Tom Ross:

We knew we had found people that were super into this, that were willing to put in the work and that would be engaged. The interesting thing was that every single step we had drop off. So some people didn't open the email. Some people didn't fill out the wait list. Other people didn't respond to the email. Other people didn't do the exercise. And they would've been the people much more likely that would've been lurkers or inactive or not participatory within the community. Again, it's this exercise in deliberately putting up friction to allow people to qualify themselves as a future active member.

Chris Do:

Can you introduce yourself to the audience in case they don't know who you are?

Tom Ross:

Yeah, absolutely. My name is Tom Ross. I am a guy that's really passionate about building communities. I've always built communities online for the last 20 years or so. I love it. I love bringing people together and creating these really special places for them. And for the last eight years I've been the founder and CEO at designcuts.com. We're the highest rated design marketplace in the world. But more importantly, we're not just an e-commerce platform. We have a genuine community of 750,000 members and a really special one at that. Our community members rave about being part of this community. They show up for our live events. They're very supportive, they're very active with a real thriving forum. And it seems to be at the backbone of everything we're doing. And I really think this is the case for a lot of businesses moving forward. I think community's the future. I think it's how we're going to differentiate. I think it's how we develop loyalty with our audiences and our customers. And really, I could evangelize about the benefits of community all day, but suffice to say it's run through my entire career to date. And I love geeking out with Chris about it as well because I know he's a passionate community builder too.

Chris Do:

Yes, I am. I like to think so. Okay. Let's jump into it, Tom.

Tom Ross:

I think community, as with so many things within marketing and business, it really, really behooves us to get the fundamentals right. And what I see a lot of people doing is they get caught up by the exciting stuff, by the gamification and the fancy functionality or the hot new platform, et cetera. And where you really need to start is you need to understand what is your value proposition. So why should someone sign up for your community in the first place and why should they stick around? And you need to understand who are you targeting. IE, who is your ideal community member. Because if you don't get those two fundamental things right, then nothing else is really going to help you. You can have the best marketing in the world, you can have all the fancy widgets, but really if they're on top of a terrible foundation, you've failed before you've even gotten started. So I always encourage people to start there. And if we're talking about who is your ideal community member, it pays to define them. And an exercise that I like to do is I like to actually draw up an ideal member persona. So this involves looking at things like hard metrics and soft metrics. Chris, have you done this with The Futur? Have you got an audience persona or something like that?

Chris Do:

We do. We have a couple of them actually.

Tom Ross:

Yeah. Interesting, right? And as you grow, often new ones can emerge. But yeah, I think it's a really helpful exercise. And this is not an exhaustive list, but if we're talking about hard metrics, this could encapsulate things like where are they based geographically? What age are they? What gender are they? What income bracket are they in? What industry are they in? What level of education do they have? And then soft metrics tend to be the more human stuff. So what are their hobbies and interests? What are their struggles and pain points? Where are they at in life? What's their sense of humor? What words and tonality do they use? What resonates with them? And when you start thinking through all of these things, you start to build this concept, this idea of this ideal person. And it can be so, so helpful. I actually did this when we started DesignCuts eight years ago.

We drew up a figure on the whiteboard. We gave them a name. We had all of these lines and ideas growing from that person and it informed everything we were doing from the way we talked to them in our emails, to the marketing copy on our website, the tonality we used, the sense of humor we used to resonate with them on social media content. So it was a really, really informative exercise. And of course this completely maps to building communities as well. So how do you discover these traits? Well, I think one-on-one conversations are often the most informative way. They tell you more than any survey ever could. I think just immersing yourself in the area, in the industry that you're trying to serve, actually go and talk to people, pay an interest, build relationships and get into conversations and be taking notes. Try and look for patterns. Have this pattern recognition where you start to see commonalities in the types of people that you're trying to reach. You get to know them, you get to understand them.

And this was relatively easy for us when we started DesignCuts because we'd been designers our whole life. So we were designers. We were our target audience. We had friends that were designers. We knew how designers thought. And so that made that exercise come pretty naturally. So generally, I won't want to start a community in a space where I have no freaking idea what the people are like or what they care about or how they talk. I would be horrendous starting a community for super corporate people because I feel a bit alien and naive in that space.

You can also look at current data. So you might not have a community yet, but let's say you have a social media audience. Many of us, we might not get a ton of engagement, but often you get a handful of people that are the true fans. They're showing up in your comments, in your DMs. They're the most supportive people in your audience. And you can start to look for commonalities with those people where you're like, huh, okay, so the people that really show up for me, I can clump them together based on these common traits. And then finally, it needs to be aligned with your passions and your areas of expertise because it's no good trying to serve someone just because you understand them if you're not actually passionate about showing up for those people.

And so to give you an example, I've got a list in front of me right now. I'm literally going to read through some of the traits of my ideal community member. And remember my whole side hustle as Chris says, I'm the community building guy. I literally have a community for community builders. And so my ideal member runs an existing community or is looking to launch one. Maybe they don't have one, but they're like, "Oh man, I'd really like one, but I feel stuck getting started." They have adequate time and focus to commit to that process, even if it's a side hustle like me around their day job, they're willing to put the work in. And they share my values of empathy, kindness, and having a people first mindset. Because I've got no interest in helping or tutoring a bunch of sleazy want to be internet marketers or something like that. They have sufficient financial resource to commit to membership. Because as much as I help a lot of people through my book and my content and stuff like this for free, it's a paid community and so it makes sense that if someone has zero budget, they're probably not going to fall under my ideal member profile.

And then finally, they're friendly and they don't take themselves too seriously. And again, this just matches with my personal style. I know a lot of communities where the founders are fantastic, the members are fantastic, but it's probably more professional than how I enjoy being. So for example, I'm thinking of some friends in the digital lettering community and the calligraphy communities. I know some that are really wacky and just joking around with their communities. I know others that are like university professor serious style. And both work and their members love what they do respectively. So again, it's just mapping to your personal style.

And then what I encourage all of you to do when you're thinking about your ideal community members, think about who isn't a good fit. So actually write out a list. Create a profile for the people where you know they're not going to be such a good member in your community. And on my list, it's stuff like, really the contrary of what I've just listed for the ideal community member, but someone who's not that serious or committed. Maybe someone that's not very clear on their goals or they're a bit earlier in their journey and they're just feeling totally lost. Maybe they're in client services. And I know a lot of people in The Futur community are. I'm not here to help people land more clients or up their freelance game. I'm here to help people start communities. So again, it's good to draw those lines and draw those distinctions. And then again, maybe someone who doesn't have sufficient time or financial resource to actually commit.

And Chris, let me know if you've done this next exercise, which I'm going to share, but this is super helpful. You can actually start looking at the good personas and patterns in people and then some of the unsuitable personas and you can start to give them names, which sounds silly, but it really makes the process a little more fun, a little more engaging. So for example, on my list I have a good persona would be community Carl. So Carl would be someone who is really into community. Maybe they're running one or they definitely want to launch one and they're just excited to learn more about it. I've got kind Kate. So this might be someone that shares my values. They're a really nice person. They like treating others right. It could be responsive Rachel. So responsive Rachel would be representative of someone who was very engaged. So if they're joining my wait list or I'm emailing with them, they're getting back to me right away. I've literally had members send full on video applications because they want to go above and beyond. They're like, "Please let me in. Here's why I think I'd be a good member, this kind of thing." So I'm like, wow, they're a responsive Rachel. That's a good sign.

And then for the bad personas, I got stuff like mean Mike. This is someone who's maybe a little cranky or I think they might ruffle feathers in the community. We've got overly busy Beth. This is someone where on paper they may seem to be a great fit, but I just know they're so busy, they're probably never actually going to show up in the community. Chris, this is ironic. This wasn't done with you in mind, but I've got client service Chris as one of them.

Chris Do:

No relation.

Tom Ross:

Your namesake. Absolutely. And then unclear Ursula as well. And it was tough to get alliterative on that one, but we got unclear Ursula. As I said before, that might be someone who is much earlier in their journey. I used to help a lot of people like this, but I discovered I wasn't the most passionate of playing almost that life coach role where it's like I want to help you figure out remotely what you're passionate about. I'm much happier teaching practical stuff when it comes to community.

And so what happens is both when people apply for my community and get on the wait list or people where I'm having conversations with them, building relationships on social media, et cetera, I can start to put them into these buckets. And this is not about marginalizing or categorizing people. Often people fall into multiple buckets and it can be a really positive thing. So I'm like, wow, they're super responsive or they're super kind or even they seem too busy. And that isn't to say that the unsuitable personas are bad people. Obviously someone in client services, they're not a bad person. They're just not the right fit for me and I'm not the best person to help them. So if someone comes to me with client service questions, I will point them to someone like Chris or other people in the space and say, "You know what? They're much better equipped to teach you that stuff than I am because I haven't done client services in a while."

So it's really empowering to get clear on who you're trying to serve and who you're not. And like I say, doing this simple exercise, it might sound silly with the names and stuff, but you can very quickly become much better at qualifying and selecting suitable members for your community. And let me tell you something, Chris, the success of a community happens before you even let someone in. We had this wait list for my community before it launched. It had hundreds of people on it, and we picked out the best people and we made them our founding members. And thankfully we picked the people that were super interested in community, they were very kind, they're very responsive, very supportive, all of these traits. And so what happened was now inside that community, what's happening? People are very active. They're posting a lot, they're commenting, they're helping each other out, they're striking up friendships and mastermind groups without me even guiding that to happen, predicated on us picking the right people.

I could have picked a different hundred people to get in the community when it launched and it would've been crickets. And that wouldn't mean that we were teaching materials in a worse way or that we'd set it up or structured it in a worse way. Everything would've been the same from our side and how we built the platform, but it would've been the difference between crickets and complete failure and something that is now blossoming and active and super rewarding. And it all came down to the people we intentionally selected by actually looking intentionally at these personas. So I think it's one of the most powerful things you can do.

And if you're having conversations with people before they have joined your community, they will start to demonstrate these traits. So if you're saying, "Oh, you're interested. Can you share more details?", and they take a week to get back to you, or you're having to prod them and follow up via email, guess what? If they're not very responsive, they're not going to be active. They're not going to be responsive when you open the doors and let them in your community. So it's almost a way of validating how well your community members are going to perform when they get in before you ever let them in the first place. And that lets you open your doors with confidence because you can make a pretty good guess, a pretty good prediction of how they're going to behave inside.

Chris Do:

Hey Tom, I have a question for you. We've been using this word community and I wanted to know if you had a definition of what community is and more importantly, what it's not, and then I have more questions for you.

Tom Ross:

Absolutely. There's a lot of definitions of community floating around out there. I think the simplest one is that a community is a space where many can talk to many rather than one talking to many, which is technically defined as an audience. So to give you an example, if I go on my Instagram and I push some content out there and people like it and people comment, that's really one talking to many. I'm broadcasting at my audience, at my followers there and they're consuming my content. Whereas in my community, it's on Circle, much like The Futur Pro group. It is a forum platform, which means that even when I'm not there, members are starting posts, helping each other, responding to one another and it's much more interactive. It's many talking to many. So I think that's the simplest definition.

And on the previous session, Chris, I know we talked about audiences can have a sense of community, so we can talk about the community here on Clubhouse, we can talk about the community on your YouTube for example. Even though they're audiences, people still feel the sense of belonging. There's still traits inherently within those audiences that make them feel like a community. But if we're talking about community in the strictest sense, I think it's predicated on that platform that facilitates many to many to many. Could be a Facebook group, could be a Circle forum, could be a Slack group, a Discord server, that thing. So hopefully that helps everyone.

Chris Do:

Okay. So more questions for you then. Just to be clear, if you do a podcast which is not interactive and there isn't usually a chat or forum for people to talk to each other, is that community or not community?

Tom Ross:

I would say that again, it's more of an audience. In that case it's a listenership. But there are ways of hacking community around audiences and around things like that. So for example, I know some people that run podcasts where they actually create spaces where listeners can chat as the episodes get released, or perhaps listeners can actually suggest questions and they can vote on questions, and the listeners actually then vote which questions make it on the show and that thing. So there are ways to make these more broadcast mediums more interactive. And I'm a huge fan of doing that because who doesn't like to feel involved in something? Part of building with the creator.

Chris Do:

Right. And there in fact are some podcasts which listeners contribute to the content itself. Not just in the questions, but in the dialogue. They'll tell their stories. I was listening to Snap Judgment and they have one called Spooks I think. It's a bunch of ghost stories. And some of the stories are not produced by the traditional producers, they're submitted by the listeners of the show and the program. In a case like that, when there's involvement and engagement, does that start to blur the lines or is it still really listenership and audience?

Tom Ross:

Yeah. Great question. I think the lines can be blurred. And there's a lot of people who are specialists and they're very bullish in the community space. And even my many to many definition, they'll be like, it still doesn't count. A community's not a community unless it qualifies against these 12 different factors. So I'm not that strict with it. I think it's okay to blur the lines. I encourage, even if you're not ready to drop a Slack group or a forum or something like that, I think involve your audience more, make it more interactive, cultivate a sense of community. And the example I always give is with DesignCuts, people raved about our community. They love being part of our community. They love being a community member, et cetera, et cetera. And this is before we had these shared spaces. So we didn't have Facebook groups, we didn't have our live events where people were chatting. We didn't have our forum. We didn't have all these things we're doing now yet people still loved being part of the community and talked about it a lot. And so I would argue that it wasn't that we had zero community and then one day we turned on a Facebook group and a few members joined and suddenly we had a community and we could justify saying that. You know what I mean? It was a bit more blurred to your point.

Chris Do:

Okay. So my question, and you get some time to think about this, is what is your motivation, your true motivation as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as a personality of why you even wanted to create a community in the first place?

Tom Ross:

I have a few, to be honest. That is just the truth and I can put them into two different camps. One is genuinely just the people side of it. There's a few reasons here. First of all, I'm an extrovert, so I get energized when I'm running a community and I'm jumping in and conversing with people and chatting with people, especially people who are like-minded, who I really enjoy their company. I love that experience. I love building something that has the potential to become so much bigger than me. And I know I just mentioned my extroversion, but actually I know a lot of community builders that are introverts. And the beauty is it's not about me, it's about we. And so if you are more extroverted, don't fear because you can start a vibrant, active, flourishing community and the spotlight doesn't have to be on you the whole time. You're just setting the platform and building the structure for people, but they fill it and they can become so much bigger than just it being reliant on you.

And I guess the final analogy on the people side is it's like hosting a kick-ass house party. You get to make people happy, you get to bring them value, friendships can get created and you can sit and help orchestrate and watch this and it's a beautiful thing and it's really rewarding. And this is why for me, it definitely ... There are business benefits I'll touch on in a second, but I think fundamentally at my core, I do it for the people-driven reasons and I always have. Because I've spent my 10,000 hours learning this stuff often building free communities growing up. So I started a forum fan site for the band Interpol when I was a teenager.

It ended up getting 250,000 posts and people spent their lives on it and made friendships. People struck up international relationships there. And I would just spend 10 hours every evening in this forum chatting with people and I loved it. Was I doing that to get rich? No. I found it a rewarding experience. And whenever I'm doing something ... Like I was in the final for Young Entrepreneur Of The Year a decade or so ago in London. And when I was doing that, I looked at it, I was like, wow, we have all these people getting through the different phases, but there's no place for them to actually converse after we go home from meeting in London at each stage. So I set up a Facebook group and I put the word out and most of the finalists ended up joining that and sharing ideas and conversing. Again, was I making money from that? No, I just thought it was a cool way to bring people together.

So that's the people side, but there's definitely a financial and business side. So with my new community, which is Learn.community, my favorite domain in the world, which I'm super happy I got, that is a paid community so that establishes MRR, monthly recurring revenue the same way the Futur Pro group does. And that's fantastic and that's a tangible business benefit. With my company DesignCuts, our community and our forum is free, but there's all kinds of tangible benefits there. We are differentiating from our competitors. We're establishing increased loyalty and retention and there's studies that have been done into this. People exponentially become more loyal, they exponentially have greater customer lifetime value, et cetera, even when it's a free community because it ties them to the brand and they feel even closer to it and it builds that know, like, and trust methodology. So both sides would be my answer, Chris. I love the people side, I love the business side and I believe in both.

Chris Do:

Wonderful. I have a question about your community so that if people are thinking about how to build a community and how they could grow their business or serve others while doing the same thing, I have some questions for you. How much is it to join your community?

Tom Ross:

The doors are closed right now, but we're reopening every two months. So we're reopening in November and it's $29 a month.

Chris Do:

And what do you get for that $29 a month?

Tom Ross:

You get a weekly live workshop where I literally give a presentation, teach very practical strategies, and then do long Q&A at the end. You get access to the forum where that's super active. People are asking questions and I make a point at responding to every single person. Again, get very tactical and break things down. You get a weekly challenge on Thursday where it's something you can go and implement to actually practically improve your community. And then already people forming masterminds in groups and supporting each other and that kind of thing and sharing wins. So it's going amazingly well and it's incredibly rewarding to be honest already. And I love our founding members. They're an incredible bunch.

Chris Do:

Wonderful. Do people join this community to learn how to build their own communities?

Tom Ross:

Yeah. Interesting actually. We have about 70% of our members do not have a community currently, but they're on the cusp of launching one and they just need some support to get there because they're unclear. And then about 30% are running an active community and they want to grow it, improve engagement, and overcome some of those hurdles.

Chris Do:

Okay, excellent. It's interesting because as I'm on Clubhouse quite often I'm listening to people talking about joining their community and maybe in a little while we can bring people up and try to help them build their own community and what the steps are if you're coming from zero or perhaps you have a decent size following on Instagram, on Twitter or YouTube and you want to figure out how to build a space for them and to make some money. So maybe that's where we can dive into. Okay. What else do you have?

Tom Ross:

I'd love that.

Chris Do:

Yeah. What else do you have for us today?

Tom Ross:

I touched before on this concept of defining your ideal member and why that's so important as a foundational step. But I think once you've done that, it's a really smart idea to start trying to gauge and validate interest. So let's say you have an Instagram following or a social following of some sort and you're like, I want to launch this community for X. I want to help these types of people achieve this type of transformation and provide this type of value. I'm really keen to do it, but I don't know if anyone wants a community like that in my audience. You need to start putting out feelers to validate. And so I'll tell you exactly how I did it. I put out a post on Instagram and I said, "Here's what I'm building. Leave a comment saying community and I will message you and we can talk about if it's a good fit and if it is, I'll share a link to my wait list application." And I did the same thing on my email. I gave a little teaser and I was like, "If you're interested, you can join the wait list here."

And by doing that it could have been crickets, in which case I would've been like, "Hmm. I need to go back to the drawing board. There isn't a demand for this or I've got something wrong." But luckily I got hundreds of people joining the wait list so I was like, "Cool. There's a good demand here." Particularly because I decided that I wanted to open and cap it at 100 founding members. So by getting hundreds, I'm like, okay, this seems to be about the right level of demand. And then from there, it's the all important process of filtering those members. And this is what I talked about before. You want to basically weed out the people that aren't suitable and then filter and whittle down to the people that are suitable. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. Obviously one of the ways is price. And right within the wait list application I have a question where it's like, which pricing plan do you want to go on? Is it the monthly one? Is it the annual one where you save two months? Or is it that you can't afford it or it's not a good fit right now? So straight away you can see, okay, these people committed and they're saying I want to pay this much. So that's one of element of filtering.

The second one, which I love the most is filtering by effort. So this essentially says that if they won't do X, then they won't do Y and Y is what you expect of them in your community. So if you're expecting them to jump in and start posting, be active and comment and participate, if they're not willing to jump through a couple of hoops in the application phase, they're not going to be willing to stick around and be an active member for months and months and hopefully years to come. And so I can actually just read you very quickly, Chris, my application process if you will. So straight away I have an audience. I've filtered to the most engaged people because they're the ones that have joined my email list. On my email list only a percentage of those people open my emails. And out of the people that opened the emails, only percentage click the emails. From the ones that clicked on that wait list email, some of them clicked through to the wait list and only some of those people filled it out because it was reasonably long. After they did all of that I got COVID which sucked, and all this stuff happened in life. So normally I would've been much more responsive, but those people sat there for nearly a month because I was too sick to work.

Once I was back up and running, I got caught up, we emailed them and some of them opened the follow-up email we sent and responded and other people didn't. We sent an email exercise. So even though they've already applied, they've waited around, they've done all this stuff, we sent this email exercise and they filled it out and they did some exercises which demonstrated again that they'd be very active. And then finally they completed the sign-up process and they jumped in the community. And as a result of going through all those steps, we knew we had found people that were super into this, that were willing to put in the work and that would be engaged. The interesting thing was that every single step that I just listed there, we had drop-off. So some people didn't open the email. Some people didn't fill out the wait list. Other people didn't respond to the email. Other people didn't do the exercise. And they would've been the people much more likely that would've been lurkers or inactive or not participatory within the community.

And so again, it's this exercise in deliberately putting up friction and putting up hoops to allow people to qualify themselves as a future active member. And this is a bit of a head spin, right? Because it's not what we're taught when it comes to e-commerce. When it's e-commerce, it's very much reduce friction, improve conversion rates, make it as easy for them as possible. But you don't want to do that with community. That's really dangerous. If you make it too easy and just let anyone and everyone in, you're going to end up with a lot of the wrong people, you're going to really lower the average quality of member and you're not going to see the engagement or the success that you're expecting to see.

Chris Do:

Yeah, that's counterintuitive. You're making it more difficult for people to join and that process is the retreat and follow thing. If you read Blair Enns's book on The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, he talks about making sure your clients are engaged in the transaction. And the way that you do that is you make it slightly difficult to hire you. You just take a half step back and see if the client will follow you in. And so each one of these steps of signing up for the email, opening it, and then getting on a wait list and then doing the exercises that you've set up, that's one test for you to gauge their level of commitment to doing this. Not just whether they can afford to join the group or if they have the interest in joining the group.

Tom Ross:

Exactly. And we did this other thing that was fun. We use Google Forms. Very simple free plan for our wait list and it's got all these different questions. When people fill it out, you can go on the responses and you can click one button and it exports it to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. So all your data is automatically pulled in there. And then you can look through those people. And with each of the questions we asked, we had generally a multiple choice answer and we assigned a score and a traffic light system to them. So if they gave the optimum answer that meant they mapped in alignment to our ideal member profile, they would get a green. That cell would get turned green and they would get two points. If it was somewhere in the middle, it's an average answer or response, they would get yellow and it would be one point. And if it wasn't really a suitable answer, they would get red and they would get zero points. And then we could total up their score across their whole row and give them a total output score at the end.

What this meant was, it let us qualify people in quite a quantitative way, but also through the effort they exhibit. And so we're looking for two things. We're looking for generally people that score relatively highly and the people that are willing to put in the effort and jump through the hoops and show they're going to be active. And we found this a really effective way to really drill down to the people that are going to be our perfect members. And I guess I want to caveat this by saying this is a lot of work. There's two thoughts on that. Firstly, I don't want people to find it intimidating and be like, this is too much. I encourage a lot of you to start like MVP, minimum viable product communities. Start simpler, learn as you go. And we can dig into that in Q&A. And certainly my early communities were not this complicated.

However, the other thing I would say is it is so worth putting in the additional effort this early because the more work you put in up front before you open your doors, the less work you're going to have down the line because you're going to get less members churning, which means canceling, you're going to get less moderation because you have nice people in there, not unsuitable people, and you're going to be financially better off as a result. So I know the work I put in pre-launch is what's giving us a really smooth experience now working with members and loving every minute.

Chris Do:

I have this question for you, Tom, because this is something we think about a lot. How did you land on the number $29? We've seen people who have communities that are $7 a month to hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month. How'd you wind up with that number 29?

Tom Ross:

Yeah, this is a great question. I actually did a post on this ironically in my community because people were asking me about pricing and I'm like, I'm going to create a resource about this. I know you tend to be very bullish on pricing yourself, and I think that's great. And you even said to me before, you're like, "You're pricing this too low," in your opinion, and I accept that. I have a bit of a framework for how I price these things. So first of all, I ask myself some questions. So one thing is how much do I want and need to earn? And in the case of this project, I'll be very transparent, I'm looking to earn around 50K in the first year and 100K the second year.

Then I look at the typical market rate for this kind of community and this kind of industry. And there are some which are lower, there are some which are higher, but I noticed a lot of them were in this 15 to 20, 29, 39, 49 range. So for example, Pat Flynn's community at SPI Pro, I believe that's $49. But my next point is how much value can I bring members? Well, I think a lot. People are telling me incredible feedback right now and they're super, super happy, but this is still a side hustle for me. So if I was doing this full-time, I was there 12 hours a day, just pot in committed, I had a team. So to compare my community to SPI Pro, I literally think they have eight team members that they've hired to help run this thing. This huge resource, and it's a full-time focus for them. For me, it's a side hustle. So I have to balance that with the expectations of how much I can provide, even if it's a lot.

Then it's reverse engineering my revenue goals and saying, well, how many members do I want to help? I know I could get 10 people paying me $1,000 a month and I could create a mastermind community and it would be much smaller. That model doesn't really interest me. I want to have more widespread impact than that. So I know if I can get 500, maybe 600 members and 29 bucks a month, I can work towards those ambitious revenue goals, which for me, if I'm running a six figure business as a side hustle for fun for my passion project, that would sit pretty right with me.

And then I think as well, you need to think what price can I realistically command given experience, credibility, brand, et cetera, et cetera. So all of these things went into my pricing. And I think could I charge 49? Maybe. But do I feel comfortable and happy charging 29? Yeah, I do. I think it will let me help a lot of people. What's dangerous I think is obviously when you under price. If I was charging $5, I would probably resent how much work and time I was putting in. But again, I've been pretty clear about my revenue goals and I think I can hit them. And if I do, I'll feel more than happy showing up and investing the time and realizing that I'm not going to be seeing an enormous opportunity cost without the stuff in my life.

Stewart Schuster:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

Chris Do:

Hey. I hope you're enjoying this week's episode as much as I am. Now, before we dive back in, I want to ask you a quick question. Are you an established creative service provider, coach or consultant looking to scale your business without losing your soul in the process? If so, the Futur Pro membership was created just for you, and I'd like to see you inside with us. Go to thefutur.com/pro to learn more and join.

Stewart Schuster:

Welcome Back to our conversation.

Chris Do:

Cassandra, what's on your mind?

Cassandra:

Hey Chris. Hey Tom. Thanks so much. This is just absolutely on point and great timing. Say Tom, thanks for all your great information. Chris is such an example of running such an incredible community. One of my questions is, when building a community, my plan is to create a quarterly onboarding experience where I will create micro summits quarterly, and then that big back end is coming into the community and getting access to the summits as well as courses, etc. One of the patterns I see happening in the community-driven platforms is there's tons of $27 offers and they're full of PDFs and just a lot of overwhelming information. So my first question is how to really moderate a community so that they're getting precision information at the right time without overwhelming them where they just end up hopping out of the community. And number two, what is the best platforms that you're seeing?

Chris uses Circle, which is a great platform. I also know of Geneva, which is a little bit more user-friendly. I service a lot of ADHD individuals and I feel as though Facebook is just a cluster F of you know what of just absolutely rabbit holes. So best platforms and then just really how to create a community so that they're getting timely information and it's not overwhelming if you unlock courses by certain months or what have you. So a couple of random questions there for you. And then maybe last and not least, you can maybe speak about where you see communities going in the future. Thanks. This is Cassandra and I am complete.

Tom Ross:

Thanks Cassandra. Some excellent, excellent questions there. Just to clarify then, so you have people entering into your community through a few different ways. They may have purchased the course and they go in that way. They may have joined an event or a summit quarterly, I think you said, and they go in that way. So there's a few paths into your community. Just to clarify, is the community itself paid or is it made available ostensibly free for people that paid for something like a course?

Cassandra:

That's a great follow-up question and you can maybe speak into that. I do think that there has to be a free engagement in some way, shape or form so maybe you could speak of that, of what's appropriate for that level. But no, this will absolutely be a continuum of a subscription plan where it's paid monthly.

Tom Ross:

Okay. I'm really glad to hear that. I put some content out recently. What I see a lot of people doing is they sell a course and to try and up the value proposition, they say, "If you buy my premium course, you also get lifetime access to my online community." And then what happens is members are in that community three, four, five years later still demanding that creator's time and they haven't paid a nickel more than they did at that initial point of purchase. So it's diminishing returns and the community leader can even start to resent them because they have nothing for that ongoing time despite that expectation. So I just wanted to touch on that for the wider listeners. I'm glad that yours does not fall into that category and that you seem to have more of a typical subscription model.

So to your original question ... I think there were three questions in there. The original question was that overwhelm. And I think there's a few things that you should be doing. The first thing is just proper onboarding. And I'm so glad you asked about overwhelm because it is the death of so many communities. You get dumped into this space, there's so much going on, you don't know where to start. No one's holding you by the hand and it's really problematic. Onboarding can happen in several ways. I love Circle. I run both my communities on it, and as you mentioned, Chris does too. And with Circle, you can do stuff like there's a pop-up when someone first joins. And this is a great place just to put a friendly, welcoming video saying, "Hey, welcome. Here's how you get started." And just give that initial message, that hand holding. Then you can actually choose which screen they see after that point.

So for the first time they log in, you can point them to something like a start here space or section. And this is a really good place to bullet point or itemize, you should do this, then you should do this, then you should do this. So that might be something like you should set up your profile and then you should go over and introduce yourself and then maybe you should ask a question. So it's making it sequential. So rather than, wow, there's 20 options here, which one do I take? It's very much like ... You do this, then this, then this. Again, that's super, super key with onboarding. And that's onboarding in a more scalable way. But I also think that if you're the community manager or you've hired a community manager, that's a lot of their job as well. So I'm a huge fan in sending one-on-one messages to people depending on their action and the behavior they're taking.

So what we did recently with our community is there were a bunch of people that signed up and they never introduced themselves. So we would reach out and say, "Hey, thanks so much for joining. We appreciate it. We recommend jumping in here and sharing a bit about yourself and you'll get to know the other members." So we would manually and unscalably guide them towards that. There were other people that may have introduced themselves but then didn't do anything else. So we're like, "Hey, it was great to get to know you. Thanks for the introduction based on where you're at with your community, which you mentioned in your intro, why don't you jump in here and use this resource or why don't you ask a question about it over here and we'd love to help you and so would other members." So particularly in the early phases, there's oftentimes a lot of manual behind the scenes work that result in clarity and what appears to be organic engagement happening within the community.

And this is true of so many expert community builders. On the surface level, you're like, "Wow. Everyone seems super clear and everyone's super active here." But it's because behind the scenes in the DMs and et cetera, you have people working hard that are ensuring that they know what's going on, they're holding them by the hand and they're appropriately guiding them. And so yeah, that's a few thoughts. I can go deeper, but I'm going to go to the next question because of time. You mentioned best platforms. So as I mentioned, I'm very bullish on Circle. I could talk all day about why I love that platform so much. But I think honestly, you need to reverse engineer the platform based on the type of community you're trying to run, and particularly based on the type of members. So you mentioned, I think some of your members you're dealing with have ADHD, and I can imagine Facebook being a nightmare because I don't have ADHD and I just find it super overwhelming and an unenjoyable user experience.

But it's very different. If I was starting a community in the gaming space, you better believe I'd be using Discord because that's what people are using. Or if I was getting into like an NFT community, Discord seems to be the place to be for that. I wouldn't be trying to shoehorn those people into Circle just because I like the platform. I would, as I say, reverse engineer around the members and their needs and where they naturally and natively spend their time online.

And then I think your final question, Cassandra, was the future of community. I think community is the future, but I think there's a few interesting movements we're seeing. I think particularly on the back of the loneliness epidemic brought on by the pandemic, by COVID, people are yearning for interaction, and I think no longer do people just want to sit and passively consume content and mindlessly scroll on social media. I think increasingly people are searching out shared community spaces where they can have deeper connections, they can make friends and they can actually be part of the conversation. And I think we're going to see this interactive thing happening at scale. So blogs are very prevalent, but I think increasingly content creators are using platforms like Circle to actually publish content natively within the community. And then instead of it just being a blog post which people passively consume, suddenly people can have their say, you can spark a discussion up and it can become much more interactive and community focused on the back of that content. So I think we're going to see a lot more of that kind of thing as well. That's just a few thoughts. Chris, I don't know if you had some thoughts on any of those questions.

Chris Do:

I have a few thoughts, but I'm probably not going to try to attack every single question. The one that really resonates with me is how do you deal with content overwhelm? And Cassandra, I know you know this because part of our community. There's 650 people in this community and it's growing and there's tons of calls and challenges and activities. There's just so much to do and it can be very hard to deal with that. So I think anybody that's starting out, I think you have to focus on doing less but better. To have one clear outcome, to work on that and to really deliver on that promise. At the end of the day ... Especially, I'm just addressing everyone who's interested in paid community because I think everybody here can start a free community and that's good. But if you're talking about getting paid to do this, there's a couple of things you need just to think about.

You can charge any amount of money you want from $1 to $1,000 per month. And your obligation, your duty to that person who joins your community is did you give them more value than what they paid? And the amount of value you provide will keep them there for a long period of time or for a short period of time. And so if you say, I'm going to charge 50 bucks a month, all you have to do is deliver in my mind $100 worth of value to that person. Solve a hundred dollar problem, a pain point or a challenge, and you've done your job. And if they receive and perceive that to be valuable, they'll stick around. And part of that is complexity. So this is where we run into trouble because our group has grown to be so diverse and so different. The needs are very complicated and they're always evolving and it can be a very difficult thing.

One idea that we were talking about recently ... We have a dedicated community manager. Those of you guys in the pro group know this. And he was telling me, "My gosh, I think I have to onboard every single person just to make sure they know where to go and what to do because there are some really basic questions that can lead to a very frustrating user experience." And I told him, "This is not scalable. If you can just imagine if we get 20 signups, what are you going to do with your life? Because all you're going to do is try to onboard people." So we talked about this idea that I think everybody here can develop and manage and execute quite easily.

And here's the idea. Write down a list of questions or issues or challenges that people are going to have in the community. Like, where do I find this? When does this happen? And then record a really super short video of you explaining to people, and it probably is going to be a screen share where you're recording the video of what you're doing on the screen and talking over it. Then you're going to create a database of say, 50 videos. And then you're going to create a keyboard shortcut, which links to each one of these videos. So if you host them all on say Dropbox, when somebody has that question, you just type in a couple of letters and it'll give you a link to that video. So this to me is the best of both worlds where you're giving very bespoke custom answers and you're being super respectful of the person's time and you're not going to become resentful answering the same question over and over and over again. It's totally scalable. So think about that.

Write down a list of 10 to 20 questions that people are going to ask. Create super short bite-sized videos. The shorter, the better. And just show them what the answer is and then have that tapped in to little keyboard shortcuts that you can type up. You don't need any special software. Most softwares like PC or Mac, there's a way to do this. Okay, I'm a Mac person, so I know how to do it on the Macintosh. And I hope that'll help you with that one problem, that one challenge there Cassandra.

Tom Ross:

Just to quickly follow up on that, I think both are important. So what I was alluding to where it's, as I said, more unscalable, that's in the earlier phases. But as Chris says, you can't do that when you have hundreds of members and he's at the point where he's starting to see those common pain points emerging through the experience of running this community. So funny you say this, Chris. We're literally building this right now. We're calling it the knowledge base, and we're seeing a lot of the same questions pop up as you mentioned. So it's like we just point them to the knowledge base and everything's in there.

Chris Do:

Cassandra, was that helpful to you?

Cassandra:

I love it. Thank you so much. So, so incredible. And there's a reference in your big idea book, Tom. It says, serve your audience, don't use them. And so I'm just going to cap it off with that. So thank you so much, guys. Appreciate it.

Chris Do:

All right. Nidhi, you're up next. Hi.

Nidhi:

Thanks so much for allowing me to come up. So good to see you and thank you, Tom, for sharing so much knowledge with us. My question, I happened to become an influencer here on Clubhouse. I have a community called Mental Health Matters Club here. We have over 81,000 members. And on Instagram I've got around 7,000 followers. And I have been wanting ... It's been abundantly made clear to me the importance of shifting my community off of these platforms onto something like Circle or Mighty Networks or Geneva or someplace where the community can engage. And so my first question is about any tips that you have in regards to being able to convert people from one platform to another. Because I'm noticing it's actually more challenging than I ever thought it was going to be. So I will start there and pause, and I'm sure more questions will come up as you share.

Tom Ross:

Yeah. Really good question. And congrats as well. Not only on the scale of your communities, but I was checking out your bio. I love the mission and everything you're helping people with there. I touched on already this notion of essentially putting out the feelers, advertising the fact you have something. Again, I did the emails, I did the social mentions and said this low friction method of DM me community or comment community and then I reached out and I shared the wait list that way. And then again, I would go through the whole method still with filtering that I touched on. So hopefully that in itself is something that you can utilize.

But something that I'm about to start doing is actually providing free content at scale that is predicated on the early stage community. So what you may be able to do, Nidhi, is get a MVP community of some early founding members. And given the scale of your audience, I'd like to think you could get a decent number of people into a closed community just to get the ball rolling. But then to make this more appealing at scale, you can start to get these success stories and what's happening in that community and turn that into content for your wider audiences. Because this is essentially going to sell the idea of your community in a non-salesy, non-pushy way that actually provides value.

So you're not there screaming, get the special offer and sign up and give me your money. You're saying, "Today we're going to have this member on from my community, and we're going to do a clubhouse room with them, and we're going to talk about the success that they found." And that's the really effective soft sell in the community. And you can do this on Clubhouse, you can do this on Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. So my upcoming content strategy is going to be massively predicated on just publicizing the knowledge being gleaned and the success happening within the closed community, because I know it's going to essentially then become a constant sales model for that community. So I hope that's one practical tip.

Nidhi:

No. That totally makes sense. And being able to have exclusive content is what I'm thinking. I'm offering on Mighty Networks, and I just literally started this two, three weeks ago. One follow-up question for you is as you're creating the content that's exclusive, that becomes that soft sell for people to join the community, one of the things that I'm confused about is I'm offering this at an extremely low price. It's embarrassingly low. It's $1. It's $1 a month to join my community on Mighty Networks. My rationale behind doing this is I'm thinking get people onboarded, get people in the community, and then as your content comes out, then you're able to increase the price because the value is then at a different level. Right now, I'm still very much in the green phase as I'm building this community. Is that the right mentality?

And then the follow-up to that is that if I'm going to charge something like 25 or 50 bucks a month for somebody to join this community, I then feel a pressure to create content that's going to be reflecting of that price that I'm charging. And already having to create content for Clubhouse, for Instagram, for Twitter, for Linkedin, for all of these platforms, it takes a lot of energy. And so I think that that is the follow-up to why I am thinking lower price because it feels like less pressure for me. So I don't know if that's the right mindset to have and any feedback there would be so greatly appreciated because this is not my forte and definitely not my specialization.

Tom Ross:

I'm sure Chris has some excellent thoughts on this, so I'll keep my answer brief. But I'm not a fan of that strategy for a few reasons. I think that what you're essentially saying by lower pressure is you're going to give yourself an excuse or an opportunity to provide significantly less value, which isn't then in turn justified by low price point because the contrast to that is that you charge more and therefore you have to provide more value. I would argue that you would always want to provide the most value you can for your members, and that would be a good starting point. And therefore you should start with a more reasonable price point. Because let's say you charge a dollar. Well, your options are you either provide hardly any value to ensure you get an ROI as the community leader, or you try and really provide value for people as you should, and you show up for them and you prioritize them, and then your hourly rate or whatever that dollar breaks down to is terrible. And then resentment sets in and it's untenable. It's unsustainable. Because if it breaks down that you're earning 5 cents per hour, but you could be earning 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 500 bucks an hour doing something else, you are not going to ever prioritize your community.

And I think this is dangerous. And I've fallen into this trap before, maybe not for a dollar. But I've done this before where the community was not the priority. It was the thing I got to after work, after social media, after everything else. And so by the end of the day, tired Tom showed up and he didn't deliver enough. And I'm flipping that right now. I'm saying my community is the priority and everything else orbits around that and I try and provide as much value as I can around that because I care about showing up for my members and I care about giving them ROI. But Chris, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this.

Chris Do:

I have several thoughts on this, Nidhi. I think first it begins with this concept of, okay, there's a couple of different ways to tackle this. Let me do it more mathematical, then I'll get into the emotional parts of this, which is do you have an idea as to how many active members you realistically want to support and build community around per month? And what financial goals will make it important enough for you to show up on a regular basis? And based on that, we can start to figure out how this is going to work. Now, if you don't know how many active members you want, you can just tell me what your monthly financial goals are that will make you feel like you want to show up and you're happy and delighted to do this.

Nidhi:

I will be honest, I haven't thought about what the monthly goals are. However, I would feel really good being able to create exclusive trainings and videos and really put my heart and soul into it, which I do on all these platforms. I really try to create valuable content. And so I think at least a couple of thousand bucks a month would be nice in terms of being able to have some additional income.

Chris Do:

So can I pin you down? Can you just float out a number?

Nidhi:

Yeah. Let's say 5,000. Let's say an extra 5,000 would be really nice.

Chris Do:

Okay. So at your current $1 a month, you'd have to onboard 5,000 people. Now, it seems pretty easy considering your club here on Clubhouse has 85,000 members or something like that. But you're going to find out really quickly as many people do that when you show up for something free and you follow someone, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to whip out their credit card and swipe it. And so you're going to see a pretty massive drop-off. Even at the dollar mark you're going to see that. My friend Dot Lung who does social media, she loves to say followers don't equal dollars. I wish there were an extra syllable in there so it would rhyme perfectly. So it's always the big test because ... And I'll tell you this. We have 1.6 million subscribers on our YouTube channel. I have 600,000 followers on Instagram. As I mentioned earlier, my community, the paid community is 650 members.

So look at the drop-off rate from each one of these things. So I have more than double the subscribers on YouTube as I do on Instagram. And then I have ... What is it? Less than 10% in terms of people are actually in the community. Even on Clubhouse. I have 75,000 followers here. So you're going to have to either grow your community on Clubhouse to some astronomical number to get the conversion, or I think the better strategy is just to increase the price. So realistically, how many people do you want to contend with? Because 5,000 is a lot of people to serve on a regular basis. So let's work on that then. How many people do you want to serve in your community?

Nidhi:

To give the individualized attention, to respond, to be fully engaged, I think probably at maximum ... I don't know. Maybe 100, 200 people.

Chris Do:

Yeah. That's what I was thinking too. Okay. My math is not that great, but it's not a dollar. I know that. So I think it's ... Is it 50 bucks? Let me do that. 50 times 100, which would be 5,000, right? So now you know that you need to target $50 per person. Now, there's the question here-

Tom Ross:

Or at east 25, right? If it's 200 members.

Chris Do:

Yeah. I would just go for your number. I really would. Because asking someone to go from zero to whatever number, just ask them once. There's also another challenge because we've done this, we've gone from zero to 25 to 75 to $150 a month, probably to go up again soon. But each time you do that, a whole bunch of people leave. And the thing is, everybody that's new doesn't have that problem because it's always been this price. They didn't know once it was free or 25 bucks. And so you've got to go through this process. It's a lot of churning, and I would try to avoid that if I can.

So I would just go out of the gate, you are a person who creates a lot of value wherever you go. And I know this because I've been in your rooms, we've talked together before and you've hosted calls for us in our office hours and people go away raving how valuable it was for them. And I think this is where a lot of us, especially who aren't totally comfortable with the idea of selling our time or what we do for money. It's a difficult psychological thing that we have to overcome. That each one of you provides a lot of value to the world. But as soon as you get into discussion of money, it's like, oh no, who would care about this? And I think you already have a healthy mindset around this. I'm going to ask you a question. What would your resistance be to starting at 50 bucks a month?

Nidhi:

Yeah. My biggest fear, honestly, Chris ... And first of all, thank you so much. Coming from you, I just am so appreciative of your kind words. It really does mean a lot to me. And honestly, my fear is that people won't convert. I know people will pay $5,000 for me to do an hour long workshop. I know that there are certain companies I'm selling to that can afford that price point. I think my fear is that the community that I have here on Clubhouse and beyond, because it was free, I think that that ultimately is my hang-up. I'm like, ooh, would they even be willing to pay 50 bucks a month, which is 500 bucks a year to get something exclusive from me? So it probably is a little bit of a mindset thing. I'm realizing that. You're right. I do provide great value. I have a lot of knowledge and expertise to share. So maybe it is a reframing that needs to happen there.

Chris Do:

Yeah. I know you're a licensed clinical social worker, but I consider you a creative human being. A lot of creatives have a problem with this. We love to do this. We would do this for free all day long. We'd be on Clubhouse, we'd have meetups, we'd do all this, and then one day we wake up and we find we're broke and we're nowhere near where we need to be, and our financial cushion is zero. An emergency is like a career ending emergency for us because we have no money saved up. And we have to start to learn that in business as in life, people show up to pay for something and they expect something back. And if you deliver on your value, which I know you do, I know you do, then there will be no issue.

Nidhi:

Message received. Yes. Okay. Well here it is. Starting today, I will invest energy and time into building this community in the way that I do on every platform. I'm going to give even more and I'll charge 50 bucks for it and let's see what happens. I just really appreciate the boost of confidence and that you believe in me. And so I'm totally going to take it. If you're saying it's workable, let's give it a shot and let's see what happens. And it'll be a cool experiment and I will give 150% to this community. So thank you so, so much for this feedback. Really appreciate it.

Tom Ross:

If I may give a final very quick tip, Nidhi. I would break this up and make it more achievable by setting milestones for how many members you want to get each month and so on. So reverse engineer your 100 members. Because it may be daunting being like, well, I need to convert a hundred people. But over what time period are you happy to do that in? Because if you've got 10 people a month, that really starts to feel much more achievable. And then you can actually track that. So I'm doing this with my community right now. I need to get 10 people on my wait list a week and know that I convert roughly half of them. And so I can track every week, am I getting those 10 people or am I not? Or do I need to get my face out there or do more stuff to grow that wait list? It'll be the same thing for you. You could be midway through the month, be like, I got two people. I need to shout this thing out some more. I need to do some more Clubhouse rooms. I need to go and get in front of other audiences, whatever it might be. But that becomes controllable and you can intentionally work towards this revenue goal that you've just defined with Chris.

Chris Do:

Yeah. And I want to say a couple of things, Nidhi. I want to say one brief message and I'll share a very quick story and I think it's going to relate to something that you had just said. I think you'll be able to figure out what I'm trying to say to you. I was in Geneva doing a talk, and I was nervous. I was just trying to prepare. And my friend Joel Pilger and I were both speakers and we're just in the lobby just writing our talks and trying to run our ideas by each other. And this is the day before we have to give our talk. And I look at him and he looks at me like, we'll be up late tonight, both of us.

And he says something to me. He said, "Chris, I'm going to tell you something that a mentor of mine shared with me that changed the way I look at this." He's like, "Whenever we go up on stage, we think we have to pull the best of what we have to offer on the very top shelf, and we're going to reach for that and it's going to be a little bit out of reach for us and we're going to stress out trying to get that thing off the top shelf." And he said, "You know what he told me, which was you know what, just grab something from the bottom shelf. The stuff that you take for granted, the stuff you already know how to do all the time, you can talk about day and night, and the audience will be thrilled to have whatever's on your bottom shelf. I promise you that."

So when you start this community and you start it for 50 bucks, I heard you say, I'm going to give it 150%. I'm going to just do more than I've ever done. That's wonderful as a mindset, but that's creating this expectation for you that you have to do way more than what you've done. You've already done the good work, and that's evidenced by the 34,000 people who follow you and the people who flood into your rooms when you open up a room. You need, I think less than 10% of the people who follow you here. I didn't do the math yet, but 34,000 ... Is it even 1%? I don't know. I'm not doing the math right now. You don't need that many people. You've already shown up. You've done the good work. What you've done is you've paid it in advance by showing up on Clubhouse and other spaces on a regular basis giving value, and people are looking for a way to give value back to you. You just have to put up a signpost and say, here's where you do that.

Nidhi:

Wow, I'm just taking a second to process because yes, you're right. I was very much gearing myself up to create this, do this, think outside the box, put this together. But you're right. There's so much that's within my wheelhouse that I could easily speak to and do 30 minute, 10, 15 minute talks that would be valuable or whatever post I come up with. And so yes, that is so helpful. I feel very much poured into, and I feel so much more confident now going out there knowing that I've already received people's back channel messages being like, yeah, you'll have no problem with 50 bucks a month. So I feel just inspired to do this, and I'm not going to hold really high expectations of myself. It's instead going to be just producing what people know me to produce and feeling good about that and feeling good charging for that. So thank you both so much. This has really been honestly transformational, and I will be thinking about this and processing it for the next little bit here. So thank you.

Chris Do:

And great. Nidhi, and you've done a lot for me so I'll do what I can for you. If you have other questions, practical things, I'll be more than happy to answer them privately in DMs or we can have a call and I'll just tell you what we're doing. Okay?

Nidhi:

Yes.

Chris Do:

And I want to give one last little tip to everybody here. If you're thinking about creating a paid community, find one that's similar to the one that you want to create and just join it. Sit there for a month and a half and just do opposition research. Figure out how they have things set up. How was the onboarding process? And make a sheet of notes. Things that they do well, things that they do poorly and things that they do but can be improved. And just use that as just research money. And you do need to do something like that. And I think you will learn a lot from sitting in someone else's community that's got a similar vibe and style as to what you want to create. Maybe a different topic, but just do that research. Okay, Jeremy, great question. Can you say it for the audience please?

Jeremy :

Yeah. Absolutely. And good to see you as always. Nidhi just left. I was going to ask this mostly on her behalf, but this will be really beneficial for the entire audience as well. Someone like Nidhi, someone like myself and what I've seen from you as well, givers. There's so many apps now with Clubhouse and with Instagram as well where you can give out your free time so much. And you heard her say it, we all heard her say it, I'm going to go 150%. I know you talked about this, but I'm going to go 150% really going to give more and have some exclusive content. And my question to you, which was, well, shoot, if she's going to continue to give, is there going to be enough for exclusive content? So as a giver, do you need to take away some of that free time and make yourself a little more exclusive in order to create that community? [inaudible 01:07:52].

Tom Ross:

That is a good question. It's also something that I'm currently contending with Jeremy so excellent timing.

Chris Do:

We all are, by the way.

Tom Ross:

Oh yeah. I know Chris hates this as well. I could write a book on what I hate about sleazy internet marketers, but probably the thing I hate most is that they sell people on the what and the why and they never divulge the how. And you go down this endless rabbit hole. I saw one recently. They're literally there being like, "And in a moment I'm going to drop the value." And it never came until the very end. And they're like, and if you sign up for this thing over here, then I'm going to unlock the value. And if you go down that rabbit hole, they're going to dangle the next thing and then they're going to unlock the value. And the thing is, there is no value. They're just trying to extort money from you, and it drives me crazy. So I'm assuming that no one in this room is like that. So if you're like Chris and I and you genuinely bringing value, this is a real conundrum, because you've got to provide some exclusive value within your community, but you want to keep showing up for your free people.

So one way that I do this is I will give some of the value from within my community, but I won't give it quite as in-depth, but it will still be extremely valuable. So for example, if I give a 90-minute workshop for my community members, then a ten-slide carousel on Instagram is never going to be able to capture as much detail, but it doesn't mean it can't be extremely good content and extremely helpful on that platform. So that would be one thing. Another thing which I mentioned before, I'm going to be sharing in-depth case studies of what people have learned and how they've used that and how it's transformed their communities. And the idea there is that that's unique to them.

So whilst I'm giving away some of the value that's happened in that community, it's actually going to entice people who want to show up, who want that for them, for their journey, because it's going to be different for every single member. And then finally, I think much of the value can be derived in terms of access. I know there's a ton of access in my community and in Chris's where yes, people can show up and learn broadly some of the same ideas. And in fact, this is super meta, Jeremy. A lot of what I shared today, I've been half reading from some previous presentations that I've given in my community, so I'm sharing some of the same ideas. But the difference is that in my community, there's extended Q&A at the end. We can screen share, we can actually dig into each other's communities, and people can ask follow-up questions in the forum, and members can help one another. So you see the difference? I'm sharing a lot of the same information, but it's not quite as comprehensive. It doesn't have quite the same level of access. You're not going to be able to refer back to this Clubhouse call after the fact, et cetera, et cetera. So that's how I'm doing it, but Chris, I'd love to hear your thoughts because you're in a similar boat.

Chris Do:

I am in the same boat and we're both drowning in our own boats. So there's two people who create a lot of content. Let's just be clear. And this is going out to everyone in the back. Whoever's here right now, just pay attention to this part. If you're on Clubhouse and you're hosting rooms, you have the exact same problem that Jeremy had asked, which is if you show up and you give all of yourself, what is there left for people to show up and pay you for? This is a conundrum. And the alternative to this, which is what Tom already said, is we get caught in these upselling loops. And you see it happen all the time. Join this small thing to get to the next thing, and they're just upselling you until they bleed you dry. And so we're here as an antithesis to that because we want to be able to genuinely give 100% away of what it is that we know.

We're going to put this all into one category. We're going to call this the loss-leader. And as you know, this is a term I think that was used in grocery stores where they sell you things at a loss like milk, because you walk all the way from the front of the store to the back of the store to buy the milk and on your way there, you're going to pick up chips and you're going to pick up all kinds of things. And that's a loss-leader. I want you to look at you showing up every day on social platforms where you're freely giving away your knowledge as a loss-leader. Now you have to have something to capture that loss-leader, otherwise it's just a loss. What are people going to pick up? And you'll be surprised. Because if you keep showing up and you keep giving value in a generous way without any expectations, without being some cheesy salesperson, it's not a giant marketing funnel. Life is not a giant marketing funnel. People will show up for you.

Case in point, Jennifer Robin was here. She wanted to buy Tom and myself a cup of coffee, so she sent me money. She couldn't send Tom any money because Tom doesn't have monetization turned on. People do this willingly, freely as an expression of their gratitude. And here's what you don't realize too sometimes. People pay for convenience. So you do a hundred calls on Clubhouse, it's a lot to track down. And it's not always on a time of their convenience. They could have been driving, they could have been busy being a parent So they don't catch everything and they can't replay it. They will pay for convenience and I know this because we did multiple episodes with Blair Enns over the course of seven ... Or no, actually it was ... I don't know, 12 proclamations, So 12 Nights of the Win Without Pitching Manifesto. Even though people sat in for all that, they bought the books. This is how it works.

Now, most of us in a normal society, we're built around cooperation. We don't want to just take, we don't want to be moochers. When we feel like we get something of value, we feel imbalanced so we need to give that value back. It doesn't always work out to be one-to-one. You might give back and buy a book, or you might just give back by helping someone else and that's totally fine too. So people will pay for convenience when it's collected, organized, and grouped together in a way that makes sense. They'll pay for that. People will pay for access. Clubhouse happens on your time. Instagram happens on your time. But if they're scheduled calls or things that work on the time of your audience who shows up ... They want access to you. They would love to be able to ask Nidhi a direct question and not have to work through a 45-minute conversation. They will pay for that. People will pay to be around other people. This is a strange concept, but once I explain it, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

Yes, you'll start a community. They'll join to be there with you, Tom, or with Jeremy or Cassandra or Isabel or anyone else. But then they get to meet all these other people who have common cause, belief, purpose, interests. And my business coach told me this many years ago. He said, "The person you want to meet is two people away from the people you already know." So you're two people away from the person you want to meet. And people call this networking. Networking has a really strange vibe and a feeling for a lot of people because it feels artificial. But my friend, Anneli Hansson, who's a brand strategist, she told me the other day, "I'm so grateful for this community you've built. Where else could I meet Christine Loose or Petrula Vrontikis and Heather Crank?" You draw these people to you and they find friendship and professional relationships within the community you've built. So when Tom said at the very beginning of this conversation that happened an hour and a half ago, community is that space where many to many conversations can happen and you don't even have to be a part of that. All you've done is to create space to bring people together with like-minded individuals with common interests and goals and purpose, and the magic happens in there. And yes, people will pay for that. Jeremy, I hope that answered your question.

Jeremy :

Yeah. It doesn't sound like you're drowning in that boat though. You did a pretty good job.

Chris Do:

But I always wonder, this is the grass is greener, right? Where it's like, I wonder if I just drip fed and just pull back everything that we do for free on all our platforms, what would happen to our business? And it's a fantasy. I don't think I'll ever know the answer to that, but I'll just leave it on that. And so with that, I want to thank everybody for joining our call today. If you want to find out more about Tom, Tom, what can they do? And I know you're opening up your program in two months. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Tom Ross:

So if you go to my profile on Clubhouse, you can check out my Instagram, et cetera. My free book is at communitymanual.com, and I promise it actually has a ton of value. It's not just a sucker you in type thing. And if you're interested in joining my community for community builders, you can go to Learn.community. I still love that domain. It makes me super happy. It will show you a login page, and there will be a little line of text saying, click here if you want to join the wait list. And if you do that, we'll reach out and have a conversation and see if it's a good fit from all sides. But again, Chris, this was super fun. Thank you, mate.

Stewart Schuster:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Stewart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barrow for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborne for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris, and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.