Digitale Vorlagen für Makler verkaufen: Skalierungsplan

0:00Unternehmer/Gast Hi, my name is Sam. My business partner and I run a membership site for real estate agents where they basically get daily social media templates, lead magnets, training videos, all the stuff to help them sort of save time and get better at Instagram. Okay. So, it's a membership. What do you What do you give them on a monthly basis? Um a lot of it is just daily social media templates. So, 30 days of content that they can edit, customize to their own personal branding, post to social media, and then there's a library of like little lead magnet things and and that they can customize again and use on their Instagram and training videos help them set all up their Instagram, all that stuff.

0:41>> But mostly it's going to be the the the the content templates. Yeah, it's good. It's a content membership, yeah. Okay, got it. Okay, so how many people you got? What do you charge? >> [snorts] >> Yes, we charge $49 a month. All right. Um we have just under 300 members. Okay. And yeah, I mean we do just under sort of 20k a month. >> Yeah. And we take home, you know, 75, 80% of that. Cool. Got it. So, what is the What's the issue?

1:10Yeah, so my question is, you know, how do you >> your churn? What's your >> like just sort of push >> What's your What's your churn? Yeah, uh yeah, uh the hovers around 12%. Ooh, monthly? Yeah. Monthly? Ee. Okay, got it. Do you have any metrics that like after a certain point people continue to stick? Um we've only been in business for just over a year, so it's hard to get that like 12-month kind of stick number, but monthly it's it's 12%. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll tell I'll tell you why this is important.

1:42If let's say it's 12%, well 12% is tough cuz that's like you lose all the customers by the end of the year, almost. Um okay, what's sales velocity right now? Meaning monthly sales, units sold. >> Uh between, you know, you know, 50 a month. 40 to 50 a month. 50 a month? Yeah. >> Okay, got it. Okay, so you're still you're still growing, but slow. Right, and we're getting to the point where churn is starting to catch up with us. Yeah. Um and and that kind of leads into my question being, you know, how do you kind of decide whether to push or pivot when there are sort of the structural challenges or at least perceived structural challenges in your market. Um and you're maybe looking at a different market, a different niche that might sort of be better for your business or for your offer, essentially.

2:29As in not marketing as as in not doing it for real estate agents, maybe doing it for a different uh market. Why do you think this other market is going to be different than real estate agents? Yeah, so I mean generally real estate agents um from my perspective, they're they there is not a structural volatility in terms of their income and obviously with SMBs that's, you know, a given it's probably worth real estate agents.

2:59Um And you know, they don't make a lot of money, there's not a lot of willingness to pay. Yeah. Basically what we've seen in our market, there is like an a market leader with, you know, over 5,000 members, been doing it for 6 plus years now, um and a couple others with a thousand plus like we are a late entrant into this market. This is something we started to do just cuz we thought we might as well pick up a proven business model. Okay. Um and we've seen other content memberships in other industries like, you know, accountants, uh one with like aesthetic nurse practitioners.

3:30>> Yeah. Started at the same time as us, have the same Instagram following, we've gone through their funnels, and they've like 5x. Yeah. From in in terms of what we've been able to do growth-wise, and we're wondering trying to figure out why that is, essentially. Um well, do you Do you have full transparency into their numbers? Um I have full transparency into a few of their just, you know, the amount of members they've had and the amount of Instagram followers they've had. I've kind of gone through their funnel a little bit. I know that they don't necessarily run a ton of ads, like it's not like they're doing a ton of ad spend, for example. Do you know what their churn is and how many members they have?

4:06Um I can give you one example of one that has We have like 50k on Instagram, they have 40k on Instagram. We're kind of friendly with them, and I know they have like 1,800 members. Okay. And that's That's been a year and they and their sales velocity from what I can tell is like 100 plus a month, maybe 150, 200 a month. Okay, and they started the same time as you? Basically, yeah. Similar following, a lot. So, I mean the only >> have no They have no big competitors.

4:33Yeah. Well, I mean I think going to an underserved marketplace is not a terrible idea. Um the reason I'm like more okay with this is that you guys are still really early, you know what I mean? Like it's it's kind of it's it's pretty much a brand new business. I do think that like is this business that you have uh fixable? Yes. If the market leader, I'll put quotes around that, has 5,000 people, well there's like a million realtors. So, there's lots of opportunity, right? That's still there, like no one really owns the market. Um so, those are kind of the plus sides.

5:03I'm going to also bet that like to your point it might not be that realtor like realtors, of course, if you take them in aggregate are have volatility, but if you look at the top 5% of realtors, like they they make they're full-time, right? If you have a lot of part-timers who are in there, uh then you have huge amounts of churn cuz they're they're not even they're barely even business owners, right? Right. So, you could probably fix this in terms of value prop, though. Yeah, okay, go ahead.

5:30Yeah, just in terms of our value prop, it's mean if you're a top 1% agent, you probably have uh some sort of social media manager or media team. We're a low-cost alternative to that, essentially. So, it's kind of just a a uh you know, a feature, not a bug, I guess, in our business, so to speak. Yeah. Um but you'd have to have like the I mean the thing that's bad with the business right now Okay, zooming all the way out. What do you want to happen?

5:56Do you want to sell this thing or make more money? Short-term, make more money, for sure. That's what we're focused on. >> Right, so the thing is is that you're selling 50 a month, which is actually like really not a lot. Um from a sales velocity perspective, even the size of that market. And that like that is the problem, right? Like you could sell like if you have a million-person marketplace, it's like we could be selling a thousand of these a month, right? And then the churn, even though it's, you know, 12%, it's like, well, we just know that we're going to get 8 months on average times 50 bucks, so we're going to make $400 per customer as long as CAC is, you know, $100 or less.

6:31Cool. We have high margins, we're good to go. Um and you just take the money and then you do whatever you're going to you're going to do. Uh that's like short-term. You could do that. And I think targeting people who've done a sale within the last 30 days or something like that, maybe they're not the 1%, but they're like, quote, on the way, they're, quote, reinvesting their business, and if they just had a sale in the last 30 days, they have some cash. Like there's some elements here that you can do. I also like are you doing a big uh Do you do a big promotion for getting annuals?

6:57Uh we Yeah, we try with that. We do 2 months off or we're starting to add other bonuses in terms of the annual as well to try to push more people towards annuals, but yeah. Right now, LTV is 8 months for you. So, you might as well give four and pull the cash flow forward since it's equivalent, and churn on those customers will be lower. Right. Cool. All right, so that's thing one. Um now, to the larger question of like should you go after a blue or you know, a blue ocean market? Um and in in so doing, like does that mean you're going to start another Instagram page and like build that whole thing up and do that game?

7:30Essentially, that's kind of the thing that we're, you know, relatively best at, the thing we've messed all the time into. It's something that I think we can do, but it's obviously going to take time. And time away from our, you know, everything else we do. Yeah. I like I Okay, I'll tell you what I want. I I don't think it's a bad idea. I'll say that. I don't think it's a bad idea. Um like normally I just say like, no, stick with your existing thing. I do think you should stick with this thing a little longer, and I'll tell you why.

7:58Alex I think that it would it would behoove you to learn which types of realtors churn versus the ones that don't. And there's probably two or three characteristics that separate the people who do versus ones that don't. Number one. Number two, I do think you need to make a better incentive to get people to prepay for annual. Number three, is there a version of this business that like on top of this you sell some sort of maybe $500 a month thing as an upsell or a thousand-dollar month thing that does have some have some sort of managed element to it that you have lots of AI and automation built into it so that you can do it with high gross margins.

8:30Alex Right, yeah, definitely something we've thought about just adding adding upsells, adding different offers. >> Yeah, I I like I I I I can appreciate the simplicity of the business, believe me. Um I just feel like you have a lot more to learn from this before doing the next thing. Um rather than just saying like, oh, it's the avatar. It's just cuz like that's the obvious thing that everyone says, and the market leader, and I'll put quotes here, has 5,000 people. It's not that many. No, and I and I've I've tried not to just say it's the avatar to the best of my abilities, you know what I mean? It seems like that's the easy way. So, that's what I would do. All right, so I would try to learn more about the customers, number one. Number two, I'd have the annual prepay thing. Number three, I would start running ads and see what your cost of acquisition is with ads.

9:12Alex And having that strong pre pre prepayment thing, I would also have a self-liquidating offer on the thank you page that could be even higher than just the annual. Right? Cuz that could just improve the funnel metrics overall. Maybe like a a two or three >> a like a high-ticket a high-ticket item? Yeah, and I'll say high-ticket with quotes here. I'm talking I'm talking like 197 to, you know, 397, somewhere in there, which might be like, uh we have all these accounts. We'll tell you We're going to give you the 100 best-performing pieces of real estate content over the last year.

9:41Alex I would buy that. Right. Right? Yep. All right, that's what I would do. I think you need to learn this game better, and then you'll have more perspective, and you might just break through and then just become the market leader. Yeah, okay, thank you. Really appreciate that, and appreciate everything you do, all the content you make. Appreciate you, too.