Hey, Dave here. This week I’m in your inbox to talk about exitfive. Not to promote exitfive, but to use a story from building this business to share a lesson. It’s a bit longer than a typical email, but I hope you’ll stick with it and read the whole thing. Our attention spans have shrunk to 30 second video clips, so think of this as mental training. I am helping you build up your focus. The topic I’m writing about this week I’ll call Rip The Bandaid. It’s a business lesson but there’s a lot that can be applied to marketing. Here we go: Sometimes you need to go backward to go forward. I lost 1,000 customers and $100,000 in revenue when I moved my community (Exit Five) from Facebook Groups to Circle last year. I knew this would happen. And it sucked to lose revenue, to lose active members. But I did it because I wanted to take a few steps back to go forward and build a better product for the future. I wanted to move off of Facebook and onto a platform that we can own (custom web and mobile app built with Circle). And I wanted to shift from a "discussion forum" to a "membership site." Over the past ~10 months we have re-acquired the customers we lost and made up for the difference. The result today is a much better platform and a product that is well suited for the type of business we're building. Plus, we don't have to log in to Facebook anymore. This felt like ripping out a piece of legacy software. And it would have been much easier to not do it. To stick with it. To deal with the sunk cost and just keep building. But I knew it wasn't the right fit for the long term. So I took the pain. There was churn. There were plenty of members who cancelled because they wanted it on Facebook. "Hey, I don't login anymore since you moved it off Facebook and I'm bummed about that." Members who told me they don't use it anymore since it's not on Facebook. But also dozens of people told me they never joined *because* it was on Facebook. To build anything is to be able to make gut decisions and take some chances. Some people will love it, some people will hate it. But only you can decide if it's the right move based on your vision and where things are going. There's no paint by numbers approach to entrepreneurship and building a business. Data is great, but it doesn't give you the perfect playbook of what to do. Often times you have to endure short term pain to get things in a better position for the long run, and we're there now. I sacrificed $100k in revenue to get here, and went from a community that cost $0 to run on Facebook to one that costs $20k on Circle. But today we have a real business, built on the proper platform - and it wouldn't have happened without being able to rip the bandaid last year and make a hard decision to change platforms. Today we're building a niche media company - we're helping B2B marketers build successful careers, and we're doing that through our membership site (web/mobile app that we moved off Facebook) and our content (podcast, newsletter, webinars, social media, AMAs, members only content). We've been in the gym for the last 10 months and had to rebuild the foundation for the future. Now we're in great shape and ready to keep building. I'm writing this as a note to myself to rip the bandaid when needed - and to share with you. Sometimes you have to take a few steps back to go forward. Sometimes you have to hit pause. You have to be able to know which feedback to ignore and what's worth listening to. We have so much data available to help make decisions today, but ultimately it will come down to a gut decision. Don't forget about the art of business.And don’t be afraid to rip the bandaid. - Dave P.S. If you read all of my story here, reply back and let me know… |
