Live Building A $100K MRR Paid Community, Pt. 1

All right. So we're going to talk about how to achieve product-market fit with a community. So we have a school group for agency owners called the Agency Owners Association. This is going to be the very first part of a series that I'm going to do, taking us to $100K per month in monthly recurring revenue or MRR. I'm going to share the lessons along the way, the mistakes that we make, and I feel like it's a lot easier to share experiences around stuff that I'm doing right now and it's going to help you. So just for context here, I Myself and my podcast co-host Neil, we both own agencies and we want to show people how they can get to 8, 9 figures and beyond. A lot of people in the group right now, they're 6, 7-figure agency owners. And, you know, we want to help them get to the next level. And so we think of this group as EO and YPO, but unbundled for agency owners. So Neil and I were both YPO members. We both are. I've been an EO in the past. And to me, community is very important because Sam Altman from OpenAI has said this. Yeah. What's not going to get commoditized in the next 5 to 10 years or so is going to be community. In fact, communities are going to become more valuable. And so when we think about crawl, walk, run, I'm going to show you how we're going about it right now, how I believe we're getting a lot closer to product-market fit. And it's continuing to grow. And we haven't seen any churn yet because the group is still fairly new. And well, the goal here is, again, let's get the group to $100K in monthly recurring revenue. And we can be open about sharing this, right? This is something that Neil and I don't really get to build in public in terms of the things that we do. And we thought this would be really cool, or I thought it'd be really cool rather, for me to kind of share the story along the way as we grow this thing. So maybe you can learn some lessons from this as well, and you can maybe get a group to $100K+. And there's actually a handful of people— I'm pulling up my screen over here, but there's a handful of people that are already doing $400,000 to $500,000 a month just using their school group. And school group is It's no different than any other community platform out there. I just, I'm grateful that Sam Ovens, the founder of Skool, he let me invest in the company. So I just use it as an investor. So you can see for this group, Agency Owners Association, this is with Neil and myself. And you can see if I go ahead and click on settings, you can see the group is doing $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue right now, right? And so again, I want to share this journey and show you basically how we're building this thing up. We haven't really run ads and we haven't really promoted it hardcore right now. I would say that the only ad that you would see— so when I say running ads, that means we're not using Meta ads or something like that. We're just really sponsoring it ourselves using our podcasts. And what we have right now is a mid-roll that will show up in our podcast episodes and we rotate the mid-rolls with other offers that we might have. And we also do the same thing with the YouTube videos as well. And so those are the videos that you might see. And sometimes the YouTube videos might do well in terms of the views. And then we just want to make sure, I think we're going to see a future where more and more people, they're going to use their organic reach and just promote their own product because that's where they make the most money at the end of the day. So this is what the group looks like. You can see there's a leaderboard over here and we want to gamify it more. People can start here, introduce themselves. And people here are asking each other for help, right? Trying to help financial, trying to get A financial lead to help with the results. So my point of showing you all this right now is I want to show you the piping a little bit and let's talk about what product market fit looks like, right? So product market fit means it's an engaged group to me and people are actively contributing. And so you can see, these are the top 5 in the last 30 days or so. And there's an entire leaderboard here where it shows different levels and you can gamify the different levels too. If they reach a certain level, you can Maybe they unlock a call or something like that, right? Currently, the way we've gamified it is we're saying, hey, you know what? Once we get to 50 paying members, then Neil's going to start contributing more in the group right now because he wants to see how this goes initially and then he's going to jump in. It's going to unlock Neil, right? And then the next level, it's like, okay, let's say we get to another 100 members, paying members in the group, then that'll unlock a very special guest speaker, right? And so we can kind of gamify it that way. And so the other thing I would take a look at too is we're talking about product market fit here is we want to take a look at metrics, right? Just to see that, okay, in the past 30 days or so, your group grew to 46 members. Okay, great. We added 16 people in the last 30 days, which is fantastic, right? And 43 members were active. So ideally we want 100% that are active, but still 93% is amazing. And here we can take a look at, okay, the people that aren't active, how do we get them active, right? And then you can see when the best times are to post. So I do think we're pretty close to product-market fit. I just want to run a couple more of these experiences. Right now what we do mainly is in the group, and you can see the benefits over here, there's like a weekly Q&A where you can ask questions, or sorry, I should say you can ask your questions anytime in the community. And then right now we're doing a weekly hangout and then We're not committing to that in perpetuity. What we're doing is we're doing that weekly and we're doing that in sprints of basically a month or 2 months or so. And what that does is that says, okay, I might commit to this for 1 or 2 months or so as the founder of the group, but that's not going to happen in perpetuity, right? You want to make sure that you set the expectation with the group at the end of the day because you don't want them to think that it's going to happen forever, right? Because then you're held to a standing meeting forever. But it's really important if you're going to start a group that you get people engaged in the beginning, right? If they're not engaged in the beginning, the group's going to fall flat. So, you got to basically put your full heart and effort into it. And then we also have a community manager, Ezra, who's been great about keeping people engaged, asking the right questions. And I'm trying to connect with him very often. We're talking most days and we're trying to meet on the phone to talk maybe once every week or every 2 weeks or so. All right, quick note, this is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. We're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from, from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website, and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. The other thing we put in here is we add in some courses that we have. So I have one called called Consulting School. And they get a course, instead of having to pay $2,000, it's just sitting in there. And then access to Neil and Eric's network. So people can ask us for stuff, but just depends on the ask and we'll see how we can best help. We actually do share leads. So we get a good amount of leads that we can't serve, right? And a lot of these people that are 6 to 7-figure agency owners, maybe it's a niche that we don't serve or it's a service that we don't do. We offer it in here and that way that's just another value add. Special deals on software. Both Neil and myself are very connected with other software entrepreneurs and we just want to make sure we can add value. And then strategies and frameworks. We also add templates and things like that too, right? So I still think it's very much the beginning of this group and I think it's just going to get stronger over time, right? So what else does product market fit look like? So we survey the group quite a bit, right? And so the questions that we ask over here, so what do you like most about the group or what will be most valuable to you? What would you like us to add to the group? How can we improve the experience? What are the goals for this quarter? How can Agency Owners Association help you? How would you like to help other members? Anything else you'd like to share with us? Right. So let's just say like, okay, this doesn't tell me the most. Like people can say, okay, well, I like the people. I like— people are basically saying they like the variety, right? And you can take an export from this, a spreadsheet like this. You can dump it into ChatGPT or Gemini and just say, okay, what are the main things people like based on this column over here? What are the main things they like over here? Right. And then you can just basically summarize it that way. And so a lot of people are saying, okay, well, or a couple people I should say. So in-person meetups or people want some matchups with people, tools and automations to implement AI, way to partner together with my skillset, more SOPs and onboarding, right? Crash course in organic lead gen. None yet interested in templates, right? Have more guests speaking and able to connect with people. So people want, I'm sensing that people want more connection at the end of the day and we are planning on adding that, right? But you're not going to get better with your community because your, the community is the product. It's the people. It's the type, the quality of interactions that they're having, right? If we're not doing those things, then the community is not going to get better and the people are going to churn out, right? So, it's really important for us to constantly have that feedback loop and ask questions like this, right? And then maybe every quarter or so just asking like, hey, how's the overall experience for you right now? What are you missing right now? So, our community manager is going to be responsible for just checking in on that. And for the people that want in-person, in-person is going to cost more money and we're really It's really— eventually, I think we'll have one for 6-figure owners, but we want one to just focus on the 7-figure ones initially because the fact of the matter is they do have money, more disposable money to spend at the moment. They just, you know, larger revenues, right? And so, because it's not going to be cheap for an in-person thing, we're probably— it's probably going to be 5 figures for a ticket and it's going to be 2 events a year, right? But you have to think, okay, 5 figures is pretty expensive, but if you get a multiple of 3 to 4x on it or maybe a 10x or 20x on it, Based on someone that you meet at the end of day, or some interaction that you have, or some idea that you get—is it worth it at the end of the day? Right? And that's how you got to look at this stuff. And so, going back to product market fit again, so you know we are we're trying to constantly add value. Like we we didn't have the lead sharing thing in the beginning. It's like what else can we do? What else can we do? But also not just like what else are we thinking that's good? What are other people thinking that's good at the end of the day? Right? And so when we go to other people. And we ask questions like this, then we can figure out, okay, if 40 to 50% of people are saying the same thing, it's probably something we should take a look at, right? And also this feedback is good. How can we improve this experience? The current Hangouts are all over the place. Tag people who have context with questions. I think that's a good idea too, right? I think we actually need to take action on these things. Again, still a very new group. I think it's only— 1,000. I want to say it's 2 to 3 months old. And so I think to have a group that's already at $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue and us pushing to our podcast. And by the way, I wouldn't say our podcast is like the biggest podcast in the world, right? I think it certainly does well, but we're nothing in the range of a Joe Rogan, for example, or a Tim Ferriss. And that's what I would say, right? And keep in mind, even though our marketing, our niche is marketing, We're targeting agency owners. So we're only going to get a subset of our audience that converts at the end of the day. So that's what it is. And the other thing I would say we're doing is we are now connecting people. We do have an Airtable, right? And so I think again, product market fit within a community is just understanding what people in your community need and then delivering on that. If you're not listening, you're not going to be able to get better. And that's how I'd say is the key thing to achieving product market fit. I think we've done a good job so far, but if we just continue on doing what we're doing right now, I'm going to tell you that the product itself is going to fall flat. And so we have to make sure that we're constantly innovating and we're constantly delivering because the community is whatever— it's whatever you put into the community, that's what you're going to get back. It's the same deal with the YPO, for example. I've always heard this when I was in like entrepreneurs organization or YPO, people are just like, honestly, you get what you put into it. And so, same thing with the community. If you're going to start a community, go all in for the first probably 3 to 6 months or so if you're the founder of the group, and then go from there, right? And you can use a platform like Skool if you want, or you can use other platforms that are out there, but that's what it is. And the other thing too is you don't want to scale it before you figure it out. And so, people talk about nailing it before you scale it, right? Yeah. As you continue to get feedback, then you have to just maybe talk to people in isolation too and be like, hey, how much would you recommend this group? And also ask people the question, if I wanted you— what would it take for you to stay in this group forever? What would you need? Right? If you ask good questions like that, then you're going to be able to figure things out. You could also get a sense for just, hey, overall, what would you rate your experience with the group right now? 1 through 10, 10 being best. And I think if it's honestly, if it's at an 8.5, 9 or higher, then I think you have a pretty good group and then you can think about scaling it, right? And so there are some other things that we're planning on testing in terms of scaling. So we can talk about that a little bit. And I'm going to continue. This is a series, right? Until we get to $100K MRR, this is the series, right? And I'm going to have another series coming talking about how to get the path to $100 million in revenue, right? on the agency side. And I think that's going to be an exciting series too. And so I'm just focusing more on sharing stories and we're still going to have podcasts on this channel. Those of you that follow this channel, those of you that are new to the channel, just understand that I do interview people, but I want to focus on 20 to 30% of the people that I find that I actually want to have a conversation with. And I think it'll go a long way there. And I think that's going to be a nice balance at the end of the day. Quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing six figures, seven figures, eight figures, even nine figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads. We also we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more. By going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside. So the other thing we're planning on doing is, and we're actually starting this, is a free community, right? And I'm going to show you a free community as an example over here. There's a group that I joined that it's called Synthesizer School. And so check this out over here. So Synthesizer School, they have about 9,700 free members over here. And then they have like a start here button. Like these links over here help people get started, right? And make $10,000 a month. I think that's probably their upsell offer. But basically the idea with the free community is they have a lot of people in here and they're going to funnel into people that might become paid members, right? And they have 124 people online. So if I, oh, this is school games. This is like a, It's a challenge that the founders of school had. So I wouldn't say that that's what pushes into their funnel. But this one, I think, so Synthesizer School, they're just focused on helping people make more money, ultimately create content, make money, educate Earth. And you can see people are just sharing stuff, right? So this is a pretty vibrant community, I would say. And you can have, the free community can be your marketing engine because when you post in the free community and you own the group, you can actually send an email every 72 hours or so to the entire group. And you can push different offers at the end of the day, right? So some of these headlines are actually pretty decent. I actually kind of want to read some of these. And so I'm going to save this for later, right? So anyway, that's what a free group looks like. There's actually another one over here. I think this is a good example. So this guy over here, this Adonis Gang group, you can see it's a bunch of dudes and it's about, I think it's about helping people become men. So I joined this one just to understand how their funnel works. And you can see here, there's 132,000 people in here. That's a lot of people, right? And you can tell, so they actually have a paid group that actually funnels into their paid group over here where there's 1,800 people. And so 1,800 times $129, this group makes $232,000 a month, right? And so it talks about masculinity and everything. Sorry, let me share this tab instead. So you can see, look, 1,800 people, $129 a month. You just do the math on that. That's There's another group I know of, I think it's 300 people in the group, they're paying $1,000 a month. And that group is helping French people make more money online, right? So it just depends on what it is that you're offering. You can see for this one over here, $129 a month, that tells me that for the group that I have, we're not valuing it at enough, right? So we can have a free group, which we're planning on doing for marketing school. And then that will have a broad set of people. And then a certain subset of people will be people that can upgrade to the Agency Owners Association. And we might make a paid group. In the future for maybe marketers that want to go deeper, but people are lacking community at the end of the day. And I think starting a virtual group is a good place to begin with, but just keep in mind that ultimately people want more in-person interactions. People want to connect with other people. And so you have to be able to facilitate that. And if you aren't able to facilitate that, then it starts to fall flat. It can't just be— right now we're doing a lot of hangouts and a lot of it's focused on me answering questions. That's only going to go so far. It can't be focused on one person, right? It's got to be focused on connections with the group and having other people from within the group share as well and seeing where it can go. But in the beginning, right now, the founders, myself, Neil, we're going to try to carry it. And then eventually, it's going to be more organic hangouts where people are just hanging out with each other and setting up more hangouts, right? More space for people to hang out and just maybe setting like an open Zoom room. So, there's a lot of different ideas here. that we can go with, right? So I think that's a great example. And by the way, going back to the Agency Owners Association, we had, if you look at the pricing before, the pricing before subscriptions, check this out over here. So we had it at $149 a month. And the people that are on the free plan are basically people that work with me. So $149 per month on, that's 30 members, right? And then we said, hey guys, we're increasing the price. The price increases also help too. So once you have product-market fit, you want to start to scale it. You can also hit your community, hit your email list as well and say, hey, like, look, the price is going to go up and this is what it's at, right? So we have 8 members now paying $199 a month. And I know that there's good enough value in here. Eventually, we're going to just keep increasing the price. Like next price, we'll just keep doing $50 increments. And I think we can probably get it to $999 a month or so. But we're going to take our time with this, right? And so I think there's no resistance here and just we're going to keep increasing until we see That there's significant drop-off. Because when you think about it, at the end of the day, if we have, let's say, 500 people in this group paying $999 a month, that's $500K a month, right? So even if we bring it to 100 people, that basically gets it to the $100K, right? And so I know that given the authority that Neil and I have built over the years, that we should be able to get there in due time. And it's going to be better than any type of podcast ads that we've ran. Or that we've run in the past. And well, why can't you do it yourself, right? And so that's what it is. And you've seen some other people with the free groups do it that way. And it's just basically their funnel. And you can run Facebook ads or whatever ads you want to the free group. And then you can have your community managers try to upsell those people just by chatting with them and trying to understand what their goals are. And if they do seem like they're a fit, then they can try to make a soft pitch to the paid group, right? Yeah. And then you can pay your community managers an incentive on that. Just aligning incentives at the end of the day. Then your community managers are going to be incentivized to just make sure that the group is a good experience too, because they want people to stay as long as possible. So we talked about free community ads. You could certainly run ads to this directly. And what I would say is we spent— we did a test recently. It was only like a $700 or $800 test, and we actually got one conversion for $550. Wow. For the $199 a month. And if someone stays for at least 3 months or so, then you break even on that. It's going to take you 3 months to break even on the— that's your payback period, right? It's 3 months. And so every 3 months, basically, you can pay for a new customer, right? But if you can get that payback period down, then let's say you get it to 1 month or so, so you can use that. That's basically, you can just refresh that money back into ads faster, right? Yeah. And that's how you might want to think about it. But the fact that we drove a direct conversion directly from ads, and by the way, I didn't even hone in on the targeting that much, that says a lot. And so the next step would be adding more creatives and then honing in on the targeting more, which I might make in a future video. And then we can explain that more. So working towards wrapping up here. So other things that we want to do to enhance the group. So again, product market fit to me is a moving target. To me, it's a 60-day moving average. So we want to have guest speakers, we want to have in-person, we want to have breakouts, we want to be able to connect people more, and we want to constantly collect feedback like what I mentioned. So maybe every month or so, your community manager and even yourself, you're checking with a couple members just to see how things are going. Every quarter you're sending a survey to everyone, and maybe after every couple Hangouts or so, you're sending them to— you're sending surveys to people. And for new members, Maybe after the first hangout or 2, you send them an automatic survey just so you understand how the experience is going, but you have to stay on top of it, right? And that's what I would say. So look, if you want to find out more about the group, you can just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, marketingschool.io/agency to see how it works. If you're an agency owner, if you want to join, feel free to. And I'm just going to keep sharing how we're going. So we're at basically $6,000 in MRR right now. And the goal is to get to $100K in MRR. And then maybe we'll go for a $500K challenge and maybe a million challenge. Who knows how far this is going to go, but that's it for today. Let me know what you think in the comments about this type of format if you're a longtime follower of this channel. And let me know if you think we're going in the right direction and what you think you'd like to see change and what else that you think I might've missed. So that is it. And we'll catch you later. Thank you.