How we’re using a free t-shirt to launch a new membership site.
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Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to a very snowy Marketing in your Car. It’s been a little while since I’ve done Marketing in your Car. I want to tell you what’s been happening. We are about to launch this new software as a service, or SAAS as they call it program, product. It’s actually three products.
We’ve been working on it for the last year or so, actually, a little bit longer than that on some of them. We’re at a point now where they’re almost done but they haven’t quite gotten done. We really need a good UI designer to help polish everything off. There’s this guy who I think is the best UI designer I’ve ever seen in my life, and I bribed him and paid him a whole bunch of money to come to Boise to work.
We flew him out this week. He works typically, he wakes up at two o’clock in the afternoon and then hangs out and starts working at seven o’clock at night until six AM. That’s his schedule. That’s East Coast time so it’s even later. Four o’clock my time, he’s normally waking up. We flew him out here and he’s still on that schedule. We’re kind of working around him.
The last two nights in a row, I have worked until about four AM. Then I go drop him back off at the hotel, I come home, sleep for three or four hours until my kids wake up, and then I’m back at it again. I’m running at almost no sleep but for the last two or three days, we’ve gotten so much stuff done. It’s just exciting.
For all you guys who are out there launching new companies or businesses, you probably know that there’s days when you just go in there and kill yourself, when your body is ready to die but it’s all worth it afterward because at least for us, our thing is almost done, and fired up and excited. Last night while they were working, Todd was programming, Dillon was designing, and I was writing sales stuff.
I came up with an idea for a new business model. Because I had eight more hours while they were working to do whatever I wanted, I started implementing this concept. What we did, we’ve done a lot of membership sites in the past. My problem is I always charge $97 for them. While we made a lot of money, retention was never amazing on it.
One of my close friends, Stu McLaren, I remember a couple of years ago, he told me, “Man, if you had a membership site that was $20 a month, people would stay forever. You charge so much, people don’t stay.” I had an idea for a membership site, a $20 a month one that was basically like a forum where people could come online and talk about marketing stuff.
Outside of that, there wasn’t a lot of stuff in there, just that. I wrote the copy for it, not really good but I was like, “Why is someone going to pay $20 a month to get that? What’s the hook to get someone in?” I was looking at all these people doing t-shirt stuff. That’s the hot topic right now. Everyone is selling t-shirts on T Spring.
We tried looking at different models and ideas, and saw one guy in the real estate space who is giving away free t-shirts, like a tripwire offer, giving away a free t-shirt and then upselling them into his continuity program. I was like, “What if I made a t-shirt, the coolest t-shirt in the world and the only way you get that t-shirt is if you’re a member? You join and we ship you out this free t-shirt,” kind of like Insanity does.
You buy their product, and if you lose weight, they send you a t-shirt. We flipped that around. I wrote the whole copy, designed the whole letter last night and it turned out amazing where basically what we’re going to do is print 1000 of these t-shirts and they’re going to be limited edition. When they’re gone, they’re gone. The only way to get one is to become a member of our membership site, which is $20 a month.
You pay $20, boom, we ship you out the t-shirt. When the 1000 t-shirts are gone, they’re limited edition and they’re gone forever. At that point, we’ll design another t-shirt and do it again, and just keep doing this process until we get 3000, 4000, or 5000 members in the member’s area. Every time we have a new t-shirt come out, we will offer it to the new members first so they can pre-order so we can sell 500, 1000, 2000, however many members which lowers our cost. Then we do this launch where we go and pre-print all the pre-ordered ones and then 1000 other ones, and give away these t-shirts for free and advertise them on Facebook, and a bunch of other really cool things.
Like I said, it turned out amazing. The model is really cool. We’re going to be replicating it I think across all of our niches. In our weight loss space, we’re going to design an amazing t-shirt for the weight loss space, one for the jiu jitsu space, one for all these different markets we’re going into, just an amazing t-shirt and the same model, $20 a month membership site and limited edition of that t-shirt, 1000 of them. When they’re gone, they’re gone, and then replicate that over and over again.
I’m excited. It’s a new model. It’s a new concept, new idea. No one is doing it yet. I’m sure that people knock me off. I hope they do. I hope you do but just wait. We’ll be rolling this out probably in the next seven to ten days. I’ll get the t-shirts printed. We already have a design and they turned out amazing. I messaged the designer last night at three in the morning and woke up this morning, he had already designed it and it looked awesome.
It’s exciting, a new model, new ideas to think about. That’s about it for today. I hope you’re loving your business. I hope you’re excited. I’m going to go pick up Todd and Dillon, get back to work. We get one more day of pounding out UI designs and back in programming before they leave. Then I get back to my regular sleep schedule because I am tired. I appreciate you guys and will talk to you all soon.