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Community Building

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Community Building

The businesses most likely to survive the next decade of artificial intelligence are the ones that would have thrived in 1890. That is the counterintuitive conclusion that emerges from dozens of conversations on My First Million about community, membership, and human connection as economic moats.

Country clubs are the template. Not the aesthetics—the economics. A country club has no proprietary technology. It has no patents, no algorithms, no data flywheel. What it has is a group of people who know each other, who show up regularly, and who would lose something irreplaceable by leaving. The lifetime value of a country club member stretches across decades. The switching costs are not financial. They are relational.

Sam Parr recognized this pattern before he could articulate it. Hampton, the CEO community he founded after selling The Hustle to HubSpot, charges $8,500 per year. The price is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the product cannot be replicated by software, no matter how sophisticated the software becomes.

The AI-Proof Thesis

When Sam and Shaan Puri brainstormed businesses that would survive an AI-dominated economy, the conversation kept circling back to one characteristic: physical human presence. Shaan put it directly: “Hampton, you’ve got this community of CEOs in different cities and it’s great. You started off online. I’m so glad you shifted to in-person, which was hard but a necessary change.”

The difficulty of that shift is precisely what makes it defensible. Anything easy to build is easy to replicate. Hampton started with virtual meetings because virtual is cheaper, faster, and simpler to scale. The data looked fine. Revenue came in. But Sam scrapped the model anyway because it did not feel right. The virtual format could not create what he actually wanted to sell: genuine relationships between founders navigating similar problems.

This is a pattern worth studying. The hard pivot—from scalable-but-shallow to difficult-but-deep—appears again and again in the community businesses that endure. The ones that optimize for convenience tend to commoditize. The ones that optimize for connection tend to compound.

The country club analogy extends further than most people realize. Sam and Shaan discussed how these institutions maintain their value across generations: “Communities with long LTV because people stay for decades.” The mechanism is not the golf course or the dining room. It is the density of relationships that accumulate over years of proximity. Every Tuesday dinner, every chance encounter in the parking lot, every favor exchanged between members builds a web that becomes increasingly costly to abandon.

The Senior Living Insight

One of the more unexpected community business models discussed on the show involves senior living—not as a healthcare play, but as a community play. The economics reveal something about how the best community businesses actually work.

The model works like this: “You’re still in the same community. You don’t have to do a big cross-country move. As your body goes down that gradient, you just move down a different level of service in the community. Super profitable. The LTV of the customers—imagine 20, 30 years in one of these communities.”

Twenty to thirty years. That is not a subscription business. That is an identity. The resident does not think of themselves as a customer paying for a service. They think of themselves as a member of a place. The distinction matters enormously for retention, pricing power, and the kind of margins that accumulate when acquisition costs are paid once and revenue flows for decades.

The parallel to Hampton is instructive. Both businesses sell belonging to a specific group of people navigating a shared life stage. Both create environments where leaving means losing not just a service but a social fabric. Both generate the kind of lifetime value that makes most SaaS metrics look anemic.

Free vs. Paid: The Spectrum

Not every community charges $8,500. Chris Voss, the former FBI hostage negotiator, launched the Black Swan Negotiation Community with a different model entirely: “Membership is free. Get started getting a return on the investment of your time.”

The free community serves a different function. It is a top-of-funnel asset—a way to build trust and demonstrate expertise before converting members into paid training, consulting, or higher-tier offerings. The community itself is not the product. It is the distribution channel.

This creates a spectrum that every community builder must navigate. On one end: free communities that monetize through conversion. On the other: premium communities where the membership fee itself is the primary revenue. Hampton sits at the premium end. Voss sits at the free end. Both work. But they work for different reasons and attract different behaviors.

Free communities scale faster but suffer from low commitment. When there is no cost to joining, there is no cost to ignoring. Premium communities scale slower but attract members who have signaled, with their wallet, that they intend to participate. The fee is not just revenue. It is a filter.

The Platform Layer

The conversation on My First Million has evolved beyond community-as-standalone-business to community-as-infrastructure. Sam described a vision for AI-powered community platforms: “With Hampton, it might be memberships or paid communities. You subscribe to the sales feed and anytime somebody comes in and pays for an AI job that improves their sales process, I want to know what they did.”

This is the marketplace layer emerging inside communities. Members are not just connecting with each other. They are transacting, sharing operational intelligence, and creating a knowledge base that becomes more valuable with each interaction. The community develops network effects—each new member who shares a tactic or case study makes the community marginally more useful for everyone else.

The implication for community builders is significant. A community that merely connects people competes with LinkedIn, Twitter, and every other social platform. A community that facilitates specific, high-value information exchange—what worked, what failed, how much it cost—creates something that general-purpose platforms cannot replicate. The specificity is the moat.

The MFM Funnel

Perhaps the most instructive community case study is the one hiding in plain sight. My First Million itself functions as a community funnel. The podcast builds an audience of entrepreneurially-minded listeners. Hampton converts the most successful of those listeners into paying members. The content-to-commerce pipeline that Sam and Shaan discuss as a business model is the same pipeline they operate.

The podcast is free. It reaches millions. It establishes Sam’s credibility as someone who has built and sold companies. When a founder earning $3 million in revenue hears Sam discuss the challenges of scaling, they are hearing someone who has navigated those same challenges. The trust is established before the sales conversation begins. The customer acquisition cost for Hampton approaches zero for podcast-sourced leads because the content does the selling.

This is why community businesses pair so naturally with media businesses. The media creates awareness and trust at scale. The community monetizes the highest-intent segment of that audience. Neither works as well alone. Together, they create a flywheel where content feeds community and community generates the stories that feed content.

What Makes Community Businesses Work

The patterns across these examples converge on a few principles that hold regardless of price point or niche.

Switching costs are social, not technical. The reason people stay in communities is not because the platform is good. It is because their friends are there. Building genuine relationships between members is not a nice-to-have. It is the entire product.

LTV is the metric that matters. Community businesses look unimpressive on a monthly basis. The acquisition costs are real, the margins can be thin, and growth is slow. But when members stay for years or decades, the cumulative economics dwarf faster-growing businesses with higher churn.

In-person beats online for retention. Virtual communities are easier to build and easier to leave. Physical presence creates bonds that survive the inevitable moments when a member questions whether the investment is worth it. Hampton’s pivot from virtual to in-person was a pivot from convenient to defensible.

The fee is a feature. Charging money is not just a revenue model. It is a curation mechanism. It ensures that every person in the room has demonstrated a baseline level of commitment. Free communities attract spectators. Paid communities attract participants.

AI makes human connection more valuable, not less. As information becomes commoditized and AI handles more routine tasks, the scarce resource shifts from knowledge to trust, from data to relationships. Community businesses are positioned on the right side of that shift.

Sources

Primary research from My First Million podcast episodes:

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