First subscription customer! ($900/mo, productized service) 🥳

Yesterday I sold my first subscription ($900/mo) for productized coaching/strategy. 🙌🏿

What is it?

Bonus Brain is 1 on 1, asynchronous life and business strategy. I help folks navigate the daily life of entrepreneurship - "how do I handle ______?"

Target audience is entrepreneurs with relationship-based businesses (folks I've served with this asynchronous model: small UX/UI agency owner, life coach, micro graphic design agency, private chef/caterer, high dollar digital course sales person).

Biz details thus far

• My version of the concept of asynchronous coaching came late February 2023. You can read about Bonus Brain's origin story on this post I shared on IndieHackers.

• And two weeks ago I officially went from the beta brand to this service's real home BonusBrain.io.

but today I'm celebrating after selling a bunch of one-off months of this model, I have my very first subscriber with my productized service!!

Recurring revenue, baby!

My typical one on one coaching is engagement-based and $5k-$30k depending on length of engagement and other factors. It ends up being a lot of "eat what you kill" and that feels really hard sometimes. So this feels pretty rad to have on-going income like this.

A few thoughts about this customer's use

The subscriber was someone who'd bought 1 off packages the last few months when I was still trialing the idea.

She really used the tool as intended; ie, reach out whenever she has a challenge to solve (vs in a typical coaching relationship you wait until your weekly 1 on 1 to talk to your coach).

Her inquiries are a combo of:
60% tactical ("How do I have this conversation? What's a good strategy for getting into this room? Here's the outline for a talk I've giving - thoughts?),
25% coaching (reflection, visioning, exploring challenging/not helpful thoughts, navigating discomfort with hard emotions),
and 15% consulting (me to her: "Do this, not that.")

Which is an excellent mix!
It's been less successful with high levels of coaching in this model - coaching requires a copious about of contingent communication and that's really tough to do well via voice messages over several hours.

How I got this subscriber

On Wednesday, I sent an email to all of the early users of the service (then called 30 Days of Audio-Based Coaching) inviting them to legacy pricing to the subscription ($900/mo vs the new price $1000/mo).

I've sold about $11k of single months of access but this is the very first subscriber/recurring revenue!

Challenges

Marketing

One of my on-going challenges is really nailing the marketing for this offer (vs the audience for my larger/longer engagement coaching clients). They're definitely not the same people and they don't use access to me in the same way.

I believe I've tapped out the folks I had use the beta (one subscription customer from the 6 beta customers feels solid).

And I'm hesitant to hop quickly into typical social media marketing (even thought that would probably be effective for this offer).

This week (like today) I need to decide on a game-plan and really focus on it this summer so I have data to review by the end of August.

Scope

Coaching, consulting, strategy can be a slippery thing (hard to name, hard to quantify results and hard to keep 'in scope') so I'm writing out a spec doc to help me stay within my bounds of what I can effectively offer support on and what I can't.

Near term goals

My goal is get 15, $1k subscribers by August 30, 2023. I financially support myself with coaching and am ready to move away from the traditional model. It's full steam ahead for Bonus Brain!