#311: How to Build a Successful Paid Community | Growth in Reverse

Summary

Podcast Summary: Creator Science with Jay Clouse

Episode 311: How to Build a Successful Paid Community | Growth in Reverse

Date: July 14, 2026
Host: Jay Clouse
Guests/Co-hosts: Chanel, Dylan (Growth in Reverse)

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Episode Overview

This episode pulls Jay Clouse—founder of Creator Science and a seasoned community builder—into the guest seat, as he’s interviewed by Chanel and Dylan from the Growth in Reverse podcast. The conversation dives deep into the strategies, systems, successes, and lessons learned from building and running paid communities, focusing extensively on Jay’s experience with "the Lab," his flagship creator community.

Key themes covered include onboarding, retention, scaling, member mastermind groups, offline events, risks of growth, and the evolving shape and purpose of paid memberships. Jay shares candid insights and practical advice, grounded in his decade-plus journey as a community leader.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. How the Lab (Community) Started and Evolved

Timestamps: [05:40]–[10:42]

• Origins: Jay’s community journey began in 2012 with in-person Startup Weekend events, moving to online mastermind groups on Slack and Zoom (when both were cutting edge).
• Transition to Circle: Advised and co-built SPI Pro with Pat Flynn’s team, gaining early exposure and expertise with Circle before launching his own community.
• Naming & Format Evolution: The Lab started as "Creative Companion Club," with early experiments on Discord and Twitter before landing on its current format within Circle.
• Longevity as an Edge: "I've seen so many waves of people come and go, and now I've seen so many waves of communities come and go, and it's like, I'm still standing. The lab is still standing." ([10:36] Jay Clouse)

2. Pricing, Scarcity, and Growth Levers

Timestamps: [10:44]–[15:42]

• Initial Member Cap: Capped at 200 members to control experience; this drove urgency and scarcity, successfully boosting sign-ups but creating future churn issues.
  • "Scarcity and urgency both in play there, great marketing drivers... the following year, February was our highest month of churn ever." ([12:25] Jay Clouse)
• Marketing Levers: Beyond scarcity, status/affiliation and running time-limited sprints or masterminds increase urgency. Evergreen models present a challenge without built-in urgency.
• Conversion Rate: High conversion for accepted applicants due to quick, personal video invitations at the moment of peak interest—something Jay considers a differentiator.

3. The Realities of Community-Building: Effort, Retention & Pain

Timestamps: [15:45]–[20:46]

• Constant Demands: "A community is never done. It's not passive revenue really at all. And it demands a lot of you."
• Emotional Connection: Jay takes member churn personally and admits it’s hard not to, especially when active or valued members leave.
• Setting Expectations: Many communities fail because creators don’t clearly define the purpose, experience, or personal time commitments required before launch.
  • "A lot of people are like, ooh, community tool exists. I have audience. Let me throw the two together. And that's not really a recipe for success." ([17:16] Jay Clouse)

4. Promotion, Value Delivery, and Member Outcomes

Timestamps: [20:46]–[23:23]

• Persistent, Subtle Promotion: Focused on steady awareness rather than hard sells, using campaigns around masterminds as periodic spikes.
• Relationship ROI: The real return for many is network-driven: a single connection or introduction can create outsized value (e.g., 48x membership fee).
  • "A lot of the return comes from the relationships that become an introduction that become something incredibly lucrative." ([23:15] Jay Clouse)

5. Designing for Engagement & Retention

Timestamps: [23:43]–[25:54]

• High Engagement = High Retention: Engaged members almost always renew; silent periods can mask private DMs and value exchanges.
  • "It's very rare that I'm surprised by somebody who didn't renew… there’s a lot of people that surprise me, people who renew, and I'm like, I haven't seen you in weeks, months…and I look at the profile and I was like, they were active yesterday. Oh, I had no idea." ([24:48–25:42] Jay Clouse)

6. Onboarding, "Midboarding," and Redesign

Timestamps: [27:21]–[29:13], [38:16]–[44:10]

• Onboarding Overhaul: Constantly iterating on onboarding, focusing on immediate, positive experiences: shorter intro videos, private podcast, member directory guides, DM automations.
  • "The happiest, most successful members in the community are people who make friends. They're people who are engaged in our live sessions." ([38:55] Jay Clouse)
• Manual Touchpoints: Every new member gets a video testimonial and a 20-minute welcome call with Jay—"Doesn't scale super well, but… it's a big reason why people are like, this onboarding is amazing." ([43:09] Jay Clouse)
• "Midboarding": Need to support members in the middle of their journey, not just at entry/exit.

7. Community Structure: Tiers, Density & Moderation

Timestamps: [29:13]–[36:41]

• Growth Beyond Cap: Moved past the cap to enable more "density"—niche (topic), platform, and geographic—making for richer subgroups and knowledge sharing.
  • "Communities… benefit from diversity, but they also benefit from some level of sameness…removing the cap allows density." ([29:46–30:50] Jay Clouse)
• Tiered Access: Basic tier (formerly "starter") bundles paid products, office hours, and later, limited forum access; higher tiers require $10k/month non-service revenue or 10k+ followers.
• Moderation and Experience: Higher tiers have more active moderation; basic tier users tend to be less vocal. Need to continually adjust formats to match member needs.

8. Mastermind Groups: Double-Edged Sword

Timestamps: [32:01]–[33:07], [42:59]–[44:10]

• **Mastermind groups boost retention but can lower broader community engagement, as the most valuable interactions move to smaller circles.
  • "The more people I get in mastermind groups, the more people renew. But also it removes some of the highest value, most potent posts in the broader community." ([32:31] Jay Clouse)

9. The Role of In-Person (Offline) Events

Timestamps: [44:12]–[48:34]

• Retention Engine: Offline events—whether full retreats or informal dinners—meaningfully boost member retention, providing enough value to justify annual fees for many.
  • "Some people just aren't forum people. But if they can set aside two days…they get a lot out of it…one or two conversations per year can more than pay for your membership." ([45:26] Jay Clouse)
• Growth Impact Unclear: These events aren’t necessarily the biggest growth lever but strongly reinforce member loyalty.

10. Scaling Risks & Protecting Community Culture

Timestamps: [50:25]–[52:44]

• Growth Risk: If a large influx of new members joins quickly, it can destabilize community culture before they’re integrated.
  • "If a significant portion of members in a short period of time are new….the culture of the space is a little bit at risk." ([50:32] Jay Clouse)
• Leader Involvement: Hyper-present founders don't scale; as the membership grows, expectations and touchpoints must evolve deliberately.

11. Who Should/Shouldn’t Start a Membership & Common Pitfalls

Timestamps: [52:53]–[54:19]

• Mistake: Not setting or communicating clear expectations, leading to misalignment and churn.
• Design to Constraints: Creators must understand their own desired relationship to the community and design accordingly.
  • "You should know what is true about how you want to spend your time and make sure you don't design a membership that is counter to those design constraints." ([54:03] Jay Clouse)

12. Fun Community Moments

Timestamps: [54:23]–[55:59]

• Fantasy Sports: The Lab also runs a fantasy football league and Survivor league, fostering community bonds through fun side activities. Friendly rivalry is encouraged.
  • "We will never let fantasy football come between us, but we will continue to compete." ([55:39] Jay Clouse)

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Notable Quotes

“A community is never done. It's not passive revenue really at all. And it demands a lot of you.”
— Jay Clouse ([16:01])

“Scarcity and urgency both in play there—great marketing drivers. But the following year, February was our highest month of churn ever. Because people joined because they're like, ‘I got to do it.’ But it wasn't necessarily from this considered… ‘Do I really want to do it?’”
— Jay Clouse ([11:52–12:25])

“If you're requiring people to do this call and response—you have to ask for help to receive help—and that's where the value is derived… that's a pretty effortful and vulnerable thing. Not everyone wants to do that publicly.”
— Jay Clouse ([18:13–18:45])

"A lot of people are like, ooh, community tool exists. I have audience. Let me throw the two together. And that's not really a recipe for success."
— Jay Clouse ([17:16])

"The dirty little secret is a lot of the return comes from the relationships that become an introduction, that become something incredibly lucrative."
— Jay Clouse ([23:15])

“Figure out what makes your members the happiest and most successful and then try to make it more likely that new members become those people.”
— Jay Clouse ([42:28])

“If a significant portion of members in a short period of time are new…the culture of the space is a little bit at risk…”
— Jay Clouse ([50:25])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• How the Lab Started/Evolution: [05:40]–[10:42]
• Marketing, Scarcity & Growth Levers: [10:44]–[15:42]
• Retention & Emotional Toll: [15:45]–[20:46]
• Promotion & Value Delivery: [20:46]–[23:23]
• Member Engagement & Churn: [23:43]–[25:54]
• Growth Beyond Member Cap & Community Density: [29:13]–[36:41]
• Onboarding & Manual Touchpoints: [38:16]–[44:10]
• Offline Events: [44:12]–[48:34]
• Risks of Rapid Scaling: [50:25]–[52:44]
• Who Should/Shouldn’t Launch a Membership: [52:53]–[54:19]
• Community Fun & Light Moments: [54:23]–[55:59]

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Memorable Moments

• Jay regularly reworks onboarding, culminating in a process combining brief video courses, custom DM automations, and real 1:1 calls—a secret to his standout retention rates.
• The infamous “membership cap” both fueled growth and created unexpected guilt for departures, as departing members felt they were “taking a spot” from someone else.
• Offline dinners at conferences can provide as much (or more) retention impact as full-scale events.
• The most successful members are often those who form friendships, not just extract technical value.
• Jay’s biggest stressor: rapid, unintegrated growth threatens the fabric and culture of a thriving community.
• Even serious communities get their fun: the internal fantasy football and Survivor leagues build camaraderie.

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Key Takeaways for Creators

• Think Carefully About Your Own Time: Don’t launch a membership without understanding your own willingness to be present—build for your ideal involvement from day one.
• Strong Onboarding Wins: Personal touch, clarity, and immediate value are essential for member retention.
• Beware Growth for Growth’s Sake: Sudden member spikes can destabilize your group; pace and thoughtfulness matter.
• Engagement Predicts Retention: Members who interact and connect (in any forum or format!) are much more likely to stay.
• Value = Relationships, Not Just Content: The network effect and introductions can offer members exponential, sometimes unexpected returns.
• Don’t Rely on “One Size Fits All”: Segment your community by journey stage and needs; tailor your offers and forums accordingly.

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Find Jay & Further Resources

• Creator Science: creatorscience.com
• Free Membership Teardown Resource: creatorscience.com/teardown
• Growth in Reverse Podcast: (linked in show notes)

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Transcript

[Jay Clouse]

Hello my friend.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Last month while I was in Boise for the Lab Offline and Kits Craft and Commerce conference, I recorded a podcast episode. Not for this show specifically, but for Chanel and Dylan on the Growth in Reverse podcast. Chanel is a member of the Lab. She's been on this show multiple times. She's always an audience favorite, and this time they turned around the mics to ask me a bunch of questions about community memberships and where I see that space going. Given that this has been a huge focus for our team over the last month, plus with the Membership Summit and now the live cohort we're running, it felt like a good time to share this on our feed as well. Some things you'll hear me talk about in this episode are the persistent challenge I have found with member led mastermind groups, two onboarding tactics that I've kept secret for a while, the goal of offline events as I see it, what to think through before launching a membership, and the unexpected risk in scaling a community too quickly. That's just a few bullet points. We covered a lot of ground in this one, all related to communities and memberships. If you enjoy this episode, subscribe to Growth in Reverse. There's a link in the show notes they do a great job. We'll get to that full conversation right after this. This episode is brought to you by Circle, the community platform chosen by Tim Ferriss, Dr. Becky Kennedy, and of course, me. If you've been online over the last month, you've probably seen some chatter about Circle Eclipse, their biggest product release in company history. Here are two of my favorite parts of this release. First up, Circle AI. Imagine an AI partner that knows your business and runs it alongside you. Not only that, but it has the full knowledge of what you can do with Circle, from routine tasks to strategic work. It's like having the power of an entire team without one. What used to take you days or weeks to build can now be built in just a few hours with Circle AI Number two. Circle Discover a marketplace where millions of people can sign up, tell Circle what they want to achieve, and get matched with the creator businesses on Circle that take them there. Discover already features thousands of the top communities, courses and events on Circle, and for creators, it's a new marketing channel that you switch on with a single click. These are just two aspects of the Circle Eclipse launch. Read about the rest and join the waitlist for Circle AI at Circle so Eclipse. That's Circle so Eclipse. This episode is sponsored by AHREFS Listen,

[Jay Clouse]

this is gonna sound like I'm joking, but I'm really not.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

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[Jay Clouse]

That month was the highest month of membership revenue. The following year, February was our highest month of churn ever. The strongest marketing levers sometimes are not exactly what people actually need.

[Chanel]

How do you think about scaling a membership like that? It's doing really well. Tons of engagement people are loving it. But do you settle in for a little bit and then think about growth?

[Jay Clouse]

I really care about retention more than anything else. When somebody discontinues their membership, like, I do feel it sort of.

[Dylan]

Personally, what is a strong marketing lever

[Chanel]

for a community who shouldn't launch a membership?

[Dylan]

Welcome, Jay. Yeah.

[Jay Clouse]

Hey, we're doing it.

[Dylan]

We're doing it.

[Jay Clouse]

We're doing a whole collab. I love it.

[Chanel]

Yeah.

[Dylan]

Chanel, you've been on Jay's podcast.

[Jay Clouse]

One, two, twice.

[Chanel]

Three.

[Dylan]

Two. If not three, you just did like a Becky.

[Jay Clouse]

Okay. If you count the Bucky. The Bucky count the Becky collab, then yes. Three times and arguably three of our most popular episodes.

[Dylan]

Wow. There you go. Well, maybe this will be our most popular episode.

[Jay Clouse]

I have a strong feeling it will be. Love it.

[Dylan]

I love the confidence.

[Chanel]

That's awesome. Yeah. Well, I thought it would be fun to get you in here and talk kind of memberships, offline events in real life stuff.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

Sure.

[Chanel]

Because I was just part of your second annual offline event for the lab.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah.

[Chanel]

Which is your flagship community.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah. What did you think?

[Chanel]

It was amazing.

[Jay Clouse]

Okay, great.

[Dylan]

It sucked. Jake.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah. I feel like it was an improvement over last year, which is hard because it was rated a 9.4 out of 10 by the People who attended last year. So, like, not a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like it was. I haven't heard any constructive feedback yet, which means people are either being really nice or I'm missing something or it was great. I don't know. We'll. We'll send out the survey this weekend and get some data on it. But for my eyes, everything went without a hitch and I was more calm and in it. But I thought it was great.

[Chanel]

I like it. So, yeah, how did you. I guess let's go back a little bit. How did you start. Decide to start the lab? Like, what was the transition point where you were like, you know what? I think it's time to launch this.

[Jay Clouse]

I've been doing Community in some fashion since 2012, and at that time it was all in person. Like, I was an organizer for Startup Weekend and I facilitated global Startup Weekend events. And so those events were like weekend long. We would have like 100 to 120 people in Columbus every time we did this. We did three a year. And we like really galvanized the Columbus startup and tech community through this. And then when I left tech and started doing my own thing, I was facilitating Mastermind groups, mostly online, but also most of the early folks who were doing that in 2017 were in Columbus. So through that Mastermind program at the time, I mean, this sounds crazy, but in 2017, doing community on Slack and video calls on Zoom, both uncommon things, I had to literally teach people how to download and use Zoom. And on the back end of our weekly calls and our 12 week cohorts, we just continued to let people hang out in Slack. So over the course of four years, we had 120ish people who had gone through a 12 week cohort and they were on Slack. One of the people who went through that program was Matt Gartland when he was independently running an agency and he had like a product idea. And so he went through that 12 week program, experienced the program itself, experienced how we were doing things in Slack. He was later acquired, like, joined forces with Pat. They got an early access beta to a platform called Circle, decided they were going to use that in 2020. When the pandemic hit, they're like, okay, pandemic is hitting. They had done Flynn Con the year before. Flyncon is not going to happen. With the pandemic, let's accelerate our plans to do online community. We're going to use this platform. He brought me in to consult on that. So we designed and built which was at the time was called Spi Pro in 2020. They asked, hey, can we just hire you to lead our community team? Because this launch went really well. The launch of SPI Pro did really well. And I said, no, I'm kind of busy, I'm doing this mastermind thing. They said, what if we acquire that, absorb it and you just lead the community team. So we launched SPI Pro. We hired Jillian Benbow. At the time she was a great community manager. I was leading the community team as a whole. And in 2021 I worked within SPI. But part of that acquisition was I'm going to keep doing my own content like we had. I was very explicit in the contract leak. These are the things you are not buying which is all of my still going digital properties. And of course as it goes 2021, the year I didn't have time to focus on anything besides making content in the business. Like I wasn't doing any services, I wasn't doing weird freelance projects. That's when the content started taking off. So I was suddenly forced with like this, I'm essentially doing two full time things. Moment of SPI and my stuff. I'm of course going to bet on myself. So I transitioned out at the end of 2021, started 2022, back out on my own with a big community sized hole in my life. And so I said I learned a lot. Circle is a platform I wanted when it didn't exist and I was using Slack. So I'm going to do something with that. And if you recall, I think you're around at the time I was like batting around different designs. This community. I had this experience in Discord where it was like, watch me design this community because I wanted to try out Discord.

[Dylan]

I remember being in that.

[Jay Clouse]

That was actually kind of fun. And then we, we started as a Twitter community. But I realized I don't want to just focus on Twitter for forever. Turned it into. At the time it was called something completely different. It's called Creative Companion Club because the newsletter is called Creative Companion. And eventually it became the Lab. So super long answer. But I would say I've always been a community person. At the time that we started what became the Lab, I just had like a hole in my life of a community that I felt like I was leading or even belong to. And because Circle was just like the perfect platform for that type of thing, I, I had more experience with Circle than just about anyone else on the planet at the time. So I. I figured this is. This is what I'll do. That's awesome.

[Dylan]

And so that was circuit 2022, I think Chanel and I both were that year, at least part of.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dylan]

Creative Companion Club, actually how we met. Yeah.

[Chanel]

I don't know if you know that.

[Jay Clouse]

Interesting. No, I mean, it would have been. It would have been early 2022, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's still going. And, you know, in the creator journey generally, I've seen so many waves of people come and go, and now I've seen so many waves of communities come and go, and it's like, I'm still standing. The lab is still standing. Like, there's. There's a longevity to the business and the community that I think is pretty rare in the content space.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Jay Clouse]

And I get it.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

It's hard.

[Dylan]

And it's evolved, too. Right. Like, first launched it. It was a certain price point. I think you had, like, a cap on members and all that.

[Jay Clouse]

Yep. Yeah. We. We initially had a cap because I wasn't sure I could get above 200 people and have it be the experience that I wanted.

[Dylan]

Right.

[Jay Clouse]

Because at SPI, we had, I think, close to 600 when I left. And that creates new positives and new challenges. And so I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to do that. So I capped it at the time, which was a fantastic marketing move. And eventually I realized that number was maybe directionally correct, but arbitrary and limiting, of course. So I moved to an application model. But the marketing of the cap was so good that there are a lot of people who still ask me, like, are you still at your cap? Like, Right. So that's been a difficult thing to actually overcome, in retrospect, is like, letting people know we don't have a cap anymore. We do have an application, but there is. There's not like a hard cap on it anymore.

[Chanel]

I remember that when you were getting close to hitting that cap, you would, like, tweet out, you're like, all right, we're at 196.

[Jay Clouse]

Totally.

[Chanel]

And it was amazing.

[Jay Clouse]

It might still be my. No, it's not. But it. It's the highest month of membership revenue ever. It's not the highest month of business revenue, but that month was the highest month of membership revenue. But, you know the thing that I learned about that, scarcity and urgency both in play there, great marketing drivers. But the year after, I remember we sold out in February and it was Valentine's Day. Because I was at a hockey game on a date when I was tweeting out that we're running out of space, and I was not happy. But the following year, February was our highest month of churn ever.

[Chanel]

Wow.

[Jay Clouse]

Because people joined because they're like, I got to do it. But it wasn't necessarily from this, like, considered. What does that mean? Do I have space for it? Do I really want to do it? And so I struggle with marketing generally. Not that I'm bad at it, but that the strongest marketing levers sometimes are not exactly what people actually need. And, yeah, that's an example of seeing that in action.

[Dylan]

What is a strong marketing lever for a community?

[Jay Clouse]

Well, scarcity and urgency always matter. I would say that status and affiliation matter. You know, like, I would say probably that a place like Hampton is really good at leading into, like, status and affiliation or Sean's new thing. Aspen, I think, is probably a little bit more status and affiliation than. Than what we have in the lab. But generally you do need some level of urgency to get people to make a decision, because decisions are stressful and feel high stakes. And if I don't need to make a decision right now, then I'm probably not going to make a decision right now. And so you need to create some real genuine tension that says you need to make a decision right now for better or worse. Otherwise people just stay on the fence forever. So as an evergreen membership, typically that has created some challenges. But things that we've tried, we'll do sprints every now and then where it's like, for the next four weeks, we're all going to focus on this. We're going to have some live sessions around that. That always works in terms of, like,

[Dylan]

sorry, advertising that publicly that we're doing these.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah, correct. Folks that have, like, indicated some level of interest or putting it on the sales page or something. We'll do masterminds three to four times a year. That's always a strong pull for folks kind of reason to join now rather than later. If you just do open and close doors, that also works. But I look at that and I'm kind of like, yeah, that most of the time that's kind of a faux urgency. It's not quite genuine, but it materially works that well. We are, as a team thinking about doing an open and closed doors. And as we're recording this right now, we're currently on a wait list because there is some benefit to everyone joining at the same time so that you can have some, like, kickoff activities and connection between folks, depending on how many times per year we did that, we could say, like, maybe we only open doors four times a year. And that's also when we do mastermind matching, we have a kickoff call. There's some benefit to doing that for sure. There's also a cost if. If people are at peak excitement when they apply. However much time passes between that moment and opening the doors, like, there's probably a degradation of that.

[Chanel]

Yeah.

[Jay Clouse]

And maybe they're in a moment where they wanted to join something and they found something else.

[Dylan]

Right.

[Jay Clouse]

So Evergreen doesn't drive urgency, but we do have a super high conversion rate for people who apply and are accepted, who join. Like, I'd say close to 99 out of 10 people who apply and are a fit. They join because I send them an email pretty quickly, let them know like, hey, this will work for you based on what you said in your application. Uh, it's all. There's a personally recorded video for me specifically to them, so that works. And I think part of the reason that works is because I am replying near the point of peak excitement, which may not be true if we do open and closed doors.

[Dylan]

Hmm. Some trade offs there.

[Jay Clouse]

Trade offs for sure.

[Chanel]

Yeah. So you mentioned before that you feel like the lab is kind of rare in the space because it's just so

[Jay Clouse]

different and old, enduring end dog years. Yes.

[Chanel]

Yeah, yeah. Why do you think that is? What makes it so, I don't know, sustainable in a way?

[Jay Clouse]

Well, it's exhausting. Like, a community is never done. It's not passive revenue really at all. And it demands a lot of you. And it also, I don't know, people probably have healthier relationships with their business and products than I do, but when somebody discontinues their membership, like, I do feel it sort of. Personally, I don't think I should. I don't want to, but I do. And if there are ever times that I think, like, maybe this isn't for me, it's when we have like a slew of people who don't renew, you know, because it just like, it like hurts. But, you know, a community is never done. And depending on the design of the space, you might end up putting a lot of time into it. But you can design for anything. If you don't want to put a ton of time into it, you just design the experience differently. And that's where a lot of folks fail with memberships is they aren't thoughtful about their own design constraints, the expectations that they set, the experience that they're creating. But they pull people in. Those people have their own set of expectations that may not be aligned with what you actually want to deliver because you didn't set the expectations. And if their expectations aren't met, they're going to leave and you're going to conclude, I guess people don't want this and you're going to feel personal pain when they leave. So, like, I get why this all fails, but I think the more time you spend in pre production, I would say, of your membership, the better off you are to a point. There's, of course, diminishing returns where you're just overthinking and not taking action. But a lot of people are like, ooh, community tool exists. I have audience. Let me throw the two together. And that's not really a recipe for success.

[Dylan]

Needs to be more well thought out.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah.

[Dylan]

Elephant in the room. I was a lab member and I

[Jay Clouse]

did leave, and I felt it personally, I don't recall.

[Dylan]

And okay, so. And it wasn't again, it was like the, you know, it's not you, it's me thing. And it was just like, I felt. I think you had a cap at the time. I wasn't contributing a lot and I wasn't in the space enough. And I felt like I was taking a spot from somebody who could benefit from that.

[Jay Clouse]

That was also an interesting unintended consequence of having a cap, because a lot of people who left said that, which I'm a little bit of a skeptic. So when I hear that, I read that as like a convenient excuse.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Jay Clouse]

And most of the time, you know, still today when people leave, a lot of times it's like, oh, I don't have time to use it. Which to me is. I mean, it all comes back to cost and perception of value. So there's. If you are not renewing, then your perception of value is lower than the price of remaining. And the price is not just the financial cost. It's also, if you've been here a year, you are aware of what is required of me to get the most out of this. That's also a cost. So it's the financial cost plus the. The cost of effort. And if the perception of value is lower than that, I get it. Of course you would come to that conclusion. And usually that's like. That's how I read every reason for leaving, except for the ones where it's like, I'm no longer doing the creator thing, in which case it's like, obviously, then this doesn't make sense. But, you know, my Mandate to the team because we're growing now and we're on a Sprint based system. We're starting a new Sprint at the end of June and that Sprint is going to be all around improving, upgrading, changing the lab experience based on a ton of feedback we've been gathering for the last month. And the goal is reduce the effort, increase the impact. Because forums are just a part of the experience, inherently effortful experience. If you're requiring people to do this call and response, you have to ask for help, to receive help and that's where the value is derived. Is that the. If that's the only way you're extracting value from the community, that's a pretty effortful thing and vulnerable thing for people to be like, I'm stuck. Not everyone wants to do that publicly. So we, we've created a bunch of different means for extracting value, the offline event being a big one of them. And arguably maybe we've created too many. Like, I think, I think there's some complexity that we also need to reduce now because we've tried a bunch of things and all those things exist in some form and maybe it's too much now. So, yeah, it's a dance. This is why a lot of communities fail is like sometimes things that were valued and were useful and were competitively differentiated no longer are either. And you gotta, you gotta change, you gotta evolve, you gotta recalibrate.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Chanel]

How do you think about promoting the lab in a way? Because I mean, it's not a low ticket thing. Like, it's definitely an investment, but so it's gotta take time for people to decide, like, hey, this is for me, right now is the time for me. How do you think about promotion and like getting people on, like, ready to join?

[Jay Clouse]

Well, the nice thing is the lab is pretty much the only product that I talk about consistently. Have a bunch of other courses, we have creator hq, but every week that I'm releasing content, usually there's some reason for me to mention the lab. And I just think of it as repetition, awareness. And over time, I hope you're thinking of like, hmm, that's interesting. Becomes. Yeah, I think I want to give that a shot. Repetition is just the key to anything. I don't think we go far enough on campaigning for it though. And what we have done over the last year, especially around masterminds, is doing campaigns around joining the lab. And lo and behold, when you specifically say, like, hey, you should join the lab in the next two weeks, more people consider it more strongly. So should do that more. But, you know, there's diminishing returns to any campaigning strategy. At some point, you kind of reach the. The threshold of, okay, I'm aware and the people who are interested are interested. And the people who are aware and not interested are kind of like, enough.

[Dylan]

Shut up.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah, but I just, I try to be persistent and I would even say, like, constant without being annoying. Like, awareness is the big thing for me. Yeah. Because we're not. The lab is not a prescriptive linear journey, at least not as it exists today. The lab is a place you opt. You opt into to say, I want a close, private network of people who are like me that I can bounce ideas off of, I can pull ideas from, I can learn from their experiments. And generally just. It's kind of a social place now too. So I don't want to make big promises like, if you join here, you're going to double your income. Next month might happen. I've had some folks who have gotten. I think the peak is a 48x return on their membership. It was somebody who. She was like, fairly active. She's an author. I don't know if I can say her name specifically, so I won't. But she was like, hey, I'm writing a book and I need introductions to an agent. And I introduced her to an agent and she got an advance that was way higher than what she was doing on her own. And she's like, this is a 40x return, 48x return on my membership. Someone else just told me they had a 16x return on their membership this year because of a connection in the lab that led to a speaking event that led to a relationship. So, you know, the, the dirty little secret is a lot of the return comes from the relationships that become an introduction that become something incredibly lucrative. But if I marketed it that way, I think it would also invite people who are coming for the wrong reasons.

[Chanel]

Yes.

[Jay Clouse]

So I don't. So I just kind of try to do this subtle, like, signaling and filtering. And the people who are intrinsically or like, kind of naturally interested, they just tend to be the right fit, you know, like, that was the biggest point of feedback I got at our offline event this, this week. People were just like, everybody here is so nice. Well, the other thing everyone says is on every welcome call and in the conversations this week, people are like, I feel intimidated to be around this group, but everyone feels that way. Everyone feels like they don't belong because everyone is so impressive. But then you spend time talking to any individual and they're so nice and they're so accommodating and. And they're so helpful. That's true online, that's true offline. But it is something I'm taking a note of to go back to the team and say, like, we need to actually address this in onboarding. To say you might be feeling like you don't belong and you do, and you are, you know, invited for a reason, because we don't have any assholes. Like, we don't have transactional people. And the people who, like, skew a little bit transactional, they end up not renewing. And those are the ones that actually don't feel pain, you know, because it's like this. The community is not worse off when they leave. When it's somebody who is very active and they don't renew that I feel pain, not just for me, but for the community as a whole. But that's very uncommon.

[Dylan]

Yeah, yeah. Do you see any kind of ratio, like, the more somebody engages, the more they're likely to renew?

[Jay Clouse]

Or is 100? Yeah, 100. It's very. It's very rare that I'm surprised by somebody who didn't renew.

[Dylan]

Right.

[Jay Clouse]

It's like, I haven't seen him in a little bit. Yeah, this makes sense. So, you know, there's. There's a lot we could be doing proactively because if you're not seen as active most of the time, that probably means that you're not super engaged, which means you're probably not extracting value from the thing. So why would you put more costs into the system? And we actually have, like, flags that are raised internally based on people's activity and risk scores. But then there's a lot of people that surprise me, people who renew. And I'm like, I haven't seen you in weeks, months. And I think, like, I'll probably get an email asking for a refund, which of course I'll grant, and they just never come back. And I look at the profile and I was like, they were active yesterday. Oh, I had no idea. So it's really interesting, the different ways people extract value and are a part of communities.

[Chanel]

Totally. I see the same thing in our community. I'm like, oh, it feels kind of quiet today. And then I look and there's like, DMs flying everywhere. And I'm like, oh, well, they're just getting value differently. And I just don't see it.

[Jay Clouse]

Totally.

[Chanel]

Yeah.

[Dylan]

It's behind the scenes a bit.

[Jay Clouse]

Totally.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

After a quick break, I share my current thoughts on Onboarding, retention, and in person events. So stick around.

[Jay Clouse]

We'll be right back.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

If you work with clients and you're

[Jay Clouse]

tired of hearing that the only way to grow is to hire people or

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

work with AI, you should check out

[Jay Clouse]

Grow Without Hiring, a podcast by my good friend Ken Yarmish.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

Ken bootstrapped his professional services business to $5 million per year as a solopreneur. And he did it by systematically making small changes, like pitching six figure deals instead of five figure deals, something he has an episode about.

[Jay Clouse]

I've learned a lot from Ken and

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

he's worked with some big names. People like Matt Barker, Nasheen Chen and Laura Acosta trust Ken to sharpen their offers and scale their businesses with systems. And this podcast is his playbook. Every episode is short and tactical, like my voice memo episodes where Ken breaks down how real solo operators engineer their businesses. The sales, the delivery, the offers, the systems, all in a market that's splitting between big winners and everyone else, the show is easy to binge. You listen to one episode and find yourself sweeping through the whole catalog. I recommend starting with the episode titled Algorithm Proof Marketing, then hit follow so new ones land automatically. Search for grow without hiring in your favorite podcast app or go to GWH FM. That's GrowWithOutHiring GWH FM. And now back to my conversation with Chanel and Dylan.

[Dylan]

Oh, just one last note on what you were saying about the engaging. We talk a lot about re engagement campaigns for newsletter subscribers. Right. To get people to make sure they're. They're wanting to still receive your. Your emails if they have gone cold. So you mentioned red flags. What do you guys do? Like do you have certain automations or anything set up in the back end that it's like somebody hasn't hung out? Like send them an invite to.

[Jay Clouse]

We should. And now that we have the capacity, we probably will put something like that in place.

[Dylan]

Okay.

[Jay Clouse]

But like the temptation is, you know, if someone's renewing in the next 30 days, they've been inactive, try to reach out to them. Which is better than nothing, but also probably too late. Yeah, like we want to go upstream further. The term that's in my mind is like midboarding. Because our onboarding is fantastic.

[Chanel]

Yeah.

[Jay Clouse]

And we do have like literal off boarding automations as well. But there's this middle period in the middle of the year where like you had a great initial experience, you probably had some wins, and then it's not obvious what to do next. Without being like pretty self driven in terms of using the forum coming to the events. So I, I often think like, what can we do in the middle of the 12 month journey to make sure that you have a plan or we help revise that plan or give you more prescriptive steps? Yeah, to a degree. People like to be told what to do next. Um, I think we could do a better, a better job there for sure. Um, but no, we don't have anything active right now because when the team was more resource constrained, meaning there was a smaller team and it was mostly just me. Yeah, it's kind of like, should you improve your weaknesses or just double down on your strengths? There's a point where I was like, maybe we should just try to super serve the people who are most active. And that's kind of where I landed for a long time. But you can make a good argument either way.

[Chanel]

I think you had a cap on the member account before at 200, you remove that. How many members are you at now?

[Jay Clouse]

Standard and VIP have I think 220 combined and on the basic tier we have I think 120 right now. So we're at about 340 in total in the community.

[Chanel]

Okay. How do you think about the size of the community moving forward? Like, do you want it to grow to 600?

[Jay Clouse]

I'm up for the challenge. I think people need community spaces they value and I think most community experiences, and I'm using an intentionally broad term because I think the same is true for like in person experiences. I think most community experiences are under considered and poorly designed. And so if there's going to be community experiences that exist, I hope people trust me to make a better one. And so if the lab were to double, it would cause some problems and I would have fun trying to solve those problems. So I do think what I realized and the reason I removed the cap was because I wanted more density in a lot of different ways. I wanted niche density, I wanted platform density, I wanted geographic density. Because communities, they benefit from diversity, but they also benefit from some level of sameness. I would love to empower more in person events and if I'm not going to be on the ground at all of them, it would require some geographic density. I would love to have more productive. Like here's super nitty gritty on what's working on Instagram right now requires platform density. Some people come in and they're like, hey, I teach guitar on YouTube and when they meet other musicians on YouTube, that's a different level of shared experience and knowledge transfer than somebody who's a movement coach. You know, like there's, you can learn from anybody, but there are some things you just learn better from people who are even closer to what you're doing. So it was very hard to have a 200 member cap and density in any of those areas because if we're at the cap and we have 20 people who are really focusing on Instagram, really hard to create more density around Instagram without kicking people out. So yeah, removing the cap allows density. I think density allows for smaller group experiences which as a community grows, I think you just need to think of it as concentric circles where you have different levels of experiences that are smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller groups.

[Dylan]

That's very, it's very thoughtful and it makes a lot of sense in, in some ways the more those groups form, they don't require your involvement as much and it becomes just like a member driven community to some degree that you're comfortable with.

[Jay Clouse]

I saw this when I was at spi. I carried it over when I started the lab. The interesting thing about masterminds in particular, a lot of people stick around for years because of their mastermind group. And so we see that retention goes up when someone's in a mastermind that's meeting, but engagement in the community as a whole goes down. So it's an interesting tension because the more people I get in mastermind groups, the more people renew. But also it removes some of the highest value, most potent posts in the broader community because they're just sharing it with their small group.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Jay Clouse]

So it's an interesting, it's an interesting challenge to do, to do masterminds and keep people engaged in the broader community. Especially for folks who are not in a Mastermind, you know.

[Dylan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chanel]

And creators are busy people, so how do you expect them to do both?

[Jay Clouse]

Totally. That's, that's like the core tension in the community is like this is a uniquely busy person. So making an experience that is gratis, gratifying and fairly effortless to extract value is a challenge.

[Chanel]

Yeah, you kind of alluded to having basic members. So how long? I think it was like a year and a half ago or two years ago that you introduced that basic tier.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah.

[Chanel]

People get access to like the content, but not necessarily the forum. You've changed out a little bit.

[Jay Clouse]

I think it's evolved for sure. In the beginning it was just like, well, first it's called the starter tier.

[Chanel]

Okay.

[Jay Clouse]

And people didn't like that because they're like, I'm not just getting started. And I was like, okay, fair and then I called it Basic and I don't think that's better. And going back to change the name of the basic tier is something that like I genuinely want to do, but the downstream automations and copy and all the things I'd have to unwind and fix with that. The switching cost is high, so I haven't made the switch of the name yet. But the, the tier initially was basically just a bundle of all of my paid products.

[Dylan]

Okay.

[Jay Clouse]

Because like together all the paid products were like $1,300 of stated value. And it's like you can join the basic tier for 699 a year and people joined, but there was no, there was no real community experience with that and they would extract all the value from those products in year one. There's no real reason to renew. So why is this a membership? So over time we've added a community forum aspect to that, we've added monthly office hours to that and that's certainly helped. Like there are people who find real value in the basic tier and have renewed more than once. That's great. But I do find that folks who are early in the journey want a little bit more structure. So part of what we're doing in the next Team Sprint, changing things in the lab is we're going to be restructuring the Basic tier. We're going to restructure the VIP tier, both pretty significantly, I think, to make those experiences better by meeting people where they are a little bit more.

[Chanel]

Have you found that people upgrade from

[Jay Clouse]

basic to when they become eligible? Yeah, they do, yeah.

[Dylan]

There's an eligible eligibility factor, right?

[Jay Clouse]

That's the application. So the eligibility criteria for the lab is either earning $10,000 per month of like non service revenue. So meaning like if you're running a services agency, that revenue I wouldn't really count in the equation of, of whether you meet that criteria.

[Dylan]

Okay.

[Jay Clouse]

Or having 10,000 followers on any individual platform. Could be email, could be Instagram, could be TikTok, could be whatever. So one of those two things needs to be true to be eligible for Standard and vip. And I tell people that if you are eligible, you should join Standard VIP because it's going to surround you with people like you. It's gonna be a better experience for you. So people who are in the basic tier who do end up getting to that area of eligibility, a lot of them have upgraded, which has been really cool to see. I don't think the basic tier is yet designed to help people go from where they're at to meeting that without A lot of self direction.

[Dylan]

Right.

[Jay Clouse]

So that's what we would like to do is try to be a little bit more prescriptive in the basic tier to meet people where they are and help them create a plan that hopefully gets more people to that point of eligibility and joins that. Yeah.

[Dylan]

Is there a lot of moderation with your team in the basic tier or is that a really like you joined and now it's your own?

[Jay Clouse]

It's not as active as standard VIP either, which is surprising to me because generally part of the reason we have an application and have separate tiers is because if you think about if you have a membership where people are on different stages of the journey, typically folks who are in earlier stages have slightly more basic questions. They have nearer, they have like closer wins and they also tend to ask for the most help.

[Dylan]

Right.

[Jay Clouse]

So in a space where you have a people on different stages of the customer journey, even if a small number of those people are on the earlier end, they will have a disproportionate amount of airtime, let's call it. And so folks who are a little bit more advanced feel like what they're seeing is mostly conversations that their past. And so those folks start to question is this space for me? And I wanted the standard in VIP really the core lab experience to be for folks who were doing this full time or could be doing it full time, which meant that I had to create a threshold of being there with the application. I thought that just pricing alone would be a threshold and for the most part it is. But like it's enough of a non threshold that it wasn't, it just wasn't effective enough as a filter. But anyway, in the basics here, it's just not as vocal as I would have expected. We have a good crowd that shows up to office hours, but yeah, I thought we would be spending more time there. And you know, as a community builder, I think to myself we should try to create more conversation here. As a resource constrained individual, I've kind of let it go. But that's another reason why we want to reevaluate and redesign the basic tier experience. Because if you're not participating in the forum, right, and especially if you're not coming to office hours, then you're really just saying I just want access to these paid products. And hopefully you do that and hopefully extract value. But if, if not, then it's not going to be the best experience for you.

[Chanel]

How do you. I always think of you when I think of you. I think of like incredible onboarding and I think you do a great job at that. You also do a good job of retention, obviously. But how do you design a community, anything, really, for an incredible onboarding experience? Orient people, let them know what they should be doing. Like, how do you think through that and how has it evolved for you?

[Jay Clouse]

We've probably redone our onboarding like four or five times. So every one of those times, I would hope, gets a little bit better. But it is important because a lot of people tell me that they just have a hard time getting people to engage and name your tool. And it's because people do what they want to do, and for whatever reason, if they're not using your thing, they don't want to. And so why is that? Is it because they had a negative experience? Is because they've had no experience? You can't have a good experience without having experience. So onboarding solves hopefully both of those issues. To say, we're going to give you a positive. We're going to give you an experience and it's going to be positive. And so what I try to do is periodically figure out, okay, what makes our happiest, most successful members happy and successful, and how do I try to tip the scale in my favor for everyone who comes in to be more likely than not to be that type of person. And the happiest, most successful members in the community are people who make friends. They're people who are engaged in our live sessions. So when I did onboarding most recently, I made two changes. Actually, I made three major changes. Number one was I shortened the onboarding course, we'll call it, where like, people get in. And I say, watch these five videos. That was getting a little big, so I shrank it to make it feel like I can do this in the same session that I just signed up in. And in that onboarding experience, I'm hitting a couple of key highlights. One being, like, make sure you subscribe to the private podcast feed, because those people, even if they're not in circle, are more likely to feel like they're in touch with the community and they're extracting value. A second one was here's how to use the member directory to find people like you and things that you care about because it's not obvious. The like kind of customizations we've done in the member directory to find people who are specifically on Instagram and running memberships. I also set up a couple of DM automations to ask people, what are you trying to solve? Or who would you like to Meet because I recognize that introducing two people together who can learn from each other is a really high value, high leverage thing. So as we continue to improve this as a team, we're going to be looking at how do we make personal one to one introductions for new members. A just a standard part of their onboarding experience. I think it's still going to be fairly manual. And we just did our. Our latest round of Mastermind Matching kicked off this week and my mandate to the team is let's be really nosy about have they met yet? And like, let's make sure the leader is supported, that they have found a meeting time that they have met. I like overhauled. Here's how to run this Mastermind because again, like, Masterminds are a hugely positive part of people's experience if they meet. But a lot of groups just like fail to coalesce because either a light leader doesn't step up or one or two people kind of don't respond and the leader is being too kind and like waiting for them as the whole thing fizzles. And so short of hiring like staffed facilitators, we're still trying to say like, let's try to make this member led. But we may end up going the route of hiring facilitators tbd, extra costs, but like, probably worthwhile. But now that we again have more capacity on the team, it's like, can we just be more involved in the two weeks following Mastermind Matching to make more groups more successful. So anyway, for any community it's like, figure out what makes your members the happiest and most successful and then try to make it more likely that new members become those people.

[Chanel]

I like that. Yeah. I remember when I joined the lab, actually it was pretty early, it was still Creative Companion Club, but I do think you had the welcome video and that always stood out to me. And so that's something I've implemented for mine because I'm like, this is just brilliant. Like, it makes so much sense if

[Jay Clouse]

I were to share two more secrets that I feel very clever and pleased about. And now people, the challenge is everything that I do. Like, yeah, a whole host of other memberships are like, yeah, we should do that too. And it's no longer special and unique, but I'll share these. The moment somebody purchases something, they have taken all the risk and extracted none of the value, right? And so like their peak excitement followed by peak anxiety. And so after somebody joins the membership, the first thing they see is a like glowing testimonial from Andrew Connell saying, like, this is the best investment I've made in my business. So that at least at that point they can be like, okay, like, other people, again, have. Have seen positive results from this. And then after they watch that video, they schedule a 20 minute welcome call with me. And those have been awesome. I think that's a really key part to the member experience because I can learn a lot about these people. It makes me better in Mastermind matching. It makes me better at making introductions. Doesn't scale super well, but if somebody renews, I don't do a second welcome call. And I really. I care about retention more than anything else. So I'll do the welcome calls for as long as I can stand to do it. Um, both those touch points, I think, help a lot in onboarding, and it's a big reason why people are like, this. Onboarding is amazing.

[Chanel]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

Mm.

[Chanel]

Totally.

[Dylan]

We are in Boise right now at KIT Studios for. You're here for the lab offline, which you've talked about as my voice is like, dying on me here. We did karaoke last night. I will not reveal any other details, but how important is offline events in person? Events to really grow a community? Do you. Do you think your. The lab would be where it's at without your last two events?

[Jay Clouse]

I've come to Craft and Commerce now three years in a row. And the first year we didn't have like a full offline. We just did a dinner on Wednesday night.

[Dylan]

Like a meetup kind of thing.

[Jay Clouse]

Yes. And even just that dinner led to. It was. It was open to folks in the lab to come. And even just that dinner, people got connected and had friends throughout the rest of the event and they started conversations. So I think three years ago, that first event, we had more people joining directly from Craft and Commerce then than we did last year. And I'm not entirely sure why that is. I do know that the first year I also did the sticker thing on the badges, and I didn't do that last year. So this year I was like, gonna do it again this year. Hope it starts some conversations. Hope some people reach out. So I don't know if it's important for growth. I do think it's important for attention.

[Dylan]

That's what I was.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah, I think. I think there are a lot of people who come to the offline events, and for them, they're like, this is enough. This more than justifies the costs of the year of membership. And that's part of the reason why we do it, because some people just aren't foreign people. But if they can set aside two days in their calendar and take the plane and show up in the room and then just kind of surrender to the experience, they get a lot out of it. And at the level of folks that we have in the community, I really believe one or two conversations per year can more than pay for your membership because there's huge leverage in certain things. Like on day two, we had probably a 20 to 30 minute conversation all about sponsorship that we almost skipped because I started the conversation like, okay, who here has something to share that's working for them in the realm of sponsorship? And nobody said anything. And it became very clear like, oh, most of you aren't even really pursuing sponsorship. So then it became a conversation of how the people who are using sponsorship are doing it. And I think that's going to result. And a lot of people in that room trying out sponsorship in their business for the first time and probably paying back their membership very quickly. Yeah, because like, the rates that you can charge on LinkedIn right now, in particular, like, you're going to pay for your membership and one or two sponsored posts. So I think that's very, very productive. And that's exactly the type of thing that I try to emulate online too, is I hope that one or two of these experiments, one or two of these ideas just clicks for somebody and they're like, yes, that was the 16x return on, on my investment. So offline events are just a lot easier to create more positive touch points in a very compressed period of time. And it just appeals to a different type of person. Like there's just a segment of people who just want to be in person and just want to take two days out to engage with this and they're not going to be super active in the forum otherwise, and that's totally fine.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Jay Clouse]

So I think it's super key to retention. I don't know about growth.

[Dylan]

Okay. Yeah, my mind was going at, like, if I was part of the lab and I came to this event, it'd be like, this was so much fun. I'm, I'm going to renew for this reason alone, let alone all the other benefits to joining. I feel like we, we have growth Reverse Pro membership. We don't have a, like, offline event like you do, or in person event, but we do when we come here, we host meetups and. Yeah, and it's a great opportunity to meet people and there's people who, you know, have renewed their memberships a few years in a row and we hardly see them in the community, but they come here and it's like we're friends and we chat and, and sure enough they show back up the next year and everything. So I think it's a pretty powerful lever.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah, I think you can do that. I think piggybacking on events that your community is already going to go to is a good idea. And I don't think you have to have like a full two day dedicated experience up front to do it. I think you could do like a dinner one night. You know, I think, I think that's like a very low lift way of doing it. Outside of craft commerce. That's what we do at. Or did at cex, so we did at Vidsummit. Anywhere that I'm going, it's like, let's, let's see who's in town, let's pop something up. And that's probably a good 80, 20.

[Dylan]

Are you gonna do more in person events?

[Jay Clouse]

I would love to. It's a particularly challenging season of life to do that.

[Dylan]

Yes. You have a young daughter and another one on the way.

[Jay Clouse]

Yeah, it's. It's just challenging. And so part of the conversation Mal and I will have is like, how do we make this feel less intense and unblock ourselves? Like sometimes we get so overwhelmed by our vision of what would make this amazing that it becomes so big that we just end up doing nothing. And it's like, maybe we should actually just do smaller scoped things more often and make a trip out of it. Like maybe she and I should plan a vacation. And then part of that vacation is, by the way, the, the first night we hosted dinner, like it doesn't have to be that crazy and I want to do more of that. We, we had, I think we only had one or two folks come internationally this event and last year I think we had at least a half dozen.

[Dylan]

Wow.

[Jay Clouse]

Folks outside the US don't want to travel to the US right now and I don't blame them. So I would like to, I would like to, I would like to do an international event. But we were going to do that in November this year and our due date is late October.

[Dylan]

So.

[Jay Clouse]

Like that, that blew that up.

[Dylan]

Yep.

[Jay Clouse]

But yeah, next year I would like to do an international event. Will it be our like, flagship, flagship offline event in June? I don't know. We'll see what the, we'll see what the feedback and the data says.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Chanel]

I have a friend, Mallory Rowan. Yes.

[Jay Clouse]

Yes.

[Chanel]

So she recently launched a membership. It's going great. She's wondering how, how do you think about scaling a membership like that? Like it's doing really well, Tons of engagement people are loving it. But do you settle in for a little bit and then think about growth? Do you not take your foot off the gas? Like how do you.

[Jay Clouse]

There's context here that matters, I think, but let me try to speak in terms that can be abstracted. I think it's risky for a community if a significant portion of members in a short period of time are new. So let's say, let's say you have the Lab and there's 200 members. If something, if this podcast goes viral on YouTube and 200 creators want to join, and so now suddenly the community is twice as big, but one out of every two people is brand new. The culture of the space is a little bit at risk because you don't have, you don't have enough culture protectors relative to people who just don't know any different or better. So I do think, depending on the design of the experience, if it's very peer to peer, I think you want thoughtful integration of new folks. If there's not like a big peer to peer component and it's more prescriptive linear learning journey, I don't think that consideration is the same. I think, I think scale as much as you can and want, but if a lot of the, the value of the space is in their relationships between members, I think you, you want to be thoughtful about the speed of integration to protect the culture of the space. But if it's early, like maybe that culture just also doesn't exist yet and you can co create it with new folks. So I think it's important to look at, okay, the design of the space currently, the number of people who are in here and it's going well, what is the bottleneck to protecting this experience? Or what are, what are like the risks of, of this, if it's going great, but she's also hyper present, hyper accessible, hyper responsive, that doesn't scale her individually. So you have to be thoughtful about that. You might have to change the design of the experience. If it changes the design of the experience, you have to make sure that you're setting correct expectations when people come in and not doing some sort of accidental bait and switch. So those would be the things I would look for. But otherwise, you know, if people like it and it's working, I also am prone to overthink things. So maybe just, maybe just go for it and then like solve, solve the, the, the good problems that Come up.

[Chanel]

Yeah, I'm curious. Just a. A few more things on my head. Common mistakes people make or who shouldn't launch a membership.

[Jay Clouse]

Common mistakes are not setting, just not setting expectations and allowing people coming in to name their own expectations and not knowing what those expectations are, which makes it very hard to win with those people. So I think it's really important to start your membership and say, what is the purpose of this space? What is our purpose for. Yeah, what is the purpose for this experience? And then making sure you deliver on that, you know, not over promising and under delivering in that way. People who should not do a membership. I don't know. I don't know that there's like a person who shouldn't do a membership. But you should know what is true about how you want to spend your time and make sure you don't design a membership that is counter to those design constraints. Essentially, like you should know. Okay, here is what I want my relationship to this space to be and then design it to have those boundaries in place. Because I think a lot of people create a space and it's like you get to hang out with me. Then depending on how big your platform is, you can have a lot of people who are now here expecting a lot of time from you. And if you're a people pleaser, you'll spend all of your time pleasing the people, which is a problem. So you have to be thoughtful about the, the, the size and scale aspirations, your ideal relationship to the space in terms of how you are inputting your time and energy into it and design the experience to fit that.

[Dylan]

I like it. And I don't know if I can continue talking, but.

[Jay Clouse]

But the adaptogens, they need to adapt.

[Dylan]

I know. Come on. This is very off topic, but I think it's funny because you have a lab fantasy football league.

[Jay Clouse]

Yes.

[Dylan]

And you did not win it this year. I did not know, but somebody in this room did.

[Chanel]

I tried so hard to find space in my suitcase to bring that, to bring the trophy.

[Jay Clouse]

Oh my gosh. That's so funny. I am pumped about doing that again this year. Yeah, I love to do stuff like that. We did a Survivor fantasy league as well.

[Dylan]

Okay.

[Jay Clouse]

Which was very fun. Yesterday I was with Liz Wilcox and we recorded a video to send to my wife. But then she was like, can we send this to the lab? Survivor chat.

[Dylan]

Love it.

[Jay Clouse]

That was very fun too.

[Dylan]

Liz, who was on Survivor.

[Jay Clouse]

Liz is on Survivor. Yeah. Liz is a finalist on Survivor.

[Dylan]

Right.

[Jay Clouse]

And she's also like one of the most memeable modern players because like she had kind of an epic meltdown that just won't leave the Internet. So. Yeah, it's, it's.

[Dylan]

Check it out if you have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.

[Podcast Host (possibly Dylan or Chanel)]

Yeah.

[Dylan]

Nice. I thought I had to bring it up since you were both in the room and you know, is the.

[Chanel]

Right here.

[Jay Clouse]

It's the, the silent fourth party between us.

[Dylan]

You have to go for back to back.

[Jay Clouse]

We will never let fantasy football come between us, but we will continue to compete.

[Dylan]

Yeah, totally. That's awesome. This has been awesome.

[Jay Clouse]

Cool.

[Dylan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chanel]

Thanks for coming on the show. Finally we'll have a shirt again.

[Jay Clouse]

Long time for sure.

[Chanel]

Talk through everything else.

[Jay Clouse]

We just had to come all the way to Boise to do it.

[Chanel]

That's it.

[Jay Clouse]

Just three folks who never record in person. Recording in person.

[Chanel]

How about that?

[Jay Clouse]

Thanks for having me.

[Chanel]

Awesome. Thanks, Jay. Appreciate it. Where can people go to find you and what's your main creator?

[Jay Clouse]

Science.com search creator science in your podcast player.

[Dylan]

Jay has a podcast, everybody.

[Jay Clouse]

I have a podcast. Yeah. Creator science.com Cool.

[Chanel]

Awesome.

[Jay Clouse]

Oh, actually let me say we have a full tear down of how we think about memberships and build the lab. It's a new free lead [e-mail] teardown.

[Chanel]

Perfect. And we'll put links to the episodes with you and I below as well.

[Dylan]

Yeah, great. Yeah, cool. Thanks, Jay.

[Chanel]

Thanks.

[Jay Clouse]

Of course.