In this interview, Micah talks to Ariel Fuller, co-founder of Dunamis Woman. She’ll share with you her journey to membership success, her experiences in building a thriving membership site, and how she grew it from just 10 members to over 70,000 globally.
You’ll learn how Ariel used her technical background and hands-on approach to business growth to overcome challenges and create a thriving business. You’ll also hear about the benefits of stepping back and allowing others to contribute to your membership success.
Overall this interview highlights the importance of trust, finding the right integrator, trying new things with team support, and treating customers like family when building a successful membership site.
Ariel’s experience with Dunamis Woman demonstrates the significance of a hands-on approach to business growth and technical expertise. These insights are valuable for anyone looking to create a membership site that empowers its members.
If you want to learn more about Dumanis Woman, click here.
The site is managed/built by Kyle Newton, a mutual friend of Micah and Ariel and also a Memberium Certified Agency Partner. To discover more about Kyle and his role in the membership success of Dunamis Woman, click here.
If you’re interested in becoming a Memberium Certified Partner yourself: https://memberium.com/certify
Important Highlights
[4:32] – How did Ariel strategically grow Dunamis Woman?
Ariel followed the idea of laying a foundation, understanding their avatar, and building the rooms of their business. Using the book “Rocket Fuel” as a guide, Ariel and her mother identified their roles and then sequentially developed different aspects of the business, like live events, an online presence, apparel, and products.
[11:59] – What can visionaries or creatives do to find a good integrator? What are the signs of a good integrator?
According to Ariel, to find a good integrator, it would be beneficial to seek someone with strong operational skills or who has served in an operating role, including organizational skills, communication, or project planning. This person should be adept at compartmentalizing ideas and creating strategic plans around them. They may not have all the technical skills required, but they would know how to delegate tasks effectively. If a full-time employee is not feasible, a consultant with an integrator mindset can be employed to break down the vision into digestible pieces for the team.
[22:00] – Importance of customer support in tech platforms?
Ariel emphasizes that customer support is a crucial element in the success of tech platforms and membership success. According to her, the level of support is often a key determining factor when choosing a software or service to work with.
She appreciates platforms that maintain strong customer support, even as they grow and evolve, to cater to the varied learning stages and needs of their users.
[27:54] – What is Ariel’s approach to empowering women through their program?
Ariel aims to empower women by helping them heal, transform their minds, and learn to apply their beliefs practically. They teach them specific steps tailored to the unique struggles and needs of women in faith-based contexts, which sets them apart from other programs or churches and contributes to their membership success.
[40:24] – How does Ariel describe the essence of her membership site?
Ariel believes in treating her site’s users like family rather than just members. She stresses the importance of making members feel at home on the platform and continuously enhancing their experience. She believes that if the site can make its users feel at home, they will repeatedly engage with its content.
Transcript
[Micah: 00:03]
Hey everybody, it’s Micah with Memberium, and I’m joined by Ariel Fuller of Dunamis Woman. Welcome Ariel. Thanks for joining us.
[Ariel: 00:12]
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. Very amazing opportunity. I see so many emails from you and I’m like, I get to meet you live in person.
[Micah: 00:19]
I’m excited to meet you too.
[Micah: 01:15]
So we have a mutual friend Kyle, who is one of our Memberium partners and I’ve been getting to know him a lot better and he introduced you to me so grateful to Kyle for that. But you are a user of Memberium. You have a huge community of women that you’re inspiring and empowering. I read about it so I kind of know some of the things, but why don’t you give us your story a little bit, if you don’t mind, to get started?
[Ariel: 01:39]
Yeah, I definitely, and it’s actually interesting you asked me who I’m here with? With my mentor, cuz he’s the one that introduced me to Memberium when I first got started. And so yeah, we officially, I would say we’ve been in business for a very long time. My mother and I, when I say we, we run our company together. We are the number one dynamic mother-daughter duo that guides now over 70,000 women of faith across the globe. And we focus on the areas of healing and spiritual growth and so you know, she has this vision for her entire, as long as I could live, with Dunamis and Dunamis is a Greek term. It literally means power. The English term is dynamic or dynamite. And around 2017 is when I said, okay, let’s really take this beyond just, you know, a passion project or a faith led movement that you have, but really create a enterprise and a business around what we’re doing to change lives and so, In 2017 started off with maybe 10 women who said, I’m a Dunamis Woman. Right? $0 in the bank account. And we just started driving, you know, our energy and our force into really expanding our brand and our business.
And so, Here we are now into 2023 with over 70,000 women in our community. And really we have our core when they go beyond our community, which is our free group and our tribe, we say, Hey, come a little bit closer into our Dunamis Woman University and our universities, where you’re really gonna learn how to become a Dunamis woman, a woman of power, a woman of strength, a woman of miraculous force, and so that’s where I built our membership site with Kyle and I looked to find someone who had that tech background like myself and I knew I couldn’t, you know, build it cuz I’m running the business. And so I, you know, met Kyle and together we just connected and I believe with my understanding of Memberium and Keap and my tech brain that I don’t even know where I got from. We just kind of built this home that is I literally stay home for our women in our university. They are in this site all the time. I can’t even do updates cause they don’t go to sleep. Right. But it’s just, they found it home. So it’s been very intricate, you know, In our life to use Memberium as a tool to create the home for our audience.
[Micah: 04:05]
So, so cool. Um, hearing about how you started, you know, like you’re saying there was maybe 10 women who thought they were a Dunamis Woman, and then where you are today because when I looked over, you know, your business before this interview, I was pretty impressed with how you have events, you have apparel, you have services, you have programs, you fleshed it out, you know, in the period of five, six years, whatever, you’ve really built so much. I’m curious, what was a little bit of the order, like, kind of what was the progression or the roadmap that you followed to get from, uh, where you were to where you are?
[Ariel: 04:41]
Yeah, so you know, When we first started, we had, like, my mom is a visionary, right? And I show up as the strategic integrator, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this book, Rocket Fuel, right? But Rocket Fuel really helps you understand your position and who you are. So when we first started, my mom had like all these octopus hands, right? It’s like, I’m gonna help women do this and this and this and this and it was like, and that’s how we started, right? Just like throwing up on all of our audience saying We could help you with all these different. And, um, I read this book called Flywheel, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, but, um, I had to say, okay, what journey are we gonna take these women on? And really kind of create this momentum of where they can go because my mom had so many different ideas and I was like, let’s take ’em all, but let’s strategically position them.
And so that’s kind of what we did is we kind of saw how one leads to another and then another and that’s kind of how I said, okay, we’re gonna do live events, but we also have a strong online presence, and we also have your apparel and your products, and we also have the TV show.
So how do we really create a home that works well? And so that’s what I did at the beginning of our business. I took our business like a home. And I said, let’s play the foundation first, right? Let’s play the systems. Let’s lay everything that we need. Let’s figure out our avatar, and then we’re gonna build the rooms of our business and we’re gonna say, Hey, where do we want our women to go in our different rooms of our home? Is it the community? Is it our university? Is it our live events? And this is where we knew that they can find areas. And so just every year, brick by brick, we just started building this house and I just started putting them in order of sequential ways that they can elevate in our brand if that makes sense.
[Micah: 06:33]
Of course, it makes sense. Talking about it as a house is something I haven’t heard before. I love that though. Kind of creating a home for them to come into because it can be so abstract to build a site, right? why do you think people stick in your group? Because I would guess they do have some other options. Like you’re the main mother-daughter dynamic duo, but there is probably other faith-based kind of women-focused organizations. What do you think makes you guys special?
[Ariel: 07:07]
Well, I definitely think that the mother-daughter dynamic does make us very unique. Many women in our faith-based space are doing it alone individually and really, um, for my mother and myself, it’s all about legacy and building legacy, but also working with your legacy because that’s what you’re really striving to be a better person for. A woman of faith, a woman of belief, a woman of power. A lot of the women who come in, they’re doing it. If you can’t fight for yourself, you’re gonna fight for your children. You’re gonna fight for those that you love, that are attached to you, which is your legacy, your grandchildren. So I think that has been our one main stamp.
The second thing I would say is my mom is, Outside of me, I’ll talk about me too, but my mom is a unique individual. Okay. She is a pastor, but she’s very radical. She’s like a mixture of Tony Robbins, Iyanla Vanzant, and maybe the late Myles Munroe, who was a pastor all in one, right? She’s this radical, raw woman, but she’s also very passionate about healing and healing the hearts of women. But she has a really deep understanding of the word of God, and I think that’s what makes us very unique because many women in our space are afraid to step beyond the territory. Um, and to be radical and relentless and to walk in their own strength and identity.
And so I think she’s really treading a space that most people are scared to in our world because she’s all about the results, right? Like if you are gonna believe. If you are gonna be grounded in your faith, I’m not just believing to do the same thing. I’m believing also to see miracles and to see results, and to see change. And so she’s someone that will do whatever it takes to do so.
But then me, I’m a little softer. I am very calm, collective, a great teacher, and give a great foundation to our women and our audience. And I think they love that because they may say, “Hey with your mom, she’s the Ph.D. level, but Ariel, you break it down like ABC and I can understand.” So together, our personalities work really well, and I think that’s what helps. And we have the same birthday and we look alike. So, it’s just a weird combination.
[Micah: 09:27]
Yeah, that’s hard for another, group to replicate, right? So, I was just gonna say in the rocket fuel thing, the fact that your mom can be such a big personality and you can have a big personality, but understand how they fit together to create something powerful. I think a lot of other businesses, somebody who is like your mom is maybe the stage person, let’s say they’re looking for somebody like you, right? They’re looking for somebody who can fill in those gaps.
[Ariel: 10:04]
Yes, I hear that all the time. There are so many visionaries who are really looking for that integrator, that person who can really come in and build the systems around. And, you know, it’s, it’s very, very rare that some people even find that person. Right. But I think once you do, it’s very important to if they’re not your family member, they’re just someone you know, you didn’t. It’s very important for you guys to dream big together because the downfall of an integrator and having someone if you don’t appreciate or value them and you all don’t dream big together and you don’t kind of marry each other for the time being, whatever that is, um, you know, integrator really could take what you’re building and go and either execute it or give it to another visionary and no one wants that to happen to their business. Right.
Um, but it’s very important to respect the way that they operate and respect the systems that they put in place because we know visionaries, they’re just like, I want it all and I want it all now. Right? And the integrator may say, yeah, we’re gonna have it all, but this is our plan for two years, three years, four years, whatever the case it may be. And sometimes that could be a clash because it’s like, no, I want it now. And they have to trust that the integrator is really understanding how to really build a sustainable business if you have the right integrator and the sustainable system that’s gonna hold the vision as it grows.
[Micah: 11:37]
So let me ask a more specific question of you since you are the integrator in this picture, you’re the one that I think everybody wants, right? At least people listening to this podcast, you know, we got thousands of people using Memberium and mostly I would say they are the visionary or the creative. Right. And I’m sure you’re also creative, but just saying what can they do you feel, to find a good integrator? Like what, you know, you mentioned appreciating the integrator. What can they do to find them?
[Ariel: 12:10]
I think honestly, finding someone who I, my background, I really love operations. I’ve learned along the way organizational skills, but also someone who maybe is really good at just managing projects. When you kind of go into those terms of when you’re looking for skills, if you see someone who maybe has served in an operating role, uh, maybe like you know, organizational skills or communication, or even if it’s just project planning, they kind of are really good at filling in the gaps of being that integrator. They may not know how to do the tech stuff if that’s what’s needed, um, but they do know how to maybe take your ideas and kind of compartmentalize them to where they need to be and create a launch plan or a strategic plan around it.
And so if I wasn’t in this space of being an entrepreneur all my life, well, the goal for me was to be a lawyer, but the other side was I really wanted to be a chief operating officer for another company because that’s kind of in a way what I am now in our business, I’m COO but it’s kind of that organizational operation of the services of the team. And I think that if you find someone with that background or with that skillset, they’re really good integrators, in the interim. And if that’s not someone that you want as a full-time employee or a w2, really looking to sit back, do a high-level maybe strategy session with someone who thinks that way, like an integrator, and let them kind of flush out all of your ideas and then they can say, Hey, here’s the team that you need to execute and they can help you at least communicate, kind of like how I found Kyle to say, okay, now go get this person cuz they’re gonna be good to implement this part.
And that’s what I do now with visionaries who come to me. Right. I Take all their ideas. I organize them and I say, these are your departments of what you need, and this is the person you need to help you execute that. That may be four people. That may be one person, that may be five people, depending on your team, but at least I’m letting you know, Hey, when you find them, communicate this. And this is what you’re aiming for. This is the goal of what you wanna see achieved because that way they can communicate specifically with that person about what needs to be done instead of communicating with one person the bigger vision. Does that make sense a little bit?
[Micah: 14:43]
It does make sense, and I’ll try to repeat it back and you can add on anything. It sounds like kind of the key thing you’re saying is, you know, of course, if you can find the person with strong operations and bring ’em in and they’re thick, great, but if you’re not ready for that, Finding that person and getting them on maybe a consulting basis to say, Hey, here’s my vision, can you help me translate this vision into digestible pieces for maybe other team members that I do have or can get, even though I can’t afford a full-time integrator?
[Ariel: 15:14]
Correct. Yes, that’s exactly it. Because that person is still gonna enjoy breaking your business down to a T and you know, helping, you know, Hey, here are the people you need to fill in gaps.
[Micah: 15:27]
So I have a question for you because you, and I’m sure you’ve probably been asked this in some ways at times, but being in the business with your mom and having her, like I said, maybe be the foundation of it or the initial creation aspect of it, do you feel like as an integrator you’re going to be able to pivot into that role? Or do you feel like you’re gonna become creative and hire an integrator?
[Ariel: 15:51]
Yes. So that’s the growing pain that I’m in now. Right? My mom really desires to step down and one day myself come up to become the CEO and there is a big visionary part of me that definitely desires to do so and so the downfall to that though is that you gotta let your hands go out of the micromanaging of the integrator. So right now I’m in a place of building a team and it’s hard because you know that you probably can do everything that your team is really doing that you have to build and cultivate. But that is the goal for me to step in more in that creator role because I do love, you know, creating strategies and marketing and seeing how we can take things to another level and bringing a team to be able to execute.
So that’s where we are right now. And I think it’s great because you can now take your knowledge and pass it on to someone else who wants. I mean, they should definitely have the foundational level of doing the work, such as my graphic designer or you know, someone who’s on our web team. But, It’s good to be able to give them a piece of you to say, Hey, this is where I want you to eventually be. And they can grow underneath your leadership and underneath your guidance, to be able to help them.
And it’s no need for me to soak in all this knowledge cause I could only go so far, which is why I brought in someone to help build our Memberium site because I knew that my knowledge stopped at some level. I couldn’t do everything. But because of the little that I did know, I was very great at directing the team to build what I desire. And so, I dunno if that fully answered your question, but Yes, where I’m aiming to be.
[Micah: 17:39]
It definitely does answer the question and it’s kind of a sticky question. Right. I guess a question I have when you talk about your technical background and having somebody brought in to build the Memberium site, how technical are you? Cuz you do seem, you know, well organized, technically minded, how far does that go for you?
[Ariel: 17:55]
Yeah, so everything I pretty much learned, on my own. I didn’t, like I said, I went to school to be a lawyer. My degree was in communication. My parents say I get my tech brain from my dad. Growing up as a kid, you know, I don’t know if you remember, but you probably do back in the day, we had AOL and my dad was doing a lot of coding on his computer and I would just kind of like watch him do little things, but never really sat down to actually teach. And so one thing I did was just, you know, once I got out of college and I knew that law wasn’t gonna be my path, I just started diving into WordPress back in the day, which was very old. It’s not the drag-and-drop builder of what it was. And I just started playing around and just creating, the same thing with graphic design, the same thing with app building.
And you know, when you don’t have funds in your business because we started with zero, you’re gonna have to be the one to at least try. Right. To make it happen. And that’s just where we were. I knew my mom didn’t have the hands to make it, and I didn’t have the skillset, but I was like, we also don’t have the money to pay someone, so I can’t let my, “I can’t do this” be an inability to at least try and if I mess it up, I tried to at least excel my business to a better way. She was a mouthpiece. It’s like if I could just try to put together some little flyer, right? Or try to put together some little website. So along the way, just trying and putting my hands, pulling up my sleeves, getting a little bit dirty. I just started seeing growth and you know, now I’m kind of in awe when someone tells me like, oh my God, you’re way more advanced than any person I had I worked with because I just learned along the way and that was the biggest thing that took place at a conference when I met my mentor that I just told you about.
I remember he pulled up my website when we were at my first conference and he said, oh, this needs to be on a landing page. And I was like, what’s a landing page? I had no clue what that was. And he was like, yeah, go buy this and put it all in there. And I literally went to the back of the room, bought the tool he told me to buy, and I just changed everything over there. And then I went back up to the mic a couple of hours later. I was like, okay, here’s a landing page. And everyone was like what, And I just was like, I had no clue, but I just followed instructions and I just executed and I tried my best. Now we live in a generation where these kids know how to do it all right? Like probably your niece or nephew. And so I think utilizing them would be great. But yeah, that was kind of my beginning.
[Micah: 20:38]
No, I love it. I think you’re trying to appear like, oh, I’m at this event and I’m a sales and marketing person, but you’re a straight-up nerd. I’m asking some of these questions in a different way because it’s a unique experience that you’ve had. However, some of the advice that you’re giving is really valuable, I think, to the listeners of, you know, just at least trying the thing and that story with Lamar, right, and he’s awesome. I love Lamar. Please tell him hi for me. We’ve had ’em on the podcast here.
That story, nobody told you it should be hard, right? They didn’t say, oh, you can’t do this. He just said, here, do this. Right. And you, not having anybody tell you otherwise tried it. It worked, success. And a lot of the tools really are getting easier, right? Like you said, WordPress used to be difficult. It’s much easier now and younger kids, like you said, they have the skills. So I think it’s actually crazy valuable, that advice of just try. Don’t, think, oh, that’s a new term. I don’t know. It let me go search for somebody to hire to do it. Just try it. It might be way easier than you think, you know?
[Ariel: 22:00]
Yeah. And someone in the space that you have created with Memberium, I think is very key because you have built a team, which most people don’t, that really helps beginners. When I didn’t know anything about Memberium, you know, just being able to submit tickets or go back and forth where they’re getting, in the back end of the site and saying, Hey, you know, give us access, you know, figure out what’s going on, I mean, that’s golden. And most people who build things that maybe are around a tech platform don’t really understand the value of support and having a great support chat.
And I really do look at those dynamics when I’m choosing a software or a place that I really want to work with, like even if I may have an understanding, can my team member be able to come in and ask your staff or your support team the questions so they don’t have to ask me? And so when I’m looking at all the tools that I use today, such as Keap, or Memberium or ClickFunnels, what makes me stay is not so much of the fact that, oh, well one may not integrate well with the other, it’s more of the support, right? Like, are they taking away the support? And sometimes when the company gets bigger and bigger, they will digress on support. And I feel like that’s not the best thing when you have so many people that are at different levels of their learning stages, but they know it’s needed for their business.
So I thank you for even just keeping that to the core of Memberium in itself. It’s really what sets apart, the game changers to me in a lot of ways just having that good support.
[Micah: 23:45]
Well, thank you so much for saying that. Yeah. We really do put in a lot of effort to help people at all levels, you know, and, like you said, even if you hire somebody, and we get this all the time, even if you hire somebody, Who doesn’t know much and doesn’t even speak English that well, they can reach out to us and ask a question and, and hopefully, we can even guide them to get a result. But I really appreciate you saying that. We do try, but of course, it’s the customers like you who create the amazing success that then we get to come on here and talk about.
Tell me more about the success of some of your members. So you, you have this big free community and then you have programs and courses and events. What are you doing? Like, what are they achieving? What’s happening with your customers?
[Ariel: 24:27]
Yeah. So, in our second year, which is our Dunamis Woman University, what they’re achieving is to be very honest, they all come in because they want a transformation within their life, right? Particularly in their spirit realm and their mind. But they’re also on a journey of healing. And that’s not easy for a lot of people, not just women in general, but for anyone to say, Hey, let me focus on my inner self and not get distracted by all these external things that I’m doing.
So I recognize that we’re in a space that’s serving the few. The few that are saying, I wanna tend to, what is the core of who I am? And so for them, they really want an internal transformation and a renewing of their mind so they can be a better mom, a better woman, so they can step into their purpose that God has, you know, destined for them. And so really, although we’re saying in our university, you’re becoming a Dunamis woman and they’re, there’s things that we’re teaching them on how to go through that process, they’re still kind of creating their own story and what that transformation journey looks like, you know, for them and so in our university, they focus on three areas, who they are as the woman, they focus on who they are as a wife, whether you’re married or not, that is a part of your relationships. And then they focus on who they are as a warrior. And that warrior is that spiritual component of understanding, you know, that I have a place to be able to execute in the world from a spiritual standpoint.
And so for them, they really wanna just achieve their ultimate peak of just a greater understanding and a greater sense of purpose. And a greater sense of value. That’s just kind of at our first-tier level. We do have a higher coaching program that women come to get direct coaching from my mom and I, and that’s where we say in there they really don’t just want a transformation, but they really want like guidance and impartation. They really want someone to get in the nitty-gritty of their life and say, “Hey give me some strategies, give me some direct coaching and guidance on what I need to do based upon this situation. And those are people that are unafraid, right? The ones that are transforming, some of them are sometimes scared. They’re like I just wanna do this by myself. Right? I don’t want you to be maybe like, all in my bedroom yet, right? I just wanna decorate my bedroom.
But it’s the ones in our coaching institute that say, I want you to open up my drawers, pull back the sheet, get underneath the bed, see what I got going on and help me figure this out. Right? And so those are the ones that are more indebted to be what we call Dunamis Woman for Life. They are like, I’m here for life, you’re not gonna get rid of me. I’m definitely gonna, you know, have coaching and put in the heavy work and be able to get the guidance. So they all want the same thing though. They just really want to be set free and their heart and their mind and their body, and they really want to see their legacy thrive and not necessarily go downhill because of their past or because of what they didn’t know when they were growing up. They say, Hey, I really want to build a better legacy.
[Micah: 27:53]
That’s amazing. So you guys are providing them empowerment, it sounds like on all levels, tons of topics, just kind of helping them cope and then succeed. Right?
[Ariel: 28:04]
Correct. Yes. Helping them heal, helping them transform their mind, and then helping them learn how to implement what they’re believing through the word of God and actually see the manifestation of what they say and I think that’s a difference between us versus other people. It’s not just a church or it’s not just a good sermon that we hear when we go to church on Sunday, we’re actually really teaching women. Okay. Not only are you gonna implement this, but this is what you do specifically to who you are as a woman. Because we can go anywhere. We can go to a gym and we can say, okay, I wanna lose weight. Right? But then everyone’s in the gym pumping the iron, getting on the treadmill, wanting to get a better body. But Micah, you may have other ailments specifically to who you are because of the way your DNA or your genetics. And you may see me over here kind of pumping that iron and you’re like, oh, that looks cool. I wanna do the same thing. But that may not work for your body type.
And I feel like in the faith-based world, that’s exact same things that we kind of go to church and we say, okay, everyone, this is a big sermon, but women deal with things totally different than men. And women face things totally different than men. And women have to dig deeper in some areas because of the way that they process things. And so not only are we just saying, okay, we’re faith-based, but we’re saying, How does what we’re learning, apply to you specifically as a woman? And you could still go to your main church, but here you’re really learning. “Okay, that’s my greater understanding and this is how I can build myself up as a woman to compliment the man in my life for, to compliment the child in my life”. So it’s having that specificity of what they need, which I feel like that’s why we excel so well in the space.
[Micah: 29:51]
That’s fantastic. Just, just being able to talk directly to somebody, you know, the experience they’re going through can be so I’m sure to them, you know, they probably cry all the time. Like, oh, you understand me, you get me, you’re, you know, you care. Let’s, let’s cross over this abstract cuz I love the doing good and the results and all of it. It’s amazing. Let, let’s bring it down to earth for somebody who is technical or on the line to implement some of this, tell me a little bit about how you accomplish this. So somebody, they encounter your business, they download a thing, they watch a video, they take a seven-day course, like how do they get through the content and why did you do it that way?
[Ariel: 30:36]
Yeah. So, the way that we kind of like market heavily, into our community is we do, I kind of call it like our marketing launch. We typically have excelled in what we call challenges. And I’m pretty sure you heard of that space a five-day challenge. And so I’ve kind of gotten the challenge queen domain, so I’ve kind of mastered this challenge phase. So this is typically what we do to kind of introduce women to who we are. Once they actually say, Hey, I wanna take a step further and I wanna go beyond this community into the university, the first thing we do is we utilize, the tool and we give them like kind of a welcome, a board course, and we kind of take them through these steps because we wanna welcome them into our home that we built, right? Our women are a lot older. They are mid ages between 50 and older, and so they are not tech-savvy. That is not a space for anyone in that age range. So they are sometimes overwhelmed when they come in.
So we just start them off with just this one welcomes aboard course, and we say, Hey, just watch this, get ready. We’re gonna show up on our live welcome party call and we’re gonna help you navigate. I have a great team that is around that age range, so they are very patient with our customers to be able to help them learn the tool, what we built. Once they get in there, which is why I said it’s like creating a home. I don’t make the site complicated. Kyle and I together have built a site that it’s literally like rooms when you go inside, right? You see the door of this room that says this, and then you see a door of this room that says this, and you see a door room, this, that says this. So I make sure they can easily identify what room they’re supposed to be in, and if it’s a room that they knock on that they can’t be they know it because what’s says on the top like, you already know that you’re not enrolled in that program, right? Or that course.
So I make it very visually easy for them to know this is exactly where you go, to watch your content and to watch what you’re trying to consume. And then What I do is we kind of implement like a drip model. So every 30 days something is released new and so I categorize our content in like three categories. So we have 12 modules within one course, but I break it up into smaller chunks so they can feel like they’re accomplishing something along the way instead of saying, Hey, here’s a big 12 model, cuz then you look back, you’re like, oh, I got 12 months of this, really, like, that’s long. So I kind of break it up into three modules, you know, a chunk for them to see the progress. And I don’t know if this is where you wanted me to go, but really I, because I’m thinking of the audience in the age range in which we’re serving, I kind of create the site to navigate where it’s clickable and they’re able to know, okay, this is where I’m supposed to be.
[Micah: 33:40]
I like how you keep going with the home analogy. I can’t believe no one’s ever, you know, used it before. I’ve never come across it doing these calls. It’s so genius. So simple. What do you do, let’s say on the business side of things? You’re running a business, you’re trying to make money, obviously, you want to help people transform, whatever. How do you look at that exchange of good services meaning maybe if I’m in another business and it’s technical and I’m just trying to sell something, it’s like, oh, I wanna maximize customer value, I want to this and that, which I’m sure you do, but how do you balance those two things out of helping people and achieving the revenue that your company needs to grow?
[Ariel: 34:24]
Yeah, so one thing that we do, we serve like one to many model and so our end goal for me, there are some people who serve very few for high ticket dollar, right? They’re like, I’m okay with having 10 clients and they’re all paying me $25,000 and I’m set, right? I’m very satisfied. For me, our vision, we want to really create a stamp on the world, meaning that when we do live events, we want to grow our live events to where we have not only 500 women in the room, but we want 3000. We wanna get a stadium one day. Like we definitely want as much impact as possible. So I had to know that going in, like how do we want to serve. Now we do have a smaller group for a high ticket, but we kind of built those tiers along the way.
What I did was in particularly in the faith-based world, you don’t really see a lot of high-dollar products or services, so I had to meet our audience where they were because it’s typically their very first time investing in themselves. From a coaching perspective, if you really think about it, I mean, you can go to the store and you can buy your shoes that you love and, and we know women buy all types of things, right? But to actually say, wait, to put that in me, that’s, I’m not used to doing that. Right. So what I started doing was creating services that can meet the different types of women.
And so, you know, I have our low tick dollar services that we say, okay, a lot of you all can definitely consume this and it’s gonna be easy for you to invest in, easy for you to at least learn the power of consistently investing, which is our membership site. It doesn’t have to be something like super duper high dollar. Then what we do is we kind of look at the women who have stuck around for a very long time, and what we do is we really get to know our avatar. We really get to know, okay, where are you? What type of job do you have? You know, have you ever invested in any type of coaching before? Have you ever even invested in yourself before? Like, we really get to know our women.
And so for us, my mom is like the golden person that they wanna be around, right? Like that’s, the one that I really want, if I could sit down with my favorite celebrity every day, like that’s her to them, right? So when we first started, she was serving one too many and then we realized that’s not humanly possible. You can’t get on the phone or do one-on-one sessions with 150 people. So then we started understanding the power of exclusivity. And allowing people to be able to have her in their life. And so that’s when we started creating more higher dollar investment services. It wasn’t about the dollar amount, it was more about the transformation that these women were getting, having that much access to my mother. And I realize along the way, that’s exclusive. You know, it’s very rare you can get on the phone with someone and call your coach and say, Hey, I’m struggling with this. Right? Like Kobe and other people were able to call, you know, any coach and say, Hey, I need this, but that was exclusivity. And so once we realized that to build a sustainable business and to allow my mom to serve in a greater sense of excellence, she can’t do that with everybody. So we started building those higher ticket dollar services for um, the women who just really wanted it, and when they inquired, you know, when we pitch it, when we launch it, then that those are the ones that come in. And so I think it’s always good in our industry to have many different services at different price points because that way people can elevate to where they wanna be and they can see, Hey, I’m here now, but my goal is to be here. And so I’m gonna do what it takes right now at this lower level to discipline myself, increase maybe my financial insight, so I can get to hear one day. And there are some women who are like that. They make that their goal to get to that place.
[Micah: 38:55]
So cool. The idea that you were just talking about of having multiple price points so that people can come in at the level, meeting them on their level, I think is kind of how you put it. I love that. I get a little caught up in “What’s the perfect combination and how can we optimize it with the fewest, make it operationally easier” but I love your take on all of that. I wanna be respectful of your time, especially since you’re at an event and probably missing some content. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that comes to mind membership-wise that you would wanna share with the listeners? Any advice or anything?
[Ariel: 39:34]
Yeah, so you keep referencing the home thing, and I want to give a little bit of background on why you use a home, for example. When we first started This vision before tech, before 2017, my mom literally turned the home that we lived in, into a transitional living home. And when I went away to college, I saw women come and they were in my childhood bedroom, and I was like I need to room you guys and so that’s how she was serving and that’s what women, how they were getting impartation from her and every Saturday women would come into our living room for emotional healing clinics that my mom would teach. And our home became their home, literally. And I always kept that in mind of, I never wanted to lose the essence of how we first started, and even when we say membership site, my mom doesn’t really like the term member because she says, I don’t really like calling them members, they’re like family and I think oftentimes when you’re creating a membership site or when you’re creating something for anyone to come and receive your wisdom or your knowledge, you’re inviting them into your home, your space, your family.
And I think when you treat them as so, not as someone that’s like, oh, they can’t get this tech stuff and they’re just a pain in the butt, right? Or why haven’t this person even logged in to watch their course? They’re canceling, but they haven’t even like logged in, right? Like when you kind of see them from just your, a tech standpoint or someone who’s supposed to use what you built and you don’t really see them as someone you’re inviting into your home. And they may be afraid to sit on your white couch, maybe they don’t even know that they can. Right? Or maybe they don’t even know that this back door is open for them to go to the patio and have a conversation with you. I think when you see your audience and your customers as family, it’s very important that you now start training your team. You start training your tech. You start building everything around serving at least the core ideal person that you will want to stay in your home forever.
And I think that we always have to see that because for me, Memberium can go away tomorrow and you may say, I’m done with it. I’m giving it up, it shuts down. And I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t be worried because I know that now we literally just purchase a house of healing, literally like a physical house that if we said, Hey, you don’t have the membership site, but every month you could come here, like Airbnb, come and stay, they would, right? Now home be for everybody, but they would definitely be like, I’m kicking down the doors because I wanna still experience that in some capacity. And I just would say for anyone who’s really building a membership site, you don’t know how long it’s gonna be around. But at the end of the day, if someone’s clicking the login into your membership site, it is your responsibility to make sure that they feel like they’re at home, and that’s what will make them watch your content over and over and over again.
And don’t just walk away and forget about it and say, well, it’s built, it’s done great. No, you keep enhancing that thing. You keep decorating it. You keep checking in with every one of your members and making sure that they understand how to use your home the best way. So when they leave, they never find anything like it, if they choose to leave. So that’s the way that I think about everything.
[Micah: 43:13]
Wow. This has been amazing. So many like smart, beautiful concepts. How can people connect with you if they want to talk to you or get to know Dunamis?
[Ariel: 43:29]
Yeah, so I’m super transparent. If you want to join our community, you can go to www.dunamis-woman.com. So you can go there and literally if you just Google Dunamis, DUNAMIS, uh, you’ll find us and you can join our Facebook group as well, which is Dunamis community. But if you literally have questions like just direct questions of anything that you may want, I’m definitely open. You can always email me. My email’s ariel@dunamis-woman.com. And I’m definitely open to answering any questions that anyone has. But if you wanna say, Hey, I wanna be a part of what you’re doing, I wanna see maybe what’s happening in the group, yeah, feel free to just connect with us.
[Micah: 44:27]
Ariel, I can’t thank you enough. Thank you so much for being here.
[Ariel: 44:31]
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I’m like trying to dodge the sun and make sure you can see my face, but I appreciate you having me. This was amazing.
