Rebrand.ly<\/a> link that would allow me to make edits to the proposal I sent in real time.<\/p>\r\nAs I got feedback, I changed it.<\/p>\r\n
At the end of two weeks, I’d made over fifty edits.<\/p>\r\n
Without any choice, I was building out what I was selling while adjusting it to new iterations in the proposal.\u00a0To add on to it all, I have countless sales calls pitching this constantly changing proposal.<\/p>\r\n
As you can imagine, I had many sleepless nights.<\/p>\r\n
It was well worth it.<\/p>\r\n
After three weeks, I sold it out.<\/p>\r\n
A lot of what I was selling had to do with the tool, Mass Planner (note: this tool has been banned), one of the most famous growth hacking software. I was running the members’ social accounts on it, but it was killing my computer. Even worst, it required all my attention to set up and ensure it ran continuously.<\/p>\r\n
I lost my excitement.<\/p>\r\n
Money is nice, but it’s not worth being miserable over.<\/p>\r\n
So rather than complain, I outsourced automation tools using UpWork that replicated Mass Planner’s features. I then gave them out to the members.<\/p>\r\n
This saved me a ton of time, but caused a big problem. I spent so much on outsourcing that I broke even.<\/p>\r\n
I didn’t make any money off the membership.<\/p>\r\n
3. Over-invest<\/h2>\r\n
Rather than back down, I kept outsourcing to automate all my membership work.<\/p>\r\n
The second month, I had a net positive.<\/p>\r\n
I was excited, but it also happened to be the first month I paid rent for our agency’s office.<\/p>\r\n
Yikes.<\/p>\r\n
All the money kept disappearing :\/<\/p>\r\n
But I knew two things:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n- The members were happier<\/li>\r\n
- I had built a sales funnel that was getting leads for the membership every week.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n
Most of these leads came from LinkedIn, so I decided to double-down on it.<\/p>\r\n
4. Double-Down on What Works<\/h2>\r\n
As we got more leads from LinkedIn, I began to post every day.<\/p>\r\n
Using my background in copywriting, I wrote over fifty viral posts.<\/p>\r\n
This led to almost one thousand leads.<\/p>\r\n
And a crossroads.<\/p>\r\n
Most of these leads were interested in the agency, not the membership.<\/p>\r\n
This was a good problem, but required immediate attention. By posting viral content on LinkedIn, we added ten more agency clients to our roster in two months. Our average deal size is over 10K\/month which meant we were headed in an upwards direction fast.<\/p>\r\n
I was scared.<\/p>\r\n
How well can we execute for them?<\/em><\/p>\r\nAll the worries passed as I realized “it’s us.”<\/p>\r\n
We’ve all had senior growth roles for multiple companies.<\/p>\r\n
And our head of e-commerce, Bryan, and I were also the directors of growth for a hundred-person agency, so they kicked into gear and executed brilliantly. In the last four months, none of our clients churned or complained.<\/p>\r\n
A month in, I woke up and compared figures. Our agency was on track to do 5 – 10 mil in its first year.<\/p>\r\n
The membership? 1 million.<\/p>\r\n
The problem was thirty percent of my time was still focused on the membership.<\/p>\r\n
Ouch.<\/p>\r\n
<\/p>\r\n
5. Invest in People<\/h2>\r\n
Business opportunities are everywhere.<\/p>\r\n
The people you enjoy working with? They’re hard to find (to say the least).\u00a0<\/p>\r\n
The membership has a small value compared to working next to my co-founder.<\/p>\r\n
By investing more time in the agency, I’d be investing more time in hanging out with friends.<\/p>\r\n
And that’s priceless.<\/p>\r\n
6. Focus<\/h2>\r\n
For an early-stage company, you need to focus on one KPI.<\/p>\r\n
Everyone on your team needs to be aligned with it.<\/p>\r\n
I was scattered.<\/p>\r\n
I was selling the membership, the agency, hiring, and writing.<\/p>\r\n
Today, our most important KPI is new agency clients.<\/p>\r\n
It’s no surprise that when we winded down the membership, we added several more clients.<\/p>\r\n
Raise the Flag<\/h2>\r\n
Now that we’re not promoting what felt like two different companies, we can hold our flag higher.<\/p>\r\n
We’re a team of twelve in only four months!<\/p>\r\n
We’re hoping to expand to twenty in the next two months.<\/p>\r\n
The membership may exist again, but only in a capacity where I’m not full-time on the agency.<\/p>\r\n
I’m excited to see what happens.<\/p>\r\n
And thank you for following the BAMF journey with our mission to empower 1 million founders.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Four months ago, I launched a membership.
\nI sold twenty slots at $1,500\/month in the first several weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":28868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ub_ctt_via":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3254,112,218,114,293,3385],"tags":[239,279],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/houston-2-scaled.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Houston Golden","author_link":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/author\/josh\/"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}