A Start-up Journey (Now will you Buy it?)

This is the eleventh post in this series, click here to read the first one.

I am jacked up… this is a much better idea and we are finally on the right road. I mean, who is not going to jump all over this? We got the magic word “free” on our side now. So we send out some inquiries for “subject matter experts” who might want to turn their “expertise” into cash. Voila, the phone starts ringing.

I take a meeting with Jim Patterson and Cristine Campos at Panera. Jim is a social media guy of course, but first and foremost he is an MLM guy. Jim is likin’ the idea. Christine is a social media gal, of course, who does a fair amount of live social media training so I’m thinking she has content at least. Christine, however, believes her training is above average. Realizing that eventually there will probably be a lot of social media webinars, she asks me “how will people know which ones are the good ones?” Hmmm… “How about if we had a rating system” I offer, having no idea how I will accomplish this. “That works” she says and commits me to a bunch more work.

My next meeting was with Rachel Haviland at another Panera (I prefer Panera to Starbucks because the coffee refills are free). Rachel is a social media gal, of course. Rachel also liked the concept, especially the ratings part. Great, now I definitely have to figure out a rating system. Of course all three of them say they will start working on content right away. I crack open the platform and start noodling on a rating system.

Ratings? How would this work… legitimately. Most rating systems can be gamed. Yelp has an entire army who do nothing but weed out sketchy ratings. A business owner rates himself as great and his competitor rates him as crappy, with a few real ratings from customers in between. But the rating idea has grown on me. It certainly would be an incentive for producers to produce great content. I settle on a simple “5-Star” rating concept, after contemplating the need for more than 5 stars. I whip up a little script and put it on the “sample” page. Looks lovely. But wait a minute, once again the fatal flaw of most ratings systems: anybody can rate. Requiring users to login wouldn’t help, that still doesn’t mean they actually “saw” the webinar they were rating. Hmmm… How about if the ratings were only “displayed” on their page, but were actually entered in the webinar platform. I can use one of those nifty forms we can do in our platform (shameless plug, nobody else has this feature) for that. Perfect. Can it be gamed? Well, I guess a producer could send 100 of their friends to their webinar to give it high marks, but they would all have to pay. Win for me, please game it.

So I continue taking meetings with people. The new “rated webinars” idea goes over great with most people. However it did scare off some people. I assume they were not as confident in their content as others. Oh well, our marketplace will be better for it. Poor webinars are not going to do anybody any good in our system. Again, a cool, nay a great, feature, suggested by a prospect.

I decided I should create a little survey to see what other ideas people may give me just for asking.  I use LinkedIn Answers and ask the following question:

“While most webinars today are free promotional efforts (10% information and 90% pitch), there is a growing market for “Pay for Knowledge” (100% information). Under what circumstances would you pay attend a webinar?”

I know, using a question to promote an agenda is a little sketchy, but half the answers promoted agendas too so I guess that’s how that works. But I did get some interesting responses. In the interest of transparency, but brevity, I will link to it here and just highlight the points made that agree with my delusions below.

“I am absolutely sure that I am going to learn something” Gave me new idea

“Summarize up front before I sign up what I can expect to walk away with even if I do not engage your offering after the webinar. And recommend just a few top references for follow-on studies of the subject in general, with and without direct ties to your offering if possible. The point of the “value” of the webinar is to deliver the information to me effectively, and faster than I might comprehend just sniffing around on my own.” Ratings should take care of this

“I guess what it boils down to is cost vs. perceived value. If the customer feels he can channel that knowledge into some kind of measurable and tangible financial or even personal gain, then it’s a matter of the promoter establishing a price point with the minimal amount of “pain” (time and price) to the attendee” Supply and demand, got it

“If the webinar is a stepping-stone for what I’m trying to achieve, the next question is if it’s a fit for my budget. Finally, how much do I trust a person or persons delivering the information to do so effectively? What’s their track record?” Ratings, and reinforces new idea

“For me the focus isn’t on paying for the “webinar.” It’s paying for the value, the knowledge received and the expected return on investment” same as above

“Since most of them are free, at this point I’d have to be able to get APA approved CEUs toward my license or it would have to be an amazing topic” gave me new idea

“When I know that they’re not going to waste my time with a bunch of crap. That immediately eliminates most of the webinars out there. I am engaged when one brings value to the conversation.” said already

“I’d only pay to attend a webinar when I am confident I’m going to get value for money. I would want Testimonials, including what people have really done with the info post-webinar (success stories)” reinforces new idea above

Okay, so I consider this exercise a success for what I wanted to achieve. The only negative I heard was that there is a lot of good free content out there, but we all know nothing is free unless it is pitch laden. I heard several concerns that I feel our platform already overcomes and got some new ideas. For example, I will add “reviews” and I may look into possibly even another front-end for the CEU market.

I’m feeling pretty good about things now. After mentioning to someone on LinkedIn that they should check out our webinar marketplace platform, they replied “isn’t this the same thing as Business Expert Webinars“? Holy Crap! I had researched the market for our first idea, but this marketplace idea was an offshoot and I did not even think about researching it. Like I said before, there are no new ideas.

Next Post: Competition Sucks

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