Building a 5,500+ member paid community isn't easy. Abbey is one of the rare people who's managing just such a community at Health Tech Nerds. This episode is a must-watch for newsletter creators who are looking to turn their audience into a paid community. We cover: - Why direct member outreach drives 10x better results - How to collect and act on member feedback effectively - The power of constant, "annoying" reminders - Why Slack remains the best platform despite its limits - Key...

John Faulkner-Willcocks built a 250+ member paid community in just 4 months with an astonishing 1.5% churn rate. His inspirations? On Deck and World of Warcraft (yes the video game). He's the cofounder of Open Org, a paid community for progressive People & Culture leaders who believe in the radical new idea of leaning into transparency as a way of building companies. We spent an hour diving deep into his "transparency playbook" for building highly engaged communities, including: - How...

As Program Director at On Deck and now founder of Next Careers, Anthony Nardini has helped 1000+ senior operators navigate career transitions. In this episode, he shares his playbook at Next Careers, where senior execs pay $2k to join a community that helps them land their next jobs — and 60% of them refer their most talented friends. With 700+ applications for 100 spots per cohort, his secret is extreme curation and high-touch service. This is a must-watch for anyone building high-end...

Carrie Melissa Jones shares the blueprint for building successful online communities. Carrie is the author of Building Brand communities, founder of the CMJ group where she offers consulting services to organisations like Discord, Google and Airbnb, creator of her own community membership for community builders and leaders and a Youtuber! In this episode we cover: - Sneak peak into Carrie's own community setup - Platform selection strategies - Creating effective welcome experiences- Why...

Ashley has managed to turn on-demand courses into a community experience that supports 1200+ paying members of Smart Passive Income’s All-access Pass community started by Pat Flynn. She has created an innovative "accelerator" model that allows her to deliver the benefits of a cohort-based course without the hassle of doing live lessons. We spent 75 mins exploring her community management workflow in this interview. Resources: Curated Connections, the tool to create connections...

Jordan Godbey has built communities for world's top creators like Justin Welsh and Ali Abdaal. He helps experts start a new business line by helping them build Circle communities at his company Growth Community. In this episode, he discusses his strategies, philosophies and tactics that you can use to start a $10k MRR community. Resources: • Work with Jordan at Growth Community - [https://growthcommunity.co/](https://growthcommunity.co/blueprint) • Curated Connections, the app...

Stephanie Baiocchi is the community team of one at IMPACT where she manages the membership behind the bestselling book - They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. She single-handedly manages a 3,000+ member community, runs masterminds, hosts 2 annual conferences, and creates manages the on-demand course library. We spend an hour diving deep into her playbook for building a thriving community around a bestselling book. Resources: - Curated Connections, the tool to foster authentic...

Bri Leever is filled with actionable frameworks for building a profitable community. She has honed them over the years by building communities through her consultancy - Ember Consulting. In this interview, we explore some of these frameworks. We discuss: • Why you don't need a huge audience to start a community • The key differences between "transformative" and "networking" communities • When to use platforms like Circle vs. Slack for your community • Strategies for fostering...

Scott Amenta might be the most experienced person you'll ever met when it comes to building community businesses. He's simultaneously running multiple 7-8 figure community businesses through Sylva, and building software to help community founders scale. Listen to this episode to understand: • How he identifies healthy community businesses as an investor • Why Slack is still his preferred platform (despite its flaws) • Why data enrichment is crucial for...

Shin Takeda is changing the game for creators by creating done-for-you membership Slack communities for them. Creator funnels their audience, Shin handles end-to-end operations of running their paid community. That includes events, moderation, content, website, strategy and everything in between required to make sure these communities thrive and customers stay happy. Obviously the creators love it. But more importantly - members love it too! We spent 45 minutes diving deep into his...

Jordan Cutler (@jordancutler) has done what most of us aspire to. He grew his newsletter to 50,000+ subscribers in just one year. Along the way, he has made $35,000+ in “passive” income, with $20,000+ coming from a cohort-based course on Maven. Resources: • Beginner Maps for more such case studies - https://beginnermaps.com/ • High Growth Engineer newsletter - https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/ • Jordan's Maven course - https://maven.com/jordan-cutler/mid-level-to-senior •...

Ryan Wardell is the CEO and cofounder of Startup Sauce, a private membership for SaaS founders outside of Silicon Valley doing $5k+ in MRR. This community is special for a couple of reasons: 1. It's members are super accomplished CEOs who only have extremely nice things to say about the community 2. The guy who runs it, Ryan, is not a "startup expert". In fact, he has never even been a SaaS founder. In this episode, Ryan shares his "magic sauce" that has allowed him to get...

Shreman Shrestha is the Head of Community for the Friends of Lenny’s Slack community. This community comes bundled with the Paid subscription for Lenny’s Newsletter and at the time of recording there are 17k+ members in here. In this episode, Shre discusses how this community is able to organise 200+ in-person meetups per year, challenges with organising a great mentor matching program, working with volunteers and more. Resources: • Beginner Maps - free crash course on building a...

Daniel Vassallo is the cofounder of Small Bets - a private community membership for indie hackers, solopreneurs and wanna-preneurs. This community recently crossed 5000+ paying members and has been doing $400k+ in annual revenue every year since its inception ~2 yrs ago. Daniel is a guy filled with hot original takes. He does things differently in this community and it works. Things like charging a one-time fee for a lifetime access or paying guests to do live classes in the community....

Kyle Hagge led the community efforts at Morning Brew's Learning division as a Director of Community. This interview is a “reflection episode” where Kyle takes us back to this time and shares his “magic sauce”. Among other things, he shares how his team decided which courses to pilot, why he chose Circle to host the community and why it's a good idea to automate connections. Resources: • Our free crash course where you can learn the "magic sauce" of top communities -...

Charlie Ward is the founder of Ramen Club - a private community of 300+ bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneurs that gives them the support and education to grow their business. In this interview, Charlie shares the origin story of Ramen Club, how he organises the masterminds, how he organises in-person meetups in different cities of the world and more. Resources: • Curated Connections (our tool to connect your community members) - https://curatedconnections.io/ • Get Powerup (Charlie’s Slack...

Erin Halper is the founder/CEO of The Upside - a private community of top independent consultants that gives them the resources and the support that they need to grow their business. The Upside uses Circle as their community platform. In fact, they were recognized as one of Circle's top performing communities out of more than 10, 000 communities that are hosted there! In this interview, Erin reveals the unique strategies she uses and the mistakes she has learnt from to build a premium...

Clara Ma is the founder of Ask a Chief of Staff, a community membership business that helps Chiefs of Staff level up in their career. If you are one of her 23k+ followers on Linkedin, you will know how full her events calendar for the community is. So, it came as a shock to me when she told me she and her EA were the only people working on this business. This episode is a masterclass on building a valuable events calendar in your community. --- Sign up for the free email course where we...

Ece Kurtaraner is the community consultant for Generalist World, a fast growing community membership business that helps generalists grow in their careers. Along with this, she also works with Rosieland - another private community for community builders. So, safe to say, Ece knows the secrets of building a community business. Her key insight - "Don’t overthink it, don’t try to make it perfect and keep experimenting." Learn more about how she thinks building a community business in this...

Michelle Varghese is the community manager for Small Bets, the largest private online community for entrepreneurs with over 5000 members. She has also helped in managing some iconic communities like Write of Passage and The Pathless Path. Along with this, she is also the creator of "Turn your layoff into a sabbatical" course, host of the Build a Wealthy Spirit podcast and a frequent writer on her Substack newsletter. In this episode, she dives deep into the practical aspects of running 10+...

Anthony Castrio is the founder and CEO of Indie Worldwide, a private community of bootstrapped founders. In this interview he shares his revenue, how he attracted new members in the early days using a challenge, tips for organising a good event and goes deep on the challenges with being an entrepreneur. - Learn how people build community businesses - https://beginnermaps.com/ - Join Indie Worldwide community - https://indieworldwide.com/ - Join the 100 in 100 challenge -...

Grace Ling is the founder and CEO of Design Buddies, a free community with >64k members on Discord and a total audience of >150k. Here she leads a vibrant online community, does in-person meetups around the world, sponsored partnerships, helps designers land jobs and is even organising a conference. In this episode, Grace does a deep dive into how she started this community, how she grew it and how she turned it into a thriving business. This episode is made possible by Curated...

Tatiana Figueiredo is the founder of Business of Community - an online school and community that helps founders create profitable businesses by building communities. She has helped multiple people start thriving community businesses. So, you can treat this episode as her masterclass on building such a business yourself. She discusses her journey of turning her consultancy into a scaleable community business, how you can take the first steps to build your community business and how to grow...

This episode is sponsored by Curated Connections - a simple and powerful matchmaking tool to make communities more connected. --- Logan Kilpatrick is the first Developer Relations hire at OpenAI - the company behind the revolutionary product ChatGPT. He has been responsible for working with the product teams on new launches, creating and maintaining developer documentation, running the developer forum, hackathons, events and managing the ChatGPT plugin store. In this episode, he...