Referral program win!

Little background: I run a mastermind community for early stage entrepreneurs and side hustlers (< $120k) called Better Together. We’ve been hovering around 30 subscribers for the last several months with a short term goal of 100 members. I quit my software job about 8 months ago to give this my full time attention.

The sales strategy that we’ve been using is a sales funnel with ad —> landing page —> application —> sales call. This has been working with mixed results, but has resulted in some long term (< 4 months) subscribers.

I had a mentorship call last week to talk about marketing, and my mentor, who has started + sold several companies, said I was wasting my time with the marketing funnels. He suggested word of mouth / referrals is what I should be spending my time on. This was an interesting perspective, and a bit frustrating because I’d spent the last 4 months grinding out sales funnels, but great insight.

Taking his advice, I sent an email to our list (about 600) outlining a new referral program of $100 (USD or BTC) for every person that you refer who signs up for 2 months. This campaign led to 6 referrals, half from existing members and half from non-members. Based on the early conversations, I expect this will lead to at least 3 new members, pushing us 3% closer to our goal of 100 members and $10k MRR.

Not bad considering our cost / sale via a sales funnel is about $110, and that was the first email on the subject. I’m really encouraged by this first result, and will keep finding ways to activate current members to help promote the business. Also really encouraging to see them wanting to do that!

TLDR: Spent time on word of mouth marketing rather than a social media funnel with strong early results.