Building the Kingdom

[JustJoshing]

First, start with WHY.

Look at life as a game where your objective is to win your freedom.

You begin the game enslaved, ordained to servitude sanctified by culture, tradition, and social mores.

Your objective in the game is to escape enslavement by sorting out the rules and propaganda that govern the game, which to ignore, which to leverage, and which to defy. In this game you collect experience points (failures, successes), gold (money), tools, assets, and tweak your character skills (learning new things).

Begin knowing that your knowledge of this game is half the battle -- those trapped in the game have no idea they're being gamed.

- MJ DeMarco
(bold added by me for emphasis)

Successful, fast lane entrepreneurship is the skeleton key.

Let's do this.

 

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[JustJoshing]

Gone are my first two business ventures. I chucked them when I realized the ceiling was way too low. Not all business ideas are equal and I'm done working on projects that don't have a strong upside. My focus is on providing as much value as possible, to as many people as possible. Think CENTS.

I've had an idea for a membership website that I've been chewing on, which originated while traveling through Indonesia. This is a new spin on learning English that I know is highly in demand, targeted to intermediate English speakers who want to get to fluency.

Control...✓

Entry...✓

Need...✓ (will prove this soon enough)

Time...✓

Scale...✓


My partner & I have been working full time on this for the last 3 weeks. Step one is to get soft proof of concept!

 

[JustJoshing]

Long term, medium term, short term goals - visual person here. Enjoy my awesome drawing skills.

Trying to keep the big picture in mind and not get bogged down in the day to day grind.

 

[JustJoshing]

 

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[JustJoshing]

So we have a landing page up that we're sending leads to. Once we have enough e-mail subscribers then it's time to hire a developer and get the site built. I'm completely new to online marketing so everything is an experiment here. So far just been focusing on Instagram (liking and following people who follow similar accounts) and Facebook ads. Decent conversion success 5 days in.

How many e-mail subscribers is "enough" to move on...? Assuming we're going to be charging $10/mo for a subscription. I recall MJ wrote in Unscripted that two-thirds of his e-mail subscribers bailed when it came time to get the credit card out. Is 300 too low?

 

[sparechange]

dont really like the idea of an english learning website, maybe im wrong i dno, but there are a million websites out there that teach you english for free.

 

[sparechange]

im learning Spanish right now....at duo lingo. and i myself would not give you 1 cent to learn Spanish. just some insight fyi. tough market

 

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[JustJoshing]

there are a million websites out there that teach you english for free

Sure but there are zero that offer what ours will. You say the market is over-saturated but only if approached with the same tired methods. Online English learning is a $3B market and we've got something unique and valuable to offer. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't see a massive opportunity to add value.

Don't take my word for it though... Feel free to check back in 6 months from now

 

[Sean Kaye]

Whenever I see people talking about hiring developers to build membership sites, my eyes glaze over because this can be a treacherous road for the non-technical types.

Here's a quick synopsis to save yourself some heartache and money.

Not sure what you're using for your email service provider, but if you're using ActiveCampaign, this can get a boatload easier.

You can use Wordpress with the ActiveMember 360 plugin that integrates with ActiveCampaign. That will give you a full membership site in Wordpress which is a quick and easy solution.

You can get something like ThriveCart to handle payments and subscriptions - it's designed to integrate fully with ActiveCampaign and uses Stripe, Paypal and Authorize.net for card processing (it also lets people use Apple Pay).

If you want to do a forum like this one, you can integrate that with Xenforo, but it's not entirely clean - I know someone who does this kind of thing and can refer you if necessary.

You should be able to get this up and running fairly painlessly and if you want to fully outsource the setup, you can do that as well.

Just be careful that people don't try and soak you for like $5000 or something to setup a membership site.

Good luck.

 

[sparechange]

sure its possible, i believe you will have an extremely hard time convincing people to give you theyre money for a product in a market that's over saturated. ESPECIALLY when the market is open and costs $0 to use. good luck tho

 

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[AdamMaxum]

I look forward to following your progress @JustJoshing

 

[JustJoshing]

 

[JustJoshing]

Decent progress so far, but need to start moving much more quickly. My greatest challenges have been trying to juggle between marketing (still VERY much a learner), preparing to hire a developer, and creating the first several batches of content. This week I'm focusing exclusively on hiring a developer so we can get the ball rolling on creating an actual sales funnel and start making conversions. Not going to hung up on that 300 number I wrote earlier. I've seen enough interest come in, and to me that's the Green Light. Working on a job outline now...deciding on membership plug-ins, e-mail automation software, web hosting, site features, etc.

Once the site is in the process of being built, I'll set up a social media marketing automation software that can keep this subscriber list growing in the meantime. I was hyped about using MassPlanner after a friend of mine had incredible success with it, but apparently they're no longer taking new users :/ Looks like it will be FollowLiker instead.

Staying inspired despite the somewhat slow start... Onward!

 

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[JustJoshing]

Whenever I see people talking about hiring developers to build membership sites, my eyes glaze over because this can be a treacherous road for the non-technical types.

Here's a quick synopsis to save yourself some heartache and money.

Not sure what you're using for your email service provider, but if you're using ActiveCampaign, this can get a boatload easier.

You can use Wordpress with the ActiveMember 360 plugin that integrates with ActiveCampaign. That will give you a full membership site in Wordpress which is a quick and easy solution.

You can get something like ThriveCart to handle payments and subscriptions - it's designed to integrate fully with ActiveCampaign and uses Stripe, Paypal and Authorize.net for card processing (it also lets people use Apple Pay).

If you want to do a forum like this one, you can integrate that with Xenforo, but it's not entirely clean - I know someone who does this kind of thing and can refer you if necessary.

You should be able to get this up and running fairly painlessly and if you want to fully outsource the setup, you can do that as well.

Just be careful that people don't try and soak you for like $5000 or something to setup a membership site.

Good luck.

Hey Sean, thanks. Hiring a developer to build a membership website from scratch sounds like torture, especially on the wallet. Definitely planning to use one of the membership plug-ins with Wordpress platform. There are sooo many to choose from though so it can be overwhelming. I'm using a plug-in comparison chart to help with the decision... Narrowed it down to Memberpress, ActiveMember360, and OptimizePress. That said I absolutely want to outsource this work as my time is much better spent on growing our reach (rather than staring at a screen trying to figure out where the semicolon goes )

 

[JustJoshing]

GOALS FOR JULY
​

Marketing & Social Media
Set up automation software
Collect 300+ Subscribers

Content
Complete first 5 pieces of content

Website
Hire web developer and start building the site!

 

[Sean Kaye]

Hey Sean, thanks. Hiring a developer to build a membership website from scratch sounds like torture, especially on the wallet. Definitely planning to use one of the membership plug-ins with Wordpress platform. There are sooo many to choose from though so it can be overwhelming. I'm using a plug-in comparison chart to help with the decision... Narrowed it down to Memberpress, ActiveMember360, and OptimizePress. That said I absolutely want to outsource this work as my time is much better spent on growing our reach (rather than staring at a screen trying to figure out where the semicolon goes )

Hey @JustJoshing - if you're using ActiveCampaign for your email service provider then ActiveMember360 is top shelf, the guy who runs it, Bob Keen is a great guy. A couple years back I used to use Infusionsoft and had his iMember360 plugin for a membership site, I killed it off, but forgot to cancel the subscription. I saw the rebill come through so I sent Bob an email asking him to cancel it for next year because I'd forgotten about it - within a few hours, I get an email from the guy giving me a full refund and thanking me for being a customer. He's good people and to me, that's important.

The stack I have used and recommend for memberships:

ActiveCampaign - email and automation
ThriveCart - shopping cart
ActiveMember 360 - membership side

ThriveCart is pretty good, it handles all my transactions with Stripe and PayPal and integrates exquisitely with ActiveCampaign. It's available right now in late pre-release available by a select few affiliates (myself included for full transparency - ask me if you want more info) at a lifetime price. It has a good built in affiliate module which is excellent if that's something you're looking at pursuing. I bought this product on speculation in early 2016 when it was Alpha because the developer is another one of those "good people". I rank it up there as one of my smartest decisions - I run all of my transactions through it now.

ActiveCampaign is something I use every single day because I send daily emails to my list. It's got a good marketing automation engine and the price is very reasonable. I switched from Infusionsoft about three years ago after using that for four years and it was a great decision.

ActiveMember 360 - I had three or four small memberships that I was running for some info products I used to sell. When AM360 first came out, I bought it and it works a treat. I'm going to be setting up a new membership for my newsletter business and without hesitation, it will be on AM360 - I looked at MemberPress but there are things about it that I don't like around the checkout process and the fact that they are very slow to build out integrations.

Your workflow could be:

- Your email list and members are tagged with special tags in ActiveCampaign
- Member content running on Wordpress, protected by AM360 which is driven off the tags in AC
- A person subscribes through ThriveCart which then adds them to an ActiveCampaign campaign
- The AC Campaign creates their user account, tags them accordingly to get them in the right groups in AM360 and sends them an email with their login details

You could do other stuff like have an advanced onboarding sequence kickoff out the back of that or whatever, but that's the gist of it right there.

If the membership is recurring and the person fails to pay, you set up a ThriveCart rule for failed payments which can trigger a campaign to remove access via ActiveCampaign or whatever.

It's incredibly flexible.

If you want to go down that kind of path and outsource it, I know people who do that kind of setup and I can point you in their direction - nothing in it for me, just happy to make the connection for you to get you moving forward if that's the way you want to go.

 

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[JustJoshing]

If you want to go down that kind of path and outsource it, I know people who do that kind of setup and I can point you in their direction - nothing in it for me, just happy to make the connection for you to get you moving forward if that's the way you want to go.

Definitely interested. How can I contact you outside of this forum?

 

[Owner2Millions]

So is this website SAAS? What software automation are you using?

P.S. Someone should just make a official SAAS thread it's like 3-5 of them when I search SAAS


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[JustJoshing]

So is this website SAAS? What software automation are you using?

P.S. Someone should just make a official SAAS thread it's like 3-5 of them when I search SAAS


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I'm not providing software as a subscription service, no. Not sure why this thread shows up for SAAS. Hope you find what you're looking for.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Assuming we're going to be charging $10/mo for a subscription. I recall MJ wrote in Unscripted that two-thirds of his e-mail subscribers bailed when it came time to get the credit card out. Is 300 too low?

These weren't just random subscribers, they were people who actually CONFIRMED they wanted to buy. Yet when it came down to forking over money, most bailed.

This is why a "YES I WILL BUY" never equals "YES, HERE IS MY MONEY NOW."

Thank u for the progress thread!

 

[Mosfet]

I haven't done any research on the products out there, but I've used duo lingo app and must say it is really neat. How are you going to beat that with email and instagram marketing? You better have some tricks up your sleeve.

 

[JustJoshing]

I haven't done any research on the products out there, but I've used duo lingo app and must say it is really neat. How are you going to beat that with email and instagram marketing? You better have some tricks up your sleeve.

I can appreciate the skepticism. As someone else pointed out the space for learning English online seems saturated. We're not competing with Duo Lingo (or any other resources out there) but instead are creating an entirely new and different kind of product. Again I'm keeping things close to the chest at this point. It's too early to see the results, but they're coming. Duo lingo users will love our site when they see what's possible with it.

I could go on in more detail but I don't feel the need to defend the concept - it's already in progress and we're not stopping.

 

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[JustJoshing]

These weren't just random subscribers, they were people who actually CONFIRMED they wanted to buy. Yet when it came down to forking over money, most bailed.

This is why a "YES I WILL BUY" never equals "YES, HERE IS MY MONEY NOW."

Thank u for the progress thread!

Thank YOU, MJ! You must hear it all the time but... Your work has been a life changing epiphany for me

 

[JustJoshing]

Well we finally hired a web developer to build this beaut. Thanks to Sean for the recommendation but we ended up going with someone in-house, a developer with 10+ years experience who also runs a branding strategy team. This guy is top notch and works 20 feet away from me, which is a huge plus. No timezone issues, no language barriers, the ability to look over his shoulder every once in a while, plus he gave a handsome discount.

Anyhoo, the first time I sit down with him, he tells me:
"You absolutely need to have a non-disclosure agreement. Do not talk to anyone about this without having them sign a NDA first."
DONE. We sign a NDA the next day. And now I have something to present to anyone else I collaborate with on this. (Thankfully he's not an evil a**hole.)

So at this point we're all set for him to build VERSION 1.0 of the site. The next day while having a beer together, he starts telling me the possibilities of this concept - how we can take Version 1.0 (which is currently in progress) and take it to another level. Hard to describe without going into detail, let's just say that IF WE CAN OVERCOME THE TECHNICAL BARRIERS (as this is something that hasn't been done), then the SKY IS THE LIMIT. We're talking something huge here.

The next day we sit down, this time for a Skype call with my partner. I record the conversation. At one point he says:

"That obviously would be the ultimate goal, build some sort of tech that does that...we can figure out the tech that would [describes the idea], and that would be huge. You'd be F*cking rich as hell. Because that would be a giant thing. [Laughs] I mean, this website could build up to something like that, but ultimately I would keep your eyes on that goal. It's going to happen anyway, like, you guys are tapping into something that's basically going to happen anyway, and so you might as well be the guys that do it."

To summarize...
VERSION 1.0 is being built and will be live in roughly 8 weeks. This is the concept as I originally envisioned it, which is a valuable product in and of itself.
VERSION 2.0 is the ULTIMATE VISION of where we want to go: Taking the existing concept and upgrading the tech to take this product to a whole new level. To make this happen? Well, I'm going to have to do a LOT of research. If it's going to happen sooner than later then we're also going to need funding. I've already spoken with three potential investors and have about $20k pledged so far. A friend also recommended applying to some funding programs which I'm looking into.

I know I'm getting way ahead here. We have no sales yet, no website, almost no social media presence yet, barely even have a product to speak of. But I'm planning several steps ahead on the chessboard, and that's where we're headed. One day at a time baby.

During the next 8 weeks while the site is being built, the plan is to
* Create as much content as possible.
* Start running FB Ad campaigns again (these have been on hold the last month) and tweaking as we go.
* Start developing a presence on social media.
* Find potential JVs and "piggyback" marketing opportunities.
* Meditating, to keep the excitement/uncertainty at bay...!

 

[JustJoshing]

 

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[sparechange]

curious for an update

 

[Striver]

Same here...