Success in membership web sites comes from hard work and commitment

Success comes from hard work and commitment

By David Eedle |

I dip into Jeremy Schoemaker’s shoemoney.com blog from time to time on my Google Reader. I like Jeremy because he’s pretty upfront, and whether you agree with him or not he puts his case forcefully and sucinctly.

A couple of his posts caught my attention today as they riff on the same theme – success online, like success in anything, comes from hard work and commitment.

In “How To Become A Successful Make Money Online Blogger” he makes the point:

Out of those who do launch their own product many don’t want to put in the work to make it through the dip.

And in “What You Got”, he gives Yaro a plug and notes:

Why in the hell would I want to invest in a idea that the founder doesn’t even believe in himself to try it… ???

I started AND failed at trying many ideas while working 9-5. I was fired from 2 jobs most people would kill to have because I worked on my own stuff all the time… These are people we are looking for.

Ideas, programmers, and marketers are A DIME A DOZEN. People who are willing to put in hard work to get through the dip are in VERY short supply.

When we first sold our largest membership website a couple of years ago, and as a result caught a bit of press, we started to receive approaches from a big bunch of people. Many were the types Jeremy talks of, someone with an idea and nothing else. The more forward ones would ask us for investment, but the majority would cadge a meeting with us, and we’d waste an hour talking in circles because they didn’t have the guts to ask for the dosh. After a while we became more adept at asking the right questions early in the encounter – typically “so what exactly is the sticking point for you; what are the resources you need to make this happen?’

Astoundingly, those who did ask us for money hadn’t done the work required. By which I mean, worked the numbers from our point of view – the ROI for the investor. They hadn’t grasped the fundamental point that our investment wasn’t to make THEM rich. It was to make us RICHER. Why else did they think we were going to put a bunch of money into their non-existant-other-than-on-paper concept? And by the way, no, we’re not interested in 3%. We want 50% minimum, a board seat and constant input. We’re not passive investors, we invest time and money, and that means we work hard when involved with a company.

Which leads me onto one of the questions that most irritates us and we would think anyone else who has made their wealth through their own efforts, ingenuity and capacity to survive, is – how do I make my millions without working hard?

We believe the hard yards are part of the journey, they are part of your learning how to do things better, how to create better systems, smoother business processes, better experiences for your customer.

You must be willing and wanting to work hard, and you must be willing to jump in. You could be the greatest, most strategic thinker on the planet at this moment in time, but all that thinking cannot replace the doing involved in starting and growing your business.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites.

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