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We’re Jason and Caroline Zook, a husband and wife team running two businesses together and trying to live out our version of a good life in the process. In this business podcast, we share with you our lessons learned about how to run a calm, sustainable business—one that is predictable, profitable AND peaceful. Join us every Thursday if you’re an online creator who wants to reach your goals without sacrificing your well-being in the process.
[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a calm business, one that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program, and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.
[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's get into the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Growing Steady, where we are...
[00:00:41] Caroline: Did you almost say the other one?
[00:00:42] Jason: Going steady but also Growing Steady. How are you growing?
[00:00:47] Caroline: What's shifting in me right now?
[00:00:49] Jason: Yeah.
[00:00:50] Caroline: In this particular moment, I am...
[00:00:54] Jason: Dealing with a micro injury. You threw your back out.
[00:00:56] Caroline: I did throw my back out.
[00:00:57] Jason: Sitting on the couch.
[00:00:59] Caroline: First of all, you made that part of it hurts when I sit on the couch, but I don't think that's how I did it.
[00:01:04] Jason: Right.
[00:01:05] Caroline: But what's shifting me right now is I am really having to grapple with my own impatience at the moment because we've reached that point in the year where I want to have gone faster, and yet I seemingly in my head, think that I should have accomplished more while also taking two weeks off to host a friend and have a good Valentine's Day trip and all this stuff. So obviously, I don't think that, but it's just this constant reminder, and this is part of the Growing Steady thing is if you want to run your business in a way that it doesn't burn you out, in a way where you live a full life on top of the work that you do, you have to also make peace with the fact that you're going to go a little bit slower than maybe the glamorized and glorified way that we talk about the velocity at which most quote unquote successful people are moving.
[00:01:55] Jason: This is my metaphor that I...
[00:01:56] Caroline: That's why turtles rule.
[00:01:58] Jason: I gave you earlier, which is for my Tears of the Kingdom listeners.
[00:02:01] Caroline: Yes.
[00:02:03] Jason: For those of us that play the game normally, it's going to take you like 400 hours to beat the game in its full capacity. Right. But there are what's called speedrunners on YouTube who beat the game in 40 minutes.
[00:02:16] Caroline: Right.
[00:02:16] Jason: But the thing that they're doing is they're like clipping through walls and they're like inventory smuggling things and they're doing all this weird stuff that no one's ever done before. What are you doing? And that's really actually kind of akin to business where you see a bigger creator and you're like, you have a team of 40 people, you're on every single platform posting content 47 times per day.
[00:02:37] Caroline: You're moving at a clip that I just cannot relate to.
[00:02:39] Jason: You're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. And I'm just over here trying to launch a product and I'm just by myself or I have a co-founder or whatever. And I think it's an interesting metaphor to think about. Even for those of you who don't play Tears of the Kingdom on Switch. You should because it's great. But just to think about like, yeah, this is a metaphor for running a business, which is the Growing Steady version is, takes you 400 hours and that's fine. And you're going to have side quests that pop up that derail you. You're going to have little mini bosses you got to take care of. And it's difficult and it's going to take a lot of effort. But you know who we're not? We're not the speedrunners that do it in 40 minutes.
[00:03:13] Caroline: Right. And this goes back to my whole thing about what's your optimizing principle? So it's like for speedrunners, their optimizing principle is they're optimizing for speed. Right. They're optimizing for velocity. Do you think that they are taking time to go...? Just bear with me here on the metaphor. To investigate little forests and find cool little...?
[00:03:31] Jason: Porox seeds, that's what you're asking about? Yeah. Investigate all the bubble caves.
[00:03:34] Caroline: Do you think they're looking at bubble caves? No, they're not, because they're optimizing for speed. And so it's like I said, we are not optimizing for speed. Yes, we love to make forward progress and we love to feel momentum. Micro momentum is my word for the year. However, what I'm optimizing for is balance. And I want to feel like my life isn't just passing me by because every day I'm waking up just trying to make progress on work stuff. I also want to feel like I'm enjoying the present moment. I want to feel like I'm deepening my relationships with friends and family. I want to feel like I'm working on my health. I want to just be, for the sake of being. I want to rest, I want to play, I want to have fun, to do all these things. And so, yeah, I can do all those things, but it doesn't mean that I can do them all at the same time and therefore my pace is going to be a little slower. So in summation, to answer your question, what's shifting in me right now? I am making peace with that.
[00:04:25] Jason: Going slower. I think that curtails nicely into the topic for this episode, which is wanting to talk about our lifetime pricing model that we have used for WAIM, our WAIM Unlimited program, which, by the way, enrollment is opening up here in just a few weeks. By the time this episode is out, it's like two or three weeks. We actually need to have a meeting with our podcast producer because I know.
[00:04:43] Caroline: Maybe getting those.
[00:04:44] Jason: I know those ads are going to come up.
[00:04:45] Caroline: Those preroll ads.
[00:04:46] Jason: That we get paid absolutely nothing.
[00:04:48] Caroline: I think they're going to re up their...
[00:04:49] Jason: Yeah, I think we're their one marketing avenue.
[00:04:53] Caroline: Really?
[00:04:53] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:54] Caroline: And you think it works?
[00:04:54] Jason: Yeah, I think so. I mean, as much as we can tell, but that, I think curtails nicely into this because the reason why we shifted WAIM into a lifetime pricing model was because it kind of felt like when we were doing, and we're going to get to the backstory in a second, but it kind of felt like when we were doing the monthly membership model where there was no end to the pricing, it was just like your standard pay for this monthly forever. It just felt like we were always running and it just felt like it was this constant chase of we got to get new customers, but then we got to keep the customers happy that we have so that they don't cancel. And boy, did that feel like a treadmill we just could not get off. And I think deciding to move to a lifetime pricing model felt like we were kind of dictating, hey, we're going to go walk on a trail and we get to choose the pace and we get to choose the direction. And sure, it gets rocky, it gets slippery, it's not the easiest path ever, and I don't think any path in business is. But I think we just want to talk about kind of the pros and cons of lifetime pricing. At the end of this episode, we're going to give you our reasons why we absolutely love it and then what makes it challenging. So stay tuned to that. But we also have some customer submitted questions here, some listener submitted questions, too. So we have our WAIM audience that submitted questions. Then we have two podcast audio submitted questions, which if you want to submit.
[00:06:06] Caroline: First audio submitted question.
[00:06:08] Jason: Yeah, you can go to podcast.wanderingaimfully.com if you ever want to ask us a question about anything we're talking about an episode, and maybe we'll just throw it in there in the future, and we'll just have a little listener corner that we can cozy up to and play an audio clip, which you'll hear about. But Caroline is going to give you a little bit of backstory on WAIM to kind of set the stage here.
[00:06:26] Caroline: Right. So for those of you who don't know our WAIM saga, Wandering Aimfully launched in 2018. And originally, the way that we sold it was as a $100 a month subscription, just a membership model. You pay every month, and you can cancel at any time. And for about the first six months to a year of that, our churn was pretty high. It was about 30% churn.
[00:06:52] Jason: Very high.
[00:06:53] Caroline: And to be clear, I think that's normal when you launch anything you don't yet know if you have product market fit, you don't yet know what your positioning is, your target audience, all these things. So we were kind of figuring that out as we went, what do people really want from us? And to be completely honest, when Jason and I came together to form Wandering Aimfully, kind of the only thing that we knew to sell at that time were the separate products that we had both launched over the preceding years. So it ended up being a membership model of sort of this hodgepodge of business products. And there was a lot of value there, but it certainly was not focused in any way, shape, or form, which I think contributed to that high churn. So with that model, we would see that people would stick around for roughly, like six to eight months. That was kind of the lifetime.
[00:07:39] Jason: I think eight is stretching it, but yeah.
[00:07:41] Caroline: Let's call it six months, but roughly at that time, that's when they would drop off. Right? So if you do the math, if it's $100 a month and someone's sticking around on average for six months, that's basically a customer lifetime value of roughly $600. And we just felt like we were always in this selling mode, and it was fun to experiment with. I have to say, I'm glad we tried it out. We would do these monthly launches. We tried this hybrid model where we were kind of launching, but in...
[00:08:12] Jason: Having like, a certain way, a certain number of spots available, because we were trying to control the growth early on. And really, I think what that did is it gave us an opportunity to try a lot of different marketing tactics. Like we did a test drive, and we did send in your questions, and we'll make a video for you to explain why WAIM would be right for you. And we tried all these things which you can go back and read through all of them at WanderingAimfully.com/330. That's where we wrote about. I wrote about our entire journey of getting to our enough number. But in that time, we also realized that this is a lot of work. It felt like never ending work to market and promote WAIM. Not even to mention we wanted to create things as well.
[00:08:53] Caroline: It just felt like there wasn't a lot of breathing room to enjoy the product and we were finding our attention very split. And so Jason had this idea. A couple years prior, he had launched this project called BuyMyFuture, which was the idea of kind of bundling all of his courses and products together, but also allowing someone to... It was basically a lifetime model. Pay one time and get anything he would create in the future. Right? And that went really well and people really liked it. And that was sort of our first foray into this idea of the community that you can create when you offer a lifetime offer like that because people are really buying into you and buying into the value that you'll continue to provide. And so I think you were the one who said, what if we went back to that? What if we shifted back to a lifetime model? What if we said, okay, people are sticking around for six months right now. That's $600 of customer lifetime value. I think you had offered BuyMyFuture at...
[00:09:47] Jason: We had grown it to BuyOurFuture, $1,500.
[00:09:53] Caroline: Very quickly, we just said, what if it was a flat 20 months at $100? That's $2,000 one time payment for the lifetime model. And if you compare those two, on the one hand, for the membership model, you have basically a $600 customer lifetime value compared to a $2,000 customer lifetime value. Right? And so we knew people were not sticking around for 20 months at that point. And so if someone was paying $100 a month for 20 months for this $2,000 lifetime model, well, that's such an improvement, right?
[00:10:25] Jason: Three times the customer lifetime value. And once we did that or kind of made that switch in our minds, the other couple of factors were that we repositioned it from a membership to a coaching program. And I think this is actually a very pivotal thing. And I think if there are any coaches listening to this podcast, I would really think about looking at your customer base and look at the customer lifetime value if you have an ongoing monthly membership for your coaching program. And what is the lifetime value like? How long do your average customers stay? And could you potentially 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x your customer lifetime value by going a lifetime route? Because if you know that your customers, like us, were only sticking around for six months, but if you offer a lifetime that you could make three times the money, because someone knows that they're going to eventually pay it off and then never have to pay for it again, that's a huge win for you.
[00:11:14] Caroline: And I think this is also an example of something that feels really small, like a language change and a positioning change is actually quite impactful because what was happening was, when you put yourself in a bucket of a membership, people are going to equate you with all of their subscriptions.
[00:11:32] Jason: Exactly.
[00:11:32] Caroline: These things where they look at their credit card statement, and every month they ask themselves, like, did I get value this month? Did I use this this month? Because if I didn't, you're off the bench, basically. You're getting cut from the team.
[00:11:43] Jason: And even just in a simple example, it's like Netflix is, what, like $19.99 now?
[00:11:46] Caroline: Totally.
[00:11:47] Jason: And if you look at your credit card bill and you see Netflix at $20 a month, or Wandering Aimfully's membership at $100 a month, you're going to say to yourself, these two are memberships. I have a million amount of hours of content to watch on Netflix. Wandering Aimfully gives me what?
[00:12:01] Caroline: Right.
[00:12:03] Jason: It's a mismatch.
[00:12:04] Caroline: Yeah, you're doing yourself a disservice by putting yourself into a bucket where you're going to be compared, even though those two things are not related. Right. Like, one's entertainment, one is business education. One is going to give you potentially a return on your investment, one is not. Right. But you're doing yourself a disservice by, in the minds of your customers, you're putting yourself in the same bucket. And so by moving to just a change of language, like, this is a program, this is a lifetime... I don't even want to say subscription because we didn't even use that. But you're paying for a lifetime program. It kind of becomes one thing in your customer's mind. One decision. I'm either deciding that I'm buying this program or I'm not. Rather than rethinking the decision month after over month over month. And so our churn went from 30% to 3% after we shifted to a program. And that was also due to other things. So, yes, it was the repositioning. It was also just honestly honing our product. So we started adding new monthly coaching every single month that wasn't happening before when people were churning out. So in hindsight, of course, you're not adding anything new. People are going to be like, okay, I got the value out of this and I'm out. Right? So by adding the new monthly coaching instead of just having the access to old resources and also just getting clear about the problem that we solved. So no longer was it this mismatch of like, you have art courses and you have sponsorship courses and you have writing courses, but it was really like, okay, you want to grow your online business and you want to do it in a way that is sustainable and doesn't lead to burnout. Here are all the things we've learned over the past ten years plus of learning that. And that became a more specific problem to solve. And also a lot of people were looking for how can I scale using digital products? How can I go from only offering client services to offering digital products? And that's really the problem that we solved. So again, around that time, once we shifted to this model, that's where that churn dropped from 30% to 3% and we brought our customer lifetime value from six hundred dollars to two thousand dollars.
[00:14:04] Jason: Yeah. And I think that for anyone listening to this, that's really curious if lifetime pricing will work for your business. I really think the question to ask is just like, do you find yourself stuck in the like, I'm constantly marketing, promoting, trying to get new customers, but then I'm also trying to retain those customers? You're fighting both battles. And I think for us, what we realize is it kind of removes once you get it going and you get a well oiled machine, which we'll talk more about that in a minute, but it kind of removes a little bit of the constant effort of trying to retain people because people opt in for, oh, I'm buying this thing because I believe in this thing and it's going to give me the value that I'm being promised, which we'll talk to you more about how to kind of structure that. But it makes a decision so much easier in their mind to go, I'm going to pay for this. And we get emails all the time, which is fantastic. The people are like, I actually kind of look forward to my WAIM payment every month because I know it's getting me closer to never paying for WAIM again and continuing to get value. And I'm like, yes, that is an awesome exchange for both of us because we're getting the maximum customer lifetime value, you're getting your maximum value out of us. And that feels like a good handshake relationship that's no longer kind of like the treadmill of, well, are they going to cancel because are we delivering enough? And they're thinking about canceling because they're not sure if they're getting enough. It just is a very difficult battle to fight.
[00:15:22] Caroline: Yeah, I think we had a conversation the other day. I didn't write this in the notes, but it just reminded me of that conversation we had where I related this to sort of like a relationship, something about the membership model, the monthly subscription model. As a business owner, it leaves you feeling like you're in an anxious attachment relationship where you're constantly being like, I got to prove my value. Are you going to leave me?
[00:15:46] Jason: Do you love me?
[00:15:47] Caroline: And you're kind of always in this place of uncertainty and needing to prove your worth. Whereas what I like about the lifetime model is it allows for a more sort of secure attachment where you go like, oh, I already gave you the option of whether you wanted to love me or not and you said yes, and here we are. And now all we need to focus on is making this the healthiest, most loving relationship possible. And again, I know that business relationships are not love relationships, but for some reason in my head that stuck out in a different way where I was like, I was trying to put my finger on what the difference in feeling is. And it definitely feels like this more secure kind of trust building relationship where the person has already decided that the value is going to be worth it for them and now they are just along for the ride. And I love that.
[00:16:39] Jason: Yeah. And I remember we would send out emails when we were running WAIM as a membership and every time we would send an email out that was like, hey, we made a new thing, people would cancel. And it's because it's reminding them of the things that they're maybe not utilizing because we all know with digital products, people are not utilizing it to its fullest potential and it's part of the game. But when we send emails out now, I don't think we could send enough emails out to people and no one cancels. We do not see cancellations when we send out emails that things are going on, whether it's a coaching session for the month, whether it's a new thing, whether we're highlighting a different...
[00:17:12] Caroline: They've already decided the value is going to be worth it. And so even if, let's say I'm someone, I still have payments to finish out my lifetime total payment, right? I get the email, even if the thing isn't necessarily for me. I go, man, there they are making good on their promise to continue delivering value and I trust that they're going to continue to do that and there will be something that is for me. Not to mention I've already gotten my value's worth because I made that decision at the beginning that the monthly coaching was enough for me or the community was enough for me. I went into that relationship clear eyed that I'm going to get this value out of it. And so even if the kind of gravy on top doesn't necessarily feel like it's directly for me, I feel like I've already got my values right.
[00:17:53] Jason: Yeah. Before we get to the submitted questions, I do just want to say I feel like, and I know that we're not the only people who sell like a lifetime membership program like we do, but I feel like we're in a little bit of the smaller group, especially like the online coaching space. I feel like there is an opportunity for us to kind of lead the charge to be like, hey, online coaches, people who have memberships, this is a different model and it may not work for everybody. We're not here to say that this is the perfect model. I'm just saying I think there are a lot of people that get trapped in the like, I have to sell a membership, I got to sell it monthly, I got to charge monthly, maybe I have an annual plan and that's it. And they don't even think about lifetime because they've been dissuaded by other things to be like, oh, well, lifetime means you pay for something for less and you get a stripped down version or whatever. And I think we're proof of the fact that we give a ton of value, we get a good return on that value for the money that we charge people. And it feels like a fantastic relationship like we've been talking about. But I just wish more people in the same position that we were in five years ago would more heavily evaluate this. And I think some of it is just like, it's kind of hard to look at the numbers to see it, but some of it's also just a gut feel of like, does this feel right for me for my business in that you're always going to have to get new customers? I think that's one of the misnomers of this lifetime model, is you're just going to get a whack of customers and your revenue is set forever. I don't think that's really possible unless there's something crazy that you're doing, which maybe there is, but I do think that there is some math to be done. There are some spreadsheets to be created, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And there are some systems that you can put in place to find a repeatable process, which we'll also talk about more of.
[00:19:35] Caroline: Yeah. And the thing that we talk about often that I want a lot of people to hear is people often forget that with any... Well, really any offer that you sell, but more specifically, a lifetime offer, you get to define the terms. You get to define the terms and you get to make that very clear to your customer before they make a purchase decision. So I know for me personally, and we'll talk about this later, but I hear lifetime and I hear pressure for the rest of my life.
[00:20:06] Jason: Forever. Yeah.
[00:20:07] Caroline: I hear responsible for X, Y and Z for the rest of my life. Right. But you forget that in the setting of those terms, you can be very clear. You can say, hey, with this lifetime model, here's what you're getting. So for us, for example, just to be crystal clear, on our sales page, every single launch, we reevaluate, we come together and we say, do we see ourselves doing monthly coaching for the foreseeable future for the rest of the year? The answer is yes because we enjoy it. And so we make sure that on the sales page it says we are guaranteeing you monthly coaching till the end of 2024. Right. That is what we can guarantee you. We don't know what the future holds. We make that very clear in all of the language around what you're getting with this. And all we can tell you is that we don't know what the future holds. But all we can tell you is we will continue to make things on the Internet. That I can promise you I'll be doing until the day I die.
[00:21:05] Jason: And you get a vast library of previous things. And so I think if you're someone thinking about creating a lifetime program of your own, it's really about identifying what's the current value in the existing library of stuff that you have. What is the present/ quasi future value, and what are you doing for the rest of this year that someone could look forward to? And then what's the future value? So what are you willing to promise in the future? And you don't have to throw in everything. And so we'll talk more about that, but let's get into questions.
[00:21:33] Caroline: Okay, but just the last point there is, I don't think, just to wrap that little section up, is, again, you define the terms, but I do think, and we probably should have said this at the top of the episode, but a lifetime model I think works best for people who are very squarely comfortable with the fact that they are online entrepreneurs and they do not see that changing, period. That's who I think it's really good for, is like, you don't know what the future holds. You don't know what you will or won't create, but you feel very confident in the fact that you're not going to one day decide, like, this isn't for me. I'm not saying that you couldn't decide that, but I just think if you are going to go the lifetime route and you are going to tell people that they can expect a certain level of reliability from you, you want to feel pretty confident that you can see yourself doing this for the long term.
[00:22:24] Jason: Yeah. Great caveat here 22 minutes in and everybody who listened to this point now knows what's up.
[00:22:31] Caroline: What's up?
[00:22:32] Jason: What's up? All right, let's get to Sofia's question. Here...
[00:22:35] Caroline: Our first audio question.
[00:22:36] Jason: We go.
[00:22:37] Sofia: Hey, Caroline and Jason. My name is Sofia. I'm from Chile. And in short, my question is how to make a lifetime offer more profitable? I would like to explain a bit, as a context, I have a digital library of language learning resources where members pay once and get lifetime access to all of my studying items and any new ones that I create in the future. My library is currently $97, which I think it's a fair price for everything it includes, plus the bonuses I give. But as my most loyal customers have joined, I think I'm losing them somehow. I'm worried as I know that it's harder to sell to new customers than to old ones. I feel like I'm losing my biggest potential clients when they join my library because I know that they won't have more things to buy from me as they already got everything I've made. Is there a way to make a lifetime offer like mine more profitable? Should I just increase the price to earn more per purchase or lower it so that more people join? I've been finding very hard to get new members, even when I give special coupon codes. So I'm very curious about your opinion. Thank you so much for your help.
[00:23:39] Jason: Thank you so much, Sofia, for submitting that question. All right, Caroline, what do you think? She's got a $97 library of products.
[00:23:46] Caroline: Right.
[00:23:46] Jason: She's finding it hard to get customers. She's tried coupons.
[00:23:49] Caroline: Well, my first instinct when I heard that was two things. Number one, it brings up a good point about I think lifetime is dangerous if you feel like you don't already have good product market fit because, to me, when I hear I'm finding it hard to get new customers, even now when I play with the price, coupons and things like that, there might be some rearranging that needs to happen in terms of positioning the library itself before you go lifetime. You really want to make sure that that's dialed in because you need to feel confident that you are going to get new customers if you're going to keep up the lifetime model. Right. The second thing is that we didn't even talk about, but I do wonder if just $97 for a lifetime product is just too low.
[00:24:38] Jason: Yeah, I mean, I really think not knowing the full scope of Sofia's business and what her sales page says and whatever it's like, what problem is she identifying that the library solves for someone? Because there could be a subtle positioning thing exactly like what we did, which was like, it went from a membership to a coaching program, which is a very subtle shift. And we didn't change that super drastically. It was just a subtle thing. And I think for her it could be like, here's my maybe the way she's positioning is like, get my full library of language learning products, workshops, et cetera, as opposed to become fluent in Italian in six months.
[00:25:18] Caroline: Right.
[00:25:18] Jason: And those are two different problems that you're solving. The first one isn't really a problem anybody knows they want. The second one is like, oh, that's interesting, and it's only going to cost me $97. It doesn't necessarily matter that they're getting a bunch of things for a lifetime.
[00:25:33] Caroline: Right. It's like, focus on the results.
[00:25:34] Jason: Exactly. And so I think there's something maybe to be investigated with the value proposition.
[00:25:39] Caroline: Yes. I think also kind of going back to the pricing element of $97. I was thinking about specifically what she said about I have this instinct that what I basically heard in her question was, when people sign on for the lifetime, I'm now realizing that I don't have the ability to sell to them any additional products, and that's limiting my revenue. And we can talk about whether that's true or not true because, again, you define the terms of whatever your lifetime is. But it just made me think like, we have priced WAIM Unlimited at a price point where I never say to myself, oh, I could be making more if I go back to these people and sell more. Right. Because we're already getting such a customer lifetime value for that price point that it never even occurs to me. And so something in that question is making me feel like the $97 for the lifetime is not enough based on whatever her financials are for her business. If she's thinking, man, I really wish I could also sell x, y and z to them as well. Right? So it's like, how can we, a, reposition the library around a problem that it solves, identify the value that that problem is worth to a potential customer, price it much higher so that it is sustainable and really feels like the value is good on both sides. And then maybe even define the terms like you were saying to, where you could still sell some additional add ons that would create more revenue for you.
[00:27:12] Jason: Yeah. Okay. Well, we hope that helps, Sofia. There's obviously a lot of nuance in not knowing the full breadth of your business, but the other thing we would definitely recommend is if you have not done any customer interviews with recent people who have purchased, chat with them, find out what led them to buy. What was the number one problem they thought you were solving for them. Things that you can highlight moving forward in your sales copy, your sales page, your email marketing, content that you're creating on social, any of those things. And I do think we'll talk about this more in the next question that we answer. There is just a reality to with a lifetime model, you are going to have to continue to get more customers. And so I think like we were back in 2018, 2019, we didn't know who to market to, we didn't know who our clear customer was to get in front of. But once we changed the positioning and then learned the problem that we were solving and then realized like, oh, it's monthly coaching, giving people something to focus on every month is really the linchpin of our business and what sells our lifetime model. Great. Now we know that and we can package that in. So for you, it might be that you're just not there yet on the full value proposition and packaging. So it just takes talking to your customers, doing some research before you start spending a lot more time creating more content and doing more marketing around a product that people aren't necessarily buying right now.
[00:28:24] Caroline: Love it.
[00:28:26] Jason: All righty. Let's get into WAIMer Rachilli's question.
[00:28:30] Rachilli: Hello, loves. As a customer, I've always loved the lifetime pricing model. The idea that I can pay for something once and continue to get huge value from it is just amazing. And so I really want to offer this for my upcoming group program. But as someone that's chronically ill and has super limited time and energy for launching, the idea of having to launch consistently throughout the year to keep up with that drop off point when people finish paying honestly feels absolutely exhausting to me before I've even started. But other than that, lifetime pricing feels like a great option for me. Do you have any tips for making the consistent launch process easier to manage? Or is it just a case of refining as I go and working out what works best for me? Thank you.
[00:29:12] Jason: Thank you, Rachilli, for submitting that question. We appreciate it. Carol, what do you think?
[00:29:18] Caroline: Okay, so lots of things here. I love this question, and I am now realizing, Jason, I wrote a couple of notes before this for these questions and where we wanted to take the conversation, but I'm realizing that we've been doing a lot of talking about the benefits of lifetime pricing as it relates to an alternative to monthly. Right. So if we're talking about that, if Rachilli was deciding between do I sell this program on a monthly basis or do I sell it on a lifetime, you know, especially with what she said about the unpredictability of I don't know where my health or my energy is going to be for keeping up consistent launches, I think that there are some advantages to lifetime over monthly launching because if you think about, let's just say you did two lifetime launches per year, kind of the WAIM model that we do, I do think about the fact that that's almost like, less failure points for, like, you find yourself in a situation where there's less likelihood that you're going to find yourself in a flare situation twice a year than it is every month. Right. Because there's just less opportunities for that to happen. And so I think you could create a system where you would just dial in your launch formula to the place where you feel like even in the worst case scenario, like, let's say you just were in the middle of a flare, you absolutely had no energy. Do you feel like you could still confidently pull off even a bare bones launch? I think playing out that worst case scenario is really helpful and getting that to a place. Could it be hiring a temporary kind of like, launch support person who could at least just send out the emails? Could it be. I don't know what those solutions are, but I think doing the thought exercise to think through, let's say I was in a position where health wise, I just couldn't manage a launch. What would my kind of emergency solutions be for that? I think thinking that through would help the uncertainty of I'm afraid to do this lifetime model because I don't confidently know if I would be able to handle those launches. Right. So that's one thing. But then as I was just hearing her question again. I was thinking, but let's talk about the benefit of a lifetime model versus just a launch model, right? Where the program, you're not launching a lifetime model, you're just saying, hey, the program is going to be for the next six months or whatever. What do we think the benefits of the lifetime model are over that? Because I think it would have to be a significant improvement versus just doing the one off launches.
[00:31:50] Jason: Yeah. And I think it kind of boils down to customer lifetime value. So it's like if you're a person who maybe has a coaching program that you want to launch and you know that you want this program to be something that people take for three months or four months and then they take a break, but then they maybe re up at a second time through the year if they want to go through the program again. We see this a lot with different coaching programs where people say, like, okay, we do this for like four months and then you can buy another package to do it again. I think if you know that you're going to do something like that, a lifetime model is great where you can say like, hey, if you pay this amount, it'll be less money than you were to pay for this for like two years or something like that. And so I think it's interesting to evaluate the potential customer lifetime value in that example of what you're doing. And then I think the other part of it is to realize for you personally, and I know for us, we just really don't like being in the constant sales and promotion game.
[00:32:46] Caroline: Right.
[00:32:46] Jason: And I think having a controlled bigger, maybe focus in these launches for a lifetime where you maybe put a little bit more effort because you might want to get a couple more people, that buffers your income for a little bit longer because maybe you're selling it for a little bit more, I think that's more of a pro than it is doing a smaller launch with just like, a cohort that's going to go through something where maybe you're not able to put as much time into it.
[00:33:08] Caroline: Right. Well, that makes me think what I actually like about the lifetime model versus maybe just the individual kind of product launch model is it creates this bigger umbrella where any ideas that you have programs or products or new curriculums that you come up with can kind of live underneath this bigger umbrella, and therefore, you're not actually having to reinvent the wheel every time. So going back to Rachilli's question about being able to confidently know that I can do these launches even with chronic illness. I think actually creating a lifetime model where it lives under this bigger umbrella means that you don't have to reinvent the launch formula every time. Right.
[00:33:54] Jason: Exactly. Which is what we did with WAIM Unlimited.
[00:33:56] Caroline: Exactly. That's what I was going to say. Part of what allows us to have such a repeatable launch formula, similar launch emails every time, a sales page that we update year over year, but hasn't materially changed in probably the past three years, is because we have this umbrella product of WAIM Unlimited that all of our new ideas can live under, because it's a lifetime model. And so again, if I am Rachilli and I am thinking about the benefits of this lifetime model over maybe just an individual launch formula, I love the idea of creating this sort of more flexible container where she can hone in on a launch formula that she could repeat very predictably, which then speaks to, and I think assuages some of that fear of, listen, I don't know when I do these launches two or three or four times a year, where is my health going to be or my energy level going to be in that moment, but if you have a container that's flexible like that, you know, the launch is going to be much more predictable. Launch over launch. Therefore, you can hone a system where even if you were at your lowest energy or even if you were in the middle of a flare, you would have, as we said at the beginning of answering this question, some resources, some plan A, B and C to be able to pull off that launch even if you weren't maybe feeling your best.
[00:35:19] Jason: Yeah, and I think the last point for Rachilli, and again, we'll talk about this towards the end of the episode even more. But it's just to be really super clear about the terms when someone is buying your lifetime program. So resist the urge to put everything under the sun in it and promise all this stuff for years to come and just put what someone's going to get, what they can expect to get in maybe the next year. And if there's anything that you are very confident that you're going to create, maybe in a year or two's time, you can add that in. But don't set yourself up for failure. Don't say, like, for the next ten years, I'm going to release a new course every month for you. It's like, no, that's going to lead you down burnout route.
[00:35:57] Caroline: Because, listen, I think this goes for anyone who deals with chronic illness. I think this goes for anyone like myself, who deals with anxiety, anyone who feels like, maybe their energy fluctuates. Anyone who plans on having a family, anyone who just feels like their energy or their capacity is not going to be extremely predictable and consistent, I think you need to be planning your terms around your lowest capacity, not your highest capacity. Right. You need to kind of under promise against, okay, if I was at my lowest capacity, here's what I kind of feel like I could still deliver on. And then let everything else be gravy. Let everything else, when you are at your best, when you are on those stretches where you feel really good, when you do feel like you're not experiencing anxiety on a daily basis, that's speaking for me or anyone who deals with that, then let that be gravy. Let that be your chance to over deliver on those promises. But don't back yourself into a corner where you feel like you have all this pressure because, again, that's only going to negatively impact your health or your mental health.
[00:37:01] Jason: Great. All right, Rachilli, we hope that was helpful. You're awesome. We love you. Let's move on to Mark's question here. So Mark asked us, why do we have payment plans covering five or 20 months rather than six or 24? Does it not guarantee that your bank account has a couple of sad months each year? So, very easy answer to the 20 month question is that we really didn't want our payment plan to go more than 20 months into the two year realm. It just felt like way too long to have someone paying for something. 20 months felt like, okay, it's not two years. Still kind of a long time, but it felt doable. So that felt like an easy answer.
[00:37:33] Caroline: And the way that the math worked out again, when we started WAIM Unlimited, offering WAIM Unlimited lifetime, it was $2,000. So if you do the math, that's 20 months at $100 and anchoring it to that previous $100 a month. We had already proven that people would pay for that, so it just felt like easy math. So that was the answer to the 20 months rather than 24. And then, great point about the five versus six. But again, the math worked out much better. If you divide 2000 by five, you get?
[00:38:04] Jason: 400, but if you divide it by six, you get $333 and 33 repeating cents forever.
[00:38:08] Caroline: So that was just a math thing. But to answer your question of does your bank account have a couple of sad months each year? Absolutely it does. And so this is where we mentioned spreadsheets earlier. But you really do have to be careful about the cash flow of your payment plans and however you decide to structure this lifetime pricing. Would it have been better to have at least a six month plan so that they overlap? So that you're doing a launch every... there's five or six months in between each launch. That would be a better system where you would make sure that your cash flow doesn't dip. However, because the math worked out the way it did for us, we knew the cash flow would be fine, and we modeled it out.
[00:38:53] Jason: And what matters is you're making the same money. So if you're stretching it out to an even number of payments that overlaps, it's still the same amount of money.
[00:39:00] Caroline: Yeah, you just have to manage your expenses.
[00:39:02] Jason: Exactly.
[00:39:02] Caroline: A little bit. But once you get enough launches under your belt, it starts to stack in such a way.
[00:39:07] Jason: Exactly.
[00:39:07] Caroline: That you don't have these huge gaps. It was a little bit harder in the beginning because of that gap, but when we plan out our launches for the year, this happened much more in the beginning where that gap was more important. We would also be like, okay, well, if we do the Spring launch a little bit closer to the end of...
[00:39:25] Jason: We would start to catch...
[00:39:27] Caroline: April, or we do closer to the beginning of September for the Fall launch. You can play with the dates of that a little bit to try to kind of even out your cash flow a little bit. Astute observation.
[00:39:36] Jason: The funny part is, it's a moot point now because we raised the price, which we'll talk about in another question. Our price now is $2,800. And so we have a seven month plan for the $2,800 plan because we wanted to keep the price at the $400 per month for people. So we now do have an overlapping. And it has worked itself out.
[00:39:54] Caroline: Right. At some point in the next two to three years, we will no longer have the one lonely, sad month or the two lonely, sad months that we have.
[00:40:04] Jason: All right, Meghan's question. If you were to offer, maybe you already do, lifetime pricing for Teachery, how do you calculate the price for it? So, funny enough, we actually did have a lifetime plan for Teachery a while back. This was in 2016, 2017, and the price for that was $900. Back when that happened, 116 people bought that Lifetime plan, which comes out to $104,000 in total revenue. And if you just go off of our kind of, like, customer lifetime value calculations at that time, well, actually, like, right now.
[00:40:36] Caroline: I know I'd be so interested to know what our customer lifetime value was at that time.
[00:40:40] Jason: I think memory serves me that it was, like, $500.
[00:40:42] Caroline: Okay.
[00:40:43] Jason: So when I set that price, I was like, if we can get double, which, again, is a great value. So our current customer lifetime value for Teachery sits at $700 is what the metrics tell us. I think it was at 500 at the time, because, again, the business was only around for like three years. At that point, we had way less customers. The platform wasn't great. But if you just do the math, basically, even now's customer lifetime value, if our average customer lifetime value is $700, that's a net gain of $20,000 increase over what our average would be. So in that math, our lifetime model would be making us $20,000 more than what our customers would be paying us before they canceled and stopped using it.
[00:41:22] Caroline: Yeah. So to answer the question more directly of how do you calculate the price for it, first and foremost, you're looking at the math related to your customer lifetime value. You want it to be more than that, right? You want it to be a significant increase over that. But then you're thinking about all the other pricing things, right? You're then taking that number and comparing it to what are other course platforms charging yearly? Is there a realm where you could have a better lifetime deal than another course platform is offering annually? That would be a compelling marketing story. So you're doing a little bit of that. You're asking yourself, how much does it cost to run Teachery? How much do those costs increase per user so that you're not getting yourself into a situation where you do have a bunch of lifetime users, and for software, you have costs that are scaling up infinitely and you have to handle those users. These are all things that you would also think about if you had, like, a freemium model, right? Or something like that.
[00:42:17] Jason: Yeah. I have been given permission that we are doing a lifetime plan again in some shape or form for Teachery, and I am allowed in this episode by my co-founder because I have to get approval now. These things, I can't just willy nilly do whatever I want.
[00:42:33] Caroline: Horrible.
[00:42:34] Jason: If you're listening to this, you're 40 some odd minutes into this episode. If you want to buy Teachery for a lifetime value, if you send us a message through support@teachery.co and you want to sign up, it'll be $1,200 is the lifetime price. So $1,200 is the price. If you want to join and you want to have lifetime Teachery, you will never pay for it again. You'll pay $1,200. Right now, Teachable, at a comparable plan, is $1,500 a year.
[00:42:59] Caroline: Well, that's my point right there.
[00:42:59] Jason: Thinkific is like $1,400 a year. I think podia is like $1,100 per year, maybe $900 per year on the same type of plan, same type of features, all those things. Like, I've already done the comparison charts. So if you're interested.
[00:43:14] Caroline: You've done some thinking about this.
[00:43:16] Jason: Support@teachery.co. $1,200. Say you want the Lifetime plan. You heard it on the podcast, and I'll give you a way to do that. It's not going to be sexy because it doesn't exist yet, so we got to do some workarounds. But you will get Teachery for lifetime, and you'll save dozens of dollars.
[00:43:29] Caroline: Even sexier. Yeah, because you're like, whoa, I got to jump through a couple.
[00:43:35] Jason: Sounds like we're doing some inventory smuggling in Tears of the Kingdom. All right, we got a couple more questions here. Let's get to them. So Edward asked, how do you come up with the pricing for this approach where you both have finances to run the biz but aren't in the, oh, shoot, we need more lifetime pricing customers mode in two to three years?
[00:43:52] Caroline: My real answer to this question.
[00:43:54] Jason: So just to also reframe this question, because it was confusing the first time I read it, but it's like in the beginning when you're doing lifetime pricing, it kind of feels like you're not sure it's going to be profitable and work out.
[00:44:05] Caroline: Right.
[00:44:05] Jason: But once you get two to three years in with a couple of launches, which is exactly how we felt.
[00:44:09] Caroline: They start to layer.
[00:44:10] Jason: They layer. And we had honed the messaging and the marketing, so it was easier and we were getting more customers. And then it became, oh, we're at our enough number. Like, we actually hit that. Again, wanderingaimfully.com/330, if you want to read that whole journey.
[00:44:22] Caroline: Yeah. The answer to this question, just being 100% truthful, how do you know? Is we made a very ugly spreadsheet that literally had columns for every single month for like five years, and all the rows were the different cohorts. So in the beginning, when we were doing monthly, it was like, okay. And we were trying all these different things. It was like we were trying a test drive. We were trying a one time offer of this. I just had row after row of all these offers that we had tried to sell in different ways. Then we got to this place where we were launching more realistically. We had our six month plan, coaching plan, and then we had a WAIM Unlimited plan. So I'm telling you, this spreadsheet was the ugliest thing you've ever seen, but it was the only way to, you can't just do...
[00:45:08] Jason: It's very hard to get like a lifetime pricing.
[00:45:11] Caroline: With a software subscription where you go, our MRR is blah, blah, blah. You don't have MRR because the MRR drops off at some point. So maybe our new business idea is that we come up with a lifetime. This is actually not a bad idea.
[00:45:26] Jason: Well, I've heard this many times before is that someone says, if you have a spreadsheet in your business that other people don't... you need to create it as a product.
[00:45:32] Caroline: Okay, we need to create this as a product to make it easier for people because, yeah, it was really difficult to be like, okay, this person's plan ends in this month.
[00:45:44] Jason: Exactly.
[00:45:45] Caroline: And so the answer, though, is I would still tell people to do this. If you are even considering lifetime pricing, do the ugly spreadsheet because you need to be able to and play with different numbers. So say, here's my best case scenario for my launch. We would always have two tabs. We would always have a conservative tab and like, a swing for the fences tab. And so we'd be like, here's how the cash flow looks. If we did our bare bones launch that we feel like we only get this amount of people, but we feel pretty confident we can get that. Here's how the cash flow looks. And then if we really worked at it and we doubled our launch sales, here's what that would look like.
[00:46:21] Jason: Yeah. If someone wants to contact us and pay us $400 for an example version of that spreadsheet, will you create a template? You can pull out all of our data and put dummy data for $400, would you do it?
[00:46:34] Caroline: No.
[00:46:34] Jason: Okay. How much?
[00:46:35] Caroline: I wouldn't do it for $400.
[00:46:36] Jason: $1,000?
[00:46:39] Caroline: No, because I can't.
[00:46:40] Jason: Really?
[00:46:40] Caroline: I can't sell a spreadsheet for $1,000.
[00:46:44] Jason: But this could, like, someone who's charging for a lifetime thing could be like, I'm going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next couple of years.
[00:46:49] Caroline: No.
[00:46:50] Jason: I'll pay $1,000 for the spreadsheet.
[00:46:51] Caroline: Instead, I will convince Jason to make this as a product and we'll sell it. My time is not worth it.
[00:46:57] Jason: I can't wait to work with another developer on another difficult project for twelve more years.
[00:47:02] Caroline: This is what you signed up for, my man.
[00:47:03] Jason: Shout out in the ugly spreadsheet. I wanted to share this memory. There was a time early on where we made a hilarious miscalculation. And for 7 minutes we were looking at the spreadsheet. And we were making $100,000 by the 16th month. And we were both like, oh, my, we have cracked it. We have literally figured out the secret to Internet business. In 16 months, we will be making $100,000 per month because of this lifetime pricing.
[00:47:36] Caroline: Double counting, like several rows.
[00:47:38] Jason: No, it was like ten x counting. It was ridiculous.
[00:47:42] Caroline: We laugh about that still to this day.
[00:47:44] Jason: Because there were 7 minutes of joy.
[00:47:47] Caroline: We were just like, we figured it out. We were looking at it on the big screen in our office, and we were like, oh, my is, how has nobody figured this out? And it was like, yeah, because your spreadsheet's wrong, you doof.
[00:47:59] Jason: It was absolutely hilarious. I'll never forget. All right, Natalie has a couple questions here to finish this out. And then we also wanted to share our final thoughts of why we absolutely love a lifetime pricing model, and then what makes it challenging. So let's go through these slightly, a little bit rapid fire since Natalie submitted so many good ones.
[00:48:14] Caroline: Yes.
[00:48:15] Jason: First question, have you ever revisited your lifetime value? And the answer is yes. So Wandering Aimfully Unlimited was $2,000 for the past five years. And last year we actually was the first time that we reevaluated it. And we said, listen, Teachery has had an enormous amount of improvements added to it, and you get Teachery with WAIM Unlimited. We have added the page layout library, the notion starter pack, the audio coaching with 220 audio messages, the coaching private podcast. We've done 53 coaching sessions that people have access to nowadays.
[00:48:48] Caroline: The Teachery theme pack.
[00:48:49] Jason: The Teachery theme pack. Like, there's more things that we're forgetting because we forget all the things that we create because we've added so much. Let's up the value now. We really hemmed and hawed quite a bit on what we wanted the price to be. A lot of that is because many of our members tell us that Wandering Aimfully should be worth $5,000 or $10,000 because they join other programs that are of those costs, and they're like, those pale in comparison to the value I get in WAIM. And while we hear that, we just also didn't feel like we could just double the price of it. So the price for this year is $2,800. I have a feeling that we might up the price again in 2025 and maybe do like a slower, incremental price. We haven't had that full discussion, but for this year, the price is $2,800. So we only went up by $800.
[00:49:31] Caroline: Yeah. So the answer to the question is, yeah, you can always revisit your lifetime value, especially if you have the type of lifetime product that is getting more valuable as time goes on. I think that's the idea. So, yeah, every time you launch it, you revisit, you reevaluate.
[00:49:48] Jason: Like, Teachery is a perfect example. In 2016, 2017, it was $900. Right now, as we're talking about it, and I've told people if they email support@teachery.co, they want lifetime. It's $1,200. I think there's way more than $300 in value in the past seven years. But that's a price that we feel really good about. That's like almost a no brainer lifetime cost for Teachery.
[00:50:05] Caroline: Yeah, but we're just not one of those people that are always increasing prices. We like to have a good reason for it.
[00:50:10] Jason: Unless we're doing a bump sale, then it's increasing with every single...
[00:50:12] Caroline: Then that's literally the point of it.
[00:50:14] Jason: All right, her next question. Do people stay engaged for longer with lifetime pricing compared to the standard of membership drop off? And this one's very anecdotal, and it's very hard to track this, but as the person who manages our community, basically our inbox, watches the Zoom registrations every month for our coaching sessions, I can say that it definitely feels like people stick around for a lot longer. And it definitely feels like the ebbs and flows of people returning is much higher.
[00:50:43] Caroline: They come back.
[00:50:44] Jason: I think, especially in when we sold courses and things like that, you get someone for a month or two and then you never see them again. Whereas with WAIM, we may send out an email that's on a coaching session, that's on marketing, and you see people pop back in who haven't been around for years, and they're like, this is what I needed that brought me back in to check everything out and like, wow, look at all these things I found.
[00:51:05] Caroline: That's when I feel like those moments when people come back around are the moments when I feel like the lifetime model really shows its worth because, again, it goes back to that transactional nature. Clearly they've been in a place of their business where maybe they wanted to focus their education time on something else, or maybe they were at a different stage in their business, or they were focusing on different things in their life and they come back around. And I love it because it's like, oh, this was here waiting for me when I was ready. And I love that about the lifetime model is that you're just here still serving customers who are at that place where they need it at that time and then others can ebb and flow. And I really like that. So it's anecdotal evidence. But yes, I do think people stay engaged for longer with lifetime pricing because they feel the flexibility that they can leave and come back whenever they need to.
[00:51:56] Jason: This segues nicely into her next question, which is, do you have a sense of how loyalty plays out in a generous model like this? My impression, there's a stronger feel of loyalty to WAIM and to the other customers. And I, again, as the person who's managing the community and seeing our thousand plus people in the Slack channel, it is very much that we deliver a ton of value and way more than most people that they buy things from.
[00:52:24] Caroline: And then it's funny because it's like the way that we're able to deliver so much more value is because we have a model that feels more sustainable to us. So it's like, again, it goes back to that win win thing. It's like the only thing that allows us to deliver on that value and pour back into the product is because we're not always focusing on sales and marketing. We only have to do that twice a year.
[00:52:45] Jason: Yeah.
[00:52:46] Caroline: So it just feels like a very generative model.
[00:52:49] Jason: Yeah. And I think it also adds to the feeling of people buying something like WAIM with a lifetime model, is that it's not a transaction. Like we mentioned, that they're looking at every single month, even if they're on a 20 month payment plan, they know that's coming to an end and that they will continue to get value for years. And the thing that we have heard from so many people, because I send an email every time someone finishes paying their WAIM membership off, is they're like, it still feels too good to be true that I'm not going to pay you any more money.
[00:53:14] Caroline: Right.
[00:53:15] Jason: And I'm like, yes, then we have won. This is exactly what we wanted this model to do.
[00:53:19] Caroline: Yeah. And I really do think there's something also maybe in the way that when you purchase a lifetime product, you're taking a little bit of a bet on that person. You're having to put a little bit of faith in that person that they're going to deliver in the future and you're kind of buying into investing in them and their journey. And so maybe that also just contributes to that loyalty.
[00:53:43] Jason: And I think, honestly, coming from a consumer's perspective, I think I would buy more stuff from more people if I knew that it was like a lifetime model.
[00:53:52] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:53:52] Jason: And I just think that it's hard to convince people to offer a lifetime model. But I feel like I would buy more things because I'd be like, great. I am betting on you, and I think you're going to deliver, but I don't know if I want to bet on you every single month for the next two years if I'm going to get value from that. And that's the kind of risk that you take when you offer kind of a more standard pricing thing.
[00:54:13] Caroline: Very interesting.
[00:54:13] Jason: All right, Natalie's final question here before we get to our last takeaway.
[00:54:16] Caroline: My favorite question.
[00:54:17] Jason: Do you feel more creative in the lifetime model, or is it even less pressured, in a way? Does it create a more regulated nervous system because it's more predictable than a membership model financially anyway?
[00:54:29] Caroline: I think so.
[00:54:30] Jason: I mean, I wrote what I believe is a billion percent yes.
[00:54:33] Caroline: Yeah. Again, it may not be perfect for everyone, but for us, it is the perfect solution to all the things that we love. And it definitely makes me feel the most at ease because it gives me a container that I can play in and add value to. It gives me predictable revenue. It gives me repeatable launch formulas. It gives me a group of customers that I feel like I'm pouring into all the time. It feels like this big circle. I know this is very a little bit cheesy, but it feels like this big community circle where people aren't just, like, walking in and out. It feels like the circle is the circle and new people come in. But once you're in the circle, you're in the circle forever. You know what I mean? Unless you cancel or you leave, which is very few people, that's the circle. And I love that about it. It feels truly like a community feel.
[00:55:28] Jason: Yeah. I think one of the things we didn't talk about at all at the beginning of this episode is that obviously, our lifetime model is priced in a way where it's many months of payments, and so we can have a lot less customers because the lifetime value of that customer is higher. So we don't need so many customers. Going back to Sofia's question, where she has a $97 product, you need so many more customers, and that might not feel less pressured because you're always going to have to be getting more customers at that price point. And I think for us, it's that we know we can get less customers who are of higher quality because they're opting into us for a lifetime, and that they're not just opting in for maybe a suite of products, but to be a part of a community like you said to be a part of another group of people who are like minded.
[00:56:15] Caroline: Yeah. And so I think, again, going back to Sofia's question, a good thought exercise there would be playing what we call offer math, playing around with the numbers and saying, okay, what do I feel like I would need to charge? Really break the mold here. For a second, don't think about what someone's willing to pay. Think about what would I need to charge, and how many customers do I feel confident I could get in order for me to make my minimum monthly magic number, my enough number, and then reverse engineer. Okay, let's say that that's even, like, $600. Let me reverse engine... instead of 97. Let me reverse engineer. What would the solution have to be promising value wise, in order for it to be worth $600 in someone's mind? Going back to what your point was of focusing on the result, focusing on what the outcome is you're getting someone. And then how do I need to shift my library of resources in such a way that I feel like I can get people that result? And then that can really give you a place to start from now where you're not having to only charge $97 and you feel like you need to constantly get new people through the door.
[00:57:21] Jason: And I do think there is some reality to this, too. Again, we've tried to make this clear in this episode, is that lifetime pricing isn't for everything. It's not for everything. It's not for everybody. Like, if you have an Etsy store and you sell digital downloads, you probably don't have a good business for lifetime pricing. Now, maybe there's a way you could creatively package it. But again, people who are selling $9 things, $17 things, it's hard to create a value that's enough for you as a business owner.
[00:57:46] Caroline: To not feel that pressure.
[00:57:47] Jason: Exactly. And you're always going to have some semblance of transactionality. But I do think, again, it is worth, like you said, do the offer math, create a little spreadsheet, compare things, and see how it goes. All right, let's wrap up here with why we absolutely love lifetime pricing. Carol.
[00:58:03] Caroline: I mean, I think we've mentioned it. It's a win win. Like, I feel like it maximizes value for the creator and it maximizes value for the customer, and both people are happy, and I love that about it.
[00:58:13] Jason: Yeah, I feel this because I'm the one who interacts with our customers on a daily basis in multiple places, that it definitely facilitates deeper connection because it doesn't feel transactional. I think people feel like they're a part of something. They're a part of something for many years to come and that it's not just they're another customer who bought a thing that the person who created it isn't going to reach out to them.
[00:58:33] Caroline: Yeah, I didn't write this down here, but I love feeling like you're always over delivering. Like, I love that because you feel confident about the person has already decided that the value is worth it. And so like Jason said, when people say, wait, really? You're serious? I don't have to pay anymore? People who have been around for three years and they stopped paying long time ago, and every new product we come out with or every coaching session, they're like, wow.
[00:58:55] Jason: When we launched the notion starter pack, it blew our existing members minds. It wasn't necessarily a fantastic carrot to get new members. Like, it didn't move the needle much, but I remember getting like 50 email replies from people being like, wait, what? I don't have to pay for this? This is just included? It's like, yeah, absolutely. This is what we promised you. We were going to make things in the future. These are the things.
[00:59:16] Caroline: We didn't lie.
[00:59:17] Jason: And then, yeah, we love it because especially with the price point of what we sell and how the payments work out, it feels like we have very predictable revenue.
[00:59:24] Caroline: I didn't write this down, but also it feels predictable because it feels like a predictable container that can hold all of our new ideas. So again, I didn't write this, but I'm just now realizing this about it that I don't feel like I'm constantly reinventing the wheel on I have to rewrite my messaging, I have to rewrite my sales emails for every new product or idea we come up with. Instead, we can add those things to WAIM Unlimited. We can just hone the messaging of WAIM Unlimited as a whole, of helping you create a calm business and transition to products and all of those things. That doesn't really change. But the different tools that we add to the lifetime product in order to accomplish that goal, that's where we have the flexibility. And I absolutely love that.
[01:00:08] Jason: Yeah. All right, so what makes lifetime pricing challenging? Let's start with the first one here. You have to do sales pushes to keep the revenue up and you're kind of locked into a little bit of a schedule because the lifetime pricing plans expire.
[01:00:21] Caroline: You can't be like, oh, not doing a launch this year.
[01:00:24] Jason: But again, I want to make this point very clear. I think that people hear lifetime pricing and they're like, oh, I'm going to have to keep selling forever. You're going to have to keep selling forever anything you create.
[01:00:35] Caroline: Totally.
[01:00:36] Jason: Like the fallacy of, I just do one huge launch and I live off of that money forever. It does not exist in online business. I think it's a very rare unicorn event that happens for some people, and even that it's probably someone who's been doing it for ten years and they've honed all the skills and have all the tricks of the trade.
[01:00:54] Caroline: Yeah. So it's just like, what version of that are you willing to deal with? And is the lifetime the version, the lifetime model, the version that you want to be selling with? This one especially, I think if you are the type of person, like I was, where you do feel a lot of pressure to deliver and you think that maybe the idea that you are going to deliver some type of unspecified value for some unspecified time into the future, that could be a lot of pressure for a certain type of person. But again, I think you can mitigate some of that with the clear terms that you set when you do sell the lifetime model. But I know that some people, just like, they want it to be more flexible. They'd rather do one off product launches and change up their programs every year so that they just can have that flexibility.
[01:01:42] Jason: Yeah. And if you want to, we paid a lawyer to write our terms. You can go to wanderingaimfully.com/terms and you can read our terms. They're very easy to find. You can see how we wrote up the terms. Yes, we did write in a clause because our lawyer asked us about. It was like, what if you guys get a divorce? We're like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. But that's a good question. We should probably answer that because we do run this business together. The other thing that makes it challenging is that the price does have to be right. And so you really have to be careful not to underprice because you don't want to be resentful of your customers. If you only charge them like $300 for something, but you have to service them in some way for years to come, that might not feel good. So I think it's really, again, going back to what we've said multiple times, find the average customer lifetime value, and if you don't have that now, the average perceived customer lifetime value moving forward, and just try and find a number that feels good to you and know that you can start with a price and you can then increase the price the next year. And people who've already paid for it. They are locked in at that price. But new people who join, we're not going to have anybody complain in 2024 that they're joining WAIM for $2,800 and they didn't get it for $2,000 because, a, we did two launches where we were very clear that the price is going up the next year, and b, we have added so much value to it that no one can say the $800 increase in price is overpricing what we've done.
[01:03:04] Caroline: Yeah. And I think the more that I think about it, just on this last point of basing it off of your customer lifetime value, I really do think that lifetime pricing works best when you have something to compare it to. So moving from a membership model to a lifetime model, or moving from a one off product model to a membership model because that's the only way that you know for sure that you're kind of getting a better bang for your buck because you have something to compare it to. Does that make sense?
[01:03:29] Jason: Yeah, for sure. All right. We really appreciate all of the questions that were submitted.
[01:03:35] Caroline: That was fun.
[01:03:36] Jason: Especially the audio questions. We know it takes a little bit of courage to record an audio message. But again, if you want to go to podcast.wanderingaimfully.com, if you ever have questions about things we're talking about, we'll come back to those as we get them and try and fit them into episodes in the future. And I think that's it for this episode. We hope it was enjoyable. You learned a lot about our lifetime pricing model and how we think about it and how it's been working for us.
[01:03:56] Caroline: I'm so glad we finally recorded this because in my mind, we had recorded an episode on Lifetime pricing and in all of our archives, I can't find it. It never happened. I made it up, so I'm glad that this actually exists now.
[01:04:08] Jason: Yeah. All right, that's it for episode. We'll be back in your earballs very soon.
[01:04:12] Caroline: Enjoy your week.
[01:04:13] Jason: Bye.
[01:04:13] Caroline: Bye.