This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey friends, community, Psi Josel School audience. Thank you so much for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Here we are halfway through, almost halfway through the first month of the year. I hope you've been enjoying the stories and other episodes thus far.
I hope your first month of the year is starting well overall. And I'm excited to bring you our second Failure Friday episode of season six. What's Failure Friday? Well, in short, I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more. So that's why we have this weekly segment that features a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure.
Like I said, you can learn so much through this process. I have learned far more from all the things I've gotten wrong and the things I've gotten right. So just like our Throwback Thursday segment, which conveniently happens the day before Friday, you get to hear directly from Psi Josel who have struggled to get something off the ground, or have made some kind of assumption sometimes that ends up not turning out as well as they hoped. Okay, and that's kind of what we have here today. This short story features Amelia Dalfonts, co-owner of Master ABA.
She actually co-owns it with her twin sister, fun fact, and their business helps families, teachers, and professionals learn the skills they need to help children with autism. So we heard more about Amelia and her twin sister Diana on episode 1480, "Behavioral Analyst Creates Resources "for Parents and Teachers." Now here today, Amelia is gonna tell us about an idea they had early on that they went all in on. They thought this membership model was really gonna work, it's gonna be a big success, and they put a ton of work in on it. You can probably guess what happens, but of course, it's all about the details. And I've been there too.
Like I have absolutely done this. It reminds me a little bit of last week's story, last week's Failure Friday, which was a totally different challenge. The guy Brock in that story encountered complacency, where he just kind of took his eye off the ball for a while, but I related to that too. So that's why I love this series because it's all so relatable. Anyway, Amelia is gonna take it from here.
I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap-up. [Music]
My name is Amelia Delphonse, co-founder of Master ABA, where we teach professionals to ethically use the strategies of applied behavior analysis to help children with autism in a way that respects each person as a neurodiverse individual. But this isn't where we started. In the beginning, we founded Accessible ABA and set out to teach parents of children with autism how to use ABA at home. I know from years of experience that the largest gains for these children happen when parents understand the basics of ABA.
We saw this as the biggest need in our field and went at it with everything we had. We wrote posts on a blog and had over 30,000 views on the site each month. We figured our next step was a membership site where we could put all the information parents needed in one place. We put in endless hours creating 12 modules, each with videos, transcriptions, downloadable resources, you name it. When the membership didn't sell like we were hoping, we kept pushing, releasing new content every month for a year.
We knew that parents needed our help and we were determined to give it to them. For our efforts, we made a total of $2,200 in two years from a total of 17 members. At one point during that first year, we took a look at our website statistics and for the first time thought about who was coming to our site. Although the majority of the content we'd written was directed toward parents, the posts that had the most views by far were ones that would appeal to professionals. We took the time to really think about why we weren't getting the results we were hoping for and came to a conclusion that we could have easily reached at the beginning of our journey if we'd taken the time to consider our target audience.
We wanted to help parents of children with autism. We still do. But these parents simply don't have the time to search the internet looking for answers to their problems. Most are struggling day by day just to get by. And although we know that learning ABA can drastically reduce the challenges they face, they aren't looking for this answer, at least not online.
With this realization, we started writing posts directed to professionals instead and focused on putting the needs of the child ahead of everything else. We created materials to help these professionals provide quality training to parents whose children are in their programs. And yet we also continued to create the content for our first membership site every month in spite of the evidence that this was the wrong audience to target. Instead of pivoting, we spent countless hours toiling away creating videos that even our 17 members will never take the time to watch. In March of 2021, we launched our membership site for professionals.
In nine months, we earned $6,800 from our professional site between our membership and courses and have had more than three times the number of members sign up. We're getting ready to launch a new membership and are redesigning the offerings in a way that our audience is already excited about and have another that will be ready to go mid 2022. Had we reacted to the information we got when we did our analysis a few months into the parent membership, we could have saved ourselves a lot of work and would probably already have our last membership live. We're now much more willing to pivot when we see something is working or not working and we focus on the areas where we'll be able to make the most impact. We still serve our target audience, parents of children with autism.
We just don't do it in the way we originally planned. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Also, life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. I thought about that when Amelia mentioned planning. You know, as I said, I have been there like putting more and more attention on something that isn't what people really want.
And it's so key, you know, to understand not just who your ideal customer is, but what their desires are, what their needs are, as well as what their capacity is. And in this case, it sounds like that might've been the error, maybe overestimating the amount of time or attention or capacity someone had to partake or participate in this membership. So it might've been a very helpful membership, but if people don't have capacity to participate in it, then it's not going to get you very far, you know, as the business owner or side hustler. So I really appreciate Amelia sharing this transparent and truthful story. As I said, we learned so much from this stuff.
So check out her website at masteraba.com, masteraba.com. There are lots of resources for parents, teachers, and professionals working with kids with autism. And if that's not you, well, keep them in mind in case you know someone who might benefit. Lastly, if you have a question or an update for us about your side hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. I'm excited to build out the rest of the year with you in mind.
Let's make something great together. You can subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. It's all completely free, and there's a new episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
