Joe Casabona: Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about my membership, the Creator Crew. Now, if you’re wondering how you can get ad-free extended episodes of this podcast a day early, plus access to super helpful live streams, a community of creators and small business owners, and so much more, the answer is the Creator Crew. You can head over to buildsomething.club, and for just 50 bucks a year, you can get everything I mentioned and more.
And let me tell you, I think today’s Build Something More episode with Corey, the bonus episode for members only is totally worth the price of admission. We talk about pricing and how monthly pricing for creators how it works out, how somebody would get a membership, or a value from a membership in this way, and the value to price ratio. It was a masterclass for me. And I know that members of the Creator Crew will love it.
So head over to buildsomething.club right now, and for 50 bucks a year, which is a little less than five bucks a month, you can get ad-free extended episodes of this podcast an entire day early.
All right. Now let’s get on with the show.
Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips to small business owners. It’s Episode 243. You’ll be able to find the show notes over at Howibuilt.it/243. And you’ll be able to learn about our sponsors, TextExpander and Nexcess. You’ll also hear about them later in the show.
Now a few weeks ago, we heard from John Warrillow about why we need to make subscriptions a core part of our businesses. Someone who’s done that really well is marketer and fellow creator, Corey Haines. As we recorded this episode, he was going through the biggest change his membership has ever seen. Consolidation of offerings, niching down and increasing the price, a trifecta for those who fear losing customers. But you know what? It was the best month of his membership to date. Listen on to find out why and how he did it.
Plus in what I think is the best Build Something More today, we talk about pricing—how to price as a creator, offerings, and price to value ratios. It’s a really great conversation. And I know you will learn a lot because I definitely did.
So let’s get on with the show.
Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips to small business owners. My name is Joe Casabona. It is episode 243. And today’s sponsors are Nexcess and TextExpander. You’ll hear about them later on in the show.
But today, my guest is Corey Haines, the founder of Swipe Files. And I’m really excited to talk to Corey today because I am part of his membership over at Swipe Files. He recently made some changes to it that I’m extremely interested in as somebody who’s kind of going through the same thing.
As we move from 2021 into 2022, I want to put more of a focus on creators and recurring revenue and subscriptions and things like that. So between this interview and the interview from a couple weeks ago with John Warrillow, I think this will be a nice one two punch. But first let’s bring in our guest. Corey, how are you?
Corey Haines: I’m doing well. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been exciting week, just wrapping up the pricing change, and making some updates, and kind of like looping everyone in on the vision for Swipe Files going forward. It was a crazy couple of weeks to be honest, even a couple months, really. And now I feel like I’m kind of over the hill finally. And so it feels good.
Joe Casabona: Nice.
Corey Haines: Doing good.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s awesome. Here’s the thing. Memberships are not easy. Even if you do like the easiest tech stack, which is probably like, I don’t know, just getting like Memberful or something like that, right, Memberful, Buy Me a Coffee, or whatever, Patreon, any of those, it’s still hard, right? Because you probably got to connect certain things and put out membership content. So just getting it launched is hard.
And then if you want to go through a change, which is the main thing we’re going to talk about today, now you have to think about, well, what about my current members? How am I going to make this as easy transition for them? and just a whole bunch of other things that hopefully nobody sees because it’s all going to be behind the scenes.
But first before we dive into that, why don’t you… first of all, let me just say I heard about you through a couple of other WordPress world podcasts. Joe Howard’s WPMRR podcast and then the Matt Report from Matt Medeiros. So there was that one two punch. That’s when I signed up for your membership. But why don’t you tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Corey Haines: Yeah. So my background is in b2b SaaS marketing is the world that I’ve fallen into, and also fall in love with. I really love that world. So I spent a few years in a couple of different startups. It’s like the first marketing hire essentially, and going from zero to one, and doing kind of grunt work.
The first startup I worked for was called My Crash Course Marketing. So I kind of just did anything and everything, scraping climb my way to MRR growth and some sort of marketing success. I was also the head of growth at Baremetrics for a while there. And then, for the last year or so, I’ve been out on my own, sort of made the leap into consulting and my own project, Swipe Files included.
So I’ve been doing consulting for b2b SaaS startups, mainly early stage, kind of zero to one staff, which is a very hard job just by the way. I didn’t pick the easiest. I wish it could have made my life a little bit easier. But this is the stuff I love and the people that I love.
And then Swipe Files now is also sort of my sort of membership site, sort of the category where there are courses, community, like a monthly office hours session. It started as basically like a newsletter. And as these things go, sort of has evolved over time. More recently, you know, niche back down to SaaS marketing is really my bread and butter, what I love, my roots, expertise. I can talk about that all day long. So Swipe Files is to help people, SaaS founders and marketers grow their MRR through SaaS marketing and growth tactics.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s fantastic. I know, we’ve said MRR multiple times between the two of us. MRR, monthly recurring revenue. So that’s a goal of a lot of businesses. Again, I’ll reference the episode with John Warrillow, who wrote like “Built to Sell” and the “Automatic customer.”
Corey Haines: Yeah, right.
Joe Casabona: Just stuff that you as a business owner want to do because it makes your revenue more predictable. You’re not always grinding it out to try to get a new client because you’ve got some monthly recurring revenue.
Corey Haines: Hmm. I mean, it makes your life a lot easier, especially as a creator as well. I was actually just rereading an article from Li Jin, who I think she has Atelier ventures now. She has her own VC kind of like micro funds of sorts, but she’s like all about the creative economy and sort of even coined that term, I believe.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Corey Haines: She was talking about the middle class or I guess the missing middle class for creators actually, and how there’s this power law effect where people at the top make a ginormous amount of money, absurd amount of money, millions a year, hundreds of thousands a month, and then like everyone else is basically on below minimum wage. They’re in poverty. It’s like you’re making a couple 100 bucks a month and you’re happy with like your first $1,000 in sales. So there’s this huge discrepancy and gap.
Actually one of the things that she talks about is how recurring revenue and subscriptions is a really core part to enabling and building the middle class for creators. Because if you can make $50,000 to $100,000 a year, that’s a great living for a creator. And a lot of that is easily attainable, but also usually dependent on some sort of subscription. You know, $100 to $1,000 a year in revenue per customer.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that makes perfect sense. Because you see a lot of creators… and this is not a dig at any of them that I’m about to name. But Amy Porterfield, for example, Marketing Made Simple, I loved that in the beginning. And then there was a run maybe a year, a year and a half ago, where it was like, “Oh, I spent like $100,000 on Facebook ads and I made $10 million.” I’m like, “This is not relatable to me anymore.”
Corey Haines: Right.
Joe Casabona: And to an extent I would say that Pat Flynn is a little bit similar, right?
Corey Haines: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: He’s like talking about starting these Deep Pocket Monsters YouTube channel. He’s like, “You just got to do this.” And I’m like, “Pat, you have literally thousands of people who will just follow whatever you do. Like just whatever you do.” And that’s great. That is great for them.
But I think you’re absolutely right about kind of the middle class. Maybe hopefully in a couple years, I’ll listen to this Some be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m there now.” I think there’s a lot of creators who are struggling. And you’re right memberships and subscriptions, even though people will say they’re subscription fatigued, I think people will pay for the content that adds value for them.
Corey Haines: Yeah, yeah. I mean, just one note on the subscription fatigue thing, too, I think some of that is overblown a little bit. It’s just like virtual signaling or people who like to make noise and talk about stuff, just like seeing things that rouse up and sort of are controversial.
I think that’s mainly true from a consumer perspective, because we’re seeing all sorts of streaming platforms, and you have all sorts of subscriptions that you buy, either monthly, or annually, whether it’s like insurance, or AppleCare or phone bill, Spotify, you know, whatever you’re watching for TV or streaming games, right? I think that’s true.
But I think what is missing also is you can’t conflate that with a like business subscription. Now we’re starting to see the emergence of like b2b content and b2b creators, or even just like Patreon. It’s like instead of going to Hollywood Video or Blockbuster two decades ago to go rent a movie, you’re spending five bucks a month on your favorite comedian instead. Or you’re spending 100 bucks a month to be a part of a mastermind or community to help you grow your business, or your side project, or whatever it is.
Even just like a creative outlet. Maybe it’s art or you’re really nerding out on some sort of report or newsletter. And that way, people don’t have fatigue. There’s two different worlds.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Because one, I mean, consumers you’re spending for consumption, you’re probably not making money off of your Netflix subscription. But you’re paying for entertainment there. Also the first couple of streaming services are positioned like, “Stop paying $100 a month for cable and do this instead.” And now they’re like, “Don’t pay cable, pay us directly and it’ll be like 80 bucks a month.”
Corey Haines: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: We’re going to get into this in a minute, because I think this is kind of the core of what we’re talking about. You’re repositioning your membership a little bit, or maybe like scaling it back down and giving it more focus. I’m doing the same thing, where I was just kind of like, “Pay me and I’ll create extra stuff.” And now I’m like, “Who can I help? What’s my value proposition? And what makes it worth paying me 5, 10, 15 bucks a month to small business owners or creators?” So with that, let’s talk about Swipe Files a little bit. First of all, what is a swipe file?
Corey Haines: So a swipe file is a word that marketers made up to describe basically what a lot of other people do in other industries. So designers will have like a mood board, writers will have zettelkasten, or authors will have zettelkasten. Today the hot word is like building a second brain. We’re kind of saving and organizing information in a way where you can reference it later.
So swipe file is basically that for marketing. So you’re saving ads, emails, landing pages, you’re taking little snippets of texts, and copywriting and images, and things that you find that are interesting that you can reference later.
So the original idea was I was curating a swipe file with detailed commentary about why something works or doesn’t work. I still have that. It’s still a part of it. In fact, I’d like to get back to that one day. Now it’s sort of evolved past that. So Swipe Files was more like a brand, more than a literal descriptor of what people can get. But yeah, to answer your question, that’s what a swipe file is.
Joe Casabona: Got you. So the name kind of originated from the charge that you were making your swipe files, like publicly available at some price, right?
Corey Haines: Exactly. Yeah, there’s multiple swipe files, there is the landing page swipe file, the ad swipe file, the email swipe file, and then you had like the b2b swipe file, and then you had the b2c, the ecommerce swipe files. So swipe files, plural, you can reference multiple different swipe files, which is still true to a certain degree. But it’s this dragony word that us marketers know.
Joe Casabona: And that’s fantastic because I think it lends itself to kind of maybe one pillar of what could be a good subscription or membership, which is curation. Right?
Corey Haines: Totally.
Joe Casabona: Maybe it’s just in the people I talked to, but I think that’s really under underestimated. I think a lot of people think they need to put out original content. But finding and curating content could be harder and maybe more valuable, right?
Corey Haines: Oh, yeah. I think especially the kind of framework or the rule of thumb that I used to think about it is, in whatever space or industry or thing that you’re in, if there’s just an abundance of it, then curation becomes more important.
So you think about on a spectrum, if there’s a lot of abundance of this thing, then curation follows with importance. If there’s low abundance or there’s no abundance of, there’s sort of scarcity on the other end of the spectrum, then curation really doesn’t have all that much importance, because naturally, it’s easier to find content if there’s only 10 things to filter through.
Today, usually, in basically every industry, there’s a lot of saturation, there’s a lot of abundance, there’s a lot of content. And so curation… and probably, you know, it’s not going to go the other way, right? There’s only going to be more and more. So we’re sort of past the phase where curation wasn’t important. Now, pretty much forever more curation is going to be very important.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. I guess this is not really the same. But I was talking to my brother about this and I was kind of explaining… this is a slightly weird tangent, but like Rule 34, if you can think of it, it exists on the internet. I would advise you not googling that, everybody whose listening. But it’s like kind of the same thing. If people are thinking about something and they can easily publish it via Twitter or whatever, there’s room for curation.
Again, in the WordPress space, I think we’re seeing I’m subscribed to like a bunch of newsletters, and a lot of them cover the same stories. So for my bi weekly WordPress-based podcast, I’m trying to highlight the big stories and then focus on kind of something else. “You heard about all this other stuff in these other places, here’s my take on maybe a road less followed.”
Corey Haines: Yeah, yeah. Similarly I think one step beyond curation is that sort of analysis and distillation piece where then you’re like, “Not only will I tell you what to go read, I will also read it for you and tell you what is important about this thing.” And that way you’re taking even more work out of the whole process.
I even just recently went through this with NFTs because I was like, “This is fun. This is interesting. I’m not like super intuitive but I want to follow along.” And there’s literally hundreds of new projects launching every single day. And the websites where you can follow along, it’s like a Twitter feed. It’s just like every second you refresh and there’s like a few more things that you need to go click through.
Like, I would literally pay 10 bucks a month if someone could just be like, “Here’s all the interesting things summarized.” And then I don’t have to worry about all the other stuff that I have to sift through. And that way it’s not consuming me, like I have to spend all this time looking through to find it. It’s already packaged up for me. And even like you said, too, if they analyze and “these are the hot projects, these are not ones,” you know, again, that’s where the curation and analysis piece really becomes valuable.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And then you can screenshot those curated pieces and mint them and sell them as a [inaudible 00:18:33]. That’s how it works.
Corey Haines: That’s how it works, for sure.
Joe Casabona: I take a picture of a receipt of a thing I bought, and now you have that picture.
Corey Haines: Yeah. Take picture; step two, question mark; step three, profit.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Corey Haines: It’s as simple as that.
Joe Casabona: Perfect. I think it’s Morning Brew has a pretty good like free list of their coverage of crypto and NFTs. I’ll have to find it for the show notes. But Morning Brew, speaking of curation, has been like my favorite newsletter in the morning. I got those joggers coming in.
Corey Haines: Nice. That’s a high tier reward, isn’t it?
Joe Casabona: They were doing it for like… A couple weeks ago they were saying, “Just refer five people this week and we’ll send you joggers. It has to be five new people.” And I have a big family. So I was just like, “Everyone sign up for this. I want these sweat pants.”
Corey Haines: Amazing. Those who have a big family, right?
Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly.
Corey Haines: You get all the reward milestones.
Joe Casabona: I’ve got both my parents and I’ve got three brothers. Boom. That’s five.
Corey Haines: There you go. Easy peasy.
Joe Casabona: They made it a little bit harder because you got to go through their onboarding process. But luckily my family persevered and I have sweatpants because of it. I’ll link my affiliate link to Morning Brew.
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Joe Casabona: So Swipe Files kind of started off as this one thing or a newsletter, then it turned into this one thing, and then you have this membership. I mean, I think people who have listened to this show for a long time know I’m not a marketer. In fact, marketing is my absolute weakest skill. I can build stuff on the web, I’m great at talking, and… I can’t think of third things for the rule of three. But marketing is just my worst.
So I guess my question is, how did you hook people like me in Swipe Files? Maybe you don’t know the answer to this, maybe it’s hard. But I feel like—we touched on this—you kind of expanded Swipe Files out and then are contracting it now. Is that right?
Corey Haines: Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, it started as just like anyone who wants to learn marketing, get better at marketing. And then with the community aspect as well, when they introduced that, it was, “If you’re remotely interested meeting other people, interested in the marketing, join this community and you’ll be connected and you can sort of meet those types of people and learn through osmosis.” Kind of the proximity rule a little bit.
But now it’s contracting back down to SaaS marketing. So it’s mainly kind of these three personas of founders, SaaS marketers, or the in house marketers or freelance marketers, and then like agency owners and service providers, product and services. People who are in the space but aren’t in a company, they service a SaaS company.
And it evolved again, from like I had like these disparate courses I had created, I had the community, I had the newsletter, I had telegrams and stuff like that. Now, it’s all being bundled into one single membership. That includes all the courses. So the two I have already created, including one I’m now in the process of creating, this office hours kind of monthly session, which is a new…
Basically I do like the first half is a new kind of innovative tactic. Second half is questions and answers that way people have direct access to me, and they can get their questions answered, whether it’s urgent or not. And then the community. So that’s also for anything else. People want to get connected, they’re looking for help, they have a question, they want input, they need a form filled out, things like that. They can just share what they’re working on and just feel connected, Build Something community. So that’s the memberships kind of those three core components now.
Joe Casabona: Great. And as you said, that’s all included in one price now, right?
Corey Haines: Yeah, in one tier. Previously, I had played around with a couple of different parts. I started with a monthly, quarterly, and annual subscription. The annual subscription starting at $99 a year and then the monthly at like $29 a month because I knew they would have higher churn. And if you want to just like come in and basically pay for a paid trial, then that’s essentially what they could do.
Quickly got rid of the monthly and quarterly, just like the annual. And then I also experimented with tacking on the courses into what I call the All-Access membership. So $399 once, then renew it into $99 a year. Because someone could come in and binge all the content and peace out and out on the gate 99 bucks. And so that sucks. So I had to charge more for that.
Now, just recently in the last week, increased the base membership, which is the single membership tier now. There was pro, all-access is $299 a year. Partly also because, one, I feel like the value proposition is very clear. But two… it was actually… I had started with my Creator mastermind. I’m a part of a group of I think seven… maybe it’s five other people. I can’t remember. There’s either six or eight of us.
I actually feel like I’m like the lowest part of the totem pole on the rankings of how well people are doing. But we’re all in a similar stage of high five figures; low six figures revenue. We are not famous by any means. But we’re successful and have some sort of following.
So we do this monthly meeting on mastermind, and I had sort of brought up my topics and everyone was like, “Wait, so why don’t you just focus on SaaS marketing, blah, blah.” I was like fumbling with my words. “I don’t really have like a great reason, especially now.” They’re like, “Wait, so why are you only charging 99 bucks a year? You’re providing way more value. This can literally generate millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue and you’re charging 100 bucks a year. People would pay way more. You need to paid way more.” I was like, “Yeah, you’re right.” So I’m following that. I’m listening to them trusting my trusted advisors and friends.
And eventually, actually, in December, it’s going to go up to 499 a year. I think that’s probably where it’ll stay. They were actually really pushing for $1,000 to $2,000 a year. Because then there’s a very clear business use case of if you’re a SaaS company, you want to grow like… literally, if you go to my membership page, the value proposition is, “Hey, want your MRR graph to look like this?” And it’s a picture of an MRR graph that’s up into the right. Which is what everyone wants. They want to see consistent growth. They want to have a plan, a marketing engine that works for them.
And that’s what I teach people how to do. And so there’s a ton a ton of value in there where the ROI can be had in a month. It’s a very quick time to value if they just go and implement even a few things. So that was kind of the impetus and genesis story for making that change.
Joe Casabona: God, I love that. So, first of all, your mastermind advise, maybe in Build Something More we could talk about masterminds. But first of all, you said your value proposition was very clear. I think this is something that’s really important. That is an afterthought for a lot of people who are like, “I’ll just charge a membership because I’ve seen…” I mean, especially since I’ve been thinking about it, I tried to launch my first one in like 2017 after my podcast hit like 50,000 downloads in nine months. I mean, I was told that was a lot. That’s a lot.
But that doesn’t convert to people willing to throw money at you. And I just kind of stole other people’s perks. And that’s not what you should do either. And so when I relaunched my membership in January, I kind of thought, “Why are people listening? Five bucks a month for extra content, I think is good.”
I also had this other membership at Creator Courses where I sell all of my courses in a membership. And so now I want to bring them all together under the banner of the Creator Crew is probably what I’m going to call it. And I’m going to focus on helping creators create more easily, helping creators make money creating content. But that’s more than just like, give me money to create content.
I literally read a website copy recently that was like, “Give us money to pay our salaries.” And I’m like, That’s not a value proposition. Everybody wants to get paid to do what they want to do.
Corey Haines: Yeah, I mean, you have to map it back to what people want. People are very inherently selfish. So always the question is, well, what’s in it for me? Like, what do I get out of this relationship? Because it’s a two sided exchange. So I give you money, what do I get in return?
And the funny part is that I think that actually, you know, early on Patreon was really onto something because it was basically like donations, but for nonprofits for creators and artists and comedians. It was just like, “Yeah, if you like this person, you want to see them succeed, pay $1 a month, $2 a month, 5 bucks a month. If you’re like a baller and you want some sort of like badge of honor, pay 100 bucks a month.”
But then they’re like, There wasn’t much that the creator was on the hook to deliver on. Now, that sort of changed. I think that’s because there’s an abundance of creators these days. So now it’s like, “Well, you want my money and you want my money, why would I give it to you? I only have so many.” And that’s kind of where the subscription fatigue quote unquote comes in a little bit.
But you have to have a really clear and tight value proposition and it has to map back to you. What is the transformation that you’re helping people achieve? Like, what is the value that they’re getting out of the thing? Its value proposition. What are you proposing will bring value to their life?
I mean, even for me as a marketer, it’s hard to really distill down on how am I helping people and how do I package this up and then talk about this in a way that’s compelling and interesting and unique. I think, especially marketing your own products is really, really tough because you get inside your head, and you can’t see the forest, the trees, and you’re sort of in the weeds, and you don’t really know how other people think about it.
So I mean, a quick hack for that if you just go ask other people to describe your product and the value for you, either through a survey or through conversations, or emails, or DMS, stuff like that. But for me, when I knew that I wanted to niche down and focus again on SaaS marketing, I’d spent like literally an hour just sitting here in this desk chair thinking like, “Like if I really had to distill it down, how could I package this up and communicate this in a way that’s so crystal clear that this is ultimately the thing that people want?”
So there’s a few different levels like to nerd out here for a second of like value propositions. You have the basically with a feature or the functional value of something. And that would be like, you know, we’re using Zencastr. And that’s like you describe the value as recordings in the browser, or something about stability or uptime, or something about like video streaming.
Joe Casabona: I don’t have to tell my guests to record their own audio, because Zencastr does it for me or whatever.
Corey Haines: So that would be a level up. That’s kind of a next level where it’s like a social value. So now it’s kind of like, how does this relate to other people, to how other people view you, to your relationship with other people? So for me, you’re like, “Hey, you don’t have to do X, Y, and Z, because Zencastr will do the video streaming, or I’ll do the local recording for you.
And then we have like an emotional value, which is sort of like the peace of mind that it gives you or the feeling of triumph or a victory. And at the very top, it’s basically like, this is ultimately the transformation that you’re trying to help people achieve.
So if you’re selling like Beachbody products, it’s like the ultimate thing at the end of the day is a six pack. Let’s be honest. Do you want this thing? Sure, you’re going to feel better about yourself? Sure, it’s going to change the way your friends see you and your relationship. Sure, you’re going to feel better, and you’re going to be healthier as well the functional things. By the end of the day, the transformation that you want is a six pack.
So when I thought about the Swipe Files, I was like, “What is that ultimate transformation? What is the ultimate value proposition?” Like everyone just wants to see their MRR grow? And how do people normally communicate that? Through their analytics, through their charts. I was the head of growth at Baremetrics, I would know this. This was what people look at and stare at all day long. They just want to see that graph keep ticking up into the right.
But it takes a lot of digging. It’s really like a whole self-discovery exercise through the lens of your business and your products and the things that you put out there in the world, which is not easy. It’s a hard exercise.
Joe Casabona: As we speak, I think I’ve come to a conclusion about my own ultimate transformation. Y’all, this is like 60% of the reason I started this podcast. Yes, I’m an educator, I love teaching, but I feel like I’m getting a free consulting call here with Corey.
Corey Haines: I feel that way about the guests I interview on my podcast too. So you’re not alone. It’s definitely like one of the main benefits for sure.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, that was great. So I’m going to recap that really quick because I think this is important to repeat. Levels of value prop. Feature: describing what it does. Social: how does this relate to other people and what value does it bring there? Emotional: the peace of mind that this thing brings you. And then ultimately, the transformation you’re trying to achieve. Whether it’s that six pack or for me just my belly not jiggling when I brush my teeth? Like, that’s all I really want. That’s Kevin James joke. I can’t take credit for that. Or people who want to be freed from client work and just get paid to create their own content.
Corey Haines: I mean, for me, that’s my ultimate goal. If someone were selling something to me, and I’m like, “How does this help me get to do follow up. How does this help me replace my salary basically? That’s all I care about at the end of the day.
Sure, there’s like all sorts of things around how does this help my members and how does this help me be more productive, and how does this help me feel better about the way that I’m doing things? But at the end of the day, I care about the revenue that’s coming through the door and how much of it is coming through the door.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. I think we have a good overview of everything for like kind of why this came about and how you did it. I just want to ask you, were you nervous making the change? Were you nervous about the backlash or implementing it?
Corey Haines: So nervous. In fact, I was like, “Why am I doing this right now? Because it’s so much work and preparation. And I just felt like, all right, the interesting part about this is that it’s one of those things where you can sit down and plan for as long as you want. And this whole process could take a year, if you really wanted to. Some companies do. When they roll out pricing changes, or new memberships or new products, that takes forever.
I was like, “I know what I want to do.” And as soon as I push down the first domino, then the second one’s going to go. And then like, I kind of have to do this really quickly. So I was like, “I have to be ready for what I’m getting myself into.”
So once I mapped out, like, “Here’s what the new memberships going to look like. Here’s the way I would describe it,” I had the landing page done, then, I mean, it’s fairly simple but it’s also kind of complicated actually making this switch. One, of course, you want to communicate that to your members or prospective members.
So I sent out an email to my entire list, members included, basically just describing, “Hey, here’s what’s going on. Here’s the changes, just so you know.” It was not without its hiccups. And I’ll list those because I think that that’s an important part of the story here.
One that same week… basically, I own SwipeFiles.com but I’m paying for it on a payment plan through the registrar that I bought it through because it was, not a ginormous sum, but more than I’m comfortable just like seeing go out the door on one fell swoop. And it’s an old registrar.
And basically what happened as I was using the email forwarding to my email corey@swipefiles.com. And that broke right as I was making the updates. So people are asking me questions like, “Hey, really cool stuff, but what about this? What about this?” and I’m not getting them. The emails are bouncing. So I had to figure that out.
Number two, I didn’t realize that Memberstack didn’t support one time charges when you’re upgrading or basically if you’re just changing membership plans. So that also threw a wrench in basically me trying to transition members over to new products or trying to do some sort of upsell to a certain degree.
There was also just things around members being confused about is my price going up? No, there’s legacy pricing. Once you lock in that price, you have it forever. So I’m trying to get as many people on the 99 bucks a year plan before I got to $299. It’s going to be the same thing for when it goes to $499. But some people are like, “Oh, no, the price is going up,” and they didn’t get to the part where I’m like, “Nothing changes for you.” So there was [inaudible 00:37:45]. Just a small amount. And some people come back or I sort of clear that up with them.
Also some people were not SaaS marketers or into SaaS, so they’re like, “Peace out, this is not for me.” And that’s completely fine. And I make my peace with that. That is completely reasonable, understandable and okay, but still a bummer to just see the turn happen. It’s not surprising. But that’s sort of one of things you have to be okay with is maybe just people don’t want the new membership, or the new focus or the new thing that you’re going to be doing.
Even early on you had a really heavy emphasis on the community. Now it’s more of like a come for the content, stay for the community instead of come for the community and stay for the content. So it’s kind of reverse there. And that’s not everyone. So there’s a lot of like mental hurdles that you have to overcome. That just takes a while. People just…
In fact, Derrick Reimer, the founder of SavvyCal who I do marketing for, he was like, “Hey, I just had someone ping me and was like, ‘Isn’t Swipe Files that thing where like you write the tier downs?'” And he was like, “No.” Like try to explain like the new membership. And sometimes there’s that first impression that you have to reteach people. So it was that you have to overcome. So anyways, I digress on that a little bit.
But then it’s pretty seamless. You swap out a button, you make a new membership, and then you like, Make sure everything like works right. You know, checked on my Zapier or checked ConvertKit and checked like, “Is there anything else? I’m probably missing something.” And then you announce it, you make the change. And it’s no big deal. You answer questions. I answered a bunch of questions over email. I figured out all that stuff. But then it’s live. And I just saw today even my first new trial came in under the first new plan.
I mean, also, just FYI, this month has been the best month of all time because there is an urgency to lock in the legacy price. And so it’s not all bad. This month has been fantastic, really, really grateful everyone who was sort of buying into it and upgrading. I hope there’ll be another one of those events when I make the next kind of price increase to the final destination for me.
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And now let’s get back to it.
Joe Casabona: As this episode comes out, it comes out the week of Black Friday if I’m not mistaken. I mean talking about that urgency is… I mean, I guess if I’m publishing this episode the week of Black Friday, the cats out of the bag. But I’m going to convert my ala carte courses to membership only. I think that’s something again that… I keep mentioning John’s episode, but he kind of convinced me in that moment. And then I saw you kind of doing a similar thing.
And really if you want that MRR and you want to create the value, and you want to keep people engaged, I think it’s really the smart move to make. And then I can bundle it all in this one value prop which is you’re a creator and you want to make money creating. Like you are tired of the client, and you want to make money creating content.
And so Black Friday week will be the last week that people can buy courses ala carte. Like starting like December 1, it’ll be membership only, and it’ll probably be like $199 a year or something like that. So creating that urgency is important.
And then with the hiccups kind of what I’ve noticed… because what the membership I’ve done a couple of switches now. It was on one site and then I moved it to another site because I just rushed these decisions like ship fast and break things or whatever. Most people are going to be understanding of the hiccups.
I actually had a member let me know today that he was charged twice. Somehow Stripe created two subscriptions for him. And it’s just five bucks a month but he was like, “I’m not really worried about the five bucks. I’m just letting you know that there might be some issue.” I’m like, “That’s really nice.” Because some people would be like, “How dare you maliciously charge me an extra $5.”
Corey Haines: Most people are very, very understanding. I mean, I was talking about that with my friend last night. Because, one, he was asking, you know, “Well, would you still offer your courses ala carte if you wanted to.” I was like no, because at the end of the day, someone can subscribe for one year and it basically be the same price. In fact to be cheaper as if they were compared to if they were to buy ala carte.
But two, the risk versus reward just isn’t there. If this is going to work for the vast majority of people, there’s going to be a small amount of people who aren’t going to be happy with it. I’m okay with that. You can’t please everyone. You have to do what’s best for you. And ultimately, that should be what’s also best for your customers, for your members. And there are people that just will get mad about anything and everything.
So if you made it cheaper, people would have been mad about that because they paid more before. If you made it more, they’re going to be mad, because they didn’t get the discount before and just hate us. Right?
Joe Casabona: Yeah. And frankly, those people are not the people who are seeing the value proposition for what it is. Perfect example is my accountant, Rachel. She’s amazing. I think she’s like super booked. But if anybody needs an accountant, I’ll happily recommend her.
I was paying her quarterly to do my P&L and payroll stuff. She messaged me and she’s like, “Hey, I just want to give you a heads up next month I’m going to get rid of the quarterly plan, and I’m going to do a monthly plan at the same price.” So my price like quadrupled. And I’m like, “Rachel saves me literally thousands of dollars each year. Like there’s no way I’m not going to pay her whatever she asked me basically.”
She doesn’t knows if I can afford it or not. Happily right? Because I have questions. I’m growing the business. So it was like momentarily like this is an another expense. But then I was like, yeah, but I mean, come on. She’s proved the value that she provides.
Corey Haines: Yeah, you can’t get too in your head about it. It was a short window. I gave people a week notice. I originally was going to increase the price every month by $100 a year to kind of like ease people into it, have more excuses, talk about it. I was going to give people a month notice for the first kind of price bump and increase. And then again, I was talking to the creator mastermind, they’re like, “No, no, that’s like way too complicated. Way too much time. Give them like a week max notice and then just make like two changes, max.”
Because it’s actually that urgency works in your favor. People don’t need a month to decide. In fact, it’s probably even more angst and anxiety and work for them to mull over for a long time. Just make it easy for them. Make it a week or two weeks max. As little decisions as possible is better.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s perfect. And speaking of as little decisions as possible, first of all, we’re coming on about the on the end of our main episode time in Build Something More. I didn’t make a note about what we were going to talk about, but I have a second thing. And it’s about that pricing monthly, quarterly, annually because that’s exactly what I offer for the Creative Crew right now. And I’m really interested in that.
So we’ll talk about price psychology and hopefully… I can’t believe I did this. Oh, masterminds. I did make a note. And if you’re a member, you can get these haphazard notes as a PDF. You can sign up over a buildsomething.club to get the PDF, and the extra conversation, Corey and I had a good pre show. And we’re going to have, I think, a really good post show.
Corey Haines: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: But before we do that, I need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?
Corey Haines: Oh, my trade secret. It’s such a bummer, because I thought about this for a long time beforehand. Oh, I remember it. My trade secret, and this relates to everything I’ve talked about today is that creators have to think about product market fit just like startup founders do. When I first started Swipe Files, I didn’t really think about product market fit all that much.
The idea of basically being how do you build a product that is perfectly suited and tailored for a specific market. And then once you figure out what that thing is, then you can sort of scale it and get traction and grow your revenues from there. But first, you have to crack that first equation of product market fit.
That’s kind of like creator like you’re creating content. It’s not rocket science. You just put it out there and people will pay for it. Or you sort of figure it out along the way. And then a year into it, I’m like, “Ah, I still feel like I haven’t really cracked it like. It doesn’t feel like I have product market fit.” It’s one of those things that’s very elusive.
So my point is, I think that this whole SaaS marketing training, single membership is finally my product market fit. And I felt that and I’ve heard that and I’m really confident in it. Jury’s still out. But so far based on the results this month has been like a lot more traction that you can see in the last couple of months. And so you have to search for part of market fit, you have to think very particularly about like, what is, one, like we talk about an easy value proposition that just clicks and makes sense. Two, the products and you can actually deliver on. And three, something you can do sustainably that you love, that you enjoy.
Because you don’t want to be caught into creating something and delivering something that you don’t actually find enjoyable. Because creative burnout is super, super easy kind of treadmill, it’s really hard. You want to be doing something that you can do sustainably.
I really like creating course content and sort of asynchronously helping people one on one. So this is the model that I found work best for me. It’s going to look different for every single person. But think about product market fit. Don’t just spaghetti tests everything and put stuff out willy nilly and make everything ala carte. You want to really think about product market fit. And that’s my trade secret for creators from the startup world.
Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s incredible and resonates so much with me. Because again, kind of what we were talking about before, well, I mean, you’re right about Patreon. Because Patreon kind of support artists making their art was kind of the first big grab for Patreon. And it was kind of the same in the WordPress space too. It was just like a bunch of companies wanted to support people doing WordPress stuff. But now we’re very much beyond that. And you do need to think about product market fit and why people are going to pay you.
I think a great piece of advice I got from a YouTube consultant because I’ve been doing a lot of… I’ve grown my YouTube channel considerably since the pandemic started. I was at like, I don’t know, less than 500 subscribers. Now I’m almost 2,000.
Corey Haines: Amazing.
Joe Casabona: And I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just kind of putting out content every week. But he said to me, “Look at all of your videos and unlist any that you can’t say yes to this question. If it goes viral, do I want to keep making these videos?” Because that’s what ultimately you have to do on YouTube. I mean, TikTok too.
Like, you see, God, the lead singer of Parachute, Will… Last Name, I forget. But he does those funny TikToks where it’s like behind the scenes of songs being created and the Law and Order one blew up. And then he just had to do that for like two straight years. I think it’s a really good, do something sustainable so that you don’t get burnt out. I absolutely love that.
Corey, this has been fantastic. Again in Build Something More we’re going to be talking about… I said masterminds in the beginning, maybe we’ll touch on that but I really want to talk to you about pricing models and why you decided to kind of mix monthly and quarterly and go for yearly and vices in virtue of that.
Again, if you’re not a member, you can sign up, you can get all of the show notes and become a member over at Howibuilt.it/243. If people want to know and learn more about you, Corey Haines, where can they find you?
Corey Haines: They can find me on Twitter, which I’m most active @coreyhainesco. Also my personal site is where I list all my projects and more about me. It’s Coreyhaines.co, Swipefiles.com to join the newsletter, which will also basically very quickly siphon you to find the membership as well. And you can use the code HOWIBUILTIT for half of the membership, which I believe by the time this comes out will be close to that $499 kind of cusp. And so whether it’s at $299 or $499, it’ll be half off to begin to a good deal anyways, if they want to sign up. There’s a seven-day free trial as well. But just for your members.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. Yeah, fantastic. Well, so if you are listening and you’re like, “I want to learn more about…” Corey outlined his target audience, but it’s been super valuable for me as someone who’s not really in SaaS marketing, which is kind of the main value prop. But it’s been really valuable for me. And if you’re part of the Creator Crew and Corey is okay with this, I will release this code to them a little earlier.
Corey Haines: Totally.
Joe Casabona: So big perk of being in the Creator Crew is you get to hear about deals like this before. Probably like a month before everybody else. So awesome. Corey, this has been so great. Thanks so much for coming to the show. I really appreciate your time.
Corey Haines: Thank you. My pleasure.
Joe Casabona: Thanks to everybody listening. Once again, those show notes where you can get the link and the discount code and the sign-up for my membership and everything we talked about over at Howibuilt.it/243. If you are a member, be sure to stick around for Build Something More. Thanks so much to our sponsors: Nexcess and TextExpander. And until next time, get out there and build something.