Testing Business Ideas Before Membership Site Launch
What makes your membership site idea a good one? That you may need to find out before you even pay for hosting or start your site. Yes, it is important to test your membership idea to avoid that pinch in your heart.
A membership business can help you become a full-time content creator. However, only if you jump in the right waters and swim through the waves.
In this article, we plan to help you turn your unconscious vision for the membership site into a conscious and viable business plan. But before we continue…
Importance of Testing Business Ideas Before Membership Site Launch
Can you open a restaurant without knowing how to cook a few dishes well? No, right! It doesn’t work that way. Even after you learn cooking, you need to take insights by taste tests from multiple people. Only then can you summarize whether your idea and the food you cook will help you run a successful restaurant or not.
We can name many reasons for the importance of testing and validating a business idea. Let’s start with a few of them.
- Understand potential challenges.
- Have a chance to listen to future customers.
- Reduce costs associated with a failed launch.
- Strengthen your commitment to the project.
- Optimize your content to meet member needs.
- Understand potential Return on Investments or any Loss
- Estimate the time required to Break Even in the market
- Know whether people are willing to pay for your idea
Now, let’s talk about the actual way to validate your idea before you even launch a membership site.
Customer Validation: Talk to Potential Customers
Yes, you can start a great on-demand course or membership subscription website.
No, you can’t do that just by rolling out your super exciting content to the world, without talking to your potential customers. You need feedback.
Customer validation is the be-all and end-all when testing you membership site idea.
Where to find them and how to talk to them?
Find people who can give you valuable insights – those can be even your closest circle. So, who to interview?
- Your friends, colleagues, past colleagues.
- Business owners and founders related to your membership site industry.
- People on forums and social networks like Reddit, Facebook, or X who might be interested in your industry.
- Freelancers on platforms like Fiverr (this will be a paid service).
It’s understandable to feel nervous about approaching them, especially the first group. However, with the right questions and a thoughtful approach, you can gain insights that would otherwise be inaccessible.
In business and marketing terminology, this is called customer validation: Are there real customers who have expressed interest in the product or service you are going to offer?
Customer interviews and surveys come to the rescue to validate your membership site idea.
What are the main principles in asking questions for the interview? This is a very interesting and important part.
The main principle is – don’t even tell them what kind of site you are going to have. Don’t tell them how it will work. Don’t mention your business. Ask questions about what they do now and general hypothetical questions.
Examples of Customer Validation Interview Questions:
- How do you now consume Y type of content?
- Do you have any current subscriptions to the Y type of content elsewhere?
- What is hard to achieve with the Y website where you consume content?
- What kind of online content do you consume regularly? (e.g., videos, articles, podcasts).
- How much time do you spend consuming online content per week/day?
- For how many courses have you enrolled in the past year and what was the completion rate?
- What monthly/annual fee do you pay for a subscription to a Y service?
- How often do you use the Y platform?
- Do you feel any problems not having access to Y content?
- What device(s) do you prefer to consume content?
- Do you have any membership cards?
- How do you manage your online subscription?
- What are the key factors influencing your choice of content?
- What’s your motivation to use/subscribe to content?
Adapt and tailor these questions to your type of content/membership business keeping in mind the following aims to answer these questions:
- Is the problem significant and painful for customers?
- Are customers willing to pay a premium to solve this problem?
- Who are the direct and indirect competitors?
- Can the idea capitalize on a specific trend or needs that are unmet?
Founder Validation: Validate Yourself
Customer validation is a pretty clear thing. But what about founders? Haven’t even thought about it? Validating your own qualification for the long-term work on the project is as important and inspirational as validating your customers.
Here are questions to ask you/your team of founders to validate your idea.
- Do you/your team have the necessary skills, experience, and passion to execute the new membership site idea?
- What is the market size? Is it large enough to sustain a profitable business?
- Do you have a long-term vision? Is your team of founders passionate about the idea and willing to work on it for years?
- Is the idea situated within a promising market or industry?
Create what you wish existed and measure the amount of energy you are ready to put into your processes of creating a sustainable membership.
Start Promoting Related Content on Various Sites
Use existing platforms to give a boost to the content you want to offer as a membership subscription.
Those can be platforms where you feel to be most comfortable with, for example:
- Podcasting platforms and streaming services.
- Starting your own YouTube channel.
- E-book selling sites.
- Blog or newsletter subscription platforms like Substack.
- Local workshop to test interest in your content.
- Meaningful posts for the X platform or Facebook.
Use Existing Membership Platforms & Course Sites as Proxies
A competitive market often signals demand – but the trick is to identify gaps where existing players fall short and offer a better solution. Have found similar course or membership site ideas on third-party sites? Why not use the popular course platforms or social media groups with the potential target audience and upload some of your lessons to understand the appetite of customers?
You can go even further and invite people who are already part of similar communities or groups in other niches to measure their interest.
This won’t just help you test your membership idea with minimum costs but also help you learn the onboarding processes and community engagement firsthand to understand what you can reproduce with your own membership model.
Pre-Sell Memberships
Are your potential customers ready to pay? Perform a pay-to-access test. That’s right, test their true intentions by offering them to pay a small amount of money for early access and present it as an early-bird discount.
This can be just a few password-protected lessons on your beta site even before you launch the actual site. If you don’t have a site, you can send content, such as audio, text, and video even via email.
To entice them even more, try to play with these incentives:
- Exclusive club
Give users a feeling that they are joining part of a special community.
- Beta tester discounts
Offer digital points to those who give feedback to your membership.
- Feedback rewards
Offer digital discounts to those who give early feedback to your membership. These rewards could translate into discounts or free lessons.
- Test-driven guarantees
Offer a money-back guarantee during the early access period.
Concluding – Test Membership Ideas for Business Before Launch?
So, what makes your membership site idea a good one? You can’t understand it without validating your idea with the real market.
- That takes validation from your customers and co-founders. Use questions and interviews to collect data-driven insights from potential customers and industry experts.
- Use some of your content to build an audience on various content platforms and collect feedback.
- Promote your future site to beta testers with exclusive bonuses.
And finally, remember, testing is valuable before launching your idea to the world to catch quirks and refine details before going live.
FAQs for Testing Business Ideas of a Membership Site
1. How to Test Your Business Idea Without Spending a Dollar?
To survey your audience, use ARForms to create a questionnaire. Further, if you want to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), create a membership site with ARMember Lite completely for free. This will help you create, navigate, and manage a membership and test your business idea.
2. Is it important to create an MVP for testing a business idea?
A minimum viable product or an MVP is crucial to know whether your idea has the potential to sell or not. Based on the interaction or engagement you get for your MVP, you can tweak your product or idea. This step helps in creating a business idea that meets the audience’s needs.
3. What to do if there’s no expected response to the business idea?
If you generated a lot of inquiries and questions regarding your idea but limited conversion, your idea still has potential. You must tweak your strategies and provide exclusive value for conversions. However, if the idea fails to generate any significant interest or response, you must tweak your idea altogether.
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Brian Denim
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