Key Takeaways
- How Laurel learned about the power of asking for what you want as she crowdfunded her film about homeopathy.
- How past job and career experience, no matter what it is, will likely help you as you launch and run a membership site.
- Why Dinner Mates is more than just a supper club – and offers something more profound than just dinner.
- How Laurel ran her first event before even knowing her value proposition and achieved a 52% conversion rate.
- How Laurel has relied on other membership sites in order to help hers succeed.
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- “If you really want conversion, you get people to drink. That’s my big lesson.” – Laurel Chiten
Episode Resources
Transcript
Read The Transcript
[INTRODUCTION]
Shelli Varela: Today’s guest decided to let go, go with the flow, and found herself with a membership that combats loneliness.
Stu McLaren: There is a big trend brewing that’s revolutionizing the way business is being done. Big companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are jumping on this too but so are thousands of others in all kinds of markets like photography and calligraphy, fitness, finance, meal planning, lesson planning, dog training, and so many more, and they’re doing it by shifting to a recurring revenue model. Hi. My name is Stu McLaren and for more than a decade I’ve been helping tens of thousands of entrepreneurs generate recurring revenue through membership sites. Join our host, Shelli Varela, as she takes you behind-the-scenes to see how these companies are building a thriving tribe that spends with them every single month. Now, let’s get to today’s episode.
[INTERVIEW]
Shelli Varela: Laurel Chiten, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. How are you?
Laurel Chiten: I’m totally great. So happy to be here.
Shelli Varela: I’m happy you’re here. I’m super stoked. I love, love, love your story as we were chatting before we hit the big red record button but I am so stoked to tell people about your membership site, Dinner Mates Club. But before we get into that, your story is super close to my heart. You actually started as a filmmaker and I’m wondering if you could take us back to that time and tell us how we ended up here.
Laurel Chiten: It’s a great question and here I go. I’ve been a filmmaker, an independent filmmaker for about 30 years, I’ve won a lot of awards, my films have been on television, and it’s just been quite a journey, plus I got a lot of grants. I was used to getting the most competitive grants and then I decided to make a film that told the story of homeopathy, which is a very, very controversial system of medicine. And at the time, I thought surely people going to want to fund this. It’s about our healthcare crisis, it’s really looking at that, and it was the first time in my entire career, I didn’t get $1 of grant money.
Shelli Varela: Wow.
Laurel Chiten: So, I really thought nobody cared. Now this was, I think, over 10 years ago is when I started it but then I realized that the people that use homeopathy care. And so, this is before the internet is the way it is, I started developing email and writing to people and slowly people started giving me money. I remember the very first money in and this is a little bit of a side tangent, but I want to tell the story is that there’s this woman that I met and I was invited to a party and I was told that there’s somebody there that has money. And I started thinking, how do you go to a party? Who has the money? And I see this woman, very unassuming woman, and it turns out she was the one that had all the money and she also had all these – she was on a ranch. She was in New Mexico. And at the time, I was raising goats. It was a little hobby of mine.
But to make an extremely long story short, we became friends. I really liked her and one day I asked her, “Do you want to give some money?” I had no money at all. I had no seed money. I said, “Do you want to give some money to this film?” And she said, “I wanted to ask you but I was afraid of hurting our friendship.”
Shelli Varela: Wow.
Laurel Chiten: And I tell that story to filmmakers. I said, “Moral of the story is never be afraid to just ask.” So, I think I asked her for $50,000 and she gave me $15,000 but it was seed money. It was enough to get started. So, I kept going making this film and then slowly but surely, I started getting a following and people giving me more and more money. So, it took eight years to make and over the course of that eight years, I had built an international following. And I had started really understanding how to market, how to use social media, and I had raised about 350,000 to make the film, which in filmmaking is nothing but it all came from individuals and it didn’t come from grant, which is why this is significant. So, then one day I was sitting in the other room and my other was doing her thing, and I was slightly bored, and I sent out an email blast to my now big list of about 2,000. And I just said, “Who might be interested in showing this film in your community? In order to commit, just raise your hand.” And that’s when I got, I think, 350 responses.
And I went, “Oh my God, this is how I’m going to distribute the film.” So, I realized this is fanbase distribution. The fans had supported it and now they’re going to distribute it and then I found out there was something called theatrical on-demand or cinema on-demand. It’s basically because I knew if I left it up to them, it would have been a mess so I had to find somebody to help them. So, to make an extremely long story short, it went on tour all over Australia because it has a very Australian part of the film, there’s an Australian story, and then I went on tour all over the United States. And for me in my entire 30 years of making films, this was not only the most satisfying distribution. It was the most lucrative for me. And so, I got in touch. I knew why I made the film. I saw my audience. I saw my film making a difference. So, then I went, “Oh my God, what I’ve been doing is marketing.” I didn’t know it was marketing. I didn’t understand it but I’m really good at it. I really love it. Because what is marketing? Marketing is about teaching really at the highest level.
So, I went, okay, so now what? So, then I ended up going to the traffic and conversion conference in San Diego last February. I go in like 6,000 people or however many people there. I realize I’m probably the only filmmaker and that’s what I call, in filmmaking term, my inciting incident because the language that they speak as a marketer is the same language as filmmakers do. They talk about impact, they talk about making a difference, they talk about story, but the big difference is they’re making money and most filmmakers are not. So, that’s when I had my epiphany and I went, “I want to teach filmmakers how to think like entrepreneurs,” and I want to take everything I know and I want to be that bridge that’s going to bridge independent filmmakers with this entrepreneurial world. So, I started getting really excited about making this happen. And then I found out about this guy, Stu, and I heard about all his videos, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to watch this.” I don’t even know what a membership is. I didn’t even think. It was so far from my thoughts thinking about…
Shelli Varela: So, funny, Larrel. Stu McLaren is so many people’s inciting elements.
Laurel Chiten: Yeah. So, I watched this guy, but as I watched and I actually got really irritated. He has too much too perfect to life but I kept watching it. And then I remember it was Sunday night and it was 8:00 at night here East Coast until midnight and I stayed and watch the entire Q&A and I really kind of had my hands crossed like, “I’m not going to join,” and of course I ended up joining. And so, that’s really how I got from being a filmmaker all the way to finding TRIBE. But how did I then get to doing Dinner Mates, which is so far from the filmmaking world? Do you want me to bridge that gap?
Shelli Varela: Yes, please. Yes.
Laurel Chiten: Okay. So, then what happened is I was building this success path and I was all in on TRIBE and I had little post-its stuck all over my very tiny New York apartment and I built my success path. And the whole time I’m doing it, and I decided what it is. It was going to be called Film Mates and it was teaching filmmakers how to think like entrepreneurs. And the whole time I’m doing it, I’m feeling this thing in my stomach that I don’t know that filmmakers really want this, but I’m committed. I’m going to do it and then one day in July, I walked into a restaurant here in my neighborhood in New York and I saw this table of people eating in my neighborhood. And it was a vision and I went, “Oh my God, could I create something where people could come together in the neighborhood and make friends over dinner?” And I just had this epiphany and I walked up and I said, “I want to call it Dinner Mates.” And so, I started just running it by some friends of mine and everybody said, “Oh, my God, this is an amazing idea. You have to run with it.” And I have a good friend of mine who builds apps and I told him this one night at midnight, and he said, “Drop everything. Let me build this. You got to run with this.”
And so, I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’m going to do this.” So, I’m still conflicted, right? I’m still not sure and I go to TRIBE Live and anyone who talked to me, I talked about my conflict like what do I do? And then finally, I saw Stu standing by himself and I went over to him. Sometimes I’m quite shy. It was really hard for me to actually go but I went up to him and I said, “I don’t know what to do.” And he said to me, “Well, what are your two ideas?” And I told him and he said, “Well, how far are you in the other one?” I said, “I haven’t even launched yet.” And Stu he goes, “So, what is the problem?” And so, I go, “But I feel…” He goes, “Pick one.” And that was it. I left TRIBE Live and I said, “I’m all in on Dinner Mates.”
Shelli Varela: I love it. So, I want to talk about if you’re open to it.
Laurel Chiten: Yes.
Shelli Varela: So, you have this entire vast background in film and filmmaking, and you know it and you’re passionate about it, and you can see the blind spots. Would you talk to how you let go and went with flow? So, you let go of an idea that you started with that you thought, “Oh, this is absolutely my title. It’s who I be.” A lot of times you’ll hear me talking about labels and shedding your labels and losing your labels so you can be that which you are meant to become. Can you talk about the moment when you just said, “Okay, I’m going to veer away from the thing that I should do ‘that I know how to do’ to the calling me?” What did that feel like and what was that process like for you?
Laurel Chiten: You’re talking about shedding an identity?
Shelli Varela: Yeah.
Laurel Chiten: That’s a great question. And I have a little dog and I think a lot when I walk my dog. And one day, I was thinking, “What I’m doing with Dinner Mates is so much like what I do as a filmmaker,” and the motivation and what drives you, what animates me is almost the same. It’s about creating impact. Why did I spend 30 years of my life doing what I did because I wanted to create impact? It’s creating impact. It’s building community. It’s helping people. So, the motivation is actually all the same. I just change modalities, really. And so, in a lot of ways, I think I’ve always been an entrepreneur. So, it really in a lot of ways, I feel like I found my home, in working as just an entrepreneur and not a filmmaker, if that makes any sense. So, even though it’s 180-degree pivot, it actually doesn’t feel like I’ve changed that much. It almost feels like I’m doing what I’ve always done, except it’s like working with a different material.
But there’s a lot of things that are really different because the things that are insane is I’m still living on almost no money because I’m at the beginning stages. It’s the same thing. It’s like, “Oh, my God, I’m back here again,” where I’m having to spend money in order to get something off the ground. So, that’s a very familiar territory for me. So, in that sense, it does feel very similar.
[ANNOUNCEMENT]
Stu McLaren: So many people in all kinds of niche markets are leveraging their existing knowledge and influence and they’re transforming it into passive monthly income. This isn’t luck. This is a repeatable formula for producing a growing subscription income and if thousands of others can do it, you can too. To find out what type of membership site would be right for your business, visit GetTRIBEGuide.com. Go to GetTRIBEGuide.com and download it today. You’re awesome!
[INTERVIEW]
Shelli Varela: It’s interesting to watch the trends of people meeting in person because I remember way back in the day when the internet just started, meeting people in person was the norm and then very quickly it became this rage. It’s like I can talk to my friends. Wait, what? And I don’t even have to leave my house. As that persisted and became more prevalent, we really are missing out on the human contact and sharing space and into your point breaking bread. I know your tagline is break bread, make friends, build community, which is brilliant. There’s the feature and the benefit. The feature is you get people together for dinner and all of that kind of vibe but what is the benefit of that to your members and to your site?
Laurel Chiten: What I’m hoping is ultimately, it becomes I get enough people in so I can curate it and what I mean by that is that we can actually find people that are like-minded that are having dinner together. So, for me, it’s really about breaking loneliness, and are lonely. And of course, I can never use that in my marketing because people don’t want to identify with being lonely but I think there’s an epidemic of people being lonely. And so, this for me is a way to get people out to eat with one another. It’s not just about the food. It’s not just about being a foodie, although that’s part of it but you know it, Shelli, there’s a lot of supper clubs out there that are just about the food. And I actually joined one of them to see how they do it. And it’s fun, and it’s great, but I never saw those people again. So, I’m really trying to find a way in our society right now where there’s a consistency that people are seeing each other on a regular basis, doing something really fun over food.
So, what I’m really trying to do is really break the loneliness, is really provide a way for people to be able to make friends and as an adult, it’s really hard to make friends. I mean, I’m the first person to admit it. I’m here in New York. I don’t have that many consistent friends. So, I really built the membership for me and I think there’s a lot of me’s out there. I could feel that.
Shelli Varela: When you can solve your own problem, you solve many people’s problems, then I just want to acknowledge you.
Laurel Chiten: I’m my own avatar, yeah.
Shelli Varela: Yeah. I want to acknowledge you too because anybody that ends up in a situation in life where they’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole, whether that look like depression or isolation or it all starts with something as simple as being lonely, not that lonely is simple. But the breadth of help that you’re actually offering on a deep-seated level is far more important and profound than simply dinner.
Laurel Chiten: No, that’s exactly right. And as I said, when I walked my dog I think and I was thinking like because everything I do, I’m so passionate. It’s just who I am but why am I so passionate about this? And I realized because a core part of me is wanting to provide value to people. And I see people so often on their own especially here in New York. That’s why I’m really dogged about this. And this is the way I always was with my films and I’m really tenacious. I’m like a dog with a bone because I really believe in what I’m doing. And whether it be my film on homeopathy that I felt was going to save lives, well, in so many ways, I feel like this is going to save lives.
Shelli Varela: Absolutely, it is. What’s the biggest surprise or gift that arrived as a result of you saying yes to starting that membership site?
Laurel Chiten: Ready? It’s like do this. And one of the things that I did is I launched way before I was ready. And one of the biggest things, Shelli, that I learned from TRIBE is to just do it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You just have to get it going. And so, I set up an entire dinner before I really even knew what the value proposition was. And I hired this young man to work with me and he said, “You’re not ready.” I said, “Yeah, but we’re not going to know unless we do it.” So, we set up this dinner, we work with a new restaurant that’s in Brooklyn, and I set it up. I think I set up an event right at that point and we sold out three weeks in advance. Now, granted, none of that money at that point came to me, but we had 27 people that really want to come to something which they didn’t even know what they were coming to.
Shelli Varela: That’s amazing, by the way.
Laurel Chiten: But it’s like they just want to have dinner. So, now they’re all in this place and what I did was I went over to the tables and I would say, “By the way, this is a membership.” So, that when I got up to speak, they wouldn’t be surprised, and so many people said to me, “This is such a great idea.” So, I remember the guests just saying, “I’m so happy you did this. This is such a great idea.” So then, after the meal, that was before the dessert, I got up and spoke and this is what the little video I made. This is what the video really talks about, and I just said, “Okay, guys, let me tell you what this is. This is a membership. This is what it’s about. This is what you’re going to get,” because I kind of made things up because I kind of had an idea what I think it’s about but at that stage, I just want to bring people together. And I went, “Who wants to join?” and we had I think 52% conversion. People like, “I want to join. I want to join.” So, all these people signed up for the membership and I made it super cheap just so I could get people in the door. So, that was really exciting.
So, that was in Brooklyn and then we set up another one in the Upper West Side, which is in Manhattan, which is my neighborhood. Double the price point. I think we had it for like $72 including the prices of the platform for one dinner and we sold 40 seats. It was packed. We sold out both of them and that was 40. So, it was like almost double the people, double the price, and people still came. So, that was thrilling and there are some people came up to me and just one person said, “This is a brilliant idea.” So, that one had like 75% conversion. I said, “Who wants to join?” And they go, “I do. I do. I do it.” “And why wouldn’t you want to join?” I mean, it was like because they’re caught in the moment but the other thing is if you really want conversion, you get people to drink. That’s my big lesson.
Shelli Varela: That’s like your ninja trick.
Laurel Chiten: Yeah. My ninja trick is make sure that they have alcohol and just make the offer really exciting and give them a really good time, they will join.
Shelli Varela: That’s brilliant. For those people who are thinking of joining the membership, I’m going to ask you to give us the information about where they can go to look at your site for a couple of reasons. First of all, because you’re amazing and you shared your time with us and your incredible story, but also, you’re a filmmaker, and nobody tells stories like filmmakers. So, if anybody’s out there and they’re thinking of starting a membership site or they have one and they’re trying to market it, or they have one and they’re marketing it but they want to do it better, I want to send them to your site so that they can see that video that you referred to. Would you be able to give us? Where can we find that?
Laurel Chiten: Okay, ready? It’s DinnerMatesClub.com.
Shelli Varela: Incredible.
Laurel Chiten: But I also have to give a little credit to some TRIBErs. Georges Wansek who is – I hope I’m saying his last name right. He has Zero Stress WordPress membership. If it weren’t for him, I don’t know how I would have put my entire site together. And he’s been amazingly supportive to me so that every time I had any problems with anything, he helped me walk through setting up the sales funnel. Because I had to learn all this tech in order to get this all to work. I had to have a way for people to sign up. And you asked in your questions like what are some of the problems that you had to overcome? When I first signed people up, I was all excited and they putting in the promo code and it’s all working and I came home and I realized it’s a yearly membership and I told him was going to be this for the year and I had signed them up as a monthly membership.
Shelli Varela: Okay.
Laurel Chiten: And so, it took hours and hours and hours to figure out how to change it so they weren’t going to get billed like a few weeks later. So, anyway, he helped me just sort of do a lot of the things on my website that I think without him, I don’t know how I would have done it. So, just a little shoutout to him.
Shelli Varela: Here’s the benefit of having a community if you’re a membership site owner, and also being part of another membership or community is Stu always says we come for the content, but we stay for the community. And you just beautifully articulated that because in the TRIBE Community, like the reason we call this podcast, It’s a TRIBE Thing is because that’s how we be like if I have it and you need it, then you have it. And that’s how we all are. And so, that is the spirit, yeah, that we’re trying to foster in all of our memberships and community. So, I just wanted to acknowledge you for that and for the shoutout as well.
Laurel Chiten: I don’t think I could have done any of this without TRIBE.
Shelli Varela: Yeah, I’m obviously a big fan. It’s definitely changed my life and having the privilege of doing these interviews and these sessions with all of these incredible entrepreneurs really fills my bucket because to watch the ripple effect of a man, Stu McLaren, who at one point said yes to the thing, that he could’ve said no to just the same as the rest of us. So, the ripple effect is really the biggest gift of having a membership site beside of course from the recurring revenue. Larrel, I wanted to thank you so much for your time. And if people are looking for you is the best place to get you, DinnerMatesClub.com? Or is there another place you’d like people to connect with you?
Laurel Chiten: Oh, no. That’s probably the best. It’s probably the easiest. I have a bazillion emails. Can I just do one more little shoutout?
Shelli Varela: Yes, sure.
Laurel Chiten: Okay. Because also I looked at all the questions you asked in advance, and I was thinking where were the places I was stuck and where did I move beyond that? And one of the places I was stuck because you have to understand that I have never done this before. I haven’t done any of this before. And every time it’s like, what do I need to do? What’s my next step? And so, what happened is I started listening to too many people’s advice and I was really lucky we had a Paul and Melissa Pruitt came to New York and a bunch of us got together and I was in that space of, “Oh my God, I am overwhelmed,” and Paul said to me, “Okay, now. Put on blinders and don’t listen to anybody else.” And so, of course, I listened to him. He was the last person I listened advice with, but that was such helpful advice to me.
Shelli Varela: Yeah. It’s really that simple, right? Just do the next right thing.
Laurel Chiten: Yeah. And I went from being very overwhelmed to actually being laser-focused.
Shelli Varela: Brilliant. I appreciate your time. Your story inspires me personally, and I’m super grateful that you were able to drop by and share it with us.
Laurel Chiten: Oh, well, thank you, Shelli. This is wonderful.
[CLOSING]
Stu McLaren: I hope you love that story. It’s amazing, right? That’s what It’s a TRIBE Thing is all about. So many people in all kinds of niche markets are leveraging their existing knowledge and influence and they’re transforming it into passive monthly income. Listen, this isn’t luck. There’s a repeatable formula for producing a growing subscription income and each week we’re going behind the scenes to show you exactly how they did it. Get the latest stories and actionable ideas from each episode at www.ItsaTRIBEThing.com and if one other person who could benefit from this, tell them to subscribe. Tell them to go to ItsaTRIBEThing.com.
[END]
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