I’d be interested to know why you think wannapreneurs have no money @jitbit?
First of all @jv2222, congrats on getting some initial paying members. I think your idea has potential and, as is usually the way, it will come down to how well you are able to execute.
I’m going to do a bit of a brain dump below but I hope you will take it in the constructive sense that it is intended. I’m sure you’ve already thought about a lot of what I’m going to write so it would be great to hear how you plan to address my concerns. Isn’t that the best way to learn?
Assuming the @jitbit is right about serial entrepreneurs (and I am not so convinced) I could still think of 3 potential markets for this:
- Full-time employed (where you seem to be aiming now)
- Consultants that want to get into products
- People that have failed with their initial product effort
The main issues I see are:
- Once someone finds an idea they want the pursue the value of daily recommendations go to zero. In fact it could be even worse as a constant stream of new problems / ideas is a huge distraction.
- If all of the information about each problem is available as part of the free trial period you are likely to have a lot of people who don’t want to be part of the community continuously signing up for free trials to get access to the problems.
- Not all problems are created equal. A small number of problems are likely to attract the majority of the attention and so, especially as you scale, you are going to have multiple different people working on variations of the same ideas. This kind of competition seems to decrease the value of the community aspect (and possibly the problem information too).
- (Linked to the above) Presumably you are going to put the interested members in contact with the people that you have spoken to that have the problem. They will probably be happy to speak with the first or second person but by the fourth or fifth it will just be an annoyance.
- Building a successful community is hard and you are going to be competing with established groups like Micropreneur Academy.
My first impression is that you have 2 distinct products that you have shoe-horned together because you want the subscription revenue:
- Problem discovery
- Community / education
The value propositions are so different that it makes much more sense to me to keep them separate. What was the thinking behind combining the two?
My feeling is that it could make more sense to focus on “problem discovery” up front and then look at selling the community subscription on the back-end.
The model that springs to mind would be to make the daily “opportunity email” free to subscribe to but only make a limited amount of info available (enough to decide if this was appealing) and then sell the more complete info package. You’d have a few options available:
- Fixed price (unlimited)
- Fixed price (exclusive)
- Auction
When starting out the fixed price option feels like it would be best due to the small volume but the auction model could be really interesting long-term (due to the asymmetry of appeal mentioned above). You could even start with auction model but have a minimum price. To be honest thought, I really have no idea without testing
.
Even if people don’t buy the info you would still have a fairly targeted list to sell on the community aspect down the line.
