Free vs. Membership

We were (un)lucky enough to learn some very important information about our target market for the membership site we’re developing. Unfortunately, it seems like a very tough market to penetrate (not open to outsiders) and a group that really, really, really doesn’t like to pay for anything.

But that’s ok. We’re going to trim the site down and launch it as a free resource supported by ads. I think in the long run we can do better using this method. As Seth Godin has pointed out repeatedly, attention is the best thing you can get from your market. If you have their attention the rest is easy. It seemed as though we’d have a tough time getting anyone’s attention based on our research, but by being a free resource we should be able to pull it off.

This also makes everything a little easier on the technical end. We don’t have to deal with managing memberships, and if we ever decide to grow to a membership site we still have the option by offering premium features like video examples which were going to slow down our time to market in the first place.

Launch date just got moved up!