596: Why Building a Community Might Be the Most Important Thing You Do This Year

Summary

Episode 596: Why Building a Community Might Be the Most Important Thing You Do This Year

Podcast Information:

• Title: The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast With Steve Chou
• Host/Author: Steve Chou
• Description: Start An Ecommerce Business, Become Your Own Boss And Spend More Time With Your Loved Ones
• Release Date: July 2, 2025

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I. Introduction

In this episode, Steve Chou delves deep into the significance of building a community for ecommerce businesses. Joined by Tony, Jen, and Derek, Steve shares his recent experience in launching a Discord community for his course members and explores the broader implications of community-building in today's digital landscape.

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II. Choosing the Right Platform for Community Building

Steve Chou's Choice: Discord Steve initiated his community on Discord, highlighting its extensibility and cost-effectiveness as primary reasons for the choice.

• Steve Chou [01:39]: “Discord is like the platform for geeks. They have an awesome API, you can make bots, you can code in, all these features. And it's free.”

• Tony [01:53]: “Actually the extensibility is what appealed to me the most. Plus the free made it a no-brainer.”

Challenges with Discord: While Discord offers robust features, there are initial technical barriers. Steve mentions minor onboarding issues experienced during the soft launch but emphasizes that such challenges are common with any new platform.

• Steve Chou [02:16]: “It could be Gmail and they can't get Gmail working. So to be fair, those.”

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III. Comparisons with Other Platforms

Facebook Groups: The Old Guard

Steve criticizes Facebook Groups for their inefficiency and poor user experience.

• Steve Chou [03:14]: “I hate Facebook groups first. That's more fun. Facebook groups suck.”

• Tony [03:48]: Elaborates on the poor search functionality and distracting nature of Facebook, making it hard to maintain focus within the community.

Alternative Platforms: Circle, Mighty Networks, Slack, and Geneva

The discussion explores various other platforms:

• Circle and Mighty Networks are recognized for their popularity but criticized for limited free features and higher costs.

• Slack: While offering excellent search capabilities, Slack's pricing model becomes prohibitive with large communities.

• Geneva: Mentioned as a new contender with features like chat and video rooms but lacks widespread recognition.

LinkedIn Groups: A New Option

Tony introduces LinkedIn Groups as a potential platform, noting its ease of setup and existing user base, though recognizing platform dependency.

• Tony [29:00]: “It's basically just you just create the little group.”

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IV. Challenges in Community Building

Moderation and Spam Control

One of the primary concerns is managing spam and maintaining a constructive environment as the community grows.

• Steve Chou [08:32]: “I just don't want to get destroyed, you know, inundated so far and it's only been a week.”

Technical Management

Steve emphasizes the need for automated moderation solutions, leveraging Discord's API and potential AI integrations.

• Steve Chou [08:57]: “I think I can write a little code that pipes in certain responses directly into OpenAI, get a sentiment analysis and then automatically ban someone or put them in like a suspension.”

Scalability Issues

As the community grows, strategies for sustained engagement and management become critical.

• Steve Chou [33:10]: “But I mean just looking...”

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V. Monetization and Member Access

Free vs. Paid Communities

The conversation contrasts Steve's approach of offering the Discord community exclusively to course members with Tony and Jen's strategy of building a paid community.

• Steve Chou [15:03]: “No, it's just a course.”

• Tony [15:49]: Discusses the benefits of having a paid tier to vet out spam and maintain quality interactions.

Value Proposition of Paid Communities

Tony argues that charging even a nominal fee can enhance community quality by reducing low-quality interactions.

• Tony [19:51]: “I actually have our entry price at $9 a month which is ridiculously cheap.”

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VI. Engagement and Nurturing the Community

Active Participation

Steve plans to hold weekly office hours to foster engagement and accountability among members.

• Tony [30:44]: “That's sort of the bigger, but I guess benefit.”

Content and Value Addition

Members are encouraged to share valuable resources, such as podcasts and educational content, to stimulate meaningful discussions.

• Tony [31:38]: “Anytime you can show success when you sell a service, you sell more services.”

Building Community Leadership

As the community scales, empowering members to take on moderation and leadership roles becomes essential.

• Tony [34:07]: “And you know, not for free, you know, either for you know, in exchange for community access, things like that.”

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VII. Future Plans and Considerations

Platform Enhancements and Automation

Steve is exploring ways to integrate AI for moderation and streamline member onboarding and management.

• Steve Chou [37:00]: “The answer is. I'm sure there is.”

Potential Expansion Strategies

Ideas include leveraging community access as a funneling tool for courses and implementing trial periods to attract and retain members.

• Tony [43:19]: “I just...”

Handling Growth Pains

Steve reflects on past experiences where rapid growth led to operational challenges, emphasizing the need for robust onboarding processes.

• Steve Chou [44:32]: “Because you need to know everyone's handle and then you need to write a routine that fishes those people out and make sure.”

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VIII. Conclusions

Building a community is portrayed as a pivotal strategy for ecommerce success, offering enhanced engagement, support, and a platform for sustained business growth. However, it comes with challenges such as platform selection, moderation, scalability, and maintaining value for members. Steve and his co-hosts underscore the importance of thoughtful planning, leveraging technology, and fostering active participation to cultivate a thriving community.

Notable Quotes:

• Steve Chou [03:14]: “I hate Facebook groups first. That's more fun. Facebook groups suck.”
• Tony [16:04]: “You can have a paid community, but I think the gateway is to have a free level right now for you.”
• Tony [19:51]: “I actually have our entry price at $9 a month which is ridiculously cheap.”
• Steve Chou [37:00]: “The answer is. I'm sure there is.”
• Tony [43:19]: “I just...”

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Additional Resources:

• Free Six-Day Mini Course: Interested listeners can sign up at mywifequitterjob.com to receive comprehensive tutorials on starting an ecommerce business.
• Seller Summit 2025 Recordings: Available for purchase at sellersummit.com for access to keynotes, workshops, and panels.

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This summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from Episode 596, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't listened to the full episode.

Transcript

[Steve Chou]

Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to E commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I share what we've learned so far about building a community. From the wins to the awkward missteps. We'll talk about what's worked, what definitely hasn't, and some of the little moments that have surprised us along the way. But before we begin, I want to let you know that the session recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are available [e-mail] if you missed the event, you can now get instant access to every keynote, workshop and panel. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today we're going to talk about communities because this is something that has been very heavily on my mind and I actually just implemented a Discord community for my class members. And I'm thinking in broader terms now because email is getting less delivered, SMS is even getting less delivered. And so what's the best way to get people to listen? It's by building community, it's by being a part of a community. And this is all new to me, so I'm just kind of winging it as we go along.

[Tony]

So yeah, let's talk about the community you just launched for. First of all, we'll go granular and then we'll get bigger picture for people because one of the things that you did that I think is super interesting is that even though you've had Facebook groups for people that are in the course and then like the general population, you created a community on Discord. Why Discord?

[Steve Chou]

So honestly, Discord is like the platform for geeks. Like they have an awesome API, you can make bots, you can code in, all these features. And it's free.

[Tony]

Yeah. So I think the free part is what appealed to you the most. Probably.

[Steve Chou]

Actually the extensibility is what appealed to me the most. Plus the free made it a no brainer. Plus my friend is pretty high up at the company.

[Tony]

So I know initially because this, this community just launched very recently and initially I know you had some people who had trouble getting in. So I do think there is a little bit of a tech barrier for people. How is that going now? It's been about a week.

[Steve Chou]

Okay, so that's an exaggeration because anytime you have any new platform, there's always going to be someone who cannot do doesn't. It could be Gmail and they can't get Gmail working.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

So to be fair, those. So I spent. So I did a Very soft launch just to people who actually attended office hours live. And we had two people say that they couldn't get on and. And whatnot. Whereas the other, I think we attracted 45 members that day. And of that, two people could not get on due to one. We kind of narrowed it down to an email deliverability issue. Like, they couldn't receive the password email, which I think is on their end. And the other person, we never figured out because I didn't want to spend the whole office hours.

[Tony]

Did they ever get in the community? Are they still in limbo?

[Steve Chou]

That I don't know. We actually have office hours today and we'll find out.

[Tony]

Okay, so how do you have it structured inside Discord right Right now?

[Steve Chou]

Right now it's. I mean, it's literally a week old, right? So there's one room for discussion. So let's talk about why I hate Facebook groups first. That's more fun. Facebook groups suck. Like, people would tag me on there, and let's say I was, like, in the car and I couldn't get to it. Later on, when I was not in my car, I wouldn't. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to find that message again. It's just not laid out well. And then the fact that it doesn't show you everything in your feed just kind of defeats the purpose.

[Tony]

I would also say the search feature in groups is terrible on Facebook. So, like, because what I found is that you. Same thing, right? You're somewhere, you see, you get a notification that you've been tagged in something, you don't have the ability to respond. Maybe you even take a peek at it, right? And you're like, oh, this is going to require me to sit down and think, right? And then when you go back to find that and it's not readily available, right? Because there's activity in the community, it gets pushed down, whatever. Even when you try to search it, often you can't find it, right? Because the search is so janky, I think, in Facebook. So for me, that's a huge negative. The other huge negative for me in Facebook groups is it requires getting on Facebook. And so for someone like me, who I don't like to spend time on social media, especially not Facebook, once you get on to go into the community to answer a question, then you're on Facebook. Then you're like, oh, someone tagged me in a photo from high school that I don't want on the Internet. And someone did this. And now, you know, someone sees that you're on, so they try to message you, right? Like, so then what becomes a simple answering a question now turns into 30 to 45 minutes of time wasted on social media, because now you've been sucked into the Facebook vortex.

[Steve Chou]

I don't know if that's fair to say. Well, first off, number one, you love Facebook because that's your demographic, Tony. We all know that. Second of all, I think any community platform requires an app or something to get on it, right? That you have to have on. And then it's pretty easy to get lost in, like, a Discord community also, because then you end up looking at all these other questions.

[Tony]

But that's different. That's different, right? Because if I'm so. I only. The only thing I know on Discord is your community. I don't have any other. If I do have a tie on Discord, I don't know about it, right? It's something from like, five years years ago. So when I go on Discord, I'm only interacting with that community. I'm not being distracted by, like, oh, are they getting divorced? Because he's posting all these pictures with this, you know, oh, look, oh, look, she's lost £100. And, oh, look at this. And, oh, you know, you know, there's none of that, right. I'm only on there to look at the community and then I'm done. Right? So that's. I think I've checked into your community maybe four or five times since about. For about a week. And so I go in, I answer if someone's tagged me, I try to answer that question, and then I look through the other questions and see if there's anything, and then I'm done.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

I. There's nothing else to distract me except for the stuff inside the community. So if you're the community owner, I think it's great because you go in, you deal with the community. If you're using a separate platform, doesn't have to be Discord. And then. And then there's nothing else to take your time away.

[Steve Chou]

I can see that. I mean, granted, right now it's literally 45 people out of 6,000, right. Once it goes out to. I don't know how many people actually have Discord, I was actually shocked. I. I think I can't remember how many people are in office hours that day, but I think a good 2/3 had Discord, which I thought the people.

[Tony]

That come to office hours, though, are a little more nerdy in general. Maybe it'll be interesting to see when it goes out to the whole group. But that brings up, I think, the first important point about a community and one that I don't think that you're actually prepared for. If we're going to be honest about things today, sure.

[Steve Chou]

Tell me, tell me what I'm not.

[Tony]

The time it takes to run an active and healthy community. You joked right before we started recording, maybe chat GPT can run the community for me. And while like we were joking about, about other things that Chad is doing very well. And while I think there probably will come a point where that is going to be a component, right. Where it can, there, there is some AI in it.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

And I'm sure like, especially with Discord, if you have ability to like code things in, I can see maybe some like canned responses, things like that, the ability to sort of implement things that we do with email and in customer service.

[Steve Chou]

I have a solution to this problem, by the way, and it was not Chachi pt that was just a joke.

[Tony]

But I do think one of the tough parts about a community and I know a lot of people who've grown huge communities.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

Think about our friend Jen Garza who had her, you know, 100 plus thousand keto community. Tiffany Ivanovsky had 70 plus thousand, you know, fashion based. It takes a lot of work to be in those communities, keeping it from getting spammy, making sure the discussions are productive and positive. Especially like right now, 45 people, that's not that hard.

[Jen]

Right?

[Tony]

But for most people, 45 people in a community is not going to move the needle in your business.

[Steve Chou]

I'm not even thinking about the business part yet. But the moderation part is actually fairly straightforward. Now that I can see this is why Discord's valuable. I can write a little code that pipes in certain responses directly into OpenAI, get a sentiment analysis and then automatically ban someone or put them in like a suspension. I don't know if you can do that with any other platform where you have access to all that. Maybe you do. Maybe.

[Tony]

Yeah. I'm not, I'm not.

[Steve Chou]

Maybe it's possible. And then for the moderation part, I think once the community gets going, there's students that come to office hours like every week and they've been coming every week for five years. I would just ask them for help like if they want to moderate it. And I'm pretty sure I can find someone to help with that.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

I can think of one person in particular who'd love to do it, I'm sure in particular once it gets off its feet and whatnot. So. So back to the Platform. Like, I think I was originally gonna do this on Slack.

[Tony]

Yes.

[Steve Chou]

Because I love Slack. I have it on and it's. The search is great. The huge disadvantage of Slack is you gotta pay per member, which is ridiculous, granted. I guess that's probably not what Slack was designed for. It was probably designed for small teams, you know, working together. But yeah, those, those caught. Like if you had like a 5,000 member community, it'd be like $50,000 a month.

[Tony]

Absolutely. So I actually asked chat gbt, I said, hey, give me some places to host a community.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

Because I know we, we know of some. But I was like, there's probably some that we haven't heard of. So of course their number one answer was Facebook groups.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

Which I think that's been where communities have lived for a really long time. I think the problem is, the other problem is, you know, it's you. You're still relying all on Facebook.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

Like you were saying, you don't see everything, not everything shows up anymore. And I mean, I know people who've just been. Their, their groups have been banned, right. Or disbanded.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So they've had issues with Facebook sort of just locking them out of their own. It's not theirs, obviously, it's Facebook's, but, you know, so I think Facebook groups are still. They're still popular, but I think there's a lot of downside. And as these other platforms continue to become more popular and grow, I think Facebook groups are going to become less ideal. But they're free. And that's, I think, the biggest draw.

[Steve Chou]

I mean, that's the understatement of the century. I think Facebook groups suck once upon a time. They're great. And actually I grew mine. My regular. My wife quit one to. I think it was like 14 or 15,000 people. Spam got out of control. Like they literally nerfed the reach like in your feed because they wanted to run more ads.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

And this is a long time ago they've. That my wife quit group of 15,000 people was. It's pretty much defunct. And it was defunct as soon as Facebook made those changes.

[Tony]

Well, and it used to be one of the benefits of the groups was that when someone joined their group, if they were just casually on Facebook, they would get notifications about the groups. And that doesn't happen anymore either. So I think there's. You're right, it's a lot of downside. You know, they also talked about discord, which we've talked about. One that they talked about that I'm not familiar with and I don't know if you've heard of is called Geneva. Never heard of it. It's apparently free, it has chat, video rooms, all that stuff. So I don't know if it's even worth checking out if people have heard of it. It was one that was a complete shock to me because I, I'd never heard of it and I feel like I've done some research on this.

[Steve Chou]

So I think the important thing is that whatever platform you choose is kind of mainstream. Like I, I know you guys are starting a Circle community. I feel like it's not mainstream. Meaning like if I were to ask like a friend who's not in the industry if they've heard of it before, they would probably say no. But you ask them if they've heard of Discord before and they will say yes.

[Tony]

So I would agree. I mean, I don't know. I, I don't know because most of my friends are in this world, so everyone knows what Circle is. So I don't have a lot of friends outside.

[Steve Chou]

Well, no, no, your friends.

[Tony]

I don't have many friends outside of people in the Internet space.

[Steve Chou]

No, no. The ones that you hang out with that I met, they're the only people I can ask. Right, exactly. Whereas here, everyone, all my friends aren't in this.

[Tony]

So here's what I think about that though. So Circle is one school is another one that's a really popular one.

[Derek]

Right.

[Tony]

Mighty Networks is another popular one. Those three, I think are probably the most popular paid versions. They all have like the free trial, but I don't think any of them allow you to do anything that's like long term free, like, you know, like minimum sign up type thing. So I think it doesn't necessarily matter if people have heard of it because I know a lot of people who are in communities and they don't like necessarily know what the platform is, they just know they click here to log on.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So I think as long as you make it easy for people to join the community or to get into the community, the hosting of that community is probably not as important if it's not a tech based group.

[Steve Chou]

This is what I mean by that. A lot of people already had Discord apps on their phone, surprisingly right. So it makes it less friction. It's kind of like joining an affiliate network.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

I was like, oh, do I want to join another affiliate network or do I just join the one that I'm already on, that I know about? I think it's similar. But yeah, you're Right. Once someone's ingrained in the community, the.

[Tony]

Platform and I, it. I think for you it'll be really interesting if you open this up to everybody in the course. How many? Like, because right now you're dealing with such a small sample size and I would say these people do lean tech heavy based on like who I know is in that group. It'll be interesting when you, when you open it up to the 6,000 if you're still seeing that level of like, oh, I already had discord. I think a lot of people are going to be like, I have no idea what we're doing doing. Which is fine. I don't think it's that hard to figure out for sure.

[Steve Chou]

Well, I'm doing it slowly because I want to see what the moderation is like and that way I can write those routines appropriately. Not that anyone is like rude or anything, but people do occasionally post like self promotional stuff, which sometimes is okay to me. Like I don't, I don't usually care. But then there's people who, who try to sell services, you know, or tools that, that I don't want happening, like of their own.

[Tony]

Of course.

[Derek]

Yeah.

[Tony]

So I guess the next question is your community is going to be free?

[Steve Chou]

No, it's just a course.

[Tony]

Oh, I thought you were going to open it up to anybody who wants to be.

[Steve Chou]

Oh, okay. So no. So first of all, this is only going to be course members for a long time. Not, not for a long time, but for at least the rest of this year. Once because I got to get to know the code base and what I can do and what I can't do and you know, it just makes sense to, to roll it out slowly, especially since I've never done this before. Like I don't want to get destroyed, you know, inundated so far and it's only been a week. Like people have already emailed me, you know, of those 40, I would say 10 or 15% have emailed me saying, hey, this is great. Like I can just message someone. I can message someone easily.

[Tony]

They're all messaging me and get an answer. So let's.

[Steve Chou]

Like I said, it's good for me too.

[Tony]

So I guess that's my next question because I think a lot of people, I think this seems interesting to a lot of people and it's actually on its own, a standalone business model.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

You can have a paid community, but I think the gateway is to have. There's a free level right now for you. You're kind of doing it the Reverse way, right. Like you have a paid product, the community comes with the paid product. But at some point you're probably going to use the community to convince people to upgrade.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

To the paid product. So people that aren't in the course to get them in. So like what's the strategy for that? Is there a strategy yet?

[Steve Chou]

I haven't thought that far ahead yet. I seriously have not. Like the goal of this is not lead gen at the moment. The goal is to just make, make a community of students that can ask questions and, and interact with other people easily.

[Tony]

So here's why I think that's valuable for you and anyone.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So like we're reversing this, right? So instead of having a paid community, you're having a few free community for people who've already paid. I think the community will help people make progress.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So it'll help people continue to move forward with finding their product, getting sales wherever they are in that funnel. And, and I think anytime you can show success when you sell a service, you sell more services.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So the better success stories you have, the better you sell. And so for, for this case, I think the community becomes a great marketing tool for, you know, people seeing better success. Being able to use that in your case studies as well as just another selling point for being in the course.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

It's not just a bunch of lessons. It's also this community that's very activ. People are getting their questions answered within, you know, 48 hours, whatever it is, and being able to continue to make for progress in their businesses.

[Steve Chou]

Yeah, yeah. In terms of opening it up, I think I will need a lot more code in place to moderate stuff. If anything is like the Facebook groups where every other comment was spam, that's going to be infinitely worse on discord. So I will need to. There's already a bunch of code written actually. I probably just need to adapt it to do the moderation. Which actually brings me to my question. Why are you guys on circle? Like is it a paid community only?

[Tony]

So we are building a paid community. There will.

[Steve Chou]

Okay.

[Tony]

There will not be a free tier.

[Steve Chou]

Okay. Okay.

[Tony]

Yeah.

[Steve Chou]

All right.

[Tony]

So we're doing the opposite, right? We're bringing people in on a very low priced offer with limited. I don't want to say limited, but you know you're not getting 450 lessons, right. So the community is the like lower hanging fruit and getting people in and then upselling them within the community to higher tier offers. So we're reversing what you're doing. Basically.

[Steve Chou]

I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store. I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be [e-mail] free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and and I'll send you the course right away. Once again, that's my wife. Quitterjob.com free. Now back to the show. Well, I mean I might just charge like a buck.

[Tony]

Yeah. So our, right now we kind of have our entry price at $9 a month which is ridiculously cheap. Probably not going to be that way for very long.

[Steve Chou]

But that's, I mean I'm probably going to do that too just so it vets like the outright.

[Tony]

And that's where I think, you know, I actually went back and forth on the free paid how much do you charge? Kind of thing and did a bunch of like forecasting models and things like that. But I think the one thing about people paying that makes a difference is that it does keep out a level of spam. It's not going to be, I mean unless you're charging $500 a month or something like that, you're still going to get problem people right at some point. But I think even at A$5 whatever you're going to minimize that from the, from the start. Which is why I think charging like a very small amount is not a bad idea. And honestly for like a my wife quit her job community, I think the charging is actually pretty smart as well as. Here's my worry for like my wife quit her job because you already have an established group is that the new people coming in will annoy the old people.

[Steve Chou]

You know, actually the old people, it's all locked. Like the course members have their own.

[Tony]

So that's what I was saying. If you're doing something like this, you do need to have that locked area where the premium tier, whatever you want.

[Jen]

To call it, right.

[Tony]

That they have a space to go to where they're not. Because we've found that when we every once in a while we open up our Friday check ins to all of YouTube and all of our paid course members get annoyed at the Questions that come in because you know, usually they're new, which is fine, or they haven't gotten started or their questions are very basic. They haven't watched even a handful of YouTube videos.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So you're getting sort of this like hodgepodge of people. Not all the time, but definitely happens. And so you want to make sure that you have like that safe space for paying customers to be able to have those higher level conversations.

[Steve Chou]

I mean I want to save space myself opening this up. This is why I'm curious. I mean you're going to have this problem at a low price point. You're going to have a moderation problem.

[Tony]

Yes.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

Does Circle have built in ways to moderate sentiment?

[Tony]

It does. I'm still digging into everything that Circle has to offer. One of the things that I say is a huge downfall of any of these paid products. School Circle, mightynet, all those people, all those network type things is that you know, the more you're willing to pay, the better the features are.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So the basic plan is garbage. And so you know, the higher like we were setting it up yesterday, actually we were getting a few people into the community yesterday and realized that there's nowhere to put. If you have like, is it, you know, you fill out your bio when you join the community and there's nowhere to put like a YouTube handle, which to me is like a huge fail.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

Like most people are working and growing on some sort of like YouTube type platform.

[Steve Chou]

Yeah.

[Tony]

And that wasn't an option. It was like Instagram, Facebook, whatever. So it's not until you go to like the 200amonth option that you have. Right?

[Jen]

Yes.

[Steve Chou]

You have to pay.

[Tony]

So I was like that's garbage. Shame on you. Circle to put a YouTube.

[Steve Chou]

Yeah, that's ridiculous.

[Tony]

I know. Further, further entrenching you and your discord love. But, but yeah, no, no, actually I'm.

[Steve Chou]

Not in love with Discord. I just think it's, it's, it's a great tool for, for the price point.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

And, and the extent and I think.

[Tony]

If you have the ability to do some of the coding and technical stuff, either you're personally do or you have someone on your staff or team or you can hire someone on upwork, whatever it is, I definitely think it's a great option. If you don't want to do that, then I think something like a school or Circle, you know, one of the things that School does really well and Circle has the same component, I just haven't used it yet is that ability for people to See what's locked. Which I think is like one of the greatest incentives to get people to upgrade is seeing what they can't have. And I remember Digital Marketer. I don't know if Digital Marketer still does this, but. But remember when you would buy like one of their Nine95, like $9.95 little mini courses, and then when you went to log in, it showed all the courses, but they were all grayed out so you couldn't click on them. And then you could always upgrade or you could get the package and get like 10 of them or whatever. But like, to me, that was genius. Cause it's like you're on there for 15 seconds and you're like, oh, they have a YouTube tutorial. Like, so to me, like, I think and probably Discord has some ability to do this, but I think Circle and School do it really well. Is you can see like what you can't have. And then also basically earning, like it's sort of the gamification where you earn points to be able to unlock different things.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So based on, yeah, you can do a Discord. But I think, I think those types of things in communities are very effective is, you know, one, for getting people to interact with because there's a reward system built in. And then two, I think for you, especially if people that come in and aren't a part of the course can like get a little peek at what's happening and sort of like the next level stuff, to me that's obviously your course is expensive, so it's not like a spur of the moment purchase. But I think people seeing that will be effective in getting people to convert at some point.

[Steve Chou]

Yeah, we'll see how it goes. Like, I'm not even thinking that far ahead, like for. For the randos, so to speak. Just because I've just had this horrific experience with Facebook groups in the past with spam, right. And there's no real easy way to moderate that outside of going through each comment and saying deny, deny, deny or whatever. This is one of the reasons why I like Discord because of all the hooks. Like, even if Circle was free, I'd probably still go with Discord actually, based on the I. I only took a very limited trial of Circle to be fair. And then School. I actually didn't try that thoroughly because you guys had said some things about it.

[Tony]

I personally, I think Circle's better than School. They're priced about the same. I've worked now in both. I think Circle just has some better features. But I Also think it's one of those things too, where, I mean, we'll use Liz as an example. She started the Fluencer Fruit on Discord because that's what the company wanted it to be on and they were supposed to help with some things and it ended up that they didn't really have the bandwidth to help do some of the integrations and so she was kind of stuck and not able to do some of that. So she ended up moving over to Circle. So I do think, I do think a lot of it is just personal preference and what you're comfortable in. Because if you're, if you are going to be the one managing and running the community, you have to be. Want to log in and deal with it every day.

[Steve Chou]

It is not intuitive. Yeah, Discord. Some of the things are not intuitive. Like you're attaching bots to what? I mean, like I had to watch some videos just to even understand what the heck was going on, you know. But once you get it, it's cool. It's like anything in life, I think.

[Tony]

I also don't love that Discord is black. Is there a way to change that?

[Steve Chou]

That's just like, okay, see, that's nothing. That's nothing. I wouldn't even put brain power into that. Like, I don't really care how well.

[Tony]

Because I don't like the black screen with the white text personally. To read, like, that's just a personal preference, which I don't know. I've never seen a way to have not Discord not look like that. And maybe that's just the interface.

[Steve Chou]

I've not spent any brain power looking at that. But it's probably true because black on white saves power on your phone.

[Tony]

Okay. That's probably why they do it. Yeah.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

For certain screens.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

Because black doesn't use power.

[Tony]

Yeah, I just, you know, I got these old eyes. I gotta.

[Steve Chou]

But, but you're right about like the platform risk also.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

Like we're beholden to Discord, Circle and whatnot and. Or beholden to Facebook. So unless you want to start your own platform, which is ironically something I had with the class before, that was a big time pain in the butt.

[Tony]

Yeah.

[Steve Chou]

I will. Probably won't do that again, I would.

[Tony]

Say, unless you're just like so geeky and love doing those things. Coding up your own community.

[Steve Chou]

I didn't code it up. It was just a standard off the shelf platform. I didn't.

[Tony]

Oh, I thought you did. Was it, Was it Andrew who coded his up? Somebody?

[Steve Chou]

No, no, no one's coded, there's. From scratch. They've modified what's existing, which is what I did.

[Derek]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Chou]

But there's just all sorts of issues with that.

[Tony]

It was also very ugly.

[Steve Chou]

You have to host it yourself. Oh, yeah, I know it was ugly.

[Derek]

Yeah.

[Tony]

So also, I don't know if you know this, but LinkedIn actually has a community option for LinkedIn groups.

[Steve Chou]

I did not know that. I'm new to LinkedIn.

[Tony]

Me too. No, I just, I've. I did a deep dive into LinkedIn after. So last week we did a hot seat with Charles and one of the things that he has been having some success with are these like mini LinkedIn newsletters, which I was very interested in. And so I basically spent the weekend sort of digging into like, what can you do on LinkedIn, you know, what ability? Once again, you're still building something on another platform. Right. You don't own anything on LinkedIn, but they basically do have little private groups where you can invite people in to chat and build a community. I'm not sure like what the limit is on it, like how many people can be in the group or anything like that, but that might be something too where if you're just getting started and you don't want to like invest any tech or anything like that and just like, oh, I wonder how many people would be interested in this. You know, I think that might be an interesting option. It doesn't, doesn't seem like it's too difficult to like set up. It's basically just you just create the little group.

[Steve Chou]

So let's, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about nurturing the community and keeping it up. My experience with that was, I remember like I was one of the first members of Andrew's group over at ecf and I remember in the beginning Andrew was posting every single day in that, in that group. So what are you guys doing? You have people paying 10 bucks a month, but even at 10 bucks a month, people expect value.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

As soon as they sign up. So what are you doing?

[Tony]

So we will. So one of the things we're doing is we're actually holding a 45 minute, like office hours every week in the community.

[Steve Chou]

Oh, wow.

[Tony]

So that's sort of the bigger, but I guess benefit.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So obviously the community will have conversation, but that's our big draw is this 45 minute, like accountability session, a weekly accountability session. However, I think as we, you know, sort of stand up this community, I do think you have to be in there every single day. I Don't think there's a way around it, especially if yours is a little different because you, these people already were in a community before you just kind of moved locations. But when you're starting from scratch, I think you need to be in there or you need to have a dedicated person. It doesn't necessarily have to be you on a daily basis either starting a conversation every day or replying to conversations that you know will continue to grow.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

So sort of open ended type things, you know. The person who I think is so good at this is Tiffany Ivanovsky. You know, she's done this in Facebook groups for years and of course she's got a very different type of group, right. It's all clothes and fashion based. So it's really about building like friendships and trust. And so she posts, you know, crazy things like when Paul goes to the store and buys 500 poinsettias because she said she wanted some color on the front porch, right. So she's able to put like any kind of thing in there to drive engagement. I think if you're trying to build like a business based community, which we are both doing, you know, it needs to be pretty focused on the types of business. So you know, for you, obviously lately it could be anything involving like tariffs or trade or you know, stuff like that. Stuff that just engage the people that are in there and start conversation. One of the things that I think we, we had someone post yesterday, you know, basically like, hey, here's this really great podcast. If you start listening at 40 minutes and whatever, there's a really good commentary on XYZ that we had talked about previously. So I think anything where you're just like adding value, educational content and then making sure that you interact when people post is really important. Especially in the beginning when you don't have like self appointed community leaders.

[Steve Chou]

So right now presumably you don't have a ton of members and you're doing these office hours for accountability. What happens when it gets to even like a hundred members? That model will break down, right?

[Tony]

For accountability? Yes and no. I'm not sure. Like, I mean we haven't. The community is not live. The only people in there are like invite only right now. So.

[Steve Chou]

But yeah, but I mean just looking.

[Tony]

Forward, I think it'll change a little bit either there'll be multiple accountability times, you know, to accommodate and it won't always be run by us. So the goal would be, you know, to have to raise up people within the community to lead, you know, not for free, you know, either for you know, in exchange for community access, things like that. So. And I. And I've seen that work successfully in a lot of other groups. Like a good example of this is, you know, Ezra had a Facebook ads group for a long. I don't know if it was exactly Facebook ads, but it was some sort of like ad based group.

[Steve Chou]

Was it Molly's or.

[Tony]

I think it was both of theirs. They were both attached to it.

[Derek]

Right.

[Tony]

And it was pretty expensive, like several hundred dollars a month to be in the community. And you know, and I think this is good and bad. Like Molly wasn't in it a whole lot. It was other people sort of leading the group. Now I think the problem becomes when you sell it as so and so is going to be in here giving you advice versus like because.

[Derek]

Right.

[Tony]

And the crazy thing is that it's not like the people that were in there didn't know as much as anybody else. They did. They knew a lot. But when you pitch it one way and then deliver something different, I think that becomes problematic. I don't like, we're never pitching this community as Liz and myself.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

This is all. This is always a group type thing. So I think that's important too. And I think for you, you know, with the community, same thing.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

I would never pitch it as Steve answers all your questions in the group.

[Jen]

Right?

[Steve Chou]

Definitely not. Not for the. Well, not for the course, but not for the.

[Tony]

Like it's. It's a. You really have to pitch it as a community of people. Like and I think, I don't know, like real life. Like I used to be in a runners group.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

And when I had a runner question, we had a group text like I wanted to know like certain pair of socks. Like I didn't care who answered me in the group text. I just wanted. So I think you have to build it in that way where everybody in the community is going to add value and help other people in the community.

[Steve Chou]

Yeah, I. That all sounds very idyllic. I, I think it's maybe my space. But as soon as like I go live to everyone, I'm sure all these people want to use it for marketing.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

And that's where it's just gonna go to hell. So this is why I'm not going to do that for a while because I need to research all the anti spam bots and everything that I could implement first because that's what it's going to be, one big festivus.

[Tony]

Yeah, I can definitely see that. I think another tip for people who are thinking about doing something like this is to join some communities even if you have to pay like it like inexpensive and see how they manage those types of things. Because everybody has, I mean like everybody has different ways of managing. Like I know when Marie Forleo does B school you know there's a community, a pop up community.

[Jen]

Right.

[Tony]

That lasts during the B school period. Amy Porterfield does similar things where she has like these pop up communities and they seem pretty good about like not having the spam and obviously I'm not in there 247 and I'm not like monitoring them that closely but I, you know there's clearly something that they're doing right to keep it.

[Steve Chou]

Well yeah, it's called. I bet it's one person watching it all day not even joking. I'm.

[Tony]

I'm willing to bet where you hire an overseas va honestly like this is where you pay someone you know overseas to monitor that.

[Steve Chou]

The other honestly if, if chat GPT can handle like 80 of it that's it's pretty easy for AI to spot like whether it's going to be promotional.

[Tony]

Yeah. The other thing I think is, and this is why I do think you should consider charging something to the non course members is that I think when people pay they're less likely to be. When there's like clear parameters set up before beforehand they're less likely to do that because they don't want to get kicked out. So I, yeah.

[Steve Chou]

Plus they skin the game.

[Tony]

So I do think even having people pay something is worth it because you know, I think it just clears out a lot of the, the problems. But yeah, I do think you have to monitor it pretty closely especially with what you're doing.

[Steve Chou]

The other thing that everyone has to deal with potentially is you know, once you start charging monthly like people's credit cards, people complaining like oh, you know, I couldn't get into discord for, for like the last week. Can I get a prorated. It opens yourself up to that stuff too, which is fine. I don't know, I'm not even thinking that far ahead. Like if I can get my class community up and, and then I'll consider looking at the moderation first.

[Tony]

Yeah.

[Steve Chou]

And then once I get the moderation down then I'll open it up. That, that, that's my sequence.

[Tony]

I'm. Yeah, I'm genuinely curious to see when you open it up.

[Steve Chou]

What you're just gonna sit there with popcorn and laugh.

[Tony]

I'm gonna start drinking martinis and just like sit there with a dirty martini.

[Steve Chou]

I Mean, even with ECF and Andrew, like he has flare ups happen all the time. And these are people paying a lot of money. I don't know how much it is.

[Tony]

A month or something.

[Steve Chou]

Yeah, a couple hundred dollars a month.

[Jen]

Yeah.

[Tony]

And I, and I think, I don't know, I've been following all the WNBA drama, so I'm all drama filled right now. I think sometimes drama is okay as long as it's moving towards a productive resolution. There have been some things in ECF that I did not feel were very productive and that were really. And I think that's where as the community owner, you have to judge. Is this in general going to make the community better or worse? And you know, even though some of it might be painful and might be hard, some of that's okay to have happen because people do need to be able to have a place where they can speak, especially like a community like ECF where it's a space where a lot of people don't feel like they have anywhere else they can have these conversations. But there comes a time when it's just bashing or just something that's just really negative. And in that, in that case, to me you just have to shut it down. That, that conversation, that thread, whatever.

[Steve Chou]

Well, one of the negatives of Discord is it's hard to have dynamic threads. It's. It's basically one long chat, right? That, that, that's a big negative. You can create separate rooms for certain topics, but it's not like a forum where you have individual threads where people can comment. So I don't know, I have, my only experience with all this is with course, with courses. And I think for the course having one long thread works because oftentimes there's not enough interaction with individual threads. Like when I had my other forum with threads, it just wasn't that dynamic. So the conversation is better like. But when you open it up to I don't know how many people, let's just call it like the size of my old Facebook group. Let's say it's like 15,000 people. Good Lord, I can't even imagine what that's going to be like.

[Tony]

Yeah, I'll be interested to see if you decide at any point to open it up and you get to that point. Does it work as a funneling tool?

[Steve Chou]

I mean there's so much work that's involved in that. Right. So one is the moderation and then the payment processing part and then there's.

[Tony]

Onboarding discord connect directly with like a stripe or anything like that.

[Steve Chou]

I'm not worried about that. If it doesn't, I'm sure it does because people have charged stuff like mid journey and whatnot. It's all. I don't fear that like writing code now is a snap because of ChatGPT. So anything I need I can probably pump out really quickly. I don't fear that at all. Like I don't even have to read the documentation anymore.

[Tony]

I was asking more for the general public, not for your own fear of that one.

[Steve Chou]

I'm sure there is. The answer is. I'm sure there is. Any, any platform will have like a native, will have like an integration, but for it to do exactly what you want that might like there's, there's some intricacies with payment processing.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

Like you might want to give them like a 10 day free trial just to check it out before it kicks in. Some of those things might not be. I don't haven't looked at it, so I don't want to comment but. And then, well, we'll see the types of questions. It can be annoying. Like even in those Friday check ins that we've done where we've opened it up to the YouTube channel. What's annoying about that sometimes is that people are just asking very basic questions that are literally covered in like the first couple lessons.

[Tony]

Well, a lot of them are covered in the free mini course.

[Steve Chou]

Some of them are covered in the free mini course. That is correct. And of course if you're a paid course member where you've already done the work, you know that that can be negative. So it's almost like you need to have like a beginner area.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

An intermediate and then advanced topics only. There's a lot of, there's a lot to think about here which is why I'm not prepared to, to unleash it.

[Tony]

Okay, final thought before we wrap this up. So as we're talking through this, I'm like, what if we just opened the community for webinars and put all the chat for the webinars in the community.

[Steve Chou]

That was my next step actually.

[Derek]

Yeah.

[Steve Chou]

Because those people are already engaged.

[Jen]

Right?

[Derek]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Chou]

I'm not even there yet though, because even those people, I mean you've seen some of our live chats on our workshops get out of control.

[Derek]

Right.

[Tony]

I just.

[Steve Chou]

But yeah, that would be the next.

[Tony]

It's an interesting component to add to a webinar. I wonder if it would increase the sales.

[Steve Chou]

Oh you mean for people to ask questions like they.

[Tony]

This not during the webinar obviously because you can't monitor a chat and like Discord when we're on the webinar. But I'm saying, like, for the, you know, let's see, say webinar pitch starts on Wednesday, you get in the community on Monday, you're in the community Sunday, and then you're out if you don't buy the course. You see what I'm saying?

[Steve Chou]

I see. I wasn't even thinking about that. I was thinking about having them as permanent, unpaid members of the Discord. Doing the moderation that you just suggested of kicking people out is tough unless you just destroy the Discord server after you're done.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

Because then you need to know everyone's handle and then you need to write a routine that fishes those people out and make sure. And make sure they're out.

[Derek]

I don't.

[Steve Chou]

I don't know if that'd be worth my effort actually, to do that. Anyway, there's a ton to think about, and if you guys are listening, we're just at the beginning stages here, just talking things through. I think your community will go pretty smooth.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

As long as it doesn't get out of control quickly.

[Derek]

Right.

[Tony]

There's worse things that can happen if it grows quick, I would say.

[Steve Chou]

I mean, growing quickly, honestly, has always been a problem for everything. For. For everything I've ever done.

[Derek]

Right.

[Steve Chou]

When there's anything that grows, like 7x like that one time we went on the Today show, that sucked.

[Tony]

Yeah.

[Steve Chou]

And then that when I got an influx of course members in my first, first webinar, that was kind of painful too, because I realized I didn't have good onboarding or anything.

[Tony]

It's, it's, it's. It's nothing like the influx that shows you everything that's broken and what, and what you're doing so well.

[Steve Chou]

Yeah, it's stressful. Then you got to scramble to. To get it up. So we're in the beginning stages, folks. We'll report back. And if you're listening to this and you're interested in a community, let us know. Send us email. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Send me a note. At some point, I'll be opening up the Discord to people who are actively selling right now. For more information and resources, go to my wife, quitterjob.com Episode 596 Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellers summit.com and if you're interested in starting your own e commerce store, head on over to my wife, quithherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I'll send the course right away via email.