Phlywheel

Let me tell you...a paid community isn't easy to grow...even when you have a free trial period! It's even more challenging to grow when what you're offering is more of a "vitamin" than a "painkiller."

So, to fully disclose, not all 100 members are paid...there is a good portion that is from our beta group (they were offered free membership for the duration of 2020). But I'm 100% counting our beta group because they are largely engaged and incredibly important to the experience of our new members!

In order to achieve our longer-term goal of 1500 paid members (monthly average) in 3 years, we will have to do a lot more to create the urgency for sign up.

Some of the things that we've learned in the 2.5 weeks we've been open are:

A. We need to create more of an urgency to move people from consideration to purchase

Lots of people love the idea of Phlywheel, but it isn't really a priority. We've heard that they want to join, but are waiting for the urgent need to arise. At least we have consideration!

To do next: experiment with creating some urgency on signing up. Right now, for instance, we're focused on selling the programming "months" as a package instead of the network as a whole - it's more limited time and it makes the offering look inexpensive... $39.99 for 4 webinars and coaching towards completion!? Nice!

B. Community is key to our best customer's heart

We don't want to waste our time on convincing people to join who aren't in our target audience. We had lots of signups from Product Hunt who came and poked around but never came back. They are likely to unsubscribe before their trial is up and this will affect our churn rate (which is pretty good right now).

Our target market? It's our most engaged community members: members who need the community of marketers to feel less alone in their roles. They come for the education and coaching, but they STAY for the community. They also bring enormous value for others and model the type of behavior we want!

To do next: focus our outbound efforts more on the community aspect and speak to the marketing teams of 1. We'll definitely need to adjust our landing pages for this audience and do some research on where to find them.

C. Ignore those that we have to convince!

This seems counterintuitive to a marketing strategy, right? Aren't we marketers supposed to focus on changing the behaviors of others? Though convincing the unconvinced may be a decent future experiment, in the early stages, we need to focus on the people who GET IT RIGHT AWAY.

My response to anyone who questions what we're doing needs to be, "It doesn't look like it's for you. All good." and then I need to move on and find those who light up when I describe what we're doing.

It's pretty cool to see someone sign up and IMMEDIATELY engage enthusiastically. It's heartbreaking to see someone sign up, poke around, then never come back (and let their trial expire).

To do next: more research on profiling the person who gets it right away. Who are they? Where do they hang out? What are their jobs to be done? How can we stick up our hands and say, "Over here!"?

So, yeah...lots of work to do, but I'm excited!

The memberships are turned on!

We've been preparing for this day for months and, yet, I still feel so woefully underprepared.

To get a sense of how ridiculously thorough we've been to get prepared:

• We hired an experienced PR firm
• ...and a SaaS launch expert
• we've been growing interest on Product Hunt - launches at 12:59 PM ET
• we ran a beta group to test our thesis (it's pretty solid! whew!)
• we've been holding excellent events to give a taste of the upcoming content
• we've run brand-awareness ads that shifted to consideration that will move - to conversion after launch (on LinkedIn, Reddit, Google, Twitter + some other more niche networks)
• we've tested messaging and set some good leading indicators and figured out some funnels
• we've been growing our new social channels
• we've made promotional and explainer videos
• we've been creating a steady stream of quality content for our blog
• we've been reaching out and building relationships in multiple communities where our future customers hang out
• we've planned a bumpin' virtual launch party WHICH IS ALSO ON MY BIRTHDAY with some really fun special (celebrity!) guests and giveaways (yes, you can sign up for free even if you don't plan on joining Phlywheel)
• we've lined up some amazing programming going forward with Tamar Huggins, April Dunford, and more...

Wish us luck! I hope our next check in is that we've achieved our first milestone of 50 paying members!

We have a total of 83 beta testers, which is great! Not everyone is active, but there is a wonderfully active core...which is pretty on par with communities in general. I'd say we have about 15-20 daily actives in the group and, from the stats, I can see that there are another 30 people who are "lurking" several times per week. We're getting great feedback and actually proving our thesis!

One of our members is particularly engaged - a SaaS business owner from Mexico. Super proud of how much he's engaging with the community, events, and content. He's attended every weekly coaching session with more and more progression each time!

Honestly, I'm holding my breath! In order to do this right, the team has put together a beta program that is fairly on par with what we're going to do for the official launch. We've created daily microlearning and weekly programming for our beta testers and are pretty much ready to roll. (gulp!)

Leading up to the beta launch, here are the steps we took:

1. Set up a Ship page on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/phlywheel/

2. I pulled together email addresses from friends (active interactions currently + "old friends"), associates (vendors and companies we've worked with who we think would be interested in Phlywheel), and those who have indicated an interest in Phlywheel (signed up for notifications in the past 3-6 months).

3. Then I carefully went through this list of nearly 500 emails and tagged them as "invite to beta" (when they've expressed direct interest), "ask if interested in beta" (for those I've had conversations with, but who haven't explicitly asked to be part of the beta), and "ask for support" (for those who are on Product Hunt - who may not be interested in the beta, but who I think would support - mostly made up of "old friends"0.

4. Last week, I sent a personal note to the "ask if interested in beta" group with information and a link for them to opt-in. When they clicked this link, they were moved to the "invite to beta" list. This ensured I didn't just send an invitation out of the blue, which would be jarring and disrespectful.

5. I also created a message on our Ship page on Product Hunt that asked for support: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/phlywheel/messages/hey-friends-we-re-building-something-and-i-d-love-your-help and imported the "ask for support" emails into PH and sent that message to this list. This was also about being respectful of people's time. I asked them for one thing...to watch out for our official PH launch in July and gave them the opportunity to "unsubscribe". Instead of unsubscribes, we gained a few more supporters!

6. We also paid for picking a date on BetaList - and got included in their daily email on Thursday. This listing: https://betalist.com/startups/phlywheel called for beta testers. We got 52 sign-ups (will be inviting 43 of them to the beta).

It's important to me to respect my contacts - even those who are friends. We ask a lot of people all of the time and there's a lot going on in the world right now.

So far, so good, but today is when we send the official beta invite, so we shall see how we fare! There is still a lot of work to be done to be 100% ready for public launch!

After going through MULTIPLE platforms (including Kajabi, Filecamp, Kontainer, Notion.so, Nuclino, Slab, Coda, Ghost, Webflow...etc etc) and sketching out what we need in a KC, we settled on Notion (thanks to @rosiesherry's awesome community resources example, which inspired me!).

I'm pretty excited about using it as our KC base - even though it's lacking lots of the features I want (such as Zapier integration, custom URL, analytics). Why? Because it's super simple to use for setting up and our future community members. :)

After looking into how to launch effectively, one thing kept coming up over and over again: being featured on Product Hunt could provide fantastic momentum for a platform like Phlywheel.

Though it isn't really our core target market, we knew we'd need to appeal to this discerning group who could be future partners and amplifiers for us.

We also needed to find a person who knows how to launch SaaS companies.

So...after doing some research, we found @NikkiElizDeMere and are super excited to be working with them!

Truly Inc. (the company behind Phlywheel) is really great at many things marketing...but we know where we fall short: PR. Over the years, I've worked with all sorts of amazing PR people and have always been in awe of their approach. You see, I suck at the whole "pitch" thing. I'm better at creating content and community...not so great at networking. (I know! It seems similar! What's up with that? It's very different.)

So, when we sat down to look at what we'd need to do to launch properly, I knew that hiring a great PR team was going to be key to reaching our target audience (who may not be as social media savvy). Super excited to work with IllumePR!

After working to build our own community platform through Wordpress (using lots of different plugins and customizing), I stepped back and reconsidered everything.

Why was I thinking about building this from scratch when there are all sorts of amazing hosted community platform options out there? I switched gears and looked into a bunch of options, from Teachable to Kajabi to Slack and beyond, but settled on Mighty Networks.

Why? Because Gina Bianchini and team put engagement at the core of the platform...which is what community is all about.