#311: How to Build a Successful Paid Community | Growth in Reverse

0:13Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Last month while I was in Boise for the Lab Offline and Kits Craft and Commerce Conference, I recorded a podcast episode, not for this show specifically, but for Chanel and Dylan on the Growth in Reverse podcast. Chanel is a member of the lab. She's been on this show multiple times. She's always an audience favorite. And this time they turned around the mics to ask me a bunch of questions about community memberships and where I see that space going. Given that this has been a huge focus for our team over the last month plus with the membership summit and now the live cohort we're running, it felt like a good time to share this on our feed as well.

0:55Some things you'll hear me talk about in this episode are the persistent challenge I have found with member led mastermind groups, two onboarding tactics that I've kept secret for a while, the goal of offline events as I see it, what to think through before launching a membership, and the unexpected risk in scaling a community too quickly. That's just a few bullet points. We covered a lot of ground in this one, all related to communities and memberships. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to Growth in reverse. There's a link in the show notes. They do a great job. We'll get to that full conversation right after this.

1:30When somebody asks ChatGPT who are the best creators in your niche, does it say your name or does it mention your competitors instead? Because a response will only share a few names. And with LLMs, if you're not sighted, you might as well be invisible. And that's at the exact moment when someone is deciding who to follow or what to buy. The first step is finding out just how visible or invisible you are to LLMs like ChatGPT. And Ahrefs built a new tool called BrandRadar to show you where you actually stand. It tracks your mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI overviews, and Copilot, and gives you an AI share of voice against your competitors.

2:09That means how often you get named when your topic comes up, and whether you're being mentioned or actually cited as a source. It's built on 481 million real prompts, making it the largest AI visibility database out there. This isn't about gaming AI. It's about finding out what of the work you're already doing, the content, the authority, and the backlinks are translating into AI visibility. Try a free preview of Ahrefs brand Radar at creatorscience.co slash radar. That's creatorscience.co slash radar. Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip, the Apple Sports app.

2:47Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone. That month was the highest month of membership revenue. The following year, February, was our highest month of churn ever. The strongest marketing levers sometimes are not exactly what people actually need. How do you think about scaling a membership like that? It's doing really well. Tons of engagement.

3:22People are loving it. But do you settle in for a little bit and then think about growth? I really care about retention more than anything else. When somebody discontinues their membership, like I do feel it sort of personally. What is a strong marketing lever for a community? Who shouldn't launch a membership? Um...

3:43Welcome, Jay. Yeah. Hey, we're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing a whole collab. I love it. But yeah, Chanel, you've been on Jay's podcast one, two, two, if not three. You just did like a Becky. Oh, okay. If you count the Becky collab, then yes, three times. And arguably three of our most popular episodes. Wow. There you go. Well, maybe this will be our most popular episode. I have a strong feeling it will be. Love it. I love the confidence. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, I thought it would be fun to get you in here and talk kind of memberships, offline events, in real life stuff. Sure. Because I was just part of your second annual offline event for the lab.

4:21Yeah. Which is your flagship community. Yeah. What did you think? It was amazing. Okay, great. It was fantastic. It sucked, Jay. Yeah, I feel like it was an improvement over last year, which is hard because it was rated a 9.4 out of 10 by the people who attended last year. So like not a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like it was. I haven't heard any constructive feedback yet, which means people are either being really nice or I'm missing something or it was great. I don't know. We'll send out the survey this weekend and get some data on it. But from my eyes, everything went without a hitch and I was more calm and in it.

4:58but I thought it was great. I like it. So yeah, how did you, I guess, let's go back a little bit. How did you start, decide to start the lab? Like what was the transition point where you were like, you know what, I think it's time to launch this. I've been doing community in some fashion since 2012. And at that time it was all in person. Like I was an organizer for startup weekend and I facilitated global startup weekend events. And so those events were like weekend long. we would have like 100 to 120 people in Columbus. Every time we did this, we did three a year. And we like really galvanized the Columbus startup and tech community through this.

5:34And then when I left tech and started doing my own thing, I was facilitating mastermind groups, mostly online, but also most of the early folks who were doing that in 2017 were in Columbus. So through that mastermind program, At the time, I mean, this sounds crazy, but in 2017, doing community on Slack and video calls on Zoom, both uncommon things, I had to literally teach people how to download and use Zoom. And on the back end of our weekly calls and our 12-week cohorts, we just continued to let people hang out in Slack. So over the course of four years, we had 120-ish people who had gone through a 12-week cohort, and they were all in Slack.

6:25One of the people who went through that program was Matt Gartland when he was independently running an agency, and he had a product idea. And so he went through that 12-week program, experienced the program itself, experienced how we were doing things in Slack. He was later acquired, like joined forces with Pat. They got an early access beta to a platform called Circle, decided they were going to use that in 2020 when the pandemic hit. They're like, okay, pandemic is hitting. They had done FlynnCon the year before. FlynnCon's not gonna happen with the pandemic. Let's accelerate our plans to do online community.

6:58We're gonna use this platform. He brought me in to consult on that. So we designed and built, which at the time was called SPI Pro in 2020. They asked, hey, can we just hire you to lead our community team? Because this launch went really well. The launch of SPI Pro did really well. I said, no, I'm kind of busy. I'm doing this mastermind thing. They said, what if we acquire that, absorb it, and you just lead the community team? So we launched SPI Pro. We hired Jillian Benbow at the time. She was a great community manager. I was leading the community team as a whole. and in 2021, I worked within SPI.

7:34But part of that acquisition was, I'm gonna keep doing my own content. Like we had, I was very explicit in the contract. Like these are the things you are not buying, which is all of my still going digital properties. And of course, as it goes, 2021, the year I didn't have time to focus on anything besides making content in the business. Like I wasn't doing any services. I wasn't doing weird freelance projects. That's when the content started taking off. so I was suddenly forced with like this I'm essentially doing two full-time things moment of SPI and my stuff I'm of course going to bet on myself so I transitioned out at the end of 2021 started 2022 back out on my own with a big community-sized hole in my life and so I said I learned a lot Circle's a platform I wanted when it didn't exist and I was using Slack so I'm going to do something with that.

8:25And if you recall, I think you were around at the time, I was like batting around different designs in this community. I had this experience in Discord where it was like, watch me design this community because I wanted to try out Discord. I remember being in that. That was actually kind of fun. It was fun. And then we started as a Twitter community, but I realized I don't want to just focus on Twitter for forever. Good move, Jay. Turned it into, at the time, it was called something completely different. It was called Creative Companion Club because the newsletter is called Creative Companion and eventually it became The Lab.

8:56So super long answer, but I would say I've always been a community person. At the time that we started what became The Lab, I just had like a hole in my life of a community that I felt like I was leading or even belonged to. And because Circle was just like the perfect platform for that type of thing, I had more experience with Circle than just about anyone else on the planet at the time. So I figured that this is what I'll do. that's awesome and so that was circa 2022 i think chanel and i both were that year at least part of yeah yeah creative companion totally how we met yeah i don't know if you know that interesting no i mean it would have been it would have been early 2022 but yeah yeah um yeah and it's still going and you know in the creator journey generally i've seen so many waves of people come and go and now i've seen so many waves of communities come and go and it's like I'm still standing.

9:52The lab is still standing. Like there's, there's a longevity to the business and the community that I think is pretty rare in the content space. Um, and I get it. It's hard and it's evolved too, right? Like when you first launched it, it was a certain price point. I think you had like a cap on members and all that. Yep. Yeah. We, we initially had a cap because I wasn't sure I could get above 200 people and have it be the experience that I wanted, Because at SPI, we had, I think, close to 600 when I left. And that creates new positives and new challenges. And so I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to do that.

10:32So I capped it at the time, which was a fantastic marketing move. And eventually, I realized that number was maybe directionally correct, but arbitrary and limiting, of course. So I moved to an application model, but the marketing of the cap was so good that there are a lot of people who still ask me, like, are you still at your cap? Like, right. So that's been a difficult thing to actually overcome in retrospect is like letting people know we don't have a cap anymore. We do have an application, but there is there's not like a hard cap on it anymore. I remember that when you were getting close to hitting that cap, you would like tweet out.

11:08You're like, all right. Yeah. We're at 196. Totally. And it was amazing. It might still be my high. No, it's not. But it's the highest month of membership revenue ever. It's not the highest month of business revenue, but that month was the highest month of membership revenue. But, you know, the thing that I learned about that, scarcity and urgency, both in play there. Great marketing drivers. But the year after, I remember we sold out in February. And it was Valentine's Day because I was at a hockey game on a date when I was tweeting out that we're running out of space and I was not happy. But the following year, February, was our highest month of churn ever.

11:44Wow. Because people joined because they're like, yeah, I got to do it. But it wasn't necessarily from this like considered, what does that mean? Do I have space for it? Do I really want to do it? And so I struggle with marketing generally, not that I'm bad at it, but that the strongest marketing levers sometimes are not exactly what people actually need. And yeah, that's an example of seeing that in action. What is a strong marketing lever for a community? Well, scarcity and urgency always matter. I would say that status and affiliation matter. You know, like I would say probably that a place like Hampton is really good at leading into like status and affiliation.

12:25Or Sean's new thing, Aspen, I think is probably a little bit more status and affiliation than what we have in the lab. But generally, you do need some level of urgency to get people to make a decision because decisions are stressful and feel high stakes. And if I don't need to make a decision right now, then I'm probably not going to make a decision right now. And so you need to create some real genuine tension that says you need to make a decision right now for better or worse. Otherwise, people just stay on the fence forever. So as an evergreen membership, typically, that has created some challenges.

13:02but things that we've tried. We'll do sprints every now and then where it's like for the next four weeks, we're all going to focus on this. We're gonna have some live sessions around that. That always works. In terms of like, sorry, advertising that publicly that we're doing this. Yeah, correct. Folks that have like indicated some level of interest or putting it on the sales page or something. We'll do masterminds three to four times a year. That's always a strong pull for folks and a reason to join now rather than later. If you just do open and close doors, that also works. But I look at that and I'm kind of like, most of the time it's kind of a faux urgency.

13:35It's not quite genuine, but it materially works that well. We are as a team thinking about doing an open and closed doors. And as we're recording this right now, we're currently on a wait list because there is some benefit to everyone joining at the same time so that you can have some like kickoff activities and connection between folks, depending on how many times per year we did that. We could say like, maybe we only open doors four times a year. And that's also when we do mastermind matching, we have a kickoff call. There's some benefit to doing that for sure. There's also a cost. If people are at peak excitement when they apply, however much time passes between that moment and opening the doors, like there's probably a degradation of that.

14:20And maybe they're in a moment where they wanted to join something and they found something else. Right. So evergreen doesn't drive urgency, but we do have a super high conversion rate for people who apply and are accepted who join like I'd say close to 90 percent. Nine out of 10 people who apply and are a fit, they join because I send them an email pretty quickly. Let them know like, hey, this will work for you based on what you said in your application. It's all that's a personally recorded video for me specifically to them. So that works. And I think part of the reason that works is because I am replying near the point of peak excitement, which may not be true if we do open and close doors.

15:02Some trade-offs there. Trade-offs, for sure. So you mentioned before that you feel like the lab is kind of rare in the space because it's just so different and - Old. Enduring. And dog years. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think that is? What makes it so, I don't know, sustainable in a way? Well, it's exhausting. Like a community is never done. It's not passive revenue really at all. And it demands a lot of you. And it also, I don't know, people probably have healthier relationships with their business and products than I do. But when somebody discontinues their membership, like I do feel it sort of personally.

15:40I don't think I should. I don't want to. But I do. And if there are ever times that I think like maybe this isn't for me, it's when we have like a slew of people who don't renew, you know, because it just like, it like hurts. But, you know, a community is never done. And depending on the design of the space, you might end up putting a lot of time into it, but you can design for anything. If you don't want to put a ton of time into it, you just design the experience differently. And that's where a lot of folks fail with memberships is they aren't thoughtful about their own design constraints, the expectations that they set, the experience that they're creating, but they pull people in, those people have their own set of expectations that may not be aligned with what you actually want to deliver because you didn't set the expectations.

16:26And if their expectations aren't mad, they're going to leave. And you're going to conclude, I guess people don't want this. And you're going to feel personal pain when they leave. So I get why this all fails, but I think the more time you spend in pre-production, I would say of your membership, the better off you are to a point. There's of course diminishing returns where you're just overthinking and not taking action. But a lot of people are like, Ooh, community tool exists. I have audience. Let me throw the two together. And that's not really a recipe for success. It needs to be more well thought out.

16:57Yeah. Um, elephant in the room. I was a lab member and I did leave and I felt it personally. I don't recall. And okay. So, um, and it wasn't, Again, it was like the, you know, it's not you, it's me thing. And it was just like, I felt, I think you had a cap at the time. I wasn't contributing a lot and I wasn't in the space enough. And I felt like I was taking a spot from somebody who could benefit from that. That was also an interesting unintended consequence of having a cap because a lot of people who left said that, which I'm a little bit of a skeptic. So when I hear that, I read that as like a convenient excuse.

17:31Yeah. And most of the time, you know, still today when people leave, a lot of times it's like, oh, I don't have time to use it, which to me is I mean, it all comes back to cost and perception of value. So there's if if you are not renewing, then your perception of value is lower than the price of remaining. And the price is not just the the financial cost. It's also if you've been here a year, you are aware of what is required of me to get the most out of this. That's also a cost. So it's the financial cost plus the cost of effort. And if the perception of value is lower than that, I get it. Of course, you would come to that conclusion.

18:11And usually that's like, that's how I read every reason for leaving, except for the ones where it's like, I'm no longer doing the creator thing, in which case it's like, obviously, then this doesn't make sense. But, you know, my mandate to the team, because we're growing now and we're on a a sprint-based system. We're starting a new sprint at the end of June. And that sprint is gonna be all around improving, upgrading, changing the lab experience based on a ton of feedback we've been gathering for the last month. And the goal is reduce the effort, increase the impact. Because forums, which are just a part of the experience, inherently effortful experience.

18:50If you're requiring people to do this call and response, you have to ask for help to receive help. And that's where the value is derived. If that's the only way you're extracting value from the community, that's a pretty effortful thing and vulnerable thing for people to be like, I'm stuck. Not everyone wants to do that publicly. So we've created a bunch of different means for extracting value, the offline event being a big one of them. And arguably, maybe we've created too many. like I think I think there's some complexity that we also need to reduce now because we've tried a bunch of things and all those things exist in some form and maybe it's too much now so yeah it's a dance this is why a lot of communities fail is like sometimes things that were valued and were useful and were competitively differentiated no longer are either and you gotta you gotta change you gotta evolve you gotta recalibrate How do you think about promoting the lab in a way?

19:50Because, I mean, it's not a low ticket thing. Like it's definitely an investment, but so it's got to take time for people to decide like, hey, this is for me right now is the time for me. How do you think about promotion and like getting people on like ready to join? Well, the nice thing is the lab is pretty much the only product that I talk about consistently. Have a bunch of other courses. We have creator HQ, but every week that I'm releasing content, usually there's some reason for me to mention the lab. And I just think of it as repetition, awareness, and over time, I hope you're thinking of like, Hmm, that's interesting.

20:31It becomes, yeah, I think I want to give that a shot. Uh, repetition is just the key to anything. I don't think we go far enough on campaigning for it though. And what we have done over the last year, especially around masterminds is doing campaigns around joining the lab. And lo and behold, when you specifically say like, hey, you should join the lab in the next two weeks, more people consider it more strongly. So should do that more. But there's diminishing returns to any campaigning strategy. At some point, you kind of reach the threshold of, okay, I'm aware. And the people who are interested are interested.

21:06And the people who are aware and not interested are kind of like, shut up. But I just, I try to be, persistent, and I would even say like constant without being annoying. Like awareness is the big thing for me. Because we're not, the lab is not a prescriptive linear journey, at least not as it exists today. The lab is a place you opt into to say, I want a close private network of people who are like me that I can bounce ideas off of. I can pull ideas from, I can learn from their experiments and generally just, it's kind of a social place now too. So I don't want to make big promises. Like if you join here, you're going to double your income next month.

21:52Might happen. I've had some folks who have gotten, uh, I think the peak is a 48 X return on their membership. It was somebody who, uh, she was like fairly active. She's an author. I don't, I don't know if I can say her name specifically, so I won't. but she was like, Hey, I'm writing a book and I need introductions to an agent. And I introduced her to an agent and she got an advance that was way higher than what she was doing on her own. And she's like, this is a 40 X return, 48 X return on my membership. Someone else just told me they had a 16 X return on their membership this year because of a connection in the lab that led to a speaking event that led to a relationship.

22:26So, you know, the, the dirty little secret is a lot of the return comes from the relationships that become an introduction that become something incredibly lucrative. But if I marketed it that way, I think it would also invite people who are coming for the wrong reasons. Yes. So I don't. So I just kind of try to do this subtle, like signaling and filtering and the people who are intrinsically or like kind of naturally interested, they just tend to be the right fit. You know, like that was the biggest point of feedback I got at our offline event this week. People were just like, everybody here is so nice.

23:04Well, the other thing everyone says is on every welcome call and in the conversations this week, people are like, I feel intimidated to be around this group, but everyone feels that way. Everyone feels like they don't belong because everyone is so impressive. But then you spend time talking to any individual and they're so nice and they're so accommodating and they're so helpful. That's true online. That's true offline. But it is something I'm taking a note of to go back to the team and say like, we need to actually address this in onboarding to say, you might be feeling like you don't belong and you do.

23:37And you were, you know, invited for a reason because we don't have any assholes. Like we don't have transactional people and the people who like skew a little bit transactional, they end up not renewing. And those are the ones that actually don't feel pain, you know, because it's like the community is not worse off when they leave. When it's somebody who is very active and they don't renew that I feel pain, not just for me, but for the community as a whole, but that's very uncommon. Yeah. Yeah. Do you see any kind of ratio? Like the more somebody engages them or they're likely to renew or 100%.

24:08Yeah. 100%. It's, it's very, it's very rare that I'm surprised by somebody who didn't renew. Right. It's like, I haven't seen him a little bit. Yeah. This makes sense. So, you know, there's, there's a lot we could be doing proactively because if you're not seen as active, most of the time, that probably means that you're not super engaged, which means you're probably not extracting value from the thing. So why would you put more costs into the system? And we actually have like flags that are raised internally based on people's activity and risk scores. But then there's a lot of people that surprised me, people who renew.

24:41And I'm like, I haven't seen you in weeks, months. And I think like, I'll probably get an email asking for a refund, which of course I'll grant. And then just never come back. And I look at the profile and it's like, they were active yesterday. Oh, I had no idea. So it's really interesting the different ways people extract value and are a part of communities. I see the same thing in our community. I'm like, oh, it feels kind of quiet today. And then I look and there's like DMs flying everywhere. And I'm like, oh, well, they're just getting value differently. And I just don't see it. Totally. Yeah, it's behind the scenes a bit.

25:12Totally. After a quick break, I share my current thoughts on onboarding, retention, and in-person events. So stick around. We'll be right back.

25:23As we approach the holiday season, it's time to start thinking about your Black Friday or Cyber Monday campaigns. I know it sounds early, but for years, I ignored this time of year because I thought it was for e-commerce and not for content businesses like mine. But then I ran a campaign in 2024. And do you know what happened? Not only was it my best month of revenue for the year, but it was my best month of revenue ever, nearly$98 ,000. I'm now convinced that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a huge opportunity for creators like you and me, and we run a sprint in the lab every year because of it.

25:57We're about to reopen the lab to new members on our waitlist. If you're a full-time creator earning more than$100 ,000 per year or on pace to earn$100 ,000 this year, I invite you to join us. Head to creatorscience.com slash lab to get on our waitlist, we'll invite new members on October 1st, which is the perfect time to join our Black Friday sprint. That's creatorscience.com slash lab. You'll be glad you did. Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip. The Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules.

26:34And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone. From athletic stuff like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic stuff like a half mile stroll. Get those steps in. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic, Sierra's got it.

27:05And now back to my conversation with Chanel and Dylan. in there. Oh, just one last note on what you were saying about the engaging. We talk a lot about re-engagement campaigns for newsletter subscribers, right? To get people to make sure they're, they're wanting to still receive your, your emails if they have gone cold. So, um, you mentioned red flags. What do you guys do? Like, do you have certain, um, automations or anything set up in the backend that it's like, if somebody hasn't hung out, like send them an invite to, uh, we should. And now that we have the capacity, we probably will put something like that in place, But like the temptation is, you know, if someone's renewing in the next 30 days, they've been inactive, try to reach out to them, which is better than nothing, but also probably too late.

27:45Yeah. Like we want to go upstream further. The term that's in my mind is like mid boarding because our onboarding is fantastic. And we do have like literal offboarding automations as well. But there's this middle period in the middle of the year where like you had a great initial experience. You probably had some wins. And then it's not obvious what to do next without being like pretty self-driven in terms of using the forum, coming to the events. So I often think like, what can we do in the middle of the 12-month journey to make sure that you have a plan or we help revise that plan or give you more prescriptive steps?

28:24To a degree, people like to be told what to do next. I think we could do a better job there for sure but no we don't have anything active right now because when the team was more resource constrained meaning there was a smaller team and it was mostly just me it's kind of like should you improve your weaknesses or just double down on your strengths there was a point where I was like maybe we should just try to super serve the people who are most active and that's kind of where I landed for a long time but you can make a good argument either way I think. You had a cap on the member count before at 200.

29:05You removed that. How many members are you at now? Standard and VIP have I think 220 combined and on the basic tier we have I think 120 right now. So we're at about 340 in total in the community. How do you think about the size of the community moving forward? Do you want it to grow to 600? I'm up for the challenge. I think people need community spaces they value. And I think most community experiences, and I'm using an intentionally broad term because I think the same is true for like in-person experiences. I think most community experiences are under-considered and poorly designed. And so if there's going to be community experiences that exist, I hope people trust me to make a better one.

29:50And so if the lab were to double, it would cause some problems and I would have fun trying to solve those problems. So I do think what I realized and the reason I removed the cap was because I wanted more density in a lot of different ways. I wanted niche density. I wanted platform density. I wanted geographic density because communities, they benefit from diversity, but they also benefit from some level of sameness. I would love to empower more in-person events. And if I'm not going to be on the ground at all of them, it would require some geographic density. I would love to have more productive, like, here's super nitty gritty on what's working on Instagram right now.

30:36It requires platform density. Some people come in and they're like, hey, I teach guitar on YouTube. and when they meet other musicians on YouTube, that's a different level of shared experience and knowledge transfer than somebody who's a movement coach. You can learn from anybody, but there are some things you just learn better from people who are even closer to what you're doing. So it was very hard to have a 200 member cap and density in any of those areas because if we're at the cap And we have 20 people who are really focusing on Instagram, really hard to create more density around Instagram without kicking people out.

31:20So, yeah, removing the cap allows density. I think density allows for smaller group experiences, which as a community grows, I think you just need to think of it as concentric circles. Yeah. Where you have different levels of experiences that are smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller groups. That's very thoughtful and it makes a lot of sense. in some ways, the more those groups form, they don't require your involvement as much. And it becomes just like a member driven community to some degree that you're knowledgeable with. I saw this when I was at SPI. I carried it over when I started the lab.

31:52The interesting thing about masterminds in particular, a lot of people stick around for years because of their mastermind group. And so we see that retention goes up when someone's in a mastermind that's meeting, but engagement in the community as a whole goes down. So it's an interesting tension because the more people I get in mastermind groups, the more people renew, but also it removes some of the highest value, most potent posts in the broader community because they're just sharing it with their small group. So it's an interesting, challenge to do masterminds and keep people engaged in the broader community, especially for folks who are not in a mastermind, you know?

32:36Yeah. Yeah. And creators are busy people. So it's like, how do you expect them to do both? Totally. That's like the core tension in the community is like, this is a uniquely busy person. So making an experience that is gratifying and fairly effortless to extract value is a challenge. Yeah. You kind of alluded to having basic members. So how long, I think it was like a year and a half ago or two years ago that you introduced that basic tier. People get access to like the content, but not necessarily the forum. You've changed that a little bit. It's evolved for sure. In the beginning, it was just like, well, first it's called the starter tier.

33:15And people didn't like that because they're like, I'm not just getting started. And I was like, okay, fair. And then I called it basic and I don't think that's better. And going back to change the name of the basic tier is something that like I genuinely want to do but the downstream automations and copy and all the things I'd have to unwind and fix with that the switching cost is high so I haven't made the switch of the name yet but the the tier initially was basically just a bundle of all of my paid products okay because like together all the paid products were like $1 ,300 of stated value and it's like you can join the basic tier for$6.99 a year and people joined, but there was no real community experience with that.

33:56And they would extract all the value from those products in year one. There's no real reason to renew. So why is this a membership? So over time, we've added a community forum aspect to that. We've added monthly office hours to that. And that's certainly helped. There are people who find real value in the basic tier and have renewed more than once. That's great. But I do find that folks who are early in the journey want a little bit more structure. So part of what we're doing in the next team sprint, changing things in the lab is we're going to be restructuring the basic tier. We're going to restructure the VIP tier.

34:31Both pretty significantly, I think, to make those experiences better by meeting people where they are a little bit more. Have you found that people upgrade from basic to... When they become eligible, yeah. They do. Yeah. There's an eligibility factor. Right, that's the application. So the eligibility criteria for the lab is either earning$10 ,000 per month of like non-service revenue. So meaning like if you're running a services agency, that revenue, I wouldn't really count the equation of whether you meet that criteria. Or having 10 ,000 followers on any individual platform. Could be email, could be Instagram, could be TikTok, could be whatever.

35:09So one of those two things needs to be true to be eligible for Standard & VIP. And I tell people that if you are eligible, you should join Standard & VIP because it's going to surround you with people like you. It's going to be a better experience for you. So people who are in the basic tier who do end up getting to that area of eligibility, a lot of them have upgraded, which has been really cool to see. I don't think the basic tier is yet designed to help people go from where they're at to meeting that without a lot of self-direction. So that's what we would like to do is try to be a little bit more prescriptive in the basic tier to meet people where they are and help them create a plan that hopefully gets more people to that point of eligibility and joins that.

35:51Yeah. Is there a lot of moderation with your team in the basic tier? Or is that really like you joined and now it's your own? It's not as active as standard VIP either, which is surprising to me. Because generally, part of the reason we have an application and have separate tiers is because if you think about, if you have a membership where people are on different stages of the journey, typically folks who are in earlier stages have slightly more basic questions they have nearer they have like closer wins um and they also tend to ask for the most help right so in a space where you have a people on different stages of the customer journey even if a small number of those people are on the earlier end they will have a disproportionate amount of airtime, let's call it.

36:42And so folks who are a little bit more advanced feel like what they're seeing is mostly conversations that they're past. And so those folks start to question, is this space for me? And I wanted the standard and VIP, really the core lab experience to be for folks who were doing this full-time or could be doing it full-time, which meant that I had to create a threshold of being there with the application. I thought that just pricing alone would be a threshold. And for the most part it is, but like it's enough of a non-threshold that it wasn't, it just wasn't effective enough as a filter. But anyway, in the basics here, it's just not as vocal as I would have expected.

37:25We have a good crowd that shows up to office hours, but yeah, I thought we would be spending more time there. And, you know, as a community builder, I think to myself, we should try to create more conversation here. As a resource-constrained individual, I've kind of let it go. But that's another reason why we want to reevaluate and redesign the basic tier experience. Because if you're not participating in the forum, and especially if you're not coming to office hours, then you're really just saying, I just want access to these paid products. And hopefully you do that and hopefully you extract value.

37:59But if not, then it's not going to be the best experience for you. How do you, I always think of you, when I think of you, I think of like incredible onboarding. And I think you do a great job at that. You also do a good job at retention, obviously. But how do you design a community, anything really for an incredible onboarding experience? Orient people, let them know what they should be doing. Like, how do you think through that? And how has it evolved for you? We've probably redone our onboarding like four or five times. So every one of those times I would hope gets a little bit better. But it is important because a lot of people tell me that they just have a hard time getting people to engage and name your tool.

38:41And it's because people do what they want to do. And for whatever reason, if they're not using your thing, they don't want to. And so why is that? Is it because they had a negative experience? Is it because they've had no experience? You can't have a good experience without having experience. So onboarding solves hopefully both of those issues to say, we're going to give you a positive, we're going to give you an experience and it's going to be positive. And so what I try to do is periodically figure out, okay, what makes our happiest, most successful members happy and successful? And how do I try to tip the scale in my favor for everyone who comes in to be more likely than not to be that type of person?

39:27And the happiest, most successful members in the community are people who make friends. They're people who are engaged in our live sessions. So when I did onboarding most recently, I made two changes. Actually, I made three major changes. Number one was I shortened the onboarding course, we'll call it, where people get in and I say, watch these five videos. That was getting a little big. So I shrank it to make it feel like I can do this in the same session I just signed up in. And in that onboarding experience, I'm hitting a couple of key highlights. One being like, make sure you subscribe to the private podcast feed because those people, even if they're not in circle, are more likely to feel like they are in touch with the community and they're extracting value.

40:16A second one was, here's how to use the member directory to find people like you and things that you care about because it's not obvious. the like kind of customizations we've done in the member directory to find people who are specifically on Instagram and running memberships. I also set up a couple of DM automations to ask people, what are you trying to solve? Or who would you like to meet? Because I recognize that introducing two people together who can learn from each other is a really high value, high leverage thing. So as we continue to improve this as a team, we're gonna be looking at how do we make personal one-to-one introductions for new members a just a standard part of their onboarding experience i think it's still going to be fairly manual and we just did our latest round of mastermind matching uh kicked off this week and my mandate to the team is let's be really nosy about have they met yet and like let's make sure the leader is supported that they have found to meeting time that they have met.

41:19I like overhauled, here's how to run this mastermind. Because again, like masterminds are a hugely positive part of people's experience if they meet. But a lot of groups just like fail to coalesce because either a leader doesn't step up or one or two people kind of don't respond and the leader is being too kind and like waiting for them. And so the whole thing fizzles. So short of hiring like staffed facilitators, we're still trying to say like, let's try to make this member led, but we may end up going to the route of hiring facilitators, um, TBD extra costs, but like probably worthwhile. Yeah.

41:56Uh, but now that we again have more capacity on the team, it's like, can we just be more involved in the two weeks following mastermind matching to make more groups more successful? So anyway, for any community, it's like figure out what makes your members the happiest and most successful, and then try to make it more likely that new members become those people. I like that. Yeah. I remember when I joined the lab, actually it was pretty early. It was still creative companion club, but I do think you had the welcome video and that always stood out to me. And so that's something I've implemented for mine.

42:32Cause I'm like, this is just brilliant. Like it makes so much sense. Yeah. If I were to share two more secrets that I feel very clever and pleased about, and now people, the challenges, everything that I do, like a whole host of other memberships are like, yeah, we should do that too. And then it's no longer special and unique, but I'll share these. The moment somebody purchases something, they have taken all the risk and extracted none of the value. And so like their peak excitement followed by peak anxiety. And so after somebody joins the membership, the first thing they see is a like glowing testimonial from Andrew Connell saying like, this is the best investment I've made in my business.

43:14So that at least at that point, they can be like, okay, like other people again, have, have seen positive results from this. And then after they watch that video, they schedule a 20 minute welcome call with me. And those have been awesome. Um, I think that's a really key part to the member experience because I can learn a lot about these people. It makes me better at mastermind matching. It makes me better at making introductions. It doesn't scale super well, but if somebody renews, I don't do a second welcome call and i really i care about retention more than anything else so i'll do the welcome calls for as long as i can stand to do it um both those touch points i think help a lot in onboarding and it's a big reason why people are like this onboarding is amazing yeah totally we are in boys right now at kit studios for you're here for the lab offline which you've talked about as my voice is like dying on me here um We did karaoke last night.

44:10I will not reveal any other details, but how important is offline events, in-person events to really grow a community? Do you think the lab would be where it's at without your last two events? I've come to Craft & Commerce now three years in a row. And the first year we didn't have like a full offline. We just did a dinner on Wednesday night. Like a meetup kind of thing. Yes. And even just that dinner led to, it was open to folks in the lab to come. And even just that dinner, people got connected and had friends throughout the rest of the event. And they started conversations. So I think three years ago, that first event, we had more people join directly from Craft and Commerce then than we did last year.

44:54And I'm not entirely sure why that is. I do know that the first year I also did the sticker thing on the badges. And I didn't do that last year. So this year I was like, gonna do it. Again, this year, hope it starts some conversations, hope some people reach out. So I don't know if it's important for growth. I do think it's important for attention. That's what it is. Yeah. I think, I think there are a lot of people who come to the offline events and for them, they're like, this is enough. This more than justifies the costs of the year of membership. And that's part of the reason why we do it because some people just aren't foreign people.

45:28But if they can set aside two days in their calendar and take the plane and show up in the room and then just kind of surrender to the experience, they get a lot out of it. And at the level of folks that we have in the community, I really believe one or two conversations per year can more than pay for your membership because there's huge leverage in certain things. Like on day two, we had probably a 20 to 30 minute conversation all about sponsorship that we almost skipped because like I started the conversation like, okay, who here has something to share that's working for them in the realm of sponsorship.

46:03And nobody said anything. And it became very clear like, oh, most of you aren't even like really pursuing sponsorship. So then it became a conversation of how the people who are using sponsorship are doing it. And I think that's going to result in a lot of people in that room trying out sponsorship in their business for the first time and probably paying back their membership very quickly. Because like the rates that you can charge on LinkedIn right now, in particular, like you're going to pay for your membership in one or two sponsored posts. So I think that's very, very productive. And that's exactly the type of thing that I just try to emulate online too, is I hope that one or two of these experiments, one or two of these ideas just clicks for somebody and they're like, yes, that was the 16x return on my investment.

46:47it. So offline events are just a lot easier to, um, create more positive touch points in a very compressed period of time. And it just appeals to a different type of person. Like there's just a segment of people who just want to be in person and just want to take two days out to engage with this. And they're not going to be super active in the forum. Otherwise, that's totally fine. So I think it's super key to retention. I don't know about growth. Okay. Yeah. I've, I've, my mind is going at like, if I was part of the lab and I came to this event, it'd be like, this was so much fun. I'm, I'm going to renew for this reason alone, let alone all the other benefits to joining.

47:25Um, and I feel like, uh, we, we have growth reverse pro membership. Uh, we don't have a like offline event like you do, uh, or in-person event, but we do, when we come here, we host meetups and, and it's a great opportunity to meet people and there's people who, you know, have renewed their memberships a few years in a row and we hardly see them in the community, but they come here and it's like, we're, we're friends and we've, we chat and, and sure enough, they show back up the next year and everything. So I think it's a pretty powerful lever. Yeah. And I think you can do that. I think piggybacking on events that your community is already going to go to is a good idea.

48:01And I don't think you have to have like a full two day dedicated experience up front to do it. I think you could do like a dinner one night. You know, I think that's like a very low lift way of doing it outside of craft commerce. That's what we do at, we're did at CEX. So we did a vid summit anywhere that I'm going. It's like, let's, let's see who's in town. Let's pop something up. Um, and that's probably a good 80, 20. Are you going to do more in-person events? I would love to. It's a particularly challenging season of life to do that. Yes. You have a young daughter and another one on the way.

48:30Yeah, it's just challenging. And so part of the conversation Mal and I will have is like, how do we make this feel less intense and unblock ourselves? Like sometimes we get so overwhelmed by our vision of what would make this amazing that it becomes so big that we just end up doing nothing. And it's like, maybe we should actually just do smaller scoped things more often and make a trip out of it. Like maybe she and I should plan a vacation. And then part of that vacation is, by the way, the first night we hosted dinner. Like it doesn't have to be that crazy. And I want to do more of that. We had, I think we only had one or two folks come internationally to this event.

49:14And last year I think we had at least a half dozen. That was a lot. Um, folks outside the U S don't want to travel to the U S right now and I don't blame them. So I would like to, I would like to, I would like to do a international event, but we were going to do that in November this year. And our due date is late October. So like that, that blew that up. Um, but yeah, next year I would like to do an international event. Will it be our like flagship flagship offline event in June? I don't know. We'll see what the, we'll see what the feedback and the data says. I have a friend, Mallory. Rowan? Yes.

49:52Yes. So she recently launched a membership. It's going great. She's wondering, how do you think about scaling a membership like that? It's doing really well. Tons of engagement. People are loving it. But do you settle in for a little bit and then think about growth? Do you not take your foot off the gas? How do you? There's context here that matters, I think. but let me try to speak in terms that can be abstracted. I think it's risky for a community if a significant portion of members in a short period of time are new. So let's say you have the lab and there's 200 members. If this podcast goes viral on YouTube and 200 creators want to join, and so now suddenly the community is twice as big, but one out of every two people is brand new, the culture of the space is a little bit at risk because you don't have enough culture protectors relative to people who just don't know any different or better.

50:59So I do think depending on the design of the experience, if it's very peer-to-peer, I think you want thoughtful integration of new folks. If there's not like a big peer-to-peer component and it's more prescriptive, linear learning journey, I don't think that consideration is the same. I think scale as much as you can and want. But if a lot of the value of the space is in their relationships between members, I think you want to be thoughtful about the speed of integration to protect the culture of the space. But if it's early, maybe that culture also doesn't exist yet, and you can co-create it with new folks.

51:40So I think it's important to look at, okay, the design of the space currently, the number of people who are in here, and it's going well, what is the bottleneck to protecting this experience? Or what are the risks of this? If it's going great, but she's also hyper-present, hyper-accessible, hyper-responsive, that doesn't scale her individually. So you have to be thoughtful about that. You might have to change the design of the experience. If you change the design of the experience, you have to make sure that you're setting correct expectations when people come in and not doing some sort of accidental bait and switch.

52:16So those would be the things I would look for. But otherwise, if people like it and it's working, I also am prone overthink things. So maybe just go for it and solve the good problems that come up. Yeah. I'm curious, just a few more things on my head. Common mistakes people make or who shouldn't launch a membership? Common mistakes are not setting expectations and allowing people coming in to name their own expectations and not knowing what those expectations are, which makes it very hard to win with those people. So I think it's really important to start your membership and say, what is the purpose of this space?

52:57What is our purpose for? Yeah, what is the purpose for this experience? And then making sure you deliver on that, you know, not over promising and under delivering in that way. People who should not do a membership. I don't know that there's like a person who shouldn't do a membership, but you should know what is true about how you want to spend your time and make sure you don't design a membership that is counter to those design constraints, essentially. Like you should know, okay, here is what I want my relationship to this space to be, and then design it to have those boundaries in place. Because I think a lot of people create a space and it's like, you get to hang out with me.

53:38And depending on how big your platform is, you can have a lot of people who are now here expecting a lot of time from you. And if you're a people pleaser, you'll spend all of your time pleasing the people, which is a problem. So you have to be thoughtful about the size and scale aspirations, your ideal relationship to the space in terms of how you are inputting your time and energy into it and design the experience to fit that. I like it. And I don't know if I can continue talking. The adaptogens, they need to adapt. I know. Come on. this is very off topic but I think it's funny because you have a lab fantasy football league yes and you did not win it this year I did no but somebody in this room did okay I tried so hard to find space in my suitcase to bring that bring the trophy oh my gosh that's so funny uh I am pumped about doing that again this year yeah I love to do stuff like that we did a survivor fantasy league as well okay which was very fun uh yesterday i was with liz wilcox and we recorded a video to send to my wife but then she was like can we send this to the lab survivor chat love it that was very fun too at least it was on survivor loses on yeah this is a finalist on survivor right and she's also like one of the most memeable modern players because like she had kind of an epic meltdown uh that just won't leave the internet so yeah it's check it out if you yeah yeah that's great yeah nice I thought I had to bring it up since you were both in the room and Chanel is the I could have like brought it and had it I know it's the the silent fourth party between us you have to go for a back to back we will never let fantasy football come between us but we will continue to compete yeah that's awesome this has been awesome cool yeah yeah thanks for coming on the show finally for sure talk through everything else we just had to come all the way to boise to do it right that's it just three folks who never record in person recording in person i love that thanks for having me awesome thanks jay yeah appreciate it where can people go to find you and what's your main creator science.com search creator science in your podcast player jay has a podcast everybody i have a podcast um yeah creator science.com cool awesome oh actually let me say We have a full teardown of how we think about memberships and build the lab.

56:06It's a new free lead magnet at creatorscience.com slash teardown. Perfect. And we'll put links to the episodes with you and I below as well. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, Jay. Thanks, Jay. Of course.

56:25Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip. The Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone. Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 cheap charity. A Carnival Cruise vacation. gift cards from DoorDash and Best Buy Peel then play in the McDonald's app Get your bag!

57:07No purchase necessary 50 US and DC age 18 plus See play at mcd.com for rules and play at mcd.com slash AMOE for info on playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd Chance card game ends November 8th Game ends November 22nd, 2026 See rules for prize details Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro