Pricing your Candid product can be surprisingly difficult.
Charge too much and no one signs up.
Charge too little and you may end up with many customers who demand your time and yet you don’t earn much in return.
Pricing also impacts the type of customers you attract.
Often lower paying customers are more difficult to work with, expect more from you and cause the most problems.
Higher paying customers know what they want, are generally easier to work with and will respect your time.
That being said, sometimes a low cost group is perfect for your particular audience. Charging $20/month to join your Candid community may be the best option.
Or perhaps you have no desire to lead a large group and instead working with 3 to 5 one-on-one clients who pay a premium price for your time is a better option. Earning $1,000 a month each from 5 clients might be the right choice for you ($5,000/m recurring income!).
Other factors to consider include:
- How long do you expect your customers to keep paying? (1, 2, 6, 12 months?)
- What kind of communication will you offer (text, audio, video, live calls – all of them?)
- How frequently will you reply (multiple times a day, once a day, once a week?)
- Where does your Candid product fit with other products/services you sell?
Deciding how much to charge and what you offer in return is a challenge to figure out. You won’t know what is a good fit until you test, and you will very likely make changes.
Thankfully, Candid is free for creators and you can make as many products as you want to.
You can test different prices, offer one-on-one and group products, change the structure and try different marketing methods to promote your Candid offer to your audience.
The Candid product sales page is designed to be easy to create, yet it contains key areas where you can uniquely present your offer (the headline, description and most importantly, the intro video). You can modify these elements any time, testing different descriptions to sell your offers.
Once you find a good fit, you can build your entire business around your Candid products, which can lead to a reliable, recurring income, and a satisfying way to make a living.
To help you get pricing and product structure right, we’re going to look a little deeper into pricing strategy.
My Experience With Pricing And Product Structure
My name is Yaro and I’m the founder of Candid.
Before I launched Candid, I spent 15 years of my life as a content creator (blog, email newsletter and podcast).
During this time I sold a range of products, including low cost monthly subscriptions ($19/m, $29/m, $49/m), delivering text based lessons in one product, audio interviews in another and video training in a membership site.
I had clients paying me $500 to $3,000 for one-on-one coaching for one to three months, which focused on live calls, and also WhatsApp text and audio messages (currently my favourite way to offer coaching!).
I still have a membership site, charging $99 month for access to all my training content, forums and a group slack chat.
I have very much been a teacher-coach content creator, so it made sense to sell educational content and coaching support.
However, you don’t have to be a teacher-coach to sell Candid products.
You might be a foodie, sharing your cooking creations. You could be a vlogger, delivering your thoughts and ideas from your life. Maybe you focus on fashion, or makeup, sports, or gaming, finance, health or travel.
Coaches naturally understand the idea of selling access to their advice as a way to make money.
Creators who give away amazing free content and then hope to build a large enough audience to earn money from advertising, often don’t realize the earning potential from selling Candid style products.
Launching a group community or charging for one-on-one messaging can return a far larger income than advertising ever will. This is especially true if you have a small but loyal audience.
People who love what you do will pay a premium for extra access and extra content from you. All you have to do is be willing to make this offer available to them. This is exactly what Candid is built to help you do.
Now let’s look at the main considerations when pricing your Candid products. Remember, this can be for coaching-education style content, or fan-community content.
One-On-One Or Group?
The first big decision regarding pricing is whether you will offer a group or one-on-one Candid product, or both.
Let’s start with groups…
Groups are usually lower cost per person, but because you have multiple people in the group, you can make more money overall.
A group can be structured in several ways:
- Large community (hundreds to even thousands of paying members)
- Small mastermind group (10 to 20 people paying a premium price)
- Groups based on cohorts or stages (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
- Groups based on topics, events, experiences, a process or goal (for example, 20 people in a 6-month weight loss program priced at $150/month each = $3,000/m for you!)
You may like the idea of a group better because the members can interact with each other, thus creating value without relying 100% on you.
For certain types of creators, especially vlog-style and personality driven entertainment influencers, a ‘fan-club’ or behind-the-scenes community group will be the best fit.
You’re not teaching anything. Your audience sees you as a friend, or a celebrity-influencer who they enjoy watching.
In this case, a group in Telegram, or Facebook, or Slack where you drop behind-the-scenes pictures, personal audios and videos — more of what they already enjoy from you, could become a huge income stream.
1,000 fans paying just $12/month = $12,000/m for you!
If your content targets a more affluent audience type, say for example financial/investing topics, the math may look more like this –
250 members paying $99/month = $24,750/m for you!
A group can take more work to support, especially as they grow. Managing 1,000 paying members requires more than supporting a handful of one-on-one customers.
What you commit to providing a group is also a big factor. Will you drop daily content, answer questions any time or only during certain periods in the week, will you create text, audio or videos, will the content be highly curated/produced or just quick content/replies you create on the fly.
You won’t know what your audience really wants, and what you can realistically provide, until you start your group.
The best advice I can offer is to be flexible. Don’t promise anything too specific immediately unless you know for sure you have the right group content formula. Explain what you plan to provide to members, but state you will adjust based on feedback.
This includes pricing too – don’t be afraid to adjust it up or down. Make sure when you do change pricing you justify why, and if possible, grandfather in any existing customers so they keep paying the same price (assuming you are raising your prices of course!).
Be prepared to experiment, gauge feedback from your customers, and iterate until you find a good fit for both you and your group members.
Now, let’s look at One-On-One…
The one-on-one conversation format is a favorite of coaches and consultants.
Depending on your level of experience, what topics you cover and what kind of audience you have, your one-on-one monthly subscription price can be anywhere from $99/month to several thousand dollars per month.
I suggest you don’t go lower than $99/m or it just won’t be worth your time to support a one-on-one customer.
Don’t devalue your time. Coaches and consultants charge higher prices because it reinforces perceived value. People don’t believe you can offer much insight if your price is low.
That being said, it’s not uncommon to feel a sense of imposter syndrome if this is your first time charging for one-on-one access.
You may not believe anyone will pay $500 or even $1,000 a month to communicate with you on an app like Signal, or Telegram or Line.
The best way to get over this fear is to create your Candid product, set a price that feels a little too high, and then get out there and promote it to your audience. You can increase your price over time as you gain in confidence and experience.
Remember to set a realistic limit on the number of one-on-one customers you take at one time. Somewhere from 5 to 10 at most is usually sustainable.
This limitation is to protect your time, but also to create scarcity.
You can’t take on too many one-on-one clients at once, and people will know this when they see the availability on your Candid product (you set this limit when you create the product). This scarcity helps to push people to take action and sign up, because you may quickly fill up and have no space left for them.
If you’re reading this and thinking — I’m not a coach — you can still offer one-on-one app conversations.
Consider your biggest fans or followers. They may want advice from you, or just a chance to ask general questions about you and the content you create.
I never considered myself a coach. I wrote a blog and people started subscribing to my content. I shared stories from my life and people started to see me as an expert on the topics I wrote about.
I felt uncomfortable giving myself the label ‘coach’, but I realized when I started charging money for advice and training, that I really was a coach, or at least a teacher or trainer.
Your audience may not want any advice from you, but simply having the opportunity to message with you is something they value.
Your customer may want to discuss your content or ideas, to get behind-the-scenes insight into how you do what you do and learn what you are working on next. In this case it’s just the connection, the feeling of being an insider, that they really value and will pay money for.
You can use a one-on-one app channel to share additional content. For example, send exercise or cooking videos, or audio stories from your life you don’t share elsewhere, delivered direct through an app you already have on your phone, only to your one-on-one fans. Imagine how special this is for them!
A fan will want one-on-one access to you as they attempt to do something you have done before. Maybe they want to produce their first independent movie, travel the world on a budget, become a public speaker or land a high paying job.
They see you as a mentor and knowing they can reach you via their phone whenever they get stuck or need motivation, is a powerful offer.
Sell Multiple Candid Products
The great thing about Candid is you can create multiple group products and multiple one-on-one products.
A winning formula for you may be to move people from lower cost products to higher, more premium products.
For example, start with a low cost group at under $50/month for each member, which is a smaller investment, so should be easier to sell.
Then, as your members get to know and value you, some will upgrade to your smaller but more premium group that’s $250/month and includes more access to you, more/better content and other resources.
Or, start with an entry-level group community ($25/month for example), then for the really serious fans or clients in the group, they can upgrade to a one-on-one experience with you priced at $500/month.
Another way to think about products is based on topics or goals.
Let’s say you’re a fitness content creator who has gone as far as competing in fitness competitions.
You could have an entry level low cost group program with general fitness content for anyone who wants to get fit, a premium group for those who want to get competitive, and a private one-on-one program for those who want you as their coach in preparation for a competition.
A fitness creator business powered by Candid products could look like this:
- Entry level general fitness group community where you share videos and answer questions priced at $19/month with 700 paying members ($13,300/month revenue)
- Competitive fitness mastermind group, for your elite clients who want to get competition ready, so you share what you did to prepare for competitions in videos, audios, pictures, priced at $300/month with 30 members ($9,000/month)
- Private one-on-one coaching program, for clients who are training for a specific competition and want direct support and a tailored plan, which you prepare for them and deliver via messages and live calls, with 5 clients paying $3,000/month ($15,000/m)
That’s a total of $37,300/month in income, with three different products, which can all be powered by Candid and delivered through Telegram, Slack, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams or Discord – it’s up to you!
Of course supporting this many people will require you have a small team helping you, but with that much monthly revenue, you can afford to hire help.
Adding Candid To Your Existing Product Mix
You may already have other products and services you sell to your audience.
Maybe you have merch, books, a course or membership site, offer freelance services or run an agency.
A Candid product can be added to your mix wherever you think it would be a good fit.
For example, offer one-on-one consulting or a group community focused on educating your customers on how to do something. It could be how to launch a successful podcast, or manage a Google ads campaign, design an e-commerce website, create YouTube thumbnails or edit videos for Instagram.
Then, during your chats with your customers, you mention that you also have a ‘done-for-you’ service, where you or your team can do the thing you are consulting/teaching how to do.
These app based conversations help you build the trust and deliver the necessary upfront education to bridge the gap in your customer’s mind, so they understand how something works. They now know what they have to do and even how to do it themselves, but they’ve decided they’d rather spend money to hire you to do it.
It’s an organic sales process, one where you get paid for delivering education and support, and later to deliver a service.
Candid can be your ‘gateway’ trust building, entry level experience, leading them to purchase more from you over time.
Or, flip the order around. Use your Candid product as the higher priced product, introduced after they’ve purchased other things from you.
For example, you are an author of several books. To augment income from these products, you offer a Candid group product, or a one-on-one experience with you, as a ‘next step product’ for those who want more after reading your books.
This kind of combination can help you go from making a few hundred dollars a month in book sales, to earning a stable, recurring income in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars from your Candid group and/or one-on-one products.
How This Helps You Price Your Candid Product
I’ve covered various ways you can use Candid products to make money.
While I can’t give you the exact answer to price your Candid products, I hope all the examples and product structures I’ve explained will help you decide what pricing points and product types to test.
Every creator is unique and every audience is unique. You know your audience best, but even with this familiarity you have to experiment to find the right price and product mix.
Remember, Candid is free for creators. You can create unlimited products. Test as many ideas as you like.
Create groups and one-on-one products targeted at different types of people in your audience, different goals, different content formats, and of course, different pricing points.
Be sure to factor in your time as well. Don’t set yourself up for burnout because you take on too many customers, or you reply too frequently or make yourself too available. You’re in charge, set your terms and price your time well.
Candid and chat apps you already use can be wonderful tools to make money with, to build connections through conversations, and ultimately a pathway for you to establish a fulfilling business off the back of the hard work you put in to build your audience.
Now get out there and test those product ideas!
Yaro
Candid Founder
