111: How to Launch a Profitable Membership, with Jay Clouse

This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record Studio Quality Podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, Spotify, and The New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guests' internet quality, but it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech, but easy to use. You don't have to have anything installed on your computer and your guests don't either, and overall the audio quality is way better. Riverside also now supports text-based editing. You can now edit your high quality video and audio content by browsing a transcript of your recording and editing the text just like you do with a word processor. This will speed up your editing process and you can even edit your content without listening to it. So if you're recording your interviews remotely, hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Visit Riverside.fm and use my code Grow15 that's g-r-o-w-one-five to start recording Studio Quality Sound and video and to get 15% off a membership plan. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that empowers independent podcasters like you to get more listeners, make more money and change more lives. I'm your host, Kevin Schmidlin, and if you've ever dreamed of creating a profitable online membership product around your podcast, then this is the episode that you have been waiting for. Our special guest today is a former guest of Grow the Show, Jay Klaus. He is a master in community building and he's the builder of several successful membership platforms, including SPI Pro, which is the membership offered by Pat Flynn. And of course, Jay now has his own membership for online creators, which is called The Lab. Today, Jay is going to share his secrets and a step-by-step guide on how to conceptualize, launch, and grow a thriving, profitable membership product that your audience will absolutely love. Just imagine if your podcast could launch a sustainable income stream while forging deeper connections with your listeners and creating a community of raving fans. That's the power of an amazing membership experience, and Jay today is going to show you how it's done. So buckle up because we're about to dive into the world of membership creation with the expert himself, Jay Klaus, on this episode of Grow the Show. So right now, Jay Klaus is one of the fastest growing online influencers who serves other online creators like you, me, and himself. In the year previous to this recording, Jay's online presence has absolutely skyrocketed. He's got over 30,000 email subscribers. His podcast creator science has accrued more than 1.5 million podcasts downloads, and it actually recently just got picked up by the HubSpot podcast network. And between his podcast, his courses, and his membership, The Lab, Jay's business is currently bringing in roughly $50,000 per month. And while that membership, The Lab is fairly new, it's already generated several hundred thousand dollars itself in only 14 months. Now, part of the reason why Jay's membership has grown incredibly fast is because this is not his first rodeo. In fact, before the lab, Jay had successfully built several thriving online communities, both for himself and as a part of the team behind smart passive income, which is the well-known platform surrounding podcasting OG Pat Flynn. I joined SPI because I ran a community for three, almost four years previous to that that they actually acquired and absorbed into SPI. So I've been doing this for almost six years. And I know what works. Jay helped Pat and the SPI team build a beloved membership, which is called SPI Pro. And shortly after that, Jay struck back out on his own, you know, being the entrepreneur that he is. It wasn't too long until he began planning his own online membership. So initially, I thought that this was going to be a community attached to this project I was doing called Tweet 100. Tweet 100 is this free 90 or 100 day challenge to publish more on Twitter. You can learn more at Tweet100.com. And people really loved it. We had like thousands of people go through this free challenge and they're like, there should be a community for this. And I thought, yeah, I'll just do that. And so the first version of the lab was actually a private community for Tweet 100 members. It was a paid part of that challenge. And then about two months in, I realized I just didn't want to do a membership that was totally dedicated to Twitter. Like there was just so much more to my life and what I was doing as a creator that I didn't enjoy having every bit of this community be about Twitter. So I started rethinking, okay, what is a more broad creator-based membership look like? And I finally kind of cracked the code on the premise and the pricing and basically flipped the switch and transitioned that Tweet 100 community into the lab in March and then started bringing in people for the product that would become the lab. And through building publicly and getting direct feedback from his audience, Jay was able to refine his membership offering into something more broad, yes, but also something very specific. So the lab is a place where professional creators experiment together. And the way that looks and what we do in the actual membership, we are constantly sharing like structured stories of, hey, like literally the structure is, here was the goal that I had for this experiment. Here's what I actually did in this experiment. Here's the goal, here's the hypothesis, here's the experiment, here's the results. Today, Jay is going to walk you through exactly what it takes to create a thriving membership like he has. But before we work through those logistics, we first need to define what a membership actually is and how a membership is different than other common online products like courses or a community. So to me, community is a space where there is peer-to-peer interaction. Membership to me is a paid product and community access is one value proposition that I've chosen to include in my membership. There are memberships that don't have community interaction at all. But to me, a membership is a paid product with one of the value propositions being access to this community forum. A course could be kind of similar. It just depends on how you're delivering the information in the course and how people achieve that outcome that you're promising. Usually courses have a very finite end point. And something I talked to a lot of people who are starting memberships is, well, what is the reason why a membership is the right delivery mechanism for what you're doing? Because there's no reason to have a membership for something that you can have someone accomplish in three weeks because then what's the ongoing relationship? Why does the ongoing relationship need to exist? So the reason that the lab is a membership is this is a space for professional creators to really stay at the edge of what's working now and that edge is moving all the time. You never achieve like, okay, this is what's working now and now I'm set. No, this is what's working now, but actually Twitter decided to kill review. So your integration said subscribers to convert kit isn't working anymore. Here's the work around that we just found. So yeah, a membership should have a reason for being ongoing in nature. Yeah, that's a brilliant distinction because I'm sure you get this question all the time from creators. I certainly hear it all the time where a creator will be like, I want to create a membership. And to me, the question is why a membership versus a course versus a community. And so when how would you answer that question? If a creator said to you like, I want to create a membership, what should I make? What should I make it? Like what should I make by membership? How would you guide that creator into creating something that's worthwhile? You can solve that puzzle if you're coming from it from that way, but usually people coming from that way are like, I want recurring revenue. I think the answer is membership. So I'm doing this for me and then they don't think through the premise and the design of a thing. And it doesn't work very well. It falls really flat. There's a lot of really bad memberships because of precisely this line of thinking. So the first question I do ask is, okay, who is it for and what does it do for them? And they tell me those answers. And I say, okay, why does it need to be ongoing? Like we're just talking about, why does why does this need to be through the modality of a membership versus like you said, of course, or even a cohort base course? Which again, I draw a big distinction between that in a membership. So if they can't answer those questions, and it has to go beyond, you know, this is for like-minded people to connect. That is necessary, but no longer sufficient in most niches, because there's already plenty of places where those people can connect with like-minded people. Unless you're truly like the only place, there's a member of the lab who helps ceramicists. And yeah, you're right. There aren't a lot of hobbyist ceramicist communities, and you can be that for them. But most niches, like there are already competing communities, so we have to go beyond that. So with a lot of the podcasters that I speak to, there is a debate over whether to have a free community or to make their community paid. So, you know, some folks are like, oh, I want to create a membership and drive my podcast listeners to join this paid membership. Others are like, I just want my podcast listeners to join this community, so I can get all my listeners, you know, in one place and interact with them and get feedback. But there's also a lot of folks who don't know which one to do. They're like, should I do make it free? Should I make it paid? Like, first of all, what's your take on free communities and whether they are worthwhile? And can you help a theoretical podcaster decide whether to do a free or paid community? It takes a special circumstance for me to recommend a free community as something that you run and maintain. I think that having a podcast community that organically springs up on like a subreddit or something that is moderated and run by your fans is an amazing thing to support how you can. But if you are starting and maintaining and managing a community, it's really hard for me to recommend doing it free because it's hard to do well. And if you don't do it well, it's a really bad experience and gives people pause to trust you or invest with you in different ways. Also, people are still like worried about, are they doing the right thing? Are they doing the cool thing? And if you have a free community that you're running and managing, and you get like three people in there, some of your best listeners might start questioning, am I the only person listening to this podcast? So it's like visibly a difficult thing to make look good. But think about if you have a free community and things are going well, what happens is you have more and more work and maintenance and running that thing and you're not getting compensated for it. So that more successful it is, the more combative your relationship to it can become. And a lot of people say, okay, well, what if I have like a paid community but there's a free part of it? Theoretically, it makes sense. But again, it's really hard to do the free part well. And that does not, if you don't do it well, it does not make people want to join the paid part of it because they're not, they're not going to be like, well, if this is like this, why would I want to pay for more of this? This isn't that great. Or if you make the free part too good and deliver a ton of value, they might say, I don't even know what else I would want from a paid thing. So it's a really tough line to tell and do well. I just don't recommend starting and managing your own free community. But if you can get your listeners to rise up and do it themselves on Reddit or something, that's a magical, magical thing. That makes it so much easier. And boy, is that accurate man. We were blessed. We created a free community at Crowley Show and we were blessed that it's up to like 4,000 members and it is just so unwieldy. Like it takes so much to manage. It's a good problem to have, but I'm going to agree more. I will say for content creators like us, you can have a membership that is not so strongly based on the peer-to-peer connectivity. There's a lot of precedents for content creators saying, here's my membership, it's X dollars per month. And as a member, you get this thing from me. It's not about connection to each other, even though that could happen in like the comments on the post that you make. But it's more of a premium or expanded content model. And I think that works for content creators if you want to go down that route. It's not going to be as lucrative, probably. You're probably talking about smaller, more frequent payments. You know, you're probably going to have a monthly option. It's probably going to be somewhere south of $50, maybe even south of $20 a month. And you're going to need volume then. And what I find from a lot of podcasters is, again, just think about the numbers and be realistic. Have some intellectual honesty. How many members do you think you'll get in the first month? And is the incremental $200 worth the extra hours you're putting into creating the premium content for this small group of people? Or should you continue to work really hard, weaponize that time towards the free content you're doing and the other audience building activities that you're doing so that this paid membership opportunity is more compelling a year from now, two years from now. All right. Let's shift gears to more a little bit more theoretical because there's tons of podcasters who hear us right now who are thinking, I want to have a membership. I want to create some sort of monthly offer. So assuming they understand that the membership should be something where there's a reason to be there monthly to stick around, what's then the next step in figuring out what to offer in that membership? It starts with a purpose and it's kind of answering both those questions, which is why does this need to exist and why does it need to be ongoing? I just call that like you need to have a purpose. What is the job that your community members are hiring your community to do for them? Think of it as a job to be done framework like people hire your membership to unhomplish or fill some role in their life. What is it? You need to describe it because what a lot of people end up doing poorly is thinking, okay, I have an audience. I can make a digital community space. I'll smash the two together and amazing. I have a community here and they don't articulate any type of purpose. So people will sometimes buy into your community just based on their affinity and relationship to you, but they are still making an assumption to close that loop in their mind of what am I going to get out of this? But if you don't put a purpose up front, you don't actually know what their assumption is. So now all these people could come in with different assumptions of what they're going to get out of this and it's really hard to fulfill the expectations of a ton of different people. They're very varied. So having a purpose filters properly up front, what people expect from you so that you can then succeed in delivering that so that people continue to stick around. You have retention and a true community with closeness actually forms on the back of that. So you got to define your purpose. Who is this for? What does it do for them? And how do they actually engage with the space in order to achieve that outcome? What does proper engagement to this space actually look like? How do you define that for the Creator Lab? So the lab is a place where professional creators experiment together. And the way that looks and what we do in the actual membership, we are constantly sharing structured stories of, hey, like literally the structure is here was the goal that I had for this experiment. Here's what I actually did in this experiment. Here's the goal. Here's the hypothesis. Here's the experiment. Here are the results. And so like literally you can go in there and see like, okay, how are we doing this? I just posted right before we got on this interview, I was running experiment last night because I've seen some anecdotal signals that made me think, I think if I post threads on Twitter between five and seven PM Eastern, that actually does better for me than posting them in the morning, which is what most people will tell you. So I ran that last night, had the most successful threat I've ever had. And I went in there, I recorded a video and I said, hey, not only did this play out in this way in this result, but also I figured out how to transition a lot of that engagement into email subscribers. And I made just a walk through video and showed people how to do that. So that's like the main way I asked people to participate. We also have what I call shared focus sprints, which are basically lightweight members only cohort based course experiences inside the lab. So the first one we did was around building a high converting landing page, then we had one around a lead magnet, then we had one around a low priced initial offer, like a digital product that can be offered into your subscribers shortly after subscribing. So these are the very specific ways that I train members on how to engage in order to feel like they're getting the most out of their membership. And last week actually created a quote unquote course inside of circle called a member guide that I point to because it has all these really short videos with tips because a new member comes in your community and their question is, how do I use this? How do I get the most out of this? So that course is the answer to that. Just go through there all these little videos, how to get the most out of your membership. Here's how to engage. Here's how to find other members. Here's how to optimize your profile. Here's how to use the search function. Anytime someone's like, I don't know how to use this space. This is the answer. There's a lot of being proactive and answering people's questions ahead of time because when people are confused or uncertain, they just won't participate. And if they don't participate, they're going to start to feel tension between paying for a thing that they're not utilizing and they're going to stop paying for it. And in communities, there are negative network effects. When people leave a community, it actually opens the door for other people to think about leaving the community like because a lot of the value is pure to pure. So if one of your best friends or one of your favorite members decides to not renew, you might not find the same value or you might just question like, Oh, this person decided that this isn't worth it. Why do I think it's worth it? It just opens up this loop in people's minds. So it's a tough, tough product and model to do well over time and being really thoughtful in the concept phase about your purpose and about your pricing is one of the most important things you can do. While you do want to be thoughtful when developing any product or service as Jay has learned, it's even more important to be thoughtful when developing a membership. A membership is one of the hardest projects to undo or back away from because depending on what you sell, what frequency that people are billed on monthly or annually, a lot of people who join the tweet 100 community joined for a full year upfront because it was like wildly affordable. And if I'm changing the nature of this community two months in, what do I do with the other 10 months they have paid for? Do I refund it? Do I pro rate it? Do I refund the whole thing? Do I keep them in there? So is more of a logistical question for expanding? But was I afraid? No, because my audience generally is much more diverse and interested in things beyond Twitter. So it was an easier sell for me in a lot of ways. Yeah, but logistically there was some things to work through. So what are those things that you need to work through? I think you got to get pricing nailed down. I think you got to choose the platform and design the experience of that platform. I think you got to think about your brand. I think you got to think about hiring and capacity planning. All of that comes before you even decide like, yes, I am going to continue to move forward with this because if you don't have all that stuff answered, you don't actually know what this will look like even if it succeeds. That's fascinating. So you think you're saying that pricing, platform, brand, and hiring before you have validation that like your audience is interested in the purpose that you've come up with? At least pricing. Yeah. And all this is conceptual. You don't have to hire anybody yet, but here's what I mean. Think about the price you have in your mind. Now ask yourself, when I launch this, how many members do I think from my audience are actually going to sign up? And actually do the math and say, okay, if they do, how much money is that to me? And then ask yourself, is that worthwhile? Because what I see a lot of people doing is they will just kind of assume pricing models they've seen. They'll be like, okay, I'm going to price this at $49 a month or $490 per year. And they don't even think about how many people will get to sign up. I think, well, I'd be great if I can get like 100 members in there, but probably I'll get 10 to start maybe 20. And suddenly, you're doing so much work because you've over promised on what you're going to deliver in this thing. You have 10 members paying $49 for the first month. So you've made $490 and you hate it. And you haven't thought through like, will this work? And again, a membership is a hard thing to back away from or undo. Even if you do it successfully, that's still a bad experience with your brand. It's going to give everyone who did that. Pause. And even people who like watch this from a distance go down and now disappear, it's going to give them pause before investing with you again. So it's really important to think through these things. Yes, you want to get validation that people have this problem and they would hire your community to do it at the price that you're proposing before actually selling it, probably. But yeah, people don't think through all these levels before they get started. Let's take the next step then. Creator has landed on a price that it works platform. How do you choose a platform? There are several fine options. Typically, I see them on a spectrum between on one end. You have a chat-based platform and on the other end, you have a form-based platform. So from a pure vibe and experience standpoint, do you want this to be more real time and immediate or do you want this to be more organized and structured and in-depth? It's really hard to do a chat-based platform at scale and have closeness because it's just so noisy and so fast all the time. So I indexed on the side of I want this to be organized in-depth and have closeness. So I chose a form-based tool in circle is my platform of choice in that world. So we've got our price, we've got our platform. Let's say that we've got the brand and you know, all the numbers look good. You're ready to go. Now what? So I think about this in two stages of launching. I have what I call the private opening and then I have the public launch. One thing I really value as a creator is identifying, recognizing, rewarding my biggest fans. So the way that I do that with the membership is before I publicly launched a lab, before I had a sales page or anything else, I started dropping little breadcrumbs in my email list, in my podcast, on social media. I would say, hey, I'm starting a membership. It's four creators. I don't have anything to show for it yet. But if you trust me, you can sign up today at half price for the life of your membership. Just shoot me a direct message. So that filters for people who are paying really close attention, your biggest fans. It's rewarding them. But the best price that there will ever be, it's getting your best people in there to give it a try at first. And now when you go and have your public launch, you don't have to show a theoretical space and say, hey, it's ready. Come on in. You can say, hey, it's in progress. And here are screenshots. And here is evidence of results that have already happened because you're documenting, as opposed to creating a theoretical sales page. So I go in those two stages. And if you can't get people into your private opening, there's probably no point in having a public launch. Okay. So let's assume that you've gotten your first initial members and they've paid you money to join your community. Then what do you do? I'm just trying to answer the question that I knows in the members mind, which is now what? You know, I just swipe my credit card and paid a bunch of money. Now what? Hey, go through this three steps of onboarding. So like, thing next, thing next, thing next. Great. You did that. Click this button to get into the digital community space. Great, you did that. Here's a video for me telling you what to do next. Go to your profile, fill it out. Great. You did that. Now make your introduction. Here's a post that tells you exactly how to make that introduction. Great. I did that. Now you made your introduction. I, Jay, as the creative of this community, I'm going to be really quick to recognize you and give you a great experience getting response from your introduction right now. A lot of communities will get to this point. They won't do all those steps I just explained, but they will get to the point where people introduce themselves to crickets to nothing. And that's a horrible first experience because I'm so excited. I just did this time and sense of that people will spend like 10, 15, 20 minutes, crafting an introduction themselves. And they say, here I am. It's a vulnerable thing. I hope I'm welcome here. And we'll get any response. It just feels like, okay, I guess that wasn't worth it. And in their mind, putting effort into your community wasn't worth it. So why would they do it again? So do you find that for those who get tons of interaction on their intro posts, those members that in the future just interact more inherently with the community? Yeah, it's become, it's just become part of the community experience. I'm just going through now. Every single post for the last several months has a video introduction. It's just part of the culture. People see it. It's recommended. They do it. It feels very human. It makes people feel close to them. People give better welcomes, tons of likes, tons of comments on all of these. And it's just like, wow, it's this immediate experience of, wow, this space is different. Yeah. And people tell me all the time, like literally within days of joining, most new members would be like, this is incredible. I feel like this is different than any community I've ever been a part of. And I feel like, sometimes people like, I feel like I've already got my money out of it because I also do a 30-minute welcome call with every single member who joins. And usually that just becomes like a 30-minute, like cozy hangout slash coaching call where we'll probably bust through something that's holding you back right now. And it's just the first experience people have, the first impression they're having with your membership can be really powerful in a positive or negative way. This is why it's really important in the concept phase to understand how do I interact with this thing to get the value from it. You need to design the way to achieve the promise you're making through some form of participation. And that doesn't stop with onboarding. You should design how members will interact with your membership the whole time that they're involved. But a lot of communities just stand up these digital spaces and they think, okay, I mean, you get out of it what you put in and they don't show you where model for you what it looks like to put energy and effort into the system and then see a return on that effort. Now, a huge part of that system and the value that your members get out of the membership will come from how people interact with each other on a day-to-day basis. But another piece of membership success rides on what type of programming you hold for your members on a regular basis. Now, your programming is basically the stuff that you do for your membership as a whole. Programming sessions are kind of like holding virtual events, but they're not quite full-blown events. I call it programming because events seems flashier than it is a lot of times. Like, I think there are types of sessions that you do that don't feel like events, quote unquote, like for the last three weeks in the lab we've had a 30-minute morning co-working session every morning during the week. That doesn't feel like an event, but it does feel like part of the core programming of like how you can engage with this thing. So, every piece of programming should have a purpose as well. And the more concrete the outcome of that that you can share upfront, the better off it is. Let me explain what I mean by that. When I started the lab, I was hosting weekly office hours, 60 minutes, open call, come in, Q&A, first come, first service, everything I can. It was really popular and over time, attendance started to decline. And I wanted to know why because we always had a good time. While we were there, people enjoyed it. We answered a lot of questions. We got a lot done. So, every chance people who had been coming, who were no longer coming, my audience, busy people, their creators themselves, and the feedback I got generally was, I like it when I go, but sometimes I don't have a question. And if I don't have a question, I don't know what I'm going to get out of it. So, it just became easy to deprioritize in their mind. When I started offering, were these 30 minute, I call them hot seats, which is a one-on-one discussion between me and another member based around a specific problem or question they have. And when I put that event in the calendar, in the programming, I could say upfront, here's exactly what we're going to be talking about. And that had great attendance. And people love watching the recordings. They became assets for the community because I can title it very specifically. Like, hey, here's how to build an audience if you don't like social media. Hey, here's how to think about your personal brand versus your company brand. Like, those are specific hot seat discussions that we've had. And even though it's around one particular person, people can extrapolate. But it's about setting expectations. So, people know what they're committing their time to. So, based on that feedback, I deprioritized office hours and opened up more hot seats per week because people could tell upfront, what am I going to get out of this? And they're more likely to join in that way. A lot of people have these ongoing event types that are kind of fluid and ambiguous as to what members will get out of it. And it's asking really for a leap of faith from people to prioritize their time to do it. So, programming just really is like an intentional look at, what am I doing and why am I doing it? And I've actually identified six different types of programming that I would call things. So, again, in the design and concept phase, you understand, what do I want my programming to do for people in my membership? And based on those six different types of programming, I then make recommendations on like, okay, here's exactly a type of event you can do for that. Now, even if your community experience is great and your programming is awesome, believe it or not, you're still going to have members decide to leave your membership. And while you might think that that's bad news or a sign of something wrong, sometimes churn can be a good thing. I've heard this describe that every member who leaves is getting you closer to the perfect base of members. Well, even still one of the best ways to grow any business and to keep it profitable is to minimize churn. Understand churn is inevitable. And I've taken a really strong approach to focus on closeness between members because I think closeness between members in the community where like the reason that they have your community in their life is because this is actually the connective tissue between some of their favorite people. I didn't even offer a monthly option. You can only join the lab for a year at a time. And that has really reduced churn because there's been almost no opportunity for churn yet. That's great. By nature of creating the opportunity for somebody to churn, some number of people will. And I find that it's a lot easier to convince somebody to make a higher priced investment one time than to convince them to make the same investment 12 consecutive months in a row. And there's going to be churn at the end of that year for sure. But I do try to identify when people are not participating. I call it participating instead of engaging because participation looks different for different people. Some people just like to log in, read the forum, maybe they'll leave some sort of signal like a like or a comment, but some people don't like posting, some people don't like commenting, but they're still getting a lot of value out of the membership, even though they're not captured in the quote unquote engagement metrics. So if people aren't participating, I do try to look out for that and be proactive and reach out to them and saying like, hey, haven't seen you in a minute thinking about you, how can I help? You know, and it's for different reasons. Sometimes life happens. Sometimes they don't want to be a creator anymore. Sometimes they just forgot. Sometimes they had a bad experience. You know, it's it's all over the board. But I had somebody tell me one time a community misses you when you're gone. So I started saying like a community misses you when you're missing. And when people are missing, I reach out to them and say what's going on. So those are some sure fire ways to reignite engagement with members who aren't getting the most out of the program. But as a business owner, what do you do with your best and most engaged members? Is there any opportunity to make your business healthier there? You know, something else that I put into the lab that I'm really proud of is we have an affiliate program because I want to grow from within members who are for other members. Those people are generally like really great members and not only is it, hey, you referred somebody. So here's your payment. If they were you next year, you get that same payment again. So people are incentivized not just to bring members in, but to make it a place that they want to stay. I love that. I love the idea of this community if successful can actually be financially rewarding to the members directly as a revenue stream for themselves. Not only do J's members get massive value from the membership itself, but they can also make the money that they invested into the membership back directly from the membership. What a deal. When you get that type of system going, your membership will grow on its own forever. And that's exactly what you want, right? Well, actually that might not be what you want. It's not what Jay wants for the lab. In fact, he's decided to stop his membership from growing. Now, you publicly declared that you are capping your membership at it's 200 members, right? That's right. Can you talk a little bit more about what went into that decision and then what the response was publicly and privately from folks when you basically said to everyone, hey, everybody, I'm capping my income. I'm capping the amount of money that I can make off of this thing. What was that whole experience like? And that's the key. It's capping the amount of money I can make off of this thing. It's not capping the amount of money that I can make as a creator. Identify as a creator. I don't identify as the guy who made the lab. The lab is one product, one revenue stream inside of my business. And it's a significant one. But it's also a significant investment in my time because I'm doing these 30 minute welcome calls with every new member that becomes several hours a week where I'm talking to new members. I'm hosting events. I'm doing hot seats in there. And this is the level of investment of time that I want to have because this is the premise of the community is a lot of access to me directly and a lot of help from me. I can't do that at scale. And if I were to try to bring someone else on to help manage the community quote unquote, it wouldn't be like me. It would be a different experience, a different product. I'd have to market it differently. That might affect the price. I would rather keep the experience as good as it is now. Keep it small. Have a lot of closeness between members. Be at peace with churn and eventually just reach this point where we're at capacity and when somebody drops off, I can bring somebody else in. Actually, even when we hit capacity, what I will probably do is build a wait list of people who want to join one at a time. I will grant them access. And then I will turn around and buy out the remaining time on people's memberships who are inactive and say, hey, seems like you're not getting value out of this six months left. Let me just refund you $750. And now this new members coming in for $1,500. So net, I'm out on top and we have a stronger community fabric. That's probably what I'll do. Members really like that because it is focused on closeness. Everyone joins for a year. So people will really get to know each other. And it's just different. And that's another way that it's different. And people really appreciate that. Now, I do think it'll probably have a good impact on retention because people who choose not to renew, if we're at capacity, it's going to be hard for them to get back in. Yeah. As it turns out, that day has already come. As the time of this recording, the lab is at capacity. And Jay currently has a waiting list of creators ready to join when room is available. However, you can get support directly from Jay in building your membership. If you want, Jay actually has a do it yourself course called build a beloved membership that guides you step by step in conceptualizing, launching, marketing, and growing your membership. So if you'd like to get your hands on that, you can just go to belovedmembership.com or you can actually use the link in the show notes to get a 10% discount. I've taken the course myself and I can tell you it is honestly one of the best courses I have taken. Also, if you're somebody who's on Twitter, I highly recommend giving Jay a follow there. He's in prolific share of ideas and strategies and he's totally worth a spot on your timeline. I'm sure he'll let you know there when spots in the lab are opening up. The link to follow Jay on Twitter is also in the show notes and by the way, follow me there while you're at it. And finally, if you like this podcast to grow the show, you would love Jay's podcast creator science. It's very similar in style to this show and it interviews some of the biggest online creators in the world about how they make and grow amazing online content businesses. That link, you guessed it, is in the show notes. This episode of a Girl the Show was written and produced by me with post-production and show notes by podcast boutique. For a Girl the Show, my name is Kevin Sridlin. I'll see you next time.