[00:00:09.670] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:10.160] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.660] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.560] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.780] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome to everyone who's viewing. It's been seven days since we last had our podcast and our vidcast, and an awful lot has happened in that time.
[00:00:35.310] - Taylor
I have something that's affected my business happen.
[00:00:40.070] - Gordon
Oh! What is that then, Taylor?
[00:00:41.670] - Taylor
So I finally launched Snippet club.
[00:00:45.650] - Gordon
Phew! It's taken a while.
[00:00:46.440] - Taylor
This is a project that I started probably about two years ago, or at least started thinking of the idea about two years ago. And it was when I started realizing that I was creating a lot of tutorials, a lot of bits of code here and there, and snippets, and I was just giving them to people and replying to people in the comments and I thought I could maybe turn this into some sort of business venture. And so what snippet club is, is it's a membership site for tutorials and snippets, for the WordPress community; so whether you're a designer or a developer. And my aim is to help people build better sites through the power of code, really. So there's a lot of the tutorials and snippets that I come across or create and find, they come from my own client projects that I've built, mainly because what I wanted and just didn't exist, or it did exist and it came with thousands of different options and things that I just didn't need, or it came with most of what I needed, but not fully. And so a lot of these solutions are things that I've built myself to use in my own client projects and I thought they'd be useful to other people to share because they're things like an event ticketing system that can keep track of tickets, for example, and it will stop people from booking more than you have available, or if you've got none available, stop people booking entirely. And it's these types of snippets and codes that I've written that I thought I could turn into a tutorial and write a step by step guide and then people can gain access and use them in their own projects.
[00:02:35.810] - Gordon
So, this was launched this week.
[00:02:39.590] - Taylor
Yep.
[00:02:39.590] - Gordon
And if you are interested in going to have a look, you can go to snippetclub.com. There'll be a link in the show notes. But because this is quite a big thing for you, it's something that has taken a while to get to. Do you want to tell us a little bit about why it's taken you two years to get to this point?
[00:03:04.590] - Taylor
Yeah. So, I obviously had my illnesses and my health issues that every time I gained momentum, it would fall flat on my face, essentially and start back at zero because I'd be working on the site, getting it up and running and ready. Because obviously I had to build the entire membership system through the use of other plug-ins. Because I didn't want to just use a membership plug-in because again, they didn't have all of the features that I wanted. So I built mine using Fluent CRM and Fluent Forms, which are two plug-ins by Wpmanagedninja, which worked perfectly and beautifully together. And I basically just tag people; so when they sign up, they get a tag to say they've got an active subscription and then I use conditions to show and hide based on those. Yeah, I think I initially started, I overcomplicated everything and I do this with quite a lot of stuff where... Oh, there we go. I do this with quite a lot of stuff where I kind of spend too much time, it goes back to one of our previous episodes where done is better than perfect. And that's what I struggled with, as I was kind of like trying to build all of these fancy features that I thought would be really useful for people without actually having any subscribers, any members to use them. I then ended up rebuilding the site from scratch because it wasn't what I wanted it to be and I wanted it to be faster and I wanted certain functionalities that I just couldn't get with the current system. And so, obviously, I basically rebuilt and redid the entire website over again.
[00:04:43.710] - Gordon
And that's before anyone actually got to see it, right?
[00:04:46.190] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:46.500] - Gordon
So, it wasn't launched and then you redid it, it didn't get launched.
[00:04:50.390] - Taylor
Yeah. So I had a couple of tutorials and snippets that I've created that were created on other sites and were released for free. So I already had some of them on there, but I never really wrote the tutorials or these snippets down that I had created, because I was kind of like, "well, let me launch Snippet Club first and then I'll write them all." And now I've just got tons of different sites, mainly just like dev sites that I have worked on, with tons of probably really useful code and things like that I've now got to go through, digging through and try and find which ones I can turn into snippets, which ones I can turn into tutorials. Because I know I've got them, but I didn't keep track of them because it was kind of like, well, Snippet Club is going to be done in a week or a month or so, and that just didn't happen. And also shout out to my friend Jonathan. He really pushed me to try and get Snippet Club up and launched, and there was a conversation that we had where, I think it was last Friday actually we had this conversation, and I sent him this bit of code and a video and said, "look how cool this is." And he was like, "oh, this is awesome. Can I make a video on it? And are you going to release it as a free premium tutorial?" And I thought, probably a free tutorial. And I was like, "can you give me a couple of days and I'll get the site sorted and ready and then you can obviously write your video and reference my site." And when I came back to it I realized I'd actually done a lot more than I realized. Because when I came back; because when I redid it I obviously made quite a lot of progress and then I stopped because I got really busy with work and when I came back I realized there was only probably 5% left to do. Which was just tidying everything up and things like that. So, yeah, shout out to Jonathan for pushing me to get it launched. And, yeah, I can now just upload content and write lots of tutorials when I build them, which I wasn't doing before because I didn't have anywhere to publish them, or if I did publish them and I wanted them to be premium, I couldn't really do that because the system wasn't in place.
[00:07:15.270] - Gordon
Okay, so you mentioned there that there are free and premium tutorials and snippets, so there's going to be some content there for people who maybe don't want to subscribe? Because that is the model you've gone for, isn't it? A subscription. We'll come back to that in a second. But there is free content that people can learn from.
[00:07:37.710] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:37.710] - Gordon
Okay. So, let's go back to the business model, because this is all about our businesses. So you've gone with a subscription model?
[00:07:47.250] - Taylor
Yes, so because it's ongoing and it requires support and obviously uploading new content and posts and things like that; it's something that I didn't want to offer a lifetime deal for life, because I have to keep adding content and obviously people pay once and they can get access and so you have to then keep finding new people to subscribe or to buy.
[00:08:15.300] - Gordon
Yeah. And there are costs involved. You've got server costs, you've got running costs, you've got support time, etc etc. Plus, of course, the time it takes to create the tutorials. You need to be compensated for your investment into this project.
[00:08:31.220] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. So it's obviously creating the solutions and the code, but then you've also got to create the tutorials for people to be able to go through and use. I wanted to make sure that the tutorials were high quality and that they had good screenshots and things like that, and so it takes time. So obviously I want to make sure that I'm not having to keep trying to find new people to be able to pay for it.
[00:08:58.560] - Gordon
Yeah, it's good to have the same people who love what you do and look forward to your next tutorial. So what is the cost of your Snippet Club?
[00:09:11.100] - Taylor
So the subscription is $24.99 a month.
[00:09:16.380] - Gordon
And that's in dollars?
[00:09:17.470] - Taylor
Yes. And that gives you access to all of the content instantly, as soon as you subscribe, and then it's just a monthly subscription after that. As of recording this, there is a lifetime deal going on which is $149 which is for life. So I'm only ever going to do this once. But I thought for people that know me and have seen my work and things like that, they know that it's going to be a good deal. And so I kind of wanted that to, I think, cover the costs of the initial development time and things like that, that I spent on getting site set up and getting a couple of the tutorials out there. So yeah, it's kind of a win win. I get kind of instant gratification of people who are going to help me in expanding and growing the platform and my membership site that can obviously be advocators and help just grow it, really.
[00:10:18.450] - Gordon
And so the people who subscribe also get the opportunity to request tutorials, don't they?
[00:10:25.980] - Taylor
Yes, so all members will have the ability to request tutorials or suggestions of ideas of things that they want built. I can't guarantee that I'll be able to build all of them, or even if they're possible, but I'd like to have a go at most of them. Because most of the time there are solutions out there that don't require a plug-in and can be very easily done with code. And I wanted to make sure that my solutions were good so that anyone could use them. So a lot of them are just copy and paste the code and then you change a couple of variables, maybe like your form ID for example. But I wanted to make sure that everyone was able to be able to use it and I wanted to be able to, on some of them, explain what we're doing. So on some of them I kind of break down the entire code and say, "first we're going to create a function that does this, then we're going to hook that into a philtre..." Just so that people can learn and hopefully understand more. I was part of a membership site, which I still am when I first kind of got into Oxygen and it was a lot of money for me at the time because I only kind of recently started my business not too long ago. But for me it was the best investment I ever made. Mainly because I was able to study the code of solutions that were not just in a plug-in. Because when we install a plug-in or buy a plug-in, you don't see the code behind it. So you have no idea how most of the options page, settings pages are created, or how they're getting that functionality. And so being able to actually see solutions that are more code based got me into more of the developer side. But I also learned a lot more because they broke some of them down saying this is why we're doing it, which is always important. For the people that have no interest in learning how to code, just want to copy and paste, they can. For the people that want to know why we are doing certain things, then that's also useful for them.
[00:12:33.090] - Gordon
That's really good. So the Lifetime deal, just so that everybody knows, when is that valid until?
[00:12:39.480] - Taylor
It's valid until the 9th October, I believe.
[00:12:42.050] - Gordon
Okay, so the 9th October is the last day to buy the Lifetime deal and after that it will be a monthly subscription. It sounds very exciting. I'm a member. I'm very excited to see what comes of it. And hopefully you'll get lots of people who are just as excited, who will become subscribers. Of course, the more subscribers you have, the more time and effort you will put into the content. So everybody wins that way. Good. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
[00:13:17.490] - Taylor
I don't think so. I've got something that I want to talk about next week, which is how I am creating the tutorials.
[00:13:23.710] - Gordon
Ah okay. Yeah. Very exciting.
[00:13:25.140] - Taylor
So I'll talk about that next week.
[00:13:26.510] - Gordon
Okay. So go and have a look at the tutorials and see what you think. And if you've got an idea of how they're being created, leave a comment below. We'd be interested to hear your thoughts. I think that's everything.
[00:13:41.160] - Taylor
Yeah, that's everything from me.
[00:13:42.620] - Gordon
Okay, so as always, thank you for joining us. You can like, share, and subscribe on Facebook and on YouTube.
[00:13:50.370] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes that we have released and spoken about.
[00:13:58.010] - Gordon
So until next week one o'clock on Friday, go and have a look at snippetclub.com and we'd love to hear what you think of it. Hopefully it will be something that will be going on for a long, long time. And you heard about it here first. See you next week. Thanks for coming. My name's Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:14:18.370] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:14:20.860] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:14:21.420] - Taylor
Bye.
