Golden Nuggets and Notes
About the Guest
Jay Clouse is the founder of Creator Science. He helps creators become smarter through his newsletter, podcast, membership, and YouTube channel.
About the Podcast
In this episode of Deep Drive, Ali Abdaal and Jay Clouse talk about different aspects about building an online community ranging from the emergence of community as the new drop shipping to the challenges, pricing models and creating recurring value.
Golden Nuggets
1 .Building a community has become a quite attractive value proposition since it brings constant, predictable recurrent revenue. However, most people are getting disillusioned since they are having a bad community experience. If someone wants to succeed in this space, they need to focus more upon making the experience so amazing people cannot imagine not being a part of. Competition is not much a worry since the glut won’t be great.
2. There are two main value proposition a community brings: connections and transformation. The third is the sense of identity.
3. A lot of people don’t understand much about themselves or what they care about, and their purpose in life. When people get into something, it becomes a part of their identity. It gives them an understanding about themselves, and they learn to identify with it. A lot of stickiness that comes from community comes from connection or sense of identity. Value proposition is the content; community is the experience.
4. Ali emphasizes on the fact that for most people, the main thing that is holding them back is just not doing the Real Work. They know everything they need to know. It’s not about more content, but rather about sitting there and doing the thing you know should be doing.
5. One of the key mistakes that creators make while creating a community is that they get very granular about the delivery and make that a value proposition on the sale page. As a result, it turns into a rigid system.
The less you promise from a delivery stand point in terms of actual programming, the more flexibility you have to right-size the programming and experiment with stuff.
If you publicly make a promise you cannot go back on that. Even if nobody would know or complain it’s hard to go back on that. The less specific you are with the delivery promise, the better.
6. A private opening for initiating a community is better than a public launch. Calling out people who inherently trust you enables you to be open with experimentation and gives you the opportunity to create an amazing experience for them. It also gives you a great story to use on your sales page.
7. Price depends whether your community is more Content and Programming Focus Vs Relationship and Networking Focus. Jay states that personally, he would price the content and programming side lower than the relationship side.
8. Higher ticket, lower volume model is far less stressful than higher volume, lower ticket model.
Barbell approach gives community creators the opportunity to earn revenues from a few high-ticket client clients keeping most of the content freely accessible to public.
9. If you want to build a community based on relationships, and conversation between members, the slower you integrate people, the better. The retentive and incentivizing mechanism for people to post and meet each other is benefitted by one to one connections. If you want to lean on the content side, numbers don’t make a big difference.
10. What falls apart with most communities is they under-bake the onboarding experience. Onboarding is like the when you swipe your credit card: you have both peak excitement as well as a peak anxiety of having made a mistake. The onboarding experience and the first day experience for individuals plays a key role in the success of your community-model than the number in your cohort.
11. Gamification is a Band-Aid for engagement, creators need to be careful about gamification since it can both used positively to generate behaviors or might be creating busy work. So, whether or not gamification is a right-fit depends upon your audience.
12. Recurring revenue comes from recurring value. Recurring value comes from something that is new constantly. When you have some much stuff, it gets difficult to train people on which stuff to use and also everything becomes less valuable by comparison.
Time Stamps
00:00 Intro
1:01 How Jay started
7:15 The history of “The Lab”
9:55 Community vs content
15:35 About Productivity Lab
25:45 The challenges
33:40 Jay’s approach to sales pages
36:30 Price: to cap or not to cap
46:30 Higher ticket, lower volume?
52:40 How many people to bring into the community
1:02:40 Spaces within the community
1:07:05 Mistakes we can learn from
1:10:00 Giving recurring value
1:21:00 The importance of a good first experience
For more details and the transcript, here is the video link and Podcast page:
Podcast Link
https://aliabdaal.com/podcast/how-to-build-a-profitable-community-jay-clouse/
