Increase Your Student Success with a Community Powered Course With Jordan Godbey

For course , creators , expert and thought leaders or I should say experts and thought leaders , or I should say experts and thought leaders .

He has launched more circle communities than anyone else on earth , and if you don't know circle , I'm sorry , but it's the place that many people who are frustrated with Facebook groups are leaving to so they can have a much more engaged community . And actually , true story , jordan lives down here in Queretaro , mexico , central Mexico .

We're not on the beach , it's more like Phoenix , arizona , if you've been there but he lives down here with his wife and daughter , not more than 45-minute car ride from me . Would you say Jordan , yep , yep , he lives on the nice side of town . I'll say that . Would you say Jordan , yep , yep , he lives on the nice side of town .

I'll say that I live in a nice part . I live in a nice suburb too . We both actually are blessed to live in nice suburbs , but Jordan's suburb is . But and the very cool thing , jordan , is you just got back from a 10 day trip to Europe that culminated in recording an episode on none other than Ali Abdaal's podcast .

It's attracting the right people who you were meant to serve with , like the passions and the gifts that you have as far as your areas of expertise . But when you open up Kajabi or Thinkific or Teachable , wherever your course is hosted and you look at the completion rate and you're just like , why is the completion rate so low ?

Number one this issue plagues us all . Number two Jordan has the solution to increase your course completion rate and ultimately serve more people better . Jordan , tell us about that .

You have neighbors , you have families , you have other kids running around that they get to play with and interact with , and , while we may live in a nice part of town , it's this new construction neighborhood and it's like we're kind of deserted , we're kind of abandoned in here , and so we're sort of left to just live and do life all on our own .

And that's actually kind of what I want to talk about with courses . Right , and so like , courses have been around for a long time now , almost since the beginning of the internet , and it's been an amazing way to transfer information , right ?

You , as an expert , you've done something in your life , you've had a career , you've been on your own , and so you're distilling down all of your wisdom and knowledge and experience into this course that , theoretically , anyone can just sign up for and they can go through and then they can get the result .

But in the real world , what we know when we look at those analytics and we put out surveys and we get feedback is , unfortunately , very few people are getting the outcome and the transformation that they signed up for , the promise that they signed up for , and it's because life is hard and when you're just watching the videos all by yourself in your room on

nights and weekends , or before work or on your lunch hour or whatever it might be for your students , there are just endless distractions and notifications and urgent things that are bombarding them .

We are so overloaded now with information , with content with YouTube , with social media , with content with YouTube , with social media , and so what I find is is is happening is that people are struggling to get to the end of the course and then to implement what they're learning all by themselves , because doing hard things alone is very hard .

Right , you have to have an amazing amount of discipline and motivation and scheduling yourself and time and energy management , and so this new kind of wave of online courses that we've seen are community-based and they're community-powered .

So that's really what I want to talk about today is it's a fundamental shift in the way that we are delivering courses and helping people achieve breakthroughs is doing it inside of communities .

So what kind of community is best for which course , and can you walk the listener through that ?

Once you break it down , it's kind of like saying online business there's so many different kinds of online businesses and so what we've seen is , within the community model , there's two main value drivers that you want to be thinking about is what is what are people really coming to my community for ?

Is it they're coming for connection they're coming to be with other members and be brought together or are they coming for curriculum and they're coming here to learn something , to have lessons , to have homework and exercises and to get feedback on it ? So , as course creators , you know a lot of a lot of our audience .

They're coming to us for that curriculum side of things , but , like I mentioned , the curriculum by itself is usually not enough to help them achieve breakthrough or transformation . So we actually want to blend a bit of the two .

And then the other thing to be thinking about or asking yourself is do I want to deliver and sell a low ticket offer , or do I want to do a high ticket offer ? And that is really going to change what you include inside of the community and the type of experience that you want to deliver , as well as , potentially , how you're even selling it right .

You can sell a low ticket offer off of a sales page . You know someone sees an ad and they click on it , they go to the sales page and if it sounds compelling enough and it's cheap enough , they might just pull out their credit card and buy it right away .

But if they're going to sign up for a very large transformation in their life that's going to take , you know , 12 months and cost $5,000 , they're probably going to want to get on a call and they're going to want to talk to someone and see if they're the right fit and there might be payment options and that kind of thing .

So those are really the two major axes that I think about is that connection versus curriculum , and then low ticket versus high ticket , and that kind of gives us the four different community types that you might want to build .

But what about somebody who has , like , say , an offer that's sitting right what I would call mid-tier , between $397 and $797 for their offer ? What kind of community would fit well with that ?

He recently built a very large , big new course and he does a lot of data collection , and so he he's been asking his audience what would make this course truly amazing , and

everyone came back . The number one thing was a community , and he wasn't really expecting that , but he's like okay , I built this 19 hour long course and what they want is a community .

So what he did was he decided to offer the course by itself , and that was , I believe , around that $700 mark , and then there was an add-on option or upgrade option that you could choose to have the community with it .

You couldn't just get the community without the course , so you had to first be a course customer , but then people who wanted more interaction , they wanted more support and wanted to be surrounded by other people going through the course .

They could choose to be in this private community , and I think it still falls into the low ticket side of things and because of that of things and because of that , justin's involvement is somewhat limited , right , and the reason why is because he had previously done a community a few years ago where it was very , very unstructured .

It was just basically like live chat Everyone's just putting in tons of questions and DMS and tagging him . So every single day he was just waking up to like a flood of stuff . It's a lot of time and that's actually one of the biggest concerns that people have .

When they hear community , they're like that sounds like a lot of work and a lot of time and I don't think I have time to run a community and that was . Justin's exact concern . When he reached out to me , he was like everyone's telling me they want a community , but I don't really want to be fully consumed with this . Is there an option here ?

Is there a solution ? And I said absolutely . So we worked together to create a calm , clear community that was not going to consume him and I can say confidently now that we're about four or five months into it that it has totally worked .

So he shows up for about 30 minutes to an hour a day , so on average he's doing three to five hours a week and he's answering questions , he's putting things that he's thinking about into the community and he schedules a monthly office hour that people are able to submit questions ahead of time .

He can research them , he can put together a slide , he can do a really thorough , nice answer for them and he shows up to deliver that live . It's about 90 minutes to two hours once a month and that is kind of the biggest highlight of the monthly cycle inside his community , and so people are giving us really good feedback .

They're rating it very high in terms of value and satisfaction and he's able to keep his peace of mind and keep his time really well under control .

So you have him set up on a once a month or I mean you worked with him to decide just a once a month Q and a call , so to speak .

So that starts at the sales page , that starts at the emails , and so one of the major value drivers of the community is that peer to peer interaction , and so there's areas inside the community where you can ask for help , you can ask for feedback , you can say , hey , I'm looking for a copywriter . Does anyone know anyone or is anyone here able to help me ?

And so what we're doing is we're just creating a container , a space that did not exist previously and for many course creators out there . You know , people buy our courses , but where do all the people live ? Right , they live , like on an email list or in a CRM or inside of Teachable , but they can't really interact .

And so just by giving the opportunity for the course students themselves to interact , that creates a lot of value , and it's a bit unknown of what that value is going to be .

So we then facilitate that by asking , you know , questions to the community , or asking people to post their wins or post their challenges , but then other members are just able to find each other , dm each other .

We created a system where people could add different tags and badges to talk about what their specialties are and and so that further gives people access to the directory of other members and they're creating friendships , partnerships , relationships , all of that kind of stuff .

In this case they're in the same program , so I can see that and the listener can see that .

I'm super curious how then you took , I guess , the value of the community and helped your client sell that , and thus the listener listening right now could answer the question well , how do I sell the value of a community that's quote , unquote , lower ticket , that only has me as the listener , the business owner , in there once a month ?

How do I sell that value of the community such that somebody wants to join and then comes in and has a good time and ends up completing more of the course ?

Let's let's not just click next , next , next , and just watch all the videos and feel like we've accomplished something or now we're smarter . It's like let's actually do the things that are being taught to us in the videos . And the community is a place for the members to even hold themselves accountable .

But it's like hey , show your work , you know , share what you're doing and let other people in the community see it , or share your wins of . Hey , I did what Justin told me to do in the videos and I went and I posted on LinkedIn and I got my first customer , I got my first lead or whatever it might be .

But it's just a place for you to not feel so disconnected and isolated and like nobody cares . There's no one to talk to about this . You know , I'm just in my job . I can't talk to anyone else around me , so it's a place for you to be able to just show up and see that other people are going through the course .

And then Justin is there , like I said , almost on a daily basis , so it's not that he's only there once a month and you just can't ever see him or have access to him , but it's just about what are you promising ? And I think that's really important . You don't want to over promise and under deliver , and you don't want to .

You don't want to be too vague , where people think that you are going to do like calls every week or every day , and so we just wanted to get really clear with that .

So you , you want to be , you want to frame things in a way that gives you also some wiggle room , where you know you might say hey , we're going to do like two live calls a month , and it's up to you and your capacity how often you want to show up live , For example , inside of my community . So I have a course as well .

People go through that and they learn how to build communities . But then I show up once a week to guide them , to give them feedback , to give them coaching , to take a look at what they're building and give them immediate you know consulting and advice on that , and so we decided for our program .

It's a bit higher ticket , it's more in the transformational community category , which is , in my opinion , it's kind of it's like the community powered courses on steroids . So there's a lot more interaction , there's a lot more feedback , and so it's up to you to decide . As a business owner , you know , where does this fit into your business , in your life ?

Is this something that you want to keep really contained and really small ? Or is this going to become the foundation of your business and you want to be able to charge more , and so you're going to provide more value and show up more ?

So when you're buying into this program , if you want to call it , the program would contain a course , would contain the community and would contain coaching or some type of live event and , holistically , I think people can feel the amount of value that is there where it's like great , I'm going to learn in three months how to achieve this goal .

And there's live events I can show up to , which is amazing . I can raise my hand and get immediate answers to my questions . There's asynchronous stuff where I can post a question and a day or two later , you know I'll have feedback and answers . And then there's a course that's 24 , seven on demand that I can go through at my own pace .

I think we we feel like that sounds like a pretty good offer right there , right .

make the community engaging , or I should say , help them with right , Because you're building communities for clients all the time . So what are some of the typical challenges in starting up a community ?

, but on the on the community side . So it's like I want to see my people showing up and posting questions and leaving comments on other people's stuff and coming to all the live calls and what you'll realize is there's basically an 80 , 20 effect everywhere in the world for everything .

So you might have a hundred members and you're like why are only 20 of them posting and commenting ? And it's like , because that's pretty much average human nature . Right , you cannot expect , like every person who buys your course to actually complete it .

But for some reason on the community side we just think like everyone's showing up or everyone's super interested in this all the time and the reality is it's just not true . So that can be a hard thing to get over , because it's kind of scary to launch a community , right , like you're really putting yourself out there .

You're saying I'm going to show up and support people and answer their questions and I'm going to go live and I hope people show up and they find this thing valuable . So one thing I've experienced is there's actually a risk in charging too little , and that risk is that people , when they only pay a little bit , they're not really bought in .

They're not like bought in financially , they're not really bought in emotionally or psychologically , they're not like I need to make this thing work . This is super high priority , this is super important .

It's kind of like oh , it sounds like a nice idea , like yeah , let me , let me sign up for that , let me check it out , and so that type of person is going to be really difficult to engage and also maybe difficult to help get success for .

And so I like to work with course creators that are really motivated in seeing their students succeed and seeing their members actually take action and succeed .

And sometimes the best thing that you can do is to charge more because you're going to get a more serious person on the other end who is like I've thought about this , I'm actually really invested , I'm really committed , I'm going to make this thing work and they're going to show up to those calls , they're actually going to do the homework , they're going to post

in the community and they're looking for that support from you . They want to see your answers to their questions , and so it's kind of a win-win scenario .

So that's just something that I've seen happen is really like having appropriate expectations for what is realistic in terms of community engagement and then , depending on how much you're charging , someone might not really care that much and they don't really need to show up because they're like oh , I only paid $97 , like one time , for this thing , you know I don't

need to just like show up and use it all the time .

People get it . It's like , okay , I'm going to pay more , but I'm actually going to be a lot more likely to succeed because I'm going to get so much more help and support from the actual person that wrote the book or recorded the course .

And so that's the type of people I really enjoy working with is the course creators , who are very motivated to see , see their students succeed . And then the students that are like yeah , I'll pay more because I get to actually work with you , and that's what I want .

People want that proximity to the expert , and until now it's been pretty hard to get that right . Like , imagine you , you read a best selling book like James Clear . You know , I was like oh're going to implement all these habits and I'm going to show up and answer your questions .

You're going to be like , wow , that's amazing and it's $2,000 , like , okay , that's a chunk of change , but if I were to actually implement the things he's teaching me and that were to become part of who I am and part of my life , how much value would that create in my life ? I'd be more productive , I would exercise more . I would do all these things .

Of course , that's worth more than $2,000 over the rest of your life .

Right , they all say we're an LMS , we can host your course , we can do payments , but people have their preferences and , from my experience , circle has the best user experience and that's really important because nowadays , when everything is online , it's digital , it's intangible , you're still using an app and if your members don't really enjoy the experience , if there's

a bit of friction or it's a bit too slow or it's kind of clunky or it's just sort of hard to use , it puts sand in the gears and it just doesn't create that positive association that someone might , that you would want them to have , of saying I want to go back and I want to check the community every day .

I want to build a habit , like when some people open up Facebook every single day or multiple times a day . That's how you want them to think and feel about your community and , your course , just going back and seeing if there's anything new . So Circle has a really great mobile app to really make that easy on people .

They don't always have to be on their desktop .

But the other thing I think is harder to know , or it's harder to kind of discover , is , with software , you want to really see who is behind the software , right Like the founders , the leaders , the people who are creating it , and what is their vision and what is the direction that they're taking the company in and how healthy is the company and all those

kinds of things . So I've had a privilege of having a front row seat to watch Circle really being birthed all the way to where it is now and the Circle team . They come from Teachable and they were there for quite a long time . So you know Teachable has been a leading platform in the course creator space for a very long time .

So they really understand online courses , they understand transformations and they understand that community is really the future of that . And so I've been really impressed by the , the , the company that they've built , the talent that they've attracted and their roadmap .

So they have a very ambitious and aggressive roadmap and they've delivered against it quarter after quarter for four years now in a row , and that's something that you don't see when you look at some of the other companies and other tools that maybe have been out there even longer , but they haven't really .

They haven't really evolved very much , they haven't changed very much , and so there's different reasons for that . But I've just been very impressed with circle and the types of creators and clients that are attracted to circle .

So I find that they just attract a very serious , very successful entrepreneur , a creator that has a very significant business and reputation , and they they value that right , so they want to pick a platform that's in line with that .

So Circle is growing very quickly and they know that creators need support , they need designers , they need consultants , they need developers actual need consultants they need developers actual developers technical developers , and so now they've launched this really nice big partner platform and so we're one of the few top gold partners on the platform , just because we've

worked with so many clients already , and so we have a lot of different services and things that we offer people to help them get up and running on Circle . But if they're already up and running , we have other things too that we can do to help increase engagement and audit their community and that kind of thing .

Like Circle started and they only trusted less than two handfuls of people to be involved , like building out communities and structuring communities and customizing communities and bringing people over , and you're one of those trusted people . For how many years ? Like two years .

to the other , the other to a platform community hosted by Circle .

And then I finally got the call directly from circle one day and they were like hey , we've got this client and we really want him to use circle . He's very interested , he's got a Facebook group . That's been very , very successful . But he knows there's a lot of downsides .

But he's like I can't do the work , I don't have the time , I don't have the desire to learn how to set everything up . Can we bring you in and talk to him ? And you know you could do it . And I was like , of course , absolutely that's sort of dream scenario .

And it ended up being Dave Gerhardt of exit five , and so Dave's a big B2B marketer and so he's done a lot in that space and he's grown a really large audience on social media .

And so , dave , he basically had a membership or membership site right , and so it's like you pay and you're going to get some extra private podcasts and he'll do some videos , but he was basically running that connection type community , so there wasn't the curriculum and the courses .

It's not like here's how to do Facebook ads and here's how to like do landing pages .

You're not signing up for the courses , but you're signing up to be around Dave , so you're getting closer access and proximity and around serious B2B marketers that are taking their careers into their own hands and wanting to learn from others , who are kind of on the cutting edge , since marketing stuff is always changing and there's always new trends and things like .

Now they're talking a lot about AI and what everyone is doing . And so he reached out to me and was like , can you move us over to circle ? And I said , of course , and we ended up taking what he had currently , which was basically just a place to chat , and it was like , well , what's the vision here ?

What would you like this community to be able to do ? And it's like , oh , it'd be great if there was a marketplace and people could find like private jobs that are not even listed online yet , and if people could get feedback on their marketing work , and and on and on and on .

So we ended up just building all of that for him and helping him realize that vision .

And it was so cool , because one of the scariest moments is you're taking thousands of people out of a Facebook group that they've been in for years and you're like , okay , we're shutting this down and now all of you can come over to this thing called circle , and the feedback was just amazing .

Like literally one of the first posts was wow , no-transcript , what you want for your audience , for your customers ?

It's there , surrounded by all the other things that are going on on Facebook , and so it's distraction central , right literally , to just continue to bombard you with notifications and pop-ups and distractions and ads right , you might know something about that .

And so Facebook is not sitting there thinking I want to create the best learning experience possible for Kwejo's group .

It's like , no , they want to extract data and clicks and stuff from all the members there , and so , by moving to Circle , you're putting them in this private space that it's calm , it's dedicated , it's designed for interaction and engagement and focus , and so you're taking them to a place where there's intentionality .

It's like saying , okay , I'm ready to block off an hour or 30 minutes , I want to go check on the course , check on the community , see if people have responded to my posts , like all that kind of stuff , instead of let me go check Facebook and then , oh yeah , there's that community that I'm in along with 50 others , you know .

So I find that that is a huge level up . And the other thing , too is I don't know how you guys feel about it I personally haven't gone

to Facebook in quite a while . I've kind of left that behind when , when I sign up for a program program , I tend to buy quite a bit of high ticket stuff , whether it's coaching or courses . I see a lot of value in creating transformations in my life .

At this point I'm running a business , and so if people were to help me with some of these major problems that I have , that unlocks a ton of value for me . So if I'm going to pay thousands of dollars and then I find out after the purchase that they're going to drop me into a Facebook group , it feels very disappointing to me .

It feels kind of like I'm paying up here and what I'm getting is kind of down here , and so just from that branding perspective and that professionalism and that quality , you don't want your first impression to sort of be a letdown of like , seriously like I paid all these thousands of dollars for a Facebook group , and so that's something I really appreciate about

the circle side is it feels like a white glove experience . It feels like you intentionally designed and built something that took effort and took time , because you care so much about your students and your customers that you want to deliver a world-class experience .

And so there's things like onboarding inside of circle , that people go through a series of videos and steps to learn how your program works and how the software works . Where in Circle I mean in Facebook you're just like dropped in , like all right , good luck , and you just go into the deep end to try to figure out how to swim .

So I think a lot about what does that impression leave on your customers , and I want to just really leave an amazing experience on their minds .

And I got , I guess , my last question lot more , you can customize it and I got I guess my last question some of the steps that somebody would need to go through to design and launch a successful community ? Can you , because you do . You take somebody through these steps all the time in your business .

But like what are those general steps that somebody should consider as they think about creating and setting up a successful community ? Yeah , absolutely .

And then we even have a resource that listeners can check out , which would be more of a detailed breakdown of our community launch roadmap , and so I'll drop the link or we can put that in the description . But essentially yeah , you want to there's really three major phases . So there's the design phase , the build phase and the launch phase .

And so , in design , that's where it's not really graphic design , but it's offer design , it's , it's , you know , community experience design . So it's what is the , the outcome that we want someone to achieve ? And then what are the ways that we're going to facilitate that ?

So it's like figuring out what kind of live events are we going to do , or how many groups or spaces are there going to be inside of Circle , or all of these different things . Even when I'm working with a lot of clients , they might be starting something completely from scratch .

So we're literally creating the offer , creating the price point , helping them create the targeting , the personas . What's the exact problem that we're solving ?

But we want to get really , really specific , really niche down as uncomfortably small as possible because that is going to allow you to deliver amazing value for that very narrow target in a pretty quick manner , versus saying , oh , I just want to help business owners grow their businesses , that is way too vague , way too generic , no one's really going to be very

owners grow their businesses . It's like that is way too vague , way too generic , no one's really going to be very interested in that offer .

But when we get very , very specific and someone feels like , wow , he just read my mind , like he's speaking exactly to me and my problem , and he has the outcome that I want , you're able to charge a lot more and get much better clients , but then you can actually deliver because you're so specific , you can create that journey of what someone needs to do and

what those steps are , and then we just build that inside the community and so that's just setting it all up , connecting your automations , all your zaps , all that kind of stuff . And then , at the end , it's time to turn it on , launch the community , kick it off , welcome everyone in , and now you're up and running and it's off to the races .

And now the job is run the community . Make it engaging , deliver the value and help your customers succeed .

By following these steps , you are going to avoid rework and mistakes down the line and you're going to have a much more successful launch in a very short period of time .

And , Jordan , thank you for , in this short amount of time , sharing so much value about communities and your experience helping people start communities and taking them through the process of planning out a good community .

I especially like how you kind of led us behind the scenes through how you can make a good community and attach it to your course or just have it be part of your course .

I love the idea of transformations and the fact that anyone out there who has done a thing can package that knowledge up , can put it into a community , can sell it for any price they want and they can help someone on the other side of the world achieve that same transformation and breakthrough and outcome in their

life . And it's just so exciting , and so I just find that the people that I get to work with are just amazing human beings , that who have that heart of wanting to serve and wanting to help others and achieve things that they've done in their lives . So it's just been such a fun journey and been a blessing . So thanks for having me on .