Forget Courses, Launch This In 2026 To Survive AI

AI is going to disrupt course creators big time. We either have to say this is no longer going to happen or adapt to what does education look like in the future.

If AI can clone your content, your writing, your course, and even your voice, what's left that it can't replicate? That's what my guest today, Jay Klaus, has been thinking about.

Is attention really the game that you want to be playing, or do you really want to be optimizing for trust? And to me, that's really what I'm focused on.

Jay is the founder of Creator Science and the creator of The Lab, a membership business that generates hundreds of thousands per year by focusing on depth, not scale.

I think about a community as concentric circles. The whole community is the outside circle, and as that gets bigger, it's more important that you have smaller and smaller and smaller circles inside. Masterminds, offline experiments, accountability partners. You can just find ways to enable small experiences.

I want to dive in on the pricing for a second.

Most people are afraid to go out and offer a several-thousand-dollar product or service, but I think that's actually the bigger opportunity for folks because you'll make more meaningful revenue with fewer sales.

What's one thing that you think creators should be doing differently right now?

Don't try to emulate what you think works. Try to be unique. The only way to get the highest returns is to be fucking different. Those people are innovating.

Yeah. Before we hit record, you said something that I was like, all right, we got to just go in and start the episode right now because you said online courses are screwed. Tell me about that.

It's not how I want to feel, but I've been embracing this line that you need to disrupt yourself before you get disrupted. Yeah. And I feel like AI is going to disrupt course creators big time. And it might be a couple of years yet. But I think the writing is kind of on the wall. And so I'm very actively, even though I'm, I'm a course creator, I made a good amount of money with courses. I don't want to put that revenue aside. I feel like unfortunately we either have to say this is no longer going to happen or adapt to what does education and our delivery of education look like in the future.

Okay. So what do you see changing in like how we're interacting with AI versus, you know, courses or every other way that we've been learning information for, you know, hundreds of years?

Well, online courses, it was innovative in the way that knowledge transfer could be really fast and really efficient. Like if I wanted to learn from somebody and they had created a course, that was a new fast way for me to learn something without having to meet that person in person, have a one-to-one discussion, right? So we plan the curriculum, We record videos and we kind of just think through the lens of how can we teach most people most of the time the skill that we want to do because we can't make curriculum for every single edge case. We just do our best to say most people start here, they're trying to get here. Let me make a journey that's efficient to get them there. And that has worked. But now we have AI and it is like this infinitely patient, hyper-personalized, new way of learning if you know how to interact with it in a way that it can teach you, which is a big if because there's still probably a huge percentage of the population who doesn't know that AI is a thing. They don't have ChatGPT on their computer or their phone. They don't know how to properly prompt ChatGPT or some other model to teach them. So we still have some ways to go here. But if you are comfortable with these tools, you can basically learn anything very quickly hyper-personalized to the context of what you already know and what you're trying to accomplish. And that's just a better learning experience than watching a bunch of videos.

This makes me think about homeschooling. So I was homeschooled and people would often ask like, what's the pros and cons of homeschooling versus going to a public or private school? And, or they'd be like, you know, did you actually learn all of these things? And it's like, well, not only did I learn those things, but I learned them in probably a quarter of the time or less. And there's a few aspects of it. So first, my homeschooling journey was I have older siblings. And so my mom homeschooled all of us and all of my friends were older than me because I was like tagging along with my older siblings. And there were two key moments in homeschooling. One was I remember it snowing outside and the snow just being absolutely perfect. I'm like, I just want to go play in the snow. And my mom said, you know, it's not like 5 hours of school. It's just until your work is done. And I was like, oh, this is time to me. And I was like very, very efficient. And I got through all of that. And, you know, 2 hours later I'm playing in the snow, right? Very, very focused kid when I had that goal and the control. But the other thing is my friends being older than me, that was not a problem until I realized they were all going to graduate high school and go to college and I was going to be left behind. And have 2 more years left or more, 3 more years left. And so I asked my mom, like, is it a fixed amount of years? Is high school 4 years or is it a fixed amount of work? She's like, oh, it's a fixed amount of work. And so I ended up cramming all of this, moving as fast as I could. And I graduated when I was 15, almost 16, went to college and like did really well in school before then dropping out and doing other things. And the parallel to me with AI is that the learning is tailored to your pace. It's not necessarily that the teachers, right? The teacher with the teaching degree and all of this stuff who does it professionally for 25 years, is the parent a better teacher? Probably not. But it's personalized and it's to that individual. And so, you know, is AI a better teacher than the professional? Maybe, maybe not, but it's definitely personalized and paced to that person. And there's, there's all of these schools that are coming up. Uh, Primer is one. There's one in Texas, uh, that I can't remember the name of right now that, you know, are basically having AI tutors work with these kids. And it's very early, right? We're, we're like finishing the first year of this basically. And the results are insane where people are going through, you know, in 2 hours a day, they're finishing all their school. They're performing way above the standardized test scores and all of that. And people are like, how could AI do this? And I'm sitting here as a homeschooled kid and going, oh, I know exactly how. It's just great tutoring tailored exactly to that one person.

Totally. Yeah, I haven't thought about this example, but it's really smart because I was, I was good at school. And so oftentimes my experience was teacher would teach something, give an example. I've got it. Yeah, but not everybody gets it that quickly. So now they go through more examples and I'm sitting there just kind of like waiting for us to move on. But on the other end of the spectrum, some people needed a whole lot of extra help also. So people would get left behind. People would get bored because they're way ahead of it. When there's just like this single track of teaching a whole group of people a certain way, it's inefficient. And so I think this future is net very good, but it will force course creators to change their model.

So you and I have interesting seats in the creator economy because we're both people that professional, like thousands and thousands of professional creators look to for like, hey, what's happening? What what's going on. I run the software product used by so many of them. Tons and tons of them are in your community learning from you. And then you've gone on and you've interviewed what, 250+ creators? And so you have like this whole lens into the world through their eyes. What are the things— like, I think everyone would be asking us like, okay, great. You just told me that my whole business model, all of this is somewhere between doomed and changing. Where do we go next?

There's like different types of models that we can go to, but I think you always kind of want to return to first principles and say, what am I doing? Like, what is, what is the object of the business? And so if you are in the education space, it's trying to help people go from point A to point B. And courses were one mechanism to get people from point A to point B. And that mechanism may not be as useful. So we just look at what are other mechanisms to do that. And working with AI is a new mechanism. You know, I think, I hope that course creation platforms start developing tooling to say, okay, if people are going to learn from AI, we basically want to create like a white-labeled private way for you to turn your lessons into a model that is specifically helping people go from point A to point B on this skill. And instead of just talking to ChatGPT generally, they're talking to JGPT to start a creator business or something, you know. And instead of watching video lessons, it may give you a prompt and some homework and ask you to reply to prove that you have learned something. Then it gives you feedback on, uh, well, maybe it'd be this way. Uh, but it could just very much be like, here's a lesson, uh, apply this to your business. How would you do that? And then you answer and it says, okay. That's interesting. Would you like my feedback on that? Would you like me to revise that for you? I think that will be a really promising future. I also think we are going to be hungry for verifiable human experiences. So, you know, this week, the last 2 days, our community was here in person because we spend a lot of time online in the lab, and I want to start having the lab offline experiences. And those experiences are hard to predict. They're a little bit even hard to market because you can't be like, hey, come to the lab offline because you're going to meet Ivan and you're going to have this specific conversation, learn this thing. You just don't know. Like you're basically holding the space for serendipity, right?

But you're putting it all together into a little container, shaking up the dice and being like, let's see what happens.

Yeah. And that's, that's magical. But I think we'll have a retreat back to cohort-based courses, which, you know, a few years ago when cohort-based courses were like this hot thing, I kind of laughed then because like, this isn't new. Like humans have been learning in person in groups for forever, as long as school and education has existed. But we, we value the opportunity to learn alongside each other, to learn from each other, even just be around each other because we are, you know, pack animals and we want to be around people. So if I'm a course creator who has traditionally just done you know, self-paced recorded courses. I'm thinking about how do I teach with, with AI? Do I want to consider doing live learning through cohort-based courses, which I think is an interesting opportunity for a few ways we can, we can dig into that. And then there's memberships as a different model that I think will continue to be effective. But as it gets more popular, the bar raises on what a good membership experience looks like as well.

Let's stay on courses for a second. What I'm thinking about is I think actually the delivery mechanism of training through a course might change, but what I, I think that as a creator, you still wanna make the course because I think the course might be the best way to create the AI interactions. Right? If you think about, so I've been working on my keynote for this week for the conference. And I have Claude and ChatGPT as my thought partner on it. And so what I did is worked on an outline, brainstormed that, then made it into slides, talked through it. But one of the key things was to record a Loom video of me running through it, both so I could share it with teammates, but really so that I could get that transcript to go back into Claude. I was like, I need the transcript of my riffing and ideas and all that to refine it. And so I think that recording and creating the course is totally worth it to get your core ideas, all the fundamental principles out there, because that's the building block that then, you know, your JGPT or something like that is really going to work off of.

That's interesting. And I think it opens an opportunity for you to work with AI to create a good course structure, because my, my unpopular opinion is that most course creators actually don't understand pedagogy. They don't actually know how to effectively teach, uh, in a way that people can learn really, really well. I'm lucky. This is, this is something that I've learned because, uh, I worked with LinkedIn Learning on like 8 courses before I was really even doing Creator Science. And they had a really great team because they bought Lynda.com. So they had all this history of how to create great courses and you would work with a producer. And you would create a table of contents for the course. Every lesson needed to have a learning objective that was based in Bloom's taxonomy of verbs. And then you would script that lesson and it was very strict on like how many words, how much time. And it really taught me how to architect a course that taught people towards a learning objective. So I do think I agree with you that if you are going to teach people in any form through through a course, through a custom GPT, you need to have a highly structured approach to teaching something that is proven effective. And I think that AI could also probably teach you how to be more effective in teaching.

Right. And yeah, refining your own content, all of those things. One thing you talked about is memberships and community. Do you see those as the same thing or are those different?

I see them as different. My mom's an English teacher, by the way, so I just take words and vocabulary very, very seriously. So to me, community is a peer-to-peer experience and a membership is a subscription product.

Okay.

And so community can be a value proposition within a membership, and often it is, but there are also memberships that do not have any community component at all, you know, like an AARP or a AAA, any type of A acronym membership, apparently. So, you know, when I look at memberships as a class of products, I see it on a spectrum of this is premium content to peer-to-peer connection.

Right.

And most memberships will have kind of a blend of both, but will lean one side of the spectrum more than the other. And premium content tends to be easier to market and sell because the value is extremely tangible and obvious. It's like, hey, you get a monthly workshop from me, you get new templates every week, you get a challenge once a month. It's like things that I really understand and can put value on. When you get into the peer-to-peer realm where it's like, come into the lab, this is where professional creators experiment and grow together. A little soft. Like, what does that mean? Because again, I can't tell you, you should join this membership because you're going to meet this specific person and have this specific conversation and your life is going to change in this way because of it. I'm pretty confident that when you do that, something magical will happen. I just don't know what, with who, or when. And so for peer-to-peer connection communities, I find what you want to do is have enough very obvious apparent value that it de-risks the purchase for somebody to join. And then you now have the opportunity to surprise them with the peer-to-peer experience. And that is probably what's actually going to retain them for years and years and years.

The magic, the potential magic is all upside, not part of the core promise. And in that way, if it doesn't happen, which we know we're very confident that it will happen, But because of the uncertainty, it's hard to sell that on sales page.

Yes.

And so you sell something concrete and then overdeliver with the peer-to-peer side.

And I really try to encourage people to price their membership for the renewal rather than the first year.

Okay.

Because when you have very clear, distinctly priced things like when you join our community, you get these 4 courses. Okay. All of those have a listed price on the sales page. And if you add them up, that's more than the price of joining the first year. Yeah, but in year 2, if you've taken all those courses, you've extracted all that value. So if you price the membership with the like products as part of the price on renewal, that price doesn't make sense because I've already extracted that value. So I really encourage people to think about pricing your membership for the renewal. So it's an easy yes to continue on once I have discovered the magic of the peer-to-peer relationships, right? And I can't imagine just not having this in my life. And that's, that's kind of an unlock because ultimately memberships are a difficult product. People want them because recurring revenue is awesome, but it's not like software where it's providing this very obvious utility that is kind of a set and forget. This just keeps working. In a membership, to earn recurring revenue, you have to keep providing recurring value, right? And sometimes it's out of your hands also, which is a challenge.

But I want to dive in on the pricing for a second. So how do you price the lab and how would you have priced it if you didn't have this idea of pricing for the renewal? And then like, how did you actually price it based on that?

So if, if I add up all of the like distinct products that I sell one-off externally, it's somewhere in the realm of like $1,700. And the lab at the standard level is $2,000 per year.

Okay.

But you can join the lab at the basic level for $700 a year and still get all those things.

Okay.

So the idea is, I think the real value is the peer-to-peer relationships you get through live sessions, through the forum, through our offline events now. But again, I just can't explain what that value is like until you experience it. And so I just want people to feel like, well, even if Jay's totally full of it and I don't get any of that peer-to-peer connection value, at least for the first year, I'm getting all of this. And it's very clear and it's obvious to me. But, you know, we, we launched at half the price that we are now and then we raised it a little bit over time, partially because I didn't know where to price it in the beginning. You know, like we're figuring it out. And then second, when retention is like close to 100%, you probably have some flexibility to raise the price, right? And then once it gets to the point where you're like, I wish retention was a little bit higher, you've probably landed on the price that makes sense right now for the value you are providing. So it's been a little bit of trial and error to find that spot. But ultimately, even if you could capture more revenue by pricing it higher, like you might get more revenue on the first sale, communities, there's so much value in having consistency amongst its members. So renewals just matter to me more than anything else because somebody who stays in the community is a great advocate, right? Somebody who leaves the community can now be like a net detractor to the products. And it's also hard for people to change their mind.

Like if they, if they had a bad experience or it wasn't worth the value.

Yeah. Even if it wasn't a bad experience, if at any point they're like, you know, I don't think I'm getting out of this what I'm paying for it right now. So I'm going to take a break. It's hard for them to go back and say, I should rejoin that because they've already made the decision that that wasn't worth it to them in that moment. Something else unique that we do that I'm starting to see a trend now. We don't have a monthly option. We've never had a monthly option. And I encourage most people not to have a monthly option if they have a peer-to-peer community, because when you have a monthly recurrence of something, I think the implicit promise of that is you can get the promise of this product in a month and that's all you need. And to me, you, you need to be a little bit more committed than that. And so it was like join for a year or don't join. And it's probably, you know, you miss out on a lot of people who want to give it a shot and jump in initially. But, um, the, the level of commitment then you have when people are like, well, I guess I'm, I'm in for it. And now they have a little bit more skin in the game also. So they will do some of the, they'll jump through some of the hoops that you need people to jump through initially and onboarding and building a habit in a membership, which is not an easy thing to do.

Yep.

Uh, to have more commitment from the beginning makes all of those things easier, I think.

Yeah, that makes sense. Are you still capping it at 200 members?

No. And I have mixed feelings about this. So initially we had a 200-member cap because the thinking was I value intimate, close communities where nobody feels anonymous. You could feel like, you know, everybody here and you're comfortable sharing things because it doesn't feel so big that you don't know who's watching, right? I think that sentiment is true. What I've come to believe, though, is that you can maintain that intimate, close feeling by enabling small group experiences. I think about a community as concentric circles. So the whole community is the outside circle. And as that gets bigger, it's more important that you have smaller and smaller and smaller circles inside, whether it's like masterminds or offline experiments or accountability partners. You can just find ways to enable small, small experiences for the people who want that.

Yep.

But as we've grown our membership, what I've realized is I also really value density of geography because I want people to be able to host local meetups all over the country, all over the world. You can't do that if you're at a 200-person cap. Yeah. And you have 2 people in Austin, Texas. I can't get more people in Austin, Texas without kicking some people out, you know? Similarly, we have, we have creators who are on every platform, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and whatever, you know, like everyone's focusing on different things. If I want a better knowledge share of Instagram creators, but we're at our cap again, I can't do it.

Like I've got 11 of them. Yeah.

And you're just stuck. So I found that, okay, directionally that made some sense. And from a marketing perspective, it was really effective because FOMO kicks in, but I was telling somebody in our community last night, I remember when we hit our 200-member cap, we had like 50 people join in one month. And it like really happened actually in like 6 hours because I was putting on Twitter like we have, oh, we're 20 spots away. Oh, we're 19 spots away. Oh, we're 18 spots away. Like it was just, it just went crazy. But then the following year, that was our highest month of churn ever also because people were joining out of FOMO and it wasn't like the same level of conviction and genuine interest. It was like, I feel like I need to join now or I might lose the opportunity. So it wasn't the best fit for them, for us. So I've done away with the cap and moved towards an application-based model because I do think vetting and curation is really important. And that's the, that's the new model.

Scarcity caps, that sort of thing that can show up in different ways. The one that comes to mind is YPO, which is the Young Professionals, Young Presidents Organization. Something like Presidents, Presidents or Professionals.

I don't know.

Someone will correct us in the comments. I just spoke at their global marketing summit in Miami. I should know that, but they're just— they're YPO. Amazing organization. They have a few things. You have to be running a business making over $10 million a year to be a member, and you have to join before you turn 45 years old.

Oh, interesting.

And so I was talking to another friend who's not in it, and he's like, I'm 44. I can be a member of this for as long as I want. And there's all kinds of amazing people. They're all the way up into their 70s and beyond, but you got to join before you're 45. And he was like, yeah, I got to join. I got to join this year because he's like, over the next 30 years of my entrepreneurial career, what if I want to be a member and I can't? And so, and they have a very strict application process, all of that. And I think there's also, if you have had it, if you've exited a company, over a certain scale. But it's this amazing community. But I was thinking about that, like it's not a cap on members. And it's not just you have to hit this bar, but it got that scarcity of like, oh, if I know about it, you know, I'm 35 and I'm like, okay, I got time to decide if I want to join YPO or not. But I was thinking of, you know, the types of scarcity in that way. Is there anything else that you've seen from different communities, either, you know, cap on members or the age is not a common one. It just—

Yeah, I haven't seen that. And I didn't know that about that either. But I am glad to know that I am considered young until I'm 45. That sounds great.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, I think the like, it's important when you have an application, in my opinion, to have some objective measure of choice, because if you don't have some objective measure to say you are eligible or ineligible, then you're making decisions on like vibe, I guess. And like, it opens up a lot of questions like, well, why not me and this person? So, you know, our application— and you can change these standards over time— our application is $10,000 per month in revenue. That's non-service-based revenue or 10,000 followers on a single platform. And I actually think that should probably raise. Yeah. Or maybe be like platform specific because 10,000 subscribers on YouTube is not the same as 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. But in the application right now, it is. I do think that those objective measures matter, and most people focus on revenue. It tends to seem to be, or some sort of identity marker, like you need to be a certified financial planner and you need to have a valid license in this way, or you need to be an HR leader with this specific designation. I think that's a good way of doing it also, because it's hard because no one wants to be exclusionary, but In a membership, that's kind of the value proposition. If the space is for everybody, it's also kind of for nobody. It doesn't make the space unique. Like, the world is for everybody. You go to these communities because, like, you want it a space where it feels like these people are uniquely like you in this specific way. So it's important, but I really like the, uh, yeah, YPO's hitting you from a few angles there.

They've got it. That's why they're part of the reason they're so successful. Really, the quality of the community is is the biggest thing. You've talked to a lot of different creators. What I'm— and you have so many in your community. What I'm curious about is what types of creators are earning the most relative to their audience size?

It tends to be, uh, folks who offer products that are at a higher price point. I mean, that's like the easiest way.

It's like $1,000 plus.

Yeah. $1,000 plus. Um, but even higher than that in some cases, like some people they're, they're charging something like $2,500 a quarter or, um, Ryan Hawk is in the community and he has this program that's $12,500 a year. And a lot of times, like, at that price point, it's, it might be a professional development type thing. So the company is paying for part of it. I'm super jealous of, of creators who like their, their customers. Well, their, their users are not their customers and their customers have deep pockets, you know? Yeah.

But you can whip out the company credit card. That's a good thing. I had some of that when I was doing the design, you know, type stuff that I would try to stay under the $500 price point because that was, you know, don't have to really fill out an expense report for that, at least back when I was doing it. But yeah, it's, it's definitely nice when someone's like, oh yeah, I just, I bought your top package because, you know, it's not my money.

Yeah. I mean, you've said on the show before also, like, it's, it's easier to sell to people with money.

Yeah. And sell skills that make money to people who have money.

Yes. It's just true. It's just true. Like people who are making the most money often are selling selling higher-priced products to people who have more money. So even though it's a higher price, it's not like that intense of a buying decision because it's not a huge percentage of their disposable income. Uh, there's this interesting correlation between different delivery mechanisms and how the public just values them. Yeah. Like an extreme example is books. People put years of work into a book to make the most efficient knowledge transfer possible. And if that's priced more than $20, we're like, that's robbery. I will not pay more than $20 for a book.

And it has a fixed cost of goods sold. Like you printed it all night. You're like $30 for the hardcover. Ooh, I'll, I'll wait till it's discounted on Amazon.

Right. At the same time, we'll buy a course with the same value proposition for $200. And if you teach it live, $2,000 is fine.

Right.

So it's just crazy to me that the more novel the delivery mechanism, the more we tend to value it and the the more, uh, human experience or accessibility we have to that creator, the more we tend to value it. So people will leverage that, which is one of the reasons why I think CBC's cohort-based courses are still an interesting opportunity, because people just tend to value it higher than a self-paced course. Even if you teach the same thing, by putting it in this container and having some interaction with you, people will pay like 10x for that thing. I think we'll probably see Teaching, enter AR, VR. I would love to hear your thought on this.

Yeah.

But you know, if cohort-based courses get popular again, as I think they will, I assume we will have a device at home for most of us that gives us access to AR and VR. It's not really true right now. Some people are hobbyists and they have those things, but if I wanted to offer a cohort-based course in a virtual classroom, I would have to teach people like what hardware to go buy. I would have to figure out how to even deliver it, but I think that will happen. And the first people to figure that out will probably charge thousands, like 4 figures, maybe 5 figures for the experience.

You know, it's interesting. A lot of times people say you have to be early and that's how, you know, you captured, built a following on this audience or on this platform or something else. I actually don't think there's a lot of incentive to be early in AR and VR.

Yeah. Well, I mean, because the harder— early if we don't have the access to do it.

And so you're just fighting this huge uphill battle. To convince everybody, hey, you should go, you know, buy a headset.

It's in like the form factor isn't great yet. Like it's still heavy. It still gives some people motion sickness, but I think that will, I think that will happen.

Going back to the price points and how you think about delivery of the information, what do you recommend to people? Like, is it just what they enjoy as a creator or are there certain things where, you know, someone's saying, hey, I'm going to launch this thing, this course, this book. Cohort-based, you know, any of that where you see that post and, you know, in your community and you're like, let me weigh in on that and like steer them one way.

What I tend to see happen is people who are earlier on in the journey, they just don't have a lot of experience or confidence in selling products yet. So their first attempt is like, let me stand up a stand store or something really simple. Let me sell like a sub-$20 product just to test the waters. And they may even have like relatively good scale in terms of number of followers. And I just think that's the wrong order to do it. I think it's better to have a higher price, higher touch, more valuable products that you can sell to fewer people in the beginning and then use the earnings from that to subsidize the lower ticket, bottom of the funnel product offerings. But most people are afraid to go out and offer a several hundred dollars or several, several thousand dollar product or service out of the gates. But I think that's actually the bigger opportunity for folks because you'll make more meaningful revenue with fewer sales.

Right.

And those people will have more skin in the game. You will have probably more influence over the outcome of their experience, which gives you like case studies and word of mouth testimonials and momentum. So I think start at the higher end. And say, if I think about these 3 delivery mechanisms of done for you, done with you, do it yourself, am I comfortable doing a done for you service? Is that the type of business I want to build? Because there are tons of people who are willing to throw money at a problem. Oh yeah, just have the outcome. And if you like, just want to handle implementation and delivery of an outcome, you're going to make more money doing a done for you service more quickly.

Well, I think about this agency that I have with Shane Martin and Sahil Bloom called Paperboy. And that scale, that scaled to $1 million a year in revenue very quickly. And it's a very, very nice business because it's entirely done for you. And people aren't saying, hey, teach me how to grow or all that. They're like, do it. And do you mind if I watch over your shoulder to see what you're doing? And they're happy to pay $5,000, $8,000 a month because of the results they're getting and all of that. But like, you know, done for you is just like, yes, please. Yeah, and do it. But then as you go into this done with you or just show me what to do, it's a different thing. I'm realizing the, the group of people that I talk to that are making the most money off of the smallest audience and seem to be enjoying their life substantially is the group coaches. Mm-hmm. Right. And so I think Ryan Hawk would be in that type of format. You've got John Meese, Dan Martell, Um, oh, so many people have learned a lot of this from Talky More, but where they're charging a meaningful amount of money, they're providing tangible, like, hey, you get to talk on a Zoom call or you get to come to this event or that sort of thing. But it's not one-to-one, it's one-to-many. And so they're not actually capped in the number of people. And so people that I talk to where they're like, yeah, I make $500,000 a year off of that. And it's just the one program. Or I make $1.5 million a year and it's just the one program. And their audience is like, 5,000, 10,000 email subscribers.

Yeah.

I don't know. Are you seeing the same thing?

Totally. I mean, it effectively scales your hourly rate to an enormous amount of money, right? You know, because you're spending the same hour, but instead of doing, you know, if somebody pays you $500 for an hour of their time and you only talk to that one person, that's $500. If you have 10 people in a group program and they all paid $500, now you've got $5,000 for that hour. That's a pretty good hourly rate. Yeah. And so, you know, depending on how you package that and what you promise in that, if you can scale that larger and larger and larger, that's fantastic. And that's kind of like the middle of the road where it's, it's not a done-for-you service. You're still certainly putting a lot of work on the plate of the person who is learning to do this. But, you know, the downside of a done-for-you service is once the work is done, like you stop earning from it also. It's like there's just tradeoffs here.

I mean, that happens using Paperboy as an example, you know, after 6 months or so, uh, you know, many clients continue, but there's plenty who are like, actually, uh, all the flywheels are built. This is growing really, really well. This is working beyond what I expected and we're going to cancel. Uh, and it's like, great. We achieved what we set out to do. Uh, for me, they're running a thriving kit account, so I'm thrilled, you know, and all of that. But you can get in a position where you did such a good job delivering that they're like, actually, we're set.

Yeah. And this, I see this come up in membership sometimes too. People, they want to build a membership because they want the recurring revenue, but then they make the promise of the membership like a very finite, achievable thing. So it doesn't align with the model of a membership. Yeah. It's like if you're going to have a recurring subscription relationship with a customer, you need to have a clear reason why that subscription should recur. Or at some point it will not recur and you'll know why. Because they, they got to the end, they achieved this. And so I meet a lot of people are trying to build a membership and the first question is like, well, what is, what is the purpose? Why should people join this? And does that make sense with the form factor of a membership to be recurring?

Yeah. Oh, there's so much stuff there that we could dive into. Stay in group coaching for a second before we go into habits around community. But in group coaching, What happens with AI and group coaching? I spend a lot of money for one-on-one and group coaching. I think it is money very well spent. Also, Claude and ChatGPT are pretty good at coaching me on what I should do and simplifying decisions and all that. And so do we just take something that is many thousands of dollars a year and replace it with something that's $19 a month?

You get to a point where this conversation just becomes all about trust, which I'm like obsessed with as a subject, maybe writing a book about it. So I think it all comes down to trust because part of the reason you join a group coaching program for Dan Martell or me or anybody else is because ultimately you trust that person to understand the problem you're trying to solve and you trust their ability to solve it for you. And so when you say ChatGPT does a really good job of coaching me, That's saying I trust the advice I'm getting from ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an advice machine. It'll give you as much advice as you want. And if you trust it, it's great.

And it's just based on probabilistic outcomes of like what— if like you truly— like if anyone dives into why hallucinations happen or all that, it's because ChatGPT has not a clue what it's saying.

It's just generating, you know, this word comes after this word after this word after this word. It doesn't even— it's not even thinking in sentences. It's thinking in probabilistic word strings. And that's great if you trust it. And if you trust it, you're much more likely to be influenced by that advice. Right. But if you don't have a reason to trust ChatGPT to do this, then maybe you don't take that advice. This is why custom GPTs are interesting because you could say I made a Dan Martell custom GPT and ultimately I'm trusting Dan Martell as much as I'm trusting ChatGPT. I've been a real slow adopter in AI in a lot of ways because I think that my scarcity as a person is valuable. And so do I want to go make a JGPT right now? Not really, actually, because I think that would devalue the experience of coming with me. If I'm able to cast the trust people have in me onto ChatGPT, but now this is an infinitely accessible, basically free alternative to me, I've just really disrupted myself in probably a negative way. And also I have no control over what this thing is going to spit out. But now if I created that, I'm kind of liable for what it spits out.

And if you told me to do this, you're like, I didn't. Yeah, well, you made the AI that told me to do this. So what's the difference?

Like, anybody could go and scrape my content and make a JGPT on my behalf, but then I'm at least I'm not liable for whatever comes out of that because I didn't make that. I didn't want that to happen. So it's a really interesting question. And I do think it comes down a lot to trust and who do we trust? What do we trust? Uh, especially when they're giving us advice, what do we listen to? And I think people are going to find that for a lot of things, ChatGPT gives them great advice. We bought a new car recently. I didn't understand the mechanics of leasing versus financing a car and how I should make those decisions. I could talk you through that completely now because I just talked to ChatGPT for like 2 days and I like got really into the finer points of it. And that's awesome. But, you know, would you just go to basic ChatGPT and say, how do I grow a creator business in 2025 and trust that? I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, uh, there is an example. There's so many examples, but, oh, um, there's a quote that I love, which is, you can have anything you want in life, and if you don't get it, you either didn't really want it or you tried to bargain over the price.

Hmm.

And I was using that quote in a presentation, and Chelsea on my team, who was helping me make this presentation, she— I had made an offhand comment about, oh yeah, I want to use that quote. And so she Googled it. To see who said it. And, uh, it was, it's, it's actually a Rudyard Kipling quote, but the AI summary at the top of Google said it's commonly attributed to Rudyard Kipling, but it's actually a Nathan Barry quote. And I was like, what? Because I have said it on podcast episodes, the transcripts exist out there, and I've used it in a blog post, and it was like, here's the blog post, like, here's the original source. And because obviously Nathan Barry came before Rudyard Kipling. We all know that.

Maybe that's crazy. It's like that meme where it's like, that's a good idea. That's my idea now. Actually, that was my idea. You can just like brute force that with— there are, there are people who make like pretty convincing arguments that if you want ChatGPT to recommend your business for certain things, spend more time talking to ChatGPT about your business and it's informing the model. And like kind of biasing it towards what you do. Like it's, it's kind of interesting. There might be something there.

Yeah. I don't know if that particular one has been fixed. Um, but, uh, yeah, Gemini from Google at one point was saying that, uh, you know, Rudyard Kipling just like plagiarized me. Um, but it is interesting thinking about the implications of this content and what you stand behind and, and what it does because it can go on. And do so many different things. All right. I want to dive in on the community side of it. Everyone says, oh, I'm going to build a community. Well, actually, what happens, right? We start this off and we say courses are dead. And so there's like, all right, now I'm going to go build a community. I'm now I'm going to go build a membership, some version of this. And they're like, I'm going to take all of this. I'm just going to put it in a different set of software. And now there's places for people to post and this will work out great. And it almost never does.

Almost never does. Like, are we at like a 5% success rate or are we all the way up at like a 15%? It's pretty low.

I mean, let's say like a 12-month success rate for a community.

And it depends on what success is. Like, I think that some people would say their community is very successful because it continues to drive revenue. But what they've got is this really high-performing engine that like brings a ton of people in and churns them right out. And as long as you continue bringing a ton of people in, it like kind of looks like success. But I measure a membership success by its retention. And so I think most people have huge retention problems. Because they have not built a sticky product that people actually experience value in. And it's kind of a, it's kind of a tough deal for the member because at the point of joining a membership, when you swipe your credit card, you have taken all the risk and that community builder has basically captured all the value for that period of time, whether it's the month that you're joining or the year that you're joining. So it's risky for somebody to join a community like this. And I think to have a successful membership, your first experience that you give to a member matters a whole lot because it's, it's not intuitive to, or it's not, it's, it's not effortless to spend time in a third-party platform where your membership is hosted. You have to create the experience that this was worthwhile and I'm going to do it again so that hopefully eventually it becomes part of their routine. It becomes a little bit more of a habit. But it only becomes a habit after repetition. And it only becomes repeated if the first experience was good enough that I'm gonna have a second experience. And the second experience was good enough that I'm willing to try to have a third experience. Most people optimize for everything up to the sale and then basically do the equivalent of saying, okay, here's a playground, have fun.

Yeah. How do you go about actually building that habit? Cuz that's what I probably hear the most from someone who has started a community is they're like, yeah, I've got like 7 really active members. And then there's another 20 that kind of log in, and then there's another 200 that have paid. And honestly, unless they forget, the chance of them renewing is very, very low.

Yeah. Well, why do we do anything? It's, to me, it's, it's kind of humans move towards pleasure and move away from pain. We do things that were satisfying. We don't do things that were not satisfying. So what people are really good at is making promises that seem awesome. And so people join the community. What happens at that point? Hopefully, uh, you give them a good experience. And so the way I think about that is when somebody swipes a credit card and joins the lab, actually the first thing they see is a testimonial from another member who says, this was great. Because what I want to do is say, you probably are now at peak anxiety thinking, did I just make a mistake? And I want to affirm the choice that you made that this is actually going to be great for review. So here's somebody else who's not me, who's less biased than me, saying this is a great experience. Then I enter an onboarding flow, and the first thing they see after that is, hey, schedule a one-on-one call with Jay, which they don't know they're actually going to get. But it's like, you just joined, you get a one-on-one call with me. And they schedule that. I know that if I lose them at that point, but they have scheduled a call with me, I can intervene. Right, and say, hey, it seems like you haven't created a profile. It seems like you haven't logged in. It seems like you haven't introduced yourself. Do you have any questions? So I can now intervene if that happens. But most of the time after they book a call, they move into the community space. In the community space, they get a direct message from me welcoming them, saying, this is an automated direct message, but this is my profile. Feel free to respond and let me know how things are going. By the way, I encourage you to work through this onboarding course so you understand how to use the space. Um, because I like to take any online experience you're trying to build and say, how is this done really well in the offline world? I used to work at a gym, uh, as just like a part-time thing when I was in college. And people would come into the gym and my job was to make them comfortable in the space if they bought a membership, uh, and sometimes in order to buy a membership. So I'd show them the equipment. I would say, here's what we have available to you and why this is going to help you. And as I'm going through the space, if there are people there who are like regular members, I would say, this is Joe. Joe's here all the time. Joe's awesome. Now they feel like I'm connected to another person in this space.

I feel comfortable. Now I can come in tomorrow or next week and be like, oh, hey Joe.

Yeah. I feel like I'm comfortable inhabiting this space. And even me as the person at the front desk, they feel welcomed into that space. In the online world, that experience doesn't exist in most communities. It's, it's again, it's just like, here's a screen with all this stuff. We're not going to show you around. We're not going to make you comfortable with the space. And in the offline world, if you walk into the gym and stare at the person at the front desk and feel uncomfortable and walk out the door, awkward, right? You can't do that online. You walk in, you're overwhelmed. Nobody knows you're looking at this web page. You click X and you're gone. You say, I'll figure this out later, but you haven't built that habit and you never come back and figure it out. So now you've just spent money for this membership. You've had no positive experience out of it. And so I'm just trying to eliminate that existence. So you get in, you do the onboarding course, uh, we eventually encourage you to introduce yourself in video because everyone introduces themselves in video. And now the clock is ticking basically because you have just taken the effort to spend time and be vulnerable introducing yourself to a group of strangers, none of whom you have met yet. And you're wondering, am I going to feel welcomed?

Right.

And most communities are good at getting people to this point, but then they get like no response. And what an awful first experience to a community than spending time introducing yourself, saying, will you welcome me? And then not feeling any response at all. So as a community builder, and this isn't super scalable, but you can do this with your team as well. I look at it as my responsibility to respond personally as quickly as possible. In video.

And you send a video, like in the comments of their post, you send a video back.

Yes.

You know, hey Nathan, so great that you joined the community. It's great to have you here. Really enjoyed our call or looking forward to our call that's coming up or whatever. I, or I actually heard you on this podcast episode, you know, some little personal anecdote.

And it's an opportunity to also answer the what's next question because someone who joins a community, they're constantly just asking themselves, what do I do next? What do I do next? What do I do next in order to experience the promise that made me purchase this membership in the first place? And so I'm just constantly in the onboarding experience trying to answer, what do I do next? What do I do next? You can only give them one step at a time or it becomes overwhelming. So it's join, fill your profile, take the onboarding course, introduce yourself, attend an event. And then once I see more about what they're trying to accomplish as part of their onboarding, I can connect them to someone else in the community or say, go watch this workshop, take this resource. And it's just little nudges like that. The feedback I get overwhelmingly is how good the onboarding experience is. People join, they'll be like, I've been here for 48 hours and it's been worth it. Yeah. Amazing. So now I have a high chance of renewal next year and I have another year to earn the next renewal.

So if you've nailed that onboarding experience, what is— how do you maintain that, say, 6 months in when they're likely going to have this dip? They're not yet evaluating, should I renew or not? But you've fallen out of that regular habit.

My onboarding automation is literally like all year long. Um, so you'll get direct messages from me at different points. You know, they'll get spaced out more and more and more, but at like the 6-month mark, I think is actually the exact point where you'll get an email in the sequence, the onboarding sequence that says, hey, You've been here for 6 months. It's possible that you're not, uh, as active as you would hope to be. Here are a few ways to reintegrate. I literally give them like steps, like here's how you can jump back in. First of all, declare bankruptcy on your notifications. Don't worry about catching up on all of those. Go see a couple of people who have introduced themselves recently. They're looking to make a friend. That's a great person for you to connect with. Send me a direct message directly and give me an update on what you're working on, and I can help direct you to the best possible next resource. So, you know, I'm constantly trying to get touchpoints, touchpoints with them. And I do my onboarding through Kit because if somebody has not built a behavior of going into Circle or your community tool of choice, right, sending them a message in Circle is not going to be effective. You have to get outside of that. I remember once back in 2017, I bought Todd Herman's 90 Day Year program and post-purchase, there was a video from Todd welcoming me. And first of all, blew my mind, remembered it, informed my decisions I still make today. And in the video he says, by the way, sometimes I like to call in and call my students and check in on how they're doing. So add this number to your phone contacts and a phone number flashed up on the screen. So I added it to my phone contacts and I got an automated call from that number like an hour later. And I just remember thinking, this is the most incredible experience as somebody who I mean, I had no business spending that amount of money at that time. It felt like a reach. But man, talk about like affirming this was a good choice. It was awesome. It really stood out. And I'm talking about it 8 years later. So like when you do things that are literally remarkable that people talk about, now I'm marketing Todd Herman's program right here on this podcast. And that's the type of thing that I think if you do a good job in memberships, it just unlocks that.

What about the size of a community? Like Is there a point where, you know, if it starts small and it's like 10, 20 people, you're not actually going to be able to get critical mass? Or, you know, how do you, how do you maintain engagement at that small size as you're building towards something bigger?

I think small communities actually have certain advantages that are a good thing. I do think there's a minimum size. I tell people if you're launching a community, try to get 10 people in. And I have like this two-phase approach that I call private opening, public launch, because you have this chicken and egg problem when you launch a membership or community and trying to get people in. Why would people join if they're joining for people and there's no people in there, right? Anybody who has an audience will have some number of people who are like up for taking the journey with very little context, very little information. And so what I encourage people to do is basically say, if you're going to launch a membership a couple of months beforehand, just talk about it in your emails, use link triggers, build a waitlist, and ultimately offer some incentive for the people who are paying the closest attention to jump in early. You want your biggest fans in there first. And so when we launched this, it was basically like, hey, I'm launching a membership for creators. And if that's interesting to you and you're, you trust me and you're willing to join sight unseen, you'll have half off this price forever. And then the price raised several times. So we have members in the community who have been there for 4 years. Were paying 25% of the, like, of the current price because they were just paying close attention. They're like, I trust you and I would jump in. But I think that's also really good to give your biggest fans the best pricing and incentive. And, and basically you build this understanding that the best time to purchase something new from Jay is immediately.

Yeah.

And a lot of people get in the opposite cycle where it's like they launch something Everybody buys, they stop, like they're not selling it very well. So they start discounting it. And that actually trains people to say, let me actually wait until they start discounting this. Um, so anyway, you only need 5 to 10 people in the beginning. And if you have a small group, I would really over-index on the number of live sessions that you do because you want to create one-to-one relationships between your members. And the smaller the community is, the more you can manually send like very personal introductions between these people. And if your community is the connective tissue in my relationship to this person I'm glad I met, that's a huge value to the community. And now those people become the cultural fabric of your community. And instead of, uh, theoretically saying I'm going to have a membership someday, you now have a real-life thing that you can document. This exists. We're already meeting. People are already having a great time. And if you want to join us, you can now do that too.

What are the communities that you see absolutely nailed this? The creators who run communities and you're like, all right, that I love something that I'm seeing here.

My favorite example and inspiration is Dan Andrews and—

Oh, Tropical MBA.

Tropical MBA.

Yeah.

They have the Dynamite Circle. They've been doing this for probably like close to 20 years now. You know, like they were doing location-independent entrepreneurship for a very long time. And that group of people did not have connection to other people doing that. Like in 2007, it was very uncommon for somebody to say, I'm going to leave America to move to Thailand to basically have geographic arbitrage of money to afford to build an Amazon fulfillment business, you know. So they created this online community and they very quickly like added in-person experiences to this. They've been doing—

spoken to their events in Bangkok and Austin.

And they do like they do. I think Dan told me they do 6 major events per year and they have hundreds of meetups that are organized by the community at the same time. To me, that's like the gold standard.

Yeah.

And outside of that, I look at things like YPO and EO, these, these organizations that have historically been very chapter, like local chapter based. And I basically want to take like the inverse approach. I think a lot of those organizations are trying to say, how do we do more online? Now and I'm saying we've been doing this all online, I want to do more in-person stuff now because I think especially in a world of AI, this is really, really important.

Well, that's something that you and I both agree on, right? Of you're really pushing towards— I said that in a way we agree on most everything.

That's one of those few things.

Yeah, we're very controversial, but no, you know, but pushing the in-person events and experiences because It's just, it's been transformational for me in my career. I've seen the same thing for everyone else. And then in this world of AI, like exactly what you're saying, like I want human experiences. Like that's why we're building out all these studios. That's why we're hosting Craft and Commerce. That's why, you know, every time I travel, I'm like doing meetups and masterminds and podcast tours and all of that because like people just want to connect.

You know, it's scary though. And I didn't realize this until this week because I hadn't seen this before. There are now like these little pendants that basically are recording everything happening. Like, it's an AI assistant. It's basically like your Fathom note-taker on Zoom, but in a physical object around your neck. And if you're in person, because you want to have these like private conversations, as is what we're trying to do here, if you start to doubt or question whether this is truly like private and not recorded, that's a big problem. So I find that that was a big takeaway for me. I'm like, okay, if I'm going to do these things, I'm going to have to create policies of we are not recording this. If you, if you are shown to have a recording device, uh, we're going to ask you to leave, uh, unless you explicitly say these are allowed, but then you make it known to everybody this is allowed. So it's a, I mean, there were, and there are a bunch of people in the room. It was a room full of like legitimate creators and everyone's basically like, assume that there's no privacy. Assume anything can be recorded at any time. And it's like, man, but I really don't want to.

Yeah. It's so hard. But then at the same time, like you could argue the inverse. And this is where I'm, I'm totally torn on this because you can argue the inverse of like, I'm going to have a bunch of amazing conversations. I'm not going to remember who all I talked to, what came from it. And why don't I like with Fathom or Granola or something like that, you know, I can just query and say, hey, what were the most important things that I learned? What were the takeaways that I should have? And I'm like, okay, do I want more authentic off-the-record interactions or do I want perfect recall?

And it's like, I want to be able to wear the device, but I don't want anybody else to wear the device.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's tough.

It's tough because it goes back to this idea of authenticity, right? Um, I've had some interactions lately with a few different companies where One of them really surprised me because they behaved in a way that was not, uh, consistent with what I thought, right? Whereas another company in a similar space has always been very, very difficult to work with. And so when they were continually difficult to work with, I was like, oh, that, that was actually a very authentic experience for them.

Right.

And so I think as a creator, you have to always be authentic because, and you know, whether that's the pros or cons, you know, if someone's like, okay, like Nathan's really smart, but he's kind of an asshole. Like at least if we're consistent with that all the way through.

Yeah.

I don't think people say that, but we'll see. Someone's nodding along like, that's, I've thought that. Um, because you have, you have to have this expectation that you're being recorded all of the time.

And for creators, especially like if you have a public image, that, that means that now you don't have as many opportunities to turn off. It's, it's like when you see a, uh, a cell phone video of a celebrity, like just lashing out at somebody, it might be like the worst moment just bad timing, out of context, but we're like, oh, that's not what I thought of that person. And that's like your nightmare as somebody with any type of public awareness of you is like people to see a moment and change their entire perception.

So it's, uh, what's one thing that you think creators should be doing differently right now?

I think we've reached like this point in the cycle where, uh, everything started to kind of feel the same. And so I think what you should be doing differently is think How can I be different, right? And be like very uniquely me. Because I don't know about you, like I log on to Twitter or LinkedIn and look through my feeds and like it kind of feels like it all converges. It all converges. So everyone sounds the same to each other, but also feels like stale to me. It feels like we're still kind of talking and going about the way things were done in like 2023, 2022, which wasn't that long ago. But in internet years, like it feels a little stale. I'm personally looking at like, where are people zigging so I can zag and really be a little bit different in a, in a world where for you feeds are the default on any platform. It really gives new creators the opportunity to actually like reach people at scale faster.

Distribution is easier than it's ever been.

Distribution is easier if you are creating like high-performing, engaging content that, uh, accessible to a lot of people, basically. And so that's good for new creators. It also creates this like boom and bust experience of most of your pieces of content. Like it's either going to go bigger than it used to go or go smaller than it ever went before also. So, uh, you know, if you're going to do social media, you kind of have to play that game right now. But, you know, I'm still all in on permission-based communication platforms, email being the biggest one. Podcasting, I think, is really good. I'm seeing right now that video podcasts on Spotify are getting a lot of organic discovery that I was not getting before. So that feels really promising. But I would basically say don't try to emulate what you think works. Try to be unique, like increase the velocity of trying different things because the only way to get the highest returns is to be on the front end of something. And those people are innovating. You can't, you literally can't just like copy somebody else's format or style and get the highest outcomes. You could be a fast follow, but, uh, I would really be experimenting right now.

And I think a way to do that, and we talked about this at your Lab IRL event on Monday, was copying from another industry.

Yeah.

Right. And so doing something that's totally novel in your industry and totally normal in an unrelated industry. And so if you're paying attention out there, you can find these things where it feels totally novel and unique, but you didn't have to come up with it in a vacuum.

Yeah. I've been finding these guys on Instagram and TikTok lately. It's these two guys who take like a 1950s singing style and put it over top, like modern hip-hop songs and then they like use this old grainy recording. It's just like this really interesting, fresh mix-up of ideas that works really well. But then I also look at creators like that and it's like, how does that ever make money?

Yeah. And so when it's pure entertainment.

Yeah, when it's pure entertainment. So I really encourage people to think like, is attention really the game that you want to be playing or do you really want to be optimizing for trust? And to me, that's really what I'm focused on is how do I make the journey of finding my content to wanting to have a deeper relationship with my work really efficient? Because I think a lot of people playing the content game are just doing huge top of funnel, leakiest bucket imaginable type of approach, which social media is kind of geared towards right now. But, uh, if you use these permission-based communication platforms like email, like podcasting, then I think you can, uh, capture a lot more of the value that you're creating.

Well, you've spent a lot of time investing in the creator community. You've got a ton of amazing people that follow you. If someone listening is saying, all right, let's, let's find out more about this Jay guy and see, see what's up. Where should they go to check out your content?

Well, if you're listening to this in audio, search for the Creator Science Podcast in your podcast player. If you're on YouTube, Search for my name, Jay Clouse, and check out our channel.

Jay, thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, excited to be here.

If you liked this episode, don't miss episode 65 with Gina Bianchini. She breaks down what actually makes communities succeed and the one metric that predicts it. It's the perfect follow-up if you want to build a membership that lasts. Thanks so much for watching and be sure to like this video and subscribe so you can get more content and I'll see you next week.