Hold on to your dream

Hold on to your dream, but listen and adjust along the way. In this 2011 video, I’m delighted that Amino Plus has finally passed a thousand members after a longer and harder start than I’d hoped.

Hold on to your dream when the start is slow

We began with a membership costing DKK 1,000 a year. Some thought people wouldn’t pay for something online when so much was available for free.

The first hundred or so members made us optimistic. But then things slowed down. I was disappointed and started thinking about everyone who’d said it couldn’t be done.

Even so, I believed a membership could be valuable for a business if it provided more opportunities to find customers and gain visibility.

We changed something almost every week

We kept adding benefits. Freelancers, for example, got more ways to be found and display their contact details.

Each individual change may have been small, but together they made a difference. Later, we offered monthly payments instead of having to commit the full amount at once.

That made the membership easier to try, and things picked up. The figures and prices in the video describe developments back then, not Amino Plus today.

Keep the idea and adapt the route

I reached my goal later than planned. But the crucial thing was that we didn’t just repeat the same thing. We listened to users and changed the product and the way people could buy it.

A difficult start doesn’t necessarily mean the dream itself is wrong. Perhaps it needs a different angle, or time needs to do its work. My experience was to stick with the basic idea while continuing to adjust. Also read Skab din egen succes about finding your own way and persevering through adversity.

Remember to list your business in Amino Indeks; you can still be among the first 🙂

The invitation to be among the first in Amino Indeks dates from 2011.

Hold on to your dream: Two years with Amino Plus

I’m bloody happy on the day in May 2011 when I record the video. It’s been a tough, uphill battle, but now I think we’re damn well making it work. Amino Plus has passed a thousand members. I’m proud, and I want to explain what we’ve been through to get there.

We started Amino Plus about two years earlier. It’s a VIP section of the entrepreneurship portal Amino, and we set the price at DKK 1,000 a year. Lots of people thought that was far too much. People wouldn’t pay online, they said. It would be difficult. People would just take the free stuff, and surely you didn’t get that much extra anyway.

Even so, around a hundred people signed up and supported us. They were some of our core users. They wanted to help, they got business through Amino, and some thought it was only fair to give a little back. That wasn’t why we’d created the membership, but it was how many of them thought.

We sold more or less the first hundred memberships within a few days. That created a lot of optimism. But then exactly what I’d feared happened: It fizzled out. After the first wave, not many more joined.

When doubt began to bite

Of course I was disappointed. And I started thinking about everyone who’d said it couldn’t be done. People wouldn’t pay online. They were afraid to pay. The benefits were only online, and they could get so much for free in all sorts of other places.

But I couldn’t make sense of it. If you ran a business in Denmark, would you really not want to pay DKK 1,000 a year for the chance of more customers, more visibility and showing you were serious about what you did? I kept holding on to that thought.

So we carried on. We added more benefits. Freelancers could, among other things, appear in more categories, get more job opportunities and have their contact details visible. We kept at it. Almost every week, we added another little detail.

Each detail could look small in isolation. But on top of everything else, it made a difference. Gradually, we began attracting more Plus members on our own. Slowly but surely.

DKK 99 a month helped things pick up

After a year, we had about five hundred members. I’d still hoped we’d be past a thousand. I always set the bar really high, but I have to admit I was disappointed.

After prolonged pressure from users, we introduced the option of paying DKK 99 a month instead of DKK 1,000 a year. Bloody hell, then things started happening. At the same time, we added even more benefits.

At that point, I almost don’t think it makes sense to be a freelancer on Amino without being a Plus member. Perhaps we tighten the screws a little here and there. But when all is said and done, we’re running a business.

Our philosophy is that if we can put a hundred kroner into an Amino user’s pocket, it’s fair for us to get five. We think so, and most people do too. We need to create value, and something also has to pay for us to run and develop it.

So now we’re past a thousand Plus members. We reached my goal a year late, but we got there. And in May 2011, we’re getting four, five or six new members a day. With the new Amino Indeks initiatives, I think things could pick up even more. That’s an expectation at the time, when the service still isn’t particularly easy to find.

Listen to others without letting go of the basic idea

Of course this can sound like an advert for Amino Plus when I talk about all the benefits. But my point to you is: Hold on to your dream.

That applies whether you’re starting a business, launching a feature or hoping to become a public speaker. A lot of resistance at the start doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with the dream. Perhaps the time isn’t quite right. Perhaps the dream needs to be rephrased a little, given a different angle or fine-tuned.

Listen to what people say. But also hold on to your gut feeling. Many people said Amino Plus should be much cheaper. I asked: Why? I think we deliver value worth far more than DKK 1,000.

My dream is actually that membership will one day cost several thousand kroner a year. That may sound crazy to a member paying less now. But my thinking is also that the value should grow.

If, for example, we can provide DKK 3,000 or DKK 5,000 in value for a price of DKK 1,000, and in a couple of years provide DKK 20,000 in value for DKK 2,000, that’s the direction I want to go. Those are my illustrative figures and my ambition in 2011. I want to create more and more value for each user, and then raise the payment too.

Development costs money, after all. At the time, we spend almost DKK 200,000 a month just on developing new services on Amino. That money has to come from somewhere. That’s the philosophy behind making value for the user and our business go hand in hand.

Adjust, persist and give it a chance

Hold on to the essence of your idea and what you want to do. Put in the effort and give it a chance. Don’t just give up after three or six months.

Adjust, persist, adjust, persist, adjust. I’m so excited about our progress that in the video I say I guarantee the ketchup effect will come one day: Nothing at first, then it all comes at once. That’s the optimism with which I tell my own story: We listened, changed things and kept going. Eventually, what I’d believed in from the beginning gained momentum.

Best wishes, Martin