Matthew Carnevale (30:39)
Yeah, thousand percent. Very well said. It reinforces their desire to give feedback to. Right. It's like if you're using something for a year and you keep shouting about what they should do and they never do it. Either your idea is terrible or they're just not listening. And if you show people, hey, we actually listen and we implement stuff, then they're going to want to speak up and give feedback. So, yeah, on this topic, you know, you can see here, proof is in the pudding. I had somebody literally email me when we introduced it and said, such a cool idea. I love that you're incorporating so much from our member calls. Looking forward to my match. So people are literally remembering telling me the stuff, I'm building the stuff. And then they're actually going back and saying, thanks for listening and building it. So really cool loop there. And another part to this is to actually treat your launches of new features like a product launch. Right. So when you do something new, you could just go to your community and say, you can now do this, but we actually promote it publicly, even to people who aren't part of our community. You know, we promote the things that we're doing that are new to pull new people in and to also get as much air cover as possible. So you can see here, here's three LinkedIn posts of people from our team writing about this new thing that we're launching. And since LinkedIn is like our megaphone, we do a lot through this channel, even when we launch something. So if Your channel's like YouTube or Instagram, launch through there, like do stuff on there to show what's new inside the community. Cool. And then one other thing I wanted to show you is Circle has this cool feature called the Weekly Digest which is like you just open it up, you write what you want to be in your weekly newsletter to members and then it gets sent out automatically, which I love and use all the time. And within there we treat it like a mini product newsletter. So you can see here like we promote any upcoming events we have and we promote, you know, just like number three is like a pro tip, it's like use this search before you ask the community. Right? Because these things are features. Even though it's a circle built thing, it's a feature of our community, so we're treating it that way. And even our events, you know, even though it's an event, it's still for us a feature of our community, so we treat it that way. So going back to the whole thing of treating your product, treating your community like a product. Awesome. Moving on to the last part. What does Exit 5 do to drive our 40% monthly active usage with a 40, 400 person community? So first things first, why does this matter? So obviously we're a paid community and for us it's pretty obvious. It's high engagement equals low churn, or you know, low engagement equals high churn, whichever way you look at it. So we're highly incentivized to get people engaged because it means more money in our pocket. But if it's not a paid community, if people aren't engaged, they're just going to stop using it and never come back. Like it's so hard to re engage people if the first week or first month in their community is not good. So it's really important to get engagement. Right? You know, it's better, in my opinion, it's better to have 10 engaged members for the next couple of months than it is to have a hundred disengaged members in the next month. And just to back that up, this is a screenshot of our subscriber churn rate. It doesn't look that drastic except for that beginning, because churn is a small percentage. But, you know, we've been slowly chipping away at our churn and knocking it down by, you know, at least half a percent every single month ever since our engagement started to go up. So there is a direct relationship between the two things. As our engagement goes up, our churn starts to decrease, which is obvious. People are getting more value out of the product, so they're not leaving. And another cool concept I want to introduce you guys to on the topic of engagement is that you really only need to provide value on the frequency of your billing plan. What I mean by that is if you bill people monthly, and I'll get into what you do, if you have a free community, it's the same thing. But if you bill people monthly, then you'll want to provide them value at least once a month, but not much more than that. You just want to provide them value once a month. If you bill people yearly, you can do more than once a year, but you got to for sure at least provide value to them once a year. And the purpose of this is a guardrail to not overwhelm you. So if you charge people monthly or have this community and you're like, I need to do all these things this month. I need to run four events, I need to do 20 pieces of content, to do matchmaking, program this, this, and this. That's just too much. You don't need to boil the ocean. Instead find maybe the 1, 2, 3 things max that really move the dial in terms of engagement and just keep running those plays and run them well. That's really all you need to do. So it's better to do one or two things really good every month than it is to do 10 things that are meh every month. And if you have a free community, the concept is still the same. It's like give somebody reason to come back at least once a month and pop in and do something. So in terms of how we do it, the first thing that we do is member led events. Nothing groundbreaking. But you can see this example here. You know, I talked a lot in this presentation about LinkedIn being a hot topic in B2B marketing. So we have an example of an event we're actually running this week which if you're part of the community, you could join the event and you could submit a link to your LinkedIn profile. So you know, in LinkedIn you just have like your profile link, you just submit it in the comments and then this person, which is a member, she raised her hand to do it, is going to tear it down, is going to say, you should change your header to this, you should change your title, change this part and this part. In this part, they're going to tell you how to make your profile look better and optimize it and they're going to do the same for your posts. So even if you're somebody who, like, you're an Exit 5 member who isn't going to log in every day and look at the feed and go through all the posts, which I don't expect everyone too, for something like this, you'll probably want to at least come in once a month, submit your profile, get that feedback, make those changes, and boom, now you got value once this month. So when the subscription's coming up or you see the charge on your credit card statement, you're like, okay, makes sense. I'm cool with paying 30 bucks. They're still providing me value, right?