We discuss with Mike the similarities between starting a start-up and building an new online course

We discuss with Mike the similarities between starting a start-up and building an new online course

Mike is the joint co-host with Rob Walling “Startups For The Rest Of Us” podcast and co-founder with Rob of the MicroConf which is the leading yearly conferences for individuals who are looking to start a Startup or already running a successful Startup company. Mike also runs his own successful startup company Bluetick.

Mike started his career with a brief, 3 month stint at a start up multimedia company called 2K Innovations Corporation in North Carolina in 1998. He was invited to join full time as a principal, but declined after seeing how the company was being run.

Later that year, he moved to Buffalo, NY to work for a wireless ISP startup called Clearwire Technologies. He bailed a couple years before it went under and sold its name, but learned a lot about working at a small company.

Jonathon: Welcome back folks to the WP tonic show. This is episode 355. I am excited listeners and viewers. I’ve got somebody that is really admired to come on the show. Hopefully he’s going to be happy with the interview and that`s Mike Taber. And he’s from the star tops for the rest of this podcast. Which I have been listening to myself for donkey’s years. Mike, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers quickly?

Mike: I think you’re kind of said it right there. I mean, I’m the Co-founder of the MicroConf Academy, which is kind of a backstop for our podcast. The rest of us are online community for self-funded startup entrepreneurs mostly in the software space. That’s called Founder Cafe. And then I’m also the CO founder under that umbrella with Rob Hall and of course have of Microcomp, which is a conference that we host a couple times a year. We do it in Vegas and then we also do one in Europe usually in the fall. The one in Vegas is in the spring.

Jonathon: And the last one was in Croatia, wasn’t it?

Mike: Yeah, I was in Croatia, so it was gorgeous location. It was the first time we’d had it there. And I can’t say I have any faults with the place other than it was just a long way to fly.

Jonathon: I had been there myself when I was living in Europe. Cindy my cohost, you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers, Cindy?

Cindy: Sure, absolutely. Hi everyone. Cindy Nicholson here from the coursewhisperer.com and I help entrepreneurs who are wanting to create online courses that and them make them good.

Jonathon: I am glad I have Mike because I personally think is a lot of synergy between the bootstrap style communities and if you’re starting a membership site. Or you have a WordPress developer and you’re looking to start a product. And I thought why not go to somebody that I’ve been listening to for years that have influenced me. So let’s go to the masters. So I thought lets go get Mike on. So Mike, first of all, do you think, as we were discussing before we went live. I think a lot of people you’ve seen the startup community with apps. And with membership sites. There’s still a tendency to think, you know we will build a fantastic course, we will build a fantastic app. And people will just come and use it, but it doesn’t really work. Does it Mike?

Mike: No, I think part of the problem is that most people envision themselves as smart people and you ask a whole room full of people. How many people think are above average intelligence? Like most of them will raise their hand. We all want to think we are Steve Jobs. But the reality is that even Steve Jobs didn’t have the distribution network that apple does at this point. So when he was able to go out and work in a cave for several weeks or months or even years on a new product. Like he still had apples distribution engine behind him to be able to take that product and push it out in front of people. And it didn’t matter like what the flaws of the product were and you can ask any apple agent and they will there’s no flaws or nothing wrong. But obviously there were major problems that came out for some of the products and they still overcame them. But the distribution strategy that they have the marketing engine to get in front of people that were built in and he didn’t have to worry about it. He could just create a great product. Whereas the rest of us, we have to not only create the product well, we also have to get in front of people. And you can’t just focus on one without the other because it’s never going to work.

Jonathon: So if you got any kind of insights for the guests and your discussions with Rob, some basic tactics that somebody should consider if they are trying to build up a prelaunch audience for their membership website or their APP or wherever they plan to sell online.

Mike: The easiest, I won’t say easiest.

Jonathon: That`s the questions I’ll ask you.

Mike: I think one of the better strategies, I’ll say not the best because obviously it depends a lot on your situation, but one of the better strategies that I think has the most potential to work for most people is to leverage other people’s audiences. So part of that includes expanding your own network, learning more about other people who have their own audiences that they’ve built. Because they got their audience from someplace and it’s usually from other people’s audiences. And yes, at some point you have to backtrack to some central location, which was probably AOL back in the day. But everyone has built their audiences over time. And if you’re new to the game, you’re new starting out. You don’t have a list of any kind. You have to get it from somewhere. You have to build it somehow and that means getting in front of people and the best way to do that is to get in front of other people’s audiences. And kind of, I won’t say market yourself a pitch yourself to them, but provide value to them and let them know, hey, I’m here and these are, this is the way that I can help you.

Jonathon: Yeah, I follow your logic. Cindy you got a question?

Cindy: So again, kind of similar to what Jonathan saying, there’s a lot of, because people are, if they’re launching membership sites or online courses, it’s like launching a product. An information product so to speak. So, I have a lot of people when they come to me, they’re like, okay, well I want to create a course on such and such. Or I want to create a membership on such and such. And you know, they haven’t really had done any work behind the scenes as to figure out whether or not it makes sense. They’re kind of asking me for my advice and I often say, I don’t know, what does your audience say? So what do you recommend, when come to you with an idea of a product or a solution to something? What rigor or what process do you recommend them going through that really kind of validate whether or not it’s a good idea to move forward with it?

to do because there’s going to be different answers if you’re building a membership site versus a course versus an iPhone app or something like that. Like each of those things has its own subtle nuances and some of them I’m going to be familiar with and some of them aren’t. I always caveat it with like, here’s what I think, but I’m not like especially, and this is especially true if it’s not something that I would purchase because I’m not really the target audience. I always caveat it is like, I wouldn’t buy this but I’m not in your target audience. So take whatever I say here with a grain of salt. And I think that that’s a common mistake that people make is that they assume when they are hearing somebody talk on a podcast or from a stage at a conference, oh, this, this information applies to me.

Mike: And over time you get jaded and you realize that it may be great information, just not great for you given where you’re at and exactly what you’re doing. So I always try to make sure that I preface whatever I say with like, Hey just take this with a grain of salt because this may not be directly relevant to you. All of that said the best thing in most cases to do is to try and get in front of as many people as you can that actually, that you believe would purchase it. So if you’re targeting people who, our parents for example, because you’ve got an idea for an iPhone app that integrates with daycare or something like that. You have to; in that case, you have to talk to not just the parents but also the daycare itself to see if they’re interested. Because you can’t get, if you can’t get those two sides to both buy into the idea that it’s never going to work.

Mike: So the idea of it like a two side and that’s, that’s almost like a two sided market, which I would not advise like self-funded companies to go after in any way, shape or form. But you have to make sure that you’re aware of all the people who are going to be involved in whatever that decision making process is. So in a larger company, for example, let’s say you’re targeting developers, you have to not just keep in mind who the developers are, who are going to be using the products, but who’s actually paying for it. What purchasing they need to go through. So when you’re looking at that, it’s like how do you differentiate between those two and how do you get in front of them and who’s going to push the product forward or try and make management aware. Like are you going from bottom up or you’re trying to top down. And depending on what your resources are, you might does one versus the other might be depending on the product, how it’s installed or how it’s used.

Mike: Sometimes you can do an end around with the sales reps, sales reps tend to have like a lot of leeway in what they can do. Especially at larger companies because sales reps are kind of hired guns for the most part. And whatever they do that brings in sales is going like management tends to be okay with it. But if you try to go into the IT department, Hey, can I help out your sales department? They’re going to say, no, this is just, we don’t do that. Go pouncing can go do whatever, but don’t talk to us.

Cindy: Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of making sure that you really get to the people who would be using the product. But maybe not even then the next level in terms of how it’s going to be leveraged and utilized. So thank you for that. Jonathan?

Jonathon: Yeah. So you got your own membership website. So what are some of the, what’s the first couple of surprise is that you come across when you start your own membership site that you didn’t envision there Mike?

Mike: Well, so when we first started out the membership site that we put together was mainly for self-funded software entrepreneurs. And we were building what essentially amounted to a course and then we had forums alongside of it. So there was a, like a whole set of, actually first, there is almost no content. We were essentially marketing the content and then building it as we were publishing it. So people could buy a monthly subscription and while they were, I think we had about three or four months’ worth of content and then every week or every two weeks we would push out more content and it was all just in time stuff.

Mike: So like we’d say okay, this is the stuff on the list and it’ll be out in two weeks. So we had two weeks to build it is really what it comes down to. And people were paying us on a monthly basis for it and what we kind of came to a conclusion at one point where we were about 15 or 16 months in that we were putting just as much effort into the tail end of the content as we were into the month one and month, as we had a month, one’s through five or six. So what happens is inevitably be with a membership site or a course like that, people are going to drop off. You have churn associated with it. So the stuff that we built in month 16 was being viewed and seen a lot less than in month one because you can get access to it until you’ve got to month 16. Because it was laid out in the course.

Mike: So we shortened it down, we compressed it and said okay, this is just going to be a 12 month course and we’ll take those extra four months, we’ll push them back in and then we offer a lifetime membership after 12 months. So you could pay for 12 months and then you get in and that was. And then you were kind of grandfathered in a lifetime member. And so that was one thing we learned is like the just the conceptually if you were going to continue generating content the entire time at some point that content, especially if you’re trying to teach people stuff, it becomes less useful to them because presumably if they have absorbed what you’re teaching them, they no longer need to be taught. So that was how we dealt with it at the time,.

Jonathon: You do hope?

Mike: I would hope. Yes. I mean, if you’re good at what you do and you actually, you know, care about the people that you’re teaching and then yes you would, you’d think about that. But it wasn’t something we thought about when we first started doing it. So that was the way we solved it. I have seen a roommate set a talk about how they shut that, a membership site that they shut down because it was actually costing them more than it was then it was generating. And it was something like $2,000,000 a year or something like that. It was some ridiculously high number and they just shut it down because it was costing them too much in their churn was too high.

Mike: So they just said we’re done with this. I’m, I’m sure that there’s a detailed article on it, some place online. I just don’t remember exactly where it is.

Jonathon: So churn is the dark secret of any kind of membership. if you learned anything about how you keep people engaged in your course and the active insights about how you developed a course to reduce churn.

Mike: Yeah. So there’s a couple of things that, I would probably advise people to look at and you know, there’s, it depends a lot on how your courses set up, but uh, if it’s an actual course and you, there, there’s a definitive starting and ending point with it and you’re trying to, let’s say it’s a $500 course, but you charge them monthly for it to kind of keep them from having to pay $500 all up front.

Mike: I haven’t seen marketers where they’ll say, oh, well you can charge on a quarterly basis or an annual basis and if you prepay, this is the price versus monthly would be $50 a month. But if you have to do that over 12 months at $600, but if you buy it all upfront and it’s 500 so you just save some money. There’s other ways to do that as well. If you have something, a similar setup where if you notice where there was a point where churn starts to become an issue it probably won’t be in that. Like the first month of churn will probably be higher in most cases anyway. Just because you get people in who aren’t the right fit. And then months two probably through five or six or something like that. You probably have some churn here and there, but there’s probably going to be a point where people have absorbed enough with the information that they feel like they know what they’re doing.

Mike: They can’t necessarily justify the costs of continuing, so at that point you can either look at what else can you provide them at that point that would be valuable. Or you could pitch them on, hey, by the rest of this course now when we’ll give you a discount, and that’s actually the way that we approached it. We looked at our, churn along the way and found that after month for between five and seven turn tended to go a lot higher. So at month four we basically pitched, hey, you can get a lifetime discount. We’ll credit you for everything that you’ve paid so far and we’ll give you a discount that you would have gotten had you bought it all upfront. So then they pay a couple hundred dollars, they get, you know, to some, a slight discount and then they get the rest of it, but they also get it immediately. So you’re essentially, instead of spreading that value out over the next six months, you get it right now.

Jonathon: That`s great. That`s really very insightful. Cindy.

Cindy: I think that’s a really interesting approach, especially when you’re looking at your turn and what can you do to kind of keep them on. So not lose them. So I haven’t heard that approach before. So that’s really neat. So I again, part of membership sites and everything is, is building an online community. And keeping people engaged and interested in what you’re doing. You know, you’ve got your podcast as part of it, but what to, you know, and so you probably have right now a pretty engaged online community. So can you talk about your thoughts and advice around how to go about doing that and how to keep your people, your people keep coming back for more?

Mike: So when you say keep people coming back for more in what context are you talking about? Like a, just a in general, a community like that’s open and free or a paid membership because they are very, very different.

Cindy: Well, it may be starting with the free community in terms of, because that’s really maybe your starting point, right? And then, and then kind of what are the differences then when it is in a paid community?

Mike: So I think we’re. So when I think of, an online free community, I think more of a sense of belonging. So for example, we have a podcast and we say the startups, the rest of his community, but there’s no website you can go to where it’s like just startups. The rest of us, people talking about that stuff. We don’t have a Facebook group; we don’t have free forums or anything like that. It’s more the idea of a sense of identity for most people. It’s like, Oh, I listened to this. I’m into microcomp community. Maybe you went once or maybe you feel like you belong there, you should go, but you haven’t gone yet.

Mike: So I feel like that’s more of an identity thing. I think you could say I’m part of the Reddit community because you go there and you participate in the forums, but that’s a very different, sense of what it is that you’re doing there and why. They are, you’re kind of killing time versus trying to educate yourself or be a member of a particular social group. The difference I think with that versus with our Founder Cafe or when previously it was the MicroConf Academy. We have the course and then we also had forums that were associated with it. One of the things that we did was we introduced the idea of cohorts. And we tested this early on where we had a mechanism where you could sign up at any time or, actually, let me step back a bit.

Mike: The signup mechanism itself, we tested between allowing people to sign up at any time versus, okay, we’re going to run a basically a monthly launch. So you sign up at anywhere between four and six weeks, something like that. You sign up for this mailing list and then when we get to a point where we decide that that list is big enough or we want to do a launch, we email them, put them in a new bucket and say, look, we’re going to be doing a launch, it’s going to be in seven days, this is what it’s going to entail. And we put them through an email sequence that basically leads up to it. So we’re essentially what maybe it was, 50 people, 100 people, 200 people, however many you get to that, you want to do that with. You treat them as if it’s a brand new launch for a brand new product and it’s not.

Mike: It’s the same product that you have. It’s just that’s kind of how you’re pitching it to them and marketing them. And if they don’t sign up, they will not be able to sign up for another six to eight weeks. So they’re going to have to wait. What that does is it essentially puts a time pressure on them that you don’t have if you can just go to a website and sign up for it anytime. And after testing this, we found that the conversion rate on that was roughly four to one. So we got to four times as many people sign up during those times where we did a launch versus when it was just open enrollment at any time you feel like it. The other thing that it does is by having a set of forums there that people could interact with them. Let’s say that we had 25 people signed up and this is something that we did at the at that point.

Mike: Whereas we limited the number of people who could sign up during any cohort. We can say, look, there are only 25 spots and if you don’t get one, you’re going to have to wait till the next time. So that also puts the little additional pressure on people to make a decision one way or the other. If it is open enrollment, people can decide at any time, oh, I’ll come back to this. And that’s really why most websites don’t have like great conversion rates because you know that you can always go back to a website and read whatever articles are there. There’s no time pressure, but if there’s a signup deadline, that time pressure is there and you have to make a decision. You know one way or the other. Can you get a refund? Sure. That’s not a big deal, but the time pressure and all the stuff that goes with it, the fear of missing out.

Mike: Those are the types of things that make people make the decision either positively or negatively and that’s good for you as a a person running that membership site. The side effect of that is that when people sign up, you’ve got a bunch of new people that come in and if you have forums where they can interact with them, they’re all new people going in all at the same time and they’re much more likely to talk and engage and post things and they would if they’d been a member for three months or six months. And by doing that on a very regular basis, let’s say once a month. You get this influx of new people that are all active and very engaged all at the same time. And it creates these spikes in activity basically once a month. We don’t actually do this for Founder Cafe right now, but that’s because we’ve switched over to a new system. And honestly like our focus has been much more on Micro Confident. Than it has been on Founder Cafe. But that as a direction that we need to go back to that and we just haven’t had time to be perfectly honest.

Cindy: Go ahead Jonathon.

Jonathon: Yeah. We’re going to go for break folks. It’s been an amazing conversation so far. Thanks Mike, you have provided so much value. We are going to go for our break folks. And we will be back with this discussion with Mike and it’s going to be fantastic. Be back in few moments.

Announcer: You want to spend more time making money online? Then use WP Tonic as your trusted WordPress developer partner. They will keep your WordPress website secure and up-to-date so you can concentrate on the things that make you money. Examples of WP Tonic client services are, landing pages, page layouts, widgets, updates and modifications. WP Tonic is well known and trusted in the WordPress community. They stand behind their work with no questions asked. Thirty day money back guarantee, so don’t delay. Sign up with WP tonic today. That’s wp-tonic.com. Just like the podcast.

Jonathon: We are coming back. It has been mind-blowing. Thanks so much Mike. But before we continue the discussion I want to talk about, one of our great sponsors and that’s WP Fusion. And what does WP Fusion does? Well in your technology stack there should be two things WordPress and your CRM. And what WP Fusion does, it enables you to communicate through WordPress to your CRM and put that communication on steroids. I haven’t got the time to go through all the amazing things, especially if you’ve got a membership site, ecommerce. If any of those two type of website platforms, WP Fusion will help you communicate with active campaign drip, all the leading CRM`s. So if you go to WP Fusion and use the coupon code WP Tonic all one word upper case, you get a unique special offer that’s only offered to you, listeners and viewers. And that’s 25 percent of any of the WP Fusion packages. And you only get that offer from WP Tonic. Go to their website, buy one of their packages. Be blown away.

Jonathon: So Mike, so about the conferences why did you decide to start a conference? Did it come from you or Rob or the both of you at the same time? Because it’s a hell of a lot of work. Isn`t Mike?

Mike: Yeah. I don’t remember whose bright idea was to be honest. I say that slightly tongue and cheek, but no, I, I honestly don’t remember, but I do remember having discussions around it.

Jonathon: Let`s blame Rob. Shall we?

Mike: What was that?

Jonathon: Let`s blame Rob.

Mike: Blame Rob, yes. Blame him for all the troubles and I’ll try to take credit for everything. But now, I mean it was a collaborative effort on pretty much everything. I’ll say the rough timeline was in 2000, I think it was 2009. We started the MicroConf or academy. So that was our membership website and then in 2010 we were looking for ways to market it and how we would get in front of people. And one of the ideas we came up with was to create a podcast. So we called it startups, the rest of it. And I really resonated with a lot of people in the community. And then fast forward to the end of the year, we thought, hey, wouldn’t it be great to get people who are in our membership site and listening to the podcast together at an in person conference and in person event.

Mike: And that’s how MicroConf came out. So it was the timeline was 2009 membership site, 2010 podcasts, and 2011 conference. In looking at it from a strictly, I’ll say product point of view, what we should’ve done with switching it up a little bit. And we should have done the podcast first to essentially help establish a community. And then after that create the paid membership site. And then after that create the conference. Because in terms of how much you pay for it, for example, podcast is free. That’s kind of the quote unquote entry level products. And then you have the membership website which costs on a monthly basis or an annual basis. And then after that you’ve got this in person event which, you know, people are going to spend a couple thousand dollars to go to. So in terms of pricing free small entry point and then, a much larger one time purchase.

Mike: We could do things like master classes or personal coaching or something along those lines. That could be like another level up if we really wanted to. But when you’re talking about tiers of products and you’re going to create a suite of products in any way, shape or form, you kind of want to have an idea of what that next thing is. And we didn’t think about it. I’ll be honest, like I feel like we kind of lucked out to be perfectly honest. Just in the way that those things worked out and the way that they lead into each other. But if I were to go back and do it, like I would probably switch them around a little bit. Because if you have a podcast, you’re essentially created an audience and you can create a mailing list, know, and leverage those conversations to figure out what exactly you’re of course offerings should be. I’m not saying you can’t create a course first because you absolutely can cause that. If you know what you, if you have a particular skill or ability and you want to teach other people, then it’s a matter of finding all those other people. And finding where they’re is searching for, how to learn that.

Jonathon: That’s great. Cindy?

Cindy: So one of the things I keep hearing you saying over and over again as well, when we tested this and when we tested that, can you kind of just talk about the importance of testing things in your business as you’re working to grow it?

Mike: Well, sure. I mean going back to the idea of testing the piece where we said, okay, well we’re going to test does open enrollment makes sense? Because we heard that from people like I’m like, we didn’t know any better. we didn’t know any other way to launch a membership site and have it as a course. Other than treat it as a product launch. It was like, this is a new software products. Like we didn’t know any better. We just kind of discovered that so. Well, yeah. But we, we kept hearing from people was why can’t I sign up? I’d really like to sign up now and I missed the deadline. And so we said, okay, well we’ll try this out and see how it works. And that was more, it was partially a result of people asking us, but when you go back and look at the numbers what would look at your own business and then we’ll take a look at that bottom number, the revenue number and multiply by four and tell me what it does for your business.

Mike: Like that’s the importance of testing and that’s a very blunt assessment of it. If you could take your revenue number right now and multiply it by four, why would you not do that? And why would you not test different things to try and find something that might work that well? There could be there. It’s very easy to assume that there’s only one way of doing things if that’s the only way you’ve ever done it. And not try to tweak things or change things. And micro conference for example, we tell, I mean our audience is cool with it because mostly they’re software people and they get that change things. But about 80 percent of it, we leave the same year over year because it’s successful and we don’t want to break it, but at the same time we need to find other things that work or maybe they don’t work and we.

Mike: So we tweak to test about 15 or 20 percent of the things that we’re doing each year. Sometimes that’s like; one time attendee talks came out of that. We said, well, you know, there are a lot of smart people in the room. Let’s see if someone gets up on stage. So we put out a call for it and said, hey, you can apply here. We let them vote on it. Four people went up on stage and that’s been a mainstay for the past several years. Like people love that. They love getting up and sharing what they can do and that’s not something that we would have figured out if we hadn’t tested it.

Cindy: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think a lot of it comes back to mindset. You know, often again, the clients that I’m working with have so much like mentally and emotionally invested in what they’re launching, that they’re not treating it like an experiment. To just see how it goes and how it lands and being able to be flexible with it. And so if they aren’t successful rather than trying an alternate route, they’re thinking that they failed with it or you know, that’s not the route that they should go. But having kind of the mindset of well, let’s just see how this goes and if we need to pivot then we will do so or what have you. So I think that, I think it’s good to have that approach with anything.

Mike: .It’s good to have that approach, but I won’t say that it’s easy either because it’s very easy to fall into the trap of if I don’t do this right or the right way, now I’m never going to get another chance. Or things are going to break. And then you start envisioning all these other problems and then you start trying to solve problems that you don’t have. and it’s just creating more work for yourself that quite frankly, it doesn’t need to be done. So like I won’t say that that’s easy because I don’t want, I definitely don’t want to minimize that aspect of it because it’s really hard for most people, especially the types of people who would be listening to this podcast, the types of people who were creating their own businesses, they tend to be smart people and smart people do not want to make mistakes. And they’re always looking for the optimal ways to do things.

Mike: And it’s not easy to put yourself in a mindset where you say, well, I may not be always right. And I may not know exactly what I’m doing. I may not know the optimal solution. And you may have a good solution. But like the, you know, there’s a difference between like a local maximum versus a global maximum. Maybe close to a good solution that’s in the vicinity of what you’re doing. But like a complete website redesign is way over in left field. Maybe that’s the right solution. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not. And you do have to hedge your bets a little bit. That’s why at MicroConf we test 20 percent, not 50 or 70 percent. Because like I said, we don’t want to destroy the whole thing that we’ve done, but you know, we’re looking for minor tweaks. Because we feel like we’ve got things pretty dialed in. But you know, there’s always room for improvement. If it was going terrible, maybe we make some drastic changes. But as I said, we only have one opportunity each year to do that. If you have 12 per year, you can test out one or two.

Cindy: Yeah I think that`s really good advice. Jonathon?

Jonathon: One thing that I think I’m somebody that’s started a podcast and then done their membership. They could look at a virtual conference as economy to grants or physical one can. Couldn`t they Mike?

Mike: Yeah, they can. That says that’s something that we’ve looked at a couple of times and then. But logistically it’s hard. you know, at least for us, because of the size of our audience. And there’s concern about devaluing the in-person conference as well. That said, like for an in person conference to attend MicroConf people’s typically spending a couple thousand dollars. You know, they have to buy the ticket itself. And then that pay for travel, airfare, you know, all, all in. I mean you could be in if you’re. Especially if you’re coming in from overseas, I mean we have people fly in from New Zealand for example. They spend 30 hours on a plane just to get there and I don’t know the exact cost of that flight, but I imagine it’s not cheap. So you know, let’s assume they’re all in for like $4,000 to come there for a week. That’s expensive.

Jonathon: And you should conference, you should do a competition about who to that came furthest?

Mike: We usually do the furthest not the cheapest. That’d be hard to calculate because some people live right there in town. Like would you do a dollar per mile?

Jonathon: You could build a app where you can work out distance and cost.

Mike: Sounds like work.

Jonathon: We going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. Hopefully Mike’s going to start you on for some bonus content. When am going to ask when Rob said I am going to start Drip. What was Mike’s initial response to that madness? And a couple other that should be really interesting. The conversation has been mind-blowing so far. Such value. Mike how can our listeners and viewers find out more about you and what you are up to?

Mike: Sure. So the easiest place to find me is probably on twitter. So you can find my twitter handle is Single Founder. And that’s more a reference to Solo Founder, Solo Preneur versus me being single because I am married. I’ve gotten that question before. I’ve never thought about it until afterwards. That’s probably the best place to find me. I also have a website, singlefounder.com and a few other places. But type my name a search engine. Mike Taber, it’s hard to miss me.

Jonathon: That’s great Mike. The interview has been a joy. Cindy how can people find out more about you and what you’re up to Cindy?

Cindy: thecoursewhisperer.com. So if you’re creating a course and need help with how to put it all together, that’s exactly what I do.

Jonathon: And Cindy’s been having Mac troubles last week, but she sorts them out. She’s bought a new Sony Mac and she’s trying to work her way up folks. She will get there. Folks, if you want to find more about WP Tonic, we’re the guys that helped you build, maintain and give you consultancy. If you’re looking to build that membership site, we’re the people. That’s what we do. We will be back next week. We’re going to have a great guest like Mike sharing his experience and insights with you, listeners and viewers. We see you soon folks. Bye.

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have a great and hard-hitting round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners and WordPress junkies where we discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress and online articles/stories of the week. You can also watch the show LIVE every Friday at 8:30am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page. https://www.facebook.com/wptonic/

SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES
#355 WP-Tonic Show Special Guest Mike Taber of The MicroConf was last modified: by