Hey friends, it's your host Ellen Yin. Welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders, the business questions you can't google. We are now on bonus episode 47, which means for 47 Wednesdays we have come together for an extra episode on the pod. In case you are a newer listener, you may not realize that prior to 2023, we were a once a week show. So on Mondays when we air our case study guest interviews, that's what we've had for all of the years of our podcast until 2023, when I decided to run this big experiment and challenge myself to publishing two episodes a week for you all on this show. And I am proud to say we have not missed a week yet. And trust me, there have been some weeks when it's been hard to put out this much content at this frequency with everything else we have going on in the business. But I am really, really proud of myself, of our Podcast Producer Sabrina for sticking it out. And as we near the end of this year, I kind of wanted to bring you behind the scenes of what our plan is for 2024 with our bonus episodes.
So like I said, I started this twice a week cadence as a test as an experiment to see how it would impact our listenership? Would it grow our show? Are people interested in a more frequent episode release all of these unanswered questions, right. And I think I can say sitting here at 47 weeks now of doing this, that unequivocally, it's definitely grown our show. I think this is actually true across most podcasts who have chosen to up their frequency of content that if you publish more content, naturally, there are more opportunities for people to find your show and to listen in and to binge listen to your catalogue. So we've definitely seen an increase in listeners and an increase in listened time over the past year, with our more frequent cadence, we knew kind of going in that this type of content output doing twice a week would likely not be sustainable long term, in terms of keeping this bonus content free, just because it's a it's a huge resource strain on our small staff. So that's why we kind of set out just to do it for a year to see you know what the feedback would be.
And actually, we recently conducted a survey and found out that 30% of you actually love the bonus episodes, the most like that's your favorite type of episode that we release, I think the options we gave you were our Monday, guest interviews, or Wednesday bonus episodes, and then our quarterly income reports and 30% of you selected the bonus episodes as your favorite episode type. So that was really great data. But the kind of the long term vision for when I started this experiment is if we found that these bonus episodes were providing value to you all that you all, were increasing your listenership of our show because of this content. And we kind of created this habit of you tuning in twice a week that we could potentially monetize this extra content, this bonus content in the future. So that's kind of the point that we've arrived to now, let me share a little bit of the thought process behind this.
As you know, the bonus episodes are really an opportunity for me to come on behind the mic usually solo, and kind of take you into my founders journey. I've always been a believer of building and public and taking you all along with the decisions that we make the strategies that we test, the ones that work, the ones that don't, a lot of things happening in real time behind the scenes, I really, really love this opportunity to go behind the business with you all. And what we have decided to do with the bonus episodes leading into next year, is that we are going to continue publishing bonus episodes. I don't know if it's going to be on a once a week cadence like we've been doing for all of 2023. But what we are doing is we are removing bonus episodes from our public podcast feed. So what you're listening to right now, and we're actually adding it as an exclusive content perk for our C Suite members.
Now if this is your first time hearing about the C Suite, that's totally normal. We hadn't really talked about it publicly, outside of our very small and private soft launch back in the spring of 2023. So we had a soft launch where we opened up 100 founding member spots all of them sold out within the week. So we haven't opened the doors since then. But essentially the C Suite is going to be our flagship product moving forward in 2024 and beyond. It's what we're really doubling down on creating the best membership for CEOs of small businesses who want access to exclusive deals and discounts with our favorite brands that support your business growth and support you as an entrepreneur holistically. And also giving you access to an incredible community of other CEOs and all different industries and niches and stages of business, as well as access to exclusive content. And under that umbrella of exclusive content is our Behind the Business bonus episodes. So I'm not saying that there will never ever be another bonus episode and 2024 on our public podcast feed, it just won't be a regular and it may not be behind the business content.
I think I really want to keep that intimacy of the Behind the Business Content and really giving people a front row seat to what we're doing in our own business for our C Suite members. So that's kind of the thought process, we're going to place our bonus episodes just kind of shift it into our private membership. And part of doing this for an entire year for free was a again, testing the grounds for this type of content, how it was received, if we felt we could produce quality content like this on a regular basis. And it's also kind of a play off of what a lot of big tech brands do.
Now, we're obviously not a tech company, we don't sell software. But as you've probably seen with a lot of tech businesses, they operate off of a freemium model, right. And I think it was actually in our podcast episode with Sam, who, you know, is a past guest, like I said on the show, so I'll make sure to link her episode below that we kind of nerded out on big business. And even though we're small business owners, we love taking ideas and inspiration from how big businesses will grow their customer base. And one of the things that I've noticed, works really well for big businesses is freemium models. So again, think of your favorite software that offers you like a 30 day trial, or think of like Netflix, that gives you I don't know what their Netflix free trial is, these days, maybe 14 days, right. And then if you love it, and you want to continue consuming it, then you know, you're asked to subscribe.
And we didn't necessarily want to do a freemium model for the private membership, because there's so much value even in just the discounts and deals that we offer as perks to our members. We call it the only membership where you can get an instant ROI like the second you join, you've already made back your investment just in the amount of deals and discounts that you can redeem. So we don't really want to do a freemium model, per se for that. But the way I kind of looked at this experiment of releasing bonus episodes every single week for an entire year, is it's kind of like a one year freemium that we have essentially test piloted with you all to see if there was any merit to it, if we should invest more resources into this, if there is value that is being added to our community here. And we think the answer is yes.
So now we're like, Okay, we've done this for free, we've offered this for free for an entire year. Now let's see how we can monetize on it. Now, the reason I want to share this with you all is because maybe there's something in your business that you would love to offer as a paid product, but you're not really sure. If you want to invest the resources or really double down on scaling it yet. Maybe you can borrow this concept and apply a similar model, a similar free trial period, if you will, to your community. And you don't even have to necessarily phrase it as such, right? Like we never told you when we started this experiment, hey, we're going to offer free bonus episodes for an entire year, we're going to double the content output that we give you guys. And it's a free trial, right? Like we never said anything like that. Because honestly at that point, we didn't even know what this would turn out to be. But what I'm saying here is if there's something you want to test in your business, it's not a bad way to collect feedback, to give yourself lots of room to experiment and grow. And get that real time data that will help you make your decisions on whether or not a product or an idea has merit and whether or not you want to pursue it further and like we did. So that's kind of like how I thought about bringing a big business strategy into our small business, how we've executed it, and now how that's informing our decisions moving forward.
So all this to say if you are in that group of people who absolutely loves and looks forward to our bonus episodes every Wednesday, I would love to give you early access to the C Suite Before we officially launch it in 2024. And I would love to give it to you at a 70% discount. It's actually a little bit more than 70% I think I did the math here. It's like 72 point something something percent, but let's just say 70%. For even number, I would love to give you this huge discount as a thank you for being our loyal listeners, and for continuing to support the work that we do as a media company.
So here's the deal. As you all know, if you listened to our last bonus episode number 46. If you haven't listened yet, it's, I think, five minutes, so just add it to your queue play it next, we are hosting our first ever 12 Days of Christmas, this is going to be a really fun campaign, where every day we're coming into your inbox and dropping a daily deal. So it expires at midnight each night. And then each new day for 12 days in a row you're going to receive a new offer. Some of these offers are existing offers that you guys love, and we're offering huge savings on other offers are brand new, you've never seen them before, you'll never see them again, it's truly a one time deal as part of 12 days of Christmas. So I'm giving you guys the early heads up that the Early Access, membership rate for C Suite is going to drop in your inbox on December 15. That's actually the last day of our 12 Days of Christmas. So our 12 Days of Christmas is going to culminate with the C Suite invite for early access. So if you are not signed up yet, for 12 days of Christmas, you can go to Ellenyin.com/12days. 12 not spelled out, but as a number. So I want to just use the digits one, two days, 12 days, you can do that. We're going to drop that in the show notes for you all if you want to click over.
If you're already on our email list. Like if you receive our newsletters and our other communications, you're all set, you don't have to re sign up for our list. This is going to be an email list exclusive though. So if you're not on our email list, or if you're not sure, just be on the safe side and go ahead and sign up for the 12 days of Christmas so that we can make sure that you're getting these daily deals dropped into your inbox because they are time sensitive. But just know as you're watching those daily deals rollout that the C Suite Early Access membership rate is going to be that final deal on the last day of the 12 days of Christmas. And again, mark that in your calendars. That's December 15. Do not miss that email.
However, for all of you podcast listeners, again, who are loyal listeners, and supporters of our bonus episodes, if you are like I just want to lock in my spot. Now, I don't want to forget on December 15. Or just in case I don't see that email or whatever reason, you can go ahead and just DM me personally now, my instagram handle is @MissEllenYin. Just go ahead and DM me 'BONUS'. And I'll know exactly what you mean. Like you're talking about the bonus episodes, just go ahead and DM me bonus, just that one word. And I will personally send you the checkout page for the Early Access member rate now, so that you can lock in your spot now, or you'll have that link until it expires December 15 or December, I don't know if we're going to keep that last 12 Days of Christmas deal open for two days. If so that would expire on December 16. Anyways, the details will be in the email. But if you want it now, if you just know, I definitely want to keep receiving all the bonus episodes next year, then go ahead and just DM me 'BONUS' and we'll get you locked in now.
And like I said it is going to be a 70% discount compared to the membership rate that we will launch at in 2024. This is an annual membership. Just so you guys have some context here. It's under $1,000. So this is an annual membership that is under $1000. It's actually under $800 total. So that's the public launch price. But you're going to get it for like I said 70% off, if you join with our Early Access member rate. So it's actually very, very affordable. We wanted to do that on purpose, because for us, it's about building a really strong community. And like I said, our plan moving forward, you're also kind of hearing about our vision for 2024. Our focus is really going to be on building this flagship product. And we would love for you to be early to the party and one of our first members beyond the founding member group. So anyways, I think that is all I have for you.
As far as the logistics of how the bonus episodes will be distributed to our C Suite members. We haven't quite finalized the details yet. It's either going to show up as an audio feed embedded directly within our private community which is not hosted on social by the way, this is an off social platform that you can actually access through an app on your phone or you can access through your desktop browser. So it's very easily accessible. You can still listen on the go. Or we might actually create a true private podcast feed so you would still listen in Apple podcasts or listen on Spotify or Google podcasts or wherever you currently listen to our show, it would just be a private feed that is not searchable. And you can only access if you are part of the membership. So we haven't decided yet what that distribution looks like. But either way, I'm telling you now that the audio files will be available to listen through mobile, so the listening experience will be more or less the same for you. It's just where we're going to host it. So we will obviously figure out all of those details before the first bonus episode launches in 2024.
But now you have the full context of this experiment. I hope this was helpful to you from kind of more of a behind the business strategy. But I also hope that if you have found value in these bonus episodes, and you want to support our show, and be part of our growing community, and part of this big movement of creating the best community for CEOs of small businesses in all industries, I would love for you to join the C Suite as an early member. And again, you can DM me the word 'BONUS' if you want that link now, or just make sure you're keeping your eye on your inbox during the 12 days of Christmas. And looking out for that final email with the invitation on December 15. All right, as always, thanks for coming with me behind the curtain as we build this business and public and I will catch you all in the next episode.
If you are enjoying two doses of Cubicle to CEO in your podcast feed every week, will you help support our efforts and continuing to bring you more quality free content by going to ratethispodcast.com/cubicletoCEO that spelled CUBICLE TO CEO and sharing a review for our podcasts. If you go to ratethispodcast.com/cubicletoCEO, it will allow you to choose which podcast player you want to leave us a review or rating on it's super easy. It takes less than 30 seconds. You can even leave just a rating without having to write a review. So it's literally as simple as one click but it goes so far and helping us continue to pour into these resources for you. So thank you so much if you choose to do that to support our show. Again, the link is ratethispodcast.com/cubicletoCEO. We'll also link it below in the show notes
