NOTABLE! An Educational Business In The Gaming And Esports Industry

[GoodluckChuck]

Great job! Your progress thread is fantastic. If it's any indication of what your product is like, then I'm confident success is coming.

I was reading the part about you considering a subscription model.

Would you give them access to all content we have at 1 go or drip it? Like each week X videos? Something to think about.

My instinct says to go with whatever option provides a better experience for your customers. It worked for Amazon. Should work for you.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes. Thanks for sharing.

 

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[Koenz]

It's always a trade-off. The more success you have the more you need to raise your prices or automate things via 1 to many selling.

Almost every company starts small with an extreme customer care, espeically almost expert and learning businesses.

Keep going.

Yea I've always been a fan of 1-to-many selling. Hence I love giving presentations as well, or webinars hehe. But I suppose that's true indeed. One can put prices higher once you've had many clients with good results from your product. Also, if you position yourself as an expert it's easier to improve prices.

Currently the 'position as an expert' part is going well, we just need to get more clients and traffic. Tomorrow (Monday) we'll start with the ''ads --> webinar --> Facebook group or call --> sales'' funnel. Curious to see how it goes!

A great customer care is important at the beginning, especially in this niche. Let's see if we can continue that once we're growing. Definitely a priority!

 

[Koenz]

I'll tell you how I look at this. I see people stuck or struggling with a problem in their life. It may have been slowly growing frustration or a f* this event. Either way, there's a push from the moment of struggle and they're looking for a solution. This is where the need is born. They may have tried other solutions or not, but there's something blocking them from achieving higher level of satisfaction in this area of their life.

They find your courses and community. They see that the potential upside is higher than the cost. If it works, they gain a lot and the actual value added to their life is massive. If it doesn't, they don't lose much. So it's ok to pull the trigger. In a sense it's like a path of least resistance. They try to fit something into their life and apply parts of different solutions to see what helps. As such, they're not interested in the overall product portfolio you offer. Or in other words, what they buy from you is not necessarily what you think you sell. Also, they need the right bits of information/support at the right time. This is a journey. Both at the microscale of navigating your content and the macroscale of growth in their life.

They may find one of your courses useful, apply it and move on. Or they may improve something just a bit and still struggle with something past that point. Follow both cases. See where they want to get and what blocks them. Or where they've gone. Even if you help them resolve one part, they'll get blocked again by something next or hit a plateau. Like we all do. Help them at multiple points along their journey and your customer lifetime value will increase.

Also, when I read your response I noticed another thing. It was about your product. Your features. Your price points. How about your customer and what they want? Where's the progress they can make?

Take a step back. How would you go about making it flow smoothly for people like this particular customer? She was missing another bit of information to keep transforming her life for the better. I know you have the answer she needs, so... is the structure of your service optimal for her? Is she the customer you want to help? The big course seems like something for someone else? Or is it not?

I think part of your challenge is segmentation. You have several different customer segments. Hence your struggle with the price point and actual solutions sought after.

The value in your posts is amazing @Flint, really enjoy reading eye-openers. Definitely stuff that makes me think about where to go with the business.

Interesting part about the fact people might be going around on the internet simply looking for solutions. The get to our website, see it's not that expensive and just buy it and see if it helps. They might indeed not be interested in the overall product portfolio but just 1 part of it. This is most common, with people buying 1 specific course that matches their needs.

I yet struggle to think about how to navigate the consumer through our different products. I do know the benefits in a microscale and macroscale which I also use on the pages of the products, but they of course have to get to that page in order to read it.

Good point about the progress for the customer. Getting insights in customer experience and needs we did the questionnaire not long ago and have the Facebook group in which we communicate with them and take them along the ride. We regularly ask questions about what they're missing or looking for, so we can help them with that. The price points is a thingie. We were on 10-20 euros and now got to 20-40euros to test. This is partly based on the questionnaire, partly based on us just willing to test it and see what comes from it.

We try to inform the customer about the progress they can make on the page of the product in the section ''after this course...''. Though, progress can be different for everyone of course depending on their personal situation and implementation.

So yea, letting our courses flow smoothly is currently non-existent. Our tactic was that with the smaller courses we can help people with specific questions. But noticing how some still have questions afterwards but they don't know where to find the answers to their questions, even though they're out there, is interesting and something we somehow have to look at. People have to discover the other courses to read about the answer the course gives them, or we don't yet have the answer to their question written down on the course page hence we can improve that to give people more insight about what the course can help them with.

The big course (aka program) is indeed for someone else, even though the steps I think parents should take should be the same for most. The program is based on 5 important steps being: mindset, communication, knowledge, balance and planning. Most discussion and frustrations at home start because of a gap between teen and parent, hence the mindset module is important. This is followed by stepping up communication to avoid these frustrations and discussions. Getting knowledge about gaming and what your kid loves to do is something that can bring both closer together. Getting closer together makes it easier to help your child remain/get in a healthy balance with sleep, study, sports, social life and gaming. To implement all, a plan of action is easy and effective (step 5).

The reason people in the program go through these steps is because we know from experience that it's effective and works. But we also notice on the phone that people with frustrations / discussions with their kid around let's say dinnertime, screentime etc are not willing to invest in the program but prefer to start with a small course. Reason being that the situation isn't bad enough yet for them to invest a higher amount (no need yet). The small course might be enough to help them which is the reason we got the smaller courses. Some people will get enough from these to fix the issues they're having.

We indeed have different customer target audiences let's say. 'Parents with gaming kids' is the big name, but in this audience there's multiple niches. These being:
1. Parents with a good relationship with their kid but want to know more about gaming
2. Parents with frustrations/discussions about smaller topics like dinnertime, screentime, familytime etc
3. Parents that worry about their kid because of the amount of gametime and increased difficulty to connect (problematic or addicted gamers)

Man, business is hard hey. So much to think about and to explore. So much yet to learn. Thanks for making me think a lot

 

[Koenz]

Great job! Your progress thread is fantastic. If it's any indication of what your product is like, then I'm confident success is coming.

I was reading the part about you considering a subscription model.


My instinct says to go with whatever option provides a better experience for your customers. It worked for Amazon. Should work for you.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you @GoodluckChuck! Still lots to learn, improve, think of.. But that's part of the ride I suppose I also learn a lot from the answers here in the thread. Makes me think about all sorts of stuff I didn't yet think about.

Yea it's about knowing if the customer would be interested. I still want to ask them the question about the subscription model in our facebook group. Based on the answers there we get more insight in if it's interesting for them or not. We'll do our best!

 

[Koenz]

Update October 11th, 2020

Book
On the 7th of October, 6 days after the launch of the first press of my book (5000 books) I received an email that the publisher is starting their preparations for the second press. They told me on Wednesday and wanted corrections and things before Thursday afternoon. The publisher already made some corrections in the book text-wise and my coauthor, a journalist and writer, was gonna check the text as well. I focused on gathering more logo's of companies that support the mission of the book.

For the first press I managed to get 40+ logo's of businesses in the book to support the mission. That being 'to help parents repair, retain or reinforce the relationship with their gaming children and help children to get into / continue living a balanced lifestyle'.

In the 1 day I had last week I contacted some people I recently spoke with and managed to get 10 more logo's. The logo's in the book are not just small local businesses. Many are known in their respective industry. I added the pages with the logo's at the bottom of this post. Big ones from the 11 I got last week are the companies:
- Sogeti
- 5CA
- The Royal Dutch Motorcycle Association
- The Royal Dutch Rowing Federation
- Schouten & Nelissen (University of Applied Sciences)

Book x VodafoneZiggo
VodafoneZiggo, a big company in the Netherlands existing of a merge of Vodafone and Ziggo, reached out to me asking to do a webinar regarding the topic of my book as well as willing to buy a minimum of 50 books (depending on registrations for the webinar). It's cool to see businesses reach and want to get the book. Might actually be smart to be pro-active myself and reach out to businesses that might want to get the book to give to clients or employees etc.

LinkedIn post about my book
The post doesn't get any attention anymore so here are the final results:
- 411 likes
- 141 comments (including my reactions)
- 29.353 reach

Facebookgroup & salescalls
Current members: 672 (+12 in the last 6-7 days)

The call I mentioned in my last update was a difficult one. Eventually she did buy one of our 40euro courses and mentioned on the phone this was 'cheap'. We had the call after her personal post in the Facebook group.

I have another call coming up tomorrow. This person was also part of the Facebook group and replied to a certain post after which I asked her to contact me through email. We'll see how the call goes tomorrow.

Ads
Starting tomorrow. Funnel:
Ads --> free webinar (should be max 1hr) --> salescall (and if not, try getting people in our Facebook group) --> sale. I like to keep the ads running from now on and improve them over time.

The calls are great because I learn so much from them. People really open up about their problems which gives me great insight about what we can do to help them. It also helps to move the business forward.

I was thinking about selling the program at the end of the webinar instead of a call, but I like to keep calling for a while to really get to know the target audience.

Pilot with our program
We had a meeting with the organisation we're going tot run our pilot with. We want to start the pilot on the 1st of November, and finish the pilot on the 1st of January. That means that our 6-week program will have an 8-week pilot. The other organisation will search 5 families where gaming is leading to problems. During the pilot, employees of the organisation we partnered with will be in touch with the families to ask certain questions to measure the process and progress. The organisation is a 'welfare organisation' (?) in a city to help people in that city with problems in the family, so they are experienced to be in touch with families. We will personally be in touch with the employees. If families have any questions, the employees will tell us and we'll answer these.

Still lots to learn
Launching a business and leading a startup is challenging and there's lots to think about. Many people on the forum can confirm. It's a continuous process of trying, failing, learning and try again, or try, succeed, learn and try even better. I feel that prioritizing tasks really helps to keep my mental state in check. I never feel overwhelmed by what's yet to be done. I realize growth takes time and we are only 'out there' since June, so basically only for 4 months. We currently have 55 paying customers bringing in 4307euros, 672 Facebook community members and multiple B2B projects we're planning to start if things go well.

I don't often look back at what we've achieved so far. But writing down these numbers is interesting. It provides a bit of perspective. When I'm working on the business I think about what has to be done and there's such a long list of things yet to improve. Often it can feel like things are going so super slow when putting in these endless hours of work day in day out. But each little step forward can lead to big steps in the future. My experience, and the experience of my partners, is growing each day. We keep learning, innovating, improving. I bet that in a couple of years we'll be looking back at where we started and be like ''ohmy, remember how shit our salespages actually were?''. Pretty funny to think about it.

'Take the risk or lose the chance' is a quote I always identified with. Countless of moments in my past can be linked to this quote, including quitting my medical study to start my entrepreneurial life. The quote also identifies with what we're doing now. We simply launched the business in June and try to learn as much as we can and keep improving. The learning curve is a lot higher this way than keeping things for ourselves and try to ''make things perfect'' (they'll never be) before actually launching the business.

So far so good.

 

[Flint]

Good effort @Koenz.
Not much time, so just very quick:

I yet struggle to think about how to navigate the consumer through our different products.

I've never tried it myself but one approach could be to use Hotjar and see for yourself how the real users navigate your website. Personal Basic plan is free and should be sufficient.

We regularly ask questions about what they're missing or looking for, so we can help them with that.

You're asking about something they haven't figured out yet, no wonder it's difficult for them to offer on a silver platter.

I'd try to learn more about their past weeks and months instead. To understand their struggle and figure out (myself) what can be of help in their situation.

I'm still happy to run this type of interview with you, my DM is open. We can trim it to a short chat if you're struggling with time.

Man, business is hard hey. So much to think about and to explore. So much yet to learn. Thanks for making me think a lot

Wait for what Gail Goodman has to say about it:

View: https://vimeo.com/54076835


It's in the context of a SaaS business, but still very applicable here.
Keep re-watching and taking notes over time. Great lessons.

 

[Koenz]

Update October 14th, 2020

Speaking #1 & interesting realisation
Was invited to speak at a talkshow of a business on monday for an hour. It was related to their overal gaming and esports project. It was a good conversation. It was a €1500 gig and there was no preparation involved from my side. Only had to travel to the location.

When I travelled back I travelled with someone that partly organised the talkshow. He mentioned that FIFA doesn't really attract their target audience and is a game they're focussing on during their project. I was surprised indeed and asked a few questions. Quickly figuring out that the reason they got to FIFA, is because the guy helping them doesn't know anything about other games or communities haha.

This was an interesting realisation. I know all people and businesses involved in helping companies with esports/gaming projects, I'm one of them and worked with Vodafone, Spinnin' Records, KIA and more. So I kinda figured out that the person they work with isn't the right person for what they want to achieve.

After realizing this we just spoke about what they might want to focus on next time and that they can always reach out to me. The interesting thing is that they didn't find me, or another expert in the Netherlands, but this random guy only knowing the FIFA niche. Maybe means we all have to do more on social media or marketing? Or this business just didn't do enough research online to find the experts. Probably... the second, as there's enough to find online.

Speaking #2
In the past week we got a few other speaking requests which are interesting. It's of course unknown how many requests we get each month so it's not something to really build upon, but it does net another €1750 if they all continue.

It's good to see that people find us for these requests. Often they reach out personally by email. One of my partners @AndreP and myself are known speakers. He's known to speak for healthcare professionals, me for businesses, including conferences, and in the gaming/esports industry. Even though Covid-19 had a negative effect on speaking in the beginning, some more opportunities arise again.

Speaking tips
I speak a lot at conferences, meetings and more, including a TEDx talk for 900 people in Germany (picture below). Talking about speaking a lot in my execution thread, I think it's cool to share some tips. I think speaking in public is immensively beneficial for your business(!), not only as an income stream but also for positioning purposes.

By speaking, you're basically selling 1-to-many. The moment you start talking, you show your expertise and position yourself. How often does it happen that people add you on LinkedIn afterwards or approach you after a presentation? A lot. It also build trust and credit.

I really advise everyone to follow some of these tips:
- Speak in front of groups as often as you can. Take all chances and get used to the stage.
- Build your personal story. People love a good story and your personal can be great to connect with the audience. Remember how @MJ DeMarco does this as well in his book?
- A good story often has a hook at the start (asked the guy in the lamborghini what he's doing, MJ got an insight and started his adventure. You now want to know how he got there)
- A good story often has 3 'acts' : the buildup (leading to a problem or pain most of the time), An insight or change that helped you get on track, and 3 good results that you eventually got (from small result, to medium result, to big result).
- If you have slides, use pictures and videos. Besides it's more interactive for your audience, it also helps to speak more free of mind
- No script. When people use a script and practice it but then during the live version they make a mistake, they get into a state of ''uhh, ahmm, ehhh, hmm...'', they get stuck basically. I don't see any benefit of a script. While building your presentation and slides, prepare what you would kinda like to say at that particular slide
- We all know lots of text on slides doesn't work. People read instead of listen to what you say. Besides, it carries the risk you're reading directly from your slides instead of talking open and free
- Speaker stance: don't hang on 1 leg, keep your chin up, don't put your hands in your pockets (i know this is the only sentence I highlighted, but this one is so important and I see it so often)
- The bigger the audience, the bigger your movements. Use the stage from left to right to connect with the sides of the audience. Use your hands and arms while talking and don't be scared to open your arms fully when you have lots of people in front of you. You see enough pictures of how Tony Robbins does this as well.
- Look in the direction you're walking, don't walk backwards.
- Stand at the front of the stage, also called the C-area (connect-area). Close to your audience
- Use different tonalities to maintain the focus of the audience.
- Use some jokes if you can, or funny movies, or funny personal experiences
- Talk about your fails if it's possible. People connect with you on a personal level.

Should be good to start with.

Salescall with a FB group member
Had a call on monday with a mother that wrote in our Facebook group. She already told me she has €500 to invest in the situation. I listened to her in a 30 min call and eventually thought our program (minimum price of the program is also 500) was too much for her. She had no problem spending it and I think I could've got her in the program, but I also think it wasn't the first thing she needed.

I advised her one of our €40 courses that she indeed bought. She's going to check that out first and utilise that. In case that doesn't work, she'll go into the program with an adjusted price due to her already following this course now. This decision was more suitable for her. After listening, this was the best choice. Also, a very happy customer.

Great compliment from the customer above:
This person heard of our business through an addiction clinic. It's great to hear that clinics refer to us first of all. But this woman gave us a great complement as well that had to do with our Facebook group and customer service.

She replied on a certain post from another woman in our group, only saying ''following, I'm in a similar situation''. She wanted to follow the discussion of a woman having some problems and she was in the same boat. I replied very quick and asked her to send me an email to explain her situation. I then asked her to book a call with me and there we go.

She was very impressed by the quick reaction, the personal approach of giving my email and then booking a call. That was a nice moment.

Mindset
On monday I got out of bed at 7:45am. It's just not my thing. I prefer getting up early. Because I felt shit, I put my alarm on 5am for the rest of the week. Something I wanted to do for a longer time.

Last 2 days the alarm goes off at 5:00, second time at 5:10, then I check a bit of FLF for inspiration, motivation, learnings etc. Then I get up quickly after, go to the gym, be back between 6:00am and 6:30am, shower, have breakfast, read a book for 1 hour till like 8am - 8:30am, and then start with stuff on my pc and laptop.

Love it

Saw a recent thread about working early morning or late evening. I can do both, but feeling-wise I just feel much better getting up early. Like someone mentioned in that thread, it's like a mental boost. You are already doing all sorts of stuff before others even woke up.

Covid-19
We launched our business in the middle of the Covid-19 period after more than a year of preparation. I think the Covid-19 period really shows the mindset of people. The glass is half full, or half empty. You can clearly see who belongs to what group.

In our case, also with my partners, our glasses are half full. We see opportunities, options, possibilities and put in the work.

I don't have any magic sause, but I do like to say that in whatever situation you are, look for opportunities instead of problems.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Some really great informative nuggets you've shared, I'm upgrading to NOTABLE.

Thanks for sharing your journey.

 

[Koenz]

Some really great informative nuggets you've shared, I'm upgrading to NOTABLE.

Thanks for sharing your journey.

Thank you @MJ DeMarco! Appreciate it

 

[Koenz]

Update October 16th, 2020 - long post, interesting thoughts, questions for you

For new people reading this thread
Hi there You can read more about me and my history in my first post in this thread. But basically, I'm currently running a new business (launched june 2020) with 2 partners called Parents of Play, helping parents to repair, retain or reinforce the relationship with their gaming children, and help children to get/remain into a healthy balance. We do so by having an online FB community, courses, books and programs. I'm also the author of a book called 'Mijn gamende kind' (My gaming child) that launched on the 1st of October and has the same mission as my business.

Enjoy my highs, lows, thoughts, tips, fails and hopefully lots of successes Feel free to jump in and share your thoughts.

Projects for youth
We already work and do stuff for parents but we also get approached more and more about things to do with children, teenagers or young adults. Often it's about educating them about gaming and maintaining a healthy balance. This includes them becoming more active.

In the past I've already given multiple workshops or presentations for children at schools and in libraries. People came to me, I said 'sure' and off we go. Now we're thinking about setting it up more professionally.

Long term instead of short term: important tip
I was asked to give a workshop for children upcoming sunday. It's a vice-president of the big business that I recently visit to get some business coaching (check earlier posts). Instead of asking for money, we have another strategy.

I'm going to do the workshop for free. It'll be 10-15 kids, from 1pm to 5pm or so. We don't want money, but what I do want is that if this workshop is succesful, this vice-president is going to lobby for us in that company to help us grow this part of our business.

So basically, he can then help us to build our youth-part of the business which long-term has a lot more gains than short-term money. If this business can help us give more workshops, or improve our content or workshops, or maybe even finance stuff, it's great. I already have good connections there so we'll see how the workshop on sunday goes.

The tip here is that even though money might look interesting, sometimes thinking more long-term and forget about the short-term money might be more beneficial.

An opportunity for a first employee?
I've been thinking about maybe getting another person to setup the youth-part of the business where he can reach out to schools and all, give presentations and workshops, maybe organize things online and more. This would be good when looking from a time-management-perspective. Now often when we get emails from people that want us to give a presentation, they specifically reach out to me. On the one hand it's fun, on the other hand it's negative.

Eventually I also want this other person to do the presentations and workshops. And this other person could be doing the presentations and workshops perfectly fine instead of me being there.

So interestingly, I know another business in the Netherlands that basically got a whole team of people without paying salary at all. They start doing things for that business, and when money comes in from those projects the people that set it up take a good cut. Or, they got some shares in the business. Now one of these two might be interesting to use when setting up our youth-department with another person. What would be your choice? One of these two or maybe something else? How would you build a team around you?

Luxury but dangerous
We don't yet have budgets for salaries though. We're not even paying ourselves yet (3 owners, but we got other income streams as well). It's a luxury position as we have less stress about money, but also a dangerous one as it can make you progress slower as you're missing the 'stress element' and survival mode. Instead of just launching stuff and get your a$$ in gear, you might think 5 times and only launch things later. It has positives and negatives.

In our case, we kicked our a$$ in gear earlier this year with the webinar for parents. Got some sales, then I had to develop all the content (which took 5 months), and only since September I can look more into online funnels and marketing while my 2 partners are more used to offline strategies (municipalities and clinics). Projects with municipalities and addiction clinics simply take a while, these are slow systems.

My mistake - lesson learned?
Had a realization yesterday. I'm quite a perfectionist which can really slow me down in some regards. I was looking around online checking platforms and such that basically can do what we do. You know, things like Teachable, Kartra, Maatos, Huddle.

And then I got this thought of: ''why the F did you want to build a whole platform from scratch instead of using these kind of platforms? Why did I put so much money into developing our own platform while I could've saved most of it and simply create something with these softwares online?''

Don't understand me wrong, it's great to have the C in Cents which is Control (as we got our own platform), but it cost speed and money. And at the beginning as a startup, speed and money are very important.

The first platform that I let someone build was not very good but hella expensive.. Then later my partners got into the business and they knew a good guy that made our current platform/website (really nice), but of course we had to pay again. Lessons lessons lessons.

All those online platforms can also be easily connected to other softwares online. This is not immediately the case with your own platform. Many of these already existing platforms have functionalities I would like to have, that we don't yet have in our own platform and have to pay of course to have them build.

Argh, I felt annoyed. Still am a bit but also looking at future solutions or combinations.

Subscription option --> won't make the same mistake?
Our platform currently works fine and we do make some sales etc with marketing starting soon. It's not perfect and has to improve over time, but okay. Currently we got courses and material that people pay for once and then they get it. But we're also thinking about a subscription option. I'll soon test what our target audience thinks of this in our Facebook group.

Now a platform like Huddle is freaking amazing for subscription services. So that rises a question that I like to have a discussion about:

Question to you all:
Would you offer a subscription option on the same website as the one-off payment options for specific products? Or would you build a (for example) Huddle page that has clearly 1 offer (the subscription options)?

I feel that it provides more clarity to the customer to not have to many stuff going on on 1 page, and therefore seperate it.

We did already think about some extra's etc that we can add in a subscription service.

Question to you all:
Besides the thoughts of our target audience: would you go for one-off-payment products like we have now, or a subscription service with different pricepoints and monthly/yearly?

Just a general question really about what your preference would be.

also another one:
Not making the same mistake - question to you all:
Would you build a subscription option on the platform we have right now with a community part (C of control), or would you make use of a service like Huddle to kick things off quickly with less costs?

So yea, I think that a service like Huddle can help us to get things up and running quickly without much costs (€70 a month, €700 a year). We currently have a private Facebook group of 675 members which is free for people to join, and I'm sure at least some people in there would be willing to pay a monthly fee for a subscription service that provides a lot more value, information, access to courses, private meetings etc.

With the money we generate from the people in the subscription service, we can then improve our own platform.

Lots of doubt here. Maybe it's a 'or and or' thing. OR have one-off-payment stuff, OR a subscription. But, we also made our own platform that is by far not as good for subscriptions as for example Huddle. What to do with our platform?

Sometimes the platform feels like a burden. Ah well. I hope someone learns from what I'm typing here haha.

Funnel and marketing
The funnel is ready. Marketing is actually also ready. The only thing we're waiting for is for the website developer to change a small thing on the website so that the marketing agency can track that. It's about a subtotal amount in the 'cart' section of the website, adding up the prices of the products someone has in the cart. Basically adding the total amount before a potential discount and then the final amount at the bottom of the page (corrected for potential discounts).

They need this for tracking purposes and measuring the sales made through our funnel so yea. Waiting to get this started. You might think, why not simply use the total amount at the bottom of the page?

Well, the problem is that when we have a salescall and literally sell something on the phone, giving them a link to pay with, we will then give them a 100% discount code to get access on our website (because they already paid on the phone). Therefore, if you'd track the total amount number on the website, it would say €0 which is wrong. (see the picture I added below for clarity)

Book x TV-show
On monday I've been invited to be in a live talkshow called 'Koffietijd'. It's target audience is woman that have children, so it's the perrrfect target audience for my book as well as our business. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, my coauthor will be in the show by a videocall while I'll be in the studio myself.

This show has like 250.000 - 450.000 people watching (depending on day and topics etc), so that's pretty cool. Looking forward to it!

 

[Martin Boeddeker]

To me, it sounds like you make it WAY too complicated.

Through is nobody can tell you. Put things out there and listen to the market feedback (but don't to single comments, instead you want to look for patterns).

In the end, it really depends on what you want to optimize for.

Get out a spreadsheet and do the numbers. It works wonders.

Typically what you will see is that you will be much more successful if you focus on selling higher ticket products.

Churn is getting higher for subscriptions these days.

As for the platform it depends as well. Kartra is great and straightforward for funnels but more specialized platforms like the others offer a better member experience.

If you want flexibility I would recommend creating everything on Wordpress using existing plugins/software like Wishlist or Membermouse, so you basically own the infrastructure.

You will always find affordable Wordpress developers and everything you want to build the platform you want.

Since you are from the Netherlands ThriveThemes would be an obvious choice.

I would go with that in your case.

 

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[Koenz]

Update October 18th, 2020

Book partnerships
Several companies showed interest to do giveaways with my book. But there's also these that order a bunch of books at the same time.

Last week a business ordered 250 book to giveaway to their guests during their official opening. In return I was the host that day. Currently we're talking with VodafoneZiggo as mentioned before and they want to take a minimum of 50 books and in return I'll do a webinar. If there's more than 50 people registering, they'll order more books. I've worked with VodafoneZiggo before on the topic of parents and gaming children. Knowing their telecom products, I also thought of a longer term cooperation regarding my book. We could give each person a book for buying X or Y at VodafoneZiggo. They thought it was interesting and we'll look into this later.

Lastly a special foundation which is founded by a Prins and Prinses of the Netherlands will do something with my book in the ''Week of Media-education'' (it's early november in the Netherlands). This is great as many big companies are in touch with this foundation and it's great for positioning and trust.

Our first recurring 'big' deal
We managed to get the deal with a very well known addiction clinic in the Netherlands, great stuff! We're looking at a deal of roughly 28k to 55k a year. This depends on the amount of parents that call the clinic or have their kid in the clinic. Besides that we'll provide 10 workshops throughout the year for the youth in the clinic.

The clinic does have an internal parent program already, but it's very general. Ours on the other hand is fully specialized on parents of gaming children, hence they want our knowledge in their clinic.

We will make a copy of our current program and edit it in a few ways so it's in line with the mentality of the clinic. Shouldn't be too much work. After this is done, it basically runs on autopilot. The only thing that takes time might be some parents booking a call with us before possibly joining the program. Other than that it's only the 10 workshops.

Very happy with this and I'm also very thankful to the clinic for this opportunity as it's a big thing. I already knew the director so that helped to get in touch and already start with a trust-factor. We officially launched in June and got this deal 4 months in. I only finished the first version of the program at the end of August. With our focussed (niche) program we can help parents with their situation. Looking forward helping as many as we can.

Responses
@Flint I'll reply to your message here (and your pm) tonight after today's workshop! @Martin Boeddeker thanks for your reply and thoughts, will also reply tonight to your message here and your pm! Appreciate it a lot guys.

 

[Koenz]

Good effort @Koenz.
Not much time, so just very quick:


I've never tried it myself but one approach could be to use Hotjar and see for yourself how the real users navigate your website. Personal Basic plan is free and should be sufficient.

Thanks for your time anyway @Flint!

So I do have google analytics where I can see the flow of people on the website. I can see where they land and how they navigate (or where they leave). It's an interesting statistic, though I don't yet know how I would possibly make some sort of funnel using this. Meaning, that they first do course A, and then follow course B. Unless possibly in course A I tell people at the end what the other courses are about which might make them check it out.

Anyway, I'll checkout Hotjar tomorrow and see what it's like!

You're asking about something they haven't figured out yet, no wonder it's difficult for them to offer on a silver platter.

I'd try to learn more about their past weeks and months instead. To understand their struggle and figure out (myself) what can be of help in their situation.

I'm still happy to run this type of interview with you, my DM is open. We can trim it to a short chat if you're struggling with time.

Good point hmm. Asking questions about what they're missing or want, but of course that's exactly where their problem is as well: they don't know.

Still interested in having calls with the customers and have a chat. I'll send you a DM again in a sec!

Wait for what Gail Goodman has to say about it:

View: https://vimeo.com/54076835


It's in the context of a SaaS business, but still very applicable here.
Keep re-watching and taking notes over time. Great lessons.

Thanks for linking the video! Going to watch it tomorrow and take my time making notes and listening thoroughly

 

[Koenz]

To me, it sounds like you make it WAY too complicated.

Through is nobody can tell you. Put things out there and listen to the market feedback (but don't to single comments, instead you want to look for patterns).

In the end, it really depends on what you want to optimize for.

Get out a spreadsheet and do the numbers. It works wonders.

Typically what you will see is that you will be much more successful if you focus on selling higher ticket products.

Churn is getting higher for subscriptions these days.

As for the platform it depends as well. Kartra is great and straightforward for funnels but more specialized platforms like the others offer a better member experience.

If you want flexibility I would recommend creating everything on Wordpress using existing plugins/software like Wishlist or Membermouse, so you basically own the infrastructure.

You will always find affordable Wordpress developers and everything you want to build the platform you want.

Since you are from the Netherlands ThriveThemes would be an obvious choice.

I would go with that in your case.

It's a habit that @AndreP (my partner) and my other partner know about me already haha. Once I get something in my head, I research everything about it and find a way to use it. Though sometimes it leads to more confusion than solutions. Trying to think ahead, while in the end you can't. It's only the market that can respond and gives you the answers. So yea, fully agree on market feedback!

I'll still ask some questions in our Facebook group as it's an easy way to get some answers. I'll do some research as well to find patterns about what people think or some similar businesses use. The spreadsheet is a great idea. Sometimes calculating business models can do wonders.

Higher ticket products, for real? Interesting stuff. Our program is currently 'only' €500 (lower end of high-ticket services I'd say). It takes testing to see if we can increase it. Also, it depends on the target audience of course. Higher prices is a different audience than this one. But well, a famous quote is 'you can't help everyone, because then you're helping no one''

I really like the platform Huddle honestly when thinking about subscriptions. It's a Dutch service but you could google translate the page and see what it is. Very interesting concept and it has potential for the future. I see more and more groups transitioning from Facebook to their own websites or other platforms, like Skool or Huddle.

I'll check out ThriveThemes as well to check what it is!

 

[Koenz]

Update October 20th, 2020

Book x TV-show
Yesterday I spoke about the book in a TV show that has between 250k and 450k people watching. Was a good 10 minutes and enjoyed it. Was almost able to say everything I like to say, except for one important thing in regards to the book. This is the 'Spel Schijf van Vijf' system, or the 5S-system as I called it before in another thread of mine. The book has a strong relationship with this system for playing games in a healthy way. The 5S-es are sleep, study, sports, social life and screens (in Dutch the last one is 'Spel', meaning 'game').

Now I've had hundreds of interviews in media since 2014 (click here, it's public)but I still learn after every interview. In this case, I had a call with someone of the show right before I went live. She quickly told me the questions I'd be getting and possible answers to those questions (she knew my story and what I can say due to another call few days before). I was going to get a question about game-addiction and wanted to answer that with the 5S-system, but she said not to mention the 5S-es there just yet but instead, leave it for the almost final question which was about screentime fights etc.

During the TV-show I did get the game-addiction questoin and honestly, mentioning the 5S-system was on the tipe of my tongue but I didn't say it, waiting for the question after. The question after never came due to time, hence the reason I wasn't able to mention it. #damn

Learned my lesson which is typical with media: just say what you want to say and don't care about the rest.

Also another important one for people getting media attention is:
1. If it's a newspaper or article somewhere --> always check the article before it gets published so you can adjust things that are wrong
2. On radio or talkshow: answer the questions short and powerful, and always go back to what you want to talk about. Sometimes, hosts ask tricky questions or trying to challenge you. Stay calm, answer short, but then go to what you want to talk about and lead the conversation yourself.

I did the second tip in the talkshow of yesterday as well. My book for parents with gaming kids has a 'wordlist' at the back with words gaming kids often mention. I knew this was going to be asked at the end of the show. So when the host asked about one of the words, I shortly answered what that word meant and then I continued about how each chapter in the book is organized with a summary at the start, more info after, concrete tips after each chapter, and the wordlist at the end. I simply wanted to mention this before the show would end, so I just threw it in haha.

In the end it was a good conversation. The 5S-model is mentioned in almost all other media attention I had over the weeks so it's not to big of a deal. Had positive reactions as well, all good.

Little trick to always get a recording of a talkshow, even though they don't give you the file or you can download it from their website
I always want to have the file of every interview. Can be great to use in presentations, in marketing etc. These are my steps to get it, and I always get what I want:
1. Ask them if I'm able to get the file of our interview. If no:
2. Go to their website and go into the code to see if I can find the link of the video and if I'm able to download it that way. If not:
3. Open my recording software 'Streamlabs OBS', put the video on my screen and then record my screen while I'm simply playing the video.

In this case, I had to do the 3rd option. Works like a charm hehe. I can't post my recording of the interview on public social media etc due to rights, but I do have the file and can use this in presentations, or snippits in marketing. Perfect.

Book x online webshop
Yesterday, my book was on the frontpage of one of the biggest online shops in the Netherlands and positioned under the section of products selling quickly. Someone else saw that and send me a screenshot. Pretty cool to see this.

The importance of follow-ups --> speaking gig
Someone bought something on our website and I personally send people a mail afterwards. Yea, it's a template I made at the beginning that I can copy and thenI change the first name, but still haha. It simply says thanks for buying, if you want more info or help book a call here, join the FB group here, and feel free to provide us with feedback. Voila

Most people don't reply, but recently someone did. She invited us to speak in a webinar she would then organize for parents with gaming children. This is a €750 speaking gig from home for maybe 1 or 2 hours. Not bad.

 

[Koenz]

Update October 22th, 2020

Meeting with @Flint
Yesterday evening I spoke with Flint on Zoom for like 2 hours. How great to see where things can lead to. Starting an execution thread without any expectations, people reply and share insights that I can use again, which now led to my first meeting with someone from the Forum. It ws also Flint's first meeting.

We spoke mostly about the customer perspective and journey. It's such an interesting area. @Flint showed me a great strategy to get to know the storyline of a customer and how you can use this in business. I like to thank you for your time again! Made some good notes as well

Speaking gigs
You find me talking about speaking stuff quite often. However, I noticed I was mentioning speaking gigs and things in different posts and thought it got a bit messy. So for the sake of clarity, these are the set speaking engagements I have planned this year:

- For students of a highschool - 4 times 25 minutes - €1250
- Webinar for parents of a primary school - max 2 hours - €750
- Vodafone webinar for parents - like 1 hour - they buy a minimum of 50 books (+ further possible cooperations surrounding the book will be explored)
- Webinar for parents through an organisation - €500
- Speaking at a business - €1500
- Speaking at my old highschool - free
- Few speaking opportunities are still pending.

So I speak for free at my old highschool. I barely ever speak for free but I feel good about it. Also, they didn't even ask me, I proposed. I saw a post of my old teacher on LinkedIn and replied, saying I'd be happy to provide students with insights about my journey and lessons.

I already know what I will talk about. For the first part: my story. For the second part: entrepeneurship. I never learned anything about entrepreneurship at highschool. You only learn to get a job. Funny that in the email I got from this teacher afterwards, it literally says ''...your road from highschool to your current study or job''. It doesn't even mention company or something. I want to give these kids something that I didn't get during these years and I hope I can inspire some at this school.

For most of the fees above, 15% goes to the agency making the final deal. I was picked up by this agency in 2017 as a speaker, it's a great and very well known agency in the Netherlands. Got my first speaking gigs through them (then 20% goes to them). But now people know me better and find me quicker, so they write me first. If I then connect them with the agency it's 15%. Why do I do it? Well, I don't have to discuss price. Not that I have too much of a problem with that, but I feel that in the position I'm in it's good that the agency goes into prices etc. I just focus on what I'll talk about.

I said it before but say it again, speaking and being 'out there' can be beneficial in so many ways. I just read the GOLD thread of ''The Greatest Lesson MJ DeMarco Taught Me'' where @MJ DeMarco also wanted to speak even though it was a weakness. He did it for his experience as well as his book. Try to take chances everywhere you can.

Paypal deal
I'll upload my content for the deal with Paypal on my instagram today. This was a deal that came through an agency as well. After some % going off, I'll get €900 for the few instagram stories and a post.

I once did a 'influencer' thing before with a sports shop, only putting some stories on my instagram. This is the second deal I ever got in like a 'influencer' position. Even though my reach and followercount is nothing impressive (instagram like 1550), I do have a certain position in the industry itself. Maybe that's why they reach out.

I do make sure that if I get offers like these, they match who I am and what I do. Paypal did a research with a business called Newzoo. Newzoo is amazing, they got great data about the gaming/esports industry and I often download their reports for my knowledge. Now Paypal cooperated with them to build a rapport, and want me to mention some interesting data etc. So it's fully in line with my activities.

Power of following up
Everyone that invests in the free training we got, or a course, or whatever, is someone that I write an email too. As mentioned before, I made myself a template to make life easy. However, I do regularly change things to make it more personal. The core message is thanking them for their purchase or interest, where they can reach out to us for help or questions, and that we'd love a review or testimonial.

As expected, I don't get a lot of replies. But from the like 44 emails I've send since I started doing this, I got 2 responses. And... 1 has led to a speaking gig of €750 which I also mentioned above, and the other got me in touch with the director of a big party in the Benelux that invited me to speak at a session next week (still pending, not paid), with the potential to cooperate in the near future which would be great.

So it does take a little bit of time, and not many reply, but it can lead to great results when people do reply. I just like to send emails as a 'customer service' thing.

I also watched the video of Gail Goodman that @Flint linked above. She eventually had a team calling every new prospect getting in their free training, or a new customer. Takes even more time, but gives even greater results when done well I guess. Might be interesting for the future, for now I have a lot of things to do first and sending the emails is a great start.

 

[Koenz]

Update October 24th, 2020

Updating the website
Been checking and updating the website yesterday and will probably continue to do so today. I took into account the things that @Flint has mentioned before. These were:
- Navigation --> add free training (done)
- Navigation --> add community (not yet, read below)
- Course pages --> add a intro/sample/preview video (not yet)
- Course pages --> add the time per video behind the lessons (Testing, read below)
- Course pages --> provide a short explanation of what each lesson is about (not yet, read below)
- About me page of myself --> add few relevant articles besides my big excel sheet (not yet)
- Improve visibility of my TEDx video (not yet)

Besides these, I thought of some other improvements:
- Add stars to show the rating of courses (Testing, read below)
- Add the amount of students in the course (Testing, read below)
- Add reviews (Testing, read below)

So in the navigation I stumbled upon some things. If I added another button in our navigation bar, the last word (which is 'contact) would jump to the 2nd row. This is something one wants to avoid. Currently I put 'Free Webinar' in the navigation and put 'References' out and positioned this in the footer at the bottom of the page. I didn't yet add a community navigation button as then again a word would jump to the 2nd row below.

Transactional and Informative navigation bars - solution?
Though I did some research and maybe there's a solution, namely a 'transactional' and 'Informative' navigation bar (check the attached picture below)

The 'Informative' navigation bar consists of .. well.. information. So for example, the 'about me' page would be there, the 'references' page could be there, some USP's of your business can be written shortly there (like in the attached picture below).

The 'Transactional' navigation bar consists of buttons that has to do with .. well.. transactions. So for example the buttons 'courses', 'program', 'books' etc. Things that make you earn money.

This way we might be able to create a clear and strong navigation at the top of our page. What are your thoughts about a 'Informative' and 'Transactional' navigation bar at the top of a page?

Updates of the 'Free Webinar page'
As I got quite some reviews or people saying something about the free webinar, I decided it would be good to put these on the page as well (see attached file #2). I screenshotted what people said and posted the pictures on the page for the webinar.

As we work with 'Everwebinar', I'm able to add a bar on the page with a timer. I made my webinar evergreen and we currently test it with the webinar starting each 15 minutes from 8am till 10pm. A timer is a psychological thing to test if it helps people make a quick decision.

I also added a picture of the Webinar Workbook people will get during the webinar.

Adding stars and amount of students
Attachment 3 shows what I've added on 1 of the product pages just to check this out. I downloaded the stars and the little icon for the people, scaled them correctly and put them on the site. The numbers are not automatically updated when people join a course. Got to do that by hand. Also, people can't give a rating on the page itself, they'll have to give it to us by email or some other way, after which I can adjust the rating myself. It's not the best way, but this works for now.

I basically checked Udemy and saw what they put at the top of their page. This is something so many people look at, I know it's one of the first things my eyes fall on when I open a Udemy page. So I think it's important to add.

Also, we call our students 'Parents of Play'. Cool to let the business name come back this way.

Adding testimonials
Attachment #4. At the bottom of the product pages I like to add testimonials we got. The thing is, we don't have that many yet. So we gotta ask people to write some for us and hopefully they want to. People easily provide a star-rating, but writing down something takes more effort.

Time per lesson + short explanation for each lesson
Attachment #5. Added timestamps behind the different lessons of a course we got. I wrote it directly behind the text due to the fact we don't yet have a nice fold-out lesson list like udemy has (that left is the course title, right is the time, and when you click on it the explanation folds out).

The above is also the reason I didn't yet add an explanation for each lesson. Like 1 or 2 sentences. Because we can't fold it in or out, it might seem messy and a lot when people check this part of the product page.

In the backend I didn't see a 'fold out' option or something, so it's probably something the developer has to build though we don't have the budget to build things right now.

Business girlfriend
She also read The Millionaire Fastlane btw and is a very entrepreneurial woman. Though, she had difficulty finding something she can really put her energy and passion in. She currently works at an experience center simply to earn money. She works less days due to Covid-19 but still a few days a week. Besides her job she's figuring stuff out for herself as well. She studied fashion in the past but didn't like it back then. However, some weeks ago she found got into it again and started playing with it, realizing that now she's out of the school system she actually loves it.

She started to make sketches and buy the stuff she needs to make things. She loves Haute Couture, but it's not easy to start with. So we had a brainstorm session like 1.5 week ago and decided that she can build masks with some great unique things that you don't yet get somewhere else. Together we thought of some things that are annoying and things she can solve. These USP's are pretty cool.

And to kick things off, she already has her first 2 B2B clients without her finishing her mockups for the mask or even having a registered business

I had a meeting with a business last week that want my expertise. We also spoke about masks etc., so I mentioned what my girlfriend is up to and what she's designing. The others kept asking questions about it and finally said that they will buy masks from her and be her first client. Then he mentioned that the organisation where we had the meeting was also looking for good masks and he got them in the deal as well.

We're probably talking about like 20 to 50 masks (don't know how many yet). She can make a basic one (with an important USP) for like €3, and more advanced ones for like €8 - €9, and she can even provide more extras if people/businesses want too.

What price is she going to sell them for..? We did some market research for ones that are kinda similar. We also realize it's her first clients and it's also about getting the name out etc, so probably she'll make the €8-€9 ones for them and sell them at like a €5 profit which is still lower than the ones online. But it's a great start.

She said that if she gets into the routine of making them she might be able to make 15 to max 20 a day.

Conclusion
We'll see where things go. For now, we are both moving forward in our young entrepreneurial careers

 

[Flint]

Meeting with @Flint

It was a good chat, cheers. Feel free to reach out in the future. I'm also curious how your approach to customers and operations will evolve over time.

Updating the website

Don't worry about small details. Big impact stuff first, right?

 

[Koenz]

Update October 31st, 2020

Partnership
One of my partners got in touch with an organisation that has a couple of schools and wanted to buy some courses of us in a package, and then get 20 packages for teachers to learn more about gaming / coping with gaming children. He already knows this organisation for a long time and has worked with them more often, so it was a warm lead to start with.

Our courses are currently either €20 or €40 depending on which. When we got this offer I got the idea to make this a subscription thing. So: each year the organisation can choose what courses / material they'd like for their teachers. Then they get a special price and we possibly throw in some extras. Why? Because else they can also just buy the courses and have livelong access.

We made a deal consisting of 3 courses, 20 packages (so 20 times 3 courses) for something like €1900, meaning around €97 per package which is nice. This is a yearly subscription. We will do our best to deliver them the best value and hope to extend this partnership of course. Would be great to start a subscription model business this way as we don't have this yet. This is the first step.

B2B
Entrepreneurship is awesome, I love it. Many things of how I thought it would be, are completely turned upside down.

I thought most of our business would be parents in the Netherlands (Dutch business at the moment, translating next year). However, currently our B2B side is stronger with 2 partnerships that are already agreed upon and only need to be signed (the clinic and the situation I wrote above). I'm sure more will come and we'll see how the B2C and B2B side will develop over time. Lots of ideas and lots to do.

Also, we registered one of our courses to become a SKJ course (meaning that if professionals follow the course, they get points for their profession). Our registration is pending and we wait for the organisation to accept our course. If so, we can also increase the price pretty dramatically to around the €200 pricepoint for professionals. When accepted, we will have to change some small things (like adding a final test). Most of the time the professionals get budget to invest in courses, or the organisation they work for pays for these. We know there is a big market for this. My partners are very familiar with the world of the professionals and giving courses to them, so that helps.

B2C
Last week we sold €540 euro B2C. One through a call, and one cold. We do have some traffic going to the website, but we barely sell anything after we increased the prices from €10 and €20 to €20 and €40. Interesting to test these prices a little longer with the improved product pages. As owners we know the value of the courses is a lot higher than 20 or 40, but we have to listen to the audience and see how things roll. Calling with the audience remains an important point like I spoke about with Flint.

Website
All pages on the website are improved. The navigation has a button that leads to the free webinar. All the salespages of our products now include a rating and reviews (not yet a introduction video, that will come). I do think adding the ratings and reviews are important for conversions, but I'm sure the introduction video's are vital as well.

Marketing
We started marketing on Facebook. We work with an agency of which I know the owner. He gets a 10% cut on deals we make. Some numbers for you:
- €141 spend
- 6060 reach
- 1945 engagement
- 414 clicks
- Cost per Click: €0.34
- Click through rate: 1.44%
- Registrations webinar: 37 (9% of people on landingpage)
- 28 live attendees (76%) & 7 replay attendees (not sure if these were also at the LIVE, so I don't calculate these now)
- 4 calls planned (14% of 28 live attendees)
- Currently we get a call for €35 (the value of getting someone from FB to call)

1 call yesterday: good conversation. Advised her a €40 course. Didn't push it like a hardcore salesman, but play more on emotion, understanding and patience. She didn't buy just yet. Will follow up tomorrow by mail. Still good convidence she'll follow the course.

1 call today: definitely one for our €500 program. She was also already in our facebook group for 9 months. Very good call and explained the whole program. She has an appointment with a general practitioner for her kid that might have Autism. She asked questions like if the program still works for kids with this diagnose. She will let things sink in and will act when she's been at the doc. Will follow up with her by email later as well.

Playing the long and patience game. Building trust which definitely happened during the calls. I'm not really the pushy kinda guy and got a closing rate of around 30%.

If there's any salespeople here, I'm very much open to learn more about different techniques or improvements to make in general! : )

I got the 2 other calls next week.

Jury
I was asked to become part of a jury for a certain challenge that had to do with sports/esports for disabled people. Businesses will think of concepts, and me with others decide which one wins. They expect it will take 1.5 day to check all applications, and the payment is €900. Besides an interesting network with other jury members, it's also a nice payment.

SaaS project
This is in the starting blocks. Can't say too much, but I work with 2 others and we design something that should eventually be used on schools. It has to do with teaching children about gaming/esports/animation and more. Very interesting project. We already know that one of the provinces of the Netherlands is interested, though we need to make a plan in order to get funding. We're working on it.

Extra
Because me and my partners have other sources of income we can play around with our Parents of Play business and keep testing and learning. This is a great process. The more we can learn, the better.

Also, a subscription model for parents is still in our minds and I designed differen tiers today. I did speak to a parent about it and she immediately mentioned that the barrier is lower, talking about pricing. Instead of one-off payments that are higher, you can have lower monthly subscriptions. I'll soon double check with our facebook group to know what people think.

Current facebook group members: 735 (+60 compared with the 16th of October).

Keep pushing

 

[Koenz]

Update November 8th, 2020 (business is live for 5 months now)

Involvement in another business
So I've been involved for over a year in a business that changed an old school building into an esports, gaming and creative tech hub. Not heavily involved, but whenever I can help using my network or experience, I do. In talks I'm mentioned as a 'strategic partner'. First few months I had little to give as they were mainly renovating the place. Now that they've recently launched and the hub is opene, I can help on multiple areas. Considering a contract, we still got to sign it and the last conversations about it are a while ago. In other words, I have to start picking that up again and finalize the deal. They offered 2.5% stake in the business. Not yet an idea of if it's a great deal or not. Also depends on what the future holds for this location though so far it's going well.

Now it's something different than my own business, however: it can be combined. This location provides rooms to host events or give presentations and workshops which I can have for free. Also, they are in touch with many schools in the area, schools have teachers, schools have kids, kids have parents ... Teachers, kids & parents --> our target audience. I'm going to be the guy that will also be more involved on the educational side of things so I can combine my business with what I'm doing there. Double win and long-term vision.

Almost ready to finally get out there
First few months were focussed on making the educational content for the courses and the program we have. Though now there's more time to focus on other stuff, which includes having conversations with other businesses, governmental institutions, schools and other organizations. We currently have a few things going on. But, what I look forward doing is reaching out to more of these to look for opportunities and grow our B2B business. As mentioned above, I first thought the B2C side was the most attractive though now we notice it's the B2B side. We don't forget about the B2C side though (read below), as it's still very important.

B2C: up or down
Our B2C side is up and down. Sometimes we sell a course, sometimes not. As our traffic is limited, we also barely sell anything B2C. Nothing wrong with that as it's a learning curve. Our marketing efforts are currently going through a free webinar --> salescall --> sale. Maybe in the future we also have to lead people to our website immediately, meaning that they don't have to register for anything and spend 1.5 hours (webinar) to get in touch with our brand. This will potentially be better for general 'brand awareness' and sales of smaller courses, while the funnel-system with the webinar can be better for high-ticket sales.

Still a lot to learn on the B2C side and how to approach this market.

Facebook group
Currently our Facebook Community group has 744 members (+9 on last week). Steady growth still. We're going to do a giveaway or something when we reach 750.

Subscription models
Most likely our platform of choice: Huddle (Dutch)
B2B: We aim to cooperate with businesses in a monthly or yearly subsciption model deal. Our first (agreed but not yet signed) client that we'll have a subscription deal with is an organization owning multiple schools. They want their teachers to follow our courses. When the deal is signed, we'll upload the courses on the Huddle platform where we can also track the progress of the teachers. This was important for the organization as they really want the teachers to follow the courses and have proof of them following it. The platform also provides a community/forum area and many more things. Huddle costs 695 a year, but the deal is close to 2k so this one deal will provide us with the budget to pay for the platform we're gonna use.

B2C: our community of 744 people is great. Though, we are still very interested in monatizing it in some way with different tiers in a subscription model. Options would then be a free one, a cheap one, a medium one, a premium one. This will also get the community off the Facebook platform. Facebook is limited in community options, and also in letting people know there's a new post. The huddle platform has lots of gamification options, monatization options, community options, notification options and so much more. Check the website for all info. Before we would set this up, we will first check what people in our Facebook group think about it.

Cashflow
Everything we earn, stays on the bankaccount of the business. Our 'luck' as owners is that we have other individual income streams. Currently we are not even close to making enough money to make a living. Cashflow is unexpected with the ups and downs in B2C and we're simply not selling enough yet. B2B is interesting as budgets are higher and can provide consistency in recurring revenue. Once we get into a more expected revenue stream, we have more money to play with, learn from, invest with etc. This will enable us to keep growing and learning

 

[AndreP]

Update from me this time, not so extensive as @Koenz posts.

We have our first course "acknowledged' from a special youth workers organization. This means that professionals who will buy our course, will get points to their personal profile. In the Netherlands you have to get a minimum amount of points to keep your certificate as youth worker.

Big plusses are:

- easy to scale, course is ready to sell

- guaranteed marketplace, professionals and organizations are willing to invest in it (they have to)

- Niche market, where the first in the Netherlands with an online course on parenting and gaming for professionals.

We're going to launch it tomorrow, big question still remains, is the price ok. We will see how the marketplace will react. We keep you updated!

 

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[Koenz]

Update 19th November, 2020

I should update smaller posts and more often, now things build up and then I have difficulty finding the time sometimes hehe. Alrighty, here we go after 11 days of no update:

Confirmed new partnerships
1. Parents of Play
With Parents of Play we have 3 confirmed new partnerships. I spoke about some in earlier posts as well, but they weren't confirmed yet.

The first is about a platform for teachers in the Netherlands where they learn more about tech stuff. They currently have 6500 teachers on their platform following all sorts of courses, from Word and Excel, to Google and stuff. In our case, we will provide them with a +-1 hour course. Teachers will learn more about the environment children grow up in, communicating with today's kids, about the gaming industry, balance, triggers and more. For us, the goal is branding and referrals. We provide teachers with overviews and good content, but for more detailed content they'll have to go to our platform and courses. Also, they are in touch with kids and parents and can therefore talk about Parents of Play to parents. There's no direct money involved in this partnership.

The second is a business that develops (browser)games. Some of their websites are insanely popular. In total they have 150 million players a month. I will work with them to help them setup guidelines for responsible / healthy gaming (€150/hr). It's a nice extra in these times as a startup, we can definitely use it. I (Parents of Play) will also be involved in setting up a campaign surrounding responsible/healthy gaming in cooperation with a very well known football club in the Netherlands. This is a short-term campaign. Long term we're thinking about us giving workshops and presentations at schools and such with them.

The third is an organization with multiple highschools. This organization will pay for teachers to follow some of our courses. It's a yearly subscription structure of a few thousand euro's a year. We expected 20 teachers to register for this opportunity, but we're currently at 25 which is great. Shows good interest. We'll see how many will join.

2. Koenz
I will soon confirm a partnership with a business and help them with the development of an app. I'll help them with gamification tools and also in general. They are going to work with the Premier League so it's pretty exciting. The partnership will most likely be a partnership for multiple years. No idea about the budget yet but I'll hear about that stuff soon.

New training on our website
As my collegue @AndreP mentioned above we have a new training on our website. The training is for professionals working with gaming children, or with families that have gaming children. Throughout their career, professionals gather certain points after they've done a training. They can add that to their total and show organizations what they've done / what they know so far. Our new training will have points for professionals which is a great. You have to apply the training to a system in the Netherlands before you get the points, everything is checked and you have to explain the whole training. But it was worth it.

Now, most of the time, an organization will pay the training for the professional, or solopreneurs will buy these courses. This specific industry is quite big and we do expect to see professionals following our course. We just published it on our personal social media channels with no sales just yet. I don't have many of these specific professionals in my network, but Andre has. We'll see how the training does. Most likely we'll do marketing in the future.

Marketing results (complete)
So here's the results of our 10 day-ish campaign we did recently on Facebook. We retaretted some people that engaged in August when we ran our first ever ads. So this was a retargetting thing:
- Budget: €150
- Reach: 6130 (of the max 7k something we could retarget the agency told me)
- Engagement: 2061
- Clicks: 443
- Cost per click: €0,34
- Click through rate: 1.46%
- Webinar registrations: 37
- Salescalls: 5
- Sales: 2 (one program (€500) and one course (€40) = €540

TLDR: €150 in - €540 out. We'll use this to reinvest in marketing again.

Considering the salescalls, it's an emotional topic. It's about their gaming kids and 9 out of 10 they have to talk to their partner ah well. I don't mind whenever we're getting a positive ROI.

Esportshub
I recently got involved in a project with a lot of other partners. They want to setup an esports hub, meaning: an offline location where talents can be guided, as well as attention to innovation, research, health etc. They already had a plan and delivered it to the state for 500k funding from the region. I was, however, part of the presentation we had to give yesterday to give more clarity. I did the introduction explaining what gaming and esports is, and also spoke shortly about healthy gaming etc. Many other topics were spoken about thanks to other partners. It was a good session. We'll get more clarity about the funding in december (go or nogo). The main questions from the political people are about funding. We're businesses and it's a 'rich and growing' industry so why 500k. We'll see where it goes.

Now, I don't get paid right now. But this is an interesting long-term project that I like to be part of. Once it starts and things get bigger, we're in the frontseat and Parents of Play can play an important role. This is about playing the long game. Not in it for short succes, but in it for the experience and potential future results. Besides the fact I learn quite a lot about political stuff, something I have no interest in whatsoever but since it's now connected to esports I'm very interested haha

Then again, entrepreneurship is not just about short-term stuff. Whenever there's an opportunity but you'll need to invest time but the potential results are there, it can be interesting to be part of it. Also network wise and learning wise.

Facebook group & Subscriptions
Members: 757 (+13 compared with last post)

We posted something about our idea of the subscription model in the group. I mentioned the fact it's not replacing what we do now, but can be an addition to what we have now. I explained the benefits etc and had a poll with 3 options to see if they're interested: yes, no, I don't know. Eventually it got down to: 16 no, 3 yes, 10 I don't know. Guess the 'I don't know' group chooses that because I didn't mention specific prices hehe.

Anyway, interesting little test. Still, if there's 1 person buying, there's a market for more. We still think it can be great to test it. Also, the platform we like to use for this is paid for anyway because of our cooperation with the organization with the schools and the teachers doing our courses. So we can now use that platform the upcoming year to test more stuff. This will be one of the tests.

Brainpicking and money
The problem of knowing your stuff, having a network and a certain position in the industry is that people like to brainpick. They ask you to attend a meeting, you go in there the first time to have a good chat and talk with them and think a bit with them, but after you might see things happening without you included.

Now, in the past couple of months people inside a building where I also have a working space started to have this feeling that the owners of this building only want 1 thing: money and growth. But, they don't really want to give and share. They take, not give. Spoke about this a lot with people recent few days.

I connected these owners with some people from my network which are high people. But never did they ask me for something that would've given me some money or budget. So now I start to hold back in what I 'give', besides the fact that if they want me to attend certain meetings I'm going to talk about payments, as I can't buy bread from doing things for free but never getting something in return.

Lesson
This is a lesson though, and I guess many here experienced this in the past. Also, many of the other people in this building is going through this lesson.

Sometimes, people have a great idea and vision and sell that to you. And honestly, this plan is good (but can be better with other owners). Also, they talk about what they can offer you and how they can help you etc at the beginning right. But, always think twice. Think it through and take your time. You don't have to decide immediately. Give yourself time, talk with others. Just let is sink in.

I'm happy and maybe lucky that a year ago I didn't sign anything (conversation included shares at the time), as I don't want that anymore. I wasn't alone in these conversations as a great friend and experienced businesswoman was there as well. I'm still free, no contracts or cooperation details (can also be a problem, look at the brainpicking part right. If you don't have stuff on paper, it might bite you as well). Because I'm still free I can do what I want, make quick decisions and also have patience. Sometimes I'm very quick, sometimes I'm patient. In this case, I'm happy I was patient. I couldn't have foreseen this situation honestly, the fact that the other businesses in the building all have the same problems with the owners. But it does change my perspective from a year ago and gives me a new perspective to where it's going, and how I want to be part of this or not.

 

[Koenz]

Update November 23rd, 2020

Setback?
I believe setbacks show an interesting part of the mentality of a person. It's interesting to see how others, as well as yourself, cope with setbacks. Some will be down for hours and won't be able to focus, others accept it and immediately continue their work looking for other chances and possibilities. Both are reactions on setbacks, but the long-term outcome will be vastly different. You can't change what happened, only what lies ahead.

If you sum up the amount of setbacks a person has in a year, and the way someone copes with these, the person that will accept the setback and continues their work immediately will be far ahead of the person that's down for hours. As @MJ DeMarco mentioned in ''8 steps that will radically change your life in 30 days or less, guaranteed'', tip number 1, it's about 'process'. Process is about consistency in time. When you spend hours being down and not productive each time a setback happens in time, you'll lose out on the person that accepts it and immediately continues not wasting hours of time.

So why this update?
I got this thought yesterday after we experienced a setback. Yesterday we received an email from the addiction clinic. The ones that followed the story know that everything was already set in place. The only thing missing was the signature on the contract, something that we've been asking the director about multiple times. The proposal was already accepted by word of mouth. The deal would've been worth around +25k to +50k for us a year.

But, the deal got cancelled due to a difference in our vision. Where the clinic's vision is to advise youth to never play games again, our business is focussed on a healthy balance with gaming. The ones that follow the story know that we are able to build a program for parents of the addicted kids that is in line with the vision of the clinic. However, what we express on our social media and what we express in general is something he can't explain to other partners, addicts and their parents if he would partner with our business.

I heard about the email through a phonecall of @AndreP, as he already checked the email and I didn't see it yet.
After the call I reflected on how I reacted and was quite surprised. That's when I thought the following below might be an interesting share on the forum.

Mindset
Instead of being pissed off or letting the news affect me in any negative way, I responded saying that 'where one door closes, another one opens' and that there will be enough opportunities and chances ahead, including our focus on partnering with other schools. In other words, I immediately accepted the result and started looking ahead. We can't change or influence the result, but we can influence our reaction to it (I just wrote this sentence and that immediately makes me think I'm currently reading ''The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People'' where this is also an important section in the book: your reaction to things happening).

Now, in the past, many years ago, I might've had a different reaction to news like this. I guess I was more emotional back then and learned enough lessons along the way. I've had countless setbacks in my ex-professional gamer career and also in my business career. Might be interesting to actually write these down in a future post.

The answer to the email
Today I've read the email myself. The director has a lot of respect for our business and mission. I noticed he also wrote that he will refer parents, with kids that won't go into the clinic, and schools that call their clinic to our business. That's still pretty cool. I've answered the email just before writing this post and mentioned that referring to one another is a great start of a long relationship with the clinic. We'll see what results this will bring.

 

[Koenz]

Update November 28th, 2020

Facebook group progress:
Members: 811 (+ 54 since my post on the 18th of November)

Finding our best target audience
Of course, it's 'parents with gaming children' and also 'professionals that work with gaming children / families' but it's still very broad.

We continue our marketing efforts with the agency to niche down on the parents with gaming kids. Should get more clarity month after month to find the group that's interested in what we have to offer. We might also need to up our marketingbudget to get better tests. We are currently testing with 150 euros for like 10 days. Anyone any ideas when hearing this? After the marketing it's up to the website and products to convert (or the webinar funnel depending on where we send them to after clicking). Still many lessons to learn there as well. Think about pricing for example. Also, I'll still have to make intro-video's for the salespages. It's important but doesn't feel urgent. Anyone that has read 'the 7 habits of highly effective people' knows this is a Quadrant 2 task, meaning that I should do it soon.

Considering professionals: we will pro-actively approach schools, municipalities and businesses after we setup the Huddle platform. I'll setup the Huddle platform in the 1st week of December so that our partner has access just before Christmas, as planned. So probably we can approach other potential partners mid December or January. Our aim is to try to get as many yearly subscription partnerships as we can to have a stable income. It will then be interesting how we can keep things fresh every year for them to renew the partnership.

The menu
When approaching these businesses later this year / early next year we'll make a menu as I like to call it. Basically a list of things that we can offer to get a conversation going and make people get a clear idea of what we do. Not sure if this is something to send in a first email or later. We'll test what works best.

Presentations this week
I gave 4 presentations this week, 3 webinars and 1 hybrid. The hybrid was amazing. It was for a global organization and they hired a big room in the Conservatorium Hotel Amsterdam. The setup included 4 lights, 2 TVs for me to see the viewers, 1 laptop with my slides, 3 technical people, and 2 from the organization. Pretty sick.

All presentations went very well. It's nice that we can have this as an extra income due to still experimenting with targeting parents and figuring out how to get traffic to our website + convert with our products.

Black Friday
Friday morning I was like: ''oh, black friday, let's do 50% discount''. We immediately got 2 sales after posting it in our Facebook group. We currently made 7 sales through social media. Most clients were from our Facebook group. It's good to see we got 7 on a day as that's rare at the moment. We have to up our traffic in time with our ads and then also see what our website conversion is. So far, the discount in combination with the Facebook group has done well.

Pareto Principle
I keep track of the sales of our product as well as the revenue in a google docs sheet. All sales combined = 100%, and then I just track how much % each product is of this 100%.

We currently have 8 products. 2 of these products account for 60% of the sales. The other 6 only account for 40%. The 3rd most sold product is 12% of the total amount.

When looking at the sales though, the product that has 12% of the sales accounts for 77% of our total revenue. All the other 7 products only account for 23% of the total revenue.

Found it pretty fascinating. It's our most expensive product normally for parents that struggle the most with their situation. Our webinarfunnel is aimed to find these people. Nonetheless, the other products are already made and are simply on the website. Whenever they are sold, I guess it's a nice bonus but it doesn't really influence our revenue.

Our one marketingcampaign is focused on engagement and clicks leading them to a landing page, and then the website if they continue. We do this to get enough people to retarget with a CTA to the webinarfunnel.

Presentations and partnerships aren't yet taken into account in this calculation.

 

[Koenz]

So before posting my full post above I made the mistake of posting way to early before it was finished. So I was wondering.. : is it actually possible to remove a post? I see report, edit, quote and reply but no delete button or something. If it's possible, it would be good to know!