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. Or, even the existence of this community itself, which is more than 5,000 members strong, but still very engaged. Needless to say, Daniel has been a dream guest of mine and this is one of my personal favourite interviews. Resources: • Beginner Maps free crash course on building a community business - https://beginnermaps.com/ • Curated Connections, the community engagement app - https://curatedconnections.io/ • Small Bets - https://smallbets.co/ • Daniel's Twitter - https://twitter.com/dvassallo • Nityesh's Twitter (host) - https://twitter.com/nityeshaga/ Chapters: 0:00 Intro 03:31 Why pay guest speakers for live classes? 07:45 Paying as a filtering mechanism 11:45 Daniel's selection process 15:49 Hot takes for running a great Zoom class 20:22 ROI of a repeat class 23:18 Lifetime membership - a great business strategy? 32:26 Overdelivering as a marketing strategy 34:30 Referrals 36:38 Why Daniel doesn't like doing surveys 38:45 Case study from a lifetime customer 41:37 Negative referrals from churned members 42:58 Case for recurring subscriptions 44:52 Small Bot 52:22 The failed community business 57:32 Small Bets origin story 01:00:56 New revenue streams