054: Online Membership Communities with Freedym's Jose Aviles.

Jose Aviles started out as a mechanical engineer.  He did project management in corporate America for about 10 years.  The entrepreneur lifestyle was what he always longed for. Corporate America was not conducive to the lifestyle he wanted.  He tried several different entrepreneurial ventures, but never focused until he found Ryan Lee. Under guidance from Ryan, he jumped into a niche that interested him and ran several summits which were successful and quickly led to his membership site in the prepper space.  And then, last year, he purchased Freedym.com from Ryan with a business partner. Freedym is an incredible repository of content for entrepreneurs. Jose belonged to certain membership sites and he was satisfied with them.  He liked the idea of not having to sell a launch. He liked the idea of a steady stream of income.  With summits, he was having to constantly focus on the next launch. At the end of the month you were always starting from zero.  With membership sites, it is more a steady increase, flow of consistent income. “People are less interested in owning stuff.  They are more interested in having access to stuff.”-Jose Aviles Jose noticed we had more success in selling a membership to have access to a larger library of content at a lower price, than selling them something very specific for a much higher price.  When you are adding new content to a membership site, it’s a great way to spike your membership. But when you are adding new content to a course there are a lot more questions surrounding it.  Are we creating version 2 of the course? What happens with version 1 clients? People like to access.  Giving access vs giving lifetime is something worth considering.  Netflix and Amazon is a good way to look at this. You pay to have access to movies rather than buy the physical movies. In Jose’s prepper site that he created, they do weekly content in the form of video.  It includes a Facebook group that members gain access to. In fact, it seems like the community is actually more important to the members than the website itself. Jose was able to buy Freedym.com by connecting with Ryan.  One thing that made Jose stand out is that he was a doer. Ryan would give him advice and then he would actually do them.  That separated Jose from others and Ryan somewhat took him under his wing and connected with him. Jose did the work and it has paid off. Buying an established business in the online space Jose says to hire a good bookkeeper! You have to look at numbers when purchasing even in the online space.  He already had the benefit of running a membership site… which made it easier to purchase Freedym.com. The numbers always have to work out for you before you make a decision to purchase.  Knowing the numbers and WHAT NUMBERS TO TRACK is paramount. Freedym.com originally was setup to be the Netflix for entrepreneurs and that’s what it is.  You can go in and find trainings on basically any aspect of entrepreneurial life. There is going to be a shift to add trainings on taking action.  But there isn’t just content, but they also have a community. The community is a space where people can go to ask questions and communicate with other entrepreneurs.  There is a great value in that community space. From the tech perspective when Jose took ownership of Freedym, there is a lot of things that went into the transfer.  What made the transfer hard was the amount of content. Basically the transfer was just reassigning ownership, but what made it difficult was learning “what talked to what” and “what made this work”.  The easy part were all the systems didn’t have a lot of special code. Jose’s vision for Freedym to keep it at the forefront of the members’ minds includes keeping the same level of quality of content but also include an A to Z aspect.  We want to remove the excuse of not going through with what you have learned. We want to create action! Connect with Jaime: Instagram: @techofbusiness Twitter: @techofbusiness Facebook: @yourbiztech LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimeslutzky/ Email: [email protected] Get on a call with Jaime by going to https://callwithjaime.com Connect with Jose: Website: www.freedym.com Email: [email protected] Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/freedymfan/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freedym/