Hey, this is Mark Butler and you are listening to a podcast for coaches.
A few episodes back.
I talked about my desire to see more practice spaces and communities
pop up in the coaching world.
And it's been great because since that time I've heard from multiple people
who have started or who are planning to start their own practice spaces and
support each other, support other coaches.
In developing their skills and their confidence in their practices.
I think this is fantastic.
I also told you at the time that I want to develop a practice space of my own.
As I thought about the best way to do that.
An idea.
That's come back to my mind is the possibility that the best model for this
practice space for this coach support.
Thing.
Is a membership.
Now, if you've listened to the podcast, you know, all of the challenges
that face scaled training models or scaled communities, because I
think I've done a pretty good job of laying out their challenges.
As I consider the possibility of creating a membership around a practice
space and a support space for coaches.
I am proceeding with great care and caution.
Not only because I understand the challenges and pitfalls that I've
seen in my client's businesses.
When they attempt to scale.
What we call a one to many offer.
But I also have direct personal experience with this.
I may have mentioned this on the podcast before.
I don't actually remember.
But between 2009 and 2012 Iran, a membership that at its peak had
somewhere between 1500 and 1700 members paying a little over $30 a month.
Which meant a $50,000 per month business that lasted for a little while.
As I think about the possibility of opening up a membership based
practice space for coaches.
I went back into my own podcast archives.
And in 2017, I recorded this episode called the rise and fall.
Of my $50,000 per month membership site.
And I just went and listened to the whole thing.
And it's fun.
It's nostalgic for me.
And there are some of the things I say in this episode that I
don't necessarily agree with.
Now, there are some that I still agree with.
Very strongly.
But overall, I wanted to share it with you because I think there's some gold.
In this episode about what it's like to create a scaled business and two.
Do some things that make it thrive and then to do some
things that really hurt it.
And maybe in the next week or two, I will apply some of the
ideas that are in this episode.
To the membership that I might start.
Around a practice space for coaches.
But I'll be honest after listening to this episode.
It's probably a coin toss.
I would say that I feel some enthusiasm about the possibility of another
community and other membership.
And also a lot of hesitation because the one thing I know is
that it is not an easy thing to do.
So with that, enjoy the episode.
And I'll talk to you next time.
This is the Mark Butler Show, episode five.
And today we're talking about the rise and fall of my 50, 000
per month membership business.
So, of course, we'll go all the way back to the beginning.
In late 2008, my business partner, Court, and I created a home study course.
We called it, the Keyword Crash Course.
It was a series of videos.
and some text and we charged 600 for it.
Court was the subject matter expert.
He was the person who had come up with this method and laid it out into
something that other people could follow.
And the whole thing taught people how to set up websites, focus those
websites around specific keywords.
Rank those websites in Google, and then make money when people
clicked through from Google, landed on their website, and then clicked
Google ads, or clicked through to affiliate offers, or whatever it was.
So basically,, our whole value proposition was, you give us this 600,
we'll teach you how to rank a website in Google that can pay you anywhere
from, you know, 100 to 1, 000 a month.
We sold the whole thing as a way to make a relatively passive 1,
000 per month residual income.
Court had spent all of 2007, a lot of 2008, building up a community
around him and his expertise in this, in this search engine optimization.
We had a thriving list.
I think it had maybe four or five thousand people on it.
Highly engaged.
So when we launched this, 600 home study course.
We made sales.
I want to say we made 50 or 60 sales over the course of the next three months.
I was the sales guy.
So I actually got on the phone or on Skype with most of the people
who signed up for that 600 program.
By the way, when you're selling a 600 program, if you're willing to
get onto a, onto a Skype call with each person, with each prospect, your
close rate will be ridiculously high.
So we sold about 60 of this course.
But then I started to look at the number of leads that were coming in
and I started to look at our list and how our list was, it was there, but
it wasn't necessarily growing a lot.
So we were kind of running out of leads and I was thinking about, well, okay, how
are we going to make money now if we've kind of tapped out our list and we don't
have a bunch of new people coming onto the list, how are we going to make money?
So over lunch one day I told Court, Hey, I'm I have kind of a crazy idea.
I wonder if we could turn the keyword crash course into a membership where
basically we'll say sign up for our membership and instead of just
consuming videos, we're going to give you the videos, but we'll also
give you a community forum where you can get answers to your questions.
We're going to do community webinars where you can talk to us directly.
So instead of just having to consume our content and then go
implement it by yourself, we'll support you through the process.
And what I proposed to court over this lunch was, uh, Let's take
the entire keyword crash course that we've been selling for 600.
Let's make the price of that program 1 and offer it as a 30
day trial to this membership.
After the 30 day trial people can stay on for 30 bucks a month and the goal
here is to build this big residual income of 30 per month members.
So we talked about it a few times and court agreed that it
was probably a good way to go.
It was a little scary because we had these 60 people who had
paid us 600 for these videos.
And now we were basically saying to them, Hey, you know
what you just paid us 600 for?
We're now gonna give it away for 1.
So we had this fear that most of those people, or at least some of those
people, would ask for their money back.
But we decided that even if some of those people requested a refund, It
was worth it because we really believed in this new model and we really didn't
believe that we could go forward making a lot of money on 600 program sales.
Now in hindsight, I would say that we could have made plenty of money
on 600 program sales if we had just fully committed to marketing
and selling that 600 course.
But as kind of a reaction to having our leads dry up a little bit and
not wanting to go out and do a bunch of new marketing, we decided,
well, let's just, tweak this thing.
So that the people we already have on our list, who are just a little bit
more price sensitive, find it easier to get into a relationship with us.
So we did that.
Oh, and by the way, the way we sort of, , soothed all the people who'd
paid us 600 is, we just told them that they all had a free lifetime
membership to this mem to this, , to this community we were starting.
I think we even said, anything else we sell, you're gonna get it for free.
I don't think anybody asked for a refund.
I don't remember exactly, but I'm I'm pretty sure no one asked for a refund.
So we got the program ready.
This was, this was in 2009.
So all of the membership platforms that are out there now, they didn't exist.
At the time we were using WordPress and we were using wishlist.
You've probably heard of wishlist member.
Uh, it was very new at the time.
It wasn't very well done at the time.
I'm still not a big fan, frankly.
There's a lot of other ways I would go if I were starting a membership site.
But we just cobbled together what we had.
, we had WordPress for the platform.
We used Wishlist for membership management.
We used a WordPress based forum software to have our community forum in there.
We had to use GoToMeeting for the webinars.
Nobody uses GoToMeeting anymore, as far as I can tell.
None of my customers are using it anyway, and I don't use it.
We had all these things that we kind of cobbled together, and it worked, sort of.
One of my favorite stories about this whole membership experience
was the system we used for content protection, Wishlist, at the time,
if you canceled your subscription with us, We didn't have any way to
automatically keep you out of the system.
So people would cancel, but then they could still just log in and use
everything in the, in the members area.
Not that we publicized that, but we discovered it pretty early on.
So as an interesting note about membership and about whether content
protection really is a huge deal, I will tell you that every few months
I would go in and I would audit.
Canceled members to see if any of those canceled members were still Accessing
the members area even though they weren't paying and we would even have some
members occasionally email me and say hey mark I canceled love the program.
It's not for me right now, or I've gotten everything I need I'm gonna
move on but I just want to let you know that even though I canceled I can
still log in And I would always send back a reply and say, Oh man, thank
you so much for letting us know that.
We are going to look into that.
And then I didn't do anything because we weren't going to look into it.
We already knew what the issue was.
We just weren't gonna fix it.
And it turned out that if somebody isn't willing to pay for a program,
they're probably not going to be bothered to log in and use it.
So keep that in mind when you, when you jump through a lot of hoops.
to do content protection on different areas of your
website or different programs.
The reality is it's hard enough on the internet to get people
to consume content for free.
So if you have paid content, just because you haven't done a really
good job of hiding it behind a paywall or a member long and or whatever, it
doesn't mean that that hordes of people are going to come consume it for free
because Like I said, it's hard enough to get people to consume stuff for free.
So it was just kind of a funny little quirk of that business
that after people canceled, they could still access the site.
No problem.
The other funny thing about it was we offered this 1 trial.
to the membership and there was nothing to stop you from just starting
a new 1 trial every single month.
And I know there are people out there who that would cause them like, really?
Oh no, we can't.
We have to fix it.
Well again, every few months I would audit that piece and I
would see who was trying to cheat.
And over the course of three and a half years we had, I don't know,
10, 000 people go through this membership total, you know, take
a trial and try out the program.
There were like five people who were cheating on the 1 trial.
So.
The reason I bring that all up as an, as an aside is don't bog yourself
down and having a perfect technical setup for your website, for your
members area, for your products, because it just doesn't really matter.
It's not really going to matter.
So anyway, we take this 600 course, we turn it into a membership.
And we launch it to our list and we get this amazing response.
I think the first day we had something like 200 people sign up the day
after that we had 200 more and the, and then people would come into
our, our members area and they would say, Hey, I'm so excited to be here.
I've always wanted to implement what court teaches and what Mark
teaches, but I couldn't afford the 600, but now they're going to let
me have it for 30 bucks a month.
And that's perfect.
I'm so excited to be here.
And we started to grow this community and you know what?
It worked so well.
It was amazing.
Let me take you through the features of the program and then
I'll tell you sort of the wins.
And the fails for each aspect of the program.
So you, you pay me a dollar, you pay us a dollar, you jump into our members area and
you consume what we call the core lessons.
These were those keyword crash course videos that we had
created for the 600 program.
You go through these and they're very, very step by step.
They were excellent.
One of the best things about this program was that court had done such a good job.
He has such a kind of a scientist experimenter brain.
where you had done such a good job of figuring out exactly what people
needed to do in order to rank a website in Google and in order to
make that website make money, that we really had this A to Z process
that worked pretty much every time.
So if you would join our program, and if you would just implement what
we taught, you would make money.
It might take you a while.
It might take you six months or it might take you a year, but you would make money.
That was so gratifying for us because we felt like we were
really, really delivering value because people were, were succeeding.
They were actually making money in, in an area, this, this area of kind of making
money online that was known to be full of scams and full of, you know, junk.
But if you signed up for our program and you actually implemented
what we taught, you got paid.
That felt amazing.
And as people started to make money, they would go back into our forum, and
they would talk about their success.
And then it fed on the energy that we had.
Actually, let me go into more detail about that.
So when you sign up for our forum, one of the first things we implemented
was what we called the badge system.
And the badge system was something we'd stolen from video games, because
we were playing a lot of video games at the time, and what we did was,
because this was a community built around making money, We created a badge
system that said, Hey, when you start making money using this method, you'll
submit proof of your success to us as the, as the moderators in the forum.
And then , we'll give you the earnings badge that corresponds
to your current earning level.
Now, when we launched this, there was a lot of discussion and debate
in the community about like, well, I don't like I'm private.
I don't want to share those kinds of details.
Some people were like, I'm from Europe and in Europe, this is
a completely taboo subject.
I don't know whether it is or isn't.
I was taking the European's word for it, but they were saying, I'm from Europe.
This is totally taboo.
We don't talk about money.
We don't talk about income.
This is totally out of line.
I'm not going to participate.
And we said, Hey, here's the deal.
You're welcome in our community.
You don't have to participate, but we think a lot of you will really
appreciate being able to watch , your fellow members of the community succeed.
It'll inspire you to go do more.
It'll create.
Friendly competition will create this high energy around actually accomplishing
what we all claim we want to do.
So we built this badge system and the first badge was like a dollar.
It was like you've earned your first dollar and then badges went
up to like twenty five, fifty dollars, hundred dollars per month.
They jumped to a five hundred dollars per month and there was a thousand
dollar per month badge and the thousand dollar per month badge was a huge deal.
It was a huge deal.
Because we had built the whole program around this idea that, hey, you come
in here, you implement this system, you can make a supplemental, semi
passive, 1, 000 per month income.
In fact, Cort and I, when we did this, we really didn't have any idea
how far people would take our system.
We didn't look at this method as a way of creating a full time income.
We didn't have a full time income from it.
We made some money from this system, but then we really monetized the
system by teaching it to other people.
So we sold the thing as 1, 000 per month, Opportunity, right?
So when people would get to their 1, 000 badge, it was this bright
yellow badge that said 1, 000 on it.
We would have people submit their proof for their 1, 000 badge.
And when they submitted their proof, our system would give them a banner.
It would give them the badge, but it would give them a banner across
their badge that said pending because we hadn't approved the badge yet.
And when you would see somebody, Post in the forum and they would get their pending
badge the forum would just it would kind of go crazy people would be like Oh check
it out John's got his thousand dollar badge pending and all of a sudden it'd
be like everybody would gather around and then we would approve the badge And then
John who just gotten his thousand dollar badge He would write basically this long
Oscar acceptance speech in the forum.
I'm serious, and I'm not mocking it It was so much fun.
It would be like I just want to thank Mark and Court, I want to thank all these
other community members because even though the lessons were great, really
the community is what helped me succeed and I want to thank this person, that
person, and the other person because they got me through some sticking points.
It was so much fun and they would talk about how, what they were
doing with the income and how it was changing their life and on and on.
I mean, it was just the best thing ever.
I loved those days when people would apply for a new exciting earnings badge.
Well then our members started to surprise us.
Because all of a sudden there were people earning 5, 000.
So we had to make a 5, 000 badge.
And then there were people earning 10, 000 per month.
We had to make a 10, 000 badge and on until finally we had to create.
A 50, 000 per month badge.
I think.
I might be, uh, is that true?
It was either 25, 000 or 50, 000.
I find both of those numbers equally ridiculous when I think about
this method that we were teaching.
I can't believe anybody was making either 25, 000 per month or 50, 000 per month.
They were both bananas.
But the energy that would, that would surge in that community
when somebody would get a 10, 000 badge or a 25, 000 badge.
It was just, it was amazing.
So this forum became, it became the hub for the whole community.
We also did webinars where people would come and they do live Q and A with me
or with court and we'd help them out.
And then sometimes we would do four webinars where we taught new
material and then those were useful because people would refer to
those webinars in the members area.
They'd say, somebody would say, ah, this question, I'm stuck.
And somebody else would say, well, you got to go check out the latest webinar.
It really answers that or it addresses that.
So the whole thing really fed on itself.
It was super productive.
Yeah.
And really, really fun.
And it attracted members.
I mean, at the time, you know, Court had done so much work.
The reason Court gets so much credit for this whole business is because in
2007 and 2008, he had done all of the, of the work to build the community,
to build the list that we could sell this community to in the first place.
But once we had this community going, Court wasn't doing a lot more at
that point to keep growing the list.
So we really were having to rely on word of mouth and on affiliates.
To bring us new members, but we were getting word of mouth.
I mean, we were adding two and three and four new subscribers every day.
Sometimes we would get a little surge, 10, 15.
We had affiliates who would drive traffic to us.
People would say, well, this is a really great program.
You got to go check it out.
And that would bring people to us.
But what really caused people to stick, I think, was this energy in
this forum where, where people were able to see other people succeeding
and they were able to follow them.
And they were able to follow them because the system that we taught
was so sequential, so reliable, that you could say, Well, if John got to a
thousand dollars per month following the system, then I'm just going to
follow the system and I'm going to make a thousand dollars per month too.
In hindsight, I really believe that the foundation of this business success was
the positivity, the energy, the passion.
And the, the friendship and the community that grew inside of this
forum, where people were cheering each other on and they weren't just cheering
each other on, they were doing it with real evidence of their success.
If I were to ever start a forum, you know, a community like that again,
I would always have the community focused around a specific goal.
And then I would celebrate as individual members of the community reach that goal.
I wouldn't do it in a way that diminishes those people who aren't succeeding yet,
but the simple reality is everybody there is there for a reason and it validates
the entire mission of the community.
When you point out the people who are succeeding and when you set them
up as the example of how to do this.
So I believe that was the foundation of our success.
But my personality is That I'm a little bit of a perfectionist and I'm a tinkerer.
And so when you put those things together, I got it in my head pretty
early on in this business that we couldn't just stand on the value we
offered with the core lessons of the members area, the members forum, the
earnings badges, and the webinars.
I was certain that that was never going to be enough to get people to
stick to our 33 per month membership.
Now, I might have been right, but we never gave ourselves a chance
to find out because I was too anxious that we were going to lose
these people that we'd gotten.
So I was never really, uh, I was never willing to give.
Our value proposition a real test by just letting it ride Let's see how far
we can take this idea of core lessons plus community forum plus webinars plus
You know these earnings badges that drive people forward So very early on
I got it in my head that we had to add software to the mix We had to build tools
for the members so that yes They might like the forum and they might like the
webinars But they can't leave the tools because the tools help them automate
the process that we teach so very early on You We hired a software developer,
just happened to be my brother, and he started to build tools that would, that
would automate parts of this process.
And yeah, the members loved these tools.
We ended up building, I don't know, three, maybe four tools that helped
automate different pieces of this, of this method that we taught.
The members loved these tools.
And in fact, we ended up spinning a couple of them off as Successful
businesses on their own.
So, one of the tools we built was this, , this keyword research tool that helped
people, like, dig up information about which terms are being searched in Google.
People loved that because it simplified a, a really tedious research process.
Later on, we built this guest posting hub called PostRunner.
It's still, it's still online, by the way.
I don't know if it still runs, but
Postrunner brought together website owners and article publishers, article
authors, and it created easy, frictionless guest posting opportunities, which at
the time gave people the opportunity to post on each other's websites, get links
from the other website to their website, which ranked their website in Google
better, so people went nuts for this.
I mean, it worked really, really, really well.
Because, again, it was so good at gaming Google's algorithm.
So these are the tools we built.
The members loved them.
And it was a huge win.
But, as I look back, I'm really not sure how big of a win it actually was, because
it confused our value proposition so much.
Like I said, we really didn't know what to do.
Whether the people who were there, were there because they loved the
community forum so much, or the webinars so much, or the tools.
And because we couldn't pinpoint, and when we asked, by the way,
people would say all three.
Why are you still here?
Oh, I'm here for the forum.
Why are you still here?
Oh, I'm here for the tools.
I'll never leave these tools.
Why are you still here?
Well, I love the webinars.
So somebody loved everything we were doing, but we didn't
know what the main benefit was.
And that made it so we kind of felt like we had to do more of
everything, more webinars, more tools, more time in the forum.
So for 33 per month, it started to get a little bit tedious.
And we only had one software developer.
And at the time, he was very new in his software development career.
So as our tools started to break down, because that's what software does,
you know, breaks down, things change, services you rely on, they change,
then you have to rebuild the software.
He started having a little bit of a hard time keeping up.
And we had to start, you know, kind of rebuilding the software, but then
we had multiple pieces of software to rebuild and it started to be tedious and
started to be hard to keep up with this kind of technical debt in the business.
And also as things started to change with Google's algorithm,
our core lessons were out of date.
And the tools that we demonstrated in the core lessons and the processes we
demonstrated, those were out of date.
So we had content debt.
So we had technical debt with our software, we had content debt with our
core lessons, and we, we started to feel like, oh, there's a lot of plates to keep
spinning here, and this isn't quite the passive income that we had hoped for.
So we recognized this and we decided, well, we have to simplify.
We have to simplify.
We've just, we've just added too much to this.
Well, that means taking things away from people, That have been enjoying them.
So we discontinued one of the pieces of software that we built for our members.
Guess how they reacted?
They were mad.
Not very surprising, right?
They were mad.
But we knew that we couldn't sustain the development of that
software, that particular software.
So we lost two members over that.
But the bigger issue wasn't that we lost those members, it was that it was sort of
the first time that we had really damaged the goodwill we had with our members.
And this is at the same time that Google is starting to change things and some
of our members are starting to struggle to, to create or maintain the income.
So they're stressed out and now we're taking features away
and that's making them mad.
And this energy starts to bubble in our forum, which is the hub for all the
communication we have with our members.
There starts to be some, you know, snarky comments and some hurt
feelings and stuff like that.
So then we start to scramble a little bit.
Now we knew that the energy in the forum was one of our keys to success.
One of my fails in this whole process is I got kind of addicted
to my own community forum.
I basically just sit there and refresh the page when the reality is sitting
there and obsessing over what was going on in our forum was not What I could
have been doing was thinking about how do we shift the entire business in a
different direction where it's not so dependent on Google's current algorithm.
And how do I work with my business partner to do more marketing and
more sales so that we bring a steady stream of fresh faces in here.
To replace those that are leaving us.
But instead of doing any of that, I babysat the forum and just kind of
obsessed over it, which ended up not being productive because as some of the snark
and some of the anger was bubbling up in the forum, I was very young at the time.
I mean, age wise, I don't know, it's 29 30, but I mean, I was very
young in business and I, and my ego was really caught up in whether
I was, the members were happy and whether they were complimenting
me and complimenting the business.
And if anybody was mad, then I was defensive.
I was super insecure about the whole thing.
And there were a handful of members that just rubbed me the wrong way.
Even on my best day, this small handful of members just got under my skin.
But instead of handling that like an adult, I would occasionally engage
in, you know, many arguments with certain members in the forum, in
front of all my other customers.
Like, how genius is that?
Like, like I'm going to restore the positivity and the energy in the
business by fighting with my own customers in front of my other customers.
Yeah, that went about as well as you, as you imagine.
Like, I'm gonna create factions in my own business between those people
who agree with me and those people who agree with this other guy.
Disaster.
You know, lessons learned.
Another thing that was going on in the forum at the time, which had been part,
a big part of our early success, was we had created a way in our forum for
members to offer services to each other.
So we had this service provider section of the forum and people could go in
there and they could basically post an ad that says, Hey, this part of
the method that Court and Mark teach, I will do that for you for this fee.
And the community loved it because the people who wanted to supplement their
income by doing services had an easy avenue to customers and the people who
had a little bit more money on their hands and they wanted to streamline
some of this by hiring people, they had access to these service providers.
It worked really well and it contributed a ton to the forum.
And what I found out later.
was that these service providers now had a, they had a profit motive to be active
and helpful in that forum because that was how they were going to get their leads.
And the reason I say I found this out later was because after one
or two experiences where a service provider treated one of their
customers badly, and it kind of would blow up in the forum, I panicked.
Again, I, I really just I wish I would have had somebody Next to me
the whole through this whole process to say, Hey, man, you, you need
to just chill, like, just relax.
Everything's going to be fine.
But instead, when I saw that this member is treating that member badly
and, oh, are we going to get sued?
No one's going to sue us.
That was a stupid.
What was I worried about?
But I was freaking out.
And so I was like, that's it.
The service provider program is over.
And I made that decision, I think pretty much unilaterally.
I might've consulted court, but court really let me sort of run the back
end of the business and I was kind of the more emotional, more volatile one.
So when I decided there was a problem with.
The, uh, with the service providers program.
I think I just sort of unilaterally was like, well, that's that.
The service provider program is over.
Well, what did I accomplish?
All I really accomplished was that I offended the best customers I had.
I had created a scenario where they could supplement their income, make a
meaningful contribution to this community.
Make some money doing it and and what was I thinking because they were also
doing the vast majority of my customer service for me But because I was young
in business and because my ego is caught up in this and because I was I was a
little bit Volatile about the whole thing.
I just dropped the whole program the whole service provider program
offending all of these service providers Well, guess what they did?
They left.
Of course they did.
Because there are other forums you can go hang out in.
In fact, once you've found your group of friends, you can go make your own forum.
And that's exactly what they did.
And how could I blame them?
So, between the rumblings with the Google algorithm, and the struggles
that that was creating for some of our members, and Me being too caught up in
my own ego about exactly how people were interacting in this forum and whether
they were behaving as I thought they should and as whether they were being,
you know, appropriately complementary of me and the system and blah blah blah.
Combine that with With my sabotage of the service providers program
in this forum and the wheels start to come off a little bit.
And whereas the business had been growing, growing, growing, and it
had reached that 50, 000, I think we, we had one 60, 000 a month.
We had lots of 50, 000 months.
We started to see membership struggle now in hindsight,.
It's easy for me to see.
That the way I was acting in this forum was sabotaging the word of
mouth engine that it had become.
, you might think that the conversations you're part of are the only conversations
, that are happening about your business.
That's how naive I was.
It never occurred to me that these people who'd been fantastic customers would be
able to go have conversations with each other and be like, uh, what's Mark's deal?
That's Like, what's he doing here?
Let's just go start a forum of our own.
Or, hey, Joe Schmo has a different forum.
He charges 10 bucks a month.
It's a better forum.
Let's just go over there.
So not only do they leave, but now the word of mouth machine is
growing for Joe Schmo's forum.
Now, could I have fixed all this?
Probably?
Maybe?
I don't know.
But in hindsight, what I know is that if I would have checked my ego and just
thought, how do I be of service here?
How do I view every single one of these members as a, as a huge blessing,
treat them accordingly, be honest and transparent and supportive.
Would that have changed things?
I think it would have changed them some.
Would the business have survived and thrived?
I don't know.
Because if you go go back to the beginning with me, when I said how this golden
path to success that we'd created was so tight, it was so reliable, so predictable.
That when Google changed their algorithm, our whole golden path was out the window.
And then that's exactly what happened.
Sometime 2010, 2011, there was a sweeping change to the Google algorithm, and it
seemed like pretty much overnight, you know, huge swaths of our members, these
1, earners, saw their income go to zero.
So, I say that because even if I had not been,, kind of an arrogant, volatile
kid, In the whole process, the business still might've failed because it was
built on such a shaky foundation.
This foundation of Google's algorithm that they can change anytime they want.
But I can still take the lessons away from it.
Lessons like treat your customers with gratitude and respect.
It doesn't mean let them abuse you, but it means treat them
with gratitude and respect.
Leave your ego out of it.
You're getting paid.
Take the money.
Say thank you.
Treat people well.
Take the time to dig into your business and understand what really
makes it work because what really makes it work may be very different
from what you think makes it work.
I was sure that our business was so successful because we had created
this golden path to success.
Well, the reality is people could get that golden path a lot of different places.
It might be slightly different, but they could get it a lot of different places.
What they really were paying us for was this combination of community and
support and these tools we'd built.
So just sort of check yourself.
Do you know what really drives the success of your business forward?
Is your ego telling you that it's one thing when the reality is it's
something completely different?
Are you taking credit for aspects of your success that actually
have nothing to do with you?
I mean, I'll say at the time too, I was also really sure that I was The biggest
part of our success, Quartz and my success, because I was the one who had
conceived of the business model and I had implemented it and I, I created the tools
and I did all of these things that ended up being the back end of the business.
And I, I'll admit that at the time, I really was undervaluing
what Court had contributed, but Court had done the heavy lifting.
Court had lined up thousands of people for me to say, hey, do
you want to join this membership?
And a lot of them said yes.
But without those thousands of people, it wouldn't have mattered.
I could have created the best back end for this business in the whole world.
There would have been nobody to offer it to.
So, as you look at your business, have honest conversations with yourself
about what's really driving it forward.
It doesn't mean your contribution doesn't count.
My contribution counted.
But I was undervaluing other people's contributions, including my
business partner and my customers.
And ultimately that, I mean, that really hurt the business.
Could we have saved it again?
I don't know, but I know that I won't make those mistakes again.
So that's, that's the story in April of 2009.
We launched by a year later, we were probably at 30, 000 a month.
A few months later, we were at 50, 000 a month, and that 50, 000 a month
lasted probably six, eight months.
Then Google started making these changes.
Mark's ego started getting in the way.
Next thing you knew, by the end of 2012, the business was on its way out.
We had spun off a couple of different pieces of software that ended up
getting sold, and that was fun.
Sold as independent businesses, I mean.
That was fun.
It was a great learning experience.
But the business was on its way out.
Court had lost enthusiasm for it.
I had lost enthusiasm for it.
And basically at the end of 2012, we wound it down.
I will tell you now that I know that I will create another
50, 000 per month business,
and I will take all the lessons I learned from that failure.
And apply them to the new venture.
I'll do a much, much better job of leaving my ego at the door.
I'll do a much, much better job of focusing on content and methods that I
can teach people that are not going to be erased overnight by a big corporation.
And I'll also take with me the memory that when you deliver real value and
when you create real community, The business can take on a life of its
own and produce more income than you really ever thought was possible.
I will never take for granted again a 50, 000 per month business because
that's an amazing success and I look forward to creating it again.
So that's what I got for you and I will talk to you next week.