it early enough to pay everybody severance and all of that, which as Upworkers, I treat them like employees, they even though they’re through Upwork.
So paid them severance. And that was hard, but it was in hindsight, I’m so glad I did, because now, looking at the cost structure and where AI is going and all the things, it’s like, oh yeah, we can build a few bots to do what everybody was doing. But, yeah, I guess, where we were started is the unique kind of partnership perspective. And what I was going to say is where Dave initially said, hey, if we get 10,000, let’s keep doing this. It grew to where it consumed both of us and hired all these people, and just took off like a rocket, basically, which we both loved.
But when we first planned the partnership, we didn’t anticipate this was supposed to be a side thing, and so we’ve gone through a couple iterations of our agreement trying to rectify. It’s almost like growth became a challenge, where it’s like, oh, the financial model we used for compensation was based on not making a lot of money. Now it’s going nuts, and it almost becomes a disincentive to pay too much money. There’s no hunger and all these things. So it’s quite the learning experience for me, being kind of naive generally, and then not having business experience or business or entrepreneurial background, or any of those things.
Jeremy Weisz 52:02
And on the other side of things, there is, like a development team, right?
Micah Mitchell 52:08
Yeah, exactly Dave, he’s got some people working with him and is looking for more.
Jeremy Weisz 52:14
Yeah. I’m of the similar nature to you, I think Micah, where it’s kind of talking dear to me when you talk about operations, redundancy and things like that, because that’s actually how I think too, because it comes in kind of really serving the customer, right, and thinking about that. So I resonate with that. I wanted you to talk about a use case. It was a very interesting use case where someone started one and actually sold it with Tyler, I think it was what happened there.
Micah Mitchell 52:50
So Tyler Garns built a membership site full of software training videos, mostly, and he created his own methodology, which he called the way. So it’s kind of like the way to do your CRM automation with Keap. And he had an agency, so he was selling people this training. He was implementing this for people and doing live trainings with them and so on. And it’s a perfect example of what the business was worth to him, what he could collect in fees in the aftermarket right. Then Keap buying it for themselves, which they did. They bought that company from him, the membership site and the agency and everything, and now they use that same membership site that he was just selling a few courses to.
They train all of their employees, all of their partners and all of their customers with that membership site. So the payoff of that piece of intellectual property and his concept of the way, so not just the video showing the things, but the way that ties it together, because it’s a complex system, they scooped up and makes a lot more sense for them to own than for him to own. They can sell that content. They can give that content away, or bundle it in to make sales and use it, obviously, to train their customer base and make it more sticky. So it’s a cool success story for him, where, in the case study with him, he kind of shares, when I first built the membership site, I was expecting this huge launch and to make all this money, and it didn’t happen. And he said, but I sold some and so I went and I did my other business. But he said, when I looked back over time, I realized, oh, that was the most profitable thing I’d done, because I put in that work.
People came in and it’s just been automated and running. So it’s often very profitable over time. And I shared with him, yeah, I had the same experience. I thought I’m going to do this giant launch didn’t work. But looking back, it’s like, whoa, some of those people have been happily consuming and paying for quite a while now, I should do more of that, right? But yeah, in his case, for it to come around full circle, for him to sell it to the company that it was about just made so much sense. Made sense for him and them. And then now Keap has this awesome asset that I think is advantaged by not having been made inside the company. And Tyler had worked for Keap. He knows Keap very well, but making it in the aftermarket where he didn’t have to get approval for things, no politics.
He just made it for the user the most useful way he could, because he had to, or they wouldn’t buy it or stay, now they have that asset. And I just, I love that story,
Jeremy Weisz 55:30
Micah, I have one last question for you. And first of all, thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey, your lessons, your stories. It really is fascinating. And my last question is about some of your favorite tools and software, right? You’re in this space. It could be WordPress plugins. It could be software. I don’t know how you run your customer support. And we’ve talked about Keap we’ve talked about ActiveCampaign. We’ve talked about LearnDash. What are some of the other of your favorites that you use, or no others use?
Micah Mitchell 56:00
Yeah, I’ll say that Keap for me was like an instant love long, long time ago. I’ve been using it for 18 years now, and it’s got its problems, whatever, but I like the company, I like the people. But the software itself, to me was just like a revelation when I first saw it. They were so far ahead of the game, and I had done enterprise CRM software when I was very young, where I had to write, like, curl command lines to bill the monthly billing each day and things like that. And so I see this Keap thing, and I’m like, holy cow, fits all this stuff and interrelates it. And so Keap, I would say, is the main thing. And nowadays a lot of people do all that integrated CRM stuff, but to have I see, I saw it, and still do is almost AI where you program it with a bunch of rules. It’s taking in data. It’s making decisions, right? It’s a smart system. It’s the brain, the hub.
Zendesk, for sure, we started on Zendesk. We moved, I think, to two other systems trying to optimize for support, and just ended up back at Zendesk because it just has everything you need in one place. And that’s something we found, back to the comment about like the 10 person team to the two person team. It was also that the people who we kept were so good, such a players, that somebody else before I just had was throwing bodies at the issues. By having somebody really smart, they can solve it in five minutes. What would have taken a committee four hours. But Zendesk is kind of the key to that, because the number of things it does for us compared to other systems. And I didn’t know I had it so good. When I first tried other systems and moved off, I’d move off and be like, where’s this? Where’s that? Oh, it doesn’t exist.
Oh, it’s coming. It’s like, No, we can’t do that. LearnDash, for sure. The ease that you can implement the things we talked about, gamification, certification, quizzes, badges, all these points, and you might add add-ons to LearnDash, but it’s, it’s the brain of that learning management. A friend was making fun of me once at a live event we were speaking at, and he said, Micah is the only SaaS owner slash tech Luddite that I know. So I’m not like a early adopter, quick to hop on, but I have been because I was in a coaching group into chat GPT for over a year now, kind of little bit ahead of our market. Not that I was using it perfectly, but just attempting. And I’m more and more every day, not just to other tools, but just like, man, I should bounce everything I’m doing off of this. Not that I shouldn’t think for myself, but using it as a brainstorming.
Jeremy Weisz 59:00
It’s great for brainstorming. Yeah, totally.
Micah Mitchell 59:02
Yeah, exactly. So, I’m sure I could think of more, but those are the ones that come to mind.
Jeremy Weisz 59:07
Any apps on your phone. It could be productivity apps, or it could be just apps that you like,
Micah Mitchell 59:16
Really big into Spotify, both for music at the gym, podcasts the rest of the time. I love workout apps. I’ll tell my team all the time, like, if I ask somebody a question about their fitness, it’s like, oh, what app do you use? You know? And I’ll tell my team, just get yourself on an app. Forget about it like you shouldn’t be, because for me, at least, I would always be thinking, what did I do before, and what should I do now? And just so much to think about. And once I got a nap, then all of that mental power was going into the workout.
Jeremy Weisz 59:55
What app? So I someone recommended Smartwad. I use that one. Yeah. I used to use macros, and I used to use way of life. And Matt, my walk looks like it’s under armor. What are your favorite fitness apps?
Micah Mitchell 1:00:13
Mostly for me, it’s just around weight training, just to force me to do it, basically because everything else I kind of do or get through playing with my kids, but fit bot is good. Body fit is good. Under body fit, there’s a program called y3t that I’ve done over the years, and I would say it’s probably the best results from anything I’ve ever gotten, and it sucks to do, but if I simply follow that, then it’s like, okay, I’m in top shape, and I don’t have to think or do anything else four days a week. I got to do this thing. It’s gonna be horrible, but then I move on and I don’t have to think again. So I love that.
Jeremy Weisz 1:00:52
I’m gonna check it out. So, Micah, first of all, thank you. Everyone, check out memberium.com to learn more and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Micah, thanks so much.
Micah Mitchell 1:01:04
Thank you.
