How to Know if You Have a Great Business Idea, The Pros + Cons of a Membership Site and Best Customer Service Practices with Steph Crowder of Fizzle
Episode 063: Show Notes
Today on the podcast, we have our good friend Steph Crowder from Courage and Clarity Podcast and Fizzle. If you have not yet seen Fizzle and its amazing membership platform full of incredible courses for small business owners, you guys should definitely check it out. Steph is one of our podcasting buddy friends. We meet with Steph and a couple of other ladies twice a month and chat all things podcasting, growth tactics, marketing, guest ideas, and all that good stuff in our podcasting mastermind. She is an incredible human being, and we love her to pieces. Steph is super knowledgeable, super kind, and we can’t wait for you to learn from her today.
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Inside this episode, Steph is giving you a step by step of all the things you need to do to
interview potential customers in order to validate your kick ass business idea. We are also
getting a behind the scenes look at a thriving membership site, and Steph is talking all about
creating amazing customer service in your business and the step-by-step creation process of
making courses inside of Fizzle. It’s a great episode, we get really in depth especially on that
membership piece and the business idea piece, so we are really excited for you to dive in and
take away some awesome knowledge bombs from Steph.
Interviewing Your Customers to Validate Your Business Ideas
One of the hardest things for most new business owners is to pick up the phone and start
talking to “strangers”. However, as a new business owner, this is the key to validating your
business ideas first, before even doing a launch. Everything you do in your business is an
assumption until you actually put it out there and ask your potential clients whether or not what you are creating will actually be the solution to their problem.
Even if you think you have the best idea and you are so sure that nobody has done it before, at the end of the day, it is still an assumption. Deciding whether or not people will pay money for the solution is definitely an assumption. So it is crucial for you to go out there and test the hypothesis first, rather than launching and hearing nothing but crickets.
Implementing the Anchor Question Methodology
Oftentimes when you are first starting to ask questions to validate your business ideas, it can
be hard to know where to even start. Two of the biggest mistakes that new business owners
make when interviewing their potential customers is asking questions that are either too broad
or too specific. The key is to ask questions that are just in between, the anchor questions, that
will allow you to hear more answers that are relatively close to the ballpark of your business idea. This anchors the whole conversation and it blows it wide open. It gets people talking and
everything is so much easier once you have crafted this question and asked it.
Navigating the Data Behind Your Business Idea
After testing your hypothesis by asking potential customers, a very likely outcome is that your
idea might not be as valid as you first thought it was. Now, keep in mind, the answers from potential customers are just information, and you can choose what you want to do with it. So do not be immediately discouraged.
Perhaps you just have not found your ideal customer yet, or maybe the market just is not yet educated on what you can provide. However, you still have to keep an open mind that maybe people just aren’t willing to buy what you have to sell. Just because you build it does not mean the people are going to come. This is a great time to start making a shift, and use the information to guide you into a more necessary market, where you can decide whether or not you would be interested in providing the solution.
The “Must Knows” of Setting Up a Membership Site
The first thing that people overlook when it comes to a membership site, is that it is much harder than it looks. There is so much more work that goes into it than most people realize, especially from a technical standpoint, which can be more costly than you may have anticipated. There is no easy, out-of-the-box solution for setting up a membership site, and most people who want to create a membership site don’t have the level of technical expertise that is needed to make that happen.
For Steph, she really believes in building your way up to the capacity of running a membership site instead of having it be your first product. One of the best ways to get started is to really nail your first course, start to build up a library of courses, grow your audience, and then you can begin to think about how that would fit into a membership site.
Customer Service Strategies to Build a Great Business
When it comes to excellent customers service in a membership site, the best way to boost the
value and getting people to sign up initially is to offer some type of free trial. People want to
come in and “kick the tires” and see what the membership is all about. Not everybody is going to be a good fit, so it is much better to know that those who have taken the step to pay for the
membership are actually enjoying it and getting what they had hoped out of it.
The ultimate goal is to leave people with a delighted experience, because then the chances of them coming back are much greater. What’s probably even more important than that is what they will tell others about you, even just to say how amazing the experience was to cancel their membership.
Quote This
Everything in our business, every single thing, is really just a hypothesis.
—Steph Crowder
Highlights
Understand the process of talking to potential clients to validate your business ideas before launching. [0:04:19.4]
Learn more about Steph’s anchor question methodology and how to implement it in your business. [0:09:08.0]
Find out how to navigate the data behind your business idea if it is not necessarily supported. [0:17:05.0]
Steph shares the ins and outs and must-know tips for setting up and running a membership site. [0:22:49.1]
Hear the best customer services strategies for building a thriving business or membership site. [0:33:06.7]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:48:10.0]
Come up with a problem hypothesis statement.
Understand who your customer is, and who you want to talk to.
Create an anchor question, ask it, and allow the conversation to flow from there.
Talk to at least 8 to 10 people, and use the data to move forward.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Steph Crowder
Fizzle
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Steph Crowder is 1/3 of Fizzle.co, the place online for honest training & community for creatives, freelancers and entrepreneurs. In the community she’s known as “Den Mama” and she loves all things customer-oriented. She also hosts a podcast called Courage & Clarity, which is one part inspiration, one part instruction to help you go after what you love. Steph lives in Chicago with her husband, baby girl and pup.
KEY TOPICS
Validating your business ideas, Implementing the anchoring methodology, Navigating a change in your business idea, Setting up a membership site, Customer service strategies for business success
