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1:29 am
June 10, 2011
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QuoteHey John, I've had a couple of meetings with a venture capitalist who is interested in taking a B to B approach to my training program by repackaging it for enterprise clients. We are probably going to move forward... I'll be preparing a pitch and he'll reach out to some companies to see what kind of interest we can generate. He asked me to start thinking about scaling/infrastructure issues like keeping track of customers just in case something were to click with one of these companies and I had the happy problem of tapping into a large user base. As your user base has grown, have you integrated with sales force to keep track of your customers? What do you recommend for scaling up the infrastructure around customer support? What other issues should be considered when scaling up the size of a membership site?
1:50 am
June 7, 2011
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Sounds like a great opportunity. I'm a bit sloppy with scaling and I tend to be a micromanager which means I duct tape everything together because I'm doing most of it myself. With that said, the only real issues I can think of where I needed to make changes I grew were as follows...
1. When I first started I used a crappy autoresponder and needed to scrap it and start over with Aweber. Hence why I push it so hard.
2. I eventually needed to switch to a private server. It's pretty affordable. I have a lot on it and pay $50 a month, but that has gone up and was initially only about $15 before I started adding domains. You also want to make sure you have a good and reliable host with decent support.
3. Customer support was the first real thing I absolutely needed in all of my businesses in order to make sure everyone got timely responses and I had time left in the day to expand. With that said I still do a huge percentage of support because I really think that personal touch goes a long way. But I can foresee a time when my personal support is only offered in the forum as it really does prevent me from expanding as much as I'd like. Even with help I still spend 2 - 4 hours a day on emails. It's intense. But the uniqueness of what I teach makes it something that is difficult to hand over completely. Some products are more conducive to using a support staff.
At least in my case, everything else could be dealt with as I grew and was pretty minor. If you are going to be constantly creating content, and it's stuff that takes a lot of editing (which is REALLY time consuming), you might consider a content manager at some point as well. Someone to take your recordings and get them into shape and publish it all for you. That will save you hours.
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