Here Are Areas Where You Can Start Paid Communities Right Now

Let's talk about 3 groups that I have that I think this could work for. So if you're going to start a pay community, I'm going to start with the bottom one, or I actually think it's the best one, but it's bottom one of our list. Nurses. We've talked about nurses a ton. It's an interesting demographic. I think nurses are kind of cool for this space for 2 reasons or 3 reasons. The first, work could pay for it. Maybe I think work would maybe pay for it. Second, nurses are typically— I've spent time around nurses, so they're typically women and they typically are people who feel like downtrodden, like they feel like they're forgotten.

Because they're not overworked, underpaid, underappreciated.

Yeah. And that is— so groups that are the, um, whatever you just said, I guess, I don't know how to explain it, but groups that are like the us versus them, like we don't have someone speaking for us. Typically that's like, there's a lot of like, I've looked when I was researching communities, there's so many successful, um, women, like women discussing X, Y, and Z communities. This is just like that. So I think that they have that us versus them mentality. And the third reason is there's a shit ton of nurses.

Yeah. Have you seen this Instagram account, Nurse Life RN?

No. How many is it?

It's 1.2 million members on Instagram. It's run by this guy. I think his name is E.B. or E.B. I'm not sure exactly how you say his name. And it's this guy, this is Black nurse, and a whole bunch of nurses.

Private.

They just went private. They used to be public. And I think you have to like, you have to request so that they can make sure that you're a nurse before they let you in. Which again is one thing that communities do well. You know, what's that quote? It's like, I don't want to be a part of any group that would accept me. You know, the better your gate at the front, the more people will value being in the group. And so this is a group and they just post mostly like nurse memes. So it's like, you know, if you, it's like being underappreciated or whatever, they'll make a joke out of it or like, you know, coming home and realizing you still have whatever, you know, on your shoe. And it's just, you know, relatable memes from the eyes of a nurse. So that's how they like keep their members engaged. It's just meme content that's a good like inside joke for the community. But he partnered with the makers of Bala Shoes, which is the nurse shoe brand that's coming out, that's trying to be Nike for nurses basically. It's Nike for medical footwear. And so he got equity in that company and gets paid every month because he is the promotional vehicle for the— for Bala Shoes, who wants to like penetrate this community, right? So not a paid community as such, but it is a private community. And on top of that, they do this. Now, what would Incredible Health, you know, the startup that's raised— I don't know how much money— $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz and all that. What would they pay to access 1.2 million nurses that are like engaged and trust this brand? And trust this leader of the community, they would pay a lot, right? Nurse job boards, like, so if this guy's ambitious, he could create a job board. He could create the next Incredible Health. He could take equity in Bala Shoes and be a part owner of the shoe brand. Like, I think that's where this goes for nurses. I think this is a great example of one.

I think this could crush. I think that guy is gonna, that guy's sitting on a gold mine. That, like, if you fast forward 10 years and tell me that he turned this 1.2 million person Instagram page into a $100 million company, I won't be surprised.

Right. If you go and start Truck Life RN right now, I think that's what's going to happen after this pod.

Truck Life RN. I might need to. The second one, this is shocking to me, okay? Google Sheets. There's this guy who tweeted at me and he started this thing called SheetsCon and he had 6,700 people sign up. Is that— I mean, I guess that's shocking because like I know that probably 100 million people plus use Google Sheets. But, and I guess it doesn't, and I guess it also doesn't shock me because I am a Google Sheets nerd and like I've dorked out about what I—

And some of the most profitable online courses in the world are become an Excel master, how to use Excel, become better at Excel. Those are like, if you go look at the charts of most profitable online courses, highest revenue online courses, Excel is always in the sort of top 5.

Yeah. Ankur, the founder of Teachable.

Teachable.

One time told me that, uh, there was some guy making a million bucks a year and he was like the biggest earner on Teachable on Excel.

Exactly.

So Google Sheets, I 100% think you could do a paid community. It would have to be cheap though, because it's the same, it's the math of like, how much money do you make for Google Sheets? I think that there's absolutely something there. Um, and then the last thing is this, someone tweeted at me, a community of vetted senior engineers who talk about advanced, advanced engineering concepts, like how to scale a tech stack from 100K to 10 million users. Totally buy into that. Something like that that is incredibly niche and incredibly high-end, where if there's a— there's this other component that we didn't talk about with the community is you have to make it so that information that you gather in that group you cannot find online. Like, um, for Tiger 21, not that many people are going to talk about How— like, because it's embarrassing— how do I, um, gift my child $15 million without the government getting their hands on it? Like, that's not something you're going to tweet because that's embarrassing. Same thing with 100,000 to 10 million users. There's just simply not that many people who have done it. Um, you're not going to find a lot of reputable information on that. So that's another trait of these paid communities and why I think this one in particular is interesting.

I think any job in any any job can do this. So nurses is a good one because you have a— some are going to be better than others because you have, uh, you know, the more people, the more potential, and the more, um, kind of like insider knowledge is needed, the more, um, downtrodden that group feels. Downtrodden is kind of a negative word, but I kind of— what you're saying, like, sort of like they feel that they need to take action, um, in order to like level up in some way, uh, the better. And so like, you know, this could work for nurses, but it could also work for designers. I could see somebody just making a community of, you know, professional designers at all these different companies. It's like, yep, we have designers from Figma and from HubSpot and from Okta and from GitHub. And you should— if you're a designer at one of these companies, you're making $150,000 a year, $200,000 a year. Um, why would you not want to be a part of the, like, the best network of other designers like you where you can share tools, tactics, salary information if you're looking for new jobs, opportunities if you're looking for new jobs? Like Every job, I think, needs this. And the more new and fringe your job, the more they— the more the community is needed. So like, I know that our friend David Spinks did this with community because community was like this. There's not really like— there's no chief community officer at these big companies, but all companies say it's all about community. Facebook's like, it's all about community. Twitch is like, it's all about community. And what does that mean? And who in your company— show me your— who's in charge of community at your company? right? And there's typically not a C-level who's in charge of community. So David Spinks said, well, look, there's all these like kind of mid-level people who are community— they run community for these big-ass companies, and there's no playbook on how to do their job. They're underpaid, they're underappreciated, and they're overworked trying to run all these events. I'm going to make the best community for community professionals. And so he made the community for community people. Grew pretty large. He ended up selling the thing. I don't know how big of a business it was in terms of a business outcome. He might have been a little early, but I think that's a great example of somebody doing this, just taking a job and making it happen.

So there's my idea. I just wanted to talk about communities. I think they're actually kind of cool businesses. I think a lot of people think that they want to start one, but, um, I also think that there's a lot of mistakes made of like charging too little. And I wanted to show a few examples of companies that make like a quarter of a billion dollars of value off communities. Because I think they're kind of cool. So that's all I got to say about communities.

I'll leave it with this, which is a lot of people, I think the majority of people who listen to us, they would love a non-9-to-5 way to make $10,000 a month.

And I was going to— I read that in your survey results.

Yeah. Yeah, which we could talk about that. But In general, that's, that's the number one thing I think people listening to this would, would just grab right away. They don't all want to be founders of billion-dollar companies or $200 million companies or whatever. But if I said, hey, this is something outside your 9-to-5, it's a side hustle, it doesn't take up all your time, and it's going to bring in $10,000 a month, I would say that this to me right now is the number one way to do it. I think there are some other ways, right? You could try e-commerce or dropshipping or something like that. You could try to do a newsletter or paid newsletter. I would do a community if I was gonna— that would be my fastest path to that right now. And I'll tell you, you know, the reasons why are all the things you said, which is like, it's not that much work to run. The members provide the value to each other. It's not all about you creating content all the time. It's not that hard to spin up. You just have to be smart about which group you're choosing and what— where you kind of have an edge, what's your group. Um, and then the last thing The downsides of it are that it can't scale super large, but that's not your goal anyways. You're just trying to get to $10,000 a month of free cash flow from your side hustle. And so that is super achievable. You know, $20 a month for 500 members and you're there. You know, so I think that is where I think this business fits in.

And I said before, I actually do think they can scale, but not all of them can. Some of them can. But I'm someone, I've built a paid community that makes many, many millions of dollars a year in recurring revenue. And it is, I would say that it's really hard to actually just start because I had to create a lot of the content early on and I had to create the, um, the culture of the community, but now I barely post and it has its own culture. So yeah, once it's, once it's taken off, yes, you create that flywheel and it works.

Or not, by the way, I just did this I just did this in e-commerce and it probably— I've probably put in a grand total of maybe 8 hours into this thing. And I'll tell you what it is. So I wanted to create a community for people who have e-commerce stores. So I created a gate at the front that said your e-commerce store must be doing $100,000 a month. What's the URL? It doesn't even have a website. There's no website. It's called Club LTV. LTV is like an inside term in the e-com world, lifetime value. It's like whatever e-com store owner wants is their LTV to go up. So I called it Club LTV. It's for people who are trying to increase their LTV. And so I said, you have to have $100,000 a month of revenue. I told— so I tweeted it out. So I definitely had a head start because I have an audience. So that brought in about the first 35 members who said, yep. And they would just send me a screenshot of their dashboard. Yep, here's me. This—

What did you say it costs?

Okay, so what I did was I made it free to join for the store owners, but you had to have this much value. Like this much, you had to be this kind of far ahead in the game. But what I did then was I went to sponsors and I basically said, hey, I have a group of 75 store owners ranging from $1 million to $50 million a year in revenue. And all of them trust me, like me, and I meet up with them once a month. And would you like to sponsor this? So I have one sponsor on board. They pay me $5,000 a month. All I do is at the event, I say, Boom, I do my intro, my high-energy intro, and then I say, hey, let me pass it to the guy that makes this possible, that makes this group possible. And he says his thing for 2 minutes. He's had— I can't say the names, but I don't know if I should. I guess I could just give him a free plug. So Mercury Bank is the sponsor of it because that's who I would use for e-commerce projects, and they have a big push in e-commerce. And so they've had at least from our group 5 different 5 out of the 75 e-commerce stores switched to Mercury just from the sponsorship. So they've gotten their money's worth out of it, including one company that's a $2 billion company has switched over to them. And so, you know, they definitely got their value out of the sponsorship.

But is this still going?

Yeah, this goes every month. And so all that we do, we have about 1 hour a month of prep and then 90 minutes a month of the actual event. And the 1 hour of prep is that Ben goes and gets a Cameo made from a different rapper every month, and the rapper is just shouting out Club LTV. He's like, so we had like, you know, we had Sean Paul do the Cameo one month, and he's like, hey, it's your boy Sean Paul, just wanted to like big, big ups to Club LTV. You guys are all doing so great with your e-commerce store. And he's like, you know, just, it doesn't even make any sense, but it's just like a video that plays and people like it. 'Cause it's like, I don't know, it's kind of goofy. So we do one, we get one Cameo ordered and he sends the calendar invite. So just make sure everybody gets it. He sends one reminder email. And then the last thing is that after the event, he just says, hey, if you learned something really useful that you're gonna implement in your business, email me with the one line of the most useful thing that happened for you in the hour. Because the structure of it is we break everybody up into groups of 6. So you're in a group with 6 other store owners who do between $1 and $50 million a year in revenue. And then the format is you say one thing you did in the last month that's really working, it's driving revenue up, and one thing that you're struggling with that you might want help from, from the group. And so afterwards they all email him the most useful things. He just, he just takes, he just takes that sheet and he just sends it to everybody. So hey, here was the top insights from the group. So that whole thing takes him one hour. What's that?

Why wouldn't you charge for that?

Because I can actually make much more off the sponsorships. For example, I've been approached by you know, the companies that want you to build their e-com store on their platform. There's the people who want you to use them for email marketing. There's the people who want for influencer marketing. Who are you using for Facebook advertising? Who are you using? What's the agency that manages your, your, um, your data tracking, like your pixel stuff? So all these companies each are willing to pay multiple thousands of dollars. I just have to onboard them now, um, because now I have the group and the group is where the value is. That's the honeypot. It's the same thing you were talking about where Aventa. They have a free group and they might— they have— they are making $25 million a year on the sponsors who want to talk to you.

More than that.

Oh, sorry, that's the profit. They're making $200 million. But, um, that's the same model that I'm using here. Don't charge the members, just make sure all the members have successful businesses.

And how many do you think this is going to get, or do you care?

I mean, I put zero effort into it since then, but like we have 75 people who show up every month to the thing and, um which is like 80-85% of the members show up every single month to the event. So they're getting value out of it. And so I bet if I told Ben, hey, go on Twitter and just reach out to these 250— cold email these 250 or these 500 ecommerce stores, because it's very easy to get lists of ecommerce stores that are successful— I bet we could triple the size of the group if we put some effort into it. But don't really care about it. It's more for fun. But it's cool because it's just free money every month and It's a good group to be in. I want to learn from these people. I want to learn what they're doing, what's working, what's not, and make these connections.

That's badass. Well, you know, I— it's funny, I've built a community as well, but it's like every time I learn something like you, the way you're doing it is a lot different than the way that we've done it. And it's really neat to hear a different point of view and perspective on how to get it done.

Right. I optimize mine for how do I spend the least time but get just enough value. Whereas I think for you, it was like a part of your business. You were like, I'm gonna, this is gonna be a multimillion dollar thing and we're gonna make it fucking awesome. Which is awesome.

By the way, if I had to start over, I would've done it differently. I would've charged way more money.

Right.

Because I've learned the mistakes that you have to add a ton of people to build a big business and a ton of people for certain groups isn't necessarily good.

Right.