Have you ever wondered what you would need to start a monthly subscription for your business?

As most of you know, every Wednesday I go live on Facebook and answer questions from my audience. In this week’s video (which I'm including at the bottom of this post if you wanna check it out), I was hesitantly gulping down mushroom green juice that, although I can’t say for certain, might have made me trip out and forget my words… 😉

Anyway, this week Amber asked, “I’m in the works of my own subscription based product… What are 1 or 2 things you wish you would have done differently from the beginning, or lessons you learned in regards to setting up a subscription based digital product?”

This was such a great question that I decided to share it on the blog too! I’ve had >>Social Curator<< for just over a year and we have learned so much about starting a subscription based digital product. Below are the 2 things you absolutely need to start your monthly subscription!

1. Beta testers.

If you have the ability to test your subscription with a small group of people in exchange for their feedback, that is my first piece of advice. We beta-tested Social Curator in May of 2017 and by the time we launched it in late July, the subscription looked entirely different! I thought I knew exactly what people wanted, but when I showed it to a small group of people I trusted, they gave me *tons* of welcome feedback on how it should be laid out, what to include, and how to improve it.

2. Be clear about your offer.

Make sure the promise of your monthly membership is crystal clear. When somebody makes recurring payments, they have to know that their investment is justified! For example, the Social Curator mission statement is: We provide photos and captions that empower small business owners to show up, build their brands, and market every day on social media. With a clear promise, you will have a higher probability of keeping people in your subscription longer and, in turn, you will be confident that you can sustain it.

If you think a subscription would be a great addition to enhance your brand, be sure to have trusted beta testers and a clear offer right from the beginning. That way, you’ll be off to an excellent start!

Good luck, friend. Rooting for you always!

(And here's the video I was chatting about earlier…timestamp notes are below so you can skip ahead to questions you're interested in!)

0:00 – Welcome
1:05 – Do you feel stuck writing captions?
2:06 – 4 caption prompts: The best thing to happen this week…
3:14 – To share a childhood memory
3:52 – How you have changed in the past year
4:24 – How you celebrate holidays
6:09 – Could you give us the deets on your current set-up and process of recording a podcast?
8:39 – What are 1 or 2 things you would have done differently in setting up a subscription based product?
14:00 – I want to do a contest, but not for sales but to create more engagement…tips?
15:39 – Help!! How do I keep up when the Facebook algorithm is constantly changing?
16:30 – How do we write captions around our products without sounding too salesy?
17:26 – Hope you start a podcast eventually…
19:00 – Can you design a month around launching?
19:23 – If we’re all using Social Curator, won’t potential clients be seeing the same content and won’t that hurt our credibility?
20:31 – Does Jasmine go live every day at 4:30?
22:06 – What’s the best thing you’ve done to build your e-mail list?
23:01 – What’s in your green juice?
23:20 – What are your brand words? How often do you recommend we refresh them?
24:29 – How do we apply for the critique?Have you ever wondered what you would need to start a monthly subscription for your business?