Authors' Community update: gumroad→paddle, signup survey data, OOC+SaaS bundle

July 28, 2022 · ooc-hey

Been a while since I gave a proper update on the authors’ community.

One of our big recent projects was to unify the brand and site to properly represent our three complementary offerings (i.e., the OOC, the book, and the SaaS):

As part of that milestone, we also shifted our merchant of record from Gumroad to Paddle (which took an annoyingly long time – Paddle’s verification process isn’t super fun). The main reason for moving to Paddle was for more control over the UX of the signup experience:

Beyond a more cohesive and compelling flow, this also makes it easier for us to do things like a post-signup survey (currently using a simple embedded typeform that we redirect to after signup).   We’re asking a small set of questions that are pretty actionable/impactful for us, including:

1. The stage they’re up to (i.e., how far toward the outcome)
2. The type of help they most desire (accountability, feedback, knowledge, etc.)
3. How they found us
4. Why they joined (i.e., mainly for the community itself or mainly for the SaaS they get access to by being a member)

Here’s a slice of recent (anonymized) data from that:

And already, some pretty interesting insights!  

1. You can see that our growth engine IS our book, but podcasts also seem to work, so if we didn’t have the book, I would focus pretty hard on hustling podcasts

2. Our members skew toward being at the start of their journey

3. With this data in hand (and also having it in convertkit as member tags), I feel much more confident creating a few series of personalized onboarding email drips

4. And more than half of our new members are there for the SaaS more than (or at least as much as) for than the community:

   

This last point is interesting because it highlights that the community is playing two important roles in (almost) equal measure: helping folks to make progress (i.e., OOC) and customer success for a SaaS app (i.e., BADASS📕). From a design perspective, that’s quite helpful for me. 

Also, a while ago, we had the thesis that our SaaS + OOC would do best if offered as a single bundle, where you couldn’t get one piece without also getting the other. (See Chris Dixon’s description of bundle theory for a deeper dive on why we thought this made sense as a pricing strategy.) The relatively even (and overlapping) levels of interest seems to be somewhat validating that belief, which makes us a bit happier to continue as planned.

I think that’s about it, but if I missed explaining anything, very happy to share more of the thinking or actions behind any of the above.

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