How To Build An Online Community - Jay Clouse | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

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Hello, Jay. Welcome to the podcast.

How are you doing? Hello, Olly.

Good to see you again, my friend.

Doing well. Thanks.

Thanks for taking the time to hop on.

I thought we would do a bit of an experimental format of Deep Dive.

I'm trying to be a bit less optimized when it comes to how I do my podcast and a bit less like a 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 OK, because I was hoping to talk to you about creators and the communities and this new wave of people making money on the internet through communities.

How does that sound?

Sounds great. I'm excited about it.

It's been transformative for my business and a lot of folks in my community.

So happy to chat and help all again.

So for people who might not know who you are, can you give a quick intro?

And yeah, who are you?

And what 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.

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 dollars in revenue per year.

And we've done some really unique things with it.

Not that will be prescriptive for you by any means, but it gives us some different levers to pull and look at what you're trying to do and see if it makes sense.

How did you get into all this stuff?

How did life lead you to this point?

That's a good question.

I started in startups because my parents were high school teachers and my entire extended family growing up were actually K through 12 teachers.

And when I went to college, that was the only 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?

But at that time, when I was in college, that was when 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.

I 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 there are 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 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 first start making money from writing?

In the beginning, it was actually group coaching.

I did some freelancing right off the bat because in the beginning, the fastest way to generate any revenue is selling your time.

So I was doing WordPress websites, I was doing 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 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 emails.

So I have this group of people that I could market this to.

And that was step one, is 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, but now that whole machine is working and it's a great life, I gotta say.

Interesting, nice. That's super interesting to hear.

One thing that strikes me as you were speaking is that I think a lot of us in this sort of creators coaching other creators space, from the outside it can seem as if the only way to make money as a creator is by coaching other creators.

And it's, I don't know 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 you and me who coach 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, we can make really good use of platforms to talk about these things.

My membership, 200 people, the majority of them, the 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 gonna see your stuff.

If you're not interested in running or plant -based diet, you're not gonna see your stuff.

We had another guy, Craig, who 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.

There are times when I genuinely have distaste for 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. So what was your, how did your, I guess, what was the history of your community, the lab?

And where did the name come from?

Good question. So I actually think we need to go back a little bit further.

That group coaching program that I started doing, that was in 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 are 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 of it in the pandemic like most other people did, I guess.

It was very, very unique use of tools back then, 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 to 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 because 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 continue 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 gonna bet on one thing, I'm gonna 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 lots of things have changed.

The business was finally branded as Creator Science.

And that year we rebranded 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.

You know, as you will have no doubt heard, Alex Formosi is going all in on school.

And it seems like the new, you know, 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 dabbling with that.

When I was at university, I was building my own business completely unrelated, but I was keeping an eye on the make money online space.

And, you know, dropshipping became a thing.

Amazon FBA became a thing.

Couple of years ago, it was all about start a social media marketing agency.

And now it seems to be start a community, because everyone seems to be like, if you want to make your first 10 K on 10 K a month online, the way to do it is community because of recurring revenue and because community is the future and stuff.

What's your take on community being the new dropshipping?

There's some truth to it, but what we're going to see is an explosion of communities that are done poorly and 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 the goal.

And as long as you do that, then you don't have to worry so much about this incoming glut of communities that are going to be done poorly.

What sort of value do people get from these online communities?

And I asked because when we launched our YouTuber Academy in 2020, I was kind of saying to my team, who needs a community?

Like don't people just want to consume the content and then just take action on the thing?

That's how I did YouTube.

I never really had a community.

I just put my head down and did the work.

But 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 the community of friends.

And then we did the first cohort of the course.

And in our feedback surveys, people kept on talking about the community.

I was like, what the hell?

It's not about the content.

So yeah, 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 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 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 second to that.

So first and foremost, connection is what people want, whether that's 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, and I can give you some examples 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 what they care about, what their purpose is.

And when they have such a great experience, they begin to learn something about themselves and identify with it.

There's that old joke of, how do you know somebody's into CrossFit?

They'll tell you. Well, that's kind of like a small example of when people get really into something, it becomes part of who they are and they wanna talk about it and that's powerful because that gives them purpose, that gives them a feeling of understanding of who they are.

Nice. So it's not about the content.

I think that would go into the transformation bucket.

It can 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 onto as far as the value proposition goes.

Like if I'm thinking about, 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.

But I would argue that a lot of the stickiness or recurrence that comes in community comes from connection or a sense of identity.

So if I were to come to you and I guess I'm coming to you and being like, Jay, I really wanna do this community thing.

We've got our YouTuber Academy community already, but it's a sort of free lifetime access once you buy the course type thing, which is somewhat active, actually, surprisingly active.

I think we had like 800 active members in the last 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 the name we've actually landed on, weirdly initially it was Productivity Club and now it's Productivity Lab.

And like in my book, a lot of the tactics are framed, well, all the tactics are framed as experiments.

Like there are 54 experiments in the book and there's a whole final 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 five to 10 million a year in recurring revenue.

What, where do we go from here?

Like how would you go about like, coaching me through?

Is this a good idea?

Is this a bad idea?

What are the sort of things that we should be thinking about?

A man with your reach and the different assets that you're controlling, there's all kinds of things that you could do well.

So why a community?

What is it about a community that's calling out to you?

Good question. Actually the word community is not the first word that came to mind.

I was sort of thinking, I wanna create a sort of peloton for productivity.

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 goddamn 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 actually is that thing?

And I found that, like for example, 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, I know I'm gonna show up.

I know I've prepaid for the thing.

I've financially committed and I'm just gonna do the thing.

Yes, I could do the workout on my own, but I know that when I do it on my own, I either don't do it or I half ass it.

Similarly, I have friends who go to exercise classes for that reason.

That you know, 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 didn't use the word community.

What if we had a sort of peloton 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 RSVP to, there would be in your calendar, you would show up.

And I joined a few Zoom co -working sessions during the pandemic at the London Writer's Salon.

Yes, I love that, I was gonna bring that up.

It's so good, yeah.

And I made so much progress on my book in these randomized Zoom co -working sessions, which were free.

So I was like, what if we bring all this together, a CrossFit sort of peloton sort of online we work 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 goddamn thing that you've been intending to do.

Yeah, I think what people look for a lot in, well, you can just say products broadly, is they love the promise of, hey, you're trying to get to this point B, 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 gonna get to where you wanna go even if it's kicking and screaming.

So I love this frame of peloton 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 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?

No, good question. We don't want this to impede my team, my content team.

In that I wanna still continue making content on the internet.

We also don't want this to end up taking ridiculously large amounts of my own time.

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 want wanted to be a like a YouTuber Academy three times a week, Ali rocks up and delivers a sermon for two hours at a time about some productivity concept.

So I wanted 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.

If for this thing to be good and I want this thing to scale, I think we can always hire more people.

We can always hire a full -time community manager.

We can always get free answers underneath that person.

Like we have a lot of resources in the business to make this really fricking good.

And one thing I'm reluctant to do, you know, one of someone on 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 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, kind of like Apple rather than Facebook.

You know, like, this is the thing, we're gonna lead the thing and we're gonna hold your hand through the thing because we know best.

Rather than, hey, this is the thing where you guys can figure out what you want to do.

It's like, I'm much more worried about that model.

Yeah, yeah. I recently heard you on my first million talking with Sam and Sean and you reinforced this idea about separating the promise from the delivery of the product.

So what I've heard so far is a really compelling promise.

You know, peloton for productivity.

Like, this is the thing where if you're willing to join this, you are going to be more productive.

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 hardest nut to crack?

What feels challenging about making this live based on what you've already kind of thought about?

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Okay, what feels challenging about this?

What feels challenging about this is that it feels like there's a lot of pressure on, like, I feel a certain sense of pressure for it to be done right from day one because I know that this could be a really good thing and I don't wanna fuck it up by me just not having, not like speaking to the right

people or, you know, which is why 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 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?

Well, I think, yeah, I think one of 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 manifest in the community weekly reviews, monthly reviews, quarterly reviews, daily sort of check -ins that feels easy enough.

And in the first month, two months, three 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 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 productivity.

I just know that Ollie's going to help me do that in the productivity lab.

Ooh, don't we need to be, say on the sales page these are all the features?

I don't think so. And we're tied into that?

I don't think so. And I don't know that you think so either.

Like I think that 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 with the delivery as possible because you just quickly discover, you know, it's like 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 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 and we've sold them an annual membership.

So can we get rid of that?

The less you specifically promise from a delivery standpoint in terms of like the actual programming, the more flexibility you have to right size the programming and experiment with stuff.

You know, you're calling this a lab.

You want to experiment with even just the delivery so you can get that best outcome.

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 fricking useful insight.

If someone's watching this and they're like, that sounds kind of obvious, that's not obvious at all.

That's just like, we've sold annual memberships for our YouTuber accelerator, $5 ,000.

And then we kicked ourselves three months later to be like, oh fuck, that thing that we put on the sales page.

Totally. We realized that that's not actually the thing, but like we put it on the fricking 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 out annual memberships, although I'd love to get your take on that, because I think annual is nice.

You don't have to worry 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, potentially, or maybe Pat Flynn.

I spoke to him the other day.

And so I was so worried, because we don't want to go on the sales page and then we're then tied into delivering annually.

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 it, then that's good and you're going to get more success stories and the sales page is basically promise success stories.

And that should work.

In terms of annual memberships, I love that.

This was non -obvious to me initially and non -obvious to a lot of people that I talked 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 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 succeed.

So for a membership, 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, is recurring revenue, it's like software.

But the thing is, 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 achieved, and they achieve it in a year's time and they churn, and they say something's broken because people are churning out.

Well, you designed the community experience to be 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.

So anyway, 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.

It 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 look, this is a lab, this is an evolving community, we're gonna take member feedback on board and we may change things up as we go along, if at that point, if we do get

six months down the line, we change something, someone doesn't like it, and they want a refund, it's like okay, fair enough.

Yeah, most of the time you won't hear from anybody like that anyway, but 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.

So the less specific you are with the delivery promise, I think the better.

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 a private opening and a public launch.

Some people will use language like alpha, beta, whatever.

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 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 Ollie is doing, it's gonna 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 and the public launch.

I like your model of a sales page, it's promise and success stories.

That is a much simpler model than the Jim Edwards Copywriting Secrets 14 -part framework on desire, agitate the desire, rigor of the promise, figure out the benefits, figure out the features, do the offer stack like the whole shebang.

What's your approach to sales pages?

To be honest, I think to a fault, I do leave a lot on the table because I tend to really do a lot of no sell selling for better or for worse.

So 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 in a heightened state of need.

But again, I think that's to my detriment in a lot of times that I don't do at least more of that.

So it's a spectrum.

It's a spectrum of how far you want to go in terms of really selling and I think anything is valid.

It just kind of comes down 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 language of the person selling me the thing.

So in general, the more case studies, the more testimonials that you have, the more successful it's gonna 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 gonna be more compelling than anything else.

Yeah, as I was browsing 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.

Yeah. I don't really lean into videos on 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.

And it's hard to fake.

Like 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 that people are having, you know, higher and higher, like a higher guard of do I trust this or not?

And when somebody records a video, they're 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 the lab now I, or, you know, after joining the lab, I am able to just finish the sentence and do it off the cuff.

People feel that honesty.

And again, I find that to be pretty compelling.

Hmm, nice. 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 tears, 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 three months, the first 12 months?

So it's worth actually doing some spreadsheet work on this, but 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 and 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 bias and a pre -framing for what people expect from it and how they expect to engage with it.

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.

So I have an assumption that with Productivity Club or Proctitive Lab and what you've told me so far, that's gonna be more on the content and programming side.

Is that accurate? So I tend to see those 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.

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 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?

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 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 current thoughts in pricing?

Or maybe even we could start with, how would you describe the target customer for this?

Yeah, great question.

How would I describe the target customer?

A phrase that came to mind is something like, ambitious entrepreneurs, creators, and professionals.

But that is very, very broad.

In reality, okay, so there's kind of two things here.

Number one, 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?

The way we think of our audience is that, our audience is probably in three buckets.

We've got the professionals who are corporate employees, they want to thrive in the nine -to -five, 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.

They have a nine -to -five, they enjoy the nine -to -five, life is good, blah, blah, blah.

They're not desperate to quit the job, but they also want some sort of creative side hustle.

Man, if that could make money, poof, we're off to the races, that's so good.

Then we have the entrepreneurs who are like, I don't have any requirement for work -life balance, I'm gonna 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.

I wanna quit my nine -to -five so I can then work 24 -7, you know, all that kind of stuff, which are people like me, broadly.

Although I started off as a side hustler and then became that kind of guy.

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, you know, at 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 wanna do and now I trust this guy to help me get there, it's like, why not?

But at the same time, I don't want this to be an entrepreneur's club or the entrepreneur's lab, although that could be a future product.

I want it to be the productivity lab where I would love for this to be a sort of almost like mass market product, 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 for Accenture or McKinsey

or something to get just as much value from this assuming they can expense it as an entrepreneur for whom even just doing one co -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. How much of this is based in direct data versus assumption?

A lot of it is assumption.

Some of it is data based on the students that we have in our YouTube accelerator, our 5K a year kind of offering.

Some of it is based on like when we poll our audience and just do casual surveys like, or 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 their hand up, hands up if you want to be a creator.

Just the sense of like, okay, these three sort of buckets and then there's the students that aspire to 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 said here.

Entrepreneurs are a small market overall.

Yes, they have probably higher willingness to spend but 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 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 a willingness to pay and maybe it means something different to them.

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 this gives me more time with my family, maybe it's against me, a promotion at work.

So, for 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 knew that's what I'm trying to do but I'm not gonna be prescriptive.

Yeah, 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 wanna make a product for everyone.

Even with all the caveats around like, hey don't make a product for anyone, everyone make a product for one person.

It's like, actually we kinda do wanna make product for everyone because I do think Peloton, just like Peloton is aimed at, maybe it started off as like the bros and the entrepreneurs and the human husbands and stuff but actually Peloton is a product for everyone who can afford it, 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 targeting.

The sort of person who would consider buying a Peloton is the sort of person who we would, who would be perfect for Productivity Lab.

Yeah, I think where this really comes to a head and you've probably already identified this is in the pricing because if we wanna 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

a thousand dollars a year for, for this entrepreneur, creator, business owner crowd, but the majority of folks probably can't budget that.

That's a very large part of their disposable income.

So I think where you have to draw a line is, are we trying to create the product that serves 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 gonna take a longer period of time.

So, and it's gonna come with a little bit more operational overhead because there are more people.

The larger the membership is, the more operational expense in terms of your own head count and time and capacity that you have to put into it.

So it's, it kind of comes this point of, are we trying to stake our claim in a larger market over here around broader productivity for everybody or do we see this as just 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 us being equal, I'd rather have three times fewer customers paying three times as much.

Because we were toying with $1 ,000 a year or $300 a year for as the price point.

$300 a year lets 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 $2 .74 per day or however the math works out.

And 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 less stressful business than lower ticket, higher volume.

But yeah, I'm curious what's your take on that.

I think that's absolutely true.

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.

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.

Does it still impact the business?

Yes. Is it on your shoulders?

No, not if you design it to not be.

I would be thinking about the broader Bali strategy and vision three years from now, five years from now, because everything that you produce and put out there is building some understanding of the Bali brand.

So if you go in the entrepreneur direction with this, that is going to at least add a small bit of perception that Bali serves this specific audience rather than the broader audience.

So if you are, and I'm kind of saying this because I watched 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.

And I think if that is true, I would be creating products and experiences that back up that vision.

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.

I like the idea of 99 .9 % of my stuff being free for all and the business being funded by a small number of people paying higher ticket prices because then the free stuff becomes very, very accessible.

But I've always sort of shied away from like mid -ticket pricing because mid -ticket pricing, unless the numbers are huge, it doesn't move the needle for our revenue.

And huge numbers of paying customers is more faff.

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 high ticket.

So what's your, yeah, what's your view on like 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 let's design for it.

So if that approach is what's appealing to you, then there's probably something there.

I think any choice you make, you have to then counter that with some intellectual honesty of, okay, if I'm saying I'm gonna do the high price membership for the more sophisticated, affluent customer, what does that mean for the free offering that I'm offering to the broader public?

What am I doing for free to them to also help them double their productivity?

And if you have a plan for that and this customer, this product subsidizes that, then I think 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 these reviews and these facilitated planings infrequently for free for the larger audience.

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 the direction that I was thinking in that I plan to continue making free YouTube videos and writing cheap books forever.

We're releasing fairly low ticket software as well, productivity software of the next year or two or three.

And we are gonna have free events as part of the productivity lab.

Maybe every quarterly planning session is just like a free for all, people can rock up.

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 a yeah, it's just this balance of do we wanna be selling $300 a year memberships or $1 ,000 a year memberships 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 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 gonna 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.

But that is a very cool concept.

I know a guy who has a platform for co -working sessions and stuff.

And it's like, if you can platformize and productize like the thing, like the co -working sessions, I think would be hugely valuable and much, yeah, if we can figure out the way to scale it, much lower ticket.

This is good. What's your take on how many people, I've watched one of Pat Flynn's talks and had some thing and he was talking about kind of doing an alpha test and then stabilizing and letting a few more people in beta test stabilizing before ahead of the public launch.

You mentioned private community, private opening.

Private opening, yeah.

Do you have a sense of like numbers that are like, what is a good number of people to bring in the private opening?

Well, again, this is kind of rooted in, to what degree you wanna lean into the relationships and connection side of things.

Because if you are listening to this and you wanna have a community that's built more on the relationships and conversations between members, the slower you integrate people the better.

Because literally the retentive and incentivizing mechanism for people to post and meet each other really is benefited by one -to -one 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.

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 in a private opening, like with one email or something, then that's a harder thing to do.

If you're gonna lean more in the content side, I don't think the limit matters quite as much.

I would just say where most communities really fall apart is they underbake the onboarding experience and just the first experience with your thing.

When people swipe their credit card, they have peak excitement and also peak anxiety of did I just make a huge mistake?

And what a lot of memberships will do is they'll be like, all right, here's the playground, have fun.

And what you really wanna 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 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 kind of the threshold.

But for you, I think it's just really good hand -holdy training of you're here.

This is the next step you should take.

This is the first event you should attend.

And you could accommodate quite a few people, I think.

That's a great idea.

How do you guys do onboarding for new members?

So when people come in, the first thing that happens when they type their credit card is they actually get a scheduling link to schedule a one -on -one call with me.

This only works because I charge pretty high ticket and have a small number of members.

But 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, welcome to the community.

By the way, I would 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.

Then they are kind of walked through a webpage 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 getting 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 the profile.

Then they have an onboarding course using Circle's course functionality, so I can see, are you going through this?

All the while, this is 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 really, it's really interesting to question as many times as possible.

Every time somebody takes a step in their mind, they're thinking, now what?

And you really just want to answer that now what question as many times consecutively as you can.

And that's kind of a fun game, just push that.

I'm not gonna tell you where the end is because maybe you'll find an end that I haven't found yet.

Just keep pushing that boundary.

Wow, okay, that's a really, really good idea.

I'd love it if everyone could have a one -on -one onboarding.

Probably not with me, but with someone on our team.

Well, let me tell you about this.

I haven't been able to figure this out in this context yet, but do you remember Clubhouse?

Is Clubhouse still around first of all?

I'm not sure if it's still around, but I very much remember it.

So back when Clubhouse was just getting started, you had to get a personal test flight invite for it, 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 it was 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 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 prerequisite information that you want, and you feel comfortable in that place, and you also feel like, I know somebody else here.

So that is a gold standard to try to achieve.

It's like with my personal trainer, I had a free 45 -minute session with him where I then signed up to a whole two months worth of personal training.

So I was like, oh yeah, I mean I'll sign up to the free session, why not?

Okay, onboarding, onboarding's stupidly important.

What else is very important?

Or what other things have you seen that destroy communities that we should be mindful of?

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 it's kinda 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 your 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.

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 gonna be seen?

Are people going to accept me in this place?

Am I gonna 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.

It sounds bad to say, but if you can't give people the experience of I just introduced 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 zappured into our Slack channel.

Totally, new introduction, everyone go say hello.

Totally, people ask me all the time.

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 communities that are gonna have such high priority in their members' minds are the ones that are timely.

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.

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 having some prerequisite activity that you know is gonna set them up for success, preventing them from getting some other thing can work for sure.

There's a lot of conversation 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.

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.

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.

I serve entrepreneurs and creators.

Those people don't have 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 gonna use gamification, make sure that it's in alignment with, this is actually getting the ultimate outcome that the individual wants.

What do you think about kind of interest spaces?

I guess if some people in the community wanna make an interest space about parenting or something like that, like do you let them do that?

Or like, yeah, how do you approach kind of like space design in that sense?

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 gonna be like, this is awesome, can we have a space for this and this and this and this?

And 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 wanna 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 want that space to work.

So you have to find some way of vetting.

Is there a 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 kinda help get conversations started, help welcome people into that space.

I think it's a great one done well.

But as you identified with accountability groups and masterminds in 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 to really suss out which ones of these are worth pursuing and putting in place.

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 we can have some sort of like roadmap with upvoting features and blah, blah, blah, you know, 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, oh, this place is growing, it's getting better, it's improving, and not, oh, they over promised and under 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.

It really is like the difference between a trainer in the gym and just putting the equipment out there.

So, more spaces means more equipment.

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 promise using this tool?

It's like the community, the membership, is a tool to serve the transformation, which is, in our case, doubling their productivity, in your case, growing your creative business.

This is why I'm really bullish 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 your progress through it.

That should be the mechanism that trains people on how to use the tool.

Oh man, you have 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, 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, 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 set up the platform.

Like, hey, you probably should spend five minutes configuring notifications in a way that serves you.

Here's how to configure your notifications.

Simple stuff like that.

This is good shit. Okay, anything else, mistakes that you've made or that you've seen other people make that we should try and learn from?

I don't know how much this applies to you or not.

I think this, again, might apply a little bit more on the side of things where conversation and relationships are prioritized in a 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 wanna be a creator.

You have people who are figuring out 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 holding their own back.

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.

It's hard because 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, 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, 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 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, as I've been sort of thinking about building this thing, one of the instincts I have to fight against is the instinct to keep on adding more shit to it.

Yes, you must. Like the teams like, well, 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 the content?

And then we're like, okay, but we can have a space for this and a space to post your daily goals because that would be helpful and a space to post your evening reviews because that'd be helpful and a space to post your weekly reviews because that'd be a space to put your life vision because that'd be

helpful. And now before we know, we've got like 15 spaces with zero members inside the community, who just in theory, it would be useful to have space, 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, especially with content.

If you think about other subscription businesses like Netflix 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.

Recurring value comes from something that is new constantly.

And do you want to get on the treadmill of saying I'm gonna create a new course every month the way that Netflix adds original programming every month?

Probably not. But saying every month, we are still having these highly effective goal -setting workshops or these productivity things.

That is the recurring value that you have there.

And I think you can find 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 comparison.

Let me give an example.

In the lab, I was doing an office hours call every single week because it was the most popular event we had, so I said, 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 things that you know are high value, you can make each of them a bigger deal.

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 any event that we do because the stakes are higher.

You could look at it from a scarcity and urgency perspective.

But if you choose a ton of stuff, I think it actually can sometimes create non -participation because there's overwhelm, but also because each one of those things now feels relatively less valuable.

What's your thought on recording the calls and recording the sessions and sticking them somewhere on Circle as like a archive of recordings?

I think generally good, depending on what the session actually is.

Are you gonna record an hour long co -working session that's just an hour of silence and put that up there?

No, I don't think that's gonna be super useful.

But if there's something that is teaching, that's great.

That creates an asset that builds a library 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?

Because eventually you might have enough assets that you can actually create like onboarding pathways.

Somebody comes in, they answer a couple of questions.

You say, well, we have identified that there's like four or 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 of these five paths make the most sense for them.

And we're gonna put them down the specific path with the specific series of content that we know is gonna serve them.

So 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 send them an invite link?

If I were doing it today, I'd probably use Circle Payments.

Circle Paywalls 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 Paywalls 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'll have less support cost having it in Circle.

Okay, so Productivity Lab leaning towards higher ticket, but I will definitely think about what you suggested the 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 expand over time by polling the members and seeing what people want and then delivering on that.

Timeliness is ridiculously important and always keeping in mind what is the sort of now what dot dot dot thing.

And like really kind of being almost a benevolent dictator and like really holding their hand, like this is how you use the thing.

Introductions were really important, onboarding course, really important, teaching them how to set up notifications and stuff.

Sort of their profile, 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 onboardings with the team, at least for the first X number of members, just so we can actually poll people to be like hey, what are you hoping to get from this and what made you sign up?

And especially at the start for the private opening when we don't have like a whole shebang sales page and everything.

With your stuff, I think you have like Friday co -working or something like that.

Yeah we do. 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 I guess 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.

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 multiple event spaces is only relevant when you have tiered levels of access and events that are only permission to certain people.

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 RSVP they can add the whole recurring thing to their own calendar and it should be okay.

Okay cool, awesome.

Ooh, one other thing, this is possibly a big one.

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 seems to be weirdly active.

And our team is in there as well.

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 Abdaal Academy kind of big Circle thing.

And now 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 Ali Abdaal Academy.

What are your thoughts on like consolidation versus keeping the Productivity Bros and the Productivity People and the YouTube People separate?

I get the draw to it.

I tried 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 gonna be separating that out.

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. What do you mean aspects 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 who 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.

The public members directory on Circle, if you use their native members tab, will show everybody in the community.

And so if you have different levels of person, I was talking about 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 said, this is untenable for the experience I want to give, for like 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'd probably separate the two out because I just find that there are certain complications.

Another reason is actually these 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.

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 gonna create a different space for the most part.

Cool, thank you, Jay, this has been enormously helpful.

Anything else come to mind at all that you would recommend as we embark on this project?

You gave a great summary of a lot of the key things 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 a 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.

And finally, I guess, if anyone has gotten to the end of this recording, 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.

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 gonna 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 one -to -one 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 two -dimensional profile photo, a name that I see in the forum, I feel more connected to that person.

I'm more likely to help them 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 five to 10 people to start.

And then those people are gonna feel really close.

You're gonna tell their friends and it's gonna grow slowly, but that's okay because slow growth means a great experience of integration into the community, and you can build a really strong culture and have really good retention.

Great, thanks so much, man.

I'm working people learn more about you and your stuff.

Yeah, I am everything Creator Science.

You can go to creatorscience .com.

If this was interesting to you, I have a membership course that goes even more in depth than to what we did here.

I created a coupon code for folks of Deep Dive.

You can go to creatorscience .com slash Deep Dive if you would like.

Lovely, thanks so much, Jay, we really had 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.

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Bye -bye.

[The Art of Building Successful Online Communities: Insights from Jay Clouse]-[How To Build An Online Community - Jay Clouse]

📋 Summary

The Shift Toward Community-Led Growth

Defining the Value Proposition: Beyond Content

The Strategic Approach to Membership Design

Key Operational Strategies:

Aligning Incentives and Pricing

Avoiding the "Community Destroyer" Pitfalls

Conclusion: Start Small

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript