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Former elementary teachers create affordable, high-quality educational materials

Little Owls Resources offers a vast content library featuring thousands of high-quality educational printable resources tailored for teachers and childcare workers.

1,000s

Educational resources

25+

Years of experience

2

Membership tiers

16

Languages

Sara and Stu host all their resources directly on their website. Even for accessing free resources, customers are prompted to create an account and join a free plan, a great strategy for upselling at a later time.

Highlights

A few takeaways from Sara and Stu’s success:

  • It's important to understand your audience's needs. Be mindful of any financial constraints when developing and pricing your digital products.
  • Explore organic channels such as social media groups and search engine optimization (SEO) when working on growing your audience.
  • Having people sign up to access free resources can be a valuable strategy to upsell them to a paid offering later on.

Meet the founders

Meet Sara and Stu, founders of Little Owls Resources and former Primary School teachers with over 25 years of combined teaching and childcare experience. Inspired by their passion for education and childcare, when their children were born, they transitioned into childminding to offer educational care for their daughters and others.

Today, their extensive content library offers affordable, high-quality printable resources for teachers and childcare workers.

Interview

Sara and Stu shared their membership journey with us. Find out what they had to say in our Q&A.

Which digital product(s) do you sell?

Content library

What is the pain point you solve for your customers?

High-quality educational printable resources for a low price. We know that our audience works with children for the love of the job, not for the money!

What were you doing before your membership business?

We both have a background as classroom teachers in Primary (Elementary) School. When our children were born, we transitioned into working as childminders so as to provide educational care for our daughters as well as others.

What challenges did you have in the early stages of your business? How did you solve those challenges?

We started by offering resources for free using an advertising model, but we soon saw that this was not going to be sustainable. We began using a basic membership system, but this soon failed us, causing us to have to manually process members and organise payments at all hours! Finding and joining MemberSpace was just what we needed right when we needed it!

Were there any keys to success, or big "a-ha!" moments that really elevated the growth of your business?

We have tried to take a long-game view of the business. We have always offered a generous amount of free resources to visitors, but now we make sure they have to sign up to become a free member to access them. An existing “free” member can then easily see the price of becoming a premium member from the MemberSpace account hub and upgrade their account with a few clicks. This, combined with keeping our prices low, has made jumping the ‘penny gap’ just that bit smoother.

Did you have a social media following or large email list before you started your membership?

Yes.

Which platform(s) was your audience on? How did you initially grow your audience there?

Initially, we offered lots of free resources and shared this information on Facebook in lots of groups where educators were looking for free and cheap resources. This was the source of our initial big boost in visitors and email subscribers.

How do you market your membership and find new members?

We rely on our resources featuring heavily in Google searches, and we email market directly to our “free” members to show the value in upgrading. We also have a very popular page listing Special Dates of the year that may be of use to educators and parents of young children. The offer of free calendars on this page drives a lot of our traffic.

Do you spend any money on paid advertisements?

No.

Have you done anything to focus on retention and reduce canceled members?

As well as emailing our “free” members, we email our premium members on a weekly basis. This email outlines the important dates and festivals of the week ahead that may be useful or interesting to Early Years educators. We also do our best to freshen up older resources on the site and create brand-new topics to maintain the level of value for our members. We also made the bold decision to encourage our existing premium members to drop their membership costs when we introduced a lower price for new members.

What are some of your favorite online tools for running your business?

We use Google Analytics to check our traffic. A site called Vector Magic for part of our image creation.

Do you have a team helping with your membership business?

Nope, just us!

What's your source of inspiration?

We were both school teachers and then childminders. We know how hard the job is and how little money people have to work with to do their best for the children in their care. We are inspired by the amazing, selfless work and care that educators provide every day. We continue to feel very privileged to know our resources are used and enjoyed by children all over the world; hopefully making teachers’ and childcare workers’ days just that little bit easier!

If you could give your younger self any advice, what would it be?

All this hard work will be worth it in the end!

What's next for your business?

We are looking to expand our offering to cover educational resources for slightly older children. We want to show a wider range of educators our resources and hope that we can help and inspire them in their work!