[Business] That Talking Thing | S2, E13 That Talking Thing

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Transcript: Season 2, Episode 13



Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 13, season two, and we have some business topics later on in the episode, we're going to be talking about AB testing, if that's your jam. But first up, we're going to talk about freemium business models. And if should every membership site have a freemium model?



Yeah. What is a freemium model? Jason? Okay. Ah, freemium is when you have a paid product, but you give away. Something for free first. It could be as simple as a free trial. I seen people talking about free trials as being freemium, but more often there's a free version of something that is limited in some way.



Um, but you kind of capture people and then they have to upgrade. There's all kinds of like MailChimp has a free plan, but when you use it a lot, then you have to upgrade. Um, specifically, specifically, it was kind of a shower thought for me that, you know, our membership product is freemium and. I also had this thought that like, it was as simple as like we should write a blog post or have a video about the freemium business model and how it applies to membership sites.



And I started thinking, I was like, should every single membership site have a freemium version? And sometimes it's obvious like, yes, like a podcast, there's a free podcast and a premium podcast. And that's your. Membership. Uh, but sometimes it's a little more settled. Like it, your blog posts are free, but the stuff you actually pay for is your premium.



Like, so even if you don't have like a free product, almost every business is putting like free content out into the world. So I was trying to wrap my head around this and figure out how we could explain it to our customers. Patrick shared a tweet recently from Nathan Berry founder of convert kit. It was, you know, an audience is like a business hack.



Like one of the best things to have in your pocket when you're starting a new business, like just a runway to being more successful because you've created an audience and that's what people use freemium for a way to create an audience that's willing just enough to give you some personal information, willing to commit just enough to liking your stuff for some small downloadable PDF, for some access to something.



And you can later market that. So kind of the goal for us, we do open-source everything, but for freemium on our site, you need to create an account to access documentation. Yeah. That's really the only thing free people get as documentation, or you can get the plugin for free. We serve a version of the plugin for start download the generic membership site.



Writing this blog post, is it like the title could be like, you have to have a free, what did we, we had like stats on this. How many of our members had freedom when Patrick did the research? It was an overwhelming majority. Had a free membership level and were priced at a monthly payment under $30. Yeah, it was the most.



So maybe this is not news to folks like, Hey, you have to, but, oh, but, oh, the other motivation for this, remember when we're in person at booths at conferences, there's this order of conversation where they say, what do you do? It's a membership plugin for WordPress. And what does, what does that mean? Like you can charge for access to content.



And then as a. What does it cost, but it's free. And like, how do you make money? Or they say like, can you use it even if you're not charging for access? Yes. I remember some plugins got paid memberships pro, so it's kind of, we have to say, Hey, it's okay if it's free, you know, figure