Blair Williams

Blair Williams is a software developer and online entrepreneur. Blair has been developing websites and web-apps for over 20 years and has helped numerous companies to create unique and sophisticated systems.

Some of the companies he’s worked for are Raytheon, AMC & FranklinCovey.

Blair has been focused on developing software and businesses around WordPress. He’s the author of several popular plugins for WordPress including MemberPress which has helped thousands of businesses run successful membership sites.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Blair’s success

Requiring members to subscribe to automatic recurring payments to receive protected content

Result if you follow the steps in Blair’s session

Recognize more revenue and have a healthier business

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Experimentation is always an important thing because you don’t always know exactly what is going to move the needle, what is the metric that is going to, you know, just be the most important for you. And every business is different, you know, even, you know, between different membership sites, different metrics can mean different things.

I do think, you know, generally, you know, the revenue numbers are important, you know, to, to at least start out looking at, but as you kind of get more involved in the business, you know, things like churn is an important thing, you know, figuring out, you know, how many customers are leaving.

It can basically give you the data that you need to make decisions about your business, you know, why are they leaving, how are they having issues with their experience with you, are you not providing value to them, and why is this not a valuable thing to them?

And so, there’s just so much to look at. You have to kind of hone in on the metrics that are important, you know, to your business. And so, in our case, I mean, I think that a lot of the things that we look at, you know, include, you know.

Just before we jump ahead to the next one, you mentioned churn there. Do you want to just give people an understanding of how you would work that out?

Yeah. So, churn is a metric that is based on like an automatic recurrence. So like, something that somebody signs up for a subscription, and they’re now committed to an automatic, monthly or annual or quarterly whatever payment, right?

And so, churn is the percentage of people that are canceling those. So it’s not necessarily a reflection of, you know, refunds or of you know, anything like that. It’s a reflection of, hey, this is the percentage of people that are opting out of your service.

So that’s kind of what churn is. And I think that the idea is that the more you know, and you’ll see this, you know, if you get into, you know, some of these SAS style recorded or metric packages like bare metrics or chart mogul or something like that, they track things like, which is monthly recurring revenue.

And so that and that, you know, to me, at least was confusing, the first two. Because I was thinking, you know, this is the amount of money that I make every month and that’s not the case. That’s the amount of money committed, you know.

So like, I have, you know, $30,000 worth of subscriptions, right? So, there, you know, that’s how much you know, how much money people have committed, right? And so your churn is going to be the opposite of that, right?

So it’s going to be okay. So I’ve got this amount and then churn is going to whittle that down, that kind of thing. And so, your job as you know, a membership site owner is to try to reduce you know, churn and increase your MRR.

And sometimes it can feel like you know, two steps forward one step back kind of a thing, right? Because you just keep seeing that, you know, your churn. Your MRR will go up and then churn will kind of bump that down a little bit and you just kind of have to keep doing this thing.

But the more MRR you have, you’ll see like if you get into groups that do memberships and also like SAS products, that’s kind of a metric, that a lot of them will use industry-wide to just kind of show the size of their business or kind of, you know, you’ve got this many members that are committed to paying this amount of money every month kind of thing.