Business-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We’ll discuss the “Labour Illusion” — do people really value things more when they see the work behind them. Also covered is the complexity of content creation and topic selection as it pertains to your “best buyer” and the visitor’s stage in your marketing funnel.
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Transcript
Season 2, Episode 7
Welcome back to that talking thing. I’m Kim. I’m Jason. This is episode seven, season two. We have some business topics. Uh, first one up here. I saw a Reddit post that had like a collection of 20 cognitive biases that biases, biases, cognitive biases that were business-related.
And so one of them was interesting to me. It’s called the labor illusion and short definition is that people value things more when they see the work behind them. And some examples given in that post were like working in public and sharing all the work that you’re doing. So I thought this kind of, this relates to our business that if people see us, maybe part of like having a blog post twice a week, And an email and you’re like, what do they care that I’m working on?
Some technical problem was striped that they shouldn’t even have to worry about, but maybe seeing that activity makes them feel better. Like, oh, there’s people doing things to help my business. And I don’t know what they’re talking about, but it makes me feel good. Is that something that we should think about for our business and lean into the labor illusion?
Can I clarify that the labor illusion is that this is a successful. This is their value. It more. If they see the work that went into it, they’re not watching someone make a sandwich. And then you’re like, that’s a great sandwich. I eat it because they’re not saying people don’t value it. They’re saying people do the illusion.
They value more when they see the value of going into something. And the Reddit article is a first. I mean, I don’t know what this labor illusion we could. I didn’t do my research here. There’s probably some like psychologists at a university that first discovered this and Harvard business school. I don’t know where it really came from.
Where are you assuming it’s maybe it’s not true. We shouldn’t think about it from my own. That’s a really good point to make sure it’s actually valid. Really? Hey, someone said we should do this. Do you yourself believe that you prefer products that. Appear to be actively being developed.
So for products that are being developed, I like seeing activity. It feels like alive. Like I feel like newsletter, Lou is an example of this Leslie pizza. Very publicly. Yeah. Developing the product, learning how to market the product. Yeah. Sharing screenshots and. Wire frames of things before they’re developed to get like public opinion.
So, so, and maybe that’s a small team thing. Uh, we have each other, so we kind of share those things more with one another versus the public. But the scary part is that you talk about things that don’t exist yet are being developed and they never come. They never release. What do you call that? My, the roadmap.
What’s your roadmap. When are you going to get that done? It’s not usually that easy stuff takes, always takes longer. And then they just get mad. You share today about what you worked on. I’ll tell you if I care, if you can’t. I was working on the license update and we have to have two versions of our license server basically, so that people who don’t upgrade right away, their stuff doesn’t break because the server change.
So I’m figuring that out. Does that like help to like, this is what I’m doing? Um, making sure your site doesn’t break before you upgrade. I don’t know. Yeah. Or like a thoughtfulness. It shows a lot of our customers are businesses too. So maybe they see us. Sometimes we share like the business ideas, like we’re updating our pricing and I’m thinking about how the decisions we make.
Like we could make an article out of that. If you’re updating your pricing, how do you avoid breaking everyone’s site when you push out, you know, new pricing kind of a thing, if you just that’s your product. Okay. I would worry also that this invites critique, commentary challenges from people, and it would be a lot of work or a small amount of work, but maybe a displeasure trouble experience to.
Invite feedback, because I think people who build in public are maybe small teams, solo team, they’re sharing for feedback. And they’re using that feedback. I wouldn’t expect us to use the general public’s feedback, someone you would post that. And they would say, well, why are you building your own license server?
What the hell is wrong with you? Um, I would encourage you to engage with it as much as I have time. And just stamp, Hey mate, we make decisions, stand by them and be ready to defend them. And that reminds me too. Sometimes folks, they like, Hey, can you do this? And then you say, oh yeah, we kind of almost do that, but here’s we could, we could build that.
And then we build it and like, I built it for you. They’re like, I’d rather that you had already built. Like, I don’t like that. You just built it. It feels like a hacky I’d rather you had, if it was already a feature, it’s like the opposite of this labor. Like if I don’t see how it was made, I assume it was made better than, you know, it was just bolted on after a support request.
Does that related to what you were saying in terms of yeah, yeah. Hmm. Worried about the downsides. I, I don’t know. How can we experiment and find. I wouldn’t start with product stuff. I would probably start with business decisions. Yeah. Teasing like content or developing to get, you know, and almost in the nature of like we’re working on a piece about subscription fatigue right now, literally they’re working on a piece.
How do you keep the people paying you over and over and over again? Right from writing your name on a list and saying, I don’t really need that thing anymore. If we kind of tease the stuff we’re writing about, people can think about it. And maybe some of that feedback does come in. They’re like, well, what about this big question?
And we’re like, shoot that wasn’t on our outline. We should have the question is something like, did you recently cancel subscription service you paid for for a lot of years and why? And it’s I hate Spotify. So I canceled my Spotify subscription because they support people. I can’t. But you can’t get that talking thing on Spotify, check it out.
Oops. Are we not supposed to say that? You know, um, but that it would enrich the article to have people’s perspectives and feedback and quotes. So the theory is that people value something more because they saw how it was made. We don’t really test how much people value things. What does that EFT score?
If maybe if we had an NFT score survey, some point. Customer flow and MPS what’s NFT NFT saying non-perishables okay. No, the NPS score. So what does the NPS net promoter score? It’s that question? Are you, uh, how likely are you to recommend this to a friend that kind of, so if we did that, you would expect, uh, the number to go up.
If they saw more about how it was made or it doesn’t have to be active developed, and it could be like previous development, you know, there’s like a video of like the coders, like at screens, you know, and then I turn it on. Oh, I didn’t know. You’re there. Hi, I’m Jason. Uh, we’re just building paid memberships, pro keeping it running, you know, I don’t know.
Is that cute? And they’re like, oh, that’s right. There’s people behind there that make this thing that made me think of car commercials, where they show a car being assembled rights. Yeah. Maybe that. And always in a more glorious, clean, and, you know, workers’ rights promoting play than reality. Probably if we thought about how there’s a lot of companies that, you know, clothing brands we use, whose products are made in ways that they would never want to show showing the mill.
And we’re like, yeah, making it look like someone builds it in their garage. I knew like the whole, the huge dairy conglomerate, and it’s like a small farmer hand milking. So maybe we just need like, but ours is not, ours is a transparent and beautiful and non abusive. Yeah. So, all right. I’ll try. It might be something to think about.
We can brainstorm on that. Get some good ideas. My idea, my topic, I was thinking about content creation and for our product. Who’s the best buyer and what’s our marketing. Okay. And we talk about creating content for people at all stages of the membership site journey, but honestly, people in the mid to late.
They’re not converting to our product. That’s not a way to get new people necessarily because it is challenging to migrate CIP systems. If you have an existing membership site and I create content like the subscription fatigue article, that is for somebody who has people paying them already, probably for a long time, has their whole membership site set up some portion of the people coming to read that article.
Maybe considering migrating, but most of them are reading that article for advice for their existing product, their existing setup. And some of them are in our funnel already are already our customer. So why should we, should we create more? For just getting started people, content almost exclusively, or think about it as some type of mix.
When we looked at tic-tac videos, I was looking at business topics. And it was business ideas. So like business tag, like I don’t forget. It was, there was like 3000 videos about business generally, but then like business ideas, 300,000 videos, because that’s all. Yeah. That’s what people are interested in.
Yes. That’s when they’re searching, that’s when they’re able to make a decision able to add you to their shortlist of considered products. Yeah. All right. That makes sense. Like lean the focus towards. Like the ideal customer. I had a similar thought like this. I was thinking about how people might come to our website and they don’t even have a website yet.
Yes. And then we think of ways, like, is there a way we could talk to them and say, oh, like use our preferred host and click their button and set up WordPress and then come back to us and set up paid memberships pro. And it’s kind of like, we, it’s another customer where we’re not serving so well. So it does like broaden the funnel, which is not.
But like you said, if we’re not really optimizing the center target, you know, the person who already has a WordPress website, but doesn’t have a membership plugin yet. Right. And pixel like, that’s the juiciest customer let’s focus on him or her and people who don’t have a website yet. You know, maybe there’s a way to do it.
Like intentionally we don’t have to convert them yet, but we just kind of like get their email so we can talk to them later. Yeah. I don’t know. Or what is the right mix? Yeah, I guess it’s a question of like, if we feel we should go for that target, but if we feel like there’s no gains there, it’s good to reach outside.
Another version of this was, but what we might doing is like reaching down. So we’re when we do an article, like a subscription fatigue article. That’s this. Okay. Yeah. It’s so many different audience and. We don’t have as many opportunities to convert and help them is the help of renewals. Because if they’re already our customer, it’s like, look at this content that we give you that, but it’s still within our own world already.
It doesn’t help our future dreams to grow necessarily. That makes sense to me. I don’t feel like I would never make any content. I think it’s good to have like a mixture, but it does, it does make sense to focus on like we did all that research and who’s our. Customer target them content for like half the content is yeah, let’s go in there.
I don’t know. I agree. It’s kind of, sometimes these systems that help you find something they’re trying to find related images. So they show you the ones that look most related, but does algorithms will always throw some curve? Because if it’s all the same thing, you kind of like can go down that get stuck in a corner, you get some curve balls.
I don’t know if that’s that could happen here. If yeah. Maybe it’s part of this labor illusion. How are you going to know? It’s like feature wise too. I think that there was some feature and I was like, oh, we shouldn’t put this in the core plugin because only like 20% of people use it. And I was like, oh, 20% of our current users.
Yes. There’s these other users that aren’t using it yet. And maybe 50% of them would use it if we had it in the four plug in kind of a thing that’s. Maybe the act of having content for later stage shows that people just entering that are new, that they’re going to have resources for me later. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That might be can it’s like, we don’t need this now, but I like that. There’s an option. Yeah. They’re thinking about this. How did this question come up about the marketing funnel? I was in the shower and I had a moment of inspiration. Is that what you, I haven’t talked to anyone else on the team. I’m like, why are we working on that?
It doesn’t seem as useful as some other blog posts. I was thinking about our goal, right. And growing. And I was thinking about how does content marketing relate to that? When, when they create outlines and publish content, I would love if an early step of that was identifying. What, where in the funnel are these people and how far along in their membership site creation journey are there?
Because one thing that a lot of our content lacks is a clear call to action or a clear answer to what comes next. Do you get to the bottom of the article? Yeah. And that’s the end you can navigate to the previous article. There’s no interconnection between them. So if we don’t know who the intended audience is and where they are in their membership journey, we can’t write a call to action.
Right. If we don’t know where they are in the funnel, then our call to action would fall flat. Yeah, it’s true. I have a couple of thoughts. One, one is maybe that’s okay because, or some of the time that’s okay. Because some content that we create should have a clear call to action. Like this really is like a net trying to capture a customer.
And some of it is just trying to build authority or benefit. Maybe it is okay. That the person reading that post isn’t our ideal customer. But there, if it’s good content it’s shareable and in our domain and builds a thought authority, it helps to get shared. They think about it later when they build another membership site, they come back.
So it’s kind of like, it’s okay to have some more of those vibes out, but I agree that the focus should be there. But another thing I thought about with regards to call the action in the shower. I was thinking about our blog in the shower too. Today was, this was a few days ago. Let’s just say, yeah, man, that at the end of our blog posts, we have this big like author block and it’s really cool to give credit to the people behind.
Maybe it’s a labor illusion showing how it’s made a little bit, but at the same time, that’s really prime real estate. And for, I was looking at some other blog earlier. Or like, oh, I was reading that book about black design. It had newspaper layout, and I was like that on a newspaper that people who write are really important on our site.
Not so much. I mean, I mean, you know, it’s nice to share. Maybe it’s nice to see, but it’s not like, you know, the people have paid. Columns on our, on our blog, the blog. There’s another purpose to that. It’s to help you. Yes. So swapping out that author space or minimizing the author and having a bigger call to action to add ons or the P like the add ons that we talk about or our products or the features, it’s more than that’s cute.
If it links to any ad-ons show, little blocks that sell those things, something like that. It has to be magic. It has to AI or go back and change all these blog posts by him. Yeah. I could see moving the author block to like, to a sidebar, maybe like make it shorter or something like, you know, does not tell, like have everyone’s face.
A lot of the call to actions are mixed within the content. Like advertisements. So you can’t trust that somebody gets to the bottom of an article, but about a third of the way through that’s where I would put some upsells type thing a content upgrade. Yeah. It could have a second advertisement. That could be fun.
Just randomly at the third. Hey, and it’ll be linked to an ad on insert an ad for it. Basically the third paragraph, this article talks about this ad on that part of our plus plan. Check it out. I like that. Alright. Take some notes. Someone write that down. Good ideas. Cute. Good. Thanks. We got a couple more business topics.
We’ll save them for next time. Next time. Cool. Bye. Bye.