Key Takeaways
- Why Amy decided to focus her life on teaching – and the interaction she had with a child that revealed her mission.
- Why Amy thought the membership model was going to be way too much work for her – and how it proved to be far more effective than running a Facebook group or a course.
- What Amy learned from her beta launch – and why she believes failing is a sign that you’re moving in the right direction.
- The reason Amy recommends hiring a team as soon as possible.
- Why you should never avoid doing something because you don’t know how.
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Ready to reclaim your time and attract more monthly paying customers? Our step-by-step guide will show you how to build a membership site that turns your passion into recurring profit. Click here to download!Memorable Quote
- “You learn, and you try, and you put yourself in a position to have something happen. When you find the people you can help, it happens. It works.” – Amy Nielson
- “If you’re not failing, you’re not trying new things.” – Amy Nielson
Episode Resources
Transcript
Read The Transcript
Shelli Varella: Amy Nielsen, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. How are you doing?
Amy Nielson: I’m great. Thank you.
Shelli Varella: Good. It’s great to have you here. You are in a niche that I know a lot of people are very interested in, with respect to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And we’ll get into what your membership site is and how that came to be. But I wondered if first, you could start with who you serve, what your membership site is, and most importantly, who you were before you had it.
Amy Nielson: Of course, yeah. So, the people that I serve are teachers and parents of kids. Their age is preschool to kindergarten. And my membership is all about giving them ways to make learning fun again. So, we bring all the play back into learning. It’s all about play-based ways to do math and reading and letters, and all different kinds of things and just make it really a lot of fun and it saves teachers a lot of time planning and preparing for lessons. And we have a lot of homeschool parents or parents of preschoolers that are working with their kids at home as well. And so that’s kind of how, that’s kind of what I do. It’s amazing. It’s really fun.
Shelli Varella: That’s amazing. Who were you before you started the membership site? Like, what is your backstory? And how did you get to be at the point that you are now that you’re able to share these?
Amy Nielson: Yeah. That’s a good question. So, I actually got my degree in accounting but I’ve loved education and so I was working in the schools as I was going through college. So, I would go work with the kids in school and teach reading and tutor reading while I was going through school and I loved it. I was really inspired by this little boy that just hated reading and those little kindergarten boys are the sweetest thing and we just had the best time and he just hated reading so much. And I told him one day, I’m like, “All right. We can’t be silly anymore. We can’t laugh anymore for a minute until you read like these five words on this page,” and he looked at me with these like huge tears and his eyes, his big eyes and he’s like, “I thought you were my friend.”
Shelli Varella: Oh, God.
Amy Nielson: Yeah. My little heart, you know, college student heart just broke. I went home and I thought there has to be a better way. There has to be. Reading should not be this awful and there has to be a better way. And so, with all of the tools that I had in a college dorm, I had to come up with a way to make it fun for him and for all the other kids that I worked with. I worked with a couple of hundred kids. And so, I went back to school for the rest of that semester, just with this mission to make it fun. So, that’s kind of how I got my start and then when I had my own kids, of course, I got to do a homeschool project with my daughter and ended up going very, very viral on YouTube, because we were teaching kids how to learn their multiplication tables in a matter of minutes. And I had teachers and parents just begging me for printables of the stuff that we were doing and so that’s kind of how I got started.
Shelli Varella: That’s such a fascinating story. So, you started out in accounting. What was the moment when you decide – was that the moment that you decided that you are making a career switch? Or was it just sort of like the moment that you realize that you had a perspective and a way of doing things that ultimately got these kids to have a better outcome in a better way with a better experience? What did that look like for you, when essentially your entire education is in accounting, to make that leap and go in a completely different direction?
Amy Nielson: Yeah. It’s kind of crazy. I left my career in accounting when I had my first child. Because as much as I loved working, my goal and dream had always been to be able to be at home with my kids. And so, I was doing that and I was doing all these fun things to learn with my kids and people would ask me all the time what I was doing and how I was doing it because they were very smart and they were very creative and they were doing really cool things. And so, people kept asking and I wanted a place to be accountable for my ideas as well. And so, I started a blog is how I started actually and then that was kind of just what I was doing for fun and kind of keep me accountable as well. When you’re writing about it, then you have to do it and so I wanted to keep track of my ideas, be accountable to make sure I was doing this stuff with my kids and then it just kind of accidentally went crazy and viral and we realized that there were so many people that needed what we were doing. And so, we started to share it.
Shelli Varella: I love what you said, “And then I realized.” So, in storytelling, there’s this epiphany moment in the middle of the story where something changes, and the story becomes different from that point on. And many people when they’re writing their signature story or they’re writing whatever their brand story looks like or even in screenplays and movies, they think that that epiphany moment needs to be this big grandiose moment but oftentimes it sounds like, “And then I realized,” and then from there on, the story changes. And my question is like, you clearly had this intuitive gift that just came naturally to you just a way of being a way of opening the kids up so that learning could be fun. Do you have any advice for people who maybe are in that same spot where they have a similar gift as well? And maybe just don’t consider it a gift just because that’s how they do? Because for you, that seems to be the thing that turns you in this completely different direction.
Amy Nielson: Yeah. I think we do discover as we try things, and I think we put ourselves in a position to be able to have opportunity. And so, I like to try things and I like to we – the video that ended up going viral because I’ve been posting stuff on my blog for maybe a year or something and no one saw it like we had no viewers. Nobody cared. It was just kind of for fun like nobody ever, yeah, it was not a big deal. But my daughter and I like we’d had people asking us about these songs that we were doing, and we just decided to try something. And so, we made videos, and we’ve never made videos before. I didn’t know how to do videos and my husband laughed at my photography skills. But we just sat down by the piano one day, and we recorded with horrible audio quality on my phone and we just went and tried making this animated video with, I mean, it was like we were learning as we were going, and we posted it and nothing happened for several months. And then all the sudden, I started getting all these email notifications that it was going viral.
So, I think you try things and you learn and you try and you just put yourself in a position to have something happen and then when you find that spot and find those people you can help, it happens and it works. And then once I started creating content for them, once I actually started with creating products that people could buy, my business exploded, and people had never come to my blog before I was suddenly getting 10 times, 100 times the amount of traffic to my blog as I was when I was giving them nothing, than when all my stuff was free, because they knew what I was making.
Shelli Varella: Interesting. So, what was the moment when you first discovered membership sites and how they worked and decided that you were going to try that for your, at the time, not even business, for your knowledge and for your expertise and for the way that you packaged and taught?
Amy Nielson: Well, that’s kind of funny too. So, I had started selling these one-off products and that’s how I started, and I was making pretty good money just selling like one set at a time. And my brother came over one day and he said, “Hey, you should do a membership site.” I’m like, “Nah. It won’t work for me. No one would like that like that might be bull. They don’t need that.” That wouldn’t work for me, right? And that’s what we tell ourselves sometimes. And then Rachel Miller, who has been an absolute mentor of mine was telling me all about this TRIBE thing. And so, I took the course and I actually didn’t take it for a membership because I didn’t want a membership. I was taking it because I thought it was going to help me do a better job of managing my Facebook groups and creating a community there. And I watched it that first night in a hotel room with like on vacation and like my mind was blown. And I thought I am making this so much harder for my people to find stuff and I make it so much harder for myself to go find them and give them what I’m creating. And it just opened my eyes to this is exactly what my people need. I can make it cheaper. I can make it easier. It’s so much less effort for me and for them and so I completely changed my mind about membership sites.
Shelli Varella: Thankfully.
Amy Nielson: And I got one up. And yeah, it was tremendously successful.
Shelli Varella: That’s fantastic. So, what do you think is the biggest takeaway for the people? Because I’m always interested in, you know, the tsunami that creates the ripple effect and we can look at you, for example, with this incredible membership site, which by the way, folks is called Planning Playtime. But you can look at sort of what you’re creating, and I think sometimes people undervalue the impact of the thing that they’re creating it. And to say that all you do is provide a new way of learning, what is the best outcome or the best bit of feedback that you’ve received from one of your students in terms of maybe a child that is able to learn because of your membership site, because of them having regular contact with you and the way you do things, and opening that kid up in a way that maybe perhaps somebody else wasn’t able to?
Amy Nielson: It’s incredible. We get amazing feedback all the time. And it just fills my heart. You know, whenever I’m having a bad day, I just go start reading the reviews, makes me warm and fuzzy inside but, yeah, we get stories from a great grandmother working with her three-year-old great-granddaughter, or we’ll get stories from teachers that are saying, “This is my first year.” And I was like, “I don’t know what I would have done without you.” Or we get a story from a teacher who’s been teaching for over 30 years and she gave everything away because she retired and then her neighbors all begged her to teach preschool and so she had to start over again. After 30 years’ worth of collecting stuff and she got rid of it all and then starting over again and teaching these kids. And we get stories of kids that like are literally begging their teachers during recess to come back and do their math. You know, stuff like that, it just, yeah, it warms your heart and you just think, “Okay. I’m doing what I was meant to do and changing lives.”
Shelli Varella: I think that’s so powerful because if you trace this back, I always like to trace it back to the root, you were a girl who said, and I quote, “This wouldn’t work for me.” And when you look at the feedback that you have received and the ripple effect that you’re making, and not just that the kids are learning, but you’re creating an entirely new, not only environment for learning so that they can learn but also the confidence that they’re going to carry forward in their lives. You know, everybody talks about developing your precognitive commitment from ages like zero to five years. You’re literally changing these people’s lives as they go into adulthood, based on the confidence you’re providing, because of the new way that you teach that they’re able to adapt and use and feel good about. What advice would you give to somebody right now, who maybe has an idea who has that, “Then I realized,” moments but is thinking, “This wouldn’t work for me?”
Amy Nielson: I think you try it. And I think you try it from wherever you are and I’ll tell you, like my first beta launch did not go the way that I thought it would and it wasn’t what I was expecting to come out of it but then immediately after I kept like modifying just a little bit like what I was doing and learning as I went, and then it just very, very quickly turned into something that was hugely successful and a major income stream in my business. And so, I think you just try and don’t be afraid to learn. And don’t be afraid of failure because if you’re not failing, it means that you’re not trying new things. So, failure is an absolute like critical part of the learning process. You’ll have bad days. You’ll have things that didn’t work how you want it, but you just try. And when you try, you’re putting yourself in a position to have success as opposed to not trying, and then you’ll never succeed, right? So, just try things. Be open and try.
Shelli Varella: Love it. What is the biggest vision you have for your membership site going forward?
Amy Nielson: Well, we are working really hard right now on providing like we’ve really emphasized teachers and really help teachers and we’re kind of spreading that out a little bit now to be able to really help parents as well. So, we’re kind of doing both of those things and what we’re trying to do is give them activities, yes, that are fun and are right now, and these activities that are going to help you have fun learning in the next 10 minutes, but also to really build that confidence that you were talking about with kids and their ability to learn anything, and that it’s really fun to learn and that they enjoy learning and help them teach themselves like learn how to teach themselves anything they want to know so that for the rest of their lives, they are confident passionate learners. And so, that’s kind of my big vision. That’s what I’ve been doing with my kids and watching how it’s like just amazing as they’re getting into high school, and what it’s done for them. I want to give them that basis now and kind of both from the parent side and from the teacher side. So, that’s kind of what we’re working on right now and it’s been really fun.
Shelli Varella: Well, it’s amazing to watch you on this journey and creating something that’s not only so valuable, but I mean, just watching the journey of you as an entrepreneur and getting this thing up off the ground and learning where the root of that came from is so inspiring for so many of us. But do you have any like tips, tools, or tricks that you wish you knew at the beginning of your journey that would have made it easier that perhaps could help the people behind you that are listening to this podcast right now?
Amy Nielson: I think the biggest thing that I learned is if you’re at a point where you’d be like where you can hire a team, do it. I think hiring a team would have saved me a lot of hardship over the last year and I kind of learned my lesson and I’m doing that now and it’s amazing. So, I would say that but also don’t be afraid to, don’t not do something because you don’t know how. Just try. And I think that is the biggest thing because I have taught myself into this business. Like, every step of the way I’ve taught myself into this and you can teach yourself to do even things you’re not good at. You can learn how to do if you just try. And so, I was able to make my business very successful on my own and then now it’s just scaling big time now that I can afford to hire people to help me.
Shelli Varella: That’s brilliant. If people are looking for you online, where’s the best place to find you?
Amy Nielson: So, you can find me at PlanningPlaytime.com. We are also we have over a million followers on Facebook and we are showing lots of really fun educational activity ideas over there so it’s Planning Playtime on Facebook. And so, those are two of probably the best places to find me.
Shelli Varella: Incredible. And just for everyone listening, I wanted to just say that, again, a million followers and this all started from, “And then I realized,” for something you love to do that was intuitive to you that came so easily to you. You probably at the time didn’t even think it was a thing but it started with, “And then I realized,” so, ladies and gentlemen, 1 million followers. Thank you so much for your time, Amy. We appreciate you.
Amy Nielson: Thank you so much.
[END]
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