Building a successful online community requires focusing on three core values: connection (addressing modern social isolation), transformation (helping members achieve tangible goals), and identity (helping members discover their purpose). To succeed, avoid over-specifying delivery mechanisms on sales pages, keep promises vague to maintain flexibility, and use private openings before public launches to refine your offering. Price strategically based on whether your community is content-focused or relationship-focused, and remember that higher-ticket, lower-volume models create less operational stress. Most critically, prioritize exceptional onboarding experiences that answer the constant question 'now what?' for new members, as this determines whether they become lifelong community members or leave immediately.
Building Profitable Online Communities: Insights & Strategy
Added:hello Jay welcome to the podcast how you doing hello Arley good to see you again my friend doing well likewise thanks for thanks thanks for taking the time to hop on um I thought we would do a bit a bit of an experimental format of Deep dive um I'm trying to be a bit less optimized when it comes to how I do my podcast and a bit less like growth hacky with it like we've been for the last couple of years and now I want to transition it more towards just having cool conversations with people who I want to learn from and if people in the audience can get value from those conversations then that's great and if not then that's also totally fine I think our conversation today will be quite Niche but that's okay because I was hoping to talk to you about creators and communities and this new this new wave of people making money on the internet through communities how does how does that sound sounds great I'm excited about it it's uh it's been transformative for my business and a lot of folks in my community so happy to chat and help how I can sick so um for people who might not know who you are can you give a quick intro um and yeah who are you and what is is your background in this whole Community thing yeah my business is called Creator science it's a media company helping people become professional creators uh a lot of people are very good at creating content and even getting attention fewer people in my experience are good at directing that attention in such a way that provides value for the audience but also captures value for the Creator and builds a real business on it so what we try to do with Creator science is help people to do that and our main Revenue driver is our membership Community which is called the lab and it's a 200 person membership it's capped but it does about a half million dollar in Revenue per year and we've done some really unique things with it um not that we'll be prescriptive for you by any means but gives us some different levers to pull and look at what you're trying to do and see if it makes sense sweet how how did you get into all this stuff like how did how did life lead you to this point that's a good question um I started in startups because my parents were uh High School teachers and my entire extended family growing up we actually like K through 12 teachers and when I went to college that was the only like path that I knew I figured I would pick a major I would work somewhere for 35 years get a pension and that's just what being an adult was right um but at that time when I was in college that was when like uber and Facebook and Airbnb were things and I shared a wall in my dorm with a couple of guys who had started businesses in high school and just like blew my brain wide open did not know that you could do your own thing so they introduced me to entrepreneurship I thought entrepreneurship was like Tech startups did software companies for a few years and then around 2017 realized hey wait I've always liked to write writing is kind of a product like I had gotten in my mind this product lens because I did software products but I realized that writing was a product but I didn't have to rely on Engineers or designers to take my vision and make it a real thing and that was just so attractive because in software the thing that you set out to make is almost never what you actually end up making because they're compromises and Technical feasibility but when it's writing and then eventually it was podcasting and then eventually it was videos there's a lot more artistic and creative control so once I kind of set my eyes on okay content is a product I think I want to do content then I just started being very analytical of what do people like how do people make that work I was just very uh analytical and looking at how do content businesses work and soon it just became oh Jay's really good at breaking down how content businesses work and that became the business itself interesting so how did you how did you first start making money from writing in the beginning it was actually group coaching um I did some freelancing right off of the that because in the beginning you know the fastest way to generate any revenue is selling your time so I was doing WordPress websites I was doing um email copywriting essentially and tying those two things together so people had a actual marketing funnel and outside of that I was building this Mastermind program essentially where I was working mostly with Freelancers and that opened my my eyes to well I'm repeating myself a lot there's a lot of things that people come in and I'm saying the same things what if I just productize that put that in a course I had had an opportunity to work with LinkedIn learning as a course author back in 2017 and that got me thinking okay well if I can create courses with LinkedIn I could create my own courses and people are already reading my email so I have this group of people that I could Market this to and that was step one you know was writing emails running group coaching programs starting to create courses getting more people into email I waited way too long to do social media or YouTube um but now you know that whole machine is working yeah and and it's it's a great life I got to say interesting nice that's that's super interesting to hear one one thing that strikes me as as you were speaking is that I think a lot of us in this sort of creators coaching other creators space um from from the outside it can seem as if the only way to make money as a Creator is by coaching other creators um and it's I don't know why why this thought came to me recently but actually that's just how it looks like because the only people talking about it are the ones who are coaching other creators and so if someone is listening to this or watching this and does not know anyone doing a service based agency or selling online courses it might seem as if the only people selling online courses are the ones who are selling online courses about how to make money on the internet but actually there is like a whole huge massive massive massive industry of people selling online courses for all sorts of things and doing coaching for all sorts of things and it's only the ones who are like like you and me who yeah Co other creators that you actually hear from and so it can seem as if oh these guys are just making money teaching other people how to make money well because we're also really um we can make really good use of platforms to talk about these things there my membership 200 people the majority of them vast majority of them are teaching very specific skills like we have this member Claire she teaches people how to become Runners on a plant-based diet very specific very Niche thing she mostly reaches people through Instagram so if you're not on Instagram you're not going to see your stuff if you're not interested in running or plant-based diet you're not going to see your stuff we had another guy Craig who uh teaches High School football coaches like he creates content for high school football coaches who teach defensive line techniques specifically so like a lot of people who have the Creator business model are very very specific and very very Niche and I think actually there's bigger opportunity there for those people than the creators teaching creators you know there are times when I I genuinely have distaste for my the my own meta nature of the business but ultimately you look at am I getting people results are people glad that they're here and that they're learning from me and when the overwhelming response is yes you press on sick um so what was your how did your I guess what was the history of your community with the lab and where did the name come from good question so actually think we need to go back a little bit further that group coaching program that I started doing that was 2017 we were using zoom on the back end of that I was using slack to connect people who were in the program currently and who had ever gone through the program by the time that business had run its course there about 120 people who had gone through that program and that sounds like table Stakes now here in 2024 but in 2017 nobody was using slack for community and I literally had to teach people how to download and use zoom very unique yeah I would not have heard of Zoom back then I only heard the pandemic like most other people did I guess it was it was very a very unique use of tool back that um but through that process I met Matt gartland who lives here in Columbus Ohio as do I and he saw what I had done with digital community on slack fast forward to 2020 we have the pandemic Matt and his business partner Pat Flynn were thinking about launching their own online community so they brought me in to consult on their Community plans in 2020 they had just gotten access this brand new tool that was in private beta called Circle which blew my mind I was like finally a tool that's actually built for Community cuz slack is built for Enterprise just doesn't really work so for most of 2020 I was helping them design and launch SPI pro at the end of 2020 they said can you come lead our community team here at SPI and after some talking they acquired my community business brought those members into SPI Pro and then I led the SPI Community team for a year in 2021 throughout that year my content business which I continued to build on the side just had a great year and it got to the point where I couldn't do both and I said if I'm going to you know bet on one thing I'm going to bet on myself so at the beginning of 2022 I went back out on my own suddenly had a lot more time on my hands was still very good at community and love Community decided that I would launch my own and so in March of 2022 we opened the doors to the lab it wasn't called the lab at the time by the way it was called the creative companion club and um lots of things have changed the business was finally branded as Creator science in that year we rebranded the the community to the lab to match the science Motif because it's a place where we experiment together and you know we're about a month away from being active for two years nice okay very cool um you know as as as you will have no doubt heard uh Alex hosi is going all in on school and it seems like the new you know in in every era of the internet there seems to be a hot sexy thing to make money online I remember you know when I was like 15 it was about like Niche affiliate sites affiliate marketing and so I tried doubling with that when I was at University I was building my own business uh completely unrelated but I was keeping an eye on the make money online space and you know Drop Shipping became a thing Amazon FBA became a thing totally a couple years ago it was all about start start a social media marketing agency um and now it seems to be start a community because everyone seems to be like if you want to make your first 10K on 10K a month online the way to do it is community because recurring revenue and because Community is the future and stuff what what's your take on community being the new uh the new Drop Shipping uh there's some truth to it but what we're going to see is an explosion of communities that are done poorly and an an almost instant cratering of that as well because people are going to become disillusioned with it because they're going to have a lot of really bad community experiences and so in the immediate term what I tell a lot of folks who are thinking about building a community is how can you give yourself the best chance that this is going to be the best community that any of your members have in their life because they're going to get saturated they're going to be a part of several they're going to join them they're going to be mildly active in several of them then they're going to get overwhelmed and burned out and they're going to pair back to one or two so how can you set yourself up to be the one or two surviving communities that people can't imagine not being a part of I think that's I think that's the goal and as long as you do that then you know you don't have to worry so much about this incoming glut of communities that are going to be done poorly what what sort of value do people get from these online communities um and I I ask because when we launched our YouTuber Academy in 2020 I was kind of saying to my team who who needs a community like you know don't people just want to like consume the content and then just take action on the thing you know that's how I did YouTube I never had really had a community I just put my head down and did the work but you know thankfully my team pushed back and they were like no I think you're unusual I think actually people really care about having an online community to be part of community of friends and then we did the first co-ord of the course and you know in our feedback surveys people kept on talking about the community I was like what the hell it's not about the content um so yeah in in in your experience what do people get from this online community stuff we're social creatures for most of human history we literally lived in small communities of people and you know now today we have like these grid systems of roads and suburbs and these giant structures that house like a very small hopefully family unit but a lot of people are are still single and doing their own thing so our culture has evolved faster than our biology and we really need connection to other people and if we're not getting it in our day-to-day getting it online where increasingly we're spending all of our time is a close to that so first and foremost connection is what people want whether that's you know front of Mind consciously what they say they want or not second to that I would say is transformation going from point A to point B in a way that you can recognize I can give you some examples of of all these and then the third thing I think people seek out or really appreciate at least when they find it in community is a sense of identity a lot of people don't know that much about themselves they don't quite understand uh what they care about what they purpose is and when they have such a great experience they begin to learn something about themselves and identify with it you know there's that there's that old joke of how do you know somebody's into CrossFit they'll tell you well that's that's kind of like a small example of when people get really into something it becomes part of who they are and they want to talk about it and that's powerful because that gives them purpose that gives them a feeling of um understanding of who they are nice so it's not it's not about the content I think that would go into the transformation bucket okay can't be about the content if they are specifically looking for transformation and usually that's like the most obvious explicit thing that I can grasp on to as far as a value proposition goes like if I'm thinking about you know if you have a community as a product or as an experience probably the easiest promise to make is transformation because it's very tangible it's very obvious uh but I would argue that a lot of the stickiness or recurrence that comes in community comes from connection or a sense of identity nice so if I were to come to you and I guess I'm coming to you and being like Jay I really want to do this community thing we've got our YouTuber Academy Community already but it's a sort of free for well free lifetime access once you buy the course type thing which is somewhat active actually surprisingly active we had I think we had like 800 active members in the last uh month of the 4,000 or so that we have in total which kind of blew my mind when I looked at the analytics but I think we could do a really good job with some sort of productivity community and you know the the name we've actually landed on weirdly is initially it was productivity club and now it's productivity lab um where and like in in my book a lot of the tactics are framed well all the all the tactics are framed as experiments like there are 54 experiments in the book and there's a whole chapter about like being a productivity scientist so I think there's a lot of parallels completely coincidentally between your science metaphor and my science metaphor but I think we could do a really cool Community called the productivity lab or something and I would love to get this to 5 million 5 to 10 million a year in recurring Revenue okay what where where where do we go from here like how would you how would you go about like coaching me through is this a good idea is this a bad idea what what are the sort of things we we should be thinking about uh a man with your reach and the different assets that you're control there's all kinds of things that you could do well so why a community what what is it about a community that's calling out to you good question um actually the word Community is not the first word that came to mind I was sort of thinking I I want to create a sort of pelaton for productivity um I think having seen lots of people struggle with productivity and stuff over the years the main thing that's holding them back is just doing the godamn work like they know everything they need to know it's not about more content it's just about sitting there and like doing the thing that you know you should be doing or even sitting there and identifying what is the thing that you should be doing actually like what what what actually is that thing and I found that like for example I've I I've been regularly seeing a personal trainer when I'm at the gym and there's something really nice about having a personal trainer who were I know I'm going to show up I know I've prepaid for the thing I've financially committed and I'm just going to do the thing yes I could do do the work out on my own but I know that when I do it on on my own I either don't do it or I half ass it similarly I have friends who do who go to exercise classes for that reason that you know at Le it's in the calendar you'll show up you'll do the thing maybe you'll make friends along the way but like the goal is to show up and do the thing and so what I was thinking is what if we had a community well I I didn't use the word Community what if we had a sort of pelaton for productivity where every week we had like facilitated weekly reviews every month there's like a facilitated planning session that helps you reflect on how the month went and plan goals every quarter there's like a quarterly planning session because setting goals in jet is like super important and what if every day we had like a handful of like Zoom co-working sessions that you would literally sign up to you'd RSV P2 they would be in your calendar you would show up and you know I joined a few Zoom co-working sessions during the pandemic uh in at the London writer Salon yes I love that I was going to bring that up good yeah and I made so much progress on my book in these random ass Zoom co-working sessions which were free so I was like what if we bring all this together a CrossFit sort of pelaton sort of online wew workk for productivity that would be really cool where people would come for the events and if they make friends that's a side effect and that's like a happy bonus but like the goal is not hey you'll make friends and you'll talk to people about productivity the goal is you'll show up and do the God you know and do the godamn thing that that you've been intending to do yeah I think I think what people look for a lot in well you just say products broadly is they they love the promise of hey you're trying to get to this point B this this outcome and we have this basically conveyor belt to take you there you just have to step onto the conveyor belt it's kind of the way I think about it in my mind is like how do I lower the activation energy to hey we've got the system it's running it's moving right now if you just step onto it you're going to get to where you want to go even if it's Kicking and Screaming so I love this uh frame of U pelaton for productivity I think that's a useful North Star so tell me more about the business constraints if we wanted to achieve that what are some of the things that um need to be true from a business perspective what are things that we absolutely cannot do or we don't want to do this things that we don't want this to impede oh good question uh we don't want this to impede my team my my content team uh in that you know I want to still continue making content on the internet we also don't want this to end up taking ridiculously large amounts of my own time um I've been doing a bit of an alpha testing phase as like a free-for-all thing in the last couple of weeks and been facilitating a weekly review every Sunday and that's actually quite nice because when I'm facilitating the weekly review I do my own weekly review and I've done a few Zoom co-working sessions where by virtue of me hosting the session I actually make progress on my own stuff so that's really cool but I certainly would want it to be a like a YouTuber Academy three times a week Ali rocks up and delivers a sermon for 2 hours at a time about some productivity concept I so I I I want it to be like low lift in terms of me having to do extra things for it beyond that like there's very little we can't do uh yeah I if for this thing to be good and you know I want this thing to scale I think um we can always hire more people we can always hire a full-time Community manager we can always get freelances underneath that person like we have a lot of resources in the business to make this really freaking good and one one thing I'm reluctant to do you know one someone in the team floated the idea of accountability group matching like matching people to accountability groups but we've sort of tried that with our YouTuber Academy and unless they were led by someone on our team or someone that was like on our payroll in some way they started to fall apart because like all it takes is one person to be disengaged and now now the whole thing is screwed and then people blame us for matching them and for they sort of have a bad Community experience so I kind of want to be quite like uh kind of like uh like apple rather than Facebook you know like this is the thing we're going to lead the thing we're going to hold your hand through the thing cuz we know best rather than hey this is a thing where you guys can figure out what you want to do it's like like I'm I'm much more worried about that that model yeah yeah um I recently heard you on um my first million talking with Sam and Sean and you reinforc this idea about uh separating the promise from the delivery of the product so what I've heard so far is a really compelling promise you know pelaton for productivity like this is this is the thing where if you're willing to join this you going to be more productive yeah um the delivery here you've just given me some constraints on how we actually achieve that but it seems doable so in your mind what's the what's the hardest nut to crack what feels challenging about making this live based on what you've already kind of thought about this episode of Deep dive is very kindly sponsored by wab which stands for you need a budget now for many people money is a cause of guilt and anxiety you're never entirely sure where all your money goes and you're left feeling guilty about purchases big or small money is often associated with restriction fear and uncertainty but your money is an extension of you in many ways and it's obviously not ideal to feel so bad about it now wab is an app that's helping millions of people change their mindset around money it's built on four simple habits which could transform the way you think about money these habits are firstly give every dollar a job two embrace your true expenses 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[ __ ] it up by me just not having not like speaking to the right people or which is why I'm you know I I reached out to you to be like hey Jay you know you've been doing this community thing for a while and I've heard it's really good what are some things to what are some like traps on the in in the Horizon that like I don't yet know about that you know about having been there that you can kind of caution me away from um well I think yeah I think I the most common trap that I see in people and I think you're predisposed to not fall into this as much but the most common trap I see for people who are building a membership is they get really really granular about the delivery and make that the value proposition on the sales page and then that becomes a very rigid system that you have to fulfill so if you want to have like you've mentioned a number of different ways that this can actually uh manifest in the community weekly uh reviews monthly reviews quarterly reviews daily sort of check-in that feels easy enough and in the first month two months 3 months like you can probably maintain that but if you're not really planning for it 14 months from now are you going to want to keep leading these weekly reviews I don't know it's it's hard to say you know so the better thing to do is to make the promise and the offer so good that you can figure out the right delivery over time and people don't have a preconceived notion of this is how I'm going to double my pre productivity I just know that Allie's going to help me do that in the productivity lab oh don't we need to be say on the sales page these are all the the features uh I don't think so and we're tight did that I don't think so and um I don't know that you think so either like I think that uh if you have a good enough promise and you have people who can follow through and say yes I did this that's good but I would try to be as vague the delivery as possible because you just quickly discover you know it's like that that old boxing quote everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth you have a plan for how you're going to deliver this and you start doing it and you realize hey actually we don't need this thing that we said we're going to do weekly we we actually just need that monthly or people aren't showing up to this thing over here we actually want to get rid of it but it's something we've promised now to people we've sold them an annual membership so can we get rid of that the the less you specifically promise from a delivery standpoint in terms of like the actual programming the more flexibility you have to rightsize the programming and experiment with stuff you know you're calling this a lab you want to experiment with even just the the the delivery so you can get that best outcome um you can you can certainly say like we have these facilitated sessions we have facilitators that are going to help you with Goal planning they're going to help you with accountability you don't have to say we're going to have this session for two hours every morning damn that is a really really really freaking useful Insight if someone's watching this like that sounds kind of obvious that's not obvious at all that's just like we we've sold an annual memberships for our YouTuber accelerator $5,000 and then we kicked ourselves three months later to be like oh [ __ ] that thing that we put on the sales page totally we realized that is that's not actually the thing but like we put it on the freaking sales page and now we can't go back from it and now we have to deliver the thing that we know is and so that was a big part of where the pressure was coming from because I want to sell annual memberships uh although i' I'd love to get your take on that cuz I think annual is nice you don't have to about churn and it feels like more of a community rather than a revolving door I feel like that's your terminology that I've heard you say on another podcast um potentially or maybe Pat Flyn I spoke to him the other day um and so I was so worried because we because we we don't want to get burned by a promise we've made on the sales page and then we're then tied into delivering annually totally if you are able to make the promise and then in member or student voices back that up people are going to see themselves in that they're going to trust you and take it on and then as long as you trust yourself to deliver on on it then that's good you're going to get more success stories and the sales Pages basically promise success stories and that that should work um in terms of annual memberships I love that this is this was non- obvious to me initially and non- obvious to a lot of people that I talk to if you create the opportunity for churn there will be churn so if you have a monthly membership just by virtue of offering the ability to churn on a monthly basis some people will do that and where I think this really plays into memberships you do not want to offer a uh a recurrence schedule that is misaligned with how quickly you can actually deliver the promise so if you're sitting here and saying it's actually probably going to take at least three months for somebody to see a return on their effort you shouldn't even give them the option to dip in and out in a month's time because they have not given it the prerequisite requirement to to succeed so for membership you know a lot of people are drawn to this because it's recurring Revenue this is why it's the big hot thing as you said now it's recurring Revenue it's it's like software but the thing is to to have recurring Revenue you have to provide recurring value and so you have to think what is the mechanism that makes this worth recurring for the member a lot of people set up this very specific outcome that can be be achieved and they achieve it in a year time and they turn and they say something's broken because people are turning out well you design the community experience to be to to a specific outcome where there's no mechanism and reason for it to recur like this could have just been a course in some ways um so anyway if you if you see a reason why this should be ongoing and it should take more than a month I like having longer periods of recurrence because I think it aligns incentives well and aligns expectations well okay that makes a lot of sense and as long as we're sufficiently vague about the delivery mechanism on the sales page or just making it really obvious that hey like this is a lab this is an evolving Community we're going to take member feedback on board and we may change things up as we go along um if at that point if if we do get six months down the line we change something someone doesn't like it and they want to refund it's like okay it's fair enough yeah yeah most most of the time you you won't hear from anybody like that anyway but I I I feel the same way you do where it's like if I publicly made a promise I cannot go back on that even if nobody would notice or complain I just feel like I cannot go back on that um so you know the less specific you are with the delivery promise I think I think the better um can I tell you about one of my favorite strategies for putting this out into the world that even gives you some more cover so I call this uh a private opening and a public launch some people will use language like Alpha Beta whatever I like I like private opening public launch because what you can do is basically just drip breadcrumbs into your existing content and say hey I'm building this thing called the productivity lab and uh if you want to be one of the first members site unseen reply to this email or shoot me a DM or go to this link and you can be one of the first members to be in there here's this incentive for doing so then you don't have to make any type of public promise because it's only calling out to the people who really inherently trust you already and they know whatever olie's doing it's going to be awesome and so you can really experiment with these people then you can get them to have good experiences and you use their stories on the first public sales page in the public launch I liked your model of a sales page it's promise and success stories that is uh a much simpler model than the gym Edwards copywriting Secrets 14 part framework on desire agitate the desire figure out the promise figure out the benefits figure out the features do the offer stack like the H bang what's your what's yeah what's your approach to sales pages to be honest I think to a fault I I do leave a lot on the table because I tend to really do a lot of No sell selling uh For Better or For Worse so I I'm am I'm always trying to build so much trust that the need for selling doesn't really need to exist that much and I would rather just show that I have delivered on the promises that I make than really like agitate the problem and get people you know in in a heightened state of need but again like I think that's to my detriment a lot of times that I don't do at least more of that um so you know it's a spectrum it's a spectrum of how how far you want to go in terms of like you know really selling and I think anything is valid it just kind of comes down to to your style but I think ultimately when we make decisions we are more likely to take the opinion of a third party who we see ourselves in or we already know and trust than the the language of the person selling me the thing so in general like the more the more case studies the more testimonials that you have the more successful it's going to be anyway and if I'm just seeing the sales page that is just covered in testimonials with specific outcomes that are outcomes That I Want from people who I can identify with that's going to be more compelling than anything else yeah as I was browsing your um the lab sales page I was struck by just how many testimonials there were and I also loved how you sort of Lent into the video thing and huh I don't really lean into videos and our sales pages but I don't know why because our videos are like really good so like I should just video is my thing it's hard to fake like it's it's getting so easy to create content you know I use that term loosely but like it's getting so easy to produce things yeah that people are having you know higher and higher like a a higher guard of do I trust this or not and when somebody records a video that just off the cuff and just talking about their experience we can feel that Honesty sometimes people really want to do a good job and they'll write a script for their own testimonial and they'll read it off a script and that actually becomes counterproductive so I always try to coach people who want to give a testimonial like hey please do it off the cuff please just finish the sentence you know before the lab I and because a lab now I or you know after joining the lab I am able to just finish a sentence and do it off the cuff people feel that honesty and again I find that to be pretty compelling h nice um what are your thoughts on price point and to cap or not to cap this is one of the things that like really slowed me down from launching my own membership I spent three months doing exactly what we're doing now like thinking through like how is this going to work and I built this kind of gnarly spreadsheet because I wanted to pull the levers and say if I have this many members at this price point and I even had tiers like if I had two tiers of pricing and I assume that this many people will go for this tier and I have this many members what does that look like in the first month the first 3 months the first 12 months so it's it's worth actually doing some spreadsheet work on this but um we have to go back to the promise a little bit because when you think about a membership I also think about this as kind of a spectrum between is this really content and programming focused or is this connection and relationship focused okay when you do the connection relationship focused as like the primary driver of course like most memberships are going to have elements of both but depending on which one you really lean into it sets a a bias and a pre- framing for what people expect from it and how they expect to engage with it when you when you go the more connection and relationship side of things scale is challenging like success in that model actually presents new challenges as time goes on y so I have an assumption that with productivity club or productivity lab and what you've told me so far that's going to be more on the content and programming side is that yeah so I tend to see those uh memberships priced a little bit lower than the relationship side and they're a little bit less retentive on average I'm just saying on average um a lot of people go for volume and so they make pricing a little bit lower I think any of these things can be overcome with a really great product and some intention so you know I would be say I would say think about the market who would be buying this who are your users who are your customers what do they have precedent for paying for in this realm you know are these people also hiring personal trainers at $200 $300 per month do they have that level of resource because you have to pick a price that the market can literally bear and then um then it's kind of how good of a job can I do of selling the value of this and delivering the value of this so what are your what are your current thoughts in pricing yeah or maybe we can start with how would you describe the Target customer for this yeah great question I would I describ the the Target customer um a phrase that came to mind is something like ambitious entrepreneurs creators and professionals but that is like very very broad um in reality okay so there's kind of two things here number one it's it's it's sort of like who is the sort of person who would invest in doubling their own productivity it is probably not a corporate employee unless they can expense it to their workplace in which case sure yeah why not um it is pro like the the the way we think of our audience is that our audience is broadly in three buckets we've got like the professionals who are like you know corporate employees they want to thrive in the 9 to-5 but also have a work life balance outside of work and they care about personal growth and stuff then we have the side Hustlers who have a little bit less of an appetite for work life balance you know they have a 9 to5 they enjoy the 95 life is good blah blah blah they're not like desperate to quit the job but they also want some sort of creative side hustle and man if that could make money po We're Off to the Races that's so good and then we have the entrepreneurs who are like I don't I don't have any requirement for work life balance I'm going to grind and hustle on the weekends and evenings until I get to my freedom number and so I can quit my job and live a life of Freedom uh I want to quit my 9 to5 so I can then work 24/7 you know all that kind of stuff um which are people like me um although I started off as a side huster and then became that kind of guy and I think the audience of people who will pay to double their own productivity are mostly the entrepreneurs but also the side Hustlers are also liable to invest in things like our YouTuber course even because it's like oh I've you know the average age of our YouTuber Academy is like 36 they've got jobs they've got money earning like 100k a year they're like cool paying a grand or five grand for this YouTuber course to help me achieve my potential in this thing that I thought I might want to do and now I trust this guy to help me get there it's like why not and so but at the same time I don't want this to be an entrepreneurs club or the entrepreneurs lab although that could be future product um I want it to be the productivity lab where I would love for this to be a sort of almost like Mass Market product and not mass market in terms of the pricing because I generally lean towards higher ticket than lower ticket but Mass market in terms of I want a professional working at for Accenture or McKenzie or something to get just as much value from this assuming they can expense it as an entrepreneur for whom even just doing one code working session a week will radically improve the productivity because we tend not to just make time for deep work I don't know if any of that made sense it does um how much of this is based in direct data versus uh assumption a lot of it is assumption um some of it is Data based on the students that we have in our YouTube accelerator our 5K year kind of offering uh some of it is based on like when we poll our audience and just do casual service like or if I if I'm giving a talk and I'm like hands up if you're an entrepreneur hands up if you identify as an employee hands up if you're a student hands up if you aspire to be an entrepreneur hands up if you want to be financially free everyone puts a hand up hands up if you want to be a Creator just this sense of like okay this the these three sort of buckets and then there's the students that aspired to one of one one of those three buckets as well I think a lot of the opportunity that you have in front of you especially with the new book with the success of your channel I think is going after a broader audience as you've kind of kind of said here entrepreneurs are a small Market you know overall yes they have probably higher willingness to spend but it's it's a small number of people I think it's challenging to try to Target both because they are so different but I hear what you're saying about I'm not sure if a a professional or corporate employee would pay to increase their productivity but they're literally paying with their most scarce resource which is their time to watch your videos and read your book yeah true to me that's like that's a willingness to pay and maybe maybe it means something different to them maybe it's maybe better productivity means I actually have more time in my day to work on my side hustle if I'm great at doing this for work or maybe it's this gives me more time with my family maybe it's it gets me uh a promotion at work so you know from me sitting over here also serving creators also serving entrepreneurs what I look at you and admire and aspire to is something that has the ability to impact more individuals and if I'm you that's what I'm that's what I'm trying to do but I'm not going to be prescriptive yeah that's that that's like at one point we were really toying with this idea of do we just Target the entrepreneurs and we realized actually no we we want to make a product for everyone um even with all the caveats around like hey don't make a product for anyone everyone make a product for one person and it's like actually we kind of do want to make product for everyone because I do think pelaton just like pelaton is aimed at you know maybe it started off as like the Bros and the entrepreneurs and the hubman husbands and stuff but actually pellaton is a product for everyone who can afford it um who cares about their health and recognizes the value of online community and getting you to do a thing that you otherwise wouldn't necessarily do and I think that is the sort of person that we're we're targeting the sort of person who would consider buying a Pelon is the sort of person who um we would who would perfect for productivity lap yeah I think where this really comes to a head and and you've probably already identified this is in the pricing because if we want to make this a more broader Market thing then the pricing probably has to reflect that and that comes at the expense of I know I could create a product that I could charge,000 a year for for this entrepreneur Creator business owner crowd uh but the majority of folks probably can't budget that that's uh a very large part of their disposable income so I think where this where you have to draw a line is are we trying to create the product that serves the the largest audience the best we can or are we trying to create a product that can drive this amount of revenue for the business in this short period of time because I think you can get to whatever that level of Revenue is with enough market saturation of the larger market it's just going to take a longer period of time so and it's going to it's going to come with a little bit more operational overhead because there are more people the larger the membership is the more um operational expense in terms of your own headcount and time and capacity that you have to put into it so it's it it kind of comes this point of are we are we trying to stake a stake our claim in the larger market over here around broader product it for everybody or do we see this as just's a high Revenue potential short in the short term product for this more sophisticated customer over here yeah that's a good question I think so all all else being equal I'd rather have three times fewer customers paying three times as much uh cuz we were toying with $1,000 a year or $300 a year for as the price point 300 $ a year let's us say that it's like less than a dollar a day to double your productivity which is kind of cute but even like $1,000 a year let's just say it's like $19 a week to double your productivity or like $22.74 per day or you know however however the math works out and you I spoke to Jordan who is part of your lab as well and he was like yeah you know generally higher ticket lower volume makes for a way more uh a way less stressful business than a lower ticket higher volume but I'm yeah I'm curious what's your take on that I think that's absolutely true um one thing that I would ask myself in your situation is when I assume that this is going to be more work and chaos and stress on the business is that because I'm assuming that I am going to be taking on all of that capacity you know there's there's a world where you do a good job of hiring training and the way that you interface with this community doesn't change at all regardless of who it is yep does it still impact the business yes is it on your shoulders no not if you design it to not be um I would be thinking about the broader oi strategy and vision three years from now five years from now because everything that you produce and put out there is building something some understanding of the Oli brand so if you go in the entrepreneur Direction with this that is going to at least add a small bit of uh perception that Olie serves this specific audience rather than the broader audience so if you are um and I'm kind of saying this because I watched your your most recent video about wanting to write books and it seems like you're trying to go broader generally as a person and as a business yeah and I think if that is true I would be creating products and experiences that back up that Vision interesting um what are your thoughts on sort of the more like barbell approach which is that the thing is either free or it's very expensive um like I like the idea of 99.9% of my stuff being free-for all and the business being funded by a smaller number of people paying higher ticket prices because then the free stuff becomes very very accessible um um but I've always sort of shied away from like mid tiet pricing because mid tiet pricing unless the numbers are huge it it doesn't move the needle for our revenue and huge numbers of paying customers is more faf and I may as well just do stuff for free then which is what I'm planning to continue to do which is why I've been sort of flirting with with with with high ticket so what's your yeah what's what's your VI like the barbell approach in that sense I think there's Merit to so many different approaches and it like ultimately comes down to which one appeals to you the most and less designed for it so if if if that approach is what's appealing to you then there's probably something there um yeah I think any choice you make you have to then counter that with some intellectual honesty of okay if I'm saying I'm going to do the high price membership for the more sophisticated affluent customer yep what does that mean for the free offering that I'm offering to the broader public what what am I doing for free to them to also help them y double their productivity and if you have a plan for that and this customer this product subsidizes that um then I think it it makes sense if you don't have a plan for that then it sounds like you're justifying a decision without necessarily following through on the model yeah that's a good point that is a good point and maybe it's you know you do you do these reviews and these facilitated plannings infrequently for free for the larger audience um and you continue to write books that help people help themselves and hopefully they get to a point where they can invest in this higher product yeah that's that that's the direction that I was I was thinking in that I plan to continue making free YouTube videos and writing cheap books forever um we're releasing fairly low ticket uh software as well productivity software over the next year or two or three um and we are going to have free events as part of the productivity lab maybe every every quarterly planning session it's just like a free-for-all people can rock up um if we have like a guest Workshop then the people in the community or in the lab can ask the questions but like it gets streamed on YouTube anyway and so this is yeah just this balance of do we want to do do we want to be selling $300 a year memberships or,000 year memberships for less for fewer people and which one would be more fun for me less stressful for the team less stressful for me in a way if someone's paying less then there's also lower expectations but in many ways lower ticket customers have even higher expectations than higher ticket customers in some ways there's a world where you have your cake and eat it too and you say this is actually a tiered community and there's tiers of access to whatever delivery mechanisms you build so that it becomes more accessible to more people over time I think in in that world if you aspire to try to serve both audiences at both price points it makes more sense to start with a higher ticket learn what works build more efficient systems and then say we're going to take this slice of it make it available to a broader audience at a lower price point okay that could work very nicely I hadn't thought of that um but that is a very cool concept I know a guy who has like a a platform for co-working sessions and stuff and it's like if you can platform IE in product like the thing like the co-working sessions I think would be would be hugely valuable and much yeah if we can if we can figure out if we can figure out the way to scale it much lower ticket this is good um what's your take on how many people i' I've you know watched one of Pat fln's talks and had some thing and he was talking about kind of doing an alpha test and then stabilizing the letting a few more people in beta test stabilizing before ahead of the public launch um you mentioned private Community public La uh private uh opening priv opening yeah do you have a sense of like numbers that are like what is a good number of people to bring in the in the private opening well again this is kind of rooted in to what degree you want to lean into the relationships and connection side of things because if if you are listening to this and you want to have a community that's built more on the relationships and conversations between members the slower you integrate people the better because literally the the retentive and uh incentivizing mechanism for people to post and meet each other really is benefited by one toone connections the fewer people that are in there the less I feel like a number the more I feel like I know the people here uh you can have like Zoom sessions to literally let people meet each other but someone at your scale who you can probably go out and get hundreds of people at a in a private opening like with one email or something then that's a harder thing to do if you're going to lean more on the content side I don't think the the limit matters quite as much um I would just say where most communities really fall apart is they underbake the onboarding experience and like just the first experience with your thing when people swipe their credit card they have Peak excitement and also like Peak anxiety of did I just make a huge mistake yeah and what a lot of memberships will do is they'll be like all right here's the playground have fun um and what you really want to do is say hey welcome in so glad you're here let me show you around let me introduce you to someone new let me help you feel seen and comfortable with the space and how to use it because when you just get thrown into an empty playground and say all right everything is here that you could want have fun with it people feel overwhelmed and they say actually let me come back and do this later and they click X they close out they've built no level of habit or expectation with that membership they might not ever come back literally again so in your circumstance I don't think I would worry so much about how many people is too many people unless You' have designed the onboarding and like first day experience for somebody and if you feel like there's a limit on how many people you can support in delivering that great experience then that's that's kind of the the threshold um but for you you know I think it's just like really good handh holdy training of you're here this is the next step you should take this is the next step step you should take this is the first event you should attend um and you could accommodate quite a few people I think that's a great idea how how do you guys do on boarding for new members so when people come in the first thing that happens when they swipe their credit card is they actually get a scheduling link to schedule a one1 call with me this only works because I charge pretty high ticket and I have a small number of members but the the point of that is they don't know that's going to happen and so at this moment of peak excitement Peak anxiety to say hey well welcome to the community by the way I'd love to do a one-on-one call with you here's where you can book it with me that's a pretty magical first experience yeah then they are uh kind of walk through a web page experience of training of like here's what you can expect here's your dashboard here are the next steps you should take and here's the link to get into the community that link is a circle invite link that gets them right into the community pops up with a video it says Hey fill out your profile they fill out their profile then they have an onboarding course using Circle course functionality so I can see are you going through this all the while this has now triggered an email that comes to them that says welcome to the community here are the first things you should do and a direct message that comes from me to say this is an automated direct message but I wanted to welcome you and say this is how you can reach me personally so it's it's really it's really answering the question as many times as possible every time somebody takes a step in their mind they thinking now what and you really just want to answer that now what question as many times consecutively as you can um and like that's kind of a fun game just like push that I'm not going to tell you where the end is because maybe you'll find an end that I haven't found yet just like keep pushing that boundary yeah wow okay that's a that's a really really good idea I'd love it if everyone could have a one-onone on boarding probably not me but like with someone on our team well let me tell you about this yeah I haven't been able to figure this out in this context yet but uh do you remember Clubhouse is Clubhouse still around first of all I'm not sure if it's still around but much remember it so back when Clubhouse was just getting started you had to get a personal test flight invite for it yeah and you would get the app you get in there and everyone for the first I think like thousands of people users had a one-on-one onboarding call with someone else and most of the time is just another user of clubhouse that loved it so there's something that can be done to figure out how do I give people a very personalized welcoming experience with my team or with other members of the community how do I incentivize that how do I make that awesome because I I really do think that an initial one-on-one is great A lot of times when I'm thinking about online communities I think about offline communities and what they do well and I go back to Fitness a lot when you join a gym and you walk in you are being greeted at the door by somebody who works there you're being shown around the space you're getting all the necessary prerequisites information that you want and you feel comfortable in that place and you also feel like I know somebody else here so that's that is like a gold standard to try to achieve it's like with my personal trainer I had had a free like 45 minute session with him where I then signed up to like a whole two months worth of personal training so I was like oh yeah mean I'll sign up to the free session why not yep okay onboarding onboarding stupidly important uh what else is very important or things what other things have you seen that destroy communities that we should be mindful of Love question a lot of people have gotten good at getting to the point where the member introduces themselves they'll have like an introduce yourself Channel and that becomes the first input from the individual and this kind of surprising because it's kind of a big ask it's like welcome to this place you don't know anybody here would you mind taking 10 minutes to basically open yourself up and be really vulnerable and talk about why you're here and the problems in life and what you hope this community fixes for you but people do it because people like to talk about themselves and they want to think that this is going to be awesome yeah where a lot of communities fall flat is as soon as I push publish and I post my intro I am just sitting there waiting am I going to be seen are people going to accept me in this place am I going to be glad that I did that and so many communities just don't deliver on that moment because they haven't modeled the behavior of members welcoming each other the team isn't prioritizing responding to them and so right off the bat what I have is a very uncomfortable experience where I just took time it was not a gratifying experience I feel actually unwelcomed because of the lack of response so if you can't deliver on that welcoming experience in the intros which I think you should prioritize get rid of it you know like it it sounds bad to say but if you can't give people the experience of I just introduce myself and I feel very welcomed then don't make that experience part of the design because that is just a really bad foot to get started off on yeah I was thinking as soon as we get a new introduction that should be zap into our slack Channel be like new introduction everyone go say hello totally people ask me all the time they they hear about the lab and they hear that it's generating a good amount of Revenue and they're like how much time are you spending on that and it's not about the number of hours that I or your team are putting in it's that I think the the the communities that are going to have such high priority in their members minds are the ones that are timely it's it's when I had the thought that this is the place I need to go to get help that was rewarded with help quickly good help quickly y um so it's not about that I spend a lot of hours in there it's that I have to be constantly aware of activity so that I can provide timely Assistance or your team can provide timely assistance that's a differentiator what do you think about not letting them in until they've booked the onboarding call or yeah I think that's an interesting mechanism I think I think having some prerequisite activity that you know is going to set them up for Success preventing them from getting some other thing can work for sure there's a lot of conversation with um with school in particular around gamification because to be honest when I talk to people about building a membership I have not once recommended school as a platform um not that it's bad I just think that it only does one thing better than Circle and that is gamification and I think gamification in a lot of ways is a Band-Aid for engagement um and so I would be careful about gamification because it can be used positively to generate behaviors but depending on who your audience is it might actually be creating busy work that actually is counterproductive to the goals they actually have you know I serve entrepreneurs and creators those people don't a lot of spare time giving them a badge for commenting on a post might not serve them it might just be taking up more time it's not super helpful so if you're going to use gamification make sure that it's in alignment with this is actually getting the ultimate uh outcome that the individual wants what do you think about um kind of Interest spaces I guess if some people in the community want to make an interest space about parenting or something like that like do you let them do that or like how yeah how do you approach kind of of like space design in that in that sense I I am kind of militant on trying to keep the number of spaces as low as possible not to say that there's like a specific number where it's like this is the maximum you should have but saying that every space should serve a distinct purpose and be used and so if somebody has a desire for a parenting space generally in the beginning especially in the beginning when you launch a community people are going to be like this is awesome can we have a space for this and this and this and this and I would just I would just capture all of those ideas and then run a voting mechanism to see which ones are actually the most popular because you don't want to just be reactive and create spaces for whoever is asking for it because you might not have critical density to make that space work and now you have a negative experience for those people who wanted that space to work so you have to find some way of vetting is there real density of people who want this thing and if so I will create it but also I'm going to try and identify a champion for that space probably the person who suggested it because now they feel like I need to prove that this should be here and they can kind of help get conversation started help welcome people into that space I think it's great one done well but as you identified with accountability groups and masterminds and communities where you don't have a paid staffed facilitator it's like creating a second job for somebody who's paying to be in the space they don't have a lot of incentive to keep up with it so a lot of times those requests I find there's not a lot of there there you have you have to really sus out which one which ones of these are worth pursuing and putting in place nice so it sounds like kind of minimum number of spaces to begin with like minimum viable space numbers or something and then very slowly over time add them in if you we can have some sort of like road map with up voting features and blah blah blah you know a feedback section that kind of thing optically it's a much better look to expand over time than contract over time and because that feels like like oh this place is growing it's getting better it's improving and not oh they over promised and underd delivered and now they're taking away those promises but the other thing is when you have a ton of spaces for somebody new who hasn't been there yet it can feel overwhelming to know where do I go in here like a lot of people talk about a lack of Engagement is the word they use a lack of participation is the way I would put it and they say how do I increase that you need to think about how am I teaching people or setting expectations of what successful participation looks like I joined this place for a specific reason I now need to be shown or trained on how to achieve that promise using this tool um it really is like the difference between a trainer y in the gym and just putting the equipment out there so you know more spaces means more equipment um people need to know which equipment should I be using I like that thing that you just said which is like how do I help them achieve the prom using this tool it's like the community the membership is a tool to serve the transformation which is in our case doubling the productivity in your case growing your creative business totally this is why I'm really bullish uh on using a course as an onboarding mechanism in the community because it gives people a very tangible now what question once they create their profile now what go through this onboarding course and you can watch their progress through it that should be the mechanism that trains people on how to use the tool oh man you such good ideas here that's such a good idea it immediately solves so many problems just I could just record some looms to be like okay you know the goal here is to help double your productivity the first thing that you should do for that is you should blah blah blah when you've done that blah blah blah and there's so many specific things with whatever platform you choose to use where people need to know how to use the platform itself not even just the way that you've you've set up the platform like hey you probably should spend 5 minutes configuring notifications in a way that serves you here's how to configure notifications you know simple stuff like that this is good [ __ ] okay um anything else uh mistakes that you've made or that you've seen other people make that we should uh try and learn from I don't know how much this applies to you or not and I think this again might apply a little bit more on the side of things where conversation and relationships are prioritized in the membership but I have found if you have a spectrum of people on a specific customer Journey let's take my example of creators you have people who are just considering whether they want to be a Creator you have people who are figuring out like what is my content going to be you have people who are just getting traction you have people who have built a full business you have people who are scaling those are like the five stages of Creator Dom as I see them it is difficult to serve all five of those stages in one membership product where relationships and connection is key it's a lot better to hone in on one specific phase of a journey because then people can really relate to each other even if they have different demographics or different professional profiles so in your case with productivity if we can find the common ground across different demographics and different people that is kind of where I would gear a lot of the messaging and marketing around because then we immediately are set to find that Common Ground as members between each other it's really difficult to have the wide spectrum because everything reverts to the lowest end of the spectrum as in the beginners hold everyone back if you have yeah if you have beginners and you have experts very quickly the majority of conversation becomes beginner conversation and the experts go and try to find a very private space for themselves yep um it's hard because you unless you literally screen and vet people it's hard to prevent that from happening I thought initially that pricing was all you needed to do like if you make the price High Enough enough then it will filter out for everybody who's too early on and that's true for the majority of cases but there are people with high Ambitions uh there are people with means there might even be people with delusions who are willing to do that and that can create a negative experience like an outsized negative experience for the community as a whole so for a long time I was very anti- application or screening process because it creates friction that makes it it just will slow down member growth but more and more I'm thinking actually the best communities of the coming however long should probably have some experience or some mechanism for making sure that the people coming in are a right fit for the community one of my uh as as I've been sort of thinking about building this thing one of the the instincts I have to fight against is the instinct to keep on adding more [ __ ] to it because I'm always like yes but like you know the team's like well I I don't I don't think we've got enough content here like Ali why don't you just go make a productivity course and I'm like I mean okay but like is I mean and I will but like is it is it the content then we're like okay but we we we could have a space for this and a space to post your daily goals cuz that would be helpful and a space to post your evening reviews cuz that would be helpful and a space to post your weekly reviews that would be helpful a space to put your life Vision CU that would be helpful and now before we know we've got like 15 spaces with zero members inside the community uh just in theory it would be useful to have space that to have a space that does this specific thing it's like great capture those ideas let's put them on a list let's roll out the minimum viable version of this and prove that we need to add more um especially with content if you think about other subscription businesses like Netflix yeah or Hulu or Amazon Prime whatever they literally again recurring Revenue comes from recurring value if you created a course and put it in there that's good value for the one time that I go through it probably but that's not necessarily recurring value you know recurring value comes from um something that is new constantly and do you want to get on the treadmill of saying I'm going to create a new course every month the way that Netflix adds original programming every month probably not but you know saying every month we are still having these highly effective goal setting workshops or these productivity things like that is the recurring value that you have there and I think you can find like the level of enough of that when you have so much stuff it gets difficult to train people on which stuff to use and also everything becomes a little bit less valuable by uh comparison Let me Give an example in the lab I was doing an office hours call every single week because it's the most popular event we had so I said let's let's ramp it up let's do more of them but what I found was the more often I did this the easier it became to deprioritize any single of them because there's another one just next week and so a couple of cycles of well I don't need to do that this week I'll just go to the one next week suddenly becomes oh I'm not using this at all whereas when you have fewer um fewer things that you know are high value you can make each of them a bigger deal you know we do a town hall in the community once per year and that allows me to say hey we do this once a year if you're going to put time aside to do anything in this community come to this town hall and it drives by far the highest attendance of every any event that we do because the stakes are higher uh you could look at it from a scarcity and urgency perspective but um if you doose a ton of stuff I think it actually can sometimes create nonparticipation because there's overwhelm but also because each one of those things now feels relatively less valuable um what's your thought on recording the calls and recording the sessions and sticking them on the somewhere on Circle as like a Archive of recordings I think generally good depending on what the the session actually is like are you going to record an hourlong co-working session that's just an hour of silence and put that up there no I don't think that's going to be super useful but if there's something that is teaching that's great that creates an asset that builds a library area of content at some point that also becomes a little bit overwhelming and it becomes a challenge of how do I way find through the best stuff so from the beginning what I would be doing is thinking about how will this be organized a year from now when there's a ton of this how can I help people way find their way into the right stuff um because eventually you might have enough assets that you can actually create like onboarding Pathways somebody comes in they answer a couple questions you say well we have identified that there's like four five different types of people that come in here we have done enough programming and built enough curriculum and content that we serve all five of those things when people come in we want them to identify which these five paths make the most sense for them and we're going to put them down the specific path with the specific series of content that we know is going to serve them so the the earlier you start thinking about that I think the better off you are but it's not Mission critical to absolutely get it right right away it's just planning for the future a little bit how do you do payments do you use Circle payments or something else to then and then send them an invite link if I were doing it today i' would probably use Circle payments Circle pay walls didn't exist when I was doing it so I actually run through my payment through ghost because my website is built on ghost and so I just use the built-in membership but I think Circle pay walls is probably the best way to do it because when people want to manage their membership they want to do it inside of the tool that they're used to using as opposed to a third party tool so you you'll have less support cost having it in circle okay so product it lab leaning towards higher ticket but I will definitely think about what you've what you suggested things to think about on that front like what is really the value the free value versus the expensive value minimum viable number of spaces that we can always like expand over time by pulling the members and seeing what people want and then delivering on that timeliness is ridiculously important and always keeping in mind what is the the the sort of now what dot thing and like really kind of being almost a benevolent dictator and like really holding their hand like no this is how you use the thing introductions were really important onboarding course really important teaching them how to set up notifications and stuff set up their profile how like hey introduce yourself and then maybe this is the next event that you should attend and like maybe here's the course that you can go through we'll figure out some sort of way to do one-on-one on boardings with the team at least for the first X number of members just so we can actually pull people to be like hey what are you hoping to get from this and what made you sign up and especially especially at the start for the private opening uh when we don't have like a whole shebang sales page and and everything with with your stuff I think you have like Friday co-working or something like that yeah we do um and a couple of other things for us we wanted to have like daily co-working and also like weekly review events and also like a guest Workshop every now and then but like seeing like clicking on the events page on Circle at least until they add a calendar feature which apparently is coming soon it starts to get like a bit much to suddenly see this enormous list of things um do you have a sense of like should we be separating out multiple event types into different event spaces or what I wouldn't I think I think multiple event spaces is only relevant when you have tiered levels of access in events that are only permission to certain people uh I hear you on like the challenge of so many events starts to be vertically a lot since there's not a calendar view but I think that's okay because generally those if those are set up as recurring events as they are then when people are SVP they can add the whole recurring thing to their own calendar and and it should be uh okay okay cool cool awesome oh one other thing this is a possibly a big one um we already have a circle Community a circle Community set up for our YouTuber Academy students which has 4,500 students in it and as mentioned 800 active in the last month still still seems to be weirdly active and you know our team is in there as well um what I was toying with the idea of is instead of having productivity lab and YouTuber Academy as two separate Circle communities consolidating them both into the Ali abdal Academy kind of big circle thing and now if you have bought if you've bought the YouTuber Academy you have access to that space if you've brought productivity lab you have access to that space if you've bought our accelerator which is our highest ticket thing you have access to all of the above and if you haven't bought anything you have access to the free stuff which is just the free events as part of O doll Academy what are your thoughts on like consolidation versus keeping the productivity Bros and the well the productivity people and the YouTube people separate I get the draw to it um I try to do that with the lab so we have like a basic level membership that doesn't have access to the community discussion spaces but has access to all of the like content we'll call it the educational content and it mostly works but there are aspects of circle as it stands today that become unusable when you have permissioned levels of access and so for me I'm actually going to be separating that out um I either want people to have like full access to everything basically or not be in that space I would create a separate Circle account oh interesting um what do you mean aspect start to break when you have different spaces I'll give you a very specific example in the home feed on Circle which is a great feature they allow you to set a banner at the top of that which basically creates like a static call to action to anybody logs into the community I find that to be very very useful for drawing attention to important aspects of membership but some of those announcements I just want to make to a specific group of people namely like the main core community members like hey here is this upcoming event that is only for members of the core Community if I put the link to join that event the people who are not permissioned to that event still see it there the uh the public members directory on Circle if you use like their their native like members tab will show everybody in the community and so if you have different levels of person you know I was talking about the the spectrum of beginners to experts if you had multiple levels of people and some people are sensitive to not wanting to be solicited or have their contact information or name or face out there to everybody in the community if you have that feature open anybody could see their information message them email them whatever so like that's the type of thing where I I said this is untenable for the the the experience I want to give a super for like a an advanced customer I want to give them like a super safe amazing private thing so yeah if you have any of those concerns I would probably separate the two out because I just find that there are certain complications another reason is actually these um uh interest groups you brought up I just started doing this in the community too where I had a space for different platforms like I have a YouTube space and a Twitter space and an Instagram space and ideally I just make those spaces and people can join them however if they would like you know but there was no way of making that experience possible without making those spaces joinable for the basic members so there's just like little things I keep running into that tells me if there's permissioning I'm just going to create a different space for the most part cool thank you Jay this has been enormously helpful uh anything else come to mind at all that you would uh recommend as we embark on this project you gave a great summary of a lot of the key things that I said a minute ago but I would just double down on saying the better the initial experience somebody has after they swipe their credit card the more coverage you have to kind of figure out and make this experience awesome like a really great first experience will carry somebody for months in the community believing that this is going to be different and awesome so I would really try to over index on making that that feel kind of magical okay brilliant it's been enormously helpful um and finally I guess cuz if if anyone has gotten to the end of this recording uh any tips for someone who does not have a huge audience looking to start their first Community I get this question a lot I think you need five people uh if you if you want to start a community I think you literally only need five people 10 would be great but I have to think there are five or 10 people in your life that you could reach out to and say I'm doing this thing it's for people like you I think you're going to get a lot out of it the smaller the number of people you have initially the more I would lean on Real Time programming in the beginning like you have the benefit with a small number of people that you can basically create onetoone relationships and interactions between all of them by having some Live Events and getting them to commit to going there because when people have real time experiences even if it's on video with other people now suddenly the the two-dimensional profile photo and name that I see in the Forum I feel more connected to that person I'm more likely to help them uh and feel invested in their success as well so that kind of goes back to making the entry experience really good but you really only need 5 to 10 people to start and then those people are going to feel really close they're going to tell their friends and it's going to grow slowly but that's okay because slow growth means a great um experience of integration into the community and you can build a really strong culture and have really good retention really thanks so much man and where can people learn more about you and your stuff yeah uh I am everything Creator science you can go to Creator science.com um if this is interesting to you I have a membership course that goes even more in depth into what we did here um I created a coupon code for folks of Deep dive you can go to Creator science.com deepdive if you would like lovely thank you so much Jay appreciate it thank you all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye
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