# How Jay Clouse Built a $500,000 ARR Community (in Less than 2 Years)

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqkgLKejKuI
Duration: 48 min
Language: English
Words: 8454
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/dqkgLKejKuI

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[0:00] ironically what I still see as the biggest issue for most creators who enter my world it's not creating good work and it's often not even just getting attention to their work a lot of them don't know how to turn that attention into a business they have like a really I guess immature view as in like it hasn't been fleshed out of what like a revenue model looks like how they actually turn this into a business and a lot of times they come in and they think that attention is sold to advertisers and that's kind of it so a lot of folks that have entered my world I've helped

[0:28] them on the revenue side building out okay what what levers do I pull so that I am financially rewarded for the work that I'm doing Jay it's it's been uh it's been a while last time I don't know if you remember the last and and only time we've hung out in the maven accelerator and the maven accelerator oh yeah I remember I have a great memory yeah so what do you remember about that time uh it was it was fun I mean I'm involved in Maven in a in a small investment capacity you might be as well so I'm rooting for for them and I think that

[1:07] cohort based courses are really interesting part of like the product um like product development for creators I think like the natural way things go oftentimes is I have an idea I want to serve this audience and now I tell people before you do like a self-based course you should do a cohort based version of it because the the price is higher you get much better feedback you can triage issues that come up so you get better student outcomes earlier on so I thought it was awesome and I really liked the Frameworks they taught us there I've actually reached out to them I want to relearn the Frameworks they

[1:45] had for cbcs because I think they're also great Frameworks for like prescriptive non-fiction books I remember when I was considering creating a cohort based course and yeah we basically we started working my agency late checkout was hired by them to build out their first version and I remember thinking initially like this feels like such a waste of time um to create the the this course and it was this six week accelerator that we did together where they basically taught us how to create a course and it was single-handedly probably one of the greatest things I've done in the last five years because it taught me how

[2:29] to what I liked about it was it forced me this is like Peak covid it forced me to distill all the knowledge I had about building businesses that were powered by Community but basically taking that and putting Frameworks to it so I created about 20 Frameworks 20 different models from that and it was just so valuable yeah yeah having something that kind of forces you well there's like a forcing function for deadlines within that accelerator even running your own program you know like when things are scheduled and live you have to live up to those deadlines and perform that degree but I agree like the the

[3:09] structure they gave us and the way they taught us to Think Through Frameworks Frameworks are so valuable is this something I didn't talked about enough in the world of creators is intellectual property Frameworks methodologies because you do that well you can build a whole business on the back of that because you put the thought into making something great and strong and referable and now suddenly people are spreading your ideas on your behalf you know like there's there's always going to be some um uh 20 year old with a ton of time and a ton of energy who's going to out tweet me or zet me whatever the word is but

[3:49] um they won't always have the experience that you have that you can package into IP but now they proliferate on your behalf and so that's like The Wonder of the maven accelerator I guess totally yeah it's like Jack butcher has this great saying build once sell twice yeah and that's related to products and and you know create a product basically and and sell it multiple times and I think with a framework it's kind of like create once and sell twice right like you're basically creating the framework and it becomes like this idea of Iris that people can now share with other people and as long as the framework has to do

[4:34] with the core thing that you're trying to get across I guess is the caveat for sure well and it's it's it's a shared vocabulary you know even lesser self Wes the co-founder of Maven she has this great blog post called spiky point of view and I referenced that all the time because I think that's becoming prerequisite for creators today is to really have some spiky point of view or some unique premise is is my word for it but the way she wrote that blog post and the way she named it now I have vocabulary to to point to somebody who has a gap in what they're doing and say

[5:09] oh this is what you're missing you're missing this thing called a Specky point of view and now I can name it I can pass that idea on and then it's like if you want to go deeper on this here's a great blog post by Wes so you know I've probably generated as much traffic into that blog post of hers than than she has and that's a wonderful thing like I want people to do that for my writing and for my my work too yeah and it's pretty meta too right like we're we're sitting here we're talking about Wes because of her Frameworks 100 I brought you on here today

[5:39] want to catch up and see how you're doing you look great number one thanks man likewise this has given me a good excuse to break from our uh kitchen renovation right now so I appreciate it okay perfect so I saved you from that well first I want you to explain what you do and then secondly I'd like to explain I'd like for you to explain um how's it going uh well I'm a meta Creator I'm a Creator who creates about creators there's a lot of people like me it's a very red ocean and there's a broad spectrum of uh legitimacy there and I hope that people see me as towards

[6:15] the end of the spectrum of of trustworthy and uh doing good work in this space because there's definitely Bad actors in this space but what I like to do is I like to study uh today's top creators understand what they're doing well why it's working and then translate that to folks who are kind of on the cusp to help them get over that hump um when I realized I'm not really interested in doing is convincing people that they want to be a Creator because in my opinion creators done well done in a way that is professional you have to be an entrepreneur and it's always going to be

[6:50] a minority of the population that is an entrepreneur if you don't have it in you I'm not going to try and convince you that you do because I'm setting you up for a lot of pain so I'm really interested in helping people who have already decided this is the life for me I'm working really hard I'm not quite getting there to push them over the hump because I mean you probably feel this way too there's not really a battery life than doing things on your terms getting your ideas out there being known and respected and sought after for the way you think about things and the art that

[7:25] you make and so that's what I predominantly do with the podcast we're on YouTube it's called Creator science and I get to talk to a lot of great people like you too so it's it's been uh really great in a lot of ways so one of the coolest parts of your job is that you you're helping people transform and as you say like getting from you know basically point A to point B could you tell a few or one story that comes to mind where someone you know someone came into you came into greater science or started listening to you and where you help them get to and

[8:00] and how they became successful and the reason I ask is as a Creator myself I'm always trying to figure out how our creators succeeding you know what are the tools that they're using how are they structuring their content how do they uh you know what are the hacks that they're using so um anything you can share is is helpful I think so let me let me lay out some some Frameworks here that I think are helpful at least in understanding how I view the space so in the Creator economy quote unquote I think it's it's kind of a dichotomy between people on the education side and

[8:39] people on the entertainment side and of course there's some in-between people who are both educational and entertaining but broadly I see that as the dichotomy and the Creator economy space I work with a lot more of folks on the education side people who have some sort of earned Insight some sort of experience and now they're saying I want to teach people who need to learn what I know and I'm trying to build a business on the back of that um ironically what I still see as the biggest issue for most creators who enter my world it's not uh creating good work and it's often not even just

[9:13] getting attention to the work a lot of them don't know how to turn that attention into a business they have like a really I guess immature view as in like it hasn't been fleshed out of what like a revenue model looks like how they actually turn this into a business and a lot of times they come in and they think that attention is sold to advertisers and that's kind of it so a lot of folks that have entered my world I've helped them on the revenue side building out okay what what levers do I pull so that I am financially rewarded for the work that I'm doing

[9:48] um I would say my best and most successful product is my membership Community the lab and in there I've probably helped the most folks with building membership communities of their own as well because that when you get that going well as you well know it's like this very pure um relationship between you and your customers and you're selling directly to your customers it's providing a lot of value to them and my membership Community then is kind of a double dip because not only am I teaching these people how they can build a membership they're seeing literally exactly what I do as well so we've had folks

[10:25] um miles McNair is one that comes to mind who they've built great businesses on SEO they get a ton of traffic uh they're teaching other people SEO and now you know he had a multi five figure launch of his membership Community right out of the gate um another one is Brian Withers he's a part of a team it's actually three Brians they were early Maven instructors as well they have been doing cohort based courses they wanted to get off of the launch cycle to a degree so they launched a private membership and so that's been really really gratifying to see that in that way um but even from a pure

[11:03] process standpoint I like helping people think about their businesses as machines because before there were creators there were already entrepreneurs and the entrepreneur's goal was to say I know how to build something out of nothing and turn that into a machine that generates revenue and over time they often worked themselves out of the business and people think that as a Creator you can't totally do that and I agree you usually can't totally do that but you can do it a lot more than most people seem to think you know you can you can Elevate yourself out of this you can make it so that you know when someone

[11:41] enters into your ecosystem your world they're going to be taken on a customer Journey that introduces them to uh your best free resources then some of your paid offers and you should be able to see in a very small cycle someone enters the front door over here they come out on the other side with their own transformation and value was created value is captured now we're building a business and that's a lot of what I work with people on can you talk more about what a membership Community is you know because I see some people launching courses that look like to me a membership community and then I see some people launching

[12:22] membership communities that sometimes look like courses to me so could you define what that is I look at it as this is a paid subscription product um first and foremost if if that is true then you might have a membership and then generally I say there's another kind of binary system is this a membership that gives me access to premium content or is this a membership that gives me access to a private community and a lot of them have both but even if you do have both in your membership I think you usually lean on one more than the other uh is this a place about peer-to-peer

[13:00] connection or is this a place about content that I can't get unless I'm outside of these Gates um so that's that's usually what I work with folks on and usually the memberships that I help people with are predicated more on the peer-to-peer connection side um and a lot of times that's augmented with some sort of Premium content but when I see a lot of memberships that are um predicated on premium content also tend to be lower priced from what I see and the folks that come in I like to say hey if you are able to create this very rare scarce space where a very select

[13:36] exclusive group of people get together to meet other people like them that's valued really highly you can design this in such a way that it compensates you well for the time and effort you're putting into it and people have a really great experience so there's there's a huge spectrum of what membership communities look like from the price point from the experience but generally I would say they either fall on the side of the spectrum of peer-to-peer connectivity or uh premium content and with your with the lab and specifically what are the price points and how many people are taking it and how much revenue does that bring in

[14:13] I've taken some interesting design choices with the lab we have 200 members because that is the cap that I put on it when we got to be about 50 members I said I'm actually going to keep this at 200 people um so we we hit that 200 member cap at uh in February of this year there were two tiers of membership there was a standard tier which was Community Access and access to all the courses then there was a VIP tier which was the standard tier plus a quarterly one-on-one call with me the standard tier is priced at 19.99 and the VIP tier is priced at 29.99

[14:51] so that part of the lab when you say 1999 you mean 1999 correct correct yes correct it's annual only it's capped it's relatively high priced um so with those two tiers of membership the community was on a trajectory of about four hundred thousand dollars in ARR um once we did hit that cap I opened up a lower tier of membership that gave access to the educational materials only so they don't have access to the Forum or direct messages but they can get all my courses all my workshops all the ongoing stuff I make I do like a monthly retro behind the scenes literally breaking down my own profit and loss

[15:29] reflecting on the goals that I had that month what went well what didn't go well so it's like this 30 minute very transparent look at my business um we do basically internal cohort based courses in the community I call them shared Focus Sprints and the videos of those courses the structure of those courses that gets recorded and put in for uh the lower tier of membership so that's fairly new and we have three or four dozen folks in that membership as well so all in all we're on a trajectory of getting close to 500 000 in ARR which is pretty insane given you started this how long ago

[16:08] March of 2022. yeah so the reason I wanted to bring you on is I think your probably one of the probably one of the people that do these membership based uh experiences so thoughtfully so everything about your uh how you operate is really smart so I think the cap is really smart I think how you're doing those Sprints is really smart I think the fact that you're doing workshops is really smart even your welcome newsletter I recently signed up to your newsletter and your welcome newsletter was like the Mona Lisa of welcome newsletters I was like this is amazing and I think people are sleeping on

[16:54] membership they're sleeping on yeah I think they're sleeping on it and I think especially for B2B where if you can you know as you say like if you can show people and and add value hey come come to this experience and you're going to come out of this experience with a ton of value and you just have to give me a couple random you know a year which is that's when people are like yeah no-brainer if if that's the case right if you can actually do it right it depends a little bit on your audience you know there there are um niches we'll call them who just don't

[17:35] have as much disposable income so my style of membership might not fit in that world there are also niches where you could take the exact thing I'm doing double or triple the price and they wouldn't blink an eye you know so it depends a little bit on your on your audience um the the 200 cap is fairly arbitrary that just felt like based on the experience that I designed what I could sustain myself without bringing in like a community manager or kind of change the expectation of what the community looked like you know I've been I've been a part of a lot of memberships now um personally building them or running

[18:10] them and there's an interesting relationship to scale with with memberships where at a certain point if this is based on peer-to-peer connectivity you actually have to fight against the success of the product because huge numbers changes the experience for members who were there early um and it becomes more difficult for you to manage so I just decided I was not going to set this up in a way where I had to fight that fight and that played a role in how I chose the pricing in the beginning too because I thought okay if all if I'm going to limit this somewhere you know what price makes me feel

[18:49] excited to continue working on this as the business grows as I get more successful outside of the membership you know and I appreciate you saying that about the the intentionality because I see every touch point that I have with my customers or subscribers you know future customers every touch point is an opportunity for thought and design and I just like really find joy in doing unique things in that process can you talk more about your top of the funnel strategy so uh how are you thinking about of course you're capped right now but I imagine you're going to have new products and maybe open up that cap in

[19:31] the future how do you think about attracting audience and then converting those into you know paying customers yeah I I look at it now as well I think as a Creator there are two types of platforms you can be creating on we call them Discovery platforms and relationship platforms Discovery platforms have built-in Discovery mechanisms to the platform uh social media YouTube search engines these platforms these machines are incentivized to introduce new viewers to your content because because they're ad supported and it keeps them on platform relationship platforms you own that distribution it's email it's podcasting it's SMS and it's private communities and so my strategy is to top a funnel is

[20:21] the Discovery platform but I very quickly as quickly as I can once I get them into my relationship platform my main relationship platform which is email and then I actually tried to grow the email to push people towards the podcast that's like at the bottom of my platform funnel if you will so increasingly in the discovery uh platform part of my business I'm actually leaning on YouTube more I'm finding that YouTube is becoming one of the largest sources of new audience because YouTube has an incredible algorithm we've started to find like good content Market fit with our podcasts on YouTube and they're really high quality which is

[21:02] awesome um and so YouTube both gets people into email even though there's not a great pathway for that and it introduces people to the audio podcast because we produce one video episode for every two or three audio episodes that we put out so that's basically the strategy is be a public loudmouth on social media and on YouTube and try to get people to email so I just hit 10 000 YouTube subscribers today dude congrats and thank you and I think it I think it has been the hardest platform for me to grow ever more than audio more than audio yes that's right crazy I find audio to be way harder than

[21:45] YouTube You're yeah tell me more about that why is that just from the discoverability standpoint yeah there's there's no discoverability and like they're really the best way to grow audio listeners is either to have a massive top of funnel elsewhere already or um to get on other podcasts or do cross promotions like you really only convert existing audio listeners to audio listeners of your show and it's it's difficult to get in front of existing audio listeners um but if you have like a big top of funnel you have you have a really large Twitter audience so I imagine that you're able to pull a significant number

[22:22] of people from Twitter into the show which was a benefit that I did not have when I started the show three years ago I think the benefit I had was I started podcasting in 2021 and when I started I basically like I went on my first million I went on the Anthony pompiano show yep uh yeah that'll do it it it just like all at the same time and then Twitter you know you know you start posting about it on Twitter and we had these like highly produced videos and stuff like that and from there a lot of people have just stuck around yeah and with YouTube because I was so late I

[23:01] think um late in the game like I just started posting like I see on your channel you you've got your long form but you've also got your short form and like I see you with these thumbnails like I'm looking at your thumbnail right now with a coffee cup against your head like you're doing the the YouTube game you gotta do it you got if any game any game that you choose to play like you've got to do that game or you're not gonna win the game um we do shorts and clips much less than we used to now because um YouTube's getting better at tying a

[23:34] short audience to your channel but that doesn't mean that that changes user Behavior like I find that most shorts viewers just aren't interested in long form and so it's not that YouTube isn't making it easy for them to do that it's just that that's not what the user behavior is and so we're a pretty small team you know we have one on uh one video editor so at one point we just decided like hey let's put all of our capacity into making the long form videos just really good and working on packaging and planning the pipeline where we're really focused on that right now but it took a while like we we we've

[24:11] more than doubled our channel in the last two months Max um but the crazy thing is like you have one video do really well if the bat catalog is good it just gives the back catalog new life when one video does well and that does not happen in audio that's the secret that people don't talk about in social media which is most followings come from a very small amount of posts going Mega viral totally totally like it's it's really about a home run like you just need a home run and I remember when this happened so in 2020 2020 I think yeah it was in 2020 I

[24:54] got I posted a thread on Twitter and it got 55 000 likes and Nick Huber sweaty startup sent me a send me a text message and he says he says Greg you're not gonna really understand this right now but this tweet will change your life and I remember thinking like this guy's crazy what is he talking about I got 50 or 60 000 followers in 24 hours nuts yeah that's nuts nuts and he was right it did change my life because all of a sudden I had this group of people who started to really trust me and then from that it evolved and and it's been really great ever since

[25:40] and I think the same is probably true with YouTube where you just need a few hits like it has there been a video over the last couple months that has really hit it for you oh yeah yeah which videos just two videos there's two videos in a row one was um an interview with Patty Galloway who's one of the most sought after YouTube Consultants out there and then the next video was with Ed his channel is called film booth on YouTube he has just a very uh tight fan base as well and so those two videos back to back just really grew the channel significantly um and they continue to perform really

[26:23] really well so one thing we've learned though well as you can probably attest if your channel is predicated on long form interviews that's just not the typical YouTube video that's playing YouTube on hard mode as it is yeah that that's that's challenging all on its own but then packaging has to be even better in my opinion because that is so hard so we've had to put way more time into packaging and part of packaging is your guest so we've even started to tailor the show a little bit to be successful on YouTube and if if we don't think that the guest will have significant pull with a unknown you know to a new

[27:07] viewer on YouTube we don't make a video episode out of it um we basically make it Audio Only and then save our resources for video specific creators I kind of hate that like I hate it because I'll tell you why I hit it and then before before you react so a while ago when this when this podcast first started we only interviewed top people if they didn't have hundreds of thousands of followers they were not interviewed on the show basically and I didn't like that because I thought the show was about having really interesting conversations with just community at the core of it but Community can mean a lot of different

[27:54] things to a lot of different people could be you know you throw events or maybe you're a burst on a coffee shop or maybe you're you and you're building on these membership sites and I got to a point where I was basically burnt out with these guests and I felt that I wasn't giving a chance to these smaller guests so for the last year or 18 months even uh yeah 12 to 18 months I've been doing a mix of guests like you who have an audience and people who who don't have audiences or have small audiences and what I like about it is okay maybe so my question to you actually this is

[28:34] feedback for me I'm like am I making the wrong decision by by dedicating resources to the to these things and my reaction to you is why don't you do more under the radar type interviews well it's I don't think you're making a quote unquote wrong decision and when I talk about the guests needing to make sense for video a couple of our most popular videos our most recent episode is with George Blackman I don't think people know his name I don't think people know his face but he is a scriptwriter for some top YouTubers so we were able to pull that into the packaging um so he's not a big name he's not a big

[29:15] audience but we knew that video would be interesting to a YouTube audience uh same with Jake Thomas who does incredible research in the world of what makes great YouTube titles again people wouldn't know his name people wouldn't know his face but YouTube titles that's a package that would work well on YouTube um I don't think there's anything wrong with having people who might not be as much of a clear home run on YouTube and putting them on the channel we've had some episodes in the past with Mariah cause or Brian Harris these people are really thoughtful and well known in the world of online courses which on the recommended page of of

[29:54] views but they do have longer average view durations in the the comments we get are incredible so I do want to put more of those videos on the channel but it's just a question of prioritization in resources because I make a pretty hefty investment and each of the videos we put on the channel and so at this phase where we are just trying to get the channel name out there and get in front of new viewers I want to put my best foot forward with the investment that I'm making I'm still having conversations with folks who really span the gamut of the Creator economy but mostly just end up in audio we're

[30:34] publishing an audio episode every week we publish a video episode twice a month Max so it's just prioritization most of it most of it yeah have you read Rick rubin's latest book creative act I think halfway through he talks about being a distributor versus being like a artist basically and he talks about if you're a distributor that means you find out what people want and you create the thing and you distribute the thing that people want and if you're an artist you you craft the thing that you want for you and then you hope that others yeah like yeah the question is where should you sit on on the

[31:21] spectrum is what he brings up I'm closer to the edge of distributor but then I say okay within the constraints of being a distributor how can I make this as uniquely me as possible and I think as time passes I will slide down the Spectrum to the other end because you kind of earn the right to do your own thing and listen to your own taste if you have Financial constraints you know if you are working at nine to five and you're happy with that nine to five and you want to make whatever you want to make just because you want to make it and you don't have intentions on

[31:54] that replacing your income on any particular time frame then you should set as far on the side of artists as you want and make whatever you want but if you have Financial constraints and you want this thing to be a viable business on some predictable time frame I think you need to lean into being a distributor because businesses are built on creating value for people so you have to understand what people want value from otherwise is a little bit like a slot machine yeah I would also I would also argue that and I wish Rick would would have said this in in the book but it's often not about Distributing to

[32:33] what people want but it's Distributing what the algorithm wants right so you're not just trying to please people you're trying to please an algorithm well and that's that's if your strategy really weighs on the Discovery platform side right um for a long time I just didn't do Discovery platforms at all to my detriment like it took me way too long to realize ah I should actually prioritize more time creating on social media instead of just doing email because the best way to grow an email list is not by writing great emails unfortunately like it's by getting top of funnel elsewhere introducing them to the point to the fact that you have have

[33:12] email because if you are really predicated on the Discovery platforms you do have to play towards what's working there you know what how is the game being played you're just not gonna win on Instagram if you're not doing reels right now you know yeah and it's even uh more specific than that like there's a specific type of real that you need to do right now and there's a specific type of Trends following the trend yeah knowing knowing how to hook people in the first three seconds knowing how to end a reel so that it Loops like every game has games within the game yeah and if you want to

[33:50] win the macro game you've gotta you've got to learn the micro games and it becomes exhausting it's really hard to like win the micro games of multiple macro games that's why it's hard to be successful on Instagram and Twitter simultaneously are you are you more tired now than or more energized now than you were let's say when you were running a startup a few years ago oh yes if we're comparing it to my startup times one you're more energized I don't think yeah I don't think I'll ever go back to like the quote-unquote startup world that doesn't mean that I wouldn't dip my toes into building like a software company at

[34:27] some point but you know I think even the word like startup often gets sucked into the scene of what being a startup founder is and I'm not really interested in that that scene or that game but you know I am interested in continuing to build strong businesses and if I see an opportunity in software in the realm that I'm playing in I would do that but I I have no interest really in doing like The Venture Capital path again um yeah I would probably bootstrap or do some other type of creative financing or really focus on just a couple of angels if I really needed capital for some

[35:07] reason but you know building building a business as a Creator the economics get pretty crazy pretty quickly and you have a lot of optionality to invest in your in yourself in your own projects yeah I mean if you're making five hundred thousand dollars of Revenue I imagine the margins on that are like 90 plus percent or 85 for sure yeah they're yeah they're they're really high and that's just one product you know granted the membership is about 70 of My overall Revenue but it's not my only Revenue uh so it's it the economics get pretty crazy pretty quickly yeah and I think a lot of creators are gonna you know years

[35:47] ago it was kind of like you either raise venture or you there was no other option actually you kind of just had to raise Venture and do the whole Venture thing now there's some so many options and I think creators are seeing so much success doing their own thing going D to C direct to community as I call it and yeah I'm wondering do you have any examples of creators that you look up to that have really awesome businesses oh tons um my friend Daphne she has a business called teacher career coach she helps burned out teachers explore opportunities outside of the classroom in what I really what blows my mind

[36:30] about Daphne's business she's she's kind of showed me under the hood a couple of times including like her convert kit subscriber graph it's the most violent up and to the right graph I've ever seen in the Creator space and it's because just like anything else if you have product Market fit and good timing like things can just go so well for you so quickly so I admire her for that because she's like genuinely helping a lot of people and she's handled like Market driven scale in a really impressive way I really personally aspire to the lives and businesses of authors more than anything else because they're they're

[37:11] able to like spend a lot of time investing into making this one really great long-form product and build really lean businesses on the back of that Todd Henry's a great example of this he writes a book and publishes like every two years or Dan pink uh James Clear he only has the one book obviously but it's such a huge ridiculous success so I really aspire to that life because you can probably relate to this Greg like when when you are playing the social media game as part of your top of funnel that's that becomes a lot of production on its own let alone whatever that is moving towards so you get in

[37:49] this place where it's like I am creating so much all the time just to remain in people's line of sight because that's the economics of how the business works I would love to pull back for months work on something much bigger much crazier much more enduring than this tweet and have that be the engine for the business you know that that would be just awesome but you when you get yourself on that that treadmill you have to buy yourself the time back to do the larger thing so those are just a couple examples but there are so many creators some podcasters too like a great podcast the

[38:30] folks who do acquired Ben and um David uh I went to college with Ben that's an incredible business that also really opened my eyes to you can have a large audience of very influential very accomplished people you know in a vacuum pre-acquired I would have said the audience of the show seems really small and yeah those people are valuable but it seems really small I think they have on there about Paige that they get uh 150 000 downloads per month or something ridiculous and all of their listeners are like Founders VCS really um intense people so that's an oh no 300 000 unique listeners crazy so that's a few examples I also think

[39:20] we've just become numb to numbers like you can't spell numbers or the num that's funny because especially I think Twitter slash X has done this to us when they put the Impressions on each tweet and now we're like okay how many likes did it get how many retweets did it get how many bookmarks did it get how many Impressions did it get and Impressions you know I always say Chase impact not impressions and I say that because well first of all I think you can get a lot of Impressions but not make an impact but also I have to you know just remind myself that these are real people

[40:03] like 350 000 people like that's literally like 10 Arenas no it's more it's like crazy 20 Arena stadiums you know it's crazy yeah there was a time before before we hit the cap on the lab uh membership wasn't two thousand dollars is fifteen hundred dollars when we hit the cap I increased uh the price for new members um but at that time I knew you know if I tweeted once a week or twice a week about the community it would be my lowest engagement tweet but it would result in a new member and so I just looked at this as like I don't even care the spread on this this is worth saying

[40:47] this is worth sharing and it's gonna have a meaningful impact on the business you know I it wasn't a 200 like tweet but it was probably a 1500 tweet like that's that's a worthwhile way of using the tool even if from the outset it's like oh that tweet bombed in a way sure uh in another way all the other tweets are bombing actually well it depends what you're optimizing for so I think when you're creating content the question you need to ask yourself is what am I optimizing for and I think that could be different each week each day each month you know I think to you at that point it was my goal is

[41:29] to get 200 people into this into this group and totally that's all you know and then after you did that you might have been like okay back to regular scheduled programming let's go yeah you know yep and I think totally the other thing is you know I look at these platforms these social platforms as a way just to build trust with people you know you're building trust You're Building trust and a certain point you want a cat you might want to cash in on that trust in some shape or form it's just a it's just a question to ask yourself which is when makes the most

[42:04] sense to cash in on that trust so it is is social media for you top of funnel for late checkout is that are you trying to get clients from social media I mean your strategy look like that you know I joined Twitter in 2000 and I don't know it says on my profile or used to say on my profile

[42:24] right 2008. and I've been tweeting about the same stuff since 2008 at the same velocity so I initially I'm on social media to get my ideas out there first and foremost and to attract interesting people like you and I've had crazy people crazy conversations with people from Twitter so that's my number one reason why I'm on Twitter and why I do social media what sort of retention do you see in the best performing versus worst performing membership I don't have a ton of data here I know that my retention is over 90 uh like most months the first four months when I was really looking at it it was above 94

[43:08] percent um so that's the best I've seen but I know that most memberships that I talk to are pretty static because they're bringing new people in every month but they're losing just as many people as they're gaining so you know by that logic it would be like 50 right um if it's less than 50 you have a real problem because you're shrinking actively yeah but even if you're not shrinking actively churn is such a dangerous thing because there are negative Network effects in a peer-to-peer based membership where if my friends are leaving why would I stick around if I don't feel close to people who are joining because we have just as

[43:45] many people joining us leaving it just feels like the party is turning over all the time and I don't feel comfortable in this space anymore so I think more memberships should uh focus on larger renewal timelines or larger commitments like I think a monthly membership and a peer-to-peer based Community is a bad idea um you'll have to do annual you could do bi-annual you could do quarterly but I think monthly memberships in a peer-to-peer based space is setting yourself up for failure yeah I think I think retention is the golden metric of if you have a good membership and if you feel like your retention is

[44:25] low then that is a signal to focus on investing in the experience and making it more retentive because it's it's better to make the product more retentive than to try to just make your top of funnel better to get more people in totally and that sometimes could mean you need a part-time or full-time Community manager that's their only focus is retention so for example have them create programming social events things like that that bring people together in your membership and you just look and you speak to that person you're like hey retention's at 50 you need to get to 70 percent and a lot of these events and

[45:05] programming actually helps increase that so you can look at it after 90 days or 120 days and be like is this working are we you know are we moving in the right direction for sure I think the larger your community grows the more you need to think about the community as a set of concentric circles where people will want varying degrees of closeness with smaller and smaller groups like if I am in a 1 000 person community but I value the ability to have a consistent small group interaction you should be trying to facilitate that in some way to make that experience something that can be

[45:44] formed it might take a little bit of work on the part of the members themselves but you can do to kind of meet them there and make that experience possible that's when scale is not a problem when you're able to continue to create close experiences in small groups then scale is is a good thing for the business but a lot of people have this membership that starts off really small and people have these great intimate small group experiences they're successful in getting more members in they don't facilitate continuing those experiences and it just becomes a different experience with the membership I don't feel that closeness anymore and that's

[46:20] when it starts to work against you we're running up on time but I have one last question and putting you a little bit on the spot but you're a smart guy you know if you weren't doing what you're doing now what is a business that you might start or where do you see a trend or some opportunities uh that you're just like if I only had more time I would do that in this space I think there is room for a an agency that is of fractional Community managers because there are a ton of people who are able to build and grow communities they don't want to do active management

[46:57] of it they don't want to hire maybe can't hire a full-time employee but also if you have a team of fractional Community managers that can be a small group of fire starters within each community that you guys take on as a client to get things kind of moving I just think it's a no-brainer I have no real interest in running an agency so I'm happy to have that out there but I think I'm shocked that this has not come around yet as like a dominant player in that space yeah agency business tough uh as you know but definitely think that if you can keep it small and you're not

[47:29] trying to hire a thousand fractional Community managers there's definitely an opportunity there yeah Jay where could uh it's been fun man yeah where could where could people follow you uh check out the podcast Creator science you can check out everything at creatorscience.com or find me at J Klaus on whatever platform you like to uh hang out on and this is this has been fun you can come come back on the show whenever your heart desires and I'd love to I was hoping to pick up that guitar and play me a song at some point part two part two if people want it comment in the YouTube comment on the

[48:03] YouTube if you want that yes yes let's make this happen should we just turn into a rock band me and you I'll be the vocalist I have no I have no instrumental ability but I I have no vocals pretend to sing I Love karaoke I Love karaoke later man

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