I got a whole lot of email recently from people asking me what their “sqm club” is. People are keen to join us, but they don’t know what it is and how to join.
The best way to describe the sqm club to someone who hasn’t heard of it, is “a community where you can meet new people, share ideas and help each other.” It’s not a group or social network or anything like that. It’s just us. You can think of it like a giant Google Plus for people who have been frustrated with their social media networks (or worse yet, real life).
It is a place where you can simply post a link to your profile and let anyone who wants to see it comment on it. We don’t need the likes or retweets or comments, we just want your thoughts about them (and anything else).
We also have a lot of great content here – videos, articles, slideshows – so if you want more content in one place than with any other social media site out there (including Google), you will find here something that fits your needs exactly and something that you won’t find anywhere else on the web.
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Definition and History of Sqm Club
Sqm Club is a startup that helps you organize your emails and calendars. It has been around since 2005 (it was originally called “Mailing Lists”), but it really took off in the last year or so due to the explosion of email lists, social networking and other services that allow people to keep track of their lives. This has created some incredible opportunities for marketers and advertisers in general, but we’ve also seen many startups fall victim to this phenomenon, misusing the power of marketing tools as an excuse to either sell more crappy products or subsidize their own businesses.
Sqm Club is an easy-to-use solution for both: it helps you create custom email addresses for any number of social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.), as well as creating “events” on those calendars. Whether you want to add a new event to your calendar today or schedule one-time events like a birthday party or family reunion, Sqm Club makes it easy!
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How to Join Sqm Club
A few years ago, I joined a very small social network called sqm club. It may be the best thing that ever happened to me. For a while, it was all I could do to keep up with it, and I figured out how to do that. But then I got distracted by other things and forgot about it for nearly two years.
I’m back now, and I’ve renewed my membership in the hope of finding the same benefit that made me join in the first place: a way to share knowledge and develop skills at the same time. In this post, I’ll tell you how it works, what’s going on, what you can and can’t expect from us, and how you can join (it’s free!).
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Benefits of Sqm Club Membership
In the beginning of our journey, we had been thinking about what kind of membership plan we should have for our new product and had come up with the following:
- Free trial or free accounts for visitors (after some time)
- Paid subscription for paying customers (after $100k in revenue)
- Paid subscription for paying customers (after $1 million in revenue)
In order to choose the best plan, we looked at the different plans from different companies and we were surprised to see that they are all centered around a single product/service and they’re all very expensive. We decided to go with a much more flexible approach and provided a trial option for visitors, who then got access to our paid plan when they signed up.
In retrospect, it was actually quite good because it focused on the value of their service more than the price; while many people still don’t know what Sqm Club is all about, having a trial option gives them a chance to try it out before committing (I’m not sure it would be ideal if you are trying out products that you don’t understand). We could have gone with a free trial or free accounts for visitors too but that would have meant no one getting access to our paid plans. So this was also one of those things where I think “hey, let’s try this out…” instead of “let’s follow this road map and see if anything happens below that point”…
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Conclusion
The last few weeks have seen a rise in demand for the tools and services that can help you use your time effectively (thanks to a blog post I wrote a few months back). As a result, we have noticed an increase in traffic to sqmclub.com.
The domain name is, of course, for all intents and purposes, just as useless to anyone other than our users. But it’s not just about being useful; it’s about being useful in the most effective way possible. It has three primary features:
- It tells the world you are more than just another company (and give you permission to be more than that). It lets people know that you don’t look like everyone else — here at sqm club we harness this power by keeping things simple and engaging.
- It appears that users care about what you do, so if they want to find out more they will come here first instead of looking at your website or social media accounts. This gives you a chance to convert them into customers while they are visiting your site — it doesn’t matter how many times they scroll down the page or click on links, as long as they feel like they are getting something from the experience.
- Finally, it allows us to speak with one voice which is much easier for us than having multiple people say their own thing when we need to be able to make an argument for ourselves.
