The beauty of apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Signal, Viber, etc is how simple they are to use, yet how they can power so many different types of conversations.
For Candid creators they can be the tool to deliver experiences with your customers that you charge money for.
These apps offer…
- Text
- Audio
- Images
- Videos
- Live calls
…all on mobile, or desktop computers using web-based versions if available.
Everything (except live calls) are asynchronous, meaning you don’t have to be there live. You can interact when and where you want to. As we’ve mentioned before, here at Candid we love asynchronous for many reasons.
What Product Types Work Best?
To help you decide what type of product to sell to your audience using Candid + Apps, here is a guide with the most used formats.
Bear in mind pricing matters. We’ve provided some price ranges for each product type below to get you started but you should read our pricing guide too.
Let’s begin with one-on-one product ideas…
One-On-One Fan Conversations
For influencers and creators who have dedicated fans, a one-on-one conversation product is an amazing way to make a steady income. Fans may or may not want advice, so this doesn’t have to be a coach/mentor relationship, it could just be a chance for your fans to get to know you better, and vice versa.
Fans will love receiving images from you, personalized audios or videos, or even just the chance to do one live call with you, or text back and forth. It’s up to you how close you want to let fans get. You set the rules.
Price Guide: $50/month to $500/month
One-On-One Coaching
You help your clients overcome a problem or achieve a goal. Usually coaching is structured, with you providing a plan with tasks and accountability to keep your clients moving forward. Coaching can be via text, audio, video or live calls, or any combination of these.
Price Guide: $250/month to $2,500/month
One-On-One Mentoring
Mentoring is a lot like coaching. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Mentoring can also be delivered via text, audio, video or live calls, or any combination of these.
The one distinction worth making is that mentoring may not be as structured as coaching. You make yourself available as a mentor, so your client has someone to contact whenever they need help or advice, but you don’t take them through a structured plan. It’s more about having someone available as needed.
Price Guide: $100/month to $1,000/month
One-On-One Consulting
Consulting is similar to coaching too, but usually refers to more corporate environments.
Consultants work with a leader (or team) inside a larger company, and are paid by the company, not the individual they are consulting with. Typically consultants charge more money because what they bring to a company can result in significant improvement, sometimes resulting in millions of dollars in added revenue.
Price Guide: $1,000/month to $10,000/month
Using Candid you can test any or all of these product types, and experiment with pricing and format. Your audience determines what they will purchase from you, but you might be surprised by which one-on-one product offers sell best.
Don’t forget Candid is 100% free for creators and you can make more than one product type.You may want to offer several one-on-one coaching or fan interaction products targeting different needs or different types of people in your audience, at different pricing points.
To get started, login and create a one-on-one product, or create a Candid account if you don’t have one.
Let’s move on to small group product types…
Exclusive Fan Club
If you’re an influencer with a small audience, you may have trouble filling a fan club with hundreds or even thousands of members — but what if you could earn $5,000 a month from just 10-20 of your biggest fans?
Think of this product as a premium club for a small group of fans willing to pay a premium price for more personal access to you. You can decide what that access involves (text, images, audios, videos), but it should be perceived as exclusive.
Group Size: 2 to 20 members
Price Guide: $500/month to $5,000/month
Coaching Programs Or Courses
If you’re a coach or trainer, author, teacher or thought-leader, a small group focused on coaching your customers to solve a problem or achieve a goal is a very effective product type.
You release training videos, answer some questions using text or audios or videos, maybe even host a live call once a month for the group. If your free content focuses on teaching something, this is a natural next step product to offer to get customers.
You can use apps to deliver your product to ‘cohorts’ of students who work through your resources together. You might lead the program once or twice a year, delivered over a four week live experience.
The live nature and deadline to participate works really well to convince people to purchase, or they will miss out working with you. It also means you only have to deliver your program a couple of times a year, yet could make over $100,000 from this one product.
Group Size: 2 to 50 members
Price Guide: $250/month to $2,500/month
High-End Masterminds/Mentoring
Much like one-on-one mentoring, sometimes people just want to have you and a group of people working towards similar goals available to them on tap for support. This can be to answer questions, emotional support, networking, or simply to stay motivated.
Small group masterminds tend to focus around a goal or project that everyone has in common, which you are an expert or have some experience doing. You lead the mastermind, making yourself available to answer questions via text, audio, video or live calls, which all members can listen to.
Frequently masterminds operate with you as the reason for bringing people together, but the members interact with each other, creating value without you. This helps reduce your workload.
Masterminds don’t usually have structured content like a coaching program or course. Your contribution is important as a mentor, and you may drop training content for the group in response to questions, but there’s no sequence to it.
Masterminds may or may not have a start and end date. You can open and close them to new members, or make them available year around, with new people coming and going throughout the year.
Group Size: 2 to 20 members
Price Guide: $200/month to $2,000/month
Premium Content Subscriptions (Membership Sites)
Unlike a course or a mentoring program, which often have a set timeframe (they begin and end), you can offer an ongoing subscription or membership, where you continue to drip release new content every month with no ending. You may also offer members the opportunity to ask questions in any format you like.
The challenge with this product type is you need to keep dropping value every month. The benefit is members keep paying their subscription each month. Depending on your topic, the ongoing subscription product format may be a great fit.
Possible examples include a cooking influencer offering a recipes club, dropping new recipes every week, a personal trainer providing new exercise routines, or a marketing expert providing case studies from successful marketing campaigns.
Group Size: 2 to 100 members
Price Guide: $100/month to $1,000/month
Small Events (Workshops, In-Person Masterminds, Conferences)
If you run in-person workshops, mastermind events – even conferences – Candid can act as your sales page and payment processor, with an app as your tool to coordinate event attendees.
Chat apps make for a great tool for event attendees to connect with each other and for you to release relevant information about attending the event. With Candid processing payments and providing a landing page for selling ‘tickets’, it’s a simple solution for small events.
Group Size: 2 to 20 attendees
Price Guide: $250/ticket to $5,000/ticket
Small group products can be the sweet spot in terms of income and workload.
Supporting ten to twenty people who each pay you $500 to $1,000 a month is a healthy full time income. People in your groups also interact with each other, so unlike one-on-one products, it’s not 100% dependent on you for communication.
Now let’s take a look at the final product type, large groups…
Large Fan Communities
Your audience may not be able to afford multiple hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a fan club. The $10 to $20/month price point may be the only option you have, in which case your goal is to create a large enough fan club for you to earn $5,000 to $10,000/month.
One structure for a large fan club is to make your premium content the centre point, but let your audience discuss it without you. You won’t be able to answer every question or participate in every chat with that many people, but you can drop regular content.
For example, you release behind the scenes vlogging style stories from your life, just like you may do already on YouTube, but in this case only for your paying members.
An alternative is make the community entirely about conversations between the members. No premium content from you, just a private place for your fans to talk to each other within a group in an app, available anytime from their phone. You bring them together and moderate, but largely they do the chatting without you.
Group Size: 100 to 1,000 members
Price Guide: $10/month to $25/month
Large Subscription Content
You may be a teacher or trainer, author, speaker or coach, and you’d like to have a monthly premium subscription around a topic you teach, but with a lower entry price, so you can reach more people.
Your reasons for doing this could be because your audience can’t afford high priced products (for example, coaching people who need to get out of debt), or you want a way to reach a lot of paying customers, and then move them into a higher priced product later (a ‘sales funnel’ model).
This kind of subscription is best for drip releasing content that doesn’t need to be in a sequence and is easy for you to create so you can continue to do so month after month. Short powerpoint style tutorials, ‘talking head’ advice videos, screen recordings where you show how to do something, can all be easily created.
Group Size: 100 to 1,000 members
Price Guide: $10/month to $25/month
Larger groups are more difficult to manage over apps, so you may want to cap your membership, or use an app only as a tool for releasing premium content to a large group and not for conversations.
We’ve all been in group chats that get too busy. It’s annoying to keep track of long threads, people replying to each other with off-topic content, which will lead to other members cancelling their subscriptions.
The Ascension Model (Sales Funnel)
Candid + Apps are entirely free for Creators. Candid charges your customers a platform and transaction fee, but you get 100% of the price you set for your products.
Since it is difficult to know what pricing point and structure will work best, you will need to experiment and likely offer more than one product.
One smart strategy is called the ascension model, or sales funnel, where you move people from lower priced products to higher ones.
You can start with a low cost one-on-one or group product, then move them to a higher priced coaching, mastermind or premium content product. Then, at the next level sell tickets to a live event or year-long high-end coaching program, charging several thousand dollars per month.
If you want to learn more about the Ascension Sales Funnel model, you can read our guide here.
I hope this article has stimulated many ideas for products you can sell to your audience.
To get started, login to Candid and create your product, or sign up for a Candid account if you are a new user.
