Searchie Spotlight: Why A Physical Box And Online Membership Is The Cat-Cow For Lasting Results

Valeria’s passion for yoga led her to build not one, not two, but three successful online businesses (one subscription box and two members!). 

With her drive to create a positive community for her members, Valeria saw steady growth in her business year over year. Now, she has the confidence to decide what part of her business she wants to focus on, when to pivot and try something new, and how to show up not just for her community but for herself, too! 

Paulina from Searchie had the chance to chat with Valeria all about her business, how she juggles her different memberships, caters to her audience’s needs, and how her business has evolved using Searchie.

This one is a doozie—and a must-read for anyone selling physical products and an online membership!

During the interview, you’ll hear: 

• What it takes to run a subscription box business plus two online memberships (and how they can be interconnected to benefit your customers and your bottom line in a big way)
• How making the move to Searchie gave Valeria—a self-described “non-techie”—the confidence to design the perfect Hubs for her business 
• Why scaling back your business is totally okay and gives you the chance to reevaluate, avoid burn-out, and maintain the passion you had when you initially started
• Plus a whole lot more! 

Let’s get into it with Valeria! 

Paulina at Searchie: Could you start off by telling us a little bit more about who you are and who your market is?

Valeria: I’m Valeria Weber Williamson, and I have three different memberships. Primarily I serve yoga practitioners who really want to get that daily practice in that they love doing but also get them results.

So, I have a subscription box, but I have two digital memberships as well, that somewhat kind of coexist in that they work together.

The primary digital one is an online yoga studio where we do on the mat and off the mat style practices. And then the other one is for teachers. It’s to help them streamline the back end of their business so they can grow a little bit more quickly.

Paulina at Searchie: You mentioned serving both yoga practitioners and yoga teachers. Can you explain how you serve those two different groups in your market?

Valeria: Well, it’s for yoga practitioners who already sort of know that yoga asana, the practice that you do on the mat, is just one small piece of an overall yoga practice. And they know a little bit about some of the benefits, but maybe they don’t know all of them. So a lot of my work in terms of reaching them is helping them to understand the possibilities and recognize this huge spectrum of practice that’s out there.

And then in the membership, we explore much more deeply, and we give each other that community, that accountability, with lots of new guests, teachers, workbooks, monthly goal-setting sessions, and things that sort of bring us all together when it comes to the teachers.

I actually have teachers that are in both. I have some members who are in all three memberships, and then I have quite a few that are in the two digital ones. A lot of times a yoga teacher likes to work on her own personal practice and develop things on and off the mat. And then, she also wants to be growing her business as well.

We recognize in the yoga world that you really have to do both, or you get burnt out pretty quickly. So, we’re streamlining backend things. I provide a lot of done-for-you templates and sequences that are designed just for the yoga community. And then the other one is really just about your personal practice.

Paulina at Searchie: You already had existing businesses on another platform. Did you have any hesitations with regard to the migration to Searchie? And what was that migration like for you?

Valeria: The actual migration was pretty seamless, pretty easy. I had Searchie for over a year and used it only for transcripts and to pull audio down. It was actually very easy, and in terms of getting transcripts, it was very affordable for that purpose alone. So I felt justified in having it for that.

And certainly people use transcripts a lot, which I did not realize before, but it turned out to absolutely be the case. They very much appreciated having that. It’s one of those little nuggets that you don’t think about, but it ends up blowing things up in a really positive way.

When it came time to actually switch it—literally more than two years’ worth of content with a new deliverable every single week and sometimes very complex multi-day deliverables in some of those weeks—bringing it all the way over to Searchie maybe took a few afternoons of going in because I had to come up with some naming conventions and there was some decision-making along the way, but once I opened up Searchie and brought it up, everything was really intuitive from that point on.

And the nicest thing about it is that I like to tweak with things. I am a perfectionist, but also not sure of what I want really until I see it. I’ll go back and forth on Searchie. It’s easy enough where I can go through that process on my own. So I’m able to switch out and think, do I want to put a picture up for this? Do I want to have a different kind of thumbnail? Do I want to do just a placard? Do I want to use playlists and have it scrollable, or do I want it to have blocks? And it really is easy to switch back and forth between the two to change the colors across the board and see how it looks.

Paulina from Searchie: I know that you have a physical product, and I know that you have two online products and there’s often overlap between your audience, what does the future look like for that?

Valeria: There’s a lot of talk about personalizing the membership so that each person who comes in has their own unique experience, that they can also change up a little bit as they grow and change over time. So they’ll see different content without having that overwhelmed feeling.

And that is certainly something that grows as well, especially in my industry with the yoga world. I do get some people who are brand new to yoga, and they’ll stay with me and learn. And every single bit of information they get is brand new mind-blowing, incredible stuff. But I have a lot of people who are teachers, or they’re longtime practitioners, and they just want to go deeper. And then they sort of become teachers over time. And I can actually offer continuing education credits to teachers for taking those courses. So kind of gives them an extra bonus, but then eventually, if they decide they want that business part, I have another membership for that as well. 

When it comes to thinking about the future of different things and multiple products for each person, I’m watching how people grow and change. I see where these tend to hit an obstacle, and sometimes you can actually create something that speaks to that. One thing I love about Searchie is that you can see everybody’s searches. So you have analytics that give you a ton of insight into what is important to people. 

“Certainly people use transcripts a lot, which I did not realize before, but it turned out to absolutely be the case. They very much appreciated having that. It’s one of those little nuggets that you don’t think about, but it ends up like blowing things up in a really positive way.”

Paulina at Searchie: There’s often a misconception in the industry where people think if someone purchases once, why would they purchase similar offers from me again? So what have you learned in terms of what that relationship is like between your audience as a whole and what that means for the multiple products that you offer?

Valeria: Well, in some ways, it can amplify. So, for example, a lot of times I’ll have people who find me through the product box. They were just looking for something fun. But in that product box, I have a book. Every single month, there is some sort of book that’s related to on or off-the-mat yoga practice. Well, in my digital membership, one of my deliverables is a yoga book chat. And the book that we talk about is the one that went out in the box.

Sometimes people will be like, “Wait, there’s a digital thing? There’s a book chat? How do I access that?” And I’ll be like, “Oh, well, it’s right over here. Check it out. It has all these other things. You get asana classes, you get all this other stuff.” But it’s separate because not everybody wants both.

Some people feel like it’s overwhelming. They just wanted a box. And then other people really don’t want stuff. They just want the information. So I keep it separate, but there’s an option to put them together.

Paulina from Searchie: So would you be open to giving us a snapshot of what kind of recurring revenue you’re bringing in specifically that relationship between the three different products that you offer?  

Valeria: So there’s been this steady growth over the past three years. The first year I did it, I was making about as much money as I was in person. The second year I did it, it doubled from that. Then the third year, I tripled the second year. I’ve been maintaining, we’re about halfway through the fourth year now. 

With the iOS changes, there hasn’t been the same amount of growth, but it is definitely maintained. And it’s given me the opportunity to build lots of foundations for things to go forward, and having the ease of [Searchie] Hubs has taken a lot less off my plate in terms of time.

“One thing I love about Searchie is that you can see everybody’s searches. So you have analytics that give you a ton of insight into what is important to people.”

Paulina at Searchie: What does sustainability look like for you in your business?

Valeria: Well, it may sound counterintuitive, but the biggest thing that I feel empowered to do at this point is to scale back. I’ve been able to grow three wonderful memberships, but I naturally kind of enjoy some of the work for some more than others.

When you’re first starting, you want to grow with all these different things and try all these things. And after a few years, you don’t want to hit burnout. You know, you don’t want to start to lose that passion, especially when you’re working in an industry that you feel a personal attachment to, right? With yoga especially, most of us come to this business because we found a very personal, incredible, beautiful value to our own practice, and we want to share that, but if you are constantly immersed in the business, you start to lose that spark and that connection.

I’m now able to feel confident enough to say, if I want to, I can just focus on this membership or these two memberships, and maybe I’m going to let that one go. I always have the knowledge that I might just take a break for six months because it’s my business. And I know how to get it back going again. There’s always ways to pivot, to maneuver and come back to try different things, to show up in different ways in people’s lives, and to show up in your own.

Catch Valeria’s full Searchie Spotlight interview here!

Thanks for reading! 

Want to learn more about Valeria’s business? Check it out right here.