Making Asirikuy More Exclusive: Taking a Leap Towards a Better Trading Community

Traditionally – within the past 3 years – I have doubled the membership fees in Asirikuy at the end of each year due to the large amount of value we add to the website as time goes by and new knowledge, understanding, systems and tools are developed (not to mention additional hosting expenses). However this year I have taken a deeper look at the website and what we want to achieve going forward and I decided to radically change the new member joining procedure in order to greatly increase the quality of new members – and therefore Asirikuy – going forward. Although the changes have already been made – so no publicity stunts from me! – I wanted to spend a blog post explaining why I have made these changes to the Asirikuy membership structure, what I intend to achieve and why I believe this is a fundamental step for our trading community.

Up until yesterday the membership to Asirikuy had been the same as for any commercial EA website on the internet with a recurrent fee. There is a yearly price, if you pay it you join and if you want to continue within the website during the next year you pay it again. However there were some problems with this model basically because Asirikuy is a website built with certain goals, ideas and philosophies in mind and not everyone is able to view the website through the proper “lens”. Everyone who could pay the money to join could join but members who joined for the wrong reasons – a.k.a holy grail hunters – took an important amount of my time in support tasks and were fairly disappointed with the website as they did not get what they truly expected (a “turn key” solution to endless profitability in forex trading). In essence the problem with new members in Asirikuy was that – despite my biggest efforts to attempt to communicate the nature and goals of the website – many people joined (possibly due to word of mouth or without properly reading the website’s contents) and they were subsequently disappointed with what they found out (just because it wasn’t what they expected , vide supra).

How could I solve this problem? I spent a lot of time during the past few weeks thinking about this (including a ten hour flight across the Atlantic) and I finally realized that the problem is that Asirikuy should not work like an “open” website (a site anyone can join). In essence Asirikuy is not an EA selling website but it is more alike a “trading university”, Asirikuy is not a place where you go to purchase a “set and forget” trading solution based on marketing schemes with the assumption that you have only a very primordial understanding about trading. No. Asirikuy is a place to seek knowledge, a place where people should join because they want to learn about and understand what is truly going on, a place where people can truly get to become real algorithmic traders through effort and understanding. A community of like minded people with the goal of teaching each other as well as learning new things. If you join Asirikuy because you seek understanding you will never get disappointed because this is exactly what you will find, analysis, evidence, understanding, discussions; all of these things which require hard work and end up breeding strong algorithmic traders.

Once I figured this out, the next step was easier. How do universities work? Well, when you go to a university you cannot get in just by paying (in theory at least) but you need to conform with some basic prior requirements and attitude towards the field of study which denotes that you are an appropriate candidate to join. Do you have to pay? Yes, because you are getting a lot of things from a university which you couldn’t get somewhere else. Does having the money mean you are in? No, you need to be a viable candidate for the university, as they do not want to spend resources on someone who is not bound to take advantage of them. This is exactly why this model is – in my opinion – so good for Asirikuy. A trader who believes Martingales work won’t be convinced by all the preaching and evidence in the world – because such is life – but most need to wipe their own accounts and “grow out” of this stage. So why would we waste time and resources attempting to convince a trader who has not grown out of this initial natural stages of trading? In my mind we should not. There is a time where traders are ready to star to understand, gain knowledge and treat trading like a business and anyone joining Asirikuy before this is most likely going to be wasting their time, our time and their money.

This is why I have taken the decision – and already implemented it – to only allow people to join Asirikuy through the submission of an essay. In essence what I want is for aspiring traders to submit an essay via email (2000 words max) in which they explain to me why they want to join Asirikuy, why they want to trade, what their expectations are and where they are in their trading career. In my mind the mere act of submitting an essay will make many of the “grail hunters” go away, merely because they – by their very nature – tend to escape from thing which demand a significant amount of effort (even more if they need to take the time to analyze their trading career, build objectives and point out expectations). Even if someone writes an essay lying to me about all of this, just the act of taking the effort to do so already says a lot about the amount of work a person is willing to put to join the website.

Sure, this decision might not be perfect and I am well aware of the fact that I will have a ton less new members for Asirikuy now when compared to the past few years. However I personally do not have a problem with this because having large amounts of members has never been a priority for me (if this had ever been the case I would have an affiliate marketing program and a ton of marketing on the net) but the truth is that all I want is to build a very good trading community where we are able to get people who really want to become algorithmic traders and help them out. I want to have a “trading university” where we are able to take those people who really want to put the hard work and understand everything and invest all the resources in them. I want a place where we have a much larger collaborative base, a trading community where each and every member is progressing through learning and understanding, becoming closer to long term profitability each and every day.

It is also worth noting that I am not going to be screening people based on their previous trading knowledge as one of our main objectives at Asirikuy is to teach those who do not have knowledge about trading. The essay is more about evaluating the “state of mind” of the aspiring trader and where that person is in their trading career. My idea is to look at the reasons this person has to trade, how serious this person is, what this person has done in the past regarding trading (what roads have been walked) and decide whether Asirikuy is or is not a good choice for this individual. I believe this is something I am good at doing based on my experience in educating aspiring traders :o) What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion about these changes!

Please note that these changes only apply to NEW members, current members do NOT need to submit essays or pay any higher fees (the rate at which you subscribed is the rate you will continue to pay). 

Will this work? Will we get an important improvement in member quality? Will we cease to have any new members ? I think time will tell and right now I am willing to take the chances in order to attempt to improve our community going forward. Of course, if you would like to learn more about automated trading and become an algorithmic trader through learning and understanding please consider joining Asirikuy.com, a website filled with educational videos, trading systems, development and a sound, honest and transparent approach towards automated trading in general . I hope you enjoyed this article ! :o)

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6 Responses to “Making Asirikuy More Exclusive: Taking a Leap Towards a Better Trading Community”

  1. Franco says:

    Hey Daniel,

    Excellent idea! The community has a lot of members lately but it feels as if only a small percentage are actually contributing.

    You should try not to chase potential good candidates away due to a too high membership fee. Students such as me usually don’t have the initial capital to spend on membership, even more so for third world country citizens. The fee that I paid was OK I could live with it but the new fee might be too much, even more so if it will be doubled again in 2013! I know for business men it is nothing but for me it is a lot of money. You could maybe think of giving a discount for students or potential good candidates who cannot afford the fee depending on the quality of the essay.

    • admin says:

      Hi Franco,

      Thank you for your post :o) Those are in fact some good observations. Part of why I want to do the essay thing is because I want to get members who will be very strong contributors, because even if the fee they pay may be much lower because what they contribute to the community is simply very valuable. Your case is a quite good example and the idea of paying a lower fee for better essays is a good one. I have just added a few lines of text explaining that people who believe the fee is too high may ask for a lower price within the submission.

      I have also added a “pay without essay submission” option so that we can draw some comparisons between members who join through both methods to see which one might in fact yield the most active members. One of the fears I have with the essay is that some members who later became strong contributors would have never joined if they had had to write an essay. The fee to join without submitting an essay is much higher (491 USD), so there is a good stimulus to go the other way (spend the time to submit an essay). I will leave it this way for the next few months and we’ll draw some conclusions after that :o) (when this happens we’ll decide how to change things to better benefit out community).

      Thanks a lot for your opinion Franco :o)

      Best regards,

      Daniel

      • Franco says:

        Thank you for understanding! The end goal should be to optimize the contribution of each new/existing member and I think your method is a good way of achieving this :)

        In my case I will do my best to contribute a good essay, hopefully within the category of the software I’m developing.

        Enjoy the rest of your holiday and all the best!

        • admin says:

          Hi Franco,

          Thank you for your reply :o) Well you are already a member – and a very good one to say the least – so certainly there is no need for you to write an essay (as this is only for prospective new members :o)). However if you want to write an essay feel free to email it to me ;o). Have a happy holiday as well,

          Best regards,

          Daniel

  2. Chris says:

    Hi Daniel-

    Happy New Year and welcome back to the Americas! Hope you enjoy some time off with your friends and family and you certainly deserve a break.

    If you get a chance, check out the book by Michael E Gerber called – “The E-Myth Revisited” – Why Most Small Businesses Don’t work and what do to about it.” The book talks about the fact that most small businesses are started by very capable technicians – which you certainly are. But it makes the point that every business at some point cannot expand further because it exceeds the capacity of the technician who created it.

    The book may not apply now, but at some future point, you may want to restructure Asirikuy so you can walk away from the day to day and free yourself up for higher value activities.

    Thanks again for all you to and Happy New Year!

    Chris

    • admin says:

      Hi Chris,

      Thanks a lot for your post and a happy new year to you too :o) I in fact agree with what you are saying, Asirikuy will someday come to the point where it will grow beyond what I can control for myself; At this point I will certainly have to delegate and hire people to help me out. However how can I do this when there is no one “trained” to do this? Luckily right now I can handle the website pretty smoothly but as time goes by I will start thinking about how to change Asirikuy’s structure so that I can grow beyond the point where I can no longer handle everything. Thanks again for posting,

      Best Regards,

      Daniel

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