Too many people create a subscription business because they heard it’s a lucrative business model. While it’s true that the membership model can help you scale your company faster, generate long-term stability and enable you to grow a vibrant tribe of thrilled members, generating revenue can’t be your only priority. Instead, when you focus on generating a positive impact on your members lives, they’ll reward you with membership and subscription growth.
In a recent interview for the Membership and Subscription Growth podcast, I spoke with Tim Broom, the co-founder and CEO of ITPro.TV. Tim transitioned to a subscription business model four years ago and is set to hit $8 million in revenue this year. What he has done, you can do. Your product may be much different than his, but the keys to his success can be applied to any subscription model.
ITPro.TV is, as Tim describes, “a Netflix for learning information technology.” They offer a low subscription price for access to a library of videos for people to learn and get certified in areas of information technology and security. At around $30 per member per month, they’ve experienced a phenomenal growth rate. Tim believes this success is a byproduct of having the right focus, value, and onboarding programs in place.
Removing obstacles for your members to succeed In a world where so many businesses are focused on profit, Tim has chosen to focus on a real, profound concern for the outcomes that each member experiences. He says, “you take care of your members, and we call them members, they're not subscribers or customers, they belong to something.”
To explain further, Tim shares that his “job description is to remove obstacles to people's success. With that mindset, we wanted to bring a different type of learning, a different way of learning. Your obstacle may be geography because of where you're located, you might not be near an institution that can provide high quality training for IT; or maybe it's money, because you don't have the cash or maybe you can't get a loan in order to do it. A lot of times you have young families with kids and someone wants to change careers, but they really can't afford to do it because they're working full-time to support their family and they can't do both. We want to remove those obstacles.”
The result of this transformation focus is an audience of loyal members who believe in your product and don’t hesitate to share their success stories with others.
Delivering a high-quality productWhen asked about having to compete with all the free information and training videos available, Tim believes that their success comes from the value of their product. They are an established and trusted source of content as opposed to the unknown sources producing the free content on YouTube. He asks, “as a business owner, who do you want to be working and making changes to your network that involves your email, or your website? Do you want them to learn from a trusted source or from someone on YouTube?”
To make certain that the value of ITPro.TV grows for each member, Tim adds, “We originate and create all our own content that is on our site. So, we're also a video production and content creating engine. Our team creates these videos and offers them up and organizes them in a way that an IT professional can get the skills and knowledge that he needs to be able to perform a task and it also grow with him as the technology changes.”
He states, “one of our core values is to create new effective content every day. So, every day, we're in the studio creating new content, so the value to a subscriber is greater a month after they subscribe because we've created approximately 400 more episodes, which happens to be about 25 minutes, the attention span of an adult.