# The Laws of Community Building with Natalie Ellis

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVehkL6yx5I
Duration: 1 hr 1 min
Language: English
Words: 12165
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/VVehkL6yx5I

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[0:00] while it was definitely messy i didn't avoid that because well my background is in nothing like this i didn't know anything about product anything about communities i was just like i have this idea and so a website i didn't realize would just crash if i had a certain amount of people on it i really had no idea about these things so at each kind of milestone we just kept out growing what we had and i had to learn about bringing in a product team and what even a product team looks like and a community manager and people with experience of being able to navigate that so i

[0:31] definitely didn't avoid it but it taught me a lot [Music] thank you so much for uh for joining us and and um and first to stephen your husband for uh helping with the tech the tech check there i know i just grabbed him out of his workout i don't even know how i run a podcast honestly but it works we got it it works and we're here and we're thankful for it you know i i do um this is kind of a funny and awkward start to the whole thing but i was like doing my prep for this and greg sent me a bunch of things uh you know to take a

[1:06] look at one of them was your instagram account and the first thing that jumped out to me on your instagram account is that we have a common love of uh cold exposure and the cold plunge so i need to ask as a starting point how did you and your husband i assume he uses it too how did you guys get into this in the first place he persuaded me and he put this thing in the backyard and he was like we're gonna get into cold plungers i was not interested i'm only three months postpartum i was not interested in this at all but one morning the baby just

[1:36] didn't sleep and i had to wake myself up and coffee wasn't working he was like just get in the cold punch i swear it'll work and you know when you're like i've got nothing to lose and i jumped in and i've never experienced bliss and energy like it when i came out so i'm converted i'm hooked i'm sold i it's what it's pretty wild i mean i've been saying this to greg and greg's like uh you know why would i do something painful and hard you know like we have a difference of opinion on this in general but i'm like uh so so back in the day like baseball

[2:05] days natalie so i played baseball in college back in the day i had this friend of mine this guy chad rogers who was a professional player i was playing in college and we used to do like crazy stupid as like mental training under the guise of mental training and part of that was like we would go in the dead of winter in boston where i lived and we'd go like swim in a frozen river like we'd go into our necks and go swim around and see how long it would take before we thought we were gonna die and um so i like used to do stuff like this but then for like 15

[2:34] years did not you know 10 years did nothing of the sort and got the cold plunge and immediately felt that like massive dopamine rush that you're talking about feeling i mean it's it's crazy like this the first 30 seconds of misery is followed by like pure bliss and almost even like uh euphoria when you're when you're getting out of it i know and i really didn't expect that because i'm not the kind of person that likes to put myself in like very uncomfortable physically torturous experiences like that but getting to the other side i was just posting this morning about how it's such a lesson though because so many times we give up

[3:14] before it gets good because we don't know that it's gonna get good and i was so close to doing that at the weekend because i was trying to do a 12 minute one and i was so close to getting out and all of a sudden something switched and it started feeling so good and i felt like i probably could have stayed in there way longer but it just it goes for everything if we knew if we could see what was around the corner we probably would keep going but we can't see what's around the corner so too often we're like man i'm gonna go the other way but it's nice when you push

[3:39] through when you get that feedback and you're like okay reminder i get to keep pushing through these things for the last 10 years i've been building internal tools to help my sales teams or engineering teams work at blazing speeds but the catch with internal tools is it's really hard to build from scratch and maintaining them also requires a lot of engineering work and it's just frankly super tedious thankfully there's now retool retool is a much faster way to build internal tools it has a complete library of 100 plus fully featured accessible ui components that you can just drag and drop into any interface retools platform lets you build the

[4:25] custom internal tools your team needs 10 times faster it's a one platform to build your interface you can connect any data source any api and publish employee facing apps in record time it's also super flexible you can write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your app looks and works and app environments sso permissions and other critical app functionality are all available completely out of the box the result you can build production-grade internal tools without the wasted effort of googling component libraries debugging dependencies or rewriting boiler plate code thousands of teams at companies like amazon doordash nbc lay check out collaborate around custom built retooled apps to operate faster

[5:22] operate better also teams of up to five can build retool apps for free so you shouldn't be surprised why we're big retool fans at where it happens to learn more you just gotta go to retool.com want to address why i don't do the cold plunge i feel like i need to defend myself please do so i've been doing startups since i've been a teenager which is the ultimate cold plunge except you might not get the the payoff of the euphoria that's startups i feel like you know i feel like that's what it is it's just incurring pain uh that might not have euphoria at the end

[6:04] well yeah i think like there's this romantic idea of startups and you know everyone wants to be an entrepreneur and you know it works out okay when i talk about startups i'm talking about like venture back startups i'm not talking about being a creator or bootstrapping something i'm talking about like going big um to me the cold plunge is going big except yeah that's the vibe i get from it i mean there's a whole host of like actual science-backed like research proven benefits from a physical and mental standpoint dopamine release thing is actually very real um i actually there's no there's no surprise why like natalie's husband

[6:42] was a professional e-athlete right he was one of the what's

[6:52] yeah and uh it's interesting to see you high performers you know baseball player league of legends um people like it you know love the cold punch so much there's just something about the cold man do one hard thing to start the day it makes everything feel easier that's all i will say i'll say do one easy thing to start the day this is the difference of opinion grant i don't think we're ever going to agree on this man it's good it's good i don't want to agree on everything with you but this is one for sure um well natalie i um i'm super excited to get to have this conversation i mean

[7:30] there's so much that i feel like you and greg have in common around you know you're thinking on on communities and community-based building um maybe just as like a starting point though can you can you just like give the quick background on you and how you kind of came to be where you are today yeah i've always been very entrepreneurial just from a really young age i always knew that i wanted to be my own boss i didn't even know what the word entrepreneur meant so i had a bunch of little businesses i would say throughout school and college and i started my first kind of serious

[8:03] business right out of college where um i was manufacturing supplements wait one sec can you hear the baby in the background or no i've got the same thing on my end so i was literally hearing it and being like is that my kid is that i have a three month old i was like is that my kid crying nice three months too let me just tell us at one time please greg while uh while she does that i literally i literally had that reaction i could hear it and i was like i went on mute and i was like going like this to try to figure out like is that my kid or is

[8:32] that natalie that's amazing i thought i thought it was roman roman's kind of got like a little bit of like uh i'm trying i'm trying to work with him on it like his his cry is still a little bit too high pitched for my liking so i'm trying to get him to go into more of like a deeper roar of a cry yeah like him to be more it needs to be more raspy i was talking about my son's cry it's a little too like it's a little too dainty still and it's really cute it's like it's very it makes me very sad when i see him

[9:01] crying um but he needs to get a little more like chest i want him to get like kind of a chest cry going well you're lucky because your boobs don't leak when your baby cries i need to be like can we get the baby to the other end of the house it's like it's a little different you and my wife should definitely have a conversation about this um is like a total total thing that's like a new world to me but man parenthood we're definitely going to wind back to that but you got cut off from your uh from your story so i had my first serious business out

[9:33] of college where i was manufacturing supplements and i had no marketing budget this was just completely bootstrapped and i just i i was in love with the idea of what i was doing but i knew i just wanted to get something out there versus going to the graduate job that i'd just been offered with accenture and so i in this time of getting them manufactured i started an instagram account and i think we grew to about 35 000 followers and so when we launched this business very very quickly we were shipping to over 60 countries we then got stocked in um a store called boots over 250 stores

[10:06] across the uk which is the equivalent of walgreens in america and that was my first foray into real business and managing cash flow and i was absolutely terrible at it i couldn't for the life of me figure out how to manage my cash flow and so while i was doing this i started just looking around for other women like me i just thought there has to be other young women like me figuring it out having no idea what we're doing and that's where i really got into instagram and i started posting stuff that was just very very real entrepreneurship you know at the time quotes weren't as popular as they are

[10:39] today so it's just very real tongue-in-cheek ambitious and that instagram account grew into what boss babe is today so and so let me just pause you just for one second so your your nutritional uh your like supplement business um what was it for a particular niche was it broad like what was the customer base or the brand or like how had you decided to start that yeah so it was for a particular name she was for young women that was struggling with acne prone skin okay and basically i'd found i'd been traveling to america while i was still college and i found that it was really normal over here to

[11:14] put powders in your smoothies which of course we all know now but at the time you know in the uk that just wasn't a thing people didn't know what this was they didn't know what superfoods were and i found that just by making a blend of all these really high nutritional ingredients it was really really good for your skin for your energy and so i started putting that together so it was just something that i had the idea for and no one was really doing it huh okay got it so just like i'm fascinated by um greg knows this i'm fascinated by people who like have an insight like that and

[11:47] then with with no like formal training are able to just go and launch a business around it that you scaled so like what did you actually like what you clearly had a bias for action to go start it but how did you get that going like did you go find a contract manufacturer did you go find like what was the actual process in the like zero to one phase of that yeah i had no idea i just built it off of google honestly so i i had an idea of all the ingredients i wanted to use and i started making things in my kitchen and then i went to a formulator to say

[12:18] hey does this actually like work is this gonna hurt anyone does this work can we make this into a product worked with a formulator and then was still just kind of blending stuff up in my kitchen and then ended up going to a manufacturer who i just agree they agreed you know what we'll give this little business a try we'll do really really small runs for you and it just kind of grew from there it was very much just me and my laptop and like trying things in the kitchen and you were going through wholesalers like you were selling to retailers or were you um were you going

[12:48] direct to consumer and selling like through a d2c page yeah i was going direct to consumer through instagram and then one day um someone called me and they were like hey wear boots we saw you on instagram and i thought it was a hoax and that was the retailer asking if they could stock it in stores and i was like yeah sure but i had no idea how i was going to even pay for it because with retailers you get paid if you're lucky 90 days after you deliver the product and i'm paying my factory two months before i even it was i just said yes and i've always had that attitude of

[13:20] like yes sure and i'll figure it out but it was a headache and i probably wouldn't do it again honestly you learned about the joys of uh working capital uh in the early days of that business i've seen a whole i mean you see a whole lot of businesses go under because of that exact dynamic like you know you're paying your your uh producers so far in advance of when your your retailers are paying you it's like you know a terrible dynamic to have to deal with when especially when you're growing it hurts you the most when you're growing so you think everything's going well and suddenly you realize you

[13:48] have no cash left in the bank because you paid all your manufacturers way out in advance of when you're due to be paid um okay so sorry i cut you off um the next iteration of this it sounds like is something that i want to kick it over to greg around too which is like you had an insight around community like you were struggling entrepreneurs probably an overstatement it sounds like you were doing quite well but you were a female entrepreneur you know at a time when you felt like that was rare and there had to be other people out there that were struggling with the same things as you

[14:18] greg you know like you as a community-based product guy that seems like an interesting um an interesting overlay there where there was like an insight around community that came out from actually building a product well i think i think natalie correct me if i'm wrong but you know you were just being yourself right like you you you created the instagram page because you're like i feel like this needs to be out there just so it just turns out that there's millions of other people like you that have that want that support and then i think you did a really good job and i want to get into it around like

[14:55] how do you create a product to support that community yeah exactly and i had i didn't have an intention of turning it into a business but it got to a point where i realized there was a lot of women looking for something like what i was doing like this kind of community in a more formal place and the way we turned it into a product was i just thought what if every month we got to learn from a really amazing entrepreneur would i have more chance of convincing them to teach me stuff if i had this community who were also there to learn from it and

[15:24] that's really just it just grew so organically and it's kind of every product we've ever built has been like that it's just grown from what they're asking for you know it's such like an interesting um i've learned a lot about this just from being around greg but it's such an interesting way of reframing being a product company to be a community company and build that fervent tribe and just taking it to take your direction from them like just as you said right there it becomes abundantly clear what product you need to deliver what service you need to deliver when you're in touch with the community and when you have

[15:59] this group of people that is uh you know being cultivated along the way um it seems like just such a de-risked approach to consumer like greg had a tweet you had a tweet recently greg of like um something about like the next wave of large consumer companies are going to be community based and it strikes me as so true actually when i hear it put in this perspective because you hear um you know consumer companies that have to take massive bets on products that are unproven that's so scary um and you end up investing so much up front for something that is like an unclear payoff but when you have a

[16:33] community that's told you a million times that they want exactly this or has signaled to you in a million different ways that they want this suddenly you're so de-risked in terms of the product launch and what your roadmap actually looks like greg any reactions i mean my reactions is like i've been like screaming about this into like a black hole for like so many years and then i feel like 2020 hit and then community became this like massive buzzword there was just like a rush of companies that just were using it improperly and i feel like actually now

[17:16] you know we're in 2020 2022. um i i just feel like especially with the economic downturn coming you know here and recession here like now is the best time to do a community-based product because it de-risks it for the entrepreneur and you don't have to spend a lot of money on ads to basically get people to your product so i think what you're gonna see is like over the next two three four years there's going to be this massive sort of influx of community-based products again can you talk about um either one of you actually like what it actually means to you like what is a community greg you

[17:53] you just i think had talked about like your framework at late checkout for what is a community and i think you had this like the tribe test around it um can you just walk through that actually uh as like a framework for us to talk about boss babe yeah so i tweeted um stop calling your instagram audience a community an audience doesn't equal community how to think about audience versus community and at lake checkout which is our product design agency you know they developed this uh this test called tribe which is you know we call it the community test so is there togetherness are there rituals is there member identity

[18:33] uh is there belonging and do people engage with each other so if you have those five things then you have a community because i was just like seeing so many people just throw that word around community community community i was it was getting a bit frustrating um and so yeah we came up with the test for it go ahead natalie sorry i i love that and i think it's so true and i even see you know some people trying to take their instagram community and putting them uh instagram following up community and putting them into a facebook group so they can sell to them and calling that a community and i still

[19:08] don't think it is because you know we do it slightly different in a way that we have certain things that we do with them on a weekly basis they know what they can expect they know exactly what they're coming for we're not just building this community to keep selling to them over and over and over again the community is the product that's the thing that they're there for and sure there's different ways they can get up sold into certain things if they segment themselves but you can't i don't just think you can put people into a group and assume that they're a community if they're just there to listen to you

[19:38] doing live videos how are they interacting with each other where are they getting the real community value from so i want to do a little exercise around this actually because i think it's i think it's a super interesting topic but it's one that to greg's point is constantly talked about and yet rarely actually workshopped like everyone talks about what is a community you know oh you need to start a community but like how do you actually do that and how do you build these things and natalie you've clearly done this and are doing this in real time greg has done this and invested behind a bunch of businesses that do this so

[20:10] let's use like just as an example because this is something i think about a lot and am thinking about a lot my newsletter list um so i have a newsletter natalie for reference called the curiosity chronicle today it's about 115 000 people on the newsletter list open rates are great like around 50 percent very engaged people constantly reply send me thoughts etc it's an awesome you know group generally around like growth growth-minded growth-oriented topics productivity self-improvement um you know life lessons things like that i am currently in the process of thinking through building out a community around it and i would love to just like get your guys thoughts in

[20:51] almost like a workshop setting of like how would you actually launch a community like what do you actually have to functionally do to go hit this tribe test and to go build it or are some of the things intangible and you just don't know if you can do it i think that's definitely tangible and i think one place i would start greg i love the way you called out the identity piece so with our community women call themselves boss babes and it's very clear that they're labeling themselves as being part of the community and so when you're thinking about that identity piece it's thinking about what does it

[21:22] mean for someone to be part of my community you know if they were to meet another person who's on my newsletter in my community in the street what would they be talking about what would they know they already have in common and how would they refer to each other i think that piece is really really interesting um and that's something we always did from the beginning and i do see when people can call themselves something it resonates are you have you seen the same thing greg a hundred percent and so like if people are watching this on youtube like sahel's watching uh wearing this new hat intellectually curious

[21:57] which i just bought yesterday and it's all about you know i think if you can sell out merch that's a good sign that you're you're on to a community-based product because it's people self-identifying and being like i love this so much that i want to go out there in the world and i want to rep your stuff yeah that does seem like a good razor i you know you know i talk a lot about razors like little rules of thumb and things like that the merch one definitely does seem that way the other one you've talked about in the past which i love is like is someone willing

[22:26] to watch you on a live stream talk about nothing we were just talking about that greg about martin shkreli that like you know i think he's like one of the worst people on the planet we have a friend who really likes him um and thinks he's super interesting but um one of the things about that guy is like he's probably one of the most hated people on the planet but he also has these raving fans who are willing to like watch him on a live stream for hours and talk about nothing and do nothing and like that is a community that he has that clearly for whatever

[22:54] reason really likes him and thinks he's interesting um so that strikes me as like another razor of thinking about whether you have something that could be the seeds of community how did you think natalie about like this whole thing of engaging with each other like was that natural to the boss babe community immediately that the women were engaging with each other or did you have to like kind of go in there in the early days and really like stoke that fire of engagement yeah it wasn't natural because when we launched our first product which was our membership you know we it was trickling in we were doing it live so people were

[23:26] joining this group and there was like five of them and i'm telling them this is the best community online of female entrepreneurs and there's like five of them looking around and one thing that we did early on was these rules of engagement and it didn't matter whether there was five people but we told them how to engage so that we took the guesswork out of it they didn't have to just pull up a blank empty post and think am i gonna say hi and tell them about my kids today or what am i going to do and so we set these rules of engagement of this is a really

[23:53] supportive place this is where you bring transparently the problems you're working through in your business this is where you bring a solution if you've got something you can offer someone else and you can do that kind of trade this way you'll do it and i was just really clear from that in the beginning and then i'd facilitate the conversation so every day would have a theme and on the certain theme i'd post something and start to get people commenting on those threads on the day and people just grew very used to that happening so they knew on a friday i was going to post something that meant they

[24:24] could come in and share with us their latest product links um and get feedback on them so it was little things like that i did to facilitate it and before too long it kind of became second nature to the people in the group and when they join our community would really helpfully help other people to curate their posts in in the way that's going to get them the best response so two two follow-ups to that number one you mentioned the kind of the fear in the early days of like there weren't many people in there and you're like oh this is the best community in the world

[24:53] and there's five people would you in hindsight like if you were giving um advice to someone that wants to start a community today would you wait until it got to some like until you had enough sign ups for there to be like a critical mass to launch it or did you do you think that was the right way to do it to just start it and kind of have the gated access from the get-go i think it was right for us because within that i think office launch period we were open for seven days and i think we brought in like 1500 paid members so it it felt like enough to get something

[25:22] really going and off the ground but even if i hadn't had that many people join i still would have done it like that because i really don't think you i don't think a lot of people know the importance of that to like back and forward conversation with those early audience members and early community members that's who's really telling you what they want to see and so i would still be in there and just treating it like it's okay it's me and my five friends and i'm gonna build some raving fans here because we're really gonna listen to each other and support each other and i i tried to keep i still

[25:54] would say i try to keep the community like that you know it's way bigger now but i still go in and i try to always know the names and faces of members if they're regulars coming to calls and i call them out and i make sure they feel seen and i read through the post to see what the common threads are and you kind of yes you might not have that big critical mass in the beginning but if you've got those raving fans you've got something really invaluable there and those are the people that are going to go and bring more people in in my opinion

[26:20] yeah i like how you're you're thinking about the culture like you're thinking about the boss babe culture and how to how to how to always improve upon it have you heard of uh the eternal september mindset or the eternal september story i feel like style you love this one no i like it tell me so [Music] eternal september um you know before there were forms on the internet basically there was this thing called usenet it was like a bulletin board in like the 80s and early 90s and back then it was college students who got access to the internet and what they noticed is that every

[27:02] september basically all these freshmen would come in to the these bbs's the bulletin boards and they would completely ruin the culture and they would because they didn't know how to use the internet it was their first time and they'd post stuff and it basically would create a horrible experience for everyone else and every september would happen until it was like 1993 or 1994 aol basically started offering bulletin boards and there was this like massive influx of i guess like a million plus users and it completely ruined the culture for bbses this particular bbs and the lesson they call it eternal september is that it's so important that

[27:42] as you grow that you're you're you're thinking about okay it's great that you know word of mouth is happening it's great that there's an influx of people but how do i improve upon the experience uh not make it get worse it is such an interesting i mean just tactically i find it so interesting because we have a lot of listeners who i'm sure thinking of either as a bolt-on to their existing business or for the future thinking of building communities i mean a community is a an amazing solopreneur business model we know a lot of people who have built you know a community that um is small

[28:20] niche around a really interesting topic that a few people care about and they've built a really fervent you know paid community around it that can be a great business to own and run and be able to live your lifestyle and this strikes me as like a very cool tactical discussion around how to do it the scaling part i'm still a little stuck on so i'd love to hear more of your thoughts around it like you have the early days you bring people in there's a ton of excitement the energy of the launch carries a lot of momentum i imagine in terms of people engaging with one another and the

[28:51] rituals and belonging and all of these things on greg's tribe test and then you kind of hit you know what our friend scott belski talks about around the messy middle of the community i imagine where the the excitement and energy of the launch has worn off um a lot of new people have come in that maybe don't have quite as much connection to the group um did you start just like tactically were there things you did like did you hire community managers that were really important for kind of keeping things and making sure everyone understood rules of engagement um did you start like a sort of alpha member committee like the

[29:29] people that you knew you could really count on the ogs the day ones to to ask them about different things you were thinking of launching like what were the things that you really did to ensure that that messy middle wasn't so messy as you scaled for the last 10 years i've been building internal tools to help my sales teams or engineering teams work at blazing speeds but the catch with internal tools is it's really hard to build from scratch and maintaining them also requires a lot of engineering work and it's just frankly super tedious thankfully there's now retool retool is a much faster way to build

[30:09] internal tools it has a complete library of 100 plus fully featured accessible ui components that you can just drag and drop into any interface retools platform lets you build the custom internal tools your team needs 10 times faster it's a one platform to build your interface you can connect any data source any api and publish employee-facing apps in record time it's also super flexible you can write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your app looks and works and app environments sso permissions and other critical app functionality are all available completely out of the box the result you can build production-grade internal tools without the wasted effort of

[31:01] googling component libraries debugging dependencies or rewriting boilerplate code thousands of teams at companies like amazon doordash nbc lay checkout collaborate around custom built retooled apps to operate faster operate better also teams of up to five can build retool apps for free so you shouldn't be surprised why we're big retool fans at where it happens to learn more you just gotta go to retool.com while it was definitely messy i didn't avoid that because well my background is in nothing like this i didn't know anything about product anything about communities i was just like i have this idea and so a website i didn't realize would just crash if i had a certain amount of

[31:49] people on it i really had no idea about these things so at each kind of milestone we just kept out growing what we had and i had to learn about bringing in a product team and what even a product team looks like and a community manager and people with experience of being able to navigate that so i definitely didn't avoid it but it taught me a lot so what we've been able to do that i think keeps our excitement really high within the group is every month it's kind of like a mini launch every month we still continue to bring in a really well sought after female

[32:22] entrepreneur that i know our members are really excited about learning from and we do a lot of build up of what's coming we do like sneak peeks into the content and then we drop the content it's very digestible we made a big mistake in the past of trying to throw everything at our members in the hope of being valuable and our engagement plummeted so when we thought people would be really excited and engaged it plummeted so we realized when we got to a certain point we had to do fewer things and do them a lot better and get more out of our content that part was really really important

[32:52] for us um you know i would also say in that kind of messy middle you're you probably have to move away from a really tight niche that got you started in the beginning so when i first started i had this really really tight niche because the avatar was me whereas when we started having you know multiple thousands of members through that niche started to widen and in order to scale we had to widen that and luckily our community on instagram continued to grow and grow we've never successfully ran ads it just never performs as anywhere near our organic stuff and so i'm a big believer in just going all in

[33:31] in one thing and we probably will figure our ads at some point but for us it's just been organic organic and how can we continue expanding that and so with that i had to have one ear to the ground of the instagram and podcast newsletter community that i'm building and another ear to the ground with our actual paid community and see how i could expand both together so yeah i didn't avoid it and i'm sure we'll still hit another messy later at some point as we outgrow certain things but i think we have built enough trust in our community that they know when we hit those kinds

[34:05] of things something better is coming because they've seen it happen before where are you today like size wise how many people are part of this community we've had over now 25 000 paying members through and in total with our just all of our products um we've had about 170 000 members through so we've gotten to a good size now where we have to learn all of the things about product and tech and and being able to sustain it but yeah i mean i'm living proof that you don't need a background in any of this stuff to make it work google and is so helpful so and the business model is is a

[34:47] monthly subscription for paying members is that the standard yeah so there's a few angles to the business model so our community yeah it's a monthly membership you can pay monthly or annually and then we have two accelerator programs that we open a couple of times a year and then another arm to the business now is partnerships um and working with brands how much is the monthly membership out of curiosity now it's 49 when we started it was 27 okay got it so i mean there's like very real arr coming through the system from just the subscriptions on on the community yeah which has been so great for us and i'm glad we did that

[35:27] first because always having that recurring revenue has meant that we've never had to make decisions that we'd regret out of cash flow fear because i never wanted to be a venture-backed company i always wanted to be able to bootstrap this and i do feel like if we hadn't have had that revenue that i know was coming in we would have had to make some decisions that probably would have compromised where we wanted to go as a brand in order to bring some quick cash in whereas having that has meant i always knew what my cash flow looked like i could make really smart hiring and investing decisions and take the product

[36:00] growth really really slow yeah i um you know i typically try not to do public math on um on podcasts because i think it's like generally just a bad idea but just like the the scale of what you're talking about is really amazing and so i do want to call it out because it's super impressive we don't have 25 000 paying members we've had that many members too okay i see i see i got they're not there's not currently 25 000. there's a lot of members members today i would have to pull the numbers but in in our recurring programs i would probably say there's about 9 000 oh

[36:38] still a lot yeah there's still a lot but it's not the 25 000. yeah yeah sure um that's okay that's still i mean it's it's still really amazing i mean like that's that's easier public math for me if i take it if i round it to ten thousand so it's like you know it's like a half a million dollars a monthly recurring in there and six million dollar error just on the subscription business it's it's i mean it's real scale businesses that can be built around fervent communities like bringing people together that have a common problem a common um you know a common set of concerns and

[37:09] worries and things that they're striving for it's i mean it's really really remarkable and you said you didn't you didn't raise venture around any of this no which is the other thing that just strikes me is unique here like um you know that i keep coming back to like there were these high-flying tech unicorn female communities like what was like the wing or was one of them or something like that and there were there were like a few that i think were launched um and i don't know what kind of numbers those things do or where they are today but man i would take your business over

[37:39] one of those any day like not having bosses and being able to continue to kind of build it in my vision in my way to the scale that you have yeah i want to say one or two things on this so first thing on um being able to grow this many paying members and one thing that i will say is really important has been really important for us is by offering higher tier programs that people can jump into because if we if we kept on the lower number that would have been a lot harder to scale um whereas offering other tiers where people can stay in your community but

[38:15] jump into an accelerator program at a higher amount a month that's been really really important for us to get to these numbers um where you're at is interesting outside that's interesting so it's almost a contrarian insight to me because when i think about getting people you know growing numbers i constantly think about like oh a lower price point will allow me to grow numbers and so you're saying like when i go to your website and i i look at different plans having different tiers to how it works um and different things that you can kind of upsell them into where you're offering more connectivity and more opportunities more value more

[38:52] products has been a thing for driving new subscribers that's been bringing in net new people new subscribers and increasing how much a subscriber is worth because especially on these lower numbers this this is why a lot of people i think in my position would have considered getting venture capital because it would be a lot easier to scale a business of you know 27 to 49 a month if i had a good chunk of money to put behind ads and i was bringing it in consistently whereas the ad landscape these days i mean i struggle to see a company like mine that's able to do those numbers and make money on like a

[39:27] 27 to 49 i i find that quite difficult whereas if i know um a client comes in i know they're going to stay for x amount of months our attention is pretty strong now wasn't it's pretty strong now but i also know the likelihood of them upgrading to an accelerator program which is where a big chunk of our mrr does come from um because we do payment plans on those and we extend those out that's been really helpful although we're not running ads to be able to justify how many posts are putting out on social because i do see a post as an ad because if i'm putting

[40:00] something out that's selling i have to think about what that does in terms of growth i can't have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake and so that's been really important for me to think about but there were a number of reasons that i didn't go and raise capital so i've made decisions like that that have allowed that if i didn't do that maybe i would have had to raise money put another way what you're saying is the content that you're creating for the instagram account for the youtube for the podcast there's a there's a dollar cost to it right exactly that's the way i see it because

[40:32] i think you've got three types of content on social it's content to build your brand content to help you grow or content to sell and very rarely is one piece of content gonna do all three things for you sure every now and then you're gonna get that which is great but if i'm putting out a piece of content to sell people into my membership that's a piece of content that's not necessarily bringing in new audience members so what is the cost to that and it's just how i always try and have our social media managers thinking about putting stuff out i've always wanted to ask this question

[41:02] to someone that does this but um having the annual plan next to the monthly and showing best value and showing how much you can save by doing annual how much has that impacted uh the kind of ability to convert people to annual like is it are most people taking the annual offer now that are jumping into it or is it is it still pretty mixed so it depends how they come in there's typically two ways that people will come into a membership they'll land on the website on the sales page and they'll choose the monthly or the annual option in that sense about 10 of people will

[41:36] choose annual and 90 will choose monthly the other way that they come in is they do a free online training with me where i teach for an hour and i basically teach the entire roadmap that we have inside of the membership and at the end i'll say okay here's the roadmap go download it you can go do it yourself or join us in the membership and there i make a really compelling argument for joining us annually versus monthly and so i throw in tons of bonuses that really make the value worth it and on those trainings i can see between it varies seventeen ninety percent of people are

[42:10] joining annually wow wow that's pretty amazing um it leads to my next question in general which is just around how you think about funnels in your business i mean it it seems like a big part of what you're doing as you think about growth is optimizing these funnels from the different channels that you have uh how are you thinking about that like was that something you've really studied or are you kind of learning by doing it what's the um what's the process around that yeah funnels is something i've studied very in-depth in our business runs off of them they're really really important from the moment someone subscribes

[42:47] for them to be able to self-segment so we can send them into the appropriate funnels to when someone joins the membership how do we then segment them firstly make sure they're getting the most out of the membership they're going to be using it and then be able to identify if and when they're ready to move to a next step do we offer them accelerate a program do we offer them add-ons that's been really important for us because again on the front end we have our instagram podcast things like that when we get them into our ecosystem we want to make sure that we're able to ascend them

[43:20] through without you know having to send out fresh emails every single day and kind of throw something at the wall and hope it sticks for a few people we want them to go through the appropriate funnels they've been amazing for us and we don't have many funnels in the business but the ones we do have every single week they're being optimized can you talk about the importance of offering some of these free materials in order to get people into the ecosystem because it sounds like i mean that's always been my approach which is like show people value or it's the gary vee like what does he call a jab jab hook uh

[43:56] model um i kind of like like jab jab jab model where you're kind of just jabbing and and let people kind of come to you and say like yes i want this but i'm curious your perspective on that it's been the number one way that we've grown our list um it's been so important so the way that i tend to think about it is when i'm selling a product i think about what's a diluted mini version of this product so if someone downloads this thing i know they're the exact avatar that would be great for my product and then i think about how can i absolutely over deliver

[44:28] so they've got a really good feel of what's inside of it so whether it's a free module of an accelerator course so they can watch it and think great i identify with this teaching style the way in which they're teaching it i know this is going to be really good for me um or whether if if it's for our membership i get on a free training and i basically walk them through the entire map that will teach them and i'll show them what's inside of each one i'll show them how they can go do it on their own and so i always want people to if they get something free i want them

[44:59] to feel like it was really really worth their time because there's no way they're going to invest more if they don't believe that so we do it through free pdfs free um webinars like online live trainings um we do it with like excel downloads we do it with emails challenges we just do it in so many different ways it's just been invaluable in the early days was this just you doing this and now you've scaled the team over time to you know have people constantly thinking about optimizing funnels and doing all of these different activities i have a co-founder danielle so that was us and yeah it was just kind

[45:36] of us and we had a fake assistant that was basically us um as our community meaning what we just had a community manager that was named something else and the two of us would be in the box i thought you literally meant a fake assistant like i've had friends who have been like i wanted to seem more legit in the early days of my startup so i would have a fake assistant answer my emails and be like hey you know i'm scheduling yeah that's what it was she was she was our community manager she she answered our inbox because if it was us we'd end up in conversations

[46:05] there was this was a fake person so it was two of us in a fake person and then we've just grown the team again just really organically i this has been the best business degree i could have possibly wished for because i would notice something and realize okay there's someone that knows this a bit better than me let me go hire them and then i would learn about building out teams and who was needed and so it's really been one foot in front of the other who do we need and slowly we've now built up an executive team and we have great people working in the business but

[46:33] it's been very very slow and what's next for you for you all like uh from a product roadmap you know standpoint like where do you see the business going in one or five years so a big thing that we're leaning into now is the brand so boss babe is a brand me and danielle have been more and more wanting to take our faces off of the business because it's really not about us it's about the women inside of the business and i think we've built something really special where they're not coming to boston for us anymore they're coming for the brand so a big part of where we spend our time is how

[47:08] can we get the brand out there even more will you see us in stores will you see us you know with more mass appeal hopefully so that's one area and then in the product so we're currently building a brand new membership product and we're just in the stage of doing tons i think we've just finished our 500th member interview where we're just figuring out what can we get rid of what can we do better and i think it's going to start to be less about the content that's inside of there and more about the community so how can they hire each other how can they advertise sure the

[47:42] content will be there but it's not something that needs to be updated every single month once you've got a good curriculum you've got a good curriculum so we're going to be doing that and then we're going to be thinking about is there something we can offer where we can match women with really really good experienced coaches that can help hold them accountable and guide them through the curriculum if they're wanting that more accountability what keeps you up at night like what are you what are you most besides your baby of course yeah yeah actually yeah and we can talk about parenting and lessons of early parenting because that definitely

[48:14] keeps me up at night as well at times um good joke greg i like that it's good baby joke um no i mean what like just around the business there's a lot of amazing features of a business like this um you know and especially the way you've built it and how deliberate and thoughtful you've been so i don't want to take away from that at all like what what do you feel nervous about or what what do you what do you stress over what if instagram didn't work tomorrow what if it got deleted tomorrow what if it went away and i lost you know nearly four million people

[48:45] um what if my newsletter system crashed and i lost all of my emails you know with it this kind of business it's all about the people that are in it and i feel like they're living in the ether somewhere and there's always these new platforms popping up i or like that keeps me up at night worrying about how we can really safeguard that audience and make sure that we still stay relevant even if instagram becomes a non-thing how do we still stay relevant as a brand i mean is that like platform dependence yes uh how do you guard around i mean is it just that you're building

[49:21] because i should think about that right like i have a lot of my business ecosystem runs through twitter and that concerns me the newsletter is a great hedge against that because you own emails but not always perfect to your point so like how have you thought about that um you know and de-risking that long term well greg i'll definitely grab some of your advice but emails that's our biggest thing like that's all that's the thing that i care most about building is our email list phone numbers um web traffic we try and think about taking people off of instagram um yeah email email email email yeah that's what i was gonna say like if

[49:56] i were you i would just be [Music] like every piece of content would be about not every piece of content but a lot of the content would be getting the emails getting the emails and then building a media website um partly probably curated uh curated content partly like community generated content and then how do you make like a destination uh of web traffic probably the two two things that come to mind and also and i'll just share i think that's so true and that's one of i would say the more the downsides of not being venture-backed is there's always these infinite resources and it's like where

[50:33] do you put them and so what we've been doing this very very slowly and we're only now starting to think about okay do we make our website media destination because we've got the that's going we've got a good system around it and so we're doing that very very slowly but if we were venture backed i know we could have popped that up a lot faster but it's something that we need to think about have you ever looked at pipe.com is that a sales thing no i don't know it's like the upfront revenue it's like they'll they'll finance your revenue basically like it's basically factoring but then i have they'll give you a bunch

[51:07] of money for your subscription up front if you wanted it it's like that's how i used to find it financing yeah that's how i used to finance going into retail back in the day i just don't want to do it i there's something really amazing about having a business like this where the cash flow is great i have no one to answer to i can sleep really well at night um i just love that too much to even think about any kind of financing i don't know if that's a bad thing and it's probably making me grow slower so i will i agree with you in principle um around

[51:42] the general response although there are the so pipe is one of them cap chase is another one um there are a handful that basically offer like it's effectively no strings attached it sounds crazy it sounds like one of those too good to be true it must be a scam type things but it's effectively no strings attached non-dilutive financing where they are basically just taking um your stream of recurring revenues that you have and in pipe's case there's just a marketplace so there's investors on the other side that it's abstracted that are basically buying that and you're getting a discount rate against it so it is the

[52:18] same as factoring but you don't have a boss in that sense like you never have to talk to pipe it just is a constant process that's happening it's realistically to your point for your type of business probably not something you need to do unless there was some big growth thing that you needed all the cash up front like if you wanted a few million dollars up front to go buy another community this could be a way to do that without raising a bunch of venture capital but for your actual ongoing needs given how you're running the business i don't really see a reason you would take it on i agree

[52:48] yeah i could i could find reasons to take it on but there's just something that i love about being in full control of the business and totally get it growing it in a way that's slow and it's not as big as i think it could be but it feels good and i'm not paying for money you could you could grow the business like 25 30 year-over-year like conservatively and like fast forward that to 10 years from now and this is like like style i know you don't do public math but you know you're better at this than me like you know what sort of what is it the law of sevens doubles

[53:28] yeah no i mean it would be a very very big like if you if you grew it at fifteen twenty percent um you know over that period the rough math is like twenty percent you kind of double the business in like four years right three and a half four years or something like that so um yeah i mean you'd be yeah it's like the rule of 70 greg it's the is the thing you're ready for you just divide by yeah you divide by 70. so it's like three and a half years you double at a 20 growth rate yeah so i mean it's like it's it's a

[53:55] really big business in a short period of time by just growing you know at a modest and attractive clip and you own it and to your point you don't have to be responsive to anybody what is like just to back to my question of like thinking of starting a community if you were to start a community from scratch today either one of you since you're both like my community gurus what's like the the tool kit for someone to start a community today like what is the no code or like very light code toolkit is it like slack discord plus you know a facebook group like what what is the

[54:27] light um you know tool kit for someone that wants to start a community and build something like this for me i would say i think it varies based on what your is already using so the last thing that i'd want them to do is have to download a bunch of new software and learn how to use it what we're seeing in our space is a lot of people are jumping on the circle i'm not sure if you've heard of it but not web-based right yeah it is but a lot of them are using it so it seems it seems like a lower lift if you were to hop on that um and

[54:58] slack a lot of them use slack so i would kind of find out what they're using i'd probably stay away from facebook groups but i find out what they were using and try and integrate into that as easy as i could what about you greg so greg's gonna say discord no no no i think no no no i hate i think no no two two communities are the same so that's just the law of communities no two communities are the same therefore there is no one-size-fits-all toolkit for all communities so i want to put that out there that being said i think a group chat just like a straight up

[55:40] group chat is like your the easiest minimal viable product for a community so if you want to test a hypothesis around hey i think there should be a community in acts because people you know have this lifestyle or people you know need support from going from here to there then can you get 10 15 20 people from the internet in a place imessage whatsapp groups that's where i'd start got it have you um have you heard of stephen bartlett yeah i actually know stephen a little bit stephen and i like i went to a few i was i was on the board of this company and steven spoke at like their

[56:23] convention a few times until we like got to know each other and then um i mean i haven't talked to him in in years but he like he'll share a bunch of my stuff on on linkedin sometimes um but i've never interacted with him it's like it's a funny thing yeah he's he started a community on telegram and i mean i want to say have has over a hundred thousand people in this group chat which might not sound like the best way to do it but when he drops merch he just drops a single link in that telegram and it's sold out instantly like just a single

[56:56] link and it might not be the most perfect way but like greg saying there's no community is the same and if he found that people are using it he just hopped in there and it's it's just so fascinating to see if people really want to be part of your community they'll jump in and they'll make whatever work i'm curious to test it like i am going to uh i'm going to i'm going to ping you natalie now that we're now that we're connected i'm definitely going to ping you on this as i do it i'm hoping to roll something out in q4 and start at least testing and learning you know on a

[57:26] smaller scale with some people but um i think there's something here we'll see we'll see if i sell out these hats greg once i announce them publicly well what i i i'm pretty confident that if you added like a a community that had a mission basically like you that's what you need to start with like what is the mission of your curiosity people um like for natalie it was just like here's a bunch of entrepreneurs and creators who who want to go faster who want support who want to stay accountable like i would start by style just like opening a google doc and just being like

[58:04] hey what is that for for my community and then once you have that and if you feel strongly about it then i would say don't invest in you know millions of dollars of custom software to go and build it just like start testing it what you know ritual by ritual i like that i feel like this was probably the most tactical conversation around community building that we could have had so i'm super excited to uh to get to release this and and hopefully some people are inspired to go start theirs um because i feel like it was a really really cool dialogue around it um i'm glad you guys humored me on that

[58:42] natalie where could uh where could people drop their email to subscribe to some of your stuff yeah like where can people find you um what should people be listening to what should they be subscribing to etc we have a podcast called the buzzfeed podcast which is awesome or you can go to bosswood.com and you can kind of see how we lay out the freebies and stuff on there you'll get a good sense of the business from there and then i'm on instagram at i am natalie and at bossbabe and you can watch on natalie's instagram videos of her getting through absurdly long cold plunges i am gonna start

[59:17] pressuring you peer pressuring you to go in up to your neck and do the like full you know breathtaking experience of like getting the air just sucked out of your lungs from going off you know what my boobs are going through enough right now that's probably true i will back off on that one my wife will give me for having said that so yeah i will back off on that one you're great you're crushing it my husband said the exact same thing to me i was like well you can feed our baby for the next week and i'll do that why not it's funny because i posted that and i had so many women

[59:51] comment the most hilarious things and i'm like you get me you know where we're at right now yeah i um i came inside one day and uh my wife was holding roman our son and she was um she was like um you know i'm really tired or something like that and i said like oh why are you tired and i literally meant it like why are you tired like what what had happened like you know was there someone that had said something or like had some event during the day and she looked at me with this look of like why am i and i was like no

[1:00:18] no i didn't mean it that way i know i know you're doing an absurd amount i didn't mean it that way oh so yeah no it's it's a uh it's i mean it's been an amazing amazing experience being a first-time parent so i'm excited to get to connect with you in person and and chat more about that um in the near future i will definitely let you know when i make it out to your neck of the woods amazing thanks for having me guys thank you so much it's been real thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode

[1:00:48] email us at hi trwih.com leave us a review at apple or spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see you soon [Music]

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