Note to Self: Be Agile and Adjust Quickly

In my last post I talked about how I came around to launching The Geekettes Club. Since our launch, I’ve decided that I will share what I can about the launch of The Geekettes Club in a transparent way, and share the positives and the negatives, lessons learned, etc. in the hopes that it might help someone else in their decision making and business building.

Ok – here goes… Note to Self: Be Agile and Adjust Quickly – (before time runs out!)

When I launched The Club, I conducted research, asking questions about the price of membership:

Should there be a cost to membership?

If so, what should it be?

What benefits/value would it include?

I wanted to establish what the price of membership threshold should be  – and what we’d include in the ‘package’. After conducting this research, I put together membership plans for the Club, and felt fairly confident in the offering.

After our hugely successful launch, I received a bunch of congratulations, a trickle (well, barely a trickle) of paid memberships, and then silence… Rather than wait to see what would happen, we jumped on it – asking some of our biggest supporters what they thought had gone wrong. Here is what I learnt:

1) Ask more people for their input on the membership rates / packages from a LARGER POOL of potential members: I asked for a lot of input, but from people who could afford to pay for membership, or who were good friends of mine (and therefore potentially bias in their response).

2) Consider the CURRENT ECONOMIC conditions: There is a lower tolerance to paid memberships in this economy. EVEN if there is a lot of perceived value, most people have already decided where to spend their limited ‘membership’ dollars at this time in the year.

3) Be sure the VALUE/BENEFITS are known: At our event, we had flyers containing a list of the benefits of membership. They were placed throughout the event, in holders. However, not everyone saw them. So we learned we should have handed them out at check-in.

4) Make sure that there IS VALUE: I still believe we are offering a lot of value with the club, but maybe we didn’t offer enough (or too little for the price).

So, what are we going to do? Well, I’m a firm believer in being agile – recognizing issues quickly, and making adjustments to succeed. So we’re going to make some quick changes, and reduce the cost of membership (dramatically), and revise the model. We want to keep the momentum going – we had such a great response to our launch!

So stay tuned, and I’ll let you all know what the outcome is!