How to make $10k/month from a community - Jordan Godbey

Maybe you feel really misunderstood because everyone around you in your day job loves the day job. You can't speak badly about it. You can't say, I want to leave and do my own thing. But in this private online community, you can. What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and Jordan Godby. Now, Jordan specializes in helping creators start, build and monetize thriving online communities. And so in this interview, we talk all about what it takes to build a thriving online community.

and how you could potentially be making $10,000 a month and even beyond from an online community. A lot of us know what we need to do. We just need to sit down and do it. So how do we create an environment and opportunity for people just to sit down and do the work?

And that alone provides massive value for people. We talk about the pros and cons of online community as a business model. And we talk about a bunch of things to consider if you are trying to make money and trying to build this sort of thriving online community business. There will be times in there that it's going to get really hard.

Maybe you only actually want to give up in the moment because you actually said, I want to achieve that thing, but there will be times where it becomes uncomfortable. And so if your goal as the creator is to truly help people, then you're going to have to help them through those hard moments as well.

All right, Jordan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, man. It's great to be here. This is going to be fun. So we are going to give people apparently a roadmap for how a normal person can get to $10,000 a month. through online communities. Now, this seems

I did an episode with Jay Klaus and I was a little bit like, that was more like a coaching session where he sort of coached me on what we do with Productivity Lab. But I kind of want this to be imagining we've got someone who's like a normal person. Let's say me when I was 26 and I had a day job.

And I'm like, oh, you know, I enjoy the job, but I would love to build some sort of business on the side. And this goal of $10,000 a month seems to be a thing, at least on YouTube, where people feel like, okay, if I can get a 10K a month, I'll be able to comfortably quit my job. And probably most people listening to this, if you could make $10,000 a month with a side business, you know, you probably feel like, damn, yeah, maybe I could quit my job and have freedom and all that fun stuff.

How does someone get to 10K a month using a community? Like, where do we start? Yeah. So a lot of times I see people just coming up with an idea and they're like, would this work? Could I make $10,000 a month using this idea? And that's not really the best way to do it, right? You have an idea in search of a problem or in search of someone's dollars. And what you really want is to solve a problem that already exists.

And when you do that, you can very easily put value to that and sell people on that. Okay. You want to solve a problem that already exists. Okay, because a lot of people will be listening to this thinking, okay, well, I mean, I've heard of dropshipping. I've heard of affiliate sites. I've heard of...

I was selling an online course. Ali Abdaal talked about his YouTuber academies. I mean, maybe I can make it big by being a YouTuber. But increasingly, they might have seen Alex Hormozy sort of convincing everyone that the best way to get to 10K a month is to start an online community on school. or something like what What's up with that sort of messaging? It's a little obfuscating the real issue here.

I feel that community is now the new hot topic that everyone is talking about and the right platform and how much to charge. But community by itself doesn't actually solve any problems. It's not just a magic bullet or magic wand. You know how there's always been a trend of like affiliate marketing, drop shipping, like all of these things. And so people get into it because it feels a bit like a get rich quick scheme or some type of.

thing that you can run without needing to have a whole lot of skills or experience. And so with community. transparency there in terms of you working with your members inside your community. So if you don't actually have something valuable to offer them, they're going to find that out very, very quickly. So community does not just magically solve a problem.

It is a vehicle for you to be able to deliver the value that you have, the experience that you have. So maybe you're a coach or maybe you are a course creator. And you've realized, okay, well, with my course, there are some inherent issues. Things like nobody finishes the course. Okay, that's a problem. Why? Well, because all of the people are disconnected and isolated. And so they're trying to do a very hard thing all by themselves.

And it's hard to do hard things all on your own. So the community then starts to add more value to the thing that you are already helping them with, which is solving a problem through your course. So by itself, the community isn't just some magic container that's going to create value. So if someone has no experience with any business thing and they've just got a day job, to what extent would you recommend community as being the vehicle that gets them to 10K months?

Okay, so let's talk about the options that they would have, right? So community, to me, is a bit... overused and under under understood misunderstood right so it's actually not one thing i see them as several different options. And so community is almost like saying, I want to start an online business. Okay. It's like, how do I make 10K a month with an online business? Like, well, what kind of online business?

Is this a dropshipping company? Is this a YouTube channel? What are we talking about here? Are you building a software product? Very, very different routes and very different requirements, right? So inside of community... There are two main value drivers. There's the connection side, which is bringing people together and the value comes from the members. And then there's curriculum.

where you're taking people through a process and you're taking them on a journey. Yeah. So for someone listening to this who might not have already drunk the community Kool-Aid. What is an online community? Are we talking like a Facebook group? Are we talking like an email list? Are we talking like trying to bring people together in real life? Like, yeah. What are we talking about? Great question.

Community, like I said, is very overused and it's very trendy right now. So humans have been in communities forever since the beginning of time. So it's nothing new, but what is new here is the online aspect of it. Okay. So I think it's important to talk about what is the difference between audience and community. A lot of people say, I already have a big community on LinkedIn. It's like, no, you really don't. You have some followers, you have an audience, but it's not a community.

For me, community requires you to be a bit more bought in. You've actually opted into something or maybe you've purchased something or you've signed up and you've said, I want to be a member or a part of that group. And so until... recently, the last few years, there hasn't really been any dedicated software platforms dedicated to community. And now there are. So that's what we're really talking about is creating a private space

that is online, that is dedicated and designed just to facilitate member to member interaction for you to engage with them, for you to deliver resources, curriculum, all that kind of stuff. Why would someone pay for a community? It seems like a bit of a scam. Well, I think we pay for communities all the time, right? Like we join private newsletters or private groups.

We want to get access to people or we want to get access to information. So maybe you're joining a club. And so we're doing those things on a regular basis, whether it's local, you're joining like a religious group or maybe a sports league or fantasy football, right? people want to be brought together with other people that have shared interests, shared visions, shared challenges, but even shared goals.

And so communities could be people who are trying to quit their nine to five and become an entrepreneur. So it's like maybe you feel really misunderstood because everyone around you and your day job loves the day job. You can't speak badly about it. You can't say I want to leave and do my own thing.

But in this private online community, you can because you can be surrounded by people that think exactly the way you do. They read the same books. They watch the same YouTube videos. And so there's that sense of connection and support. But then also if that community is being led by someone who's doing what you want to be doing, you're essentially having that mentor and mentorship relationship or a coach relationship where...

you can be sharing what you're doing on a regular basis. So you're like, hey, I'm trying to implement the things you're teaching and it's not working. Then you can actually get support versus you just read a book and if you can't figure it out, well, you're out of luck. Okay, cool. So like I'm thinking...

You know, this was the thought that we had a few years ago now, actually, when we launched our course, the YouTuber Academy. And my team talked me into having a community with it because I was like, ah, who cares about community? Because to me, like an online community is... Like, I don't really care. I feel like I've already got too much shit going on in my life. And I know enough people in real life now who do stuff. And real life is probably better than online.

But then I was really surprised that people seemed to freaking love the community. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And then six months ago, when we were thinking of launching Productivity Lab, Initially, it was going to be a $300 course. And then my team again said, hey, we should really make this a community. And I was like, nah, come on.

No one, no one wants community. Turns out people really want community now that we've launched the thing. And, you know, I kind of got talked into it by my team who did a load of market research. So we mentioned that there is a few different types of online community. Online community is sort of like online business. Like what are the different types and how should someone be thinking about this?

And I think the important thing to think about too is we all realize through the pandemic and everything, how isolated and lonely we can all be and how disconnected. And so it's a place to go to hang out, right? Where you're not just going there to get entertainment, but to really be understood, to be supported.

and to not feel so alone and isolated and so sometimes when you're trying to do a really hard thing the first step is actually that mental step of even believing it's possible right because if you don't believe something is truly possible you know we all see superstars and we see famous people and it's like, yeah, they could do it, but is this really possible for me?

Getting into that community puts you in very close proximity with people that are either doing what you want to be doing or also striving for it. And so it makes it feel a lot more tangible and a lot more realistic and probable. So let's talk about what those four different types are, right?

So we've got the two drivers we've talked about. So we've got connection or curriculum. So you want to be thinking about if you're starting a community, where's the value coming from? Is it coming from simply bringing a lot of disconnected people together? And that could be.

definitely a value driver, or is it coming from teaching someone and helping them achieve a very specific outcome? So if you've done something in your life that other people want to learn how to do, and if you can turn that into a roadmap and a curriculum and a course. doing that inside of a community supercharges that okay

So within each of those two buckets, there is a low ticket option and a high ticket option. And that is going to dictate the way that you're going to run and facilitate the community and the experience inside. And what is like, what numbers are we talking for low ticket and high ticket? Low ticket, I would say anything under typically $1,000 or something like $100 per month. Oh, okay, cool. So under $100 a month would be low ticket and over $100 a month would be high ticket. I mean, ours is...

$97 a month. So I guess you would call Productively Lab Low Ticket. Lowish ticket? It's lowish, right? But you're charging it up front, aren't you? Yeah. A thousand for the year or like nine and seven for the year or whatever it is. Yeah. So yours is a bit interesting and we can get into that because I feel that you're charging low ticket on the price, but you're actually delivering high ticket on the experience.

And so we can kind of talk about what those two... Thank you. We'll clip that out and post it as a testimonial. Differences look like... Low ticket on the price, high ticket on the experience. Okay, cool. Yeah, so four different types. Yeah, so... On the connection side, on the low ticket, we have peer communities, right? So it sounds like what it is.

Hey, we all have a similar interest, a similar goal, a similar dream. Let's get all together and we can talk about it. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. It's unstructured, but we know that by bringing all these people together.

something good is going to happen. Okay. So let's do like, I don't know, a community for people who really enjoy Brandon Sanderson's books and do that for like $9 a month. Sure. Yeah. Cool. I would join that community. I'll be like sick. It's like a bit nicer than the forums because it's paid rather than free. I would join that community. Why would you join that community? Why would I join that community? Because it's cheap enough that... Why would I join the community?

Okay, so for me, the thing that I get value from is a saving time. And so if I can join a community for $9 a month or $100 a year, and it's people who are Brandon Sanderson fans, I'm a big Brandon Sanderson fan, and they are people who are giving me book recommendations for like what next to read. That means now I'm using the small amount of time I have to read fantasy fiction to read the good stuff.

rather than the less good stuff or something to that effect. Perfect. Okay. So they have just, you've essentially bought your time back, bought your life back. You don't have to read books that are no good. They're giving you the shortcut, right? So that is one of the themes that you want to be thinking about to whether it's on the connection or the curriculum side. No one wants more stuff, more information, more whatever. They just want a shortcut to their goal. So it sounds like your goal was.

I want to read really good fantasy fiction, the good stuff and kind of avoid all the others. Yeah. And plus, I think if I were part of this community and people were doing like... I don't know, in-depth analyses of the scene, the prologue from book five and stuff, which has only just been released. I'd be like, oh yeah, I want to get all over that. Because it would just be kind of cool to go deeper in my love for Brandon Sanderson, but also to save time with recommendations for other resources.

values that that community would be providing for you would also be this outlet to have these really deep, nerdy conversations with people that maybe you can't have anywhere else in your life, right? Because no one else reads that. Now you're completely surrounded by all of these fans and you guys can all nerd out together and feel super cool. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, exactly. Super cool is a strong word, but yeah.

So another example, actually, that works really well when you have a large audience. So if you're an author and you've written lots of books and you've got millions of fans and followers, you can do that low ticket $10 a month community and it can work reasonably well. Cool. Okay.

So another example would be a B2B marketing community, right? Let's bring everyone together. So Exit5, Dave Gerhardt, he runs a B2B marketing community. He's done a lot in the B2B world. And so a lot of people have followed him for many, many years. And he's like, hey.

Let's have a community where we can all talk about cutting edge B2B marketing stuff and AI and whatever. But there's no expectation that you're going to take courses or that he's going to show up and do all of the teaching. It's simply a private place where we can talk about things off of LinkedIn. maybe a bit more sensitive, a bit more niche, a bit more cutting edge. And it's going to be higher quality. And so...

That's a very easy one to set up because you essentially bring people together and say, okay, you guys talk. unknown or low. So how much would that be? So he's charging $30 a month. So a little bit higher, but we're talking low ticket, right? So then if we were to take that to the highest end, That would be a proximity community. Okay. And so proximity community is going to be higher ticket, something like.

$1,000 even a month. Really? Yeah. $1,000 a month. So I did one and it is a mastermind. So I would say masterminds are proximity communities. And the whole idea is you are getting very close with a smaller group of people and you're meeting much more frequently. Okay. And so you're getting access to other very high quality vetted people, whether that's business owners or whatever it might be.

Or you're getting access to the leader there, the coach, someone that you want to develop a relationship or get direct feedback and coaching from. Sure. So if I were to start a mastermind type group where I was doing, I don't know, weekly or twice weekly Zoom calls. I'd be charging a thousand dollars a month, if not more for that. Yeah. Um, so what community, yeah. What mastermind are you paying a thousand dollars a month for? It's called seven figure leap.

So it's ran by a guy named Dustin Reekman. And there's 20 people in there. So you don't have to have tons and tons of clients or customers. He doesn't have a very large audience, but he's able to provide a lot of value. So he has a AM group and a PM group that meet. every thursday yep 10 people in each and we know each other so well and we show up

And the goal is that we are solving the next problem in our business. So we don't know what that's going to be. And that's going to look a little bit different for everyone. And so some weeks you may not actually have a problem, but you're showing up for the other people.

And everyone is just jamming on that one person's main issue and helping them have a breakthrough and get clarity. And then next week you're like, oh, now I'm really stuck on something. Can I get feedback? And the amount of help that you can get is so potent in such a short period of time that it's extremely valuable. Interesting. So is the guy who runs this, is he like, considered a mentor or expert here? Or is he just the guy that brought people together?

I would say he's also considered the expert and mentor, but... Much of the time, the value is from the other members. He provides amazing value himself, but it's really a collective experience. Okay. So that's sort of like a... So you're paying $1,000 a month purely to be in a Zoom call with 10 other people who are also paying $1,000 a month? Not in a Zoom call, but in a community. And so we do the Zoom call once a week, but then a lot of times...

the light bulb goes off after the Zoom ends and it's like, oh, I had this thought, I had this idea. And so in those types of programs that only meet on Zoom, as soon as Zoom ends, it's pure disconnection again for seven more days. There's no more interaction. All the momentum dies. Right. And so it's like, how do we continue the momentum? And the community acts as a connective tissue between all of those events.

And so now I can go post something and 24 hours later, two other people can respond to it and help me move forward. Sure. Okay. So we've got peer communities, which is low ticket. Only really works if you already have a big audience. So that cuts me when I was 26 out. We've got proximity community, which is the higher ticket thing.

which I feel probably cuts me when I was 26 out because I had nothing of value to share. At least that's what I thought. Would you say that's roughly accurate? Yes, I would say. Like for peer community to work, you need to have a big audience. For proximity to work, you need to have expertise. Yes, proximity communities are one of the hardest to sell.

Because you need to have a lot of trust first. You need to almost have sampled value from that person previously before you're ready to spend that amount of money to be closer to them. Because the outcome is quite unknown. Right. And so with Dustin, I actually first joined his transformational community, which we'll talk about.

It's called Podcast Profit Accelerator. And so it was a very clear outcome of like, OK, I want to get booked on a bunch of podcasts. Well, he has a system and a formula to do that. So I paid for that program, which.

I got to know him. I got to like him. I'm like, wow, this guy has a lot of great advice and coaching. And so after I graduated, it was a 90 day program. He was like, hey, you can hang out every single week and get even more coaching and advice with all these other people who have also graduated.

in the mastermind. And I was like, yes, let's do that. A lot of people might be listening to this and thinking, wow, this Dustin guy is such a scammer because he's getting you in with like a cheap thing. And then he's upselling you on the expensive thing. What's up with that? Is Dustin a scammer? No. Not at all. But the first thing was not a cheap thing either. He sold me from the expensive thing to the more expensive thing. So the first program was $10,000.

And that was the most that I've ever paid for anything. But the promise here was that he was going to 10x. the value that I am getting back from the program versus what I paid. And so what he's creating is a, for me as an entrepreneur, a lead pipeline, right? And so there's only so many ways to get leads.

podcasts that have my audience where I can speak to them for an hour and explain what I do and build trust and all of that stuff sounds like a pretty good strategy. And I did not know the first step in doing that in an efficient way, right? In a systematized way. And so He's done that many, many times for himself, which is actually one of the first steps. One of the best ways people might say, what are your credentials or how do you have the authority to do this?

Well, go and get results for yourself first. That is the first step is actually achieve something. And then if you can help one other person achieve it. then you start to systematize it and do it over and over. So by the time I met Dustin, I think he was on his eighth or ninth cohort that has 10 plus people inside of each one. So he's helped more than 100 people do this. And the results were there.

One of his episodes, he actually ran a few different businesses. One of them was a meat sticks company. Meat sticks. Yeah, like snacks, protein, meat sticks. And he did a bunch of podcasts. He ended up getting picked up by Walmart and getting put into thousands of stores to sell his Meats disk, which was more than a seven-figure contract. And so it's very...

possible and plausible that that would work for you because it worked for him. And based on your product and what you're selling, the results could be enormous. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So you called that a transformational community. Yes. Is that number three in our list? Technically number four. Oh, cool. What's number three? Number three is the community-powered course. So switching over to the curriculum side of things, the low ticket is the community-powered course. Okay.

So I think a lot of us have taken online courses by now, right? A lot of us have also signed up for online courses and we've never completed them. Some of us have bought them and never even logged into them. and they're sitting on our digital shelves collecting dust.

they're very exciting right the promise the sales page you can learn how to do xyz depending on what phase you're in in life you're like that sounds really cool i would love to learn how to record youtube videos and edit them myself even though i don't really have any intention or need to do that but it sounds really interesting

So the problem with online courses is that very, very few people actually complete them and even fewer people implement them and get the results. So as a course creator, if you truly. have this expertise and have this passion to teach others and help others. And you're putting all of your time and effort into making the best course ever. And you realize like maybe 1% of your customers are getting the results. That kind of sucks.

So there's a better way, right? And so the better way is by delivering a community powered course. So putting that course inside of a community and making it interactive. Okay. What you really want to focus on is implementation with your students. Okay. Nobody needs more information. We want a shortcut. And so even like in Productivity Lab, I think one of the core hypotheses was a lot of us know what we need to do. We just need to sit down and do it.

So how do we create an environment and opportunity for people just to sit down and do the work? And that alone provides massive value for people. Because it's accountability. It's like showing up to the gym and doing your pushups in front of the trainer at 6 a.m. when you could do them at home by yourself, but for some reason.

Some people choose not to, they choose to pay someone else to sit there and watch them count the reps. I paid a guy to watch the reps this morning at eight o'clock and it meant I did leg day. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened. Exactly. So a lot of times, yes, we need to teach people stuff, but.

We don't need to teach them as much as we think we need to teach them. We need to just help them implement. A lot of times people are just afraid to take action or they watch the video. It sounds so simple and easy when you're explaining it and you're showing how to do it. And then when I go to do it.

I get stuck or it didn't work exactly like I thought it would. Now what? If you're all by yourself sitting in your room, reading the textbook, what are you supposed to do? How do you get unstuck? Got it. Okay, so it sounds like, so we've got these four types of communities. We've got peer communities, low ticket, proximity communities, high ticket, peer-to-peer.

course power community powered courses which is low-ish low ticket um courses and then transformational community which is high ticket yes which is sort of the same thing which is smaller people and therefore more hand-holding to help you get that transformation Yeah, I would say it's like a community powered course on steroids. So it's my favorite of the four because it produces such good outcomes. So a transformational course.

has a very clear, specific finish line. So you know when you have crossed it. And you are paying typically a lot of money, maybe $3,000, $5,000, up to $10,000. And so there is a lot of support there for you. There could be daily calls, there could be coaches, accountability partners. community managers, people that you can check in with to get unstuck, but who also will be checking in with you if you disappear. So let's talk about an example of transformational communities.

PGA or Premium Ghostwriting Academy from Dickie Bush and Nicholas Cole. Yeah, he was on the pod for round two like yesterday. Awesome. Yeah, coincidentally. So when you sign up for this program, there is one outcome. You will become a premium ghostwriter, which is something that they have coined and they have. created. Right. And so what that means is you're going to be able to sell a educational email course for a price point and find clients and dah, dah, dah, dah. Okay.

If you are going through this program and you just all of a sudden ghost and disappear, they will follow up with you. They will email, they will DM. And what I've heard from them listening to their pod and how they're talking about their program is. They are very aggressive at that follow-up. And there's kind of a concern there of like, oh, are we going to piss people off? We're going to annoy them. But 90 plus percent of the time.

Students, members, customers are so grateful that somebody cares and that somebody is checking in. And the reaction is almost always, yeah, I've been really busy. Sorry. Thanks a lot for checking in. I'll be on the call on Wednesday. And so if you're someone who really cares about your students' success and you want to make sure that.

you know, you're getting great testimonials and case studies, then people need to show up. And so if they feel like they don't have any skin in the game, there's no consequences, nobody cares, nobody is looking for them, then you're going to have a lot of people who just disengage.

So that's the thing I like about transformational communities is because people are paying more, they're psychologically more motivated, more bought in. So they want to get the results. But then you have the resources to provide a world-class experience to help them get the results. Oh, by the way, quick thing. In case you are interested in starting and or growing and or monetizing a YouTube channel, then you might like to check out my part-time YouTuber Academy.

It is a course that has dozens and dozens of hours of content in it, along with templates and worksheets and resources that basically open source absolutely everything that me and my team have learned about growing my YouTube channel and also this podcast YouTube channel over the last seven plus years.

So you can check that out at academy.aliabdhal.com. That'll be linked down below in the video description and the show notes as well. Feel free to check out the part-time YouTuber Academy. Sounds to me that community, any of these four... Any of these for flavors of community. This is not a beginner-friendly online business to start. Because it sounds like peer communities, if they're low ticket, require a big audience, which is not beginner friendly. Proximity communities require expertise.

which is probably not beginner-friendly unless you already have expertise. Maybe you've been, I don't know, RevOps for three different tech startups, and now you want to build a community of RevOps people. Okay, cool. You've done something, and now you're building a community around the thing that you've already done.

Community-powered course, well, it's really hard to build a business setting online courses if you don't know, if you don't have any value to add. And Transformation Community, that sounds even harder. Would that be fair to say, or am I...

Am I not giving the beginners enough credit that they could feasibly make 10k a month with these online communities? Because Hormozy is certainly giving the impression that beginners could make 10k a month. All you have to do is sign up to school and suddenly you're making all this money. Am I missing something? Or like, yeah, what's going on here? No, I don't think you're missing something. The reality is that there's just no silver bullet, right? There's no magical hack.

that if you just sign up for this software tool, you're going to make magic internet money. That's what we all want. God damn it. The retention of this podcast episode is just tanked. Sorry, everybody. So I'm a fan of doing real things for real people and creating real value and helping people achieve transformations in their life. When you are all in on that and you're willing to...

put your name out there and be committed to that communities work really, really well because it's bringing people together and you can't really hide. You can't really fake it. Okay, I like that. Yeah, so Productivity Lab is a community. We're transitioning our YouTuber Academy from just being a course. A course with, in brackets, this sort of a community on the back end. into really a proper community thing, most likely, fingers crossed.

I've got a friend, Izzy, who's a YouTuber. I've done a couple of collab videos on her channel. She does videos helping people learn Mandarin, and she's just released a self-paced course that teaches you how to self-study Mandarin.

I was kind of saying to her, have you considered doing a community? Because I'd be keen to learn Mandarin. There's no way in hell I'm actually going to go through the course. But if I was part of a community that was having weekly calls and there was a bit of an accountability.

I would probably pay quite a lot of money for that if I was genuinely motivated to learn Mandarin Chinese. And she was kind of like, oh, but it's a lot of work. It's like, you know, I like the idea of a course being a one and done thing with, you know, passive income, hashtag passive income.

These community things sound like quite a lot of work. It does sound like quite a lot of work, doesn't it? Yeah. And is it? I mean, I guess you always have to work to make money and even passive income isn't truly passive. I think there's very few passive income mechanisms that will work, especially for beginners and especially as their first thing. For me, I think active income is the way to start. And eventually, once you've built up enough

Following, expertise, notoriety, whatever it might be, you can find ways to productize it and turn it into passive. But the dream of just...

putting up some type of website or finding some kind of app that's just going to start paying you money passively. It's just not very realistic. I've never met anyone that's been able to do that. Yeah. That's really the myth that I think... still people believe that there is in fact a magic bullet to 10 to get to 10k a month yeah and every time i do these podcasts we title them how to make 10k a month as a writer oh shit it's work how to make 10k a month as a service agency

Oh, yeah, it's work. How to make 10k a month of the community. Yeah, it's work. Good luck. You got to work to make money. I've never found anyone who's been able to become very successful without working very hard. Yeah. So with communities, it's the exact same thing. But there is a good side. So it doesn't have to consume you. It doesn't have to consume your entire life.

That was actually something that Justin Welsh had reached out to me about. So he had been running a community a couple of years ago, and it had been great for the members because they were able to get access to Justin and ask him lots of questions and get help and support. But for just inside of things, it was a bit consuming, a bit stressful, a bit chaotic.

I think partly because of the tool, the way it was set up was just kind of a chat feed sort of environment. So it's very unstructured and everyone's just piling in. And so it's like you wake up and there's 100 messages in a row. And then everyone tagging you. And so you've got all of these DMs plus the direct messages.

So the other side, it's the expectations of when you're actually selling and launching this, what are you selling and what is the value? So when people don't think through it enough, they just say, oh, I'm launching a community for productivity. Sign up here. Here's how much it costs. And they would think, oh, great. So I'm getting access to Ali and he's going to answer all my productivity questions. And you're thinking, no, that's that's not at all what it's going to be like.

So if you don't set those expectations, you can have a really hard time. So he did that for a while. That ended up ending. And a few years later, fast forward, he released a course earlier this year called Creator MBA. And he pulled his audience and he said, what would make this course really, really awesome? And the number one thing that came back from everyone was community. And he said, oh no, not again. Okay. Everyone wants another community.

And so when he reached out to me, he was like, I want to do this but I want to do it differently than we did it before. I don't want this to be the Justin Welsh show where everyone just gets in line every single day and I wake up and there's a hundred messages that I have to answer. How do we make this a calm?

easy community that is not going to fully consume me, but it's going to create a lot of value for people. And so part of it was just in the expectations. We said, hey, this is a community only for customers of the creator of MBA. So you're going through the course. This is a peer community where you get to talk to one another. Share what you're working on. Ask for feedback. You know, show us your work.

And then Justin is going to have a few structured events inside the community. So he'll do a monthly Q&A and everyone submits their questions ahead of time to give him time to prepare a proper answer, research it, show examples. And so for two hours, it's a very high quality event that everyone attends.

But then outside of that, his participation is really seen as like a bonus. So he's been able to spend three to five hours a week and still add massive value to the community. And it's not taking over his whole life. Nice. Do you know how much money he made from this? I think he was open about it on Twitter. I think, was it like one million plus?

I believe so. Yeah, because he tweeted something because we used him as an example in a video that I released like yesterday. I think he's up to like seven and a half million in lifetime earnings from his course. courses business over the last like several years um which is pretty cool yeah okay so community powered uh sorry community as a business model not for the faint-hearted But I think in a world where it sounds like it's a good addition to the...

I feel like we need a name for this. We tried to make the name Creatopreneur happen, like the Creatopreneur stack. But I think there's something around like the online teacher, the online thought leader, the online educator or something to that effect that sounds a bit less shit than that.

In that stack, there is currently, well, I make videos and I get them sponsored. I make an online course. I do one-on-one coaching. And it sounds like, well, recurring revenue membership community of some sort. either as a community-powered course, a transformational community, a proximity community, i.e. a must-mind, or a peer community. Those are also now options that online thought-leadery type people have under their belt. Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it?

Or do you think I'm being too niche with saying that, well, it feels like communities are the thing for like the online thought leader-y type people? I think what communities unlock for those types of people is more leverage. So it's a monetization vehicle and it's a way to serve more people at the same time. So instead of doing one-on-one consulting...

create a group program. And that group program would be inside the community. Because I think a lot of people might have the perception that one-on-one is the highest value that you can get from someone. But it's actually more valuable to be in a small, intimate group with that.

expert because you get to hear what the other members are thinking and what the other members are asking. And many times other people will ask even better questions than you are. And you're thinking, oh, damn, that's a really good question. Yeah, I should be thinking about that. Or I'm just going to listen to the answer and implement that. So many times what we've seen like in our program is people will show up for the weekly calls.

And I'll do a quick check-in in the beginning to see who has an immediate problem or a question that we need to tackle this week. And some people are like, no, I'm just here to kind of listen to the conversation, hang out, hear what you guys are up to. I'm working on my business, but I don't have an immediate problem. I just want to be in the room.

Because there aren't very many other places that you get to have these types of conversations. Yeah, I would pay a lot to join a community of seven-figure entrepreneurs all trying to scale to eight. And I'd probably just hang out and chill on most of these calls, maybe while going for a walk, just to absorb the sorts of things that people are asking. Because even if I don't have directly a question for, I don't know, call Gordon or whatever the thing might be, it's like...

the fact that other people are asking those sorts of questions. And we find this when I do Q&As for our YouTuber Accelerator program.

Most of the call doesn't actually ask a question. They're just sort of hanging out and listening in. And sometimes they'll have a video off. Sometimes they'll have it on. They might be doing something else, but it's like... hear from, you know, Ali Abdaal giving people specific YouTube advice and often people, oh, actually that thing he said to person X actually really helps me.

And people really value live over prerecorded, right? Even if it's the best information in the world recorded yesterday, there's something about getting to be on a live call with you today. Because it's just more real time. I can ask a question. I can get specific advice and feedback from you directly. And so if we're on a call, if you're running a call for an hour and I get three minutes of your time to ask a question and have you respond back.

That's massive value. And so I might be paying $1,000 a year or $1,000 a month for that. And for that to happen a few times and to give me an unlock in my business. it more than pays for the entire membership. Nice. So let's talk about Productivity Lab. So we worked with you to get Productivity Lab off of the ground. So thank you for all the help on that front. You're welcome. What about the process would be interesting for listeners, do you think?

I guess I'm sort of inside the bottle, so I don't really like... Yeah. I think we should talk about the design phase. Okay. And so that's really what we spent the first couple of months on. was really the offer of what are we building here? And I'm curious to hear what your experience was like on that, because I know that we had batted around a bunch of different ideas of...

You know, paths we could go down. Was it going to be an entrepreneur product or a professional product? You remember that back in the early days? And so it took us quite a while, I think, to land on exactly what the thing was and iron out all of the details. Yeah, I think a big part of it was that I knew, you know, after we did a bunch of internal market research, sort of market research from within our team.

we landed on this idea of Peloton for productivity, or like CrossFit for productivity, where no one wants another course, but people... Like everyone knows, or rather, I know that I should do a weekly review where I review my week and set goals for the next week. How often do I actually do it? Basically never. So like if I was part of a community where every week there was a facilitator taking me through a weekly review,

I would hop on that Zoom call in a heartbeat. And now I'm way more effective because I've just reviewed my week and made a plan for the next week. Similarly, I know I should just sit down and do the fucking work. How often do I do it? Well, almost never. But if there was a Zoom call where I was on there with a few people over Zoom, or even people in real life, because I like doing little co-working parties in my house, I do way more work than when I'm just sitting there on my own.

So what's the value of that for me? For me, because I've got a seven-figure business, absolutely, that's astronomical. Like, of course, of course it's worth it. And so it's almost like I was thinking, well, you know, the same reason that I have a personal trainer and or would go to exercise classes, it's because I just don't do the thing on my own.

And I know I don't need more content. I'm not signing up to a personal trainer in the hope that the personal trainer is going to give me a magical magic bullet to six pack abs. Honestly, I'm doing it so that I have an appointment that I've prepaid for so I will be there as a sense of accountability.

And so the thought was, what would that look like as a, I didn't want to use the word community. I was like, Oh yeah, community. Oh God, now I'm going to be on the hook and people are going to, we're going to feel like we have to keep on doing new stuff every single month and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I wanted to feel like.

exercise classes. Because you don't join exercise classes thinking, damn, I wish I had more community. You think I rock up to the exercise class. And if I want to chat to people afterwards, great. But the chatting to people afterwards, it's on me to make friends rather than on CrossFit to provide a small group intimate dining experience where we can get to hang out. So that was the idea. And then in my mind, I was thinking, okay, well.

I don't like low ticket things. And so I don't like the idea of $9 a month because we're going to get too many people for it to be manageable. I also don't really like the idea of $30 a month. because we're going to get too many people i was like i would love for this to be a five to ten million a year thing and if we priced it at a thousand a year we would have five thousand members to get to that

five to 10,000 members. Can I imagine doing a community with five to 10,000 members? It's like, hmm, I think so. And that was kind of where we landed on. 5,000 people paying 1,000 would be a 5 million a year asset. We can increase the prices over time. It means that we can't do the, hey, you get to make friends with an intimate small group. But that's okay, because that was never really the point.

now that we're like four weeks in loads of people are asking for like hey you know i wish there was more smaller group stuff and we're like Uh-oh, what do we do? Yeah. Okay, so... Yeah, creating those and managing that can be a bit tricky, right? Trying to match people up and all of that. So you have an option where you could simply let people opt in and you let them create their own groups. And we can do all of that inside of Circle and make it kind of easy.

Why are they asking for that, do you think? The thing people have said is the word accountability. They don't feel that much accountability being on a Zoom call with 50 people, but they would feel way more if they had an accountability group with like three, four, five, six, seven people where each week they set goals and blah, blah, blah. or felt more accountable to that group for achieving those goals. Are you guys going to do it? Should we?

I'm always a yes man when it comes to sort of students asking like paying customers asking for something where I'm like, well, I'm sure we can figure out a way to make it happen. I like to, so we tried accountability groups with our YouTuber Academy when they were self self-organized. And that was just basically a shit show because. All it takes is one person to be a dick or to not show up. And suddenly, the fabric of the group breaks down a bit.

Whereas for our YouTube accelerator, we found that a accountability group facilitated by one of our customer success gals was really effective. So she would be leading the accountability group every week. And it's the same time every week. And you can opt into different times if you want. But it's the same group of like eight to 12 people on a call every week with a coach having this small group accountability. And that worked really well. But that's a 5K offer.

I, I'm always trying to figure out ways that we can add more value to people. So I'm, as I say, I'm probably thinking yes. Yeah, we do want to have some sort of small group accountability thing going on. So this is where I feel like you're in a little bit of an awkward spot where I said that you are. pricing it at a low ticket but you're delivering at a high ticket experience so doing all of that facilitated groups led by your team that's really a high ticket thing

Right. But you're not charging enough for that. So then you might say, okay, well, let's make it self-managed. And there's ways that you might do that where people could. maybe sign up to be the group leader. They could apply, you interview them, something like that. And it's like, hey, you are going to commit to maybe it's only three months. You're going to lead this group. You're going to do the 12 calls.

and then at the end you could either choose to go and go again or maybe you give it up so there's different ways i think that you could structure that I've been in a self-led group that worked really well, but it was because there was a group leader and they were really committed to it and that kind of thing. Yeah, this is kind of our problem with this and that $1,000 feels like a lot for productivity because...

And then like, whenever I'm like, loads of people have said to me that we're charging too little, but I always feel like, oh, but. 2000 a month, 2000 a year feels like way too much. Oh my God. Yeah. Well, okay. So it's funny because right before we launched Productivity Lab,

your head of product, Gareth reached out to me and he was like, I don't know if we can launch this thing at a thousand dollars. I think it's way too much, too expensive. Right. I don't think we have enough stuff in there. And so he and I had a really good conversation where I took him through the journey of.

what does it mean to become productive, right? What does that transformation look like? What is the value that we are creating for people? And how much would that be worth in their life? And we talked about what would those outcomes be? So maybe it's they got promoted at work, they got a raise.

They got a new job. They were able to switch careers. They were able to sell more clients, get more commissions, or even just on the personal side of having more time at home, having more vacation, be with family, more exercise, right? And so we were able to work through all of that and say, how are we doing this? Well, we've got a system, we've got a process, we've got events, we've got, you know, your productivity roadmap and all of your...

processes. And so if someone were to reasonably implement half of that, right, or less, and just show up, get the work done and move the ball forward and achieve that outcome, what would that be worth to them? If someone got a raise, you would argue that'd probably be worth at least...

five or $10,000, right? If they were to sell a bunch more clients, they could make a lot more money. So we want to try to deliver at least a 10x return on what we're charging. And so by the end of that call, he was like, okay, this thing is definitely worth $1,000. Because if you were to achieve any of those outcomes, it's definitely paying for itself. But you also have to think about...

We're training and we're teaching a skill that they could likely implement and use for the rest of their life. So it's not just how productive will you be in the next 12 months, but what result would you achieve if you change the trajectory of your life by a couple of degrees over the next? 20, 30, 50 years. Yeah. It always feels weird thinking about what would this be worth to the student slash the customer? Because in my mind,

I always go to, yeah, but how much does it cost us to deliver? It's sort of cost-based rather than value-based pricing, where it's like, Yeah, I mean, it's not that hard for us to put together four daily Zoom calls doing co-working and having six weekly reflection sessions for different time zones and having a... quarterly webinar and monthly reflection with me and it's not that much work you know it feels like feels like a hundred dollars a month it's like whoa like

If you watch Netflix, they're only charging you $12 a month. That sort of thing still comes into my mind, even though I've been charging $1,000 plus for things for a very long time. Yeah. Do you see that a lot? The sort of fear of fear of pricing high? Yes, absolutely. I think it's the number one challenge that. especially newer entrepreneurs face or when someone's moving from say a nine to five into being a freelancer or just being out on their own.

charging is, pricing is such an emotional kind of thing because it taps into like, who am I and my value and my experience and what are my credentials and how can I justify this and how much time is it taking me? So I am very much a fan of value-based pricing.

And what's interesting about it is it means for someone, the value is incredibly high and this exact same program for someone else is worthless. Yeah, that's true. Right? Yeah. I think often when it comes to price, I'm anchored towards students.

Because in my mind, like the people I'm speaking to on my YouTube channel are mostly people younger than me, i.e. maybe someone who's 25, maybe who's recently graduated from uni, maybe they're in their first job, or maybe they're still a student because we have a large student population watching the videos. And then I think, like, you know, I did a video with Matt Gray a few months ago that came out on his channel where he was basically encouraging me to do 24K a year.

and targeted entrepreneurs. And there was actually quite a lot of negative reception to that video when we posted it in our YouTube community tab, because there were people in the audience who were like, I can't believe you're considering charging us this insane amount of money. We can't even afford $1,000. How could you possibly be thinking, even entertaining the thought of $24,000? This is just absurd.

And sort of intellectually, I know that that person is just not the target audience. If someone can't afford $1,000, they are not the target audience for the product. But there's still something about someone saying that, like... you're being an evil person by having the audacity to charge that much, which prices me as a poor student from Pakistan out of the equation. And it's like, I mean, yeah, it kind of does.

Am I dick for doing that? You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. Like I said, it's such an emotional topic, right? Money is so emotional. What people make, what you charge, how much, imagine when you. price your time per hour and someone finds out like you charge a thousand dollars an hour it's like i'm making fifteen dollars an hour working minimum wage how is it possible that one of your hours is worth a hundred of my hours it just doesn't feel right right

And so it goes back to value. And what are you able to help someone achieve in that period of time? Maybe you're distilling down 20 years of experience that you can give someone in one hour versus someone, like you were saying, maybe is a total beginner and doesn't really have a whole lot of experience in life. So they can't really create that much value or help someone that much in one of their hours.

I think about it too, like we were just walking through London and going through some of the shops and looking at some of the absurd designer wear and it's like, how is this white t-shirt 450 pounds? What makes it worth that? Well, someone feels something when they wear that because it has some brand or some logo, but it's just a cotton t-shirt, right? It does feel like... robbery or who are they to charge that much money right and so

It's just a t-shirt, just like the $20 t-shirt. But for some reason, some people charge 450 pounds for it and some people buy it and they feel great about it. Yeah, it's that thing that... even though I've been doing this now for four plus years since we launched our YouTuber Academy, it still amazes me that like,

that we can get away with charging so much so much and then i speak to other people who are like a thousand dollars dude that's chump change come on like you should be doing at least 10k if not 15. And I remember, so I was giving a talk at Cambridge a few months ago when my book was launching. And some guy came up to me afterwards and he was like a 19-year-old medical student. And he was like, hey, you know, so I'm doing private tutoring on the side.

And I was like, oh, how much are you charging? And he was like, oh, I'm charging a lot. And I was like, oh, okay. How much is a lot? What are we talking? And he was like, no, no, no, I can't possibly say it's too much. I was like, come on, you know, we're bros. You can trust me. How much are you charging? He was like, charging 45 pounds an hour. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. This is like...

This guy's like 10 years younger than me. Thinks that charging 45 pounds an hour is so much that he couldn't even tell me the number. And it is because for the audience of kids that he's doing private tutoring for 45 pounds an hour is a lot.

But then I know someone who was charging 500 an hour to do private tutoring for the Nigerian royal family. They've got money. It's like he's flying around on their private jet in the summer holidays and tutoring their kids. That's a completely different equation.

And then I was thinking about myself. I was like, well, right now, to me, charging $1,000 for a Productivity Lab community where we're over-delivering so much value with a ridiculous money-back guarantee where for any reason we'll just give people their money back. still feels like a lot. And when I speak to entrepreneurs who are doing 10 million plus, they sort of laugh at me in the same way that I laughed out loud when the guy thought that 45 pounds an hour was a lot.

And it's just so interesting how I think how money taps into psychology and emotions and self-worth and limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome and all of these things. There are so many people I know who are YouTubers. charging like $300 for a course and thinking, oh my God, how can I have the audacity to charge $300 for a course? At every level, it just seems to be a psychology game. Absolutely. And price is one of the best filters that you have for customer selection.

Right. So you could take this course, whatever you're doing, you charge $100 for it. It's going to attract a certain audience. It's going to attract that student audience who maybe still would struggle to pay for it, but they would find a way. And that's going to.

create a certain type of environment especially if it's inside of a community where everyone can interact if you were to take that exact same program and charge 10 000 for it it can be the exact same promise double your productivity but for ceos doubling their productivity that means millions of dollars and they would easily pay for it and so now you have a group of fewer but maybe more experienced people

CEOs versus a much larger, much less experienced crowd. Questions are going to be different. Problems are going to be different. Environment's going to be different. So it's up to you to really think about who do I best. serve right where can i create the most value for people who do i most enjoy serving oh that's a good question yeah I really enjoy serving the entrepreneurs who are at like five or six figures wanting to get to seven.

that's a really fun audience for me i could jam out with that audience all day long I don't feel any imposter syndrome. I feel like I have value to share. I feel like they're my people because they've had jobs and they've quit the job. So they all have that life experience of going through that transition. None of their friends are in that same boat. And so they feel like...

Can't really talk to my friends about this shit because they all have jobs. And I love serving that audience. I gave a talk earlier today at AdCon, and that's that audience. And they were like, do you want to go to the VIP dinner afterwards? I was like, you know what? Yeah, honestly, it's probably not worth my time. But it's just fun hanging out with people like that who are building businesses.

And we get to jam on business stuff and life stuff. It's just kind of cool. I think that's the audience that currently lights me up. Back in the day, like 10 years ago, I used to love serving medical school applicants because it was like, oh, I can help these guys get into med school and change their lives. But now...

I'm no longer enthralled by the thought of hanging out with students really unless they're like very entrepreneurial students um because i'm just i'm just playing a different game now and i sort of want to hang out with people who are playing a similar game at a similar-ish level

Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's what I love about entrepreneurship is you get to create the game and all of the rules. Yeah. You get to charge what you want to charge. It doesn't matter what anyone else says or thinks.

You're never going to be able to make everyone happy. I mean, you have a huge audience, so you know that probably every video somehow pisses someone off or rubs them the wrong way. Someone disagrees with something that you say. So that's just going to continue to happen forever. But it's up to you to get to choose. Who do I best serve? Who do I want to work with? Who do I enjoy creating content for and helping?

And that's one of the ingredients that you would use when coming up with your pricing. Have you been a therapist for any other creators about this pricing stuff? What sort of stuff do you say? Or what sort of struggles do people have when it comes to pricing? So one of the other biggest struggles is that people...

They're like, okay, I want to make this really cool thing. It's going to be awesome. It's going to have this and this and this, and it's going to be a hundred bucks a month. And I go, okay, why is it going to be monthly pricing? And they're like.

What do you mean? Like everything is monthly pricing. It has to be monthly pricing, right? It's like, no, we have a lot of other options, right? It could be one time. It could be lifetime. It could be annual, but it depends. What are we helping someone achieve? So if you're paying for Netflix, it makes sense that it's monthly you get 30 days watch as many movies as you want right and then every 30 days you kind of make that decision

Am I getting value from this? Do I still want this? Is there anything new next month? Same with the gym. You show up and use the machines, right? university doesn't charge you by the month, right? It's like, ah, I think I'll opt out this month. I'm not really feeling it. You know, maybe I'll go on vacation, come back next month. It's like, no, you're committed.

Right. You've signed up for the entire year for the entire semester. You pay it all up front. And now it's up to you to actually show up and do the work. They're going to provide all of all of the services. It's now your responsibility to get the transformation and get the outcome. And so if the outcome is going to take...

many, many months or many years, why are you charging monthly? Because for a very long time, they're going to be asking themselves, am I really getting an ROI on this? Am I getting the value on this? And the answer is going to be no. And you're giving them the opportunity to cancel and churn every 30 days. And so if someone does have a hardship of money or they get sick or they're going to travel.

It might start to look pretty enticing to like put things on pause and come back to this later. And in the online courses, community coaching world, that pretty much means never. So you're going to lose them. Someone listening to this might be like, man, this Jordan guy's evil. Are you really saying that we want to lock people into paying for a thing when they might be ill or they might have lost their job or anything like that?

We've got annual only for Productively Alive at the moment. A lot of people are asking us for a monthly or a quarterly option. And so we're like, there's this almost like... And I'm unsure about the answer for this, but it almost feels like there's a moral question here. Is it right to charge someone an annual price?

I can come up with reasons and we have refund policy and stuff. But yeah, I'm curious, what's your take on like the morality of annual versus monthly pricing? Well, I think the university example is pretty good. I don't know of any university that would allow you to just have a monthly subscription that you can pause.

But when someone is signing up for your program, you are committing to deliver the full thing to them. You're committing to show up every week, to hire your team, to do all of the things. And when they're signing up for it, they're not signing up for... the daily events or the different components, they're really signing up to achieve the outcome, right? And so when you signed up for med school, you signed up to become a doctor.

You didn't sign up for this many science classes, this many math classes. Right. And so it's like, oh, I think I'll just skip some of these math classes. Can I have a few dollars back on that? It's like you can't really cut it out. So you're signing up for the entire thing and for the outcome. And what I've seen, so there's a famous coach, Brendan Burchard, and I went to one of his coaching summits. And one of his phrases that really stuck with me is that coaches are paid to push.

When someone hires a coach, they want to be pushed. Because achieving any type of big transformation is hard. And it is going to take probably twice as long as you think it will. And maybe even cost you twice as much as you think it will. And so you've said on day one, I want this thing. Maybe it's you want to build more muscle or you want to build a seven figure business. There will be times in there that it's going to get really hard and you maybe want to give up.

Maybe you only actually want to give up in the moment, you know, because you actually said, I want to achieve that thing, but there will be times where it becomes uncomfortable. And so if your goal as the creator is to truly help people. then you're going to have to help them through those hard moments as well.

And so that might be checking in on them, accountability, getting on a one-on-one call, understanding like why have you not been showing up? You know, how can we help you? What is it that you need? Is it a different time zone thing? Is it a new video that we can create for you? But to me, it's actually in the heart of service.

to align everything towards that end goal. And they are the one that is voluntarily opting in saying, I want that goal. And I believe that you can help get me there. And so. Maybe you need to take a month or two off. That's okay.

that's life, right? Like things get really busy. We all go on vacation. We all get sick, but it's not like we quit our jobs every time we get sick or go on vacation and say, I'll be back in a few weeks when I'm feeling better. It's like, no, we have these long-term commitments.

even though life is happening. And so that's just the way that I look at it is you want to work with people that are really invested in your program because it's also kind of demoralizing. If you, as the creator, you've put your heart and soul into building this thing.

And you get like 500 people to sign up. And then next month, half of them cancel because they all go on holiday because it's July or it's August. And you're like, what happened? I just churned. I just lost half my business. It's like, oh, no, they all said they'll be back in two months.

And then they don't come back. Right. And so you also need a bit of stability, right? You have to look out for you as the business owner, as the creator, especially if you're trying to leave your nine to five and you're trying to be on your own, that can be a really big, scary transition.

And so you want to work with clients and have a business model that supports that. And that is going to give you some stability to work with people for the long term. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it's a voluntary contract people are engaging in. They know the price up front. And yeah, people email us and say, hey, look, my dog died. I had an unexpected whatever. Yeah, of course, we're going to give them like, yeah, we don't. Exactly. We're not going to hang on to it. It's sort of in ransom.

Yeah, there is a difference between having the cancel monthly subscription option available at a click. you know, for just one click away versus actually encouraging people to sign up for well. making it clear that the commitment is for a whole year. And not even just having the one click available, but reminding them every 30 days, do you want to cancel this month? Do you want to cancel this month?

It's like you're going to probably get a lot of people deciding to click that button when you're constantly asking them to go away, to quit. So we just like to have one commitment up front of you're going to join this program and this is how much it costs. And then you get access for a year and you don't have to worry about it. And then we get to spend the whole year working together to help you get that outcome. Does that sound good? And they say, yeah.

cool nice yeah that sounds pretty good when you put it that way um a bit of a niche question but One of the things I've heard against, one of the arguments I've heard against annual billing is that you don't get a true sense of what your churn is. in that, well, we've got 500 people who signed up in May of 2024. We won't actually know what the renewal rate on those people is up until May of 2025.

And in a way, had we done monthly billing or quarterly billing, it would have forced us internally to be more honest because someone canceling their subscription is then a vote. You know, they're voting with their money. Whereas someone might have signed up, they've got three months of value out of it, then they sort of... you know ghosted and yeah we reached out to them but they didn't really reply And the only time we find out that they're not going to renew is the following year.

And then what if like 70% of the cohort cancels then and now we've, uh-oh, 70% of the business is now gone and we didn't know it up front, if that makes sense. How would you think about that? Yeah, well... I think you always want to be putting new people in the top of the funnel, right? So you're not just going to sell this one group of 500 people and then service them for the next five years and hope that they just all renew every single year.

So new people are going to be joining. And this is just a super common aspect of business is that people are going to be churning and dropping out. But the other thing to think about, too, is what is the realistic expectation of how long someone should be a part of the program?

So for you, I feel like what you're actually helping to do is install this productivity system into their life. So you're helping them to create these habits and to think of it differently. Once they've fully ingrained that and are doing that on their own.

they may not really need to continue to show up to those collective sessions. And so I would actually count that as a successful outcome of the program. So that graduate could go through the whole year. They could start to change their behavior, change their life. start to do this on their own naturally every week, reviewing their week, doing these focus sessions, counting how productive they are. And then at the end go, this was amazing.

cancel. And say, thanks, Ali. This was awesome. I'm now way more productive and I have a framework for the rest of my life to use to do better. Yeah, that would actually be a good result. So I think, yeah, absolutely.

You can't just use one metric to try to measure and figure out, is the business working? Is the product working? Is it good or bad, right? So churn is not really the best metric in this regard. I think you want to have a qualitative and a quantitative measure. So qualitatively, we want to be checking in with people.

let's say on a quarterly basis, right? Like you're three months into productivity lab. Have you set your life vision? Do you have your quarterly plan? Have you started doing these things? Right. And then by the end, they should be saying yes to all of those things. Or you should be seeing that they have basically disengaged and kind of dropped out for whatever reason. Life stuff, they've decided, hey, I'm not really that into productivity stuff anymore or whatever. And that's okay too.

some percentage of those people will likely renew. But what you could also do is we can continue to iterate on the program and add new value and new things, just like Netflix does. Don't cancel because next month we're going to release this new series. And it's like, oh, I really want to see that. Okay, I'm not going to cancel.

So if you're able to forecast in the future and say, next year, we're going to do a live event in London, or we're going to bring in a few other speakers or whatever, that could be a good incentive for people to want to stick around, even if they've already implemented some of the other stuff. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. What do you think we should do with our YouTuber Academy? At the moment, it's a thousand dollar.

single single time payment self-paced course with like free access to the community on the side but the community is a bit like neglected right now and we want to kind of start taking it a lot more seriously And seeing what's happened with Productivity Lab, my idea was, why don't we just copy and paste that same model, 997 for the year. Building a YouTube channel is a long-term commitment.

Maybe we would allow quarterly pricing for people who just want to see dip their toes in. I don't think we want to go to monthly at all. And we just, we given the course, if it's given that it's recurring revenue and that gives us a reason to update the course, make sure we add modules about AI for YouTubers and thumbnails and bonus stuff. and we just take the community aspect much more seriously.

How does that land with you? Anything you would think about? So what does it mean to take the community aspect more seriously? Probably, I mean, at the moment we have like one community event each month. but we'd probably do a little bit more. We'd probably, like we do in real life meetups. In fairness, we do do quite a lot for this free community that they get lifetime access to. We have like meetups three times a year.

often in london uh but also we did one in austin we did one in uh where else yeah in austin um We do like monthly guest workshops. I think just it feels to me, it feels weird to be continuing to give so much value for a thing that they are not paying for. because they paid one off for the for the course, and they're not paying for the community. So I'm always a bit like whenever we're whenever they want the PTY team wants me to do a community workshop.

You know, I'll happily do a meetup and hang out with people in real life. But like the thought of being on Zoom for two hours to people that bought a course four years ago and are not paying us anymore, like that sort of hurts me inside in a weird way. Am I a bad person? Not at all. I had this exact same problem. And so what's going on is the incentives are misaligned.

Right. Someone paid one time four years ago and now they just get unlimited value from you forever. Like, how does that make sense? Where else does that exist anywhere in the world? It doesn't really. So. If you want ongoing revenue, then you have to provide ongoing value. You're already providing this ongoing value. You should be charging for it. So I launched a course a few years ago where I'm talking about communities and stuff.

And it was a DIY on demand, watch the videos. So I committed to showing up once a week to do these live coaching calls. And it just started going on forever. But people had only paid one time a very low ticket for this course. And then I realized the incentives were totally misaligned and people weren't even showing up. So now I'm committing my time to run these calls for free. And then people aren't even showing up because they're not even invested.

They're not even paying ongoing. And so they're like, well, what am I losing? I didn't really even pay for this. And that became a very demoralizing event where it's like, I'm trying to give away value because I said I would, because I want to support my customers. They're not even interested. So I switched it to a monthly recurring where after you join the program, if you want to continue to get coaching and these live calls, you're at least going to pay for it. And now.

People are showing up every single week because they're getting the value from it. And now me and my team are super happy with it and it's going great. Okay, nice. Yeah. So I think you should definitely do something where there's a recurring revenue quarterly or yearly because there's so much that you could do. Have you thought about this as like a course slash coaching program where there could be feedback, there could be other YouTube coaches, people on your team that are like...

Yeah, this is what we're trying to figure out. So we've got our YouTube accelerator, which was previously five grand for a year. squeezed down to either five grand or six or seven for six months because a year just was a bit too long where they were getting weekly office hours with like everyone on my team so there was like two things a day happening where they could just hop on a call and ask any one of my team questions they had like feedback on 26 of their videos they had

accountability group accountability calls with one of our coaches there's a lot going on in this program and so we had that and then we've got our youtuber academy just a thousand dollar course And so what we're thinking is we turn the $1,000 course into $1,000 a year community plus course, that mishmash thing, similar to what Productivity Lab is.

And then we keep the 5K, 5K for three months or 5K for six months offering that gives them more intensive support and handholding from the team for that short period of time. And then they just go back into the community or not, you know, whatever they want. How does that sound?

Yeah, I think it's good. So people can get into the course for a thousand for a year and have access to the community. So everyone else who's going through the course can be sharing updates and asking questions and all that. But if they actually want... active coaching from your team, feedback, live sessions, then they're paying for the accelerator.

I mean, I'd probably do, we would probably do live sessions within the community, like a monthly whatever workshop from another YouTuber or so, you know, things like that. But it'd be less frequent. It would be less frequent, probably like once a month. Whereas if they join the accelerator, there's stuff happening every day. Office hours and things that they can join. So it's very clear the separation for me of value. If they want to...

kind of go slow-ish around other people. They go through the course kind of on their own. If they want to go a lot faster, it's a lot more intense and there's a lot more things that they have access to. And they're getting your team's active involvement on a daily, weekly basis.

Kind of as we talk about this, I feel like that should just be a three month program. Like 5k for three months feels like, oh, yeah, well, we're going to work with you intensively for three months to help you level up to whatever stage you need to get to. And then great. feel free to renew or just go back into the community. Is there a specific outcome that you can put to that? What would the transformation be of the 90-day program?

It would kind of be the same as the transformation for the course, which is you build your own YouTube productivity system that makes content creation as effortless as it can reasonably be for you. And hopefully you enjoy it as well. So the 90-day program would be more like... basically that's a transformation, but you actually get support. Well, you get more one-on-one and group support along the way. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah. So you have one clear goal that they're all trying to achieve, but then you have two paths. Yes. Right. Yeah. And so I think it makes sense. It's like, hey, we've got this gym and you can come and use all the equipment as much as you want. And it's great. Or you can work with this trainer and have all these coaches and have these rooms and have these group programs and you will probably do better.

you will probably lose more weight or build more muscle maybe get access to a nutritionist you know all of that kind of stuff yes but it's going to cost five times as much Yeah. Makes total sense. Yeah. Okay. That seems reasonable. Yeah. It feels kind of weird to be switching our stuff over to this sort of recurring revenue model. It feels good because it'll be nice.

But it's also like, well, it's annual buildings. We don't really know how many people will renew. And it's like all of that sort of stuff. It feels sort of like a new area for the business because I'm very comfortable selling self-paced courses where it's one and done. there's not a lot of work to maintain it because it's like it's one and done but also

Yeah, if I'm honest about it, I think self-paced courses that are one and done don't actually serve the student. Because there's no incentive for me to update the course that I made a year ago, even though stuff has changed on YouTube. Because it's like, why would I update it? what's the point um the courses that we made three years ago are still selling But to me, it sort of feels like those should be part of the $1,000 a year subscription.

And so as we add more stuff, as more stuff evolves, as our processes change, because we're also learning, we are updating the stuff as we go along, which then makes sense because students are paying for that recurring value. I think when you align incentives like that, it actually works out better for everyone. you know earlier we were talking about pricing and charging higher ticket and locking people in and is that evil and the morality behind all of that but i believe that there's this

kind of pyramid, right? And so if you... are healthiest as a business, you have recurring revenue, you have stability, then your incentive is to continue to pour into that program and make it as good as possible and to help all of those students succeed so that you have great testimonials and case studies. Because people will say,

what are your credentials or who are you to be charging this? It's like, well, we've got hundreds of students who are very, very happy and who have achieved the promise. So it's very much in your best interest that all of them are successful versus, okay, I've put together this course and it's only a few hundred bucks and you can go watch it on your own. And most of them are not going to be successful.

So let's say you switch to this recurring revenue. A lot of them are going to continue to renew, but now you are going to be making the program better and better. So your business is going to grow. It's going to be healthier. And now there might be people saying, well, I can't even afford the thousand dollars. So that's not fair.

It's like, well, you then can take bits and pieces whatever you choose and put that on your youtube channel right you can still be giving things away for free and then the lead magnets you got like a one dollar course so you can really serve everyone really well by getting really clear on what those incentives are and what those different offers are. But you can't serve everyone all at the same time with the same offer.

Yeah, I really kind of want to put our $1 course just as a free YouTube video. It's going to be four and a half hours long. But there's something nice about that being available for free. And if people want, they can sign up to the community or the course or whatever we call it, the Academy. that kind of thing. Jordan, thank you. This has been wonderful. Where can people learn more about you and the work that you do? Yeah, thanks for having me man. It's been great.

So we put together a really cool resource for people who are interested in community where it's a bit of a behind the scenes look at how we designed and built Productivity Lab with you. following our nine-step community launch roadmap. So if people want to check it out, they can go to growthcommunity.co slash Ali and they can follow along. So if they're interested in building their own community, that'll give them some tips.

That's great. We'll put a link in the video notes, in the video description and in the show notes if you want to check that out. So that's growthcommunity.co. And they can download that for free. No strings attached. That's it. And then I am at Jordan Godby on Twitter and LinkedIn. Sick. And we'll put links to all of that as well. Thanks very much. Thanks, man.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

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