Initiators Guild: Why a membership model?
We are looking for people who have a track record of starting things (small businesses, non-profits, activist groups, podcasts, neighborhood initiatives, startups, etc.) and want to commit the next phase of their life to building something impactful (no matter if that’s in three months or three years). If you or someone you know is passionate about working on important problems and has a track record of initiating things, reach out — we would love to see you apply to the Initiators Guild. Our next cohort starts October 19, 2020 with applications due September 27, 2020.
In the blog we wrote a few weeks ago, we talked about how INVANTI is going to work moving forward. One of the newest parts of the model is a membership business model for the Initiators Guild, the newest part of INVANTI. The decision to do this was actually a shift in our thinking about our business, so we thought we would write about it to explain (and document) why we thought it was the best thing to do.
Alignment
In most of the writing we’ve done over the last few years, the word “alignment” pops up. In the original INVANTI full-time, in-person cohort model we constantly had people ask us, “Why don’t you charge the founders?” There were two reasons: (1) we didn’t think it gave us the best incentives to achieve the outcome we were striving for, (2) we wanted to make sure we were accessible, and not just available to those who could pay what would’ve probably been quite a lot of money, and (3) with our equity stakes in the resulting companies, we were charging founders, just in a different way than up-front cash.
As we’ve made the transition to our updated model, and learned a lot through the first iteration of the Initiators Guild, we have separated the needs that we think we are serving into the different layers of the studio. We continue to be highly selective in the people we choose to work with in the Guild and are energized and humbled by the diversity of identities and experiences represented in the group. After spending four months with our first cohort, we’ve learned that for people working on hard problems that matter deeply to them (many of whom are the best kind of stubborn, in not moving forward with an opportunity that doesn’t feel authentic to them), a program on a fixed timeline with fixed milestones just doesn’t make sense. Instead, what they are hungry for is a place to explore meaningful problems and progress towards starting something new with calm intentionality, surrounded by a community of like-minded peers with boosts of input and support from the INVANTI team.
If we continued with the business model that allowed us to do the first iteration of the Initiators Guild, we would have been constantly paying for the Guild out of the business model of the fund. This has some advantages, but it also forces us to decide, way too early, which founders and companies are “worth” spending time with. If we have learned one thing, it’s that when starting pre-idea, the path of any founder and concept is uncertain and unpredictable.
This is where we started to think about a different business model for the Initiators Guild. To meet these emergent needs, we decided on a membership community that supports initiators independent of a particular idea. The move toward membership shifted our incentives in two important ways: (1) it makes us accountable to all Guild members equally in terms of the value we provide, and (2) it frees up more of the fund capital to invest, instead of spending it on operations. Reason #1 is especially important to us because it drops the pre-tense that we know from an early stage what will be great for the fund, and also ensures that we aren’t treating founders as disposable just because they aren’t fit for it. The Guild is about taking the long view on founders, even if what they’re working on at a given moment in time is not a fit with the narrow thesis of the fund. We believe in supporting people to start things (1) because of the impact that those things will have, even if it’s outside our fund thesis and (2) who knows if the next thing that person works on is something where the fund becomes relevant.
Membership Features
We’ve made a few specific choices on how the membership works — below are some brief explanations on our thinking.
- On-going, monthly membership: There are other models out there that look similar to the Guild, but are time-bound and use a one-time fee. Because of the uncertainty of the path of exploring new ideas, and us wanting to be accountable to our members over that exploration, we’ve decided to go with an on-going monthly membership. We think this allows people to use the Guild for as long as it’s useful, and also doesn’t put an arbitrary deadline on what can be a very uncertain undertaking. Exploring is something that benefits from time, iteration, and sometimes pauses — we wanted the model to reflect that.
- $30/month: When we talked to current Guild members about what they thought was an appropriate price (almost all of them loved the membership model by the way!), we got a very broad range. We landed on $30/month after considering a few things. (1) An (incomplete) analogy that we thought about was a maker space. In the same way that someone may use a physical maker space to pursue a new endeavor, we thought the Guild could serve a similar role for potential entrepreneurs. (2) This seemed in the range that allowed it to be as accessible as possible. We still have some things to sort out on the unit economics front, but this seemed as good of a price point to start at as any.
- 3-Month Waiver: We know that life happens. The 3-month waiver is meant to give members flexibility if something happens in their life that makes the $30/month an issue, without having to give up their membership on the spot. One (positive) scenario we are also considering is that some may quit their job and bootstrap a company while in the Guild — if so, we wanted to have a formal way to give them some personal budget breathing room as they take that on, again without having to leave the Guild. We’ve personally been in this position, so we know what even a little breathing room does to the psyche while taking the leap of starting something.
- Scholarships: Access very much matters to us, and we don’t want our membership fee to stand in the way of someone getting support to start something. If the fee is something that a potential member isn’t able to make work, we wanted a way to make sure they were still able to join.
There are still elements of the membership model that we have to sort out — still pockets of misalignment that we want to fix, but we believe we are moving in the right direction, and hopefully in a way that only becomes stronger over time.
We are looking for people who have a track record of starting things (small businesses, non-profits, activist groups, podcasts, neighborhood initiatives, startups, etc.) and want to commit the next phase of their life to building something impactful (no matter if that’s in three months or three years). If you or someone you know is passionate about working on important problems and has a track record of initiating things, reach out — we would love to see you apply to the Initiators Guild. Our next cohort starts October 19, 2020 with applications due September 27, 2020.
