February 8, 2024 • 47 mins
In this enlightening episode of Growth Talks, we delve into the world of community building with Andy Guttormsen, the co-founder of Circle and former VP of Growth at Teachable.
Circle is globally recognized as the leading platform for creating vibrant, engaged communities, and Andy brings his extensive expertise to the table.
We start by exploring the art of crafting a community from the ground up, diving into the initial steps, strategies, and mindset required to bring people together.
Then, we shift our focus to existing communities. Andy discusses innovative approaches to foster growth and increase engagement in already established groups.
A significant portion of our conversation is dedicated to why creators should invest in building their own communities.
Whether you're just starting out or looking to expand your existing community, this episode is packed with actionable insights and strategies that will help you create a more engaged and loyal audience.
📚 Suggested book:
https://amzn.to/3Sw7uuV
🛠 Suggested tool:
https://chat.openai.com/
👍 Follow our guest here:
https://circle.so/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewguttormsen/
🧲 Watch my free lead generation course:
https://gaito.link/skillshare
🤖 Watch my free ChatGPT course:
https://skl.sh/3ZKHFcV
🙏 Subscribe to the channel:
https://gaito.link/subscribe
📚 Download the Reading List:
https://gaito.link/gtbooks
Circle is globally recognized as the leading platform for creating vibrant, engaged communities, and Andy brings his extensive expertise to the table.
We start by exploring the art of crafting a community from the ground up, diving into the initial steps, strategies, and mindset required to bring people together.
Then, we shift our focus to existing communities. Andy discusses innovative approaches to foster growth and increase engagement in already established groups.
A significant portion of our conversation is dedicated to why creators should invest in building their own communities.
Whether you're just starting out or looking to expand your existing community, this episode is packed with actionable insights and strategies that will help you create a more engaged and loyal audience.
📚 Suggested book:
https://amzn.to/3Sw7uuV
🛠 Suggested tool:
https://chat.openai.com/
👍 Follow our guest here:
https://circle.so/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewguttormsen/
🧲 Watch my free lead generation course:
https://gaito.link/skillshare
🤖 Watch my free ChatGPT course:
https://skl.sh/3ZKHFcV
🙏 Subscribe to the channel:
https://gaito.link/subscribe
📚 Download the Reading List:
https://gaito.link/gtbooks
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Chao, everyone, and welcome backto Growth Doks. I am rough your
host and my guest today is AndyGutomsen. Hi Endy, and welcome to
the show. It's really great tobe here. Thanks for having me.
Raphael. Great, great, verynice. Today we're going to talk about
communities. But you know, beforestarting every conversations here on podcasts, we
(00:23):
always have like a classic question,and the question is who's Endy. So
tell us a little bit about youknow, your story and your background.
What's the sorry sure, so youknow today I'm one of the co founders
at a company called Circle, andwe run the leading community platform. We
(00:44):
serve over ten thousand course builders basedcommunity memberships around the world. Everything from
you know, the individual kind ofyou know, freelance solopreneurs who are out
there creating a community on gardening tothe big brand like Adobe, web Flow,
Oprah who use us and you know, before that, spent about four
(01:07):
years at a company called Teachable,which is a big online course platform before
your starting Circle. But for thelast for the last eight to ten years,
been been really serving creators and businessowners who want to build a community,
share what they know and monetize whatthey know. Nice cool and I
(01:32):
know that you know, I amone of your customers. My community is
on Circle and I love the product. I'd like to start. You know,
my first question for you is thatin your experience, so during the
last few years, did you seeany let's say, you know, any
big changes in how creators, youknow, marketers and entrepreneurs they build a
(01:59):
community and they you know, usethe community to like you know, to
to to monetize what they're what they'redoing. You know, everyone now is
talking about the whole creator economies andmost of the time when we think about
it, we think about you know, YouTube and you know, make money
with videos and so on and soforth. But communities, I think are
(02:19):
like a big part of it,isn't it. There's there's been this big
kind of shift that that has happened, which you know, five or ten
years ago, there were a lotof people who were teaching you know,
a static online course and I wouldput some videos up online or you know,
(02:44):
of course, there's a lot ofyou know, offline community experiences with
people you know, getting together.There were Facebook groups. But you know,
it's funny. So one of thethings that that we realized is when
we were seeing all these course creatorsand business owners and the ones who were
(03:05):
selling a lot of their digital products, the ones who were making a big
splash out there, like everybody waskind of talking about them online. They
had customers who would, you know, buy the first product, would then
come back and buy the second andthe third product. We realized that the
people who were doing really well,you know, they had this kind of
community membership experience. And when youand I when we talk about communities and
(03:28):
memberships, really what we're talking aboutis essentially just like this like home online
right where you bring people together,you give them access a lot of times
to content to you know, youhave experts come in, maybe there's some
course experiences in there, people aresharing ideas, but you're kind of bringing
these people together around this common missionor this common outcome that we all want.
(03:51):
And so it became almost this thisreally big, you know, differentiator
in a world where we want tostand out to have a community experience.
And now it's almost like it's tablestakes. It's kind of what everybody in
the market expects for the best experiencesout there, and so it's hard to
(04:12):
actually compete in a lot of wayswhen you don't have a community experience.
And so you know, when wetalk about community, there's a lot of
people conflate community and audiences. Soaudience tends to be I'm going to build
this this audience of people where there'sa lot of people who follow me.
They pay attention to what I say, and that's great. But the difference
between a community is that a lotof times it's when somebody's in my audience,
(04:35):
I'm actually like bringing them together,and those people in the audience are
connecting and getting value with each otherinstead of it just being me who's delivering
all the value. Now I getto unlock all these like magical opportunities between
my members, and that has thisreally this really like resilient sustaining value that
(04:58):
helps people kind of like keep buyingfrom you, keep you know, standing
in your ecosystem, and can createyou know, customers for a life.
You mentioned Facebook groups, and Iremember there was a time a few years
back when you know, I wasusing a lot of Facebook groups, you
know, both for my community,but also I was part of you know,
(05:21):
someone else's communities inside Facebook groups.And then I think maybe I don't
know, three or four years ago, something clicked. You know, something
changed, uh, and everyone movedon, you know, like professional platforms
like Circle for example. And nowfor me, I mean if I go
(05:44):
into like Facebook groups, it lookslike I don't know, something is not
working anymore over there. What doyou think happened? And why? You
know, community builders like me,you know, entrepreneurs, marketers, lenswers,
creators, they decided to shift onsomething, you know, on a
platform that was like created for themto build a community. Why uh,
(06:11):
you know, Facebook or social mediain general. H I feel that they
are not the right place anymore forthat. You know, they're with with
some of these other tools. There'sstill a lot of good that that can
(06:32):
happen on them, and so it'snot like everything is wrong, you know,
with Facebook groups or with using slackfor your communities. But you know,
one of my favorite examples of acommunity, it's a woman named doctor
Becky. She has a parenting communityand you know, doctor Becky is so
thoughtful about the type of experience shewants to give people. So for context,
(06:54):
doctor doctor Becky, she started bydoing a lot of like posting on
building what we call an audience.There not necessarily a community yet an audience.
But what she realized is that shewanted to have control over the experience
she was giving people. And whenwe talk about like the experience that we
are giving people a lot of timesthat we're talking about we call it signature
(07:17):
gatherings. So it's like, whatare like the signature gatherings that you're going
to offer in your community to bringpeople together, right, because you might
have a vision now these these signaturegatherings. They could be anything from We're
going to bring in an expert,you know, once a week to come
in and teach something, or We'regoing to do kind of like an area
where I can share my ideas andget feedback, or I can share work,
(07:39):
you know, like in a writingcommunity and get feedback, or in
a parenting community, I can kindof share a thought that I'm having for
the week, little video of meand get encouragement from other people, or
whatever it is. It could bea hot seat, one of my favorites,
which is you know where I goin and I have a like a
problem that I want to solve witha small girl, and so I'll go
(08:01):
in. I'm on the hot seatthis week for twenty minutes, I share
my problem and then for an hour, everybody else there helps me solve my
problem. It could be a bookclub, right, there's all these different
It could be a challenge accountability groups. And so you might have this vision
for a community and these signature gatheringsthat you want to offer like doctor Becky
did, and by the way,doctor Becky now is multi multi seven figure
(08:22):
community. But if you're like doctorBecky and you're very opinionated and thoughtful,
intentional about those cincture gatherings, youwant control in order to bring that vision
to life. And so you knowwhat I think the market requires. You
know, for people who want tobuild a community, what they really want
is they have their vision and theydon't want to have to like force that
(08:43):
vision into a tool that is veryopinionated. They want to basically be given
the building blocks and to be ableto create that vision that's uniquely theirs.
And I think that's where ultimately alot of community tools are going. And
that's I know it's a very longwinded way of answering it, but I
think I get it makes sense andand sing on that. I know that
(09:07):
you guys just released uh you know, community Benchmark any inside that you want
to share with us, something thatI don't know can be useful, or
also something that was kind of youknow, a surprise for you, you
know, some data, something thatwas Oh, I didn't expect that.
So yeah, so just for forcontext for for folks listening to the Community
(09:33):
Benchmark Report. So, I don'tknow if you're you're like me, like
I really do value advice in people'sopinions all the time, and I seek
it out sometimes though, you justwant the data, like I'd like to
just like see the data. I'llcome to my own conclusions, you know.
So what we did we created thisCommunity Benchmark Report. We have this
(09:56):
unique advantage where we have access tothe product usage for ten thousand communities,
including many of the top communities online. And what we actually did is we
looked at the top ten percent orso as well, and we really wanted
to understand what's different between let's say, like the top ten percent of communities
(10:18):
on circle versus the other you know, ninety percent and the results. So
it took we did about six monthsof really in depth analysis research, seven
hundred interviews, ten thousand community youknow, data points, all of that,
and we did come to you knowsome conclusions. It's all on our
(10:39):
report. It's eighty seven pages,it's beautifully design's completely free. You can
go to search for Circle Benchmark Reportdownload. It's all yours. A few
interesting findings, So the first onewas that you know, four communities,
any of the top communities actually didn'treally have bigger member bases than the lower
(11:07):
performing communities. So like the sizeof the membership actually wasn't a big differentiator
between good and bad. So thattells you right there that like, like
there's not a correlation between a sixhundred person community doing really well versus one
hundred person community doing really you dojust as great. One of my favorite
examples of this is a guy hisname is Josh Hall, and he is
(11:31):
actually he does have a community offreelancers, and you freelance designers specifically,
but you know his community, it'sit's people who want to go out get
clients for their freelance design business.And so you know, there's I think
about one hundred and fifty people inthere. It's a couple thousand dollars a
year, but you can go inthere and it's small. The value of
(11:54):
it is that it's very high touchbecause it's not that big, and so
instead Josh charges a premium price acouple thousand dollars a year. He's able
then to really invest and deliver forthose members, give them a lot of
attention. We talked about hot seatsa minute ago. Like they do hot
seats, you know, every weekevery couple of weeks they bringing experts to
(12:15):
talk, but also they have theirmembers, you know, come in and
talk as the experts. Each week, they kind of will nominate somebody who's
a topic, that kind of thing. They'll do office hours. And so
when you're smaller, you actually canuse it as an advantage to deliver more
and have more control over the valuethat your members are getting. So that's
(12:37):
one example, and again that's oneguy running it a few hundred thousand dollars
a year and growing actually. Andyou know another thing you can think about
too is like you know, yousay, Andy, well, if I
want to keep my community really small, how do I increase revenue? And
one of my other favorite examples ofa community, it's a guy named Jason
(12:58):
Gainard who runs a community called mindTalks. It's not on Circle, but
what they do is he actually kindof put in a limit where he said,
you know what, we're not goingto increase the quantity of members,
but we're going to consistently increase theprice point in the quality of members in
(13:20):
the room. So it's capped ata certain amount, but every single year,
the quality of the members you know, that that you're in there with,
gets better. So that was onebig one, and I think it's
encouraging for people who are just gettingstarted. It could really be an advantage
to be small. Another one thatI thought was interesting is that when it
(13:41):
comes to going out and acquiring members, actually like more is better. And
for me this was a really bigsurprise, uh in terms of like more
channels because for me, in myexperience growing businesses in the past, Circle
Teachable, we would go out andyou know a lot of people say,
(14:03):
oh, we're going to find tonsof different marketing channels. We're going to
do paid ads, and we're we'regoing to be on Meta and Facebook,
and we're going to start a blogand a podcast, and we're going to
do direct mail and we're going todo all these different things. But I
have a YouTube show. But actually, you know, when building our software
(14:24):
business is really what we would dois we'd find like one or two great
channels that would work really well,and we would do it over and over
and over again for like three yearsand just find that one channel. With
community, it's actually not like thatwith community. Actually, the more channels
the better. So if you lookat the communities that acquire members really not
(14:45):
easily, but if they acquire themefficiently, they tend to have like four
or five six different channels that they'revery comfortable. It could be a YouTube
show, it could be that theyhave a popular blog, like, it
could be a lot of different things, and so they're kind of like they
stack them on top almost, youknow, which for for some people it's
(15:09):
great because that's what our instincts tellus as like, yeah, we want
we should be doing all these things. And for others it's more so,
hey, I got to invest hereand do do a lot of activity.
Another thing is that most of thecommunities do not have help. So sorry,
(15:33):
when I say most, I'm talkingabout the platinum communities. We call
them platinum, the top ten percentof communities in terms of revenue engagement.
They don't actually have like any fulltime help, so it's really just a
person the community admin running it so, uh, and then a lot of
times, you know, they mighthave that we have a workflows feature which
(15:56):
is kind of like a lot oflike automations and things like that, and
so it kind of does a lotof the work that a community manager might
do or they hire you know,part time help. But that was i'd
say, not a surprise, butI think it was reassuring for for people
(16:18):
to see that you can run thesecommunities without support. But those are some
of the This is like an eightyseven page deep dive report and if you're
running a community or a membership ora course, you should totally read it.
It's just full of all the chartsand the data, the graphics and
(16:41):
stories from a lot of the topthe top folks around. I'll live the
link in the description below, soyou guys can tell a load the the
you know, community Benchmark and theIn the last couple of years, there's
a lot of talking about community drivengrowth, uh, and this, you
(17:04):
know, it's a trend, thefact that not only you know, creators
and marketers and food answers are buildingtheir own communities, but also like you
know, big brands and you knowand and and big companies. They now
realize then understood the value of youknow, having an engaged community. What
(17:30):
about that? Can you share withus some you know thoughts on this new
big trend. Yeah, So thedefault is people think, oh, I
will have a community out charge forit paid membership experience, or I'll have
like a community next to an onlinecourse. And that's what a lot of
you know, individuals, individual creatorsdo that their model, and that could
(17:56):
be very lucrative. But what canbe if more lucrative, is getting creative
about how to leverage the people inyour community. So I'll give you some
cool examples. So one of myfavorite communities, it's a community. It's
run by a venture capital firm andit's a community for all of their portfolio
(18:21):
founders, the founders of companies thatthey've invested in, and you know they're
in there kind of like sharing resourceswith each other, sharing information with each
other. By the way I'm saying, there's there's like actually probably more than
ten of these on Circle alone.But it's it's this. They don't monetize
(18:45):
it, but what they do isthey build these really close relationships. They
invest in these founders in terms ofmoney, time, attention, skills,
mentorship and they help them grow theirbusinesses. But the other thing they'll do
is they'll use that for sourcing otherdeals. And so you know, for
us, I mean we have ourown circle customers. I mean all of
(19:07):
our customers are in there. Weuse it to get product feedback. We
have another so we'll say, hey, we launched this new feature. We'll
get literally fifty comments in there ofhell, why don't you to launch this
other feature. We don't care aboutthis one, or you know whatever.
It is, like, there's somuch feedback coming in. And so the
other thing is there's gosh, soso web flow is a is a they
(19:33):
have a really great community where whatthey'll do is they'll start to use that
to get you know, feedback onproduct ideas. Another one would be Exit
five. It's by Dave Gearheart.What he'll do is he'll he literally has
a job matching service in there whereyou know, he'll connect a member of
(19:55):
a community with a with like corporate. The companies you know that basically sponsor
him. So they come in andthose those companies are able to find really
great talent within the community. Sothere's a lot of like two sided marketplace
opportunities. Having a community is oneof the best ways to launch and conceive
(20:18):
of a product before even building it, because you already have this built in
you know, these built in betatesters. All of our beta testers,
they just come directly from our community. We just send them a bunch of
d MS and say, hey,do you want to you want to see
this thing for a few months,and here's what you'll do if you want
to be a beta tester. Sothere Another example would be UH sourcing sourcing
(20:45):
deals for UH. So Cody Sanchezis UH. She's a woman who has
a really great community. It's actuallya paid membership community, but it's all
about you're building businesses acquiring businesses,and so she has this community where she
teaches people how to acquire businesses,but also they do a lot of sourcing
(21:08):
in there. Well, they'll showher businesses that she can go and acquire
because now she has one thousand peoplewho know the types of businesses that she
likes to acquire because they're learning howto do it, and they'll show her
opportunities as well. And so alot of the most lucrative communities out there,
they're actually not monetized directly. They'remonetized indirectly. If you are enjoying
(21:32):
this episode, please check out mylead generation course. You can watch it
for free on guide to Dot linkslash skill Share Gai T. As an
entrepreneur, marketer, or business owner, you know how crucial lead generation is.
In this course, I'll be sharingwith you twenty proven tactics for lead
generation in both B two B andB two C markets. You can watch
(21:55):
it for free on guide to Dotlink slash skill Share Gai T. You'll
find the link in the description.Mm hmmm. I love all these examples
because, uh, you know,if someone is listening and and you know,
and they are not creators or marketers, but they're actually building a product.
Uh. Now, guys, youknow that a community is important for
(22:17):
you as well, and there area lot of uh, you know,
ways how you can you know,leverage the power of a community also for
for your product, for your foryour business. Let's i'd like to you
know, share some useful tips andtricks for people that are kind of you
(22:37):
know, starting with a community.So let's say that it's someone they have
a small community or they need don'teven even a community, but they want
to start one. So what wouldyou say, are like the top three
uh, you know, tips andtricks best practices to start a new community
from scratch. So the first thingI just want to start that with is
(23:04):
there are a lot of paths thatthat people take. They think about like
creating an online course or a membershipor a community you're starting this business over
here, and they all take alot of work. None of them are
easy. But creating a community issomething that it takes a lot of work,
but you can get started and youcan have a legit community in like
(23:27):
forty five days if you do alot of work, right. And so
the first thing I tell people isyou've probably seen some big community with beautiful
landing pages and and you know they'rethey're earning a whole lot and they do
big launches, you know, marketingand all that. Like that is not
(23:48):
how you start in the community world. What what you will do is the
first thing I would figure out,like who do I want to create my
community for? And uh, reallyhone in on like what that persona is
and stick with you know whatever.You have kind of an advantage around,
right, And what I always tellpeople is you take a pad and then
(24:11):
I want you to kind of writedown a whole bunch of ideas for how
you can deliver a lot of value. And essentially what this is is like,
choose three signature gatherings. Right,So we talked about signature gatherings earlier.
Signature gatherings are like that really thatthat value prop that kind of like
(24:32):
those moments that you're going to createin your community for those members. Now,
a lot of people they think,oh, I got to get people
to come in and hang out inmy community all day and it's going to
be like an area where people hangout, they just riff, they chat
and all of that. What we'veseen is like that very rarely works.
What actually works really well is ifyou have like three signature gatherings. So
(24:53):
let's for a minute. I wasactually I was coaching a woman the other
day who's starting a running community,and we went through a process with her
where we basically identify, you know, what are the three signature gatherings that
you're going to have, and sofor her, one of the big ones
was accountability, and so accountability forher specifically was at the beginning of the
(25:18):
week, I'm going to share,like we're all all the members We're going
to share our running plan for theweek, and then we're gonna check in
during the week. Let's tell peoplehow it's going, get some encouragement at
the beginning of the week, andall of that. Tell people like how
I'm progressing. At the end ofthe week, write up a quick report
of how I did for the week, share with the whole group. Everybody
(25:38):
shares their stuff and do that everyweek, so there's like an accountability.
It's like our signature gathering Monday Sunday, we kind of check in, you
know, how do we do.Another example is that there's a lot of
expertise about like running techniques, howto prepare for a race, all that
kind of stuff, and so creatinga schedule where each week somebody, some
(26:00):
member of the community is going tocome in and teach something, or they'll
bring somebody externally in, so that'sa second signature gathering. The other thing
are challenges, so like they wouldhave like a challenge where you know,
each month, for one of theweeks, there's like a challenge a week
where we're all going to get reallygood at something. I'm gonna post this
thing or I'm gonna do this hardchallenge at whatever it is. But you'll
(26:23):
figure out what are your three signaturegatherings? For a lot of business communities,
I love the hot seat signature gatheringbecause gosh, like, if I'm
going to sit there, have abig problem solved in a group of people,
you know, five or six ofmy peers, that's incredibly valuable.
I can I can pay for that, you know, because it's it's so
(26:44):
valuable for me. So what arethose three signature gatherings? Then what I'm
gonna do is I'm going to reachout and find my founding members. And
my founding members these are the theexcited, kind of ambitious me be a
little bit crazy, people who aregoing to take a risk and build a
thing with you. And the thingthat I feel is somebody who's just starting,
(27:06):
you know, the community is likeit's a vulnerable place to be because
you're saying, Hey, I havethis idea, I want to bring people
together. I want to bring youtogether with these other folks. What do
you think that's a vulnerable thing togo out and say to somebody because it
gives you a chance to be rejected. And so you know, when I
think about like approaching that person,you know, it's tempting to be like,
(27:29):
oh, I already have this community, it's great, and not really
be transparent about the fact that,no, this is a new thing,
like you're a founding member. Frankly, you're gonna build it with me,
and we're gonna start off small andwe'll grow from there, and it's just
going to be these three signature gatheringsto start. When you're kind of upfront
with those people, it attracts theright kind of people in So nail my
(27:52):
three signature gatherings, figure out alist of who are the people that I'm
going to reach out to first.Those people are going to be in my
phone, They're going to be inmy email inbox, they're going to be
on LinkedIn. I already know them. If I can't create a list of
thirty people who could be part ofthis group, it's probably not a group
I should start. So I'll createthat list and then I'll just send them
(28:14):
emails and then what I would dois I would hop on a call with
every single one of them. Now. One of my favorite examples of a
community with Pat Flinn from Smart PassiveIncome. They have hundreds and hundreds of
members to paid community, very engaged, valuable. Even they started out having
one on one calls with all theirfirst members. And so what you'll do
is you'll really make sure that firstgroup of founding members are the right fit.
(28:37):
Because what's different about an audience versusa community is an audience like there's
no two way commitment. But whenI go out to those members, not
only am I saying here's what I'mgoing to deliver to you, here's what
you'll get inside the community, allthe value props, you're also saying,
here's what you got to contribute tothe rest of the members. Because it's
a two way street. And soif you nail, you know, those
(29:00):
first members, then it really givesyou the best chance of succeeding. The
thing from there, though, isthat you need to create a really great
onboarding experience, and that is veryit's very tactical. There's definitely a right
way to do a lot of waysto do it, but there's definitely at
least you know, a couple ofright ways to do it, and that's
how you can set yourself up toto succeed with your community. But those
(29:25):
are those are kind of like allthat that happens in a week or two
like that, that can happen veryquickly. M And since you mentioned the
onboarding experience, do you think thereare like some common mistakes that are you
know, people make when they arebuilding a community and you know, designing
(29:45):
the onboarding experience. Yeah, sothe big mistake, the most common mistake
is all right, I got somebodyto agree to join the community, Derek's
I did. Maybe I got them. They're paying for the community, and
now I send them an invite,they come into the community, and I
(30:08):
just expect them to start contributing andeverything to be done. Like my work
is done. The work starts oncesomebody says yes, right. And so
if you really put yourself in theirshoes, which is what any great business
owner does, Marketer does. They'vepaid you, they've said yes, they're
(30:30):
coming into the community, but they'restill judging you, and they're still deciding
whether or now they're going to engage. Right. So in order to really
kind of encourage them and make surethat happens, you basically need to reinforce
their decision in that first like twentyfour to four eight hours. So here's
a few things that I would recommendthat a lot of communities do and this
(30:53):
is actually what the SPI team doesin their community too. So the first
thing is like they opin up thecommunity once a month or once a quarter,
so when they say that member,it's like, yeah, I'm in,
let's do it. They also havea new member kind of like orientation,
where before you're even in the community, they'll bring in let's say,
you know, ten members to allkind of meet each other first and say,
(31:17):
all right, you're going to getaccess to the community next week.
Here's all your other members. Let'sall get to know each other, you
know, here's kind of their backgrounds. Here's what your expectations should be in
the community. Here's all the differentways you can get value. By the
way, here's some of kind ofour rituals and how we do things in
the community. Here's how we'd likeyou to contribute, what our expectations are
(31:37):
from you. And so it's almostlike when you go into the community,
then you have this primary but youalso recognize other people in there now very
tactically, when I get into thecommunity for the first time, there's definitely
things that like the tools can doand you can set up to give yourself
a good chance. So, forinstance, you can set up a welcome
video. The first time somebody logsin, this video pops up, so
(32:00):
it might be like Pat saying,Hey, welcome to the community, Exciting
to see you here. Here's allthe different ways you can get value.
To lay the land, there's reallythree things you need to do the first
time that person logs in. Thefirst thing is you need to give them
basically a kind of a lay ofthe land, like here's how here's where
(32:22):
you can go find this stuff thatyou were promised. Here's how you can
send and receive a direct message tosomebody you know, here's how you can
attend this like the expert sessions we'redoing or joined the book club that we
had talked about, and the orientationor whatever, like a lay of the
land, navigation right, how touse the tool as well. And by
the way, best thing to dokind of a little bit of a crutch,
(32:45):
but I always recommend it is havinga new member checklist that people can
go through. And so you mighttell people go through the new member checklist.
At the end of the checklist,I want you to send me a
DM let me know that you finishedchecklist. And then I'm going to send
you a little gift when you dothat. By the way, this gives
people a little bit of positive reinforcement, a little bit of kind of fun
(33:07):
and curiosity, but also helps themuse the tool because like now they're sending
a DM, they're learning how todo that, right, And so you
might have them go through do thesethings, go check out the member directory
and find somebody to connect with.Because the second thing that you want in
that first twenty four hours lots ofways to accomplish it, is you want
them to connect with another member.So you want them to have at least
(33:30):
like one good positive interaction where maybeyou go you introduce them to the group
and they get a whole bunch ofreplies there, or you send a DM
like a group chat where you connectthem with another member. Hey, I
know that you're really into this thing. This person would be great for you
to meet. Just connecting you tothen that member helps kind of like onboard
the new member, right, theykind of bring them in, give them
(33:51):
that moment, so lay the landconnecting with another member. The third thing
is just getting some value on oneof those signature gathering. Can you get
them to have that kind of moment, right, and this is a great
first twenty four to forty eight hourswhere you've now reinforced the decision here and
that person is fully bought in.And then of course, you know they
(34:15):
get to the end of that memberchecklist, they DM you shoot them,
give them like some type of coolgift or something like just really over deliver
on expectations in that time. Butthat's how you ya on board a member.
And then of course your signature gatherings. Those are maybe there's three of
them. That's what keeps people comingback every single week. There's like the
(34:36):
two or three big signature gatherings,the big value props for that week,
and now they're in your ecosystem.Wow, that was great. And the
check this idea, I love it. I think I'm going to use it
in my community as well. Thankyou for that. It's a great idea.
That's a great idea. Actually,yeah, I love it. I
(34:59):
love it. So, you know, we are sharing some advice for people
that are starting their own community orthey have us more one. But what
about you know what's next? Sowhat about people that already have like a
small community and they decide, okay, this is the time where you know,
(35:21):
I want to go big, SoI want to start like, you
know, acquiring more new members oryou know, find new ways to monetize
them. Do you have any youknow, useful thing that you want to
share with them? Yeah, SoI think I think there there are When
(35:44):
we look at the folks who aredoing really well, there are so many
different models that works. So there'snot like a certain model that I recommend,
Like you can have, for instance, many thousands of members, all
paying monthly, all in the sameexact tier. But another way to think
about it too, is like,are there kind of different tiers you may
(36:07):
want to offer for folks to growthe business. So I think it's maybe
counterintuitive, but one of the bestways to grow the revenue of a community
business is not necessarily just to growthe number of members kind of on that
like made like let's say paid membershipexperience. A lot of times, it's
(36:29):
to offer a much higher tier thatis much more you know, let's say
valuable, your more hands on allof that, and so like, is
there like a premium tier you canoffer is one of the places that my
head goes immediately. But you know, if you want to scale up another
thing you can do is I meanreally what it is is there's you're finding
(36:54):
traffic, You're putting the offer infront of them, and you're converting them.
So if you want to sell thenumber of members, it's essentially where
are you going to find the traffic? How are you going to convert them?
I have biases here, so youknow, in terms of converting them.
For memberships especially, I love webinars. I think webinars are great.
(37:15):
I've had plenty of webinars where there'sbeen three hundred people on webinars where there's
three thousand people watching live. Youknow, ten percent of the people on
the webinar will become a member.And so you know, that's one example
of like how do you convert members? But then there's traffic, and so
you can go out to partners,you can go out to other communities that
(37:37):
are not competitive but like tangential anddo like cross cross promotions, right,
and so the at that point,like you should have your signature gathering,
is your value prop pretty solidified?You should probably have a beautiful landing page,
like people should know exactly what youget. By the way, one
(37:59):
of my favorite things to do isgo to the successful communities, go to
their landing pages and learn from thoselanding pages because you can see everything they
offer in their communities. Those areall just signature gatherings, is really what
they are. But I would startto figure out where is the traffic going
to come from. I'd look fora lot of partnerships. What we found
(38:21):
in the Benchmark report is actually paythe acquisition tends to not be great for
communities because it's a little bit morebottom funnel communities, you know, so
it's hard to like have an ad, get people to go click on an
AD and then just buy a paidmembership community recurring every month. You really
need to build a relationship with people. So I would look for channels where
(38:45):
you can build a relationship with people. That's why I love webinars for paid
memberships is because you can give yousixty minute training just pure value for free
to somebody really build a relationship withtwenty people or two thousand people all at
the same time. And you cando the same thing with partners where like
that partner can help, you know, take that relationship that they have with
(39:07):
their audience and kind of almost likebring you into that and help you build
your relationship with their audience really quickly. So it's like there's this almost like
channel product fit like this, youknow what I mean, where it's like
you got to find the right channelsfor a community membership and those are going
to be more relationship focused. Partnershipsare great there for example, just to
(39:32):
add something you know about that mycase, you know, content marketing is
the best channel. So people watchmy videos. They get a lot of
value from that, you know,from like a tutorial or an interview or
you know, something else. Andthen I tell them about the community,
(39:52):
and well the thing is, ohand this was the free part, so
I can imagine that you know,in the paid community there is much more
than that. Uh. And that'show you can also you know, deliver
some value and show them what's goingto be inside the community. Marketing always
huge on that. And the quickquestion about AI. You know everyone is
(40:16):
talking about AI, lily, andcommunities are all about relationship. You just
said that, So how AI fitsin all this? I mean, how
can we use and leverage AI forour communities but without losing the human touch.
(40:37):
So we've thought a lot about thisat Circle and there are right now
there are actually like three very specific. Actually there's four specific ways that we
have found. Not all credit equals. Some are like much bigger ideas than
others are more tactical. So I'llkind of walk you through from most tactical
(41:00):
and maybe like the least sexy tothe most sexy. So the least sexy
would be We use AI to transcribeall the events that you might do in
your community automatically. Right, soif you're running like a live session,
you're bringing an expert or whatever,really click a button. We'll create the
(41:21):
entire summary, transcript all that kindof stuff for you. So it uses
AI to kind of just support you, but not to replace any relationships.
Another example would be coming up withideas in your community for like prompts and
ways to engage you know people,you know, if you're in circle,
for instance, you may know this, but you can go in and say,
(41:42):
you know, give me, giveme ten ideas that I can for
like a post I can do toget people to share whatever, and you
know, you can come up witha whole bunch of different ideas. It'll
just do that for you. Thenext example, which is a little bit
more interesting and unique, is weuse AI to actually create what we call
(42:07):
like activity scores, which look atyour community all the engagement, how people
are kind of like interacting, andthen we compare that to all the other
communities and we kind of train amodel which basically will tell you, you
know, here's how engaged you knowyour communities, your community members are,
(42:30):
Here's how we expect them to behavein the future, and all that kind
of stuff. So it's like thisactivity score feature that we have in our
analytics area. The probably most sexything we're doing is we have a feature
coming out in a few months,but it's almost like a bot where imagine
(42:52):
it's the Raphael bot in your community, where you know, people can't talk
to you all day every day.You there's only want to you, right,
and maybe you're a coach or maybeyou're an advisor, or you're a
trainer or whatever you are. Youknow you're gonna you have all these ideas
and a lot of it comes inthe community. So you might have there
could have hundreds of posts in yourcommunity, you could have courses in there,
(43:14):
you could have expert workshops, allthe transcriptions. Essentially, the AI
will consume and read all of thecontent and the context in your community,
and then you could create the Rafaelbias Rafael or somebody goes in they say,
Rafael, you know, what doyou think about this topic? And
then it'll produce a really great answerbased off of stuff that's in your community,
(43:38):
or Raphael, I'm really interested inlearning more about X. Is there
somebody else in the community who Ishould talk to for this? And then
it'll know, you know, fromyour member directory and from that person's post
and content like maybe one or twoor three recommendations for who they should reach
out to in the community about thisthing. And so it'll really give you
leverages a community admin to essentially havethis kind of bot available for your members.
(44:05):
Although I wouldn't call it a bot. I would come up with a
better, more human name than that. But there's a lot there. Yeah,
yeah, I love it. Ilove it, and we usually and
this conversation with two quick questions.Uh, one is about books and one
is about tools. So let's startwith books. Do you have something that
(44:29):
you want to share with us?It could be you know, community related,
but also something else or a bookthat you loved, something that you're
reading right now, or I don'tknow, a book that can be useful
for my audience. Anything. Sure, So the you know, I'm reading
a book right now, about halfwaythrough. It's a really long book.
(44:50):
It's called Titan. It's about JohnRockefeller, John D. Rockefeller. You
built Standard Oil basically into the youknow, biggest company in the in the
United States and uh, the lateeighteen hundreds. But really fascinating, you
know, his kind of journey ofof building this major conglomerate, you know,
(45:14):
around that time, and so prettypretty lost in that book right now,
is really enjoying it. And uh, what's what's the name again?
It's called Titan. Okay, okay, I'll leave the linking in the description.
Okay, Yeah. What about tools? Do you have something that you
love? Uh? Of course,but what else you know, any marketing
(45:37):
tools that you and your team useyour day to day activities. Yeah,
so you know, right now,I'm just I'm using chat gibt a ton
like all the time. Uh,and we're trying, like our whole team,
you know, really encouraging them touse it as well, so you
(46:00):
know, and it's just it ishelping us go a lot faster. It
is the tool that I'm most excitedabout. I know it's not an interesting
answer, but it's it's the truth. Yeah, yeah, I totally I
agree on that, Andy, beforesaying by where they can find you,
read you, follow you, anylink that you want to share with us?
(46:24):
Sure, so, you know,just check out Circle dot s O.
If you're thinking about creating a community, it's the best place to go
and kick the tires for a bit, see what it's like to you know,
hop in and create a trial account, or you can reach out to
me anytime my emails Andrew at Circledot s O. I see anybody's emails
(46:45):
and I would love to hear fromyou. Cool. Great, great,
Andy, Thank you so much foryour tom This was great. Thank you.
This was a lot of fun,so really appreciate you having me on.
Thanks for listening to this episode ofthe podcast. I hope you enjoyed
it and you learned something new.Make sure to subscribe to us on YouTube
(47:06):
and Spotify to stay updated on newepisodes. With your support, I can
continue to bring great content and greatguests to this podcast. So hit the
subscribe button now and I'll see youin the next episode.
Chao, everyone, and welcome backto Growth Doks. I am rough your
host and my guest today is AndyGutomsen. Hi Endy, and welcome to
the show. It's really great tobe here. Thanks for having me.
Raphael. Great, great, verynice. Today we're going to talk about
communities. But you know, beforestarting every conversations here on podcasts, we
(00:23):
always have like a classic question,and the question is who's Endy. So
tell us a little bit about youknow, your story and your background.
What's the sorry sure, so youknow today I'm one of the co founders
at a company called Circle, andwe run the leading community platform. We
(00:44):
serve over ten thousand course builders basedcommunity memberships around the world. Everything from
you know, the individual kind ofyou know, freelance solopreneurs who are out
there creating a community on gardening tothe big brand like Adobe, web Flow,
Oprah who use us and you know, before that, spent about four
(01:07):
years at a company called Teachable,which is a big online course platform before
your starting Circle. But for thelast for the last eight to ten years,
been been really serving creators and businessowners who want to build a community,
share what they know and monetize whatthey know. Nice cool and I
(01:32):
know that you know, I amone of your customers. My community is
on Circle and I love the product. I'd like to start. You know,
my first question for you is thatin your experience, so during the
last few years, did you seeany let's say, you know, any
big changes in how creators, youknow, marketers and entrepreneurs they build a
(01:59):
community and they you know, usethe community to like you know, to
to to monetize what they're what they'redoing. You know, everyone now is
talking about the whole creator economies andmost of the time when we think about
it, we think about you know, YouTube and you know, make money
with videos and so on and soforth. But communities, I think are
(02:19):
like a big part of it,isn't it. There's there's been this big
kind of shift that that has happened, which you know, five or ten
years ago, there were a lotof people who were teaching you know,
a static online course and I wouldput some videos up online or you know,
(02:44):
of course, there's a lot ofyou know, offline community experiences with
people you know, getting together.There were Facebook groups. But you know,
it's funny. So one of thethings that that we realized is when
we were seeing all these course creatorsand business owners and the ones who were
(03:05):
selling a lot of their digital products, the ones who were making a big
splash out there, like everybody waskind of talking about them online. They
had customers who would, you know, buy the first product, would then
come back and buy the second andthe third product. We realized that the
people who were doing really well,you know, they had this kind of
community membership experience. And when youand I when we talk about communities and
(03:28):
memberships, really what we're talking aboutis essentially just like this like home online
right where you bring people together,you give them access a lot of times
to content to you know, youhave experts come in, maybe there's some
course experiences in there, people aresharing ideas, but you're kind of bringing
these people together around this common missionor this common outcome that we all want.
(03:51):
And so it became almost this thisreally big, you know, differentiator
in a world where we want tostand out to have a community experience.
And now it's almost like it's tablestakes. It's kind of what everybody in
the market expects for the best experiencesout there, and so it's hard to
(04:12):
actually compete in a lot of wayswhen you don't have a community experience.
And so you know, when wetalk about community, there's a lot of
people conflate community and audiences. Soaudience tends to be I'm going to build
this this audience of people where there'sa lot of people who follow me.
They pay attention to what I say, and that's great. But the difference
between a community is that a lotof times it's when somebody's in my audience,
(04:35):
I'm actually like bringing them together,and those people in the audience are
connecting and getting value with each otherinstead of it just being me who's delivering
all the value. Now I getto unlock all these like magical opportunities between
my members, and that has thisreally this really like resilient sustaining value that
(04:58):
helps people kind of like keep buyingfrom you, keep you know, standing
in your ecosystem, and can createyou know, customers for a life.
You mentioned Facebook groups, and Iremember there was a time a few years
back when you know, I wasusing a lot of Facebook groups, you
know, both for my community,but also I was part of you know,
(05:21):
someone else's communities inside Facebook groups.And then I think maybe I don't
know, three or four years ago, something clicked. You know, something
changed, uh, and everyone movedon, you know, like professional platforms
like Circle for example. And nowfor me, I mean if I go
(05:44):
into like Facebook groups, it lookslike I don't know, something is not
working anymore over there. What doyou think happened? And why? You
know, community builders like me,you know, entrepreneurs, marketers, lenswers,
creators, they decided to shift onsomething, you know, on a
platform that was like created for themto build a community. Why uh,
(06:11):
you know, Facebook or social mediain general. H I feel that they
are not the right place anymore forthat. You know, they're with with
some of these other tools. There'sstill a lot of good that that can
(06:32):
happen on them, and so it'snot like everything is wrong, you know,
with Facebook groups or with using slackfor your communities. But you know,
one of my favorite examples of acommunity, it's a woman named doctor
Becky. She has a parenting communityand you know, doctor Becky is so
thoughtful about the type of experience shewants to give people. So for context,
(06:54):
doctor doctor Becky, she started bydoing a lot of like posting on
building what we call an audience.There not necessarily a community yet an audience.
But what she realized is that shewanted to have control over the experience
she was giving people. And whenwe talk about like the experience that we
are giving people a lot of timesthat we're talking about we call it signature
(07:17):
gatherings. So it's like, whatare like the signature gatherings that you're going
to offer in your community to bringpeople together, right, because you might
have a vision now these these signaturegatherings. They could be anything from We're
going to bring in an expert,you know, once a week to come
in and teach something, or We'regoing to do kind of like an area
where I can share my ideas andget feedback, or I can share work,
(07:39):
you know, like in a writingcommunity and get feedback, or in
a parenting community, I can kindof share a thought that I'm having for
the week, little video of meand get encouragement from other people, or
whatever it is. It could bea hot seat, one of my favorites,
which is you know where I goin and I have a like a
problem that I want to solve witha small girl, and so I'll go
(08:01):
in. I'm on the hot seatthis week for twenty minutes, I share
my problem and then for an hour, everybody else there helps me solve my
problem. It could be a bookclub, right, there's all these different
It could be a challenge accountability groups. And so you might have this vision
for a community and these signature gatheringsthat you want to offer like doctor Becky
did, and by the way,doctor Becky now is multi multi seven figure
(08:22):
community. But if you're like doctorBecky and you're very opinionated and thoughtful,
intentional about those cincture gatherings, youwant control in order to bring that vision
to life. And so you knowwhat I think the market requires. You
know, for people who want tobuild a community, what they really want
is they have their vision and theydon't want to have to like force that
(08:43):
vision into a tool that is veryopinionated. They want to basically be given
the building blocks and to be ableto create that vision that's uniquely theirs.
And I think that's where ultimately alot of community tools are going. And
that's I know it's a very longwinded way of answering it, but I
think I get it makes sense andand sing on that. I know that
(09:07):
you guys just released uh you know, community Benchmark any inside that you want
to share with us, something thatI don't know can be useful, or
also something that was kind of youknow, a surprise for you, you
know, some data, something thatwas Oh, I didn't expect that.
So yeah, so just for forcontext for for folks listening to the Community
(09:33):
Benchmark Report. So, I don'tknow if you're you're like me, like
I really do value advice in people'sopinions all the time, and I seek
it out sometimes though, you justwant the data, like I'd like to
just like see the data. I'llcome to my own conclusions, you know.
So what we did we created thisCommunity Benchmark Report. We have this
(09:56):
unique advantage where we have access tothe product usage for ten thousand communities,
including many of the top communities online. And what we actually did is we
looked at the top ten percent orso as well, and we really wanted
to understand what's different between let's say, like the top ten percent of communities
(10:18):
on circle versus the other you know, ninety percent and the results. So
it took we did about six monthsof really in depth analysis research, seven
hundred interviews, ten thousand community youknow, data points, all of that,
and we did come to you knowsome conclusions. It's all on our
(10:39):
report. It's eighty seven pages,it's beautifully design's completely free. You can
go to search for Circle Benchmark Reportdownload. It's all yours. A few
interesting findings, So the first onewas that you know, four communities,
any of the top communities actually didn'treally have bigger member bases than the lower
(11:07):
performing communities. So like the sizeof the membership actually wasn't a big differentiator
between good and bad. So thattells you right there that like, like
there's not a correlation between a sixhundred person community doing really well versus one
hundred person community doing really you dojust as great. One of my favorite
examples of this is a guy hisname is Josh Hall, and he is
(11:31):
actually he does have a community offreelancers, and you freelance designers specifically,
but you know his community, it'sit's people who want to go out get
clients for their freelance design business.And so you know, there's I think
about one hundred and fifty people inthere. It's a couple thousand dollars a
year, but you can go inthere and it's small. The value of
(11:54):
it is that it's very high touchbecause it's not that big, and so
instead Josh charges a premium price acouple thousand dollars a year. He's able
then to really invest and deliver forthose members, give them a lot of
attention. We talked about hot seatsa minute ago. Like they do hot
seats, you know, every weekevery couple of weeks they bringing experts to
(12:15):
talk, but also they have theirmembers, you know, come in and
talk as the experts. Each week, they kind of will nominate somebody who's
a topic, that kind of thing. They'll do office hours. And so
when you're smaller, you actually canuse it as an advantage to deliver more
and have more control over the valuethat your members are getting. So that's
(12:37):
one example, and again that's oneguy running it a few hundred thousand dollars
a year and growing actually. Andyou know another thing you can think about
too is like you know, yousay, Andy, well, if I
want to keep my community really small, how do I increase revenue? And
one of my other favorite examples ofa community, it's a guy named Jason
(12:58):
Gainard who runs a community called mindTalks. It's not on Circle, but
what they do is he actually kindof put in a limit where he said,
you know what, we're not goingto increase the quantity of members,
but we're going to consistently increase theprice point in the quality of members in
(13:20):
the room. So it's capped ata certain amount, but every single year,
the quality of the members you know, that that you're in there with,
gets better. So that was onebig one, and I think it's
encouraging for people who are just gettingstarted. It could really be an advantage
to be small. Another one thatI thought was interesting is that when it
(13:41):
comes to going out and acquiring members, actually like more is better. And
for me this was a really bigsurprise, uh in terms of like more
channels because for me, in myexperience growing businesses in the past, Circle
Teachable, we would go out andyou know a lot of people say,
(14:03):
oh, we're going to find tonsof different marketing channels. We're going to
do paid ads, and we're we'regoing to be on Meta and Facebook,
and we're going to start a blogand a podcast, and we're going to
do direct mail and we're going todo all these different things. But I
have a YouTube show. But actually, you know, when building our software
(14:24):
business is really what we would dois we'd find like one or two great
channels that would work really well,and we would do it over and over
and over again for like three yearsand just find that one channel. With
community, it's actually not like thatwith community. Actually, the more channels
the better. So if you lookat the communities that acquire members really not
(14:45):
easily, but if they acquire themefficiently, they tend to have like four
or five six different channels that they'revery comfortable. It could be a YouTube
show, it could be that theyhave a popular blog, like, it
could be a lot of different things, and so they're kind of like they
stack them on top almost, youknow, which for for some people it's
(15:09):
great because that's what our instincts tellus as like, yeah, we want
we should be doing all these things. And for others it's more so,
hey, I got to invest hereand do do a lot of activity.
Another thing is that most of thecommunities do not have help. So sorry,
(15:33):
when I say most, I'm talkingabout the platinum communities. We call
them platinum, the top ten percentof communities in terms of revenue engagement.
They don't actually have like any fulltime help, so it's really just a
person the community admin running it so, uh, and then a lot of
times, you know, they mighthave that we have a workflows feature which
(15:56):
is kind of like a lot oflike automations and things like that, and
so it kind of does a lotof the work that a community manager might
do or they hire you know,part time help. But that was i'd
say, not a surprise, butI think it was reassuring for for people
(16:18):
to see that you can run thesecommunities without support. But those are some
of the This is like an eightyseven page deep dive report and if you're
running a community or a membership ora course, you should totally read it.
It's just full of all the chartsand the data, the graphics and
(16:41):
stories from a lot of the topthe top folks around. I'll live the
link in the description below, soyou guys can tell a load the the
you know, community Benchmark and theIn the last couple of years, there's
a lot of talking about community drivengrowth, uh, and this, you
(17:04):
know, it's a trend, thefact that not only you know, creators
and marketers and food answers are buildingtheir own communities, but also like you
know, big brands and you knowand and and big companies. They now
realize then understood the value of youknow, having an engaged community. What
(17:30):
about that? Can you share withus some you know thoughts on this new
big trend. Yeah, So thedefault is people think, oh, I
will have a community out charge forit paid membership experience, or I'll have
like a community next to an onlinecourse. And that's what a lot of
you know, individuals, individual creatorsdo that their model, and that could
(17:56):
be very lucrative. But what canbe if more lucrative, is getting creative
about how to leverage the people inyour community. So I'll give you some
cool examples. So one of myfavorite communities, it's a community. It's
run by a venture capital firm andit's a community for all of their portfolio
(18:21):
founders, the founders of companies thatthey've invested in, and you know they're
in there kind of like sharing resourceswith each other, sharing information with each
other. By the way I'm saying, there's there's like actually probably more than
ten of these on Circle alone.But it's it's this. They don't monetize
(18:45):
it, but what they do isthey build these really close relationships. They
invest in these founders in terms ofmoney, time, attention, skills,
mentorship and they help them grow theirbusinesses. But the other thing they'll do
is they'll use that for sourcing otherdeals. And so you know, for
us, I mean we have ourown circle customers. I mean all of
(19:07):
our customers are in there. Weuse it to get product feedback. We
have another so we'll say, hey, we launched this new feature. We'll
get literally fifty comments in there ofhell, why don't you to launch this
other feature. We don't care aboutthis one, or you know whatever.
It is, like, there's somuch feedback coming in. And so the
other thing is there's gosh, soso web flow is a is a they
(19:33):
have a really great community where whatthey'll do is they'll start to use that
to get you know, feedback onproduct ideas. Another one would be Exit
five. It's by Dave Gearheart.What he'll do is he'll he literally has
a job matching service in there whereyou know, he'll connect a member of
(19:55):
a community with a with like corporate. The companies you know that basically sponsor
him. So they come in andthose those companies are able to find really
great talent within the community. Sothere's a lot of like two sided marketplace
opportunities. Having a community is oneof the best ways to launch and conceive
(20:18):
of a product before even building it, because you already have this built in
you know, these built in betatesters. All of our beta testers,
they just come directly from our community. We just send them a bunch of
d MS and say, hey,do you want to you want to see
this thing for a few months,and here's what you'll do if you want
to be a beta tester. Sothere Another example would be UH sourcing sourcing
(20:45):
deals for UH. So Cody Sanchezis UH. She's a woman who has
a really great community. It's actuallya paid membership community, but it's all
about you're building businesses acquiring businesses,and so she has this community where she
teaches people how to acquire businesses,but also they do a lot of sourcing
(21:08):
in there. Well, they'll showher businesses that she can go and acquire
because now she has one thousand peoplewho know the types of businesses that she
likes to acquire because they're learning howto do it, and they'll show her
opportunities as well. And so alot of the most lucrative communities out there,
they're actually not monetized directly. They'remonetized indirectly. If you are enjoying
(21:32):
this episode, please check out mylead generation course. You can watch it
for free on guide to Dot linkslash skill Share Gai T. As an
entrepreneur, marketer, or business owner, you know how crucial lead generation is.
In this course, I'll be sharingwith you twenty proven tactics for lead
generation in both B two B andB two C markets. You can watch
(21:55):
it for free on guide to Dotlink slash skill Share Gai T. You'll
find the link in the description.Mm hmmm. I love all these examples
because, uh, you know,if someone is listening and and you know,
and they are not creators or marketers, but they're actually building a product.
Uh. Now, guys, youknow that a community is important for
(22:17):
you as well, and there area lot of uh, you know,
ways how you can you know,leverage the power of a community also for
for your product, for your foryour business. Let's i'd like to you
know, share some useful tips andtricks for people that are kind of you
(22:37):
know, starting with a community.So let's say that it's someone they have
a small community or they need don'teven even a community, but they want
to start one. So what wouldyou say, are like the top three
uh, you know, tips andtricks best practices to start a new community
from scratch. So the first thingI just want to start that with is
(23:04):
there are a lot of paths thatthat people take. They think about like
creating an online course or a membershipor a community you're starting this business over
here, and they all take alot of work. None of them are
easy. But creating a community issomething that it takes a lot of work,
but you can get started and youcan have a legit community in like
(23:27):
forty five days if you do alot of work, right. And so
the first thing I tell people isyou've probably seen some big community with beautiful
landing pages and and you know they'rethey're earning a whole lot and they do
big launches, you know, marketingand all that. Like that is not
(23:48):
how you start in the community world. What what you will do is the
first thing I would figure out,like who do I want to create my
community for? And uh, reallyhone in on like what that persona is
and stick with you know whatever.You have kind of an advantage around,
right, And what I always tellpeople is you take a pad and then
(24:11):
I want you to kind of writedown a whole bunch of ideas for how
you can deliver a lot of value. And essentially what this is is like,
choose three signature gatherings. Right,So we talked about signature gatherings earlier.
Signature gatherings are like that really thatthat value prop that kind of like
(24:32):
those moments that you're going to createin your community for those members. Now,
a lot of people they think,oh, I got to get people
to come in and hang out inmy community all day and it's going to
be like an area where people hangout, they just riff, they chat
and all of that. What we'veseen is like that very rarely works.
What actually works really well is ifyou have like three signature gatherings. So
(24:53):
let's for a minute. I wasactually I was coaching a woman the other
day who's starting a running community,and we went through a process with her
where we basically identify, you know, what are the three signature gatherings that
you're going to have, and sofor her, one of the big ones
was accountability, and so accountability forher specifically was at the beginning of the
(25:18):
week, I'm going to share,like we're all all the members We're going
to share our running plan for theweek, and then we're gonna check in
during the week. Let's tell peoplehow it's going, get some encouragement at
the beginning of the week, andall of that. Tell people like how
I'm progressing. At the end ofthe week, write up a quick report
of how I did for the week, share with the whole group. Everybody
(25:38):
shares their stuff and do that everyweek, so there's like an accountability.
It's like our signature gathering Monday Sunday, we kind of check in, you
know, how do we do.Another example is that there's a lot of
expertise about like running techniques, howto prepare for a race, all that
kind of stuff, and so creatinga schedule where each week somebody, some
(26:00):
member of the community is going tocome in and teach something, or they'll
bring somebody externally in, so that'sa second signature gathering. The other thing
are challenges, so like they wouldhave like a challenge where you know,
each month, for one of theweeks, there's like a challenge a week
where we're all going to get reallygood at something. I'm gonna post this
thing or I'm gonna do this hardchallenge at whatever it is. But you'll
(26:23):
figure out what are your three signaturegatherings? For a lot of business communities,
I love the hot seat signature gatheringbecause gosh, like, if I'm
going to sit there, have abig problem solved in a group of people,
you know, five or six ofmy peers, that's incredibly valuable.
I can I can pay for that, you know, because it's it's so
(26:44):
valuable for me. So what arethose three signature gatherings? Then what I'm
gonna do is I'm going to reachout and find my founding members. And
my founding members these are the theexcited, kind of ambitious me be a
little bit crazy, people who aregoing to take a risk and build a
thing with you. And the thingthat I feel is somebody who's just starting,
(27:06):
you know, the community is likeit's a vulnerable place to be because
you're saying, Hey, I havethis idea, I want to bring people
together. I want to bring youtogether with these other folks. What do
you think that's a vulnerable thing togo out and say to somebody because it
gives you a chance to be rejected. And so you know, when I
think about like approaching that person,you know, it's tempting to be like,
(27:29):
oh, I already have this community, it's great, and not really
be transparent about the fact that,no, this is a new thing,
like you're a founding member. Frankly, you're gonna build it with me,
and we're gonna start off small andwe'll grow from there, and it's just
going to be these three signature gatheringsto start. When you're kind of upfront
with those people, it attracts theright kind of people in So nail my
(27:52):
three signature gatherings, figure out alist of who are the people that I'm
going to reach out to first.Those people are going to be in my
phone, They're going to be inmy email inbox, they're going to be
on LinkedIn. I already know them. If I can't create a list of
thirty people who could be part ofthis group, it's probably not a group
I should start. So I'll createthat list and then I'll just send them
(28:14):
emails and then what I would dois I would hop on a call with
every single one of them. Now. One of my favorite examples of a
community with Pat Flinn from Smart PassiveIncome. They have hundreds and hundreds of
members to paid community, very engaged, valuable. Even they started out having
one on one calls with all theirfirst members. And so what you'll do
is you'll really make sure that firstgroup of founding members are the right fit.
(28:37):
Because what's different about an audience versusa community is an audience like there's
no two way commitment. But whenI go out to those members, not
only am I saying here's what I'mgoing to deliver to you, here's what
you'll get inside the community, allthe value props, you're also saying,
here's what you got to contribute tothe rest of the members. Because it's
a two way street. And soif you nail, you know, those
(29:00):
first members, then it really givesyou the best chance of succeeding. The
thing from there, though, isthat you need to create a really great
onboarding experience, and that is veryit's very tactical. There's definitely a right
way to do a lot of waysto do it, but there's definitely at
least you know, a couple ofright ways to do it, and that's
how you can set yourself up toto succeed with your community. But those
(29:25):
are those are kind of like allthat that happens in a week or two
like that, that can happen veryquickly. M And since you mentioned the
onboarding experience, do you think thereare like some common mistakes that are you
know, people make when they arebuilding a community and you know, designing
(29:45):
the onboarding experience. Yeah, sothe big mistake, the most common mistake
is all right, I got somebodyto agree to join the community, Derek's
I did. Maybe I got them. They're paying for the community, and
now I send them an invite,they come into the community, and I
(30:08):
just expect them to start contributing andeverything to be done. Like my work
is done. The work starts oncesomebody says yes, right. And so
if you really put yourself in theirshoes, which is what any great business
owner does, Marketer does. They'vepaid you, they've said yes, they're
(30:30):
coming into the community, but they'restill judging you, and they're still deciding
whether or now they're going to engage. Right. So in order to really
kind of encourage them and make surethat happens, you basically need to reinforce
their decision in that first like twentyfour to four eight hours. So here's
a few things that I would recommendthat a lot of communities do and this
(30:53):
is actually what the SPI team doesin their community too. So the first
thing is like they opin up thecommunity once a month or once a quarter,
so when they say that member,it's like, yeah, I'm in,
let's do it. They also havea new member kind of like orientation,
where before you're even in the community, they'll bring in let's say,
you know, ten members to allkind of meet each other first and say,
(31:17):
all right, you're going to getaccess to the community next week.
Here's all your other members. Let'sall get to know each other, you
know, here's kind of their backgrounds. Here's what your expectations should be in
the community. Here's all the differentways you can get value. By the
way, here's some of kind ofour rituals and how we do things in
the community. Here's how we'd likeyou to contribute, what our expectations are
(31:37):
from you. And so it's almostlike when you go into the community,
then you have this primary but youalso recognize other people in there now very
tactically, when I get into thecommunity for the first time, there's definitely
things that like the tools can doand you can set up to give yourself
a good chance. So, forinstance, you can set up a welcome
video. The first time somebody logsin, this video pops up, so
(32:00):
it might be like Pat saying,Hey, welcome to the community, Exciting
to see you here. Here's allthe different ways you can get value.
To lay the land, there's reallythree things you need to do the first
time that person logs in. Thefirst thing is you need to give them
basically a kind of a lay ofthe land, like here's how here's where
(32:22):
you can go find this stuff thatyou were promised. Here's how you can
send and receive a direct message tosomebody you know, here's how you can
attend this like the expert sessions we'redoing or joined the book club that we
had talked about, and the orientationor whatever, like a lay of the
land, navigation right, how touse the tool as well. And by
the way, best thing to dokind of a little bit of a crutch,
(32:45):
but I always recommend it is havinga new member checklist that people can
go through. And so you mighttell people go through the new member checklist.
At the end of the checklist,I want you to send me a
DM let me know that you finishedchecklist. And then I'm going to send
you a little gift when you dothat. By the way, this gives
people a little bit of positive reinforcement, a little bit of kind of fun
(33:07):
and curiosity, but also helps themuse the tool because like now they're sending
a DM, they're learning how todo that, right, And so you
might have them go through do thesethings, go check out the member directory
and find somebody to connect with.Because the second thing that you want in
that first twenty four hours lots ofways to accomplish it, is you want
them to connect with another member.So you want them to have at least
(33:30):
like one good positive interaction where maybeyou go you introduce them to the group
and they get a whole bunch ofreplies there, or you send a DM
like a group chat where you connectthem with another member. Hey, I
know that you're really into this thing. This person would be great for you
to meet. Just connecting you tothen that member helps kind of like onboard
the new member, right, theykind of bring them in, give them
(33:51):
that moment, so lay the landconnecting with another member. The third thing
is just getting some value on oneof those signature gathering. Can you get
them to have that kind of moment, right, and this is a great
first twenty four to forty eight hourswhere you've now reinforced the decision here and
that person is fully bought in.And then of course, you know they
(34:15):
get to the end of that memberchecklist, they DM you shoot them,
give them like some type of coolgift or something like just really over deliver
on expectations in that time. Butthat's how you ya on board a member.
And then of course your signature gatherings. Those are maybe there's three of
them. That's what keeps people comingback every single week. There's like the
(34:36):
two or three big signature gatherings,the big value props for that week,
and now they're in your ecosystem.Wow, that was great. And the
check this idea, I love it. I think I'm going to use it
in my community as well. Thankyou for that. It's a great idea.
That's a great idea. Actually,yeah, I love it. I
(34:59):
love it. So, you know, we are sharing some advice for people
that are starting their own community orthey have us more one. But what
about you know what's next? Sowhat about people that already have like a
small community and they decide, okay, this is the time where you know,
(35:21):
I want to go big, SoI want to start like, you
know, acquiring more new members oryou know, find new ways to monetize
them. Do you have any youknow, useful thing that you want to
share with them? Yeah, SoI think I think there there are When
(35:44):
we look at the folks who aredoing really well, there are so many
different models that works. So there'snot like a certain model that I recommend,
Like you can have, for instance, many thousands of members, all
paying monthly, all in the sameexact tier. But another way to think
about it too, is like,are there kind of different tiers you may
(36:07):
want to offer for folks to growthe business. So I think it's maybe
counterintuitive, but one of the bestways to grow the revenue of a community
business is not necessarily just to growthe number of members kind of on that
like made like let's say paid membershipexperience. A lot of times, it's
(36:29):
to offer a much higher tier thatis much more you know, let's say
valuable, your more hands on allof that, and so like, is
there like a premium tier you canoffer is one of the places that my
head goes immediately. But you know, if you want to scale up another
thing you can do is I meanreally what it is is there's you're finding
(36:54):
traffic, You're putting the offer infront of them, and you're converting them.
So if you want to sell thenumber of members, it's essentially where
are you going to find the traffic? How are you going to convert them?
I have biases here, so youknow, in terms of converting them.
For memberships especially, I love webinars. I think webinars are great.
(37:15):
I've had plenty of webinars where there'sbeen three hundred people on webinars where there's
three thousand people watching live. Youknow, ten percent of the people on
the webinar will become a member.And so you know, that's one example
of like how do you convert members? But then there's traffic, and so
you can go out to partners,you can go out to other communities that
(37:37):
are not competitive but like tangential anddo like cross cross promotions, right,
and so the at that point,like you should have your signature gathering,
is your value prop pretty solidified?You should probably have a beautiful landing page,
like people should know exactly what youget. By the way, one
(37:59):
of my favorite things to do isgo to the successful communities, go to
their landing pages and learn from thoselanding pages because you can see everything they
offer in their communities. Those areall just signature gatherings, is really what
they are. But I would startto figure out where is the traffic going
to come from. I'd look fora lot of partnerships. What we found
(38:21):
in the Benchmark report is actually paythe acquisition tends to not be great for
communities because it's a little bit morebottom funnel communities, you know, so
it's hard to like have an ad, get people to go click on an
AD and then just buy a paidmembership community recurring every month. You really
need to build a relationship with people. So I would look for channels where
(38:45):
you can build a relationship with people. That's why I love webinars for paid
memberships is because you can give yousixty minute training just pure value for free
to somebody really build a relationship withtwenty people or two thousand people all at
the same time. And you cando the same thing with partners where like
that partner can help, you know, take that relationship that they have with
(39:07):
their audience and kind of almost likebring you into that and help you build
your relationship with their audience really quickly. So it's like there's this almost like
channel product fit like this, youknow what I mean, where it's like
you got to find the right channelsfor a community membership and those are going
to be more relationship focused. Partnershipsare great there for example, just to
(39:32):
add something you know about that mycase, you know, content marketing is
the best channel. So people watchmy videos. They get a lot of
value from that, you know,from like a tutorial or an interview or
you know, something else. Andthen I tell them about the community,
(39:52):
and well the thing is, ohand this was the free part, so
I can imagine that you know,in the paid community there is much more
than that. Uh. And that'show you can also you know, deliver
some value and show them what's goingto be inside the community. Marketing always
huge on that. And the quickquestion about AI. You know everyone is
(40:16):
talking about AI, lily, andcommunities are all about relationship. You just
said that, So how AI fitsin all this? I mean, how
can we use and leverage AI forour communities but without losing the human touch.
(40:37):
So we've thought a lot about thisat Circle and there are right now
there are actually like three very specific. Actually there's four specific ways that we
have found. Not all credit equals. Some are like much bigger ideas than
others are more tactical. So I'llkind of walk you through from most tactical
(41:00):
and maybe like the least sexy tothe most sexy. So the least sexy
would be We use AI to transcribeall the events that you might do in
your community automatically. Right, soif you're running like a live session,
you're bringing an expert or whatever,really click a button. We'll create the
(41:21):
entire summary, transcript all that kindof stuff for you. So it uses
AI to kind of just support you, but not to replace any relationships.
Another example would be coming up withideas in your community for like prompts and
ways to engage you know people,you know, if you're in circle,
for instance, you may know this, but you can go in and say,
(41:42):
you know, give me, giveme ten ideas that I can for
like a post I can do toget people to share whatever, and you
know, you can come up witha whole bunch of different ideas. It'll
just do that for you. Thenext example, which is a little bit
more interesting and unique, is weuse AI to actually create what we call
(42:07):
like activity scores, which look atyour community all the engagement, how people
are kind of like interacting, andthen we compare that to all the other
communities and we kind of train amodel which basically will tell you, you
know, here's how engaged you knowyour communities, your community members are,
(42:30):
Here's how we expect them to behavein the future, and all that kind
of stuff. So it's like thisactivity score feature that we have in our
analytics area. The probably most sexything we're doing is we have a feature
coming out in a few months,but it's almost like a bot where imagine
(42:52):
it's the Raphael bot in your community, where you know, people can't talk
to you all day every day.You there's only want to you, right,
and maybe you're a coach or maybeyou're an advisor, or you're a
trainer or whatever you are. Youknow you're gonna you have all these ideas
and a lot of it comes inthe community. So you might have there
could have hundreds of posts in yourcommunity, you could have courses in there,
(43:14):
you could have expert workshops, allthe transcriptions. Essentially, the AI
will consume and read all of thecontent and the context in your community,
and then you could create the Rafaelbias Rafael or somebody goes in they say,
Rafael, you know, what doyou think about this topic? And
then it'll produce a really great answerbased off of stuff that's in your community,
(43:38):
or Raphael, I'm really interested inlearning more about X. Is there
somebody else in the community who Ishould talk to for this? And then
it'll know, you know, fromyour member directory and from that person's post
and content like maybe one or twoor three recommendations for who they should reach
out to in the community about thisthing. And so it'll really give you
leverages a community admin to essentially havethis kind of bot available for your members.
(44:05):
Although I wouldn't call it a bot. I would come up with a
better, more human name than that. But there's a lot there. Yeah,
yeah, I love it. Ilove it, and we usually and
this conversation with two quick questions.Uh, one is about books and one
is about tools. So let's startwith books. Do you have something that
(44:29):
you want to share with us?It could be you know, community related,
but also something else or a bookthat you loved, something that you're
reading right now, or I don'tknow, a book that can be useful
for my audience. Anything. Sure, So the you know, I'm reading
a book right now, about halfwaythrough. It's a really long book.
(44:50):
It's called Titan. It's about JohnRockefeller, John D. Rockefeller. You
built Standard Oil basically into the youknow, biggest company in the in the
United States and uh, the lateeighteen hundreds. But really fascinating, you
know, his kind of journey ofof building this major conglomerate, you know,
(45:14):
around that time, and so prettypretty lost in that book right now,
is really enjoying it. And uh, what's what's the name again?
It's called Titan. Okay, okay, I'll leave the linking in the description.
Okay, Yeah. What about tools? Do you have something that you
love? Uh? Of course,but what else you know, any marketing
(45:37):
tools that you and your team useyour day to day activities. Yeah,
so you know, right now,I'm just I'm using chat gibt a ton
like all the time. Uh,and we're trying, like our whole team,
you know, really encouraging them touse it as well, so you
(46:00):
know, and it's just it ishelping us go a lot faster. It
is the tool that I'm most excitedabout. I know it's not an interesting
answer, but it's it's the truth. Yeah, yeah, I totally I
agree on that, Andy, beforesaying by where they can find you,
read you, follow you, anylink that you want to share with us?
(46:24):
Sure, so, you know,just check out Circle dot s O.
If you're thinking about creating a community, it's the best place to go
and kick the tires for a bit, see what it's like to you know,
hop in and create a trial account, or you can reach out to
me anytime my emails Andrew at Circledot s O. I see anybody's emails
(46:45):
and I would love to hear fromyou. Cool. Great, great,
Andy, Thank you so much foryour tom This was great. Thank you.
This was a lot of fun,so really appreciate you having me on.
Thanks for listening to this episode ofthe podcast. I hope you enjoyed
it and you learned something new.Make sure to subscribe to us on YouTube
(47:06):
and Spotify to stay updated on newepisodes. With your support, I can
continue to bring great content and greatguests to this podcast. So hit the
subscribe button now and I'll see youin the next episode.
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