The Startup Ideas Podcast - The Laws of Community Building with Natalie Ellis

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Why are you waiting to build your community? In today's episode, we explain why the time is now to start creating, share the five tests to prove community exists, share how to have community members engage with one another, and so much more. Hosts Sahil Bloom & Greg Isenberg, are joined by Natalie Ellis, a self-taught entrepreneur who bootstrapped her way to a community-based company that generates over $6 million per year in recurring revenue. You won't want to miss this episode.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comA SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR►► This episode is brought to you by Retool https://retool.com/Retool is the fast way to build your own custom internal tools for your business. With a complete library of 100+ fully-featured, accessible UI components that you can drag and drop into any interface, Retool’s platform lets you build the custom internal tools your team needs, 10x faster. Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, and NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to operate faster and better. Also, teams of up to five can build Retool apps for free. We're huge fans of the product! If you want to learn more, go to https://retool.com/LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Natalie Ellis: https://twitter.com/natalieellis91Sahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985SHOW NOTES00:00 Sneak Peek00:57 Loving Cold Exposure05:36 Why Start-Ups are like Ice baths07:30 Natalie’s First “Little” Business13:57 Creating Products from Community17:47 Community VS Audience23:05 Generating Engagement & Creating Culture28:40 The Messy Middle37:50 Content to Grow, Build, or Sell41:00 Optimizing Funnels and Adding Value46:46 Building and Safeguarding the BossBabe Brand54:05 The Laws for Community Building58:50 Finding Natalie Ellis1:00:42 Thanks for Listening

Well, it was definitely messy. I didn't avoid that because, well, my background is in nothing like this. I didn't know anything about product, anything about communities. I was just like, I have this idea. And so our website, I didn't realize would just crash if I had a certain amount of people on it. I really had no idea about these things. So at each kind of milestone, we just kept out growing what we had. And I had to learn about bringing in a product team and what even a product team looks like and a community manager and people with experience. being able to navigate that. So I definitely didn't avoid it, but it taught me a lot. Thank you so much for joining us and, and for to Stephen, your husband, for helping with the tech, the tech check there. I know. I just grabbed him out of his workout. I don't even know how I run a podcast, honestly, but it works. We got it. It works and we're here and we're thankful for it. You know, I do, this is kind of a funny and awkward start to the whole thing, but I was like doing my prep for this. And Greg sent me a bunch of things. you know, to take a look at. One of them was your Instagram account. And the first thing that

jumped out to me on your Instagram account is that we have a common love of cold exposure and the cold plunge. So I need to ask as a starting point, how did you and your husband, I assume he uses it too? How did you guys get into this in the first place? He persuaded me. And he put this thing in the backyard and he was like, we're going to get into cold plungers. I was not interested. I'm only three months post-partum. I was not interested in this at all. But one, morning the baby just didn't sleep and I had to wake myself up and coffee wasn't working. He was like, just get in the cold punch. I swear it'll work.

And you know, when you like, I've got nothing to lose and I jumped in and I've never experienced bliss and energy like it when I came out. So I'm converted. I'm hooked. I'm sold. It's pretty wild. I mean, I've been saying this to Greg. And Greg's like, you know, why would I do something painful and hard?

You know, like we have a difference of opinion on this in general. But I'm like, so back in the day, like baseball days. Natalie. So I played baseball in college. Back in the day, I had this friend of mine, this guy, Chad Rogers, who was a professional player. I was playing in college. And we used to do, like, crazy stupid shit as like mental training, under the guise of mental training. And part of that was like we would go in the dead of winter in Boston where I lived. And we'd go like swim in a frozen river. Like we'd go into our necks and go swim around and see how long it would take before we thought we were going to die. And so I'd like used to do stuff like this. But then for like 15 years,

did not you know 10 years did nothing of the sort and got the cold plunge and immediately felt that like massive dopamine rush that you're talking about feeling i mean it's it's crazy like this the first 30 seconds of misery is followed by like pure bliss and almost even like uh euphoria when you're when you're getting out of it i know and i really didn't expect that because i'm not the kind of person that likes to put myself in like very uncomfortable physically torture experiences like that. But getting to the other side, I was just posting this morning about

how it's such a lesson though, because so many times we give up before it gets good because we don't know that it's going to get good. And I was so close to doing that at the weekend because I was trying to do a 12 minute one and I was so close to getting out and all of a sudden something switched and it started feeling so good.

And I felt like I probably could have stayed in there way longer. But it just, it goes for everything. If we knew, if we could see what was around the corner, we probably would keep going. but we can't see what's around the corner. So too often we're like, I'm going to go the other way. But it's nice when you push through

when you get that feedback and you're like, okay, reminder, I get to keep pushing through these things. For the last 10 years, I've been building internal tools to help my sales teams or engineering teams work at blazing speeds. But the catch with internal tools is it's really hard to build from scratch. And maintaining them also requires a lot of engineering work. and it's just frankly super tedious.

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It's also super flexible. You can write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your app looks and works. And app environments, SSO, permissions, and other critical app functionality are all available completely out of the box. The result? You can build production-grade internal tools

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I want to address why I don't do the cold plunge. I feel like I need to defend myself. Please do. So I've been doing startups since I've been a teenager, which is the ultimate cold plunge, except you might not get the payoff of the euphoria. That's startups. I feel like, you know, I feel like that's what it is. It's just incurring pain that might. That might be. That might not have a euphoria at the end. Well, yeah, I think, like, there's this romantic idea of startups and, you know, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. And, you know, it works out.

Okay, when I talk about startups, I'm talking about, like, venture-backed startups. I'm not talking about being a creator or bootstrapping something. I'm talking about, like, going big. To me, the cold plunge is going big, except that, yeah, that's the vibe I get from it. I mean, there's a whole host of, like, actual science-backed, like, research proven benefits from a physical and mental standpoint. The dopamine release thing is actually very real. I actually find it.

There's no surprise why, like Natalie's husband was a professional e-athlete, right? He was one of the top. What's an e-athlete? You know, e-sports. Oh, gamer, gamer, gamer. Okay, got it. Yeah. And it's interesting to see you high performers, you know, baseball player,

League of Legends people like it you know love the cold punch so much there's just something about the cold man do one hard thing to start the day it makes everything

feel easier that's all I will say I'll say do one easy thing to start the day it's just a difference of opinion I don't think we're ever going to agree on those fans it's good it's good I don't want to agree on everything with you but this is one for sure well Natalie

I'm super excited to to get to have this conversation. I mean, there's so much that I feel like you and Greg have in common around, you know, you're thinking on on communities and community-based building. Maybe just as like a starting point, though, can you can you just like give the quick background on you and how you kind of came to be where you are today? Yeah, I've always been very entrepreneurial, just from a really young age. I always knew that I wanted to be my own boss. I didn't even know what the word entrepreneur meant. So I had a bunch of little businesses, I would say, throughout school and college. And I started my first kind of serious

business right out of college where I was manufacturing supplements. Wait, one second. Can you hear the baby in the background or no? I've got the same thing on my end. So I was literally hearing it and being like, is that my kid? I have a three month old. I'm just like, is that my kid crying? Mine's three months too. Let me just tell us at one side. Please. Greg, while, uh, while she does that, I literally, I literally had that reaction. I could hear it. And I was like, I went. on mute and I was like going like this to try to figure out like is that my kid or is that Natalie that's having the problem. I thought I thought it was Roman. Oh dude I mean Romans kind of got like a little bit of like I'm trying to work with him on it like his cry is still a little bit too high

pitch for my liking so I'm trying to get him to go into more like a deeper roar of a soulful yeah like it needs to be more raspy I was talking about my son's cry it's a little too like it's a little too dainty still um and It's really cute. It's like, it's very, it makes me very sad when I see him crying. Um, but he needs to get a little more like chest. I want him to get like kind of a chest cry going. Well, you're lucky because your boobs don't leak when your baby cries.

I need to be like, can we get the baby to the other end of the house? It's a little, a little different. You and my wife should definitely have a conversation about this. Um, she's, yeah, it's like a total, total thing that's like a new world to me. But man, parenthood, we're definitely going to wind back to that. But you got cut up. off from your story. So I had my first serious business out of college where I was manufacturing supplements and I had no marketing budget. This was just completely bootstrapped. And I just,

I wasn't in love with the idea of what I was doing, but I knew I just wanted to get something out there versus going to the graduate job that I'd just been offered with Accenture. And so I, in this time of getting the manufacturer, I started an Instagram account. And I think we grew to about 35,000 followers. And so when we launched this business, very, very quickly, we were shipping to over 60 countries. We then got stocked in a store called Boots, over 250 stores across the UK, which is the equivalent of Walgreens in America.

And that was my first foray into real business and managing cash flow. And I was absolutely terrible at it. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to manage my cash flow. And so while I was doing this, I started just looking around for other women like me. I just thought there has to be other young women like me,

figuring it out, having no idea what we're doing. doing. And that's where I really got into Instagram and I started posting stuff that was just very, very real entrepreneurship. You know, at the time, quotes weren't as popular as they are today. So it's just very real, tongue and cheek, ambitious. And that Instagram account grew into what boss baby is today. So let me just pause you just for one second. So your, your nutritional, you're like supplement business. Was it for a particular niche? Was it broad? Like, what was the customer base or the brand or like how had you decided to start that? Yeah.

So it was for a particular issue. It was for young women that were struggling with acne prone skin. Okay. And basically I'd found I'd been traveling to America while I was still at college and I found that it was really normal over here to put powders in your smoothies, which of course we all know now. But at the time, you know, in the UK, that just wasn't a thing. People didn't know what this was.

They didn't know what superfoods were. And I found that just by making a blend of all these really high. nutritional ingredients, it was really, really good for your skin, for your energy. And so I started putting that together. So it was just something that I had the idea for and no one was really doing it. Huh. Okay. Got it. So just like I'm fascinated by Greg knows this. I'm fascinated by people who like have an insight like that. And then with with no like formal training are able to just go and launch a business around it that you scaled. So like what did you actually like what you clearly had a bias for action to go start it. But how did you get that going? Like did you go find a contract

manufacturer? Did you go find like what was the actual process in the like zero to one phase of that? Yeah, I had no idea. I just built it off of Google. Honestly, so I, I had an idea of all the ingredients I wanted to use in it. And I started making things in my kitchen. And then I went to a formula to say, hey, does this actually like work? Is this going to hurt anyone? Does this work? Can we make this into a product? Worked with a formulator. And then was still. just kind of blending stuff up in my kitchen and then ended up going to a manufacturer who I just agreed you know what we'll give this little business a try we'll do really really small runs for you and it just kind of grew from there it was very much just me and my laptop and like trying things in

the kitchen and you were going through wholesalers like you were selling to retailers or were you were you going direct to consumer and selling like through a D to C page yeah I was going direct consumer through Instagram and then one day um someone called me and they were like, hey, wear boots. We saw you on Instagram and I thought it was a hoax. And that was the retailer asking if they could stock it in stores. And I was like, yeah, sure, but I had no idea how I was going to even pay for it. Because with retailers, you get paid, if you're lucky 90 days after you deliver the product. And I'm paying my factory two months before I even, it was, I just said yes. And I've always had that attitude of like, yes, sure enough,

figure it out. But it was a headache and I probably wouldn't do it again, honestly. You learned about the joys of working capital in the early days of that business. I've seen a whole, I mean, you see a whole lot of businesses go under because of that exact dynamic. Like, you know, you're paying your producers so far in advance of when your retailers are paying you. It's like, you know, a terrible dynamic to have to deal with when you, especially when you're growing. It hurts you the most when you're growing. So you think everything's going well. And suddenly you realize you have no cash left in the bank because you've paid all your manufacturers way out in advance of when you're due to be paid.

Okay, so sorry, I cut you off. The next iteration of this, it sounds like, is something that I want to kick it over to Greg around too, which is like you had an insight around community. Like you were struggling entrepreneurs probably an overstatement. It sounds like you were doing quite well. But you were a female entrepreneur, you know, at a time when you felt like that was rare and there had to be other people out there that were struggling with the same things as you. Greg, you know, like you as a community-based product guy, that seems like an interesting. an interesting overlay there where there was like an insight around community that came out from actually building a product well i think i think natalie correct me if i'm wrong but you know

you were just being yourself right like you you you created the instagram page because you're like i feel like this needs to be out there just so it just turns out that there's millions of other people like you that have that want that support and then i think you did a really good job and i want to get into it around like how do you create a product to support that community. Yeah, exactly. And I had, I didn't have an intention of turning it into a business, but it got to a point where I realized there was a lot of women looking for something like what I was doing, like this kind of community in a more formal place.

And the way we turned it into a product was I just thought, what if every month we got to learn from a really amazing entrepreneur, what I have more chance of convincing them to teach me stuff if I had this community who were also there to learn from it. And that's really just, it just grew so organically. And it's kind of every product we've ever built has been like that. It's just grown from what they're asking for. You know, it's such like an interesting, I've learned a lot about this just from being around Greg. But it's such an interesting way of reframing being a product company to be a community company and build that fervent tribe.

And just take your direction from them. Like just as you said right there, it becomes abundantly clear what product you need to deliver, what service you need to deliver when you're in touch with the community and when you have this group of people that is, you know, being cultivated along the way. It seems like just such a de-risk approach to consumer. Like Greg had a tweet, you had a tweet recently, Greg, of like something about like the next wave of large consumer companies are going to be community-based. And it strikes me as so true, actually, when I hear it put in this perspective, because you hear, you know, consumer companies that have to take massive bets on products.

that are unproven, that's so scary. And you end up investing so much up front for something that is like an unclear payoff. But when you have a community that's told you a million times that they want exactly this or has signaled to you in a million different ways that they want this, suddenly you're so de-risked in terms of the product launch and what your roadmap actually looks like. Greg, any reactions? I mean, my reactions is like, I've been like screaming about this into like a black hole for like so many years. And then I feel like 2020 hit and then community became this like massive buzzword.

There was just like a rush of companies that just were using it improperly. And I feel like actually now, you know, we're in 2020, 2022. I just feel like, especially with the economic downturn come, you know, here and recession here, like now is that. the best time to do a community-based product because it derricks it for the entrepreneur. And you don't have to spend a lot of money on ads to basically get people to your product. So I think what you're going to see is like over the next two, three, four years, there's going to be this massive sort of influx of community-based products again. Can you talk about either one of you actually, like what it actually means to you?

Like what is a community? Greg, you just, I think, had talked about like your framework at late checkout for, for what is a community. And I think you had this like the tribe test around it. Can you just walk through that actually as like a framework for us to talk about boss babe? Yeah. So I tweeted, stop calling your Instagram audience a community. An audience doesn't equal a community.

How to think about audience versus community. And at late checkout, which is our product design agency, you know, they developed this test called tribe, which is, you know, we call it the community. test. So is there togetherness? Are there rituals? Is there member identity? Is there belonging? And do people engage with each other? So if you have those five things, then you have a community. Because I was just like seeing so many people just throw that word around community, community, it was getting a bit frustrating. And so yeah, we came up with the test for it. Go ahead, Natalie. Sorry. I love that. And I think it's so true. And I even see, you know,

know, some people trying to take their Instagram community and putting them, Instagram following up community and putting them into a Facebook group so they can sell to them and calling that a community. And I still don't think it is because, you know, we do it slightly different in a way that we have certain things that we do with them on a weekly basis. They know what they can expect. They know exactly what they're coming for. We're not just building this community to keep selling to them over and over and over again. The community is the product. That's the thing that they're there for. And sure, there's different ways they can get upsold into.

certain things if they segment themselves, but you can't, I don't just think you can put people into a group and assume that they're a community. If they're just there to listen to you doing live videos, how are they interacting with each other? Where are they getting the real community value from? So I want to do a little exercise around this actually, because I think it's, I think it's a super interesting topic, but it's one that to Greg's point is constantly talked about and yet rarely actually workshopped. Like everyone talks about what is a community, you know, you need to start a community. But like, how do you actually do that and how do you build these things?

And Natalie, you've clearly done this and are doing this in real time. Greg has done this and invested behind a bunch of businesses that do this. So let's use like just as an example because this is something I think about a lot and am thinking about a lot, my newsletter list. So I have a newsletter, Natalie, for reference, called the Curiosity Chronicle. Today it's about 115,000 people on the newsletter list. Open rates are great, like around 50%. very engaged people constantly reply send me thoughts etc it's an awesome you know group generally

around like growth growth minded growth oriented topics productivity self-improvement you know life lessons things like that i am currently in the process of thinking through building out a community around it and i would love to just like get your guys thoughts in almost like a workshop setting of like how would you actually launch a community like what do you actually have to functionally do to go hit this tribe test and to go build it? Or are some of the things intangible and you just don't know if you can do it? I think that's definitely tangible. And I think one place I would start, Greg, I love the way you called out the identity piece. So with our community, women call themselves boss babes. And it's very clear that they're labeling themselves as being

part of the community. And so when you're thinking about that identity piece, it's thinking about what does it mean for someone to be part of my community. You know, if they were to meet another person who's on my news that are in my community in the street what would they be talking about what would they know they already have in common and how would they refer to each other i think that piece is really really interesting um and that's something we always did from the beginning and i do see when people can call themselves something it resonates so have you seen the same thing greg 100% and so like if people are watching this on youtube like sahel's watching uh wearing this new hat intellectually curious, which I just bought yesterday.

And it's all about, you know, I think if you can sell out merch, that's a good sign that you're, you're onto a community-based product. Because it's people self-identifying and being like, I love this so much that I want to go out there in the world and I want to rep your stuff. Yeah, that does seem like a good razor. You know, I talk a lot about razors, like little rules of thumb and things like that. The merch one definitely does seem that way. The other one you've talked about in the past, which I love, is like, is someone willing to watch you on a live stream talk about nothing? We were just talking about that, Greg, about Martin Schrelli, that, like, asshole, you know, I think he's like one of the worst people on the planet. We have a friend who really likes him and thinks he's super interesting.

But one of the things about that guy is, like, he's probably one of the most hated people on the planet. But he also has these raving fans who are willing to, like, watch him on a live stream for hours and talk about nothing and do nothing. And like that is a community that he has that clearly for whatever reason really likes him and thinks he's interesting. So that strikes me as like another razor of thinking about whether you have something that could be the seeds of community. How did you think Natalie about like this whole thing of engaging with each other? Like was that natural to the boss babe community immediately that the women were engaging with each other? Or did you have to like kind of go in there in the early days and really like stoke that fire of engagement? Yeah, it wasn't natural because when we loved.

launched our first product, which was our membership, you know, we, it was trickling in. We were doing it live. So people were joining this group and there was like five of them. And I'm telling them, this is the best community online of female entrepreneurs. And there's like five of them looking around. And one thing that we did early on was these rules of engagement. And it didn't matter whether there was five people, but we told them how to engage so that we took the guesswork out of it. They didn't have to just pull up a blank empty post and think, am I going to say hi and tell them about my kids today or what am I going to do? And so we set these rules of engagement of this is a really supportive place. This is where you bring transparently the problems you're

working through in your business. This is where you bring a solution. If you've got something, you can offer someone else and you can do that kind of trade, this is where you'll do it. And I was just really clear from that in the beginning. And then I'd facilitate the conversation. So every day would have a theme. And on the certain theme, I'd post something and start to get people commenting on those threads on the day and people just grew very used to that happening. So they knew on a Friday, I was going to post something that meant they could come in and share with us their latest product links and get feedback on them. So it was little things like that I did to facilitate it. And before too long, it kind of became second nature to the people in the group. And when they join,

our community would really helpfully help other people to curate their posts in in the way that's going to get them the best response. So two follow-ups to that. Number one, you mentioned the kind of the fear in the early days of like there weren't many people in there and you're like, oh, this is the best community in the world and there's five people. Would you in hindsight, like if you were giving advice to someone that wants to start a community today, would you wait until it got to some, like until you had enough signups for there to be like a critical mass to launch it? Or did you, do you think that was the right way to do it to just start it and kind of have the gated access from the get-go? I think it was right for us because within that, I think our first launch period, we were always,

open for seven days. And I think we brought in like 1,500 paid members. So it felt like enough to get something really going and off the ground. But even if I hadn't had that many people join, I still would have done it like that because I really don't think you, I don't think a lot of people know the importance of that to like back and forward conversation with those early audience members and early community members. That's who's really telling you what they want to see. And so I would still be in there and just treating it like it's, okay, it's me and my five friends. and I'm going to build some raving fans here because we're really going to listen to each other and support each other. And I try to keep, I still would say I try to keep the community like that.

You know, it's way bigger now, but I still go in and I try to always know the names and faces of members if they're regular as coming to calls. And I call them out and I make sure they feel seen. And I read through the posts to see what the common threads are. And you kind of, yes, you might not have that big critical mess in the beginning. But if you've got those raving fans, you've got something really invaluable there. And those are the people that are going to go and bring more people in, in my opinion. Yeah, I like how you're thinking about the culture. Like, you're thinking about the boss babe culture and how to, how to, how to, how to always improve upon it.

Have you heard of the eternal September mindset or the eternal September story? Like Sahel, you love this one. No, I like it. Tell me. So, eternal September, you know, before there were forms on the internet, basically there was this thing. called Usenet. It was like a bulletin board in like the 80s and early 90s. And back then, it was called the students who got access to the internet. And what they noticed is that every September, basically all these freshmen would come in to these BBSs, the bulletin boards,

and they would completely ruin the culture. And they would, because they didn't know how to use the internet. It was their first time. And they'd post stuff. And it basically, would create a horrible experience for everyone else. And every September it would happen until, I think it was like 1993 or 1994, AOL basically started offering bulletin boards. And there was just like massive influx of, I guess, like a million plus users. And it completely ruined the culture for BBSs, this particular BBS. And the lesson they call it Eternal September is that it's so important that as you grow,

that you're thinking about, okay. it's great that, you know, word of mouth is happening. It's great that there's an influx of people. But how do I improve upon the experience, not make it get worse? It is such an interesting. I mean, just tactically, I find it so interesting because we have a lot of listeners who I'm sure thinking of either as a bolt on to their existing business or for the future thinking of building communities.

I mean, a community is an amazing solopreneur business model. We know a lot of people who have built, you know, a community that is small, niche around a really interesting topic that a few people care about. And they've built a really fervent, you know, paid community around it. That can be a great business to own and run and be able to live your lifestyle. And this strikes me as like a very cool tactical discussion around how to do it. The scaling part I'm still a little stuck on. So I'd love to hear more of your thoughts around it. Like you have the early days.

You bring people in. There's a ton of excitement. the energy of the launch carries a lot of momentum, I imagine, in terms of people engaging with one another, and the rituals and belonging and all of these things on Greg's tribe test. And then you kind of hit what our friend Scott Belski talks about around the messy middle of the community, I imagine, where the excitement and energy of the launch has worn off. A lot of new people have come in that maybe don't have quite as much connection to the group. Did you start, just like tactically, were there things you did?

Like, did you hire community managers that were really important for kind of keeping things and making sure everyone understood rules of engagement? Did you start like a sort of alpha member committee, like the people that you knew you could really count on the OGs, the day ones to ask them about different things you were thinking of launching? Like, what were the things that you really did to ensure that that messy middle wasn't so messy as you scaled? For the last 10 years, I've been building internal tools to help my sales teams or engineering teams work at blazing speeds. But the catch with internal tools is it's really hard to build from scratch. And maintaining them also requires a lot of engineering work. And it's just frankly super tedious. Thankfully, there's now retool.

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To learn more, you just got to go to Retool.com. Well, it was definitely messy. I didn't avoid that because, well, my background is in nothing like this. I didn't know anything about product, anything about communities. I was just like, I have this idea. And so our website, I didn't realize would just crash if I had a certain amount of people on it. I really had no idea about these things. So at each kind of milestone, we just kept out growing what we had. And I had to learn about bringing in a product team and what even a product team looks like and a community manager and people with experience. of being able to navigate that. So I definitely didn't avoid it, but it taught me a lot. So what we've been able to do that I think keeps our excitement really high within the group is every month it's kind of like a mini launch. Every month we still continue to bring in a really well-sought-after female entrepreneur that I know our members are really excited about learning from.

And we do a lot of build-up of what's coming. We do like sneak peeks into the content. And then we drop the content and it's very digestible. we made a big mistake in the past of trying to throw everything at our members in the hope of being valuable and our engagement plummeted. So when we thought people would be really excited and engaged, it plummeted. So we realized when we got to a certain point, we had to do fewer things and do them a lot better and get more out of our content. That part was really, really important for us. You know, I would also say in that kind of messy middle, you're, you probably have to move away from a really tightness.

niche that got you started in the beginning. So when I first started, I had this really, really tight niche because the avatar was me, whereas when we started having, you know, multiple thousands of members through that niche started to widen. And in order to scale, we had to widen that. And luckily, our community on Instagram continued to grow and grow. We've never successfully ran ads. It just never performs anywhere near our organic stuff. And so I'm a big believer in just going all in one thing. And we probably will figure our ads at some point, but for us, it's just been organic, organic, and how can we continue expanding that? And so with that, I had to have one ear to the ground of the Instagram and podcast and newsletter of community that I'm

building and another ear to the ground with our actual paid community and see how I could expand both together. So yeah, I didn't avoid it. And I'm sure we'll still hit another messy later at some point as we outgrow certain things. But I think we have built enough trust in our community that they know when we hit those kinds of things, something better is coming because they've seen it happen before. Where are you today? Like size wise, how many people are part of this community? We've had over now 25,000 paying members through. And in total with all of our products, we've had about 170,000 members through. So we've gotten to a good size now where we have to learn all of the things about product and tech and being able to sustain it.

But yeah, I mean, I'm living proof that you don't need a background in any of this stuff to make it work. Google and is so helpful. So and the business model is a monthly subscription for paying members? Is that the standard? Yeah. So there's a few angles to the business model. So our community, yeah, it's a monthly membership. You can pay monthly or annually.

And then we have two accelerator programs that we open a couple of times a year. And then another arm to the business now is partnerships and working with brands. How much is the monthly membership out of curiosity? Now it's $49. When we started, it was $27. Okay. Got it. So, I mean, there's like very real ARR coming through the system from just the subscriptions on the community.

Yeah. which has been so great for us. And I'm glad we did that first because always having that recurring revenue has meant that we've never had to make decisions that we'd regret out of cash flow fear. Because I never wanted to be a venture-backed company. I always wanted to be able to bootstrap this. And I do feel like if we hadn't have had that revenue that I know was coming in, we would have had to make some decisions that probably would have compromised where we wanted

to go as a brand in order to bring some quick cash in. Whereas having that has meant I, always knew what my cash flow looked like. I could make really smart hiring and investing decisions and take the product growth really, really slow. Yeah. I, um, you know, I typically try not to do public math on, um, on podcasts because I think it's like generally just a bad idea, but just like the scale of what you're talking about is really amazing. And so I do want to call it out because it's super impressive. Well, we don't have 25,000 paying members. We've had that many members through. Okay. I see. I see. I got it. They're not.

there's not currently 25,000. How many active paying members today? I would have to pull the numbers, but in our recurring programs, I would probably say there's about 9,000. Oh, it's still a lot. Yeah, there's still a lot,

but it's not the 25,000. Yeah, yeah, sure. That's okay. I mean, it's still really amazing. I mean, like, that's easier public math for me if I take it, if I round it to 10,000.

So it's like, you know, it's like a half a million dollars of monthly recurring in there. It's $6 million dollar air are just on the subscription business. It's, it's, I mean, it's real scale businesses that can be built around fervent communities, like bringing people together that have a common problem, a common, you know, a common set of concerns and worries and things that they're striving for.

It's, I mean, it's really, really remarkable. And you said you didn't, you didn't raise venture around any of this. No. Which is the other thing that just strikes me as unique here. Like, you know, that I keep coming back to. Like, there were these high flying tech, unicorn female communities like what was like the wing or was one of them or something like that and there were there were like a few that i think were launched um and i don't know what kind of numbers those things do or where they are today um but man i would take your business over one of those any day like not having bosses and being able to continue to kind of build it in my vision and my way um to the scale that you have yeah i want to say one or two things on this so first thing on um

being able to grow this money paying members and one thing that i will say say is really important, has been really important for us, is by offering higher tier programs that people can jump into. Because if we, if we kept on the lower number, that would have been a lot harder to scale. Whereas offering other tiers where people can stay in your community, but jump into an accelerator program at a higher amount a month, that's been really, really important for us to get to these numbers. Where you're at isn't far off. That's interesting insight. That's interesting insight. So it's almost a contrarian insight to me because when I think about getting people, you know, growing numbers, I constantly think about like, oh, a lower price

point will allow me to grow numbers. And so you're saying, like when I go to your website and I look at different plans, having different tiers to how it works and different things that you can kind of upsell them into where you're offering more connectivity and more opportunities, more value, more products, has been a thing for driving new subscribers. that's been bringing in net new people. New subscribers and increasing how much a subscriber is worth. Because especially on these lower numbers, this is why a lot of people,

I think in my position, would have considered getting venture capital because it would be a lot easier to scale a business of, you know, $27 to $49 a month if I had a good chunk of money to put pine ads and I was bringing it in consistently. Whereas the ad landscape these days, I mean, I struggle to see a company like mine

that's able to do those numbers and make money on like a $27 to $49. I find that quite difficult. Whereas if I know a client comes in, I know they're going to stay for X amount of months. Our retention is pretty strong now. It wasn't. It's pretty strong now. But I also know the likelihood of them upgrading to an accelerator program, which is where a big chunk of our MRR does come from because we do payment plans

on those and we extend those out. That's been really helpful, although we're not running ads. to be able to justify how many posts are putting out on social. Because I do see a post as an ad. Because if I'm putting something out that's selling, I have to think about what that does in terms of growth. I can't have one foot on the gas and one foot on the break. And so that's been really important for me to think about.

But there were a number of reasons that I didn't go and raise capital. So I've made decisions like that that have allowed that. If I didn't do that, maybe I would have had to raise money. Put another way, what you're saying is the content that you're creating for the Instagram account for the YouTube for the podcast. There's a, there's a dollar cost to it, right? Exactly. That's the way I see it because I think you've got three types of content on social. It's content to build your brand, content to help you grow or content to sell. And very rarely is one piece of content going to do all three things for you. Sure, every now and then you're going to get that,

which is great. But if I'm putting out a piece of content to sell people into my membership, that's a piece of content that's not necessarily bringing in new audience members. So what is the to that. And it's just how I always try and have our social media managers thinking about putting stuff out. I've always wanted to ask this question to someone that does this, but having the annual plan next to the monthly and showing best value and showing how much you can save by doing annual, how much has that impacted the kind of ability to convert people to annual? Like, are most people taking the annual offer now that are jumping into it? Or is it, is it still pretty mixed. So it depends how they come in. There's typically two ways that people will come

into a membership. They'll land on the website, on the sales page, and they'll choose the monthly or the annual option. In that sense, about 10% of people will choose annual, 90% will choose monthly. The other way that they come in is they do a free online training with me where I teach for an hour, and I basically teach the entire roadmap that we have inside of the membership. And at the end, I'll say, okay, here's the roadmap, go download it. You can go do it yourself or join us in the membership. And there I make a really compelling argument for joining us annually versus monthly. And so I throw in tons of bonuses that really make the value worth it. And on those trainings, I can see between, it varies 17, 90% of people joining annually. Wow. Wow. That's pretty

amazing. It leads to my next question in general, which is just around how you think about funnels in your business. I mean, it seems like a big part of what you're doing as you think about growth is optimizing these funnels from the different channels that you have. How are you thinking about that? Like, was that something you've really studied or are you kind of learning by doing it? What's the, what's the process around that? Yeah, funnels is something I've studied very in depth in our business runs off of them. They're really, really important from the moment someone subscribes for them to be able to self-segment so we can send them into the appropriate funnels to when someone joins the membership, how do we then segment them? Firstly, make sure they're getting the most out of the

membership. They're going to be using it and then be able to identify if and when they're ready to move to a next step. Do we offer them Accelerator program? Do we offer them add-ons? That's been really important for us because, again, on the front end, we have our Instagram podcasts, things like that. when we get them into our ecosystem, we want to make sure that we're able to send them through without having to send out fresh emails every single day and kind of throw something at the wall and hope it sticks for a few people. We want them to go through the appropriate funnels. They've been amazing for us. And we don't have many funnels in the business, but the ones we do have every single week they're being optimized. Can you talk about the importance of offering some of these

free materials in order to get people into the ecosystem because it sounds like I mean that's always been my approach which is like show people value or it's the Gary V like what does he call it jab jab hook um yeah um I kind of like like jab jab jab model where you're kind of just jab and and let people kind of come to you and say like yes I want this but I'm curious your your perspective on that it's being the number one way that we've grown our list um it's been so important So the way that I tend to think about it is when I'm selling a product, I think about what's a diluted mini version of this product. So if someone downloads this thing, I know the exact avatar that would be great for my product. And then I think about how can I absolutely over deliver us?

They've got a really good feel of what's inside of it. So whether it's a free module of an accelerator course, so they can watch it and think, great, I identify with this teaching style, the way in which they're teaching it. I know this is going to be really good for me. or whether if it's for our membership, I get on a free training and I basically walk them through the entire roadmap that will teach them. And I'll show them what's inside of each one.

I'll show them how they can go do it on their own. And so I always want people to, if they get something free, I want them to feel like it was really, really worth their time because there's no way they're going to invest more if they don't believe that. So we do it through free PDFs, free webinars, like online,

live trainings. We do it with like Excel downloads. We do it with emails challenges. We just do it in so many different ways. It's just being invaluable. In the early days, was this just you doing this? And now you've scaled the team over time to, you know, have people constantly thinking about optimizing funnels and doing all of these different activities. I have a co-founder, Danielle. So there was us and yeah, it was just kind of us. And we had a fake assistant. That was basically us as our community manager. Fake assistant meaning what? We just had a community manager that was named something else and the two of us would be in

the inbox. I thought you literally meant a fake assistant. Like I've had friends who have been like, I wanted to seem more legit in the early days of my startup. So I would have a fake assistant answer my emails and be like, hey, you know, I'm scheduling. Yeah, that's what it was. She was our community manager. She answered our inbox because if it was us, we'd end up in conversations.

This was a fake person. So it was two of us and a fake person. And then we've just grown the team again. just really organically, this has been the best business degree I could have possibly wished for because I would notice something and realize, okay, there's someone that knows this a bit better than me, let me go hire them. And then I would learn about building out teams and who was needed. And so it's really been one foot in front of the other, who do we need? And slowly we've now built up an executive team and we have great people working in the business. But it's been very,

very slow. And what's next for you, for you all, like, from a product. map, you know, standpoint, like, where do you see the business going in one or five years? So a big thing that we're leaning into now is the brand. So Bosswave as a brand, me and Danielle, have been more and more wanting to take our faces off of the business because it's really not about us. It's about the women inside of the business. And I think we've built something really special where they're not coming to Boss Babe for us anymore. They're coming for the brand. So a big part of where we spend our time is how can we get the brand out there even more? will you see us in stores?

Will you see us, you know, with more mass appeal, hopefully? So that's one area. And then in the product, so we're currently building a brand new membership product. And we're just in the stage of doing tons. I think we've just finished our 500th member interview where we're just figuring out what can we get rid of. What can we do better? And I think it's going to start to be less about the content that's inside of there and

more about the community. So how can they hire each other? how can they advertise? I'm sure the content will be there, but it's not something that needs to be updated every single month. Once you've got a good curriculum, you've got a good curriculum. So we're going to be doing that.

And then we're going to be thinking about, is there something we can offer where we can match women with really, really good experienced coaches that can help hold them accountable and guide them through the curriculum if they're wanting that more accountability? What keeps you up at night? Like, what are you most?

Besides your baby, of course. Yeah, yeah. Actually, yeah. And we can talk about parenting and lessons of early parenting because that definitely keeps me up at night as well at times. Good joke, Greg. I like that. It's a good baby joke.

No, I mean, just around the business, there's a lot of amazing features of a business like this, you know, and especially the way you've built it and how deliberate and thoughtful you've been. So I don't want to take away from that at all. Like, what do you feel nervous about or what do you stress over? What if Instagram didn't work tomorrow? What if it got deleted tomorrow? What if it went away?

And I lost, you know, nearly four million people. What if my newsletter system crashed and I lost all of my emails? You know, with it, this kind of business, it's all about the people that are in it. And I feel like they're living in the ether somewhere and there's always these new platforms popping up. I all like, that keeps me about worrying about how we can really safeguard that audience and make sure that we still stay relevant, even if Instagram becomes a non-stop. thing. How do we still stay relevant as a brand? So how do you do that? I mean, is that like platform dependence? Yes. How do you guard around? I mean, is it just that you're building? Because I should think about that, right? Like I have a lot of my business ecosystem runs through Twitter and that

concerns me. The newsletter is a great hedge against that because you own emails, but not always perfect to your point. So like, how have you thought about that, you know, and de-risking that long-term? Well, Greg, I'll definitely grab some of your advice. But emails, that's our biggest thing. Like, that's the thing that I care most about building is our email list. Phone numbers, web traffic. We try and think about taking people off of Instagram. Yeah, email, email, email, email.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Like, if I were you, I would just be like every piece of content would be about, not every piece of content, but a lot of the content would be getting the emails, getting the emails and then building a media website, partly probably curated, curated content, partly the community generated content. And then how do you make like a destination of web traffic, probably the two things that come to mind?

And also, and I'll just share, I think that's so true. And that's one of, I would say, the more of the downsides of not being venture backed, is there's always these finite resources and it's like, where do you put them? And so we've been doing this very, very slowly and we're only now starting to think about, okay, do we make our website and media destination? Because we've got that that's going. We've got a good system around it.

And so we're doing that very, very slowly. But if we were venture backed, I know we could have popped that up a lot faster, but it's something that we need to think about. Have you ever looked at pipe.com? Is that a sales thing? No, I don't know. No, it's like the upfront revenue. It's like they'll finance your revenue basically. Like it's basically like factoring, but they'll give you a bunch of money for your subscription up front if you wanted it.

It's like a that's how I used to finance. Yeah, that's how I used to finance going into retail back in the day. I just don't want to do it. There's something really amazing about having a business like this where the cash flow is great. I have no one to answer to. I can sleep really well at night. I just love that too much to even think about any kind of. financing. I don't know if that's a bad thing and it's probably making me grow slower.

So I will, I agree with you in principle around the general response, although there are the, so Pipe is one of them. Capchase is another one. There are a handful that basically offer like, it's effectively no strings attached. It sounds crazy. It sounds like one of those too good to be true. It must be a scam type things. But it's effectively no strings attached, non-deluded financing, where they are basically just taking your stream of recurring revenues that you have. And in Pipe's case, there's just a marketplace. So there's investors on the other side that it's abstracted that are basically buying that. And you're getting a discount rate against it.

So it is the same as factoring, but you don't have a boss in that sense. Like you never have to talk to Pipe. It just is a constant process that's happening. It's realistically, to your point, for your type of business, probably not something you need to do unless there were some, big growth thing that you needed all the cash up front. Like if you wanted a few million dollars up front to go buy another community, this could be a way to do that without raising a bunch of venture capital.

But for your actual ongoing needs, given how you're running the business, I don't really see a reason you would take it on. I agree. I could find reasons to take it on, but there's just something that I love about being in full control of the business. I totally get it. Growing it in a way that's slow and it's not as,

big as I think it could be, but it feels good. And I'm not paying for money. You could, you could grow the business like 25, 30% year over year, like conservatively. And like, fast forward that to 10 years from now. And this is like like, like, Sahel, I know you don't do public math, but you know, you're better at this than me. Like, you know, what sort of what's the law of sevens doubles? Yeah, no, I mean, it would be a very, very big. Like if you grew it at 15, 20%, you know, over that period. The rough math is like 20%. You'd kind of double the business in like four years, right?

Three and a half, four years or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you'd be, yeah, it's like the rule of 70, Greg, is the thing you're running for. You just divide by, yeah, you divide by 70. So it's like three and a half years. You double at a 20% growth rate. Yeah. So, I mean, it's like, it's a really big business in a short period of time by just growing, you know, at a modest and attractive clip.

and you own it. And to your point, you don't have to be responsive to anybody. What is like, just to back to my question of, like, thinking I'm starting a community, if you were to start a community from scratch today, either one of you, since you're both, like, my community gurus, what's like the toolkit for someone to start a community today? Like, what is the no code or, like, very light code toolkit? Is it, like, Slack, Discord plus, you know, a Facebook group? Like, what, what is the light, you know, toolkit for someone that wants to start? start a community and build something like this?

For me, I would say, I think it varies based on what your community is already using. So the last thing that I'd want them to do is have to download a bunch of new software and learn how to use it. What we're seeing in our space is a lot of people are jumping on circle. I'm not sure if you've heard of it. Yeah, but it's web-based, right? Yeah, it is. But a lot of them are using it.

So it seems like a lower lift if you were to hop on that. And Slack, a lot of them use Slack. So I would kind of find out what they're using. I'd probably stay away from Facebook groups, but I'd find out what they were using and try and integrate into that as easy as I could. What about you, Greg? Greg's going to say Discord.

No, no, no, no. I think... No, no, no. I hate Discord. I think no two communities are the same. So that's just the law of communities. No two communities are the same. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all.

toolkit for all communities. I want to put that out there. That being said, I think a group chat, just like a straight up group chat, is like you're the easiest, minimal, viable product for a community. So if you want to test a hypothesis around, hey,

I think there should be a community in X because people, you know, have this lifestyle or people you know, need support from going from here to there, then can you get 10, 15, 20 people from the internet in a place, I message, WhatsApp groups? That's where I'd start.

Got it. Have you heard of Stephen Bartlett? Yeah. I actually know Stephen a little bit. Stephen and I went to a few. I was on the board of this company and Stephen spoke at like their convention a few times and so we like got to know each other. And then I mean, I haven't talked to him in years.

but he'll share a bunch of my stuff on on LinkedIn sometimes, but I've never interacted with him. It's like it's a funny thing. Yeah, he's started a community on telegram. And I mean, I want to say he has over 100,000 people in this group chat, which might not sound like the best way to do a community. But when he drops merch,

he just drops a single link in that telegram and it's sold out instantly. Like just a single link. And it might not be the most perfect way, but like Greg saying there's no community is the same. And if you found that people are using it, he just hopped in there. And it's, it's just so fascinating to see if people really want to be part of your community,

they'll jump in and they'll make whatever work. I'm curious to test it. Like I am going to, I'm going to, I'm going to ping you Natalie. Now that we're, now that we're connected, I'm definitely going to ping you on this as I do it.

I'm hoping to roll something out in Q4 and start at least testing and learning, you know, on a smaller scale with some people. but I think there's something here. We'll see. We'll see if I sell out these hats, Greg, once I announced them publicly. Well, what I, I'm pretty confident that if you added, like, a community that had a mission, basically, like, that's what you need to start with. Like, what is the mission of your curiosity people?

Like, for Natalie, it was just like, here's a bunch of entrepreneurs and creators who want to go faster, who want support, who want to stay accountable. I would start by Sihl just like opening a Google Doc and just being like, hey, what is that for my community? And then once you have that and if you feel strongly about it, then I would say don't invest in millions of dollars of custom software to go and build it. Just like start testing it, you know, ritual by ritual. I like that. I feel like this was probably the most tactical conversation around community building that we could have had. So I'm super excited to get to release this. And hopefully some people are inspired to go start theirs because I feel like it was a really, really cool dialogue around it.

I'm glad you guys humored me on that. Natalie, where could people drop their email to subscribe to some of your stuff? Yeah, like where can people find you? What should people be listening to? What should they be subscribing to, et cetera? We have a podcast called The Boss Babe Podcast, which is awesome. Or you can go to bossbabe.com and you can kind of see how we lay out the freebies and stuff on there. You'll get a good sense of the business from there.

And then I'm on Instagram at I am Natalie and at bossbabe. inc. And you can watch on Natalie's Instagram videos of her getting through absurdly long cold plunges. I am going to start pressuring you, peer pressuring you to go in up to your neck and do the like full, you know, breathtaking experience of like getting the air. or just sucked out of your lungs from going all the lander. Do you know what? My boobs are going through enough right now. That's probably true. I have a child latched to them 24-7.

I will back off on that one. My wife will give me shit for having said that. So yeah, I will back off on that one. You're great. You're crushing it. My husband said the exact same thing to me. I was like, well, you can feed our baby for the next week. And I'll do that.

Why not? It's funny because I posted that and I had so many women comment the most hilarious things. And I'm like, you get me. You know where we're at. right now. Yeah, I came inside one day and my wife was holding Roman our son and she was, she was like, um, you know, I'm really tired or something like that. And I said like, oh, why are you tired? And I literally meant it like, why are you tired? Like what, what had happened? Like, you know, was there someone that had said something or like had some event during the day? And she looked at me

with this look of like, why am I tired? And I was like, no, no, no, I didn't mean it that way. No, I know you're doing an absurd amount. I didn't mean it that way. So, yeah, no, it's a, I mean, it's been an amazing, amazing experience being a first-time parent. So I'm excited to get to connect with you in person and chat more about that in the near future. I will definitely let you know when I make it out to your neck of the woods. Amazing. Thanks for having me, guys. Thank you so much.

It's been real. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at hi at t-R-W-I-H.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spree. Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon.