4 entries for Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Mighty Network's Gina Bianchini on How to Create a Community Worth Subscribing to

[Think about bringing together not just your customers but all the people who could be your customers.]

[One of the top reasons for subscription fatigue / churn is subscribers feeling bad about themselves for not being able to keep up with an overload of content and get enough value for money even if it's all high-quality. A community can be less intimidating.]

[Most people want to make better decisions about the things that are important to them.]

[Antiquated definitions of community like 'learning together and support each other' mean nothing to people now. Most valuable communities bring together a very specific profile of members in order to master something together. This replaces content with progress and journey.]

[Your customer doesn't want to spend time talking about your widget. They want to talk about what is important to them in mastery of their own identity.]

[Your customer isn't buying your stuff because they want to buy your stuff but rather because it is in service of achieving a goal. The more you align with the goal, the more likely the customer will stay.]

[lt's a mistake to focus more on the product than on customer mission.]

[The 'myth of more' can delude us into thinking that all reach is equal ('if I just get more visitors or eyeballs"), but a reach on Facebook is not the same as a reach on your private network.]

[Expecting people to show up and figure out how to get value is like a holding a workshop with no facilitator. Getting them in is not enough. Put some light structure in place to guide people.]

[Onboarding (the first few seconds, minutes, days) needs to be choreographed meticulously – it is not merely adjusting the product parameters.]

[Have a weekly event that gives newcomers a chance to get a feel for how it works.]

[Hold give/ask days with a new profile every week so that customers feel they helped someone and also got some useful insights for themselves.]

[People need to understand quickly how they will get value.]

There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed down two hundred times by a butler's thumb.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

Build vs. Buy: How to blow $100,000 saving money

[If you payed engineers to build it, instead of just buying it, the salary cost plus the lost revenue from not improving your core product would amount to orders of magnitude more than the paid service's fee.]

That new feature will not save your business

[Solutions make a difference, not features.]