[00:00:08.880] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.220] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.390] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.460] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.730] - 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 look at our matching hoodies. I mean, they're not quite matching, but they're both hoodies. We never have the same thing on. So very interesting week. Well, we've had the rain, haven't we?
[00:00:36.240] - Taylor
Yeah. The rain's come.
[00:00:36.730] - Gordon
It was lovely weather and then all of a sudden we had the rain. And so we hope you are not getting too cold where you are. And wherever you are in the world, I hope that your week has been good. How's your week been, Taylor?
[00:00:51.720] - Taylor
It's been busy. Very, very busy.
[00:00:53.620] - Gordon
Okay. Anything you want to share with us?
[00:00:56.190] - Taylor
Yeah, so going on to my topic, really, getting straight into it. So I released a tutorial and I released it as a one-off snippet for Snippet Club. Now, this isn't something that I've done before. I've only ever sold Snippet Club as a membership, as a subscription where you get access to all of the snippets and tutorials and things like that. And Kyle from The Admin Bar made a video on my snippet because he was showing me his child theme. And I basically said, "look, there's one thing, I think it looks really good. There's one thing I can't live without in my sites. And it's this template tag tutorial." I wrote this tutorial about six months ago, so it's been there a while. But I've realised recently that I don't do a good job explaining what I build and why the stuff that I've built are very powerful and really really useful. So when I explained it to Kyle and the rest of my friends and stuff, I basically said, "you can pull in data that's dynamic, for example." So if you have a company name, you can have email address, a telephone, you're going to use these in multiple places around the website, things like your footer, your contact page, maybe a Call to Action button, things that are going to be used throughout the site. And by putting them in an options page, you can essentially put it in once. If it needs to be updated, you've only got one place to update it. But there was no easy way to do this in Generate Blocks. Now, in Oxygen, when I used Oxygen, we had this functionality and it was something that I loved. And this was the reason why I built the template tags. Now, it was originally, it just supported custom functions because that was what I needed it for at the time. But I've expanded it and it now supports things like options pages, custom fields, author meta, user meta, and also query parameters. So if you put in first name equals Taylor, it will pull into the page and populate wherever you've put that. So yeah, there was a lot of useful use cases for this. I shared it with Carl, he made a video and I offered it as a one time payment for just that one snippet. Now this is something I had to custom build because the way that I have my website set up doesn't support this; I had to build an integration. And it got me thinking. The snippet alone did relatively well, although it was obviously a lot less than what I was getting for the memberships because I was getting more sales in bulk and the fact that a lot of people only wanted access to that one snippet, it did pretty well. And so I also got a message from someone that had basically told me that they found my mega menu tutorial that I made. Because of the way that my website was built in terms of the user experience for finding tutorials and things like that, they didn't invest in the membership. And they said they kept a tab on my website over the coming months. And obviously, this video was the one that pushed him to get the membership. And he spent a lot of time writing up a long, detailed explanation on all of the things that stopped him from purchasing. So things like being able to understand what is free, what is premium, all of the different stuff that I have available, so all the different categories, so the different types of builders or different types of features that I've written. He explained all of the different things of that and basically gave me advice. And it's something that I think is, I'm definitely going to take into consideration and look to improve. I also want to test selling snippets as singular. What I'll do is I'll change it so at the moment, if there's a premium tutorial and you don't have a membership, it says, "Please log in. Or if you don't have a membership, you can subscribe here." I want to slightly change that and say, "you can access this tutorial for a one-off fee of this. However, if you'd like access to this tutorial plus every other tutorial on the website, you can subscribe and become a member for this amount." And see how it goes, because the reason I didn't offer it at the beginning was because it was a bit too much hassle because of the way that I had built the site. But with this new solution I have, it's very easy to scale it up, make sure that only the people that have bought the tutorial have access, and also make sure that people that have membership, they still can have access and it doesn't take away and doesn't make my life too much of a burden in terms of trying to manage it. So it's something that I want to try. If it doesn't work, if I don't get any uptake or anything, then I may leave it just because it's been built. But we'll see if that increases the number of sales and the people that just want one-off stuff that aren't... There was a lot of people that I found that asked me for it and said, I don't do this as a... it's just a hobby. It's not something I can invest in because it's a lot more than what one tutorial would cost. But the cost of tutorial is obviously a lot higher than it would be if you divided the membership, divided by the number of tutorials and stuff. So that's what I've been up to and I've been applying to a lot of support messages, adding functionality, integrations and support for other custom field plug-ins and things. So it's been really busy with Snippet Club, but going in the right direction.
[00:06:55.040] - Gordon
So I think the lesson that we need to learn from this is always listen to your customers. They're not always right. Sometimes they're a little bit, or very wrong in what they want and what they want to pay for something, but sometimes they are actually telling you what the market wants. And if it's a one-off tutorial at a lower cost but a higher cost per tutorial, then maybe that is something you should try, which is exactly what you're doing. And I'm guessing that this has been successful enough for you to actually consider it seriously going forward?
[00:07:31.940] - Taylor
Yeah, so I had the option. I've thought about the option of a monthly subscription, but it just didn't make sense because people would just subscribe for one month...
[00:07:44.020] - Gordon
Download everything.
[00:07:45.040] - Taylor
And then just cancel and stuff like that. And so I didn't want to go down that route. And the only way it would make it feasible to have a monthly subscription would be if it was quite a high monthly subscription and people just aren't going to take you up on the offer I don't think.
[00:08:03.650] - Gordon
And the other thing is, if you're selling one-offs, you're basically having people put their hand in the air and say, "Yes, I'm interested in what you do, but I'm not ready for your subscription at this point." So it gives you a mailing list of people to go back to and maybe offer special deals to, or a discount on the first year, or something like that. It's your choice what you offer them.
[00:08:28.000] - Taylor
Yeah, it's something that is definitely... You get the initial buy-in, and then as long as you send them content and things like that, they may see, they go, "Oh, actually, I want that as well." And they then buy either one-off or they go, "Actually, this is the second time that I've wanted something that he's released, I'm going to subscribe."
[00:08:46.620] - Gordon
Yeah. And I'm guessing that if they buy something one-off, they join your newsletter of content that gets sent out.
[00:08:52.530] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:08:52.840] - Gordon
So that they can see what's premium, what's free, as long as you make it clear in the newsletter. So that's really good. Anything else you want to say on that?
[00:09:02.360] - Taylor
I don't think so. Just a lot of, a learning curve, I think. A lot of the time recently or in the past couple of years, I've missed the time to strike in terms of getting stuff out there. It's something that I don't want to miss this time. So I've been told by people that they want single snippets to be able to buy, and so I'm...
[00:09:24.400] - Gordon
Getting it out there when they want it. Very good. So I've had a really busy week as well. On Friday night, so after our last episode, I was off doing a show in the evening. I had a show on Saturday. I had a show on Sunday, and then I drove to Birmingham.
[00:09:46.780] - Taylor
Very nice.
[00:09:47.210] - Gordon
"Why did you drive to Birmingham?" I hear you say. Well, I went to a convention, a magic convention called Kidology. Now, I've spoken about one before called Trix in the Stix, which is dedicated to children's entertainment. This is another convention dedicated to children's entertainment. And I haven't been to this one for many, many years. In fact, I think it was 2016, something like that, was the last time I went. And that's when I entered the Children's Entertainer of the Year competition and won it. And that is the last time I've been and they've made lots of changes since then. They've got a new venue, they've got a slightly new way of doing things. It was good... The people that were lecturing and were on the show were people that I know very well and they're really, really good at what they do. And I thought I would spend the time to go up there and educate myself, as well as spend some time with colleagues and friends. And that's what I did. And I had a great time. There were lots of people there. There's a gentleman called Roy Charles and his wife, Nicky, who are always really nice to spend time with. He's very funny. He was in the cabaret and he did a lecture as well. Another gentleman, Richard Pinner, who is my age and we've grown up in The Magic Circle from the age of 18 when we met each other, going up to where we are now. So I've known him for 32 years, something like that. It's an awful long time. I do work for him; I do summer shows and things in parks for him as well. He was lecturing and he was in the show also. And I got to see lots of other people there. People like Paul, my double act partner, who now he lives in Northampton I don't get to see as often as I used to. We had a good time there. Then there was some other people that live all over the country that, again, I don't get to see very often. There's now three conventions of which I go to two normally, which is the Blackpool and Trix in the Stix. This is the third one. Not everyone goes to this one, but it's a nice mixture of people. Some of them go to all of them, some go to two of them. And I met up with some people I don't see very often, a lady called Kerry who used to be in the West End. She used to be a dancer and a singer and a performer, actor in the West End. And she's always interesting to talk to, such a nice person. And you know how you meet people and you go, "Oh, we should be friends on social media." And you look on social media and you find out you are actually already friends because you've got friends of friends that are mutual. And you've added this person because they look familiar or you've seen them around conventions or whatever, but you've never really actually spoken to them.
[00:12:52.820] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:12:53.320] - Gordon
Well, I did that. On this occasion, I met someone called Mar. She's a Balloon Twister and she's a children's entertainer. We had a really good chat and it was really nice because we were saying we should contact each other. It's like, "Oh, we're already friends on Facebook. Look at that. How funny." And so that was nice, putting a personality to the name or the face that I already knew. There were also people selling some magic. They'd come up with some ideas of things that you can do, and they were selling them. I bought a couple of things. Not many. I've got to the point now when I don't buy too much new magic, I either come up with it on my own or I change what I've already got, or I've got enough. That's the other thing. Most magicians, in fact, if you ask them, will have drawers and cupboards full of props and books and things that they just don't use. They bought, they thought it would be a good idea, and they've not actually done anything with that idea. Then I came home, and obviously, when you come home, you've got a ton of things to do because you've been away for a few days. So I got home on Tuesday night. Wednesday, Thursday, and today I've been just trying to catch up with email. Email gets on top of me when I go away for a few days because I get a huge number of emails. I've still got a backlog now I'm going to get down. But there are sometimes really important messages that are buried four days ago, which I need to get to, along with enquiries and bookings, which I prioritise. So hopefully, they're all done. So yeah, really busy week. Apart from all the shows and going away, I don't have a great deal to show for it. We are working on something, which I might talk about next week, in fact, a new LMS. I wonder if anyone knows what an LMS is. Maybe we'll leave it at that for the moment and we'll come back to it next week and I'll explain what an LMS is and I'll explain what I'm doing or what we're doing with it. I think that's everything from me. Anything from you?
[00:15:12.180] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:15:13.740] - Gordon
Okay. Apple have released all their new products today, which is very exciting. Not for me. I'm not buying anything. Nothing there that I need at the moment, but it's nice to see technology moving forward and it's always nice to see the new toys that Apple brings out. It gives you an idea of what you can expect when you do upgrade, whenever that happens to be. You're still thinking about the watch?
[00:15:37.440] - Taylor
Yeah, I want to get it at some point. It's not something that I'm... I've got more important things to focus on at the moment, but yeah, it's something I want to look forward to and get to.
[00:15:47.720] - Gordon
Very good. So that's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe. We're on Facebook and on YouTube.
[00:15:58.280] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:16:03.430] - Gordon
Until next week, Friday at 1pm, we'll see you then. My name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:16:09.640] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:16:12.190] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:16:12.810] - Taylor
Bye.
