How To Build An Online Community (Complete Guide w/ Tom Ross)

To be a great Community Builder, you should be a great facilitator. It is not like social media, like all eyes on you. This is my warning: don't offer lifetime memberships. Is your community a community for people who want to build communities? Loads of people actually join just to see how I'm running my community and then steal that. So how do you blow away new members with value in their first day?

Hey everyone, today I am super excited to explore membership communities with all of you. You might have noticed, but they're kind of exploding right now, and there are so many amazing membership communities that are thriving. But you may have looked at them and thought, "Am I capable of launching or building one? What's actually involved in running a community like this? And is it applicable to my skill set and my niche?" We're going to cover all of that and more today, and I want to give you a real step-by-step breakdown of how to think about membership communities.

Hey Chris, thank you for having me back.

Of course, Tom, always happy to have you. I think we were just saying a minute ago it's the third time on the channel, and uh, it's always fun, but I always want to try and up my game again. I'm excited to chat today all about membership communities, so let's start by looking at why membership communities matter.

Well, first of all, I love Community because it lets you serve your people at scale, and therefore you can have a positive impact at scale. They let you help a lot of people. In essence, also you, yes you watching, can run a subscription business. One of the most powerful things about membership communities is they're generally on a kind of recurring cadence in terms of member payments, and this is huge. If you've always handled like one-off projects, you know they're kind of feast and famine cycle, but if you have a recurring subscription-based business, it is incredibly, incredibly powerful, and I personally love this model. Communities can and do work at any scale and any niche. So if you're thinking like maybe this isn't right for me, trust me, I work with some people in some incredibly like micro-niches. I've worked with a face painting community, a community for arborists, which I learned are tree surgeons. So don't worry about how weird or small your niches; I promise there's an angle. Communities can be full-time, and a membership Community can be a really big business if you want it to, or it could just be a side hustle. And I actually run a thriving, pretty successful membership Community as a hobby right now, as a side hustle, and I'm going to dig into how I do that around a busy day job and being a new dad.

Finally, communities enable members to help members. This is huge. Communities are bigger than you. We're all used to social media where we have to be the dominant voice all the time and the one coming up with all the answers and all the content. But the truth is, if you build your community right, members are going to be helping each other while you sleep, and this is huge. But I want to caveat some things before we get into today's topic. Building Community is not always easy. Communities can take a lot of work, particularly to get off the ground at the very start, and they involve dealing with people a lot. Communities are essentially, you know, people connecting, their relationships between human beings, and it's your job to manage those relationships and facilitate them. So you're going to be dealing with people a lot. As a result, you can't really afford to be hands-off. This is a common mistake I see: people launch a community, dump a bunch of members in, and then think they can sit back. It just doesn't work like that. And in fact, Community doesn't sleep. You know, I've taken vacation, and points maybe my community got a bit quieter, I wasn't there driving it, or maybe I came back to a very full inbox and tons of notifications I had to get back to because the community didn't stop when I wasn't there. And finally, members often won't actually do what you want, and this can feel kind of frustrating. It's like, "Why, why are you not taking advantage of all the cool stuff in the community? Why are you not engaging? Why are you not talking to people?" Or maybe, "Why are you ceiling?" They're autonomous human beings; they're not always going to behave like robots. And so again, dealing with the nuances of people and this ecosystem of humans in your community does come with its challenges. But I want to underline the benefits once again because, despite these challenges, it is possible to run a great community, and it is super, super fun and rewarding if you get it right.

Chris, I know you run uh, the Future Pro Group. How have you found that experience?

I think every point you've outlined is 100% true.

100% true. Good. They don't do what you want; they're like cats in a room, and sometimes they behave and sometimes they don't. We introduce new learning paths, new tools and resources; we have an AI agent to help them, but they just don't do it. And it's, it's like you have to kind of approach this as you can put the best intentions forward, but you have to constantly—I don't know if this is the right word—but train or encourage people to use the things that you've built for them in order for them to succeed. You kind of have to nudge them along the way.

Yeah, and part of community I've had to come to terms with is you can do everything right, you can do all the right strategies, you can really, really care, and it's just not going to work out with some members, and that's fine; that's all part of it. And I'm going to break down some tactical things today that you can do to try and give yourself the best chance of success.

What I really want you to get from today—and I was talking to Chris about this before we uh, we went live here—but I've been doing this for 20 years now. I've been pretty deep in the community world. I'm CEO of Design Cuts; we're at a million members now and have a real thriving community there, and I've taken all that experience and distilled it recently into the most comprehensive Community course on the market. It's 9 hours long, 12 modules, and 45 lessons. And when I set up this this workshop with Chris, I said, "Okay, how can I take all of that material and condense it down to less than one hour and give it away for free?" So my intention today is to try and give you all the foundations and what it takes to build a successful community and essentially give you the Highlight Reel from my wider course. Because I'm not going to be able to include every bit of nuance, every practical exercise in the course, but I can give you the really, really key big steps that are going to guide you in building your community. So if you're ready, let's Dive In.

Step One is choose your topic. I feel like people can really overthink this, but for me it comes down to these three areas: something you're passionate about, something you have genuine experience and credibility in, and something where perhaps you see an opportunity—maybe the market is underserved, or there's not a ton of great communities existing already, or people are hungry for something like this. If you can get these three areas right, you give yourself half a chance of success.

Chris, I know you've talked about icky guy and and variances of this, but it really comes down to the same thing, right? It's like, what are you good at? What are you going to have passion for that you can sustain that effort? And what is something the world needs?

That's right. This is a a different way to describe similar Concepts. So 100%. And I guess icky guys sounds kind of nicer and fancier than p-p-o, or however you say this. It's a terrible acronym.

Yes, the acronym is not sexy-looking.

So once you've decided your topic—and like I say, it could be anything; it could be uh, you know, as broad as a community helping marketers, or it could be as narrow as the one I mentioned earlier, helping people into face painting—once you have this, you should craft your value proposition. And the simplest way I can explain how to do this is: Your community name helps this type of person achieve this type of outcome. Because communities ultimately are going to help members achieve something—maybe that's feeling less lonely, maybe it's landing their dream job—whatever it is, your community should be the vessel for them achieving that success or outcome.

Well, let's give it an example here. How how do you describe Design Cuts? Let's both you and I put ourselves into this so that people can see what it sounds like. I want to show how people get it wrong first before showing them how to get it right. All right, because this is a super common mistake. I ask so many people, "What's your value proposition for your community?" And they're kind of mumble something like, "Well, my community helps people in the mid-to-late stage of their life who are trying to self-actualize and reach their fullest potential across a wide spectrum of endeavors while staying true..." and on and on and on. And Chris, I I know you're not so specifically involved in the community world, but you help people all the time, right? I'm sure you see something similar.

Yeah, it's just a lot of word salad here.

Yeah, word salad exactly. So this is a little test which I kind of came up with myself: the podcast test. Can you confidently and concisely deliver your value proposition every time you're interviewed on a podcast? Because if it's this, if it's the long garbled one, you're not going to be able to repeat that word for word every single time, which proves it's not an effective one. But you hear really, really great speakers and people that have nailed this, and you're listening to 20 different podcasts, and they're saying the same thing verbatim every single time. So my one for Learn Community is: Learn Community helps you to launch and grow a successful online community. Pretty short and snappy, right? I don't need to reinvent the wheel or explain that 50 different ways. It's like, that's who we are and what we do.

Hopefully uh, yeah, hopefully that makes sense, Chris.

So I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try it.

Yeah, let's do this.

Yeah. So the Future Pro Group helps creative entrepreneurs scale their business. And you know what's so good about that? People can self-identify. So that crucial bit, creative entrepreneurs, people will hear that and say, "Hold on, that sounds like me. I'm an entrepreneur, but I'm definitely more on the the creative side; I'm I'm in a creative industry," and such. And it's speaking to their goals and their pain points. You know, they're desperate to scale; they really want to grow. So in one sentence, it's like, "That's for me," and it gives me something I want—like, short, snappy, and effective. You should really teach this stuff, Chris. Anyone ever tell you—

Okay, so step two, consider what you actually want to offer inside your community. And honestly, like I I can and have talked for an hour just about this, but I'll give you the kind of top-level view of how I think about this. There's four different types of value that your membership Community can offer: help, action, learning, and connection. Help is, let's say, a space for people to ask questions. And I'm sure you have something similar in the Future Pro group, right, Chris? They're like, "I I need help with this; I'm really stuck," and then you and your team and other members can go and help them, which is awesome.

Yeah, this happens all the time.

Yeah. And what's beautiful is the community members helping each other. And then the next one is action, because if people aren't taking action, they're just kind of spinning their wheels. So this is where you can bring in things like sprints or boot camps or challenges where you're basically just guiding and pushing people to take action. And even better if you can do that as a group, because if you're there with like-minded people and you're achieving something over the course of like a week or a day or a month, you're going to collectively feel really good, and you're going to appreciate the community more. It's like, "Ah, from being a member of this community, I I achieved something." So action is huge. The next one is learning, and again, this can come in loads of different forms. Uh, it could be workshops, it could be a knowledge base, it could be uh, content and material in the community, or it could be a course. So there's lots of different ways to teach, but I think by kind of bundling this knowledge and this training into your community—and it could be live as well, by the way. You know, teaching live is fantastic, or it could be a bit of a blend. So when I first dropped my course, I did it inside our community, and I made it a community-powered course. So it was like, "I'm going to drop a module, and then I'm going to support that with live sessions, and people can actually apply live what they're learning in the course and ask questions." It made it much more interactive. And then finally, there's connection. This one is typically quite overlooked. And what would you imagine—I mean, when I say connection, Chris, in this context—

I would imagine how they connect with each other, how they do business with one another.

Yeah, right. So it's about forming relationships, uh, maybe some business networking, something like that. But this is huge, and I'll give you an example inside Learn Community. Um, I wanted to push connection, and so we were doing things like making intros between members or setting up kind of group chats for like-minded members. But I actually started launching connection events where I'm like, "We're not going to talk about work; it's not going to be anything professional; we're just going to join the call," and there were things like ice breakers, stupid inside jokes, people opening up and getting vulnerable and just chatting about personal stuff. And as a result, people made genuine friendships from people they met on the call, and then engagement in the wider Community lifted because, you know what, you're more likely to help and interact with people if you have context on them. Think of any Community where you're a member; you're much more likely to help the person where you have a kind of loose friendship with them instead of a complete stranger. So by building connection, you kind of feed all the other parts of your community. Super important.

We do something similar using Air Meets. Have you used Air Meets before?

I'm not personally uh, using it, but I'm pretty sure I'm aware of it.

Yeah. How are you finding it?

We like it a lot. We do these once a month, and there's two components of it that we really like. Number one is speed networking, so you have five minutes to connect with somebody, and we give you a quick prompt on how to introduce yourself and talk about what uh, what you need help with and how you can help serve other people. Then when the speed networking stuff is done—that usually runs for for about 30 minutes or five or six cycles—then we we release people to tables, and tables are cool because they're organized by subjects, and you can you can sit at a table and leave; you could participate; you could do whatever you want. So it's way more interactive. So we set up tables for people are interested in video production or social media marketing or branding or coaching, and they sit at those tables, or one's just called "Catching Up," and you sit there, and people—they self—they run—they run by themselves. There's no agenda, and these calls usually are set up for 90 minutes, but we'll log back in a couple hours later, and people are still hanging out there. So it's it's really neat to see.

You just landed on two things, and I don't want to skip ahead too much here, but these are two foundational pillars of building community. So number one is that it should happen when you're not there. And as you just said, you leave these calls, and the value continues, right? It's not that everyone should be interacting with you personally. The second part is: to be a great Community Builder, you should be a great facilitator. And again, it is not like social media; like you've constantly got the mic, All Eyes On You, everyone's hanging off your every word. A lot of it is about getting out of the way, creating the structure and the spaces to enable connection for your members. So you're putting people in groups, you're bringing them together, you're organizing them, you're creating the themes, you're doing a lot of the, you know, facilitation and Logistics, and then you're getting out of the way and letting your members find Value through each other. Super underrated. People go into Community thinking in a social media mindset that it's all about them, and it's not; it's about we, not me.

Well, speak for yourself, Tom. It's all about me.

I'm just kidding. Um, I when we do these Air Meets, I try not to pop into rooms or tables too much because then everybody just shuts up and then wants me to talk, and then it becomes a lot more training or coaching, which is fine; I don't mind that, but then it doesn't allow the community members to get to know each other. So I'm deliberately kind of staying on the outside, just kind of peering in, not not wanting to interrupt what they're doing.

I I think it's a good approach. Someone told me recently, uh, "The kids have more fun when the teacher is out of the room." So they might learn more when you're in the room, but you know, they probably connect more when you're not.

Let's keep going here. Step three, plan your finances. Like any business, if you're actually planning to turn this into a business or even a profitable side hustle, makes sense to actually think about money. There's two steps because people really over- over kind of complicate money, um, but there's two main things I I try and think about. Number one is: how much do you actually need to earn? And really, this is what is your home goal, which, you know, should of course be after costs and after tax and all that good stuff. So how much do you want in your pocket at the end of the day? And then, how much can you realistically earn? And this is where sometimes I have to give people a reality check because they're like, "I want my community to, with very little effort, earn like, you know, 250,000 in the first year," but I have no experience and no audience and no way of reaching members and no track record of of doing anything online, um, in which case that might be unrealistic. So what do you need and what can you actually achieve?

Um, is this kind of remotely similar to any Frameworks that you use, Chris?

Yeah, I use something like this for calculating your project fees, and it's it's based on what you need to live and live comfortably, divided by the time in which you can actually realistically work and the number of projects you want to take on per month. So that is very similar.

Nice. I do think that crucial context of what can they realistically earn is often missed, though, right? Because we're not all exactly the same. Like, Chris, you have a higher hourly rate than I do, and with your personal brand, you can and should command that, and that's fine. Like, I don't expect to be able to charge the market what you charge. We're at different places currently.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you have a few years on me.

So I'm trying—just a few.

Yeah. And I have a much more expensive shopping habit, so I got to feed the—

All right, so here's six pricing considerations to just make this exercise a bit easier for people. Number one, like I say, how much do you actually need to earn? So does this community need to support you full-time, or is it perhaps uh, more of a side hustle, in which case it's not so pressing to earn a whole time? Um, what percentage do you want the community to be of your total income? So are you going to have other income streams, or consulting, or something like that, or is it all resting on this community? So what is your need figure, um, which, as Chris says, is going to cover your living costs? Do you have a recommendation? What is a good percentage if you're starting out?

It really varies, and I think this is this is the key, right? Often I get questions from Community Builders, and I I always say I can't give you one size fits all because there's going to be someone who is building uh, a hobby community that they want to turn into a profitable side hustle, and they have very limited time, and there's going to be someone else who wants to go all in, and maybe they got some funding, and they're pursuing it as a whole business venture, and there's a lot of gray space between. So I can't give a kind of arbitrary percentage, um, but what I would say is I have a lot of friends, and I kind of apply this to my own side hustle: when Community works, it can be the dominant Revenue stream that everything else hangs off because it's much more reliable. And so as your community scales, things like um, service-based income and and Consulting income can kind of fall away and let you really double down on that Community model.

The second part is: what is a typical price for communities in your space? So this is basically trying to ascertain like the market rate. So you should research other communities in this space and try and establish a range. What is the low end of the market? What are people charging? And what's the high end? And that typically is the range you'll be able to operate in unless you want to do something wildly Innovative. So you're going to sit somewhere between these, um, and it's up to you whether you want to kind of skew low or high.

I have a different take on that.

Yeah, please.

I think you should think about the experience that you want to create. So if you are interested in having lots of people, then you can afford to charge a little bit less and know that each person gets a little bit less attention from you or the or the resources that you you want to give. But I know a lot of people want to send everybody that's in their Community a box of goodies—like books and a welcome kit—and that costs money. And so we know that whenever you're visiting a new town, you have a lot of options—from Airbnb to inns and motels to the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons. I think you have to start thinking about what kind of experience you want to create. So I think people in your space give you a starting point, but then you have to add the X Factor. Do you want to do a little less, a little bit more, and and create a really bespoke experience for each member? Then you can charge a little bit more.

Yeah, great minds. I I have a somewhat similar slide, but I really like how you put it better, to be honest. So what is the ROI for members? And this kind of speaks to the experience, but how much value is your community realistically going to give members? And this is not just monetary, as Chris touched on; there it's it's about experience. So if you're going to blow them away and give them the Ritz-Carlton experience, um, that's pretty high ROI, and you could expect to charge a bit more. You also need to think about how necessary the community is, because some communities are kind of a nice to have, where people are going to cut that out of their life pretty quick if funds get tight, but others may help them generate life-changing results or just be such an incredible experience uh, they would never want to give that up.

Number four is: what model do you actually want for your community? Um, because if you're doing a VIP Mastermind for 10 people, which is still a form of community, that's going to be super high-ticket and expensive versus doing a scalable Forum Community with 400 members; they're going to be on completely different pricing spectrums. Number five is: what price can you realistically command? And again, this is that kind of reality check I touched on where it's like, be honest about your reputation, your audience size, and credibility in your Market because an A-list influencer in a market can command more versus an unknown person just starting out, and that's fine; that's to be expected. We all start somewhere, and we should be increasing our rates and our prices over time. And finally—and I really like this one—what price gets you excited? This is actually a tip from my friend Jay CLA, and Jay asked me this question: "What price would make you feel excited every time a member signs up?" And I think it's a really interesting reframe because if a member signs up and you're like almost resentful—you're like, "Oh, that's such a low amount; it's not worth my time"—that's not good, um, but I love it. I, you know, I feel pumped when a new member signs up. I'm like, "I can't wait to jump in and serve that member." You know, I've been um, kind of staggering and increasing our our membership price over time. I've done this like three or four times now since launch, and every time I I increase it and then a member signs up, I get more and more excited, um, versus if I look at my founding members' rate, I'm like, "Man, I really undercharged." Then that's no good. Um, and I mentioned at the bottom here: the value seesaw. You need to get value as well as your members, and it needs to kind of float in equilibrium because if your members get all the value and you get nothing, resentment is going to creep in, and you won't be committed and do a good job. Equally, if you get all the value and all the money and the members get no value, they're all going to churn, and it's going to destroy your reputation. So you want everyone to be happy, basically.

Can we talk about this a little bit more?

Yeah, let's do it, uh, about the value seesaw. I like this concept; there's a strong visual here. Can you think of a time when you started some kind of subscription-based service where you're like, "I don't—I'm not feeling good about this," and what was it about it? Can you share something? I I will as well.

Yeah, totally. So, um, I touched on then our founding members' price for Learn Community; it it was pathetically low, to be honest.

I was testing the concept.

Yeah, yeah. It was way too low; hence I keep increasing it now. But um, yeah, it was terrible. I love those founding members, and some of them are still with us today, grandfathered into that price, but I look at it now and I think I totally should have got like a quarter of the number of members but at a much higher price, um, with everything that I continue to learn. And I I priced it from a uh, insecure and and poor psychological place.

How about you? Have you got an example?

Well, yeah, well, first of all, thanks for sharing so openly and transparently, and just the level of self-awareness and the confidence to be able to say that. And I think that's where a lot of people run into; they're like, "Oh my God, you like me? Okay, here's—give me five bucks, and I'll give you all of my resources, and we'll spend 10 hours in the community." I think with where this starts to become something where you start to build resentment is the amount of energy you have to put into it versus what you get out of it. It's hard to say like there's a very hard and fast rule, but just think of it in those terms. Communities are very different than say client relationships where we know this is going to be a pain in the butt, and they're going to have a lot of expectations on us, and we can hold our nose for a period of time and get through the project. But the community is ongoing; it's organic, and it it never sleeps, as you mentioned before, Tom. So you kind of have to think about that. There have been a couple of times where I think to myself, "Gosh, I think I'm doing a little bit too much."

When you feel like you work for the community—

Yeah.

—whereas you're not the community leader. So what I what do I mean by that? Well, let's say they start bombarding you with like technical problems—"I can't log in," or "Where is this resource? And we asked for this four weeks ago"—so now you're beholden to them, and—

It's like now you're you're working for them as an employee, and it doesn't feel good. So I think when you start to get a decent amount of people in your communities and you charge whatever you think, and then you start to do the math, you're like, wow, every single month I can buy a new car—that's pretty dope. So if they want to reach out and quote-unquote harass me, I'm good with that, because that's what that's what is required. Now I have a very expensive community—uh, it's $3,000 a month, and there are 10 people in it, so that's generating about $30,000 a month for me. But the amount of attention and energy I have to put into it is sometimes overwhelming for me. I love working with those community members, but shoot, it's very demanding. So I'm like exhausted after every call because I was like, I have to be on point because they expect so much for paying $3,000 a month.

Yeah, it's such a good point, and I think tuning into how you feel is so key because it's unsustainable if you're there feeling harassed, and you're not happy with that—change something, right? Otherwise, you don't want to do this for the next 10 years. Um, I don't think I got a slide on this, but uh, this is my warning publicly: please don't offer lifetime memberships. They make me very sad. I've worked with so many people that are really adamant; they're like, "but it's so valuable, I really want to do it," and then you see them like two, three years in where the members are still requesting stuff from them, and they're not getting a dime from that, and it creates this complete imbalance where you get excited at the member at the moment they sign up, and then it just becomes increasingly imbalanced as the years go on. I I don't like the model.

Well, the problem with a lifetime membership is you change, you grow, but the membership doesn't in terms of what it does for you, and you may want to take a break, or you might want to do something different, but they're like, "wait, wait, wait, you promised us this thing." This is the way you can think about it: it's a marriage. So when you agree to a lifetime membership, you're getting married to each and every single person you make that commitment to, and that's a difficult thing to hold up with so many different people.

I like the analogy. Um, by the way, I don't know if you're familiar with this model, Chris, the Van Westendorp pricing model.

No.

It's uh, the best pricing model I think I've ever seen, and if you search this on YouTube, you'll see the video thumbnail I've just put up here. It's like 4 minutes long—honestly genius. So if you ask your audience um or your network, "Hey, what do you want to pay for this community or product or whatever it might be," they're always going to give you a lowball answer. It's very ineffective; it's a poor question. Whereas this teaches you to ask four questions, and I think if I can recall them uh correctly, something like: uh, at what price would this be so cheap that you would really question the quality; at what price would you consider this to be a bargain; at what price would this be getting, you know, on the expensive side for you; and at what uh price would this be too expensive that it would be prohibitive for you? And you basically input all the data from your answers, and you see down the bottom here, it it then drops into a graph with four lines, and where the lines intersect and form that little kind of, you know, square—um, that's your sweet spot somewhere in there. So it's like a very scientific way of learning from your audience what their sensitivity to pricing is without skewing results with like a a false answer.

I like it.

Yeah, check it out for sure. Also use an MRR calculator. So MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenue, which is going to be your favorite thing in the world once you get your community running, and you should at least project out a few years of revenue based on things like how many members you want to get um and and the price that you want to charge because often I get people to do this exercise, and then they're like, "Oh, I'm never going to reach my goals because I'm really undercharging, or I'm being too ambitious with how many members I need," or whatever it might be. So you need to figure out your revenue ceiling, and when you use some of these tools, they're going to tell you at a certain point you're not going to be able to grow forever; you're going to kind of cap out at this point uh unless you you know ramp up your acquisition.

So all of this might um a little bit fancy or technical to be honest. I rely on tools, and there are some really, really good tools out there, so you can find online calculators if you Google "MRR calculator," and they're going to tell you a lot of this stuff and let you kind of plug your numbers in and just play around, but they really help you make informed decisions around what to charge and and what scale you're trying to build for.

It's also really, really key um to understand the power of churn. Churn is how many members are going to cancel in your community, and and essentially your churn rate is going to inform your growth often more so than acquisition. Right, everyone's so worried about attracting new members, but if your churn rate is bad, you're really going to struggle to grow, and you can see it has this compounding effect. You can see it a bit on that graph down the bottom. If you, for example, change the number of people canceling each month from 10% to 5%, that will let you grow exponentially faster even if you're attracting the same number of members.

I'm sure again, Chris, you you've probably seen the impact of churn on your community.

For sure, you it's it's a rough one. It's a number I don't like looking at. Right, and often I get the question, "What is a kind of reasonable churn?" I think the the churn that I tend to look at is if you're getting 10% or less churn um month on month, you're doing you know you're doing pretty good. If it's 5% or less, you're doing exceptionally well. If it's getting up to like 15, 20, 25% plus, uh, you got a bit of a leaky bucket, and and there's some work to be done to try and improve things there. Otherwise, um it's going to be hurting your business. But um, yeah, churn is really tough.

Metaphors here so we can understand: there's a bucket, and you can pour as much water into the bucket as you want, but if there are too many holes at the bottom, it could be exhausting for you to fill that bucket. So managing a community or subscription model is based on plugging as many holes as possible. It will never be zero, yeah, but it'll be some percentage, and then putting your efforts into making sure the experience is so good that only people who are in a good fit wind up leaving, or perhaps they quote-unquote graduate from the community, and they find that their business model and what they're doing is totally no longer applicable to what it is they used to come to the community for.

So Tom, I'm curious about whether you plan on talking about this or if this is a good time to ask this, which is: what have you done to slow the churn rate down?

I'm definitely going to cover that, and um you will learn that churn is affected by so many things. You touched on some of them there: onboarding, acquisition, position, finding the right members, pricing appropriately. Um, I'll give a nugget now, right? So um your your worst enemy with churn tends to be monthly subscriptions because in that case, people have 12 decisions to make throughout the year. There's more likelihood for things to go wrong, like card failures, uh transaction issues, and whatnot, uh and monthly subscriptions tend to attract the least committed people because they just want to kind of trial the community, and and they're much more likely to leave, which is why I shifted from offering monthly and annual plans to now quarterly and annual, and I've noticed a real improvement in the quality of member and and the retention signs look very promising. And I think you're the same, right?

Qu—there's no monthly, there's no more monthly.

Yeah, we we kind of say you got to make a—it takes 90 days to start a new habit, and so we get way more committed people to join, and you I'm guessing you would never go back.

I don't think there's a compelling reason to go back.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I see this time and time and time again—um, you generally will experience churn the most with your monthly people.

Do you do in-person meetups? When you talk about connection, you said that there's a connection um event that that you produce, but do you do this ever in person?

We are planning them with Design Cuts. Um, given that Learn Communities a side hustle, there's been talk of it, but um I'll be honest, since being a parent, my free time is is very limited.

There's a lot of stuff if I wasn't—is what you're saying?

Yeah, that's a yeah, that's a good way of putting it. But yeah, it's the dream I know you have, and they've been great. I've been to some of them.

All right, step four: choose a platform. I don't want to go too in-depth on this because there's a whole, you know, separate guide I could go through for choosing platforms, but essentially I go into R&D, like research and development mode before picking a platform. What a lot of people do is they're like, "Uh, I use Slack," and they don't really think it through. So instead, try and create a list of all your platform requirements, try and mark what's a must-have and what's a nice-to-have, and then go and investigate different platform companies and you know create a spreadsheet like this. So I anonymized some of the platforms here, but essentially you can see pretty clearly it's like in this case, platform 2 would probably be the best fit because it's just within budget, and it does everything you want apart from real-time chat, which is a nice-to-have, so it doesn't matter too much, whereas all the others kind of have inherent problems. This is a much more objective way of picking platforms instead of just like a a gut feel or like a rushed decision.

Well, out of curiosity, which is the platform you guys use?

Uh, I think the same as you, so Circle. That's what you guys are on, right?

Yep, we use Circle, and I'm really happy. It's not perfect, but it's it's pretty good.

I left a slide out um here that's in my main course, but you know, in *Good Will Hunting*, you've got Robin Williams um where he gives the whole speech of like, you know, what sport—like, she's not perfect, and neither are you, but the question is, are you perfect for each other? So I feel the same way about community platforms: none of them are perfect, but there's going to be some that you kind of fall in love with, and and that was Circle for me.

All right, step five: validate demand, find founding members. This is a very, very important step. So if you're going to pay attention to any of them, please make it this one. I highly advise using an application and building a waitlist. What you don't want to do is go away, spend months creating this community and designing it and building all the features, and then push it out, and it's crickets—people just don't want it. And Chris, I'm sure with all the stuff you do on your show, you talked to a lot of people who talk about stuff like this, right? It's it's a very kind of tried and tested method of entrepreneurship beyond even just community. It's like you—the ideal way that you launch anything, whether it's a product, service, or a community, is you need to have more buyers who have expressed intent than what you can supply. So when demand is greater than supply, you're in a good place, and it's a hard thing to do; it really is. It sounds like easy, like, yeah, let's let's let's do a secret drop with Nike um Jordan Air Force Ones or something like that with a limited edition collab. Yeah, well, the world wants that, but you're like, "I'm launching my community; I only have 30 products to sell or 30 slots to fill," and you can't get 31 people to be interested. It is a tough thing.

So I'm curious, what have you done to be able to create or generate demand that exceeds what you can accommodate?

Yeah, it's a good question. I I cover some of this in a little bit in terms of launch strat, but I think it's not even necessarily about like cranking up demand at this phase; it's about seeing if anyone wants it full stop because maybe your concept is flawed. Um, you know, you really need to see, are people interested at all? Um, and so if you went to everyone who was a a good perspective uh fit or fit your member persona and you said, "Hey, I'm building this thing; are you interested? Do you want to join the waitlist?" and they all gave you a hard no—yes, that is, and yes, that's demoralizing, but it's less hard compared to spending months building it and then having the same conversation, trying to sell it, and they tell you no at that point, right? So you'd rather get the door slammed in your face early on before you've committed too much. That's the whole joy of validation. So as I kind of break down here, like, you know, it helps you prove demand; it helps you prove the concept uh and avoid this kind of crickets later on when you launch it. Also gives you really key uh member data. So often as part of the waitlist, you can ask questions that are going to let you then take those ideas and shape the community with them. It demonstrates a real willingness from perspective members. And I'll give you a side tip, everyone. So I I like having a question on my waitlist that says something like, "Which plan do you want to sign up for?" and they choose, and they're like, "I want to pay this much for the annual plan, or this much for the uh the quarterly plan," and you must include an option that says, "Uh, sorry, I can't afford this right now," because without that, I used to get people picking one of the others, and I'd reach out and be like, "I think you're a great fit; like, do you want to join?" and they're like, "I have no money, sorry." And I'm like, "Why did you apply?" Yeah.

So yeah, have that in your funnel.

So good.

Yeah, 'cause you're such a charming guy.

Time, oh well. Back out, you silver-tongued devil. Um, so yeah, it also um it allows you to filter members against your ideal persona. So you get to learn about these people when they're on the waitlist, and you might look at some people and be like, "They're an incredible fit; I want them in my community," and other people you're like, "I see some red flags; maybe they're not going to make the cut." Um, and I actually did this. So you kind of asked how I executed this. I I had—I know, right—um, I had some existing audience, nowhere near as large as yours, but um, you know, I had like 40K Instagram followers um and 5,000 people on my newsletter, my personal one at this point, and I said to myself, "I want to launch, you know, this community for community builders, but I only want to launch if if I can attract 100 founding members that will kind of prove demand and give me enough early cash to get this thing going." So I put out a few comms, did a bit of marketing, and said, "Hey, I'm thinking of building this thing; I'm going to launch it soon—um, sign up for the waitlist," and I got nearly 400 applications, which meant I was like, "Cool, this is 400 people that have committed to paying." I whittled it down; I had this whole traffic light system that you can kind of see here for like qualifying people, uh, and you can see the tiny price, right? This is what I was talking about near near the right of that image. It was 10 bucks a month, 10 bucks a month or 100 for the year. So no wonder I got 400 people, right? So this this pathetic little price, and um and so I I whittled it down, and I I got my 100 members. So I was like, "Cool." The great thing about that was not only did I prove the concept worked, but I was like, "Oh, wow, I need to go build this thing now." So I I signed up for Circle; I I learned the Circle platform, and I built the whole community in three days because I was like, "I got 100 people ready to pay me; I can't hang around now." But it's a much better way to do things that way. You're doing market validation, a product-market fit: does what I do, in the price that I want to charge, does the market want this? Does it need it? And so you're you're doing this before you go and spend the three days building a community only to find out no one wants to sign up. Yeah, and if I didn't have 100 people waiting with money in their hand, I probably would not have spent 3 days building it; I probably would have spent three months, and I would have got all percist and all that other stuff. But when people are there waiting, it really uh puts a rocket up your behind, I think.

Step six: build a community. This is what I'm talking about. So common mistakes, let's kind of get into the nitty-gritty. You should be structuring your community in a pleasant, enjoyable way for your members, and I see these same mistakes over and over. So first one is: it's way too busy; it's got too many sections, or on the Circle platform, we call them spaces. People just like stuff their community with as much, you know, as many things as they possibly can because they think it brings more value, but actually it makes it super overwhelming for members. The next thing is: it's difficult to navigate or not intuitive. So maybe things are are named very uh unclearly, or it just doesn't make that much sense. Um, again, that's going to be a terrible experience for your members. And the final thing is a poor balance of content versus community. And what I mean by this is uh people, as I say, they stuff so much content in there that it kind of drowns out these spaces where people can actually connect, interact, ask questions, that kind of stuff, because 99% of what's in the menu is content-related. So it starts to feel more like a membership site where they're there to consume content instead of a membership community where the primary purpose should be uh not consumption but connection.

I don't know if you've uh experienced any of these, Chris, but I've I've definitely kind of learned by failing in some of these areas.

Uh, definitely number one and number three for sure. We used to run our community on Facebook where you have very little or very few tools to organize the group, and so it was kind of hard to kind of create different spaces for conversations that happen because it was just all like one universal timeline. So when we went to launch our Circle community, we added in everything that they've always wanted and what we've always wanted to do, and we found that if you take 100 people and you create 10 spaces, there's a good chance that some space will have zero activity, and some will have too much activity.

Yep, and you're you're kind of diluting your audience across these things, and we had to make the hard decision by shutting things down. This is a prime example of when less is actually more. Make it easier for people to figure out. The other thing that you want to take into consideration is for people who have not been on an interface like Circle or community like this before; it can and will be very overwhelming for them to like not know where to start. And so the confusion part shuts them down, and they can't—it's like too much of a cognitive load, too much processing going on, so they they elect to do nothing. They will very likely be the people who are part of your churn rate because they're like, "I'm not getting value from this; it's too complicated."

Yeah, so less is more. And the last one at the bottom one is something that we we struggle with because I'm a teacher; I I think they want more teaching and more content. And so it got to a point where we are running so many calls and having so many subject matter experts teach things that they're like, "We we just can't do this anymore." And it's kind of wild to say like, "Oh, if you like chocolate, here's all you can eat chocolate," and it turns out, first of all, it's not good, and they become diabetic. It's like, "Oh, we should we should not do this."

Thank you. I appreciate you sharing that because the fact is, myself and Chris and even people that you know run successful communities, we're constantly learning, and we will still make mistakes, and it's trial and error forever, and that's kind of disheartening and freeing I think all at the same time because it makes you realize like it's fine to make mistakes; it's just about tweaking and adjusting and iterating as you go.

Also, I know your audience, Chris, are all about brand; you're all about brand. I love brand as well, um and I definitely think communities deserve to have their own brand, right? We shouldn't overlook this when you're building community. I think a good starting point can often be: choose three to five words that you want people to associate with your community or use to describe it. So I I don't have any uh spring to mind, Chris, for Future.

Right, generous, professional. I can see that.

Ambitious.

Mhm, creative. Those are the four words I can think of while you put me on the spot, and you know what? I think they're great because I know other communities that are probably less professional and less ambitious than the Future, and I think what you've built has a certain bar of of like quality and commitment about it that differentiates it. So yeah, I I think that's a great set of words.

What are the three to five words you use to describe your community?

You can see them here at the top. So this is for Learn Community: practical and actionable because you can probably tell I really hate vague generalism and theories; I'm like, "Show me exactly how to do it and how to implement it." Helpful and supportive, um and this is like extends to our culture and our members, but I get back to every single question and provide unlimited help because I can do that at the scale that we run it right now, um and I really love helping people, so that's like I kind of get a kick out of doing that. Personal and open, so so this is like being vulnerable and being human and sharing. And fun because I think all too often we can get bogged down in um in the work, and like it can get quite heavy and overwhelming, and I have to remind myself often, I'm like, "Just stop and like chill and have some fun." It's like maybe people don't need more work and and you know tasks to do; maybe we could just hang out and have some fun, and I think members would like that too.

Yeah, so um I don't know if you do anything similar with your brand work, Chris, but I like um breaking down touch points in the community and then kind of scoring them against these brand words. So this is a bit out of date now, um but when I first put this together, there were definitely areas where I looked at it and I'm like, "Hm, like we're kind of failing; we're not really hitting these touch points," so um you know people experiencing that are not having the brand experience I want. And one example is Circle offer like a default weekly digest that goes out, which is really convenient, you know, if you haven't got time to do a custom one, and it's good that it it does it for you, but in my case, I'm like, "This is failing; it's not hitting my brand words because it's like an automated thing." So I stopped that going out, and now I do a custom newsletter that's much more friendly and on-brand and has my tone of voice and stuff. So I turned that thing around. So you can kind of quite systematically ensure that your community is on-brand by doing a bit of an audit of of how you set it up. We are—when you're breaking out tables and things like that, I'm like, "Dang." All right, you can tell I've been really, really deep in this world um you know for a long time, but especially since we chatted two years ago, I've been so deep in figuring this stuff out. I also looked a lot younger and less tired when we chatted two years ago. I went and watched that. Parenthood hammers you.

Like, all right, step seven: plan and create culture. Culture is so important because if community is all about connections and relationships and human beings, then the culture that binds them together is one of the most powerful things. So what is community culture? It is the expected behaviors and values shared by the group, and successful culture should be clear and easy to understand; it should attract the right kind of members into your community and put off the wrong kind of members; it should be something upheld and championed by the members even when you're not there; and it should be consistent across the community rather than something that kind of ebbs and flows.

I thought you might appreciate this example, Chris, but in *Cobra Kai*, you've got Miyagi and Cobra Kai. You could say that they are kind of communities, you know, schools, and they're achieving the same outcome; they're literally trying to get their students into the All Valley tournament; they're training them in karate, but they are vastly different in terms of their cultures, right? One's like really mean and violent, and um what's the the Cobra Kai motto, right? It's like, "No mercy," or something.

Yeah. Also, it's "Strike first, strike hard, strike fast," um and and the the karate school that you're talking about is called a dojo. Let me help you there. Are you just trying to sneak in your last name? But you can tell a lot about these two communities, if you will, to to use your parlance here. Cobra Kai, it's the it's it's like a gang, and there's a bunch of them, and they wear black, and they're non-traditional because they all have like sleeveless gis. And then Miyagi is basically one old man who's kind of like a gardener guy who works on cars, and he they only have one student, Daniel LaRusso, so it's a community of two, and they're very intimate, and they it's like a father-son relationship, whereas Cobra Kai is an abusive father-son relationship.

This is something we've done very intentionally from day one with Design Cuts. You know, we regularly see—we've got thousands of five-star reviews now—and and we see it on our live events, and people are like, "I really love the the vibe of this community, the feel of this community," and I think that's you know at the heart of what we're trying to build there. So when it comes to Learn Community, I had very intentional traits. Um, I wanted it to be welcoming and inclusive, supportive and kind, practical and actionable, go deep into problems instead of surface level, be personal and thoughtful, honest, open, and vulnerable, and no hierarchy. I want it to be very egalitarian; everyone's opinion matters.

Something you can do: I would definitely put together traits that you would love to see in your members, but also try and map the antithesis to this. So what are traits that you really don't want as part of your culture? And I don't want people that are pushy or spammy, judgmental or mean, selfish, um feeling like a pressure to show up. So there are some communities where it's like, "You must engage every single week, or we're going to kick you out," and I didn't want to build that. People who take more than they give, people who lack ethics or morals, or people that are overly serious and can't have fun. We haven't had many, but you know, we've had a couple of members who've joined and maybe have gone against the culture, and you can really feel it, and when you've defined it, you can identify why that's happening.

Have you um done anything like this, Chris, or or do you just—

Kind of, you know, perhaps have it in your mind right now: we actually have a code of conduct, very cool, that's pinned to our community. It outlines certain behaviors that we encourage and some things that we say: if you break this, you will be asked to leave. It's powerful, and I, I love—like, if you have that pinned for everyone to see—um, is a constant reference point; it's really useful.

So how can you build community culture? Because I'm sure we all agree it's very important, but there are specific things that you can do. First thing is: lead by example. So much comes from the leader. It's the same way you and I are CEOs in our company; we kind of demonstrate the behavior we'd like to see in our teams, or in this case, in our members. Encourage POS behaviors, so I—to recognize and call out—you know, it could be about notes to people like, "You are just being amazing right now in the community; I really appreciate you." And um, you can also build culture traits into your ideal member persona. When you're being intentional and thinking, "Okay, who do I want in the community?" I want to make sure my landing page speaks to them. When you're clear on the traits, that factors into those kind of key marketing decisions as well.

All right, step eight: plan community events. There's a whole bunch you can do, and I'm, I'm going to kind of whip through these. I'm sure you do some of these, Chris, but I wanted to give an overview for people just who are curious about, "What can I even offer for my members?" The first one is AMAs, like ask me anything, uh, or office hours. This is a regular slot where members can join and ask questions. One-on-one attention is super valuable, so if someone gets a slot to ask a question—and in Chris's case, learn from him—that's very valuable for them. And just a tip: if you're struggling with engagement around this, try theming them. This is something that I've implemented recently, and I think often people don't know what they don't know. So if it's super open, it's like, "Come and ask anything," that can be intimidating. But if it's like, "Come and ask a question around…" Uh, we did one about engagement recently; more people show up because that kind of prompts them to think of a question around that topic, and they know that everyone else's question is going to be relevant to an area they care about right now, versus they're going to join and every other question is going to be like super random.

Next up: one-on-one coaching. You can actually offer this in a scaled community, um, and let people just book in for a limited number of one-on-one slots with you. So in my community, I call these "Deep Dives," and essentially are occasionally announced, and we like, "We got some free slots," and they book up pretty quick, but people love them because they're essentially getting like one-on-one consulting time, but other members can watch that conversation happen live or watch the replay and learn from it. Workshops: so you or your team, um, could actually show up and teach a specific thing. Also, members can—and I'm, I'm going to get into that a little more in a second. Socials: I talked about this before, but you know, it doesn't have to be all about work; you can have social events or connection-based events where people can just hang out, have fun, and make friends. Connection—so going a bit deeper into this again: you can structure it with ice breakers. I use breakout rooms as well in Zoom, which is super powerful; you can like pair people off and and get them um talking about some pretty vulnerable stuff, which can be really, really powerful.

Show and tell: so, um, Chris, I don't know if you do anything like this, but I love basically seeing a member doing something incredible with their community and then say, "Hey, can we host um a session where I kind of half interview you, you half do a workshop, but we basically like break down what you're doing successfully so that everyone else can learn from it?" I have a question for you here. I just answered me something here. Yeah, yeah, please. Is, is your community a community for people who want to build communities? It's for people who want to launch a community if, if they have an idea for one and they need help launching it, or they're running one and they're kind of struggling; they're like, "I, my engagement is not what I want it to be; um, I'm feeling a bit lost; it's not growing like I want it to be," um, so yeah, it's very uh Inception-like, meta, very meta. Yeah, it definitely is, yeah, which I love because loads of people actually join just to see how I'm running my community and then steal that and implement it for theirs, which I'm like, "Please feel free; it's great." So yeah, we, we, we do showcases, um, but yeah, you could map this to anything, like in the Future Pro, it could be like, "This member's crushing it like landing clients, so we're going, going to, you know, break down how they're doing it." So it doesn't all have to come from UKIS interviews, um, so again, this, this could be about anything; it doesn't have to be in a showcase format; it could be more free-flowing or just learning um about some of your more inspiring members, shining a light on them.

Role play: Chris, I've seen you do this a lot actually, and people seem to love it, where you get into that like, "I'll be the client, you be the salesman" kind of thing, um, definitely works in community. You've done it on uh Twitter Spaces and such as well, but it goes down pretty well, right? Yeah, I love doing this; it's kind of part teaching and part improv. Yeah, exactly, um, yeah, and people, people find it engaging uh content as well. I think this is an interesting one that I thought about recently: it could be that there's something really topical going on, so like in the creative industry, a lot of people are concerned about AI; some people are freaking out. If that impacts your members, you could have a bit of a town hall where it's like, "This is happening right now; let's talk about it," um, and people can find that really uh really valuable. I think it's good if you have a framework for discussing things. If you've been trained to be kind of a group coach or group therapy, if you're not, it can actually make the problem worse because people talk about it; the more they talk about it, the more toxic it becomes, and if there isn't a clear plan and helping to support members, it, it can actually exacerbate the problem. It's a great point. Yeah, and again, this comes back to being a good facilitator, so you should come, you should be a good kind of, you know, chairperson for the conversation, if you will. Have a structure, set expectations, guide the conversation, help moderate; these are the skills of a great community builder.

Feedback meeting: so, um, this can be used to actually learn from your members how to improve the community, so it could literally be like, "Here's some stuff we're planning; what do you all think? Like, how's everyone getting on?" Doing that in a live setting can be incredibly impactful. And retreats: we touched on this before; super fun. I'm in a few communities as a member; one of them is a group called Founders in the UK for entrepreneurs; I'm also in Community Pros of London, and I've been to in-person retreats several times, and they're awesome; like, people love in-real life, and as much as I'm championing uh online membership communities um on this call, I truly think that in-real life is where the the most magic happens, so if you can bolt that on, fantastic. And finally: don't burn out, because you might be seeing all the stuff, and again, you, you're tempted to content stuff, or in this case, event stuff, because you care and you want to show up and serve your members. Super easy to burn out; events take a lot out of you, so if I start minimal, don't do too many, don't overcommit, because it's a lot easier to ramp up over time instead of… take these away, and also consider the time around just being live, because most of these is not just like, "Show up and talk off the top of your head"; some of them take preparation; you have to organize the replays and the content and structure all of that, so there's often more work than people realize; hence, start simple, and member-led is your friend. It's less work for you; it's often better content, and what I've found—and I've seen this echoed by many, many very talented community builders that I'm friends with—often your members actually prefer that content, which kind of hurts at first; it's like, "But I'm going to be the expert; they're going to, you know, respect and appreciate me," and actually, when your members grab the mic and they start teaching something, I think it just adds fresh perspectives, variety; it shouldn't be a one-person show, and so I love leaning into member-led content, and you can see a couple of examples here, like, you know, they're always super fun; people really enjoy them, and um, yeah, I like the variety it creates.

Step nine: launch. Up until now, we've been exploring, you know, you're trying to validate demand; you've got the concept in mind; people have proven they want it; you're getting some applications in; you planned your events; how do you actually launch this thing? So once you've hopefully built this waitlist, you want to try and create a launch offer that really converts. I'm a huge fan of leveraging urgency and scarcity; they're two of the the best kind of pillars or levers when it comes to marketing, um, so try something like a limited-time discount for founding members, perhaps limited-time bonuses, or better yet, a member cap. And the third one is my favorite because increasingly I'm going off the idea of discounts and instead I lean more into scarcity; it's much better than saying like, "You get 50% off for joining"; it's much better to say, "We're only going to let in 20 members for this first cohort," and people fight over those 20 slots, and there's no discount required. Has that been your experience as well, Chris? Yeah, I think that's the preferred way to go. Yeah, I think you want to say this group is valuable; the reason why it's valuable is because it's going to be very intimate, and we're going to spend time working with you and learning from you, so I, I prefer doing that versus giving a discount. I abhor discounts, by the way. Yeah, I know you do, but um, yeah, I, I agree, and I, I've definitely shifted that way too. You can also uh lock members in; you don't have to discount for this, but what you can say is, "I will be increasing the price in future." This means that if they're locked in, not only do they feel good, they got in at the rate because they see it go up in six months or a year and think like, "I feel really good about my rate," they'll be less likely to cancel because if they cancel and want to rejoin, they're going to have to pay more. And I had this, um, I invested uh using a team in the states to help remotely consult and help me build my studio that we're looking at right now that you complimented me on earlier, Chris, and it was a lot of money at the time; I'm, I'm not going to lie, you, I wanted to take it serious, and I do a lot of events and courses, so I invested, but it kind of hurt until I saw that they have increased the price nearly 300% in the 18 months since I paid for it, so now I look at that price and I'm like, "Man, I got a steal; like, I feel amazing about the price that I paid," and your members will feel the same.

Step 10: your community landing page, which I should stress is not needed at launch. So when I launched Learn Community, this is kind of funny, but I, I didn't have a landing page, I think, for six months because I built the waitlist, and then I just sent people to a payment page, and they paid, and they went in the community, so I never had like a slick professional page, and I was so busy serving our early members, I didn't have time to build one. So after six months, I was like, "This is getting ridiculous; I should probably build a page that explains what the community is," um, but it wasn't necessary, so I don't think people should get tripped up by that. Really, this is what your page should do: so a landing page is just a page with one purpose; in this case, it's to showcase your community and let people sign up for it. It should clarify who your community is for, and Chris said before, um, "creative entrepreneurs" is who the Future Pro is for, so let people identify with that. It should explain why it's actually valuable; it should show what happens inside the community; of course, allow people to sign up with a a CTA, or call to action; address any questions or common objections that people may have; and it should, of course, present you and your community as credible and and trustworthy. And this is a typical kind of structure that I recommend because again, people get really bogged down and confused if they just see like a blank canvas; they're like, "What do I put in this page?" Number one is qualification, so put that at the top, like, you know, "This is a community for these types of people," then value, um, you know, you're hitting them with that value proposition, and this is where people read it and think, "Do I believe this is actually going to help me and be valuable?" You can then get in the weeds a bit more and talk about the specific features and benefits and what's actually included, and then you have your CTA, which is basically your offer: "Here's the price; like, go sign up." You can address objections and questions with a simple FAQ's thing somewhere near the bottom, and I recommend closing with another CTA because if you don't end on a button where they can sign up, they're going to have to scroll back up on the page to actually do that, so end on a call to action. And then throughout the page, you should kind of weave in case studies, and I got these all over my page; if you go to learn.community—my favorite domain name, by the way—um, you know, we got videos and and text and, you know, images of our members raving about the community because they are the ones that really sell it for you. So if you don't have testimonials at launch and you're trying to build an early-stage uh landing page, maybe you could leverage um industry people or past clients or people that kind of speak to your expertise around your community topic.

Step 11: ongoing marketing and growth. I'm curious what you think of this, uh, Chris, but I, I came up with this equation on the right; I was like, "What really uh, you know, leads to a community that scales?" And for me, I think it's how valuable the community is, then the market size as well as your positioning and how well you fit that market, and then how good you are at actually marketing the community, so your focus around this, your effort and your skill, and all of this kind of combined leads to how big the community can get. Interesting formula, I think, in concept, a little bit harder to to actually do as a formula, but I think it's they're good general areas for you to focus on so that you, you know, this is going to work. And the reason I broke it down like this, as I say on the left here, people typically focus on the first part, but that's very rarely the issue, so they're like, "I need to make my community more valuable; I need to stuff more things in there," and actually that isn't the weakest part; it's normally that they're doing hardly any marketing or maybe they didn't validate properly, and they don't have kind of product-market fit. I, I, I was chatting with the uh the CEO of one of these learning management systems, and I asked him, "Of the people who are very successful using your platform, what is the commonality of all of them?" He paused and he said, "You know, it's actually they focus on creating a product that people can have money to buy; they have an ability to buy." So he said that to me; I'm like, "Shoot, I think this is our problem; we teach people—oftentimes creatives—in a financial distress state," y, so we're, we're trying to help the poor, basically, right? Yeah, and the poor don't have an ability to buy, and so it's one of our biggest challenges; like, we're trying to sell things to people who have an unhealthy relationship with money; they don't have enough of it, and when they make it, they want to hoard it; they don't believe in investing in themselves; that's a fairly typical creative person. So as he was sharing with me, one of the courses that did really well—they did like a a million-dollar launch in a week—he said it was a lady who used to trade on Wall Street, and she was teaching like investment banking or something like that, so of course anybody who has money who wants to learn investment banking can afford to pay for whatever course it is. Yeah, and there was another person who launched a course on how to get a job at Facebook or Google, so of course then you, you kind of know that people in Silicon Valley make ridiculous amounts of money; it's going to be a big salary with options and perks, so they can invest a few grand into nailing the interview and getting that job, so it's one of these things. So if we're looking at the ability to grow a successful and thriving community, I look at maybe similar ideas, but number one: does the market feel this problem deeply as a pain that they would like to make go away? So if your community doesn't solve that, that you, you have a design problem. Number two: do they have an ability to buy? So they feel the pain, but they cannot buy the solution; that's probably you got to go back to the drawing board. And number three: do you have the ability to deliver? So if you can bring people in who have a problem who can afford to buy, and you can deliver the solution, what'll happen organically is they're going to tell more people, and so you're going to bring in more people with the same problem, and you could solve this over and over again; your community should grow.

It's such an interesting point; I, um, I cover something similar in my course where I audit myself as a member over the years because I've been an exceptional member in many communities where, um, you know, I've been given free membership because I contributed so much or promoted in the community or, you know, one of the biggest contributors, and so on. I, I believe in being a good member. I've also been a member in several communities where I, I'm like a ghost, right? I'm completely inactive; I cancel eventually, and I bring no value, and I tracked my behavior over the years and what was going on in my life, and I had varying degrees of budget; I had varying degrees of time, uh, like I've been in some communities where I, I think this is an incredible community; I got zero time; I'm running my business; I'm enjoying my side hustle; I got a family; I don't have time to behave like when I was 16 years old and I lived and breathed community. And I think what it goes to show is, um, you know, yes, it's definitely who you're targeting and the market you're serving, but often, um, kind of to your point, Chris, the issue lies with the member and their situation rather than your offering.

So let's look at some key marketing channels; this is not an exhaustive list, but these are typically the ones that I pay attention to: you've got an audience; maybe you built an audience with a newsletter or a YouTube channel or an Instagram, whatever it may be; maybe you've got a network as well; this could be a network of connections on LinkedIn, uh an in-real-life network; maybe you got a network of past clients that are paid to work with you. Distribution: this is getting in front of other people's audiences, so it could be—well, what I'm doing right now; I'm very meta, right, Chris, but like I'm trying to bring your audience as much value as I can possibly must, and I'm getting in front of them, and I've been on your show two times before; to this day, we get members that join Learn Community, and there's a little field being like, "Where did you discover us?" And they're like, "Oh, so-and-so, you're on the Future Pro, and like what you had to say, so I signed up." Distribution is very powerful. Paid ads: my least favorite, if I'm being honest, particularly when it comes to community because we're not selling products here; we're selling um an experience where people need to be very invested, and I like to think it helps if they have a warm relationship with you, so I don't really like going in cold um with something like ads. And member referrals: this is often overlooked; people have members loving their community; they never incentivize or ask them to tell their friends, and I've done this with a few clients that I've worked with where we've ramped up that channel, and it's exponentially helped them to grow, so that again can be very powerful. And my distribution hero, Chris, it's [Music] you. I think this is a screen grab from my last conversation, but truly, I've, I've referenced you a lot when I've talked about this because whenever, you know, we've had a a conversation like this, typically you will say, "Oh, yeah, I got, you know, four more podcasts that I'm doing later on other people's shows," and I see your name popping up everywhere, and even people that don't have huge audiences, you're still like getting in front of their audience and bringing value relentlessly; like, I don't know anyone else who does this so consistently, day in day out, and you have a huge audience, so it would be really easy for you to get apathetic and just kind of put stuff out to your own audience, and that's it, um, but you're constantly and intentionally getting in front of new audiences, and so when people aren't doing this, I'm like, "Hold on; you have zero audience, and you're not bothering to do this." Chris has a huge audience, and he's still prioritizing that, um, so yeah, I look up to you with this; truly, this is a real look at some of our earlier growth, um, I need to do a more up-to-date version of this graph, but again, I'm caveating, you know, this is a hobby for me, this community; this is like a passion project, so this is not my main business, so these are not enormous numbers, but you know, they're still pretty cool, um, for a profitable hobby, so um, I just want to prove that marketing really matters because when I initially launched, I was doing some marketing efforts, and you can see there's this kind of stepping-stone thing going on; we get new members, shut down for a month and not let people in, and then two months later, open up and let people in, and we were growing pretty nicely; then you can see the line goes incredibly flat; we had to basically make the community open; people could sign up anytime; no more launches, no more cohorts, and no more marketing because I was dealing with a newborn, and it was a lot; I'm not going to lie, so um, I went into maintenance mode and basically like the only energy I have remaining in my day after everything else in my life is to serve the members we have; I don't have time to get new members, so we went super flat; then things started to pick up a little bit, and then not too long ago, we launched uh our course inside the community, and this brought a whole bunch of new people in, and now the community is kind of just starting to grow a little bit; I'm very happy with this kind of like taking along nice intentional growth, but as kind of almost embarrassing as it is to show some of the flatness of this graph because this is not like, "Oh, I exploded to six figures in six months," I hope it's more realistic for people, and it also shows that marketing really works; it's like when I stop marketing, I stop growing; when I market more heavily, the growth follows, and the proof's in the pudding, I think.

Step 12: community onboarding. So this is how your, your new members may be feeling after they join: "Did I make the right decision signing up? Is this actually my kind of place? Are these my kind of people? Is this actually worth my time? Will this community be important to me? What do I do next? How do I use this community?" It's very common to have these thoughts. Onboarding is designed to answer these questions, and I actually really love—I connected with David Spinks, who's um, you know, like an OG in the community world, uh, we've had some really good conversations—and in his book, *The Business of Belonging*, he says, "Onboarding is what we want new members to feel, to know, and to do," and I think that's such a succinct, beautiful way of putting it. So feel: that's kind of back to the—and stuff we touched on—like, how, how do you want them to actually feel when they sign up? Like warm and fuzzy, or like super laser-focused and motivated? Like, how, how do you want them to feel? Know: what should they know? Like, they should know how to actually use things, or maybe what to do next, or, or, you know, what to expect from the community. And do: what do you want them to do as their first step? Do you want them to introduce themselves, or get help with their pressing problem, or whatever it may be, um, but again, I love this framing, so shout out to uh David for this. There's a a term in the world of community called activation; it's basically the sooner you can activate a community member to take some level of action, the better, because it's the people that never activate that become passive and then inactive and then churn, and if you don't get people to activate generally quite early—certainly within their first week—uh, there's a much higher likelihood you're going to lose them. So my rule is: within 24 hours of them joining, how do I wow them as much as possible? Because often you join a community, and that initial day experience is you deciding if it's going to be worth it or not. So how do you blow away new members with value in their first day? You could solve a problem that you saw in their application form; you could send them a really warm personal message; provide a resource that's perfect for their needs right now, or maybe make a valuable connection or introduction so they're making friends on day one, but do something; don't just dump them in there and hope that they kind of find their feet.

Hey, I have a suggestion for you: can you go back to that slide? Yes, I'm watching your presentation here; might I humbly suggest that you turn all these key ideas into bite-sized, rhyming, alliterative statements to kind of own and brand this whole thing? So you say, "First 24 hours, wow," but I was trying to figure out like what rhymes with "wow," and I couldn't, couldn't figure it out, but if you say, "Just in, quick win," then you could brand this whole thing; does that make sense, Tom? I was thinking about this recently, and I'll be very honest, I haven't had time to get around to this; I'm such a believer in this because then you start owning concepts, right? So I know you chatted with Daniel Priestley; he talks about key person of influence; he talks about oversubscribed; these are not new concepts, but you get IP in the space by framing them in a compelling way, so yeah, I completely agree; it's on my to-do list, and I appreciate the suggestion. Yeah, if you go back in and look at all the key points about community and you come up with your 27 phrases, it's like Tom Ross's 27 phrases on community, like Robert Greene's *48 Laws of Power*. Well, I, I do dream of writing a physical book on this one day, so um, there you go; I'm going to get my hip-hop hat on and uh get some rhymes kicking off, and then, and then you can make stickers, you can do merch and swag, and all that kind of stuff. All right, we are getting, we're getting near the end, everyone who's with us.

Still, right now, I appreciate you. Uh, I get I get a bit carried away. Well, congratulations everybody, you made it to Step 13. You you're go ahead and reward yourself by going hitting the like and subscribe button right now. Leave us a comment; let us know what community you're planning on launching, given the information you're getting right now. Okay, back to the show. I told you I want to make it like a a free course essentially.

Step 13: Gathering member data. It sounds kind of onerous, right, and and weird in like a Facebook way. Um, and also when people hear data, they get scared. Right? It's like, okay, that sounds very complicated. Really, I think a better way of framing it is insights, because the more you know about your members, the better you're going to understand their needs and the better you're going to be able to serve them. It's impossible—in fact, I'm trying to think of a rhyme right now—don't don't be a hater, gather member data. There you go. Um, that sucks. Yeah, good try. Good try. So you know, really, when it comes to member data, you should be an instigator. How's that R to you? I'll go all night. Um, so it it is impossible to remember everything about your members, and having these insights means flying blind. So I didn't actually do this well enough when I launched Loar community, and I'd be talking to a member and be like, wait, what does their community do again? Or like, what did they need help with? And I stored all in my brain, and it was it was terrible. Um, when you actually track this stuff and record it, it becomes really key for community management and handling member connections. It also informs you what marketing channels are working, because one of the data points I mentioned before is when someone joins, you should ask them, where did you discover this community? It's gold, because now every time a member joins, I can see what marketing channels are working, and if I do some stuff and no members ever cite that, I'm like, cool, I won't do that again; it's a waste of time. I double down on the ones that are working. I haven't got time to kind of go through uh my whole process for this, but I've gone really deep on this, Chris, like we we now have a set of milestones that people fill out. So if someone asks a question like, how do I do community challenges? I can filter by members and be like, here's eight members that crushed community challenges, and they can share what works.

Step 14: Drive member engagement. Everyone realizes when they do community engagement is freaking hard, and it really is. Even the best communities wish for more. Um, it's very very difficult. These are the three areas that I think impact engagement the most: You have the value and offering of your community; if that's really great, that's going to help. We talked before, Chris, about you might have a great offering, but if you got the wrong people in there, then engagement is going to be poor. So the number of members, obviously a degree of like critical mass applies, and also the quality and relevance of those members um matters too. And then the big one is community experience. So what are you actually doing with those members once they're inside? And again, I've got a hugely in-depth module in my course about engagement, but I want to give you a couple of my favorite strategies that you can take away today. So what most community builders do is they sit back and hope members engage, and they typically won't, or they start endlessly posting to fill the silence, and this has the opposite effect, cuz you're basically hogging the mic and giving no space for your members to converse. And this is so common; people get really insecure; they're like, it's a ghost town; I better start like posting threads or answering my own questions and fill that void. Um, that is not the right way to go about it. So what actually does work is being a facilitator. We've touched on this throughout this chat; you need to be the driver and the organizer of those early conversations. My favorite technique is private to. And what this means is, Chris, imagine you're in my community and you're not posting, which is very common behavior, right? It's not a priority; you haven't got around to it; you don't know how to frame your question; you feel insecure, or whatever it may be. I reach out to you privately, and I say, hey Chris, how's it going? And you may reply, and you're like, I'm good, like, you know, business is tough at the minute. And I'll have a conversation; I'll be like, oh, why is it tough? What's going on? And maybe you open up, and you're like, uh, we're struggling to grow right now because, you know, I feel a bit lost when it comes to marketing. And in that conversation, I pin down the specific issue you're facing, and I say, you know what? I can help with that, but if you go post it publicly in the forum, I think our conversation and the help I give you will help other members, and other members will chime in and give their perspectives and they help you too. Does that sound good? And 99% of the time they're like, yeah, that sounds amazing. So what I've done is I've gone to them instead of waiting for them to come to me; I've helped get them to clarity, and then I've nudged them to go do it publicly in the community. And the the best part is all the other members seeing this wonderful discussion unfolding; it appears organic to them; they don't know I've been the puppet master behind the scenes making this happen; it just looks like great engagement happening naturally. That's a lot of work, Tom. Yeah, it is. I can see why you're good at this. Um, and thing is, because this is a hobby, I do all of this stuff in 30 to 60 minutes a day. This is how community is scalable when you do it right, because the whole ecosystem of a community is that people are not going to be hounding you every single day, day and day out; majority are going to be passive, which is fine; they might just enjoy consuming resources or or watching other conversations. And the active people, they're going to get some help and go away and do the work; they're not going to hound you again an hour later, typically. So for me, I can I can drop in, respond to every single question, leave personal Loom responses, give someone a dedicated five-minute video answer, do that several times a day, make a few connections, have some DMs, and drive facilitating the whole ecosystem in less than one hour, and it's super fulfilling. You can also make one-on-one member introductions; you can personally invite people to events; and one of my favorite things is you can tag members. So here here's the exact workflow, right? A member posts; I'll give my best response; and then after that, I will use the data I talked about to find other members who might be able to help. So in this example, Lara posted asking about challenges, and I was like, I know Joy's done challenges; um, I'll tag her up. Joy then jumps in because of that prompt, which she wouldn't have done without it, leaves an incredible video breaking down her exact approach, and suddenly members are helping members, and I just had to facilitate that with a a little light nudge.

So we're nearly there, Chris. That is that's basically my framework for how people can think about building community, and I want to end by talking about objections, because invariably people might have some. Number one: I don't have an audience, so I can't build community. With Learn Community, even though I started with an audience, 80% of our members come from places other than my own audience; talks like what I'm doing right now, for example. So if you don't have an audience, lean on your network and lean into distribution; there are other channels than your audience. I'll delay launching my community until I release a ton of content and build an audience. Again, you don't need one. Audience building, as you know, Chris, takes a long time; it's definitely a smart strategy, but a lack of audience shouldn't stop you launching your community; just lean on the others that we touched on. I don't like marketing; I just avoid it. Unfortunately, no; it is not; builders and they will come. People are not going to magically just know about your community. So you know what sucks more than learning marketing? Failing, not being able to follow your dream, or seeing zero traction. I've seen a lot of people that claim to hate marketing, and once it started working for them because they stuck at it, they didn't hate it so much. I think it can be intimidating to learn a new skill, but I hate seeing people with great ideas, with communities, just never bring them to life because of this blocker. It only works for you, Tom, because you're already established. Again, my existing audience and network helped; I won't lie, but I managed my expectations to be much smaller than some established names. So Chris, my community as a side hustle with my level of audience earns way less than your community, and I'm just fine with that because that makes sense. So I I advise people: make your goals realistic. My community is bigger than some people and smaller than other people. If you're just getting started, you know, I've helped members launch a community with eight members, and they get a bit of extra money in their pocket, and most of all, they serve those people and care about them and help them, and that's a wonderful thing. So start at whatever point um you know, it's relative to where you're at. I appeared on a podcast, and it didn't work. I've definitely felt this before. So it's unrealistic to think everything will work. I I listened to Noah Kagan's um new book the other day; I think he said like 80 to 90% of his marketing experiments fail. That is just marketing; it's it's trial and error, and it's a lot of failure, and I have definitely found this. I've tried tons that didn't work, um, and I basically found the ones that do and got data, remember, on which ones work, and I do more of them. I'm marketing my community but not seeing great results. Either your community isn't properly validated or positioned, or you're marketing but not enough or not well enough; typically it's the latter. People are very kind of sporadic with their marketing, and and when I've interviewed vied members who really crushed it with their launches, people are very surprised at the level of effort and commitment they put into their marketing campaigns. So generally you need to be doing more marketing than than what feels natural. Nobody seems to care about my community. Again, this is why we validate; so this should actually become evident at the validation phase, not at the launch or marketing phase. Until you have something that you're sure people actually really want, don't jump into building and marketing it. And that is it. I'm going to take a breath um and just say if you do need help with next steps, um at Learn Community, you can find the entire course that these highlights are taken from, um plus join our community of 150 likeminded community builders. You also get unlimited help and questions from me, one-on-one calls for community critiques, you name it. I really like to try and over-deliver for people, and I would love to be your personal guide when it comes to community. If you don't have any budget, then I actually featured Chris in my 175-page free book at Communitymanual.com, which breaks down tons of community strategies as well as an analysis of how the future and Chris build community so well. And finally, thank you, thank you, Chris, for having me on. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. I didn't realize this would be such a long workshop, but I hope it's been helpful, um and I really really want you to feel inspired to go create your dream community. We'll include the links that Tom mentioned in the show notes below; make sure you click on those if you want additional resources that he's talking about, or if you're curious about his community and want to look at his sales page, make sure you check it out.