How Haley Ingram Created A Profitable Membership Site In Just Two Months

Eric: Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Haley. Welcome.

Haley: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Eric: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Just to get started here, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background is and what you do?

Haley: Yeah, so my name is Haley Ingram. I started a website called coffeecontracts.com. We provide social media templates for real estate agents. That’s basically our big thing. We provide marketing tools and templates for anyone in the real estate industry.

Eric: Sweet. Now, when we spoke earlier, you shared the story of how you started Coffee & Contracts. And I knew when we had you on the show I’d like to hear the full story, so would you mind sharing with our audience how you started your business?

Haley: Yeah. I graduated college in 2018 from UCF in Orlando. And when I was in college, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, but I ended up getting a marketing internship at a real estate brokerage. When I was there, I was like, “Oh, this looks pretty cool. I feel like this is something I can do being a real estate agent,” so I ended up getting my real estate license.

And then after college, I moved to a new city, and I just got my real estate license and I was ready to try to start my own business in real estate. It was difficult getting started in a new city as a young person who just graduated college, but I ended up creating an Instagram account to promote my real estate services. I would post about all things in the area, in the Tampa Bay area, and I ended up getting a lot of leads from Instagram. I started getting most of my leads from Instagram. And with that, I was also getting other real estate agents reaching out asking for help with their social media. They saw what I was doing, and they wanted to do something similar.

I really enjoyed the social media marketing aspect of real estate, but I actually wasn’t really enjoying the parts of negotiating contracts and all that kind of stuff so I ended up starting to do one-on-one social media management for these agents. And it was around that time that I actually met a personal trainer; she was a friend of a friend. And she was telling me how she used to do one-on-one training with her clients at the gym, and then she ended up making a website where she has all these members subscribe, and they get a monthly workout plan and they have a Facebook group. And that’s when it clicked for me, and I was like, “Oh, I could do that with my clients. I could probably reach more people, help more people. It could be really fun.”

I started by just creating an Instagram account and just threw stuff up there, just cute stuff, posts and whatnot, graphics that I would eventually provide just to see if anybody was catching on. And I started growing a following. And then started Googling and I found MemberMouse, and then I made the website. And then about two months later, after launching the website, I was able to do that full time and not do real estate anymore, any of the other odd jobs that I was working. Yeah, that’s a little background, the long one.

Eric: That’s a little bit of a whirlwind. Is that something that you’re used to in your life happening where things just happen that quickly for you? Basically, within two years of graduating, you had tried out a job, stumbled upon this opportunity for business, started it, and then were doing that full time. Is that say typical for you?

Haley: No, not really. I was really struggling in terms of trying to figure out what I was going to do. And as real estate, it was just so hard to… When you’re starting off as a new agent, you have to pay even higher percentages to your brokerage as far as your commission split. To make ends meet, I was working two other jobs bartending and then another marketing job. And I felt really lost and just not sure what I was going to do, so this was just… It’s crazy how it happened, but it was the biggest blessing, for sure.

Eric: Yeah, that’s an amazing accomplishment. Do you have any things in your mind that points to how you were able to ramp up the business so quickly?

Haley: I think one thing that’s cool about it is I’m promoting Instagram posts on Instagram, maybe. I’m promoting how to use Instagram to grow your business and to generate leads on social media on Instagram, using Instagram to our customers who are on Instagram. I think that was really cool. I really just focused on Instagram as our only platform. I feel like that was a big thing.

And I think just listening to the feedback of everyone, just really keeping a good pulse on the community and hearing what they’re looking for and what they need help with, I feel like that was a big reason why we grew, because we were just like, “Hey, what can we help with?” And then we’re like, “Okay, here it is.” And I feel like, I don’t know, that was probably something that helped us grow really fast in the beginning.

Eric: Primarily around Instagram. From your perspective then, Instagram isn’t dead. I know from a user, because I’m not a big social media person from in terms of using it for my business, but I’ve been on the platform for many years and I just found recently that the vibe has shifted. How does that play into what you’re doing? And was that an obstacle for you or was it a opportunity for you?

Haley: I think a little bit of both. It is an obstacle right now because Instagram just changes. Obviously, all social media platforms, they change so much and just so frequently. When reels came out, it was obvious that Instagram is starting to shift into trying to be more like TikTok. Everything they do is pretty much just replicating what TikTok does, which was an obstacle because obviously we have a content calendar with a social media post for every day of the month, which is a Canva template and a caption, and it’s a feed post. But what’s starting to happen is the algorithms will pick up that this is just a graphic, and they favor more TikTok type videos on Instagram now.

We definitely shifted, and now we also provide prompts for reels, so topics for them to talk about, hooks to use. We send them audios to use with their reels and give them ideas. We keep adding things and changing things as Instagram changes. And just from what they’re asking… We have a Facebook group, and I feel like that’s where we can really keep a pulse on things. Someone will post and say, “Hey, I’m looking for this. I don’t see it in our dashboard.” And we’ll be like, “Okay, we just added it.” Yeah, just rolling with the changes.

Eric: That’s the second time in this conversation you’ve mentioned the importance of listening to your audience and community. Can you share some strategies for how you do that? I find that that’s true too, and I also find that when you say to somebody, “Okay, it’s important for you to check in with your community,” they immediately ask, “Well, how do I do that?”

Haley: Yeah. I would say the Facebook group, there’s a ton of different platforms that you can use to host your community. And I remember when I was starting the membership in the beginning, I was conflicted if I should have a Facebook group and if it should be only members allowed or if it should be anyone can join, and then people will see how cool the membership is by just being a part of the group. I ended up deciding to make it members only, which is, I think, was the right choice because now that’s something that we talk about as a value add to becoming a member. I think Facebook is a really good place for it.

And in the beginning, we would ask questions to kind of generate conversations because at first nobody’s really posting anything. We would post questions like what’s the biggest thing taking up your time right now as a business owner? Or something just to get people talking and to see what their issues are. But then as a group started growing, people start just talking themselves. Now we have tons of posts every day. It’s really easy, you just got to stay on top of it too. A lot of what people will post about is content ideas, things that we can provide for them. For example, a listing presentation or something that a real estate agent would need. And we use AirTable to just keep a list and keep track of all of the content that they recommend and then that we-

Eric: I’m getting a sense in you describing that there’s actually a lot of organization and method to how you engage with your business, which it is an aside, in a way. We’re talking about it as an aside like, oh, I have these things and I set up, but I think a lot of people struggle with that when they get into business. How do I organize things? What do I choose to focus on and prioritize? How do you approach that yourself? And how would you suggest others to get into it?

Haley: That’s been probably one of the biggest obstacles that I’ve struggled with. I work on it all the time, our systems and the back end and the operations side of things. But one thing that helps is project management tool, of course. Basically, we release content on a monthly basis, and it’s the same thing every month.

I think one thing I had to get used to was writing down what I’m doing as I’m doing it rather than just winging it each month. I took one month to say, “Okay, this is the first step, this is the second step.” And then I put it into the project management tool and set it up to automate so that each month, I’m like, “Okay, the task is here. I have to do this so that someone else can do this,” and then we get the content out in time. Project management tools have been good.

And then there was also the problem of content management, which is we have so many templates that are links, and then we have images and then we have copies. I was like how do I manage? At first, I was just loading it into the website and the page would break because there was so much stuff, and it would just be slow. And it was just so messy and disorganized.

And I don’t know why it took me so long to find AirTable. It’s a really good content management system that we use. And you can embed it into the website in different ways. That was a game changer. I think just the tools that we’ve come across over the past three years have really helped with that.

Eric: It’s a combination of building habit around taking time to set up your plan and then tools to help you execute that and keep track of it.

Haley: Yeah, it’s definitely something I’m still working on because it’s just not in my wheelhouse, the operations side of things and project management. That’s something that I’ve been working on is outsourcing more things, things that obviously that I don’t excel in. That’s something I still haven’t really let go of yet, but I know that I probably should soon.

Eric: Let go of what?

Haley: Just project management, probably. I should probably outsource that.

Eric: It’s really hard. The outsourcing question is obviously one that has to come into play in any growing business, but it is definitely… There’s a sweet spot to it because you have to have enough experience in the particular area that you want to outsource. I think there can sometimes be a knee-jerk reaction to facing the challenge of these growth edges, like, oh, I have to learn how to do this. There might be an instinct at that time to outsource it, which is simply just bypassing the learning because it would be more comfortable if somebody else can do it. But I’ve never found success in outsourcing from that position because that’s a prime way to get taken advantage of by someone. It’s great that you’re going through the growing pains and learning the things and then finding that sweet spot for when to outsource it because there’s always another thing to learn.

Haley: Yeah, I think that’s another thing too is I think that contributes to our growth in the beginning is that it was… I feel like the smaller you are, it’s easier to listen to your audience, as we were talking about earlier. And listen to your community, and that we get a lot of competitors pop up and you can tell that it was just someone that hired a random graphic design studio or something, and they’re just throwing together a bunch of random graphics. And there’s no community, and that is what it’s. Yeah, I think, yeah, you have to wait to outsource things, but it’ll happen.

Eric: Yeah. Something that always fascinated me about my own journey with my business, other people’s journeys with theirs is there comes a point in time when you’ve been doing the business and it’s starting to… You get into the rhythm a little bit. You’re loosening up and you start to bring your personality more to it in a way, where it’s like, in the beginning, there can be some rigidness trying to do something the way that others have done it. As you’ve been doing this for three years, do you find that your personality is showing through in a very unique way in your business?

Haley: Yeah, I think so. I think it took me a while to step out of… I was hiding behind the logo of Coffee & Contracts, if that makes sense, especially when it comes to social media marketing. You could look at our website and look at our social media and have no idea who’s behind it or who I was.

But then I realized that, as I was teaching real estate agents how to grow their social media, I would constantly say, “Post more personal content and relatable content of yourself, but use professional branding photos of yourself and do videos.” And then I was like, “I should probably be practicing what I preach.” I’m literally just not even showing my face at all. I started doing that, and we got so much growth. And I feel like it really helps to just humanize a brand too. Honestly, it made our support inbox a lot nicer and a lot more pleasant of a place to be when it’s actually real people and not just a computer that they’re talking to.

Eric: I love when that happens. And it’s not always necessarily clear in the beginning, but it becomes clear at some point where I’m offering advice to clients, telling them what they should do on a particular thing or in my coaching calls. And them, like, “Wait a second. It sounds like I should be telling myself these things, or I need to hear this.” I always love those moments. And it just reminds me that there’s more to what we’re doing than just, oh, having a social media company that helps other people. Ultimately, I feel like a lot of it is just about connection. And we’re all learning from each other.

You mentioned earlier when you were polling your members about things that they could seed conversations and topics in that area, you mentioned this question about what are you spending time doing in your business now? Which I want to throw back to you because you’ve been doing this for a few years. What is your time spent like now versus when you were starting in the beginning?

Haley: In the beginning, I was doing everything. I feel like I was working so much doing the support inbox and Instagram marketing and creating the design for the website and a lot of working on the website itself. Now that things are set and I’ve outsourced the support inbox, I spend most of my time Instagram marketing, working on our systems internally. And it’s a never-ending process of trying to make the systems better and preparing for the next month’s content. I still do a lot of the designing for that.

I decided to not really… to hang on to doing the designs for the most part for the members and for our marketing because I feel like that’s what got us here is the style, or whatever, that I put on them. And that’s the thing that I enjoy the most. I feel like I could spend hours doing that, and I just have so much fun doing it. But another thing is just right now, a lot of what I’m focusing on is looking towards the future and growth and where I want this to go. Actually, we’re starting a project where we’re just going to revamp the entire website, probably add new products, change the user experience and just make it a lot more high-end feeling, so I’m super excited about that. That’s where all my energy is going right now.

Eric: What kind of things are you looking to add product wise?

Haley: We literally just have one product, $54 a month, and then yearly options as well. And it’s just been like that. I’ll add things to the membership. It just was simple that way just to be like, “Yep, you get in the membership, you get it all.” Just kept it simple.

But I’m thinking about… And this came with talking to our developer about changes to the website was an upgrade and downgrade. Or no, what is it? Upsell or down sell. If someone was canceling, then we could down sell them on something. And then we could also upsell them because they may need more help.

But what we’re thinking about adding is something that’s less templated stuff and more coaching and strategy. Maybe sending them weekly strategy for their marketing and what they should do on a weekly basis rather than just giving them all the templates for the month. And especially with all the changes that social media, that’s coming out on Instagram with original, unique content, people, to grow, they really need to post their own original content rather than something that hundreds of agents are posting.

Eric: That makes sense. Yeah, your developer’s right to suggest the upsell, down sell functionality because basically those features of MemberMouse are there because our clients, who were doing a lot of business, were asking for these features because they know that basically the people are most likely to spend money with you or people who have already spent money. Right?

Haley: Mm-hmm.

Eric: If there’s something that you can offer them in addition to what they’ve already purchased or save the sale by suggesting a membership that’s a little bit lower price if they attempt to cancel, these are great opportunities to maintain revenue or increase it.

Haley: Yeah, definitely. And then maybe some one-time products too. Who knows?

Eric: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the beautiful things about the journey is once the ball’s rolling, the membership community will be asking you questions. And then when you notice a critical point where, oh, this question has been asked so many times, I now have enough content that I could produce a standalone product, or something, which basically allows you to extend your reach to the people that you can support.

Haley: Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely.

Eric: We talked about in the beginning how you experience this rapid growth in the very beginning, but now that you’re entering into more mature stage of your business, how are you continuing growth? And where do you find that a lot of your new client leads are coming from?

Haley: Well, we do most of our marketing on the Instagram platform, of course. But one thing that we do that I think not only helped us tremendously in the beginning but continues to be one of our greatest sources of new members is through our affiliates and partners. In the very beginning, I reached out to a few agents that were just big, popular agents on Instagram, and I gave them a free membership and said, “Hi.” Introduced myself and said, “I just made this, if you want to check it out. If you like it, you can use this coupon code and you’ll get…” Whatever whenever someone signs up with your coupon code.

And they loved it and they used the post themselves. And agents would say, “Where’d you get that template?” Or, “What are you using?” And they would send them the code. And I think that just having that just really helped us to build trust because people already trusted these agents that they follow, so once they were recommending this product, they wanted to jump in as well. But that’s still something that helps us grow and just helps us with our credibility and to reach new people is partnering with real estate influencers and other adjacent companies in the real estate space, like real estate news websites or advertising agencies that do SEO or things like that for agents, that’s been a huge thing that’s helped us grow.

Eric: I probably won’t put this in the podcast, but I’m going to do something that’s really totally not something I normally do. I’m just very curious about the meta situation of our conversation right now. Because normally when I do these podcasts, I get this energetic picture. It’s almost like this flow in my mind, and I really just follow it. And usually, I lock into it within 10 minutes of the conversation, but that’s not happening for me in this conversation. I’m just-

Haley: Maybe I’m a bad conversater.

Eric: No, no, no, it has nothing to do with the conversation. It’s not what we’re talking about, it’s an energetic thing. That’s what I’m really curious about right now. I’m just like, what is going on? I’m just going to pull a few tarot cards.

Haley: That’s perfect.

Eric: We’ll just see what comes up here. Queen of cups. Reflective. Deep, deep. Okay. Princess of wands. Makes sense. Magician. Mm-hmm.

Haley: I think I’ve gotten the magician one before.

Eric: This is confirming my sense, there’s just more to you than meets the eye. That’s my sense. It’s like, okay, yeah, we’re sitting here, we’re talking about this business that you are building, it’s successful, all of that’s great, and also, I feel like we’re just talking about the tip of the iceberg, and there’s so much more. I think that that’s just what I’m feeling is, yeah, we can talk about the tip of the iceberg, and that’s perfect, and lock it down, but it’s not energized in a certain way. It just feels like it’s just okay.

Haley: Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I hold a lot in of the personal stuff, and then I always am like, “What will people really take away?”

Eric: This is perfect because it goes back to what you were saying about showing the face and how there was some resistance there showing the face. And it’s like, yes, that’s exactly it. There’s something about you. You can get so much done just by showing up. Just led by doing a little bit, you can get so much done, but if you just even showed up in just a little bit more, shared the part of you it, and then it just blows up, people just really respond to it. So much to share, really. And I really wonder. We’ll have to do a five-year reunion podcast because I wonder where you’re going to be in five years. I definitely don’t think it’s a linear path.

Haley: I hope not. Yeah, me too.

Eric: What do you feel like the biggest obstacle is that you personally face just getting to the place where you would like to be with yourself?

Haley: A big thing for me, especially recently, is I’m a very big people pleaser. I think we’ve established that with the whole listening to the community thing, but to the point where it’s difficult for me to manage people and to stand up for myself in a business way. And I don’t have any real employees, I have contractors, and it’s still extremely hard for me to let people go or even to have a tough conversation around what someone should be doing. And even companies, it’s very hard for me to reject them. Or if you get a proposal from someone and you’re talking to multiple companies and then you have to tell one of them that you picked the other one, that’s been something I’ve really been working on this year and really struggling with.

Eric: I know exactly what you mean by that. I’ve had a lot of that same things, even to this day. I feel like for me, because I would consider myself a pretty empathetic person, very sensitive. I can tune into things more deeply, and so I feel in certain situations, if I’m working with somebody and something’s not working out, this isn’t… But yeah, rather than go through whatever, I’ll project that, oh, if I let this person go, it’s going to feel this way, and I don’t want feel that. It’s this projection.

Haley: Yeah. But it’s also you’re protecting. What I realized too is I’m like, okay, yeah, you care about the person and you don’t want to hurt them, but also, you’re protecting yourself. I’m protecting myself from the backlash of that or being wrong or… It’s selfish in a way, too.

Eric: Yeah, for sure. And it’s really actually very deep work to be doing.

Haley: Yeah, I’ve been working on it.

Eric: And I don’t know if it ever really is going to go away in a sense of… But I feel like capacity increases the more we practice doing these situations make… Because I think the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in line with that type of thing is… Because as much as I don’t want to feel bad for telling somebody that this isn’t exactly right or this isn’t working out, I feel even worse in way after I’ve not gone with what I knew was the right thing and I chose not to listen to that. And then after the fact, I feel resentment. Not that the other person had anything to do with it, but because I didn’t listen to myself, now I feel resentful of myself in a way that I didn’t listen. And that done over time creates all sorts of problems.

Haley: Yeah, I think I also, I rush the gun on things. I feel like it’s my strength and my weakness at the same time. I think if I overthink things to death, then I would’ve never started Coffee & Contracts. I would’ve been like, oh, people are going to see this and think I’m an idiot just trying to do something crazy. Who do I think I am? But if I let that get to me then didn’t start it, then I would never be here. But on the other hand, sometimes I’ll be like, okay, I need to do this, I need this right now, I’m going to hire someone, I just do things way too… without thinking things through fully or… That’s been another struggle.

Eric: Yeah. And ultimately, I think that this is the beautiful mechanism of a business or an activity where we’re engaging our energy and we’re trying to share ourselves with people is naturally these aspects, it’s like a mirror; these aspects of ourselves will come up. And it gives us the opportunity to actually work with them and relate to them as opposed to if we weren’t doing it, maybe they would just lie dormant. They’ll come out at some point. They’ll come out in relationships, they’ll come out in business, they’ll come out in whatever. But it’s a gift, I think, to be given the opportunity to have these things show up because then you can actually observe them, and then we can get consistent practice of being faced with choices and being given that scenario where, oh, am I going to go with what my patterns are and what is comfortable? Or am I going to choose what I know and I feel intuitively is right but is also hard?

Haley: Yeah, that’s so true, because if I didn’t have my own business and do this, then I probably wouldn’t have to make as many decisions, especially without anyone to… When I was in real estate, I had an older mentor who’s been doing this for years that I could be like, “Hey, what do I say to this?” In this position, there’s nobody to say, “Hey, what did you do here?” Because it’s different.

Eric: It’s a real brave thing to do to put ourselves out there and start an offering because the fact of the matter is being visible… I’m envisioning that game. None of the moles who are underground have any concern about being hit on the head. They’re safe, but they’re also just chilling in their holes, they never see what’s above ground. It’s when you take the wrist to be visible, anything can come.

I think the common thing is we perceive that we’ve done something wrong. The knee-jerk reactions be like, “Okay, well, next time I need to do the exact opposite. That’s the way.” But I think with time and wisdom, we come to that, it’s just simply about balance. Like you said, there’s this aspect of you where I just want to get things done and get it out there and not think too much about it or think way too much about it. It’s not going to be about giving that up. Because there is a strength and a natural gift in that ability, it’s just the way you do it without thinking about it, it’s how you operate. But then it’s going to be a way to round that out with experience and balance it with new lessons and new experiences. And your business will follow and be molded as you grow personally.

Haley: Yeah, I met with someone recently who is just another business owner in the area who’s older and wiser, and what they said was, “You got to figure out what you want to do with your life first before you decide what you’re going to do with your business.” It was interesting the way that he said it, that I could build the business around how I want my life to be, which, what do I want to be doing every day? That’s been something I’ve been thinking about a lot too is I don’t know.

Eric: And that’s a big one too because I would say I don’t know if there was any point in time in the 14 years I’ve been running my business where I actually knew what I wanted to be doing in the future. I’ve had these general ideas. From the very beginning, the reason I started a business, because I didn’t want somebody else controlling my time or how quickly I succeeded or failed. It was basically this vague… Not vague, but it was basically this concept. It was less about, oh, I see myself doing these activities, it was more about, okay, just a container where I have the freedom to choose what I’m doing. But of course, what I didn’t realize at that time is the price that comes with that freedom is the responsibility of the business and having to go through all the lessons of the journey of the business. But I think it’s worth it.

Haley: Yeah, it definitely is. One thing that I just worry about constantly is what if all this just falls apart? What if Instagram just quits? And a lot of my business relies on other businesses or other things, so there’s always a constant anxiety that it could all be taken away and I’d have to start from scratch. But try to just think about what’s happening right now and not let myself gloom over that.

Eric: That’s another great, beautiful lesson not only for the context of business, but for everything. I would say it’s very easy at this time to end up in the mindset about what if this happens or that happens? Because some things are looming very close. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to go there. It really exercises this discipline of not pushing those things away or saying, “Oh, they don’t exist,” or whatever, but checking back in and being looking around the room and being like, “Okay, well, I’m here now. This is what’s happening now.”

Haley: The real estate market hasn’t crashed. Instagram didn’t blow up.

Eric: Right. Everything’s good for now. I really appreciate you sharing all those things. And might I add too, as a person who’s been doing business for 14 years, the awareness you have of those things existing at the early stages that you’re in is great. It took me a lot longer to get to some of the realizations that you have at this time. Having those realizations are the building blocks and the pathway of growth in the business, both personal and for the business itself. To me, they don’t feel comfortable, the lessons never feel comfortable, but it’s ultimately the bridge that gets us there, so I see it as positive.

Haley: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s definitely been a journey, for sure.

Eric: As we wrap up here, what advice would you give to others who want to build their first business at this time?

Haley: I would say like what we talked about earlier, is to don’t overthink it, just do it. Just do it before you think it’s ready. I think that is the way to go. And then you figure it out as you’re doing it. I know it’s cliché, but I think just do it. Just start the Instagram, start putting the content out there.

Eric: That’s great advice, because otherwise you get a new analysis paralysis and you think yourself out of even taking a step, which would be a tragedy. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today. And I want to ask you where our listeners can learn more about you

Haley: On Instagram, @coffeecontracts is our Instagram handle. Also coffeecontracts.com is our website. And we’re also on Facebook and YouTube and all that stuff, but primarily definitely on Instagram the most.

Eric: We’ll share any links to resources and things in our show notes for people. Again, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

Haley: Thank you so much for having me.