In short
People Magic: How to Build a $1M Community - Episode Summary
Podcast Overview Title: People Magic: How to Build a $1M Community Host: Gina Bianchini, Founder & CEO of Mighty Networks Episode Title: Over Deliver with a 30 Day Challenge Episode Description: This episode addresses the fears surrounding community building and offers a solution through a 30-day challenge. It emphasizes the importance of starting small and learning through action rather than procrastination.
Key Concepts
The Fear of Launching a Community
- Many potential community builders fear a lack of interest leading to low membership numbers (e.g., only 10 members).
- Common worries include:
- Not attracting enough members.
- Being stuck with an unengaged group.
- Fear of not providing sufficient value to members.
Solution
The 30-Day Challenge
- What is a 30-Day Challenge?
- A shorter commitment that allows experimenting with community dynamics without long-term obligations.
- It serves as a practical way to validate ideas and build community engagement.
- Benefits of a 30-Day Challenge:
- No Long-Term Commitment: Participants are not locked into an annual membership, easing their decision to join.
- Learning Experience: Facilitators can learn about their audience, gather feedback, and iterate on their offerings.
- Testing Revenue Models: Opportunity to practice charging for participation and validate pricing strategies.
Structuring the 30-Day Challenge
- Define Participant Transition:
- Bring together individuals undergoing similar transitions (e.g., first-time engineering managers).
- Daily Engagement:
- Offer structured activities or live sessions to keep participants engaged.
- Use daily prompts or themes to guide the challenge.
- Creating Value:
- Focus on tangible results that participants can expect from the challenge.
- Pricing should reflect the value provided and respect the participants’ investment.
Launching the Challenge
- Launch Timeline:
- Standard two-week promotion period.
- Post-Challenge Opportunities:
- After the challenge ends, consider introducing a membership model based on the success and engagement during the challenge.
- Use the challenge as a springboard to unveil longer-term offerings.
Key Takeaways
- Action Over Procrastination: Taking action—like launching a 30-day challenge—builds confidence and helps overcome fears associated with starting a community.
- Validation Through Small Steps: Testing concepts with a short-term challenge can provide valuable insights and help refine the community’s focus and offerings.
- Community Engagement: Building relationships during challenges fosters a supportive environment, increasing the likelihood of ongoing participation.
Conclusion The podcast episode encourages aspiring community builders to embrace the 30-day challenge as a strategic way to validate their ideas and build confidence. By starting small, they can gather insights, foster community, and ultimately pave the way for a successful and profitable community experience.
Next Steps: For a deeper dive into community-building strategies, check out the [People Magic Profit Course](https://www.mightynetworks.com/peoplemagic).
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Note: If listeners have questions about community building or want more insights, they are encouraged to leave their queries in the review section of the podcast.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You do not have to announce anything after or set any kind of expectations after this 30 day challenge. you can just go market the 30 day challenge and prove to yourself whether your audience if you have one or an email list if you have one and if you are starting from scratch it's even better to start with a 30 day challenge because it means that you can practice without any fear
0:37Hi, I'm Gina Bianchini, and this is People Magic, where I show you the absolute easiest way to create a$1 million community. With that, let's dive in. Hey, Gina, I want to launch a membership with recurring revenue, but I'm afraid I'm going to launch this thing and only get 10 people to join. And then I'm stuck with these 10 people for a year. What do I do? I hear this concern and question verbalized more often than you would think. But also, I think a lot of fear around, oh, my gosh, am I going to launch? Is this the best kind of business? What should I do? Do I really even want a community? Really stems from this concern.
1:22am I going to sign up and market a party, an annual membership, that no one's going to show up to? Or worse, I'm going to get 10 people and they're not going to be 10 people I'm stoked to spend the next year with. And you're worried that you're not going to be able to provide those 10 people with enough value that they're going to be excited about what they've purchased. So if that resonates with you, I have a solution. Don't start with an annual membership. Do something smaller one time first. So before you promise anybody anything related to an annual membership, if you are worried at all that you're only going to get 10 people and you're not sure, is your audience going to follow you?
2:14You know, is this the best thing for you to be spending time on? There is a solution. Don't stay with just a bunch of questions. Channel those questions into one action, and it's this. Launch a 30-day challenge. Host one event. Think about having a mini course or a workshop. what do all of these things have in common? They have an end date. They have an end date. So if you launch, I'm just going to stick with a challenge because I think it's the best example. So let's say you offer a two-week or let's even call it a 30-day challenge. And you do all the things that we talk about here in People Magic.
3:04You start with a transition. So you're going to bring people together in this 30-day challenge who are all going through the same transition. It's first-time engineering managers, or it's first-time parents, or it's somebody who is building their first business as a solo entrepreneur, and you take them through a 30-day challenge. So for example, we're going to do this 30-day challenge to put you on the path towards that best year ever. So that's the idea. So you want to actually make sure you still have people in a transition. You still have best year ever. You pull that together to launch your 30-day challenge with your big purpose and the big purpose formula, which is I or we bring together who you're bringing together, those first-time engineering managers, so that we can have our best year ever.
3:58So for a 30-day challenge, it's also I or we bring together first-time engineering managers so that we can plan our 2025 or plan our 2026 or plan our 2027 and organize our goals. You can accomplish that in 30 days in a really, really compelling way. Then, normally in People Magic, when we're creating a community that can become a million dollar community. We would have monthly themes, a weekly calendar, daily polls and questions. In the case of a 30-day challenge, you would just have something for people to do every day. We've also run challenges and seen people do challenges really effectively when you could even have almost like a live session right at the beginning of the day or a mantra or action for that day.
4:49So those things work really, really well. Then you have your offer. So you get to build the muscle around charging for that 30-day challenge so that you can go and validate or prove to yourself that you can charge money and people will pay you the money that you would like to charge. So you want to have your offer. As we've talked about before, pricing has three R's. So it's results. What are the results that they are going to get? Your members or the people who join you in this 30-day challenge, what are they going to get and how would they value those results? Number two, the second R is replacement.
5:30What are they replacing? So what does your 30-day challenge give them that is going to get them those results? But also, what are they spending money on today to get those same results? So it might be a book, it might be a workshop, It might be an annual membership. You want to charge a price that creates respect. Respect for you to invest heavily in making that 30-day challenge as compelling and awesome and valuable as you can possibly make it. And what do we know? We know people pay attention to what they pay for. This is a universal human action. People pay attention to what they pay for. So you want to charge enough that they're going to pay attention to the 30-day challenge.
6:20So that might be$150. That might be$99. But because you can be confident in the results that you're generating for somebody over the course of 30 days, what you replace and set your price so that you can offer people something that you respect and they respect. Then you have your launch. So you would have the same two-week launch timeframe, which we recommend with launching anything, an annual membership or a 30-day challenge or an event or a course. And then what's beautiful, especially if you are on a Mighty Network, is you will have a magical first experience. You do not have to announce anything after or set any kind of expectations after this 30-day challenge.
7:12You can just go market the 30-day challenge and prove to yourself whether your audience, if you have one, or an email list, if you have one, and if you are starting from scratch, it's even better to start with a 30-day challenge because it means that you can practice without any fear. What's the worst that can happen? You have a 30-day challenge that doesn't go that well. You will learn more by having a 30-day challenge where you've gone through those steps of people magic and you get five people or you get 10 people or you get zero people than if you just keep kicking the can down the road and you're like, oh my gosh, I know I can help people.
8:01I know what I can offer is valuable. I know I love to teach, but I'll worry about or I'll launch my membership next month or I'll launch my membership after I get back from travel or I'll launch my membership once I get through the holidays. you are so much better off preparing for and building the muscle around launching, inviting people in, talking to people about a 30-day challenge than waiting until after the holidays or waiting until you're through the next set of travel. You want to get this going because you will learn in a way that you won't if you keep putting it off. So start with a 30-day challenge.
8:57Don't worry about the annual membership. Let's even talk about that for a second. So what's great about a 30-day challenge is, again, you don't have to announce anything after it. You don't have to set expectations for people. You can just have a 30-day challenge, And guess what? When it achieves your goals, notice how I said when it achieves your goals, not if it achieves your goals. But let's say you're able to get 30 people paying you$159 for a 30-day challenge and they fit that criteria of your ideal member. They are motivated by the results and transformation that you have offered them. Well, guess what?
9:40Now you announce a surprise session on day 31. And what are you going to do on day 31? You are going to unveil a membership. So you've already validated and you haven't announced anything. You've already validated that people want this. And then you just tack on the ongoing membership. Not only should you have those 30 people who are a part of it and who have gotten value and actually now are building relationships with each other because that's going to be the key in a challenge. It's why a challenge is probably a better alternative to validate an annual membership than, say, a mini course. Because in a mini course, you'll get stuck on, but what about all of my content?
10:34And my content has to be perfect. And it's all about me. With a challenge, it's like, hey, I'm bringing people together. And we're going to go through this together. And we're going to get this specific result. As a first-time engineering manager, I'm going to over-deliver. and how do I over deliver? I'm gonna make sure everybody's super happy. I'm not gonna lose anybody. I'm going to make sure everybody has a career plan. And most importantly, I am going to push as hard as I can with love, encouragement, and energy to deliver our projects on time, on budget, on scope with a little bit leftover.
11:11So that could be your best year ever for a first-time engineering manager. So you want to be able to offer those things in the 30-day challenge. Then unveil your longer-term business opportunity, that longer-term thing that they could do. And then as you do that, maybe do something really cool like you say for these first 30 people, it's free for the first year. If you bring in three more people, that's a deal to do every day of the week. So now those 30 people, let's say 20 of them brought in three people each. Well, now you're sitting at a heck of a lot more than 30 people and it is starting to grow itself.
12:02So this is just one example of looking for solutions when you are procrastinating. You're putting it off. You know you want to do something and you know that it's going to be really lucrative and valuable, but also you're going to be able to help a lot of amazing people. And yet you just can't get it done. You just can't make it happen. When you find yourself in that situation, break down the problem. First of all, I'm a big believer. I just did this on a different project. Name your fears. Name the things that are getting you stuck. What I love about the question that started this episode is that they named their fear.
12:49The fear of, oh my gosh, I'm going to launch something. I'm going to be stuck with 10 people I'm not that excited about for a year. That is easily addressable with something like a challenge or an event. But if you don't name your fears when you are finding yourself stuck and putting things off and like kicking it down the road, then you won't be able to find those solutions. So this is relevant whether you're starting a community, a business, or you're just trying to get your life in a place where you can set a goal for yourself and confidently build practices that let you deliver against that goal, which by the way is the easiest to be done in a community.
13:37And finally, if you are finding yourself procrastinating or putting something off or just being afraid, join a community. Join a community. Get stories, experiences, ideas from other people. Someone who has run a really successful challenge may open your eyes to not just that as a solution to what's a way I can test my way into having an annual membership, but they might also be able to offer you all sorts of really interesting ideas around how to market a challenge, how to translate or transform something that starts as a challenge into a membership or a really interesting series of workshops or whatever it might be.
14:26But when you can get it out of your head, get it onto a piece of paper, get it into a community, you are going to be able to move so much faster and with so much more confidence. And this is the thing, I have learned this lesson more times in the last two weeks, which is action builds confidence. Action builds confidence. So taking an action, getting a response, even if that response is somebody's not interested, You will have more confidence because you took an action than if you let that gap exist between the thing you want to do and your present moment and not doing the thing. That's what I would recommend.
15:20This is People Magic. I'm Gina Bianchini, and we'll see you in the next episode. Woo!
15:31Thank you for being a part of People Magic. If you want more of a deep dive in any of these topics, but certainly having the framework of People Magic Profit, head on over to the website. The link is in the show notes. Have your own burning question about creating People Magic? Well, I want to answer it. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to just drop your question in the review section wherever you're listening to this podcast and keep tuning in.
From the publisher
So many people are ambivalent about starting a community out of fear. Great news. Mighty has a great alternative than a hard launch of a community. Before committing to hosting a community for the next year, try a 30 day challenge. Through a 30 day challenge you will learn, workshop and get more clear about the community you’re working towards. Additionally, you’ll get to practice charging people along with hosting a live event and even offering a course. You will learn more by doing a 30 day challenge than if you keep kicking the can down the road of an idea that could be a great community.
Get People Magic Profit Free: https://www.mightynetworks.com/peoplemagic?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=organic_sm&utm_campaign=peoplemagic

