Sam and Shaan break down three specific niches where paid communities could work right now — nurses, Google Sheets power users, and senior engineers — and examine what makes each one viable. Sam then shares how he built Club LTV, a free community for e-commerce store owners monetized through sponsorships, and explains why the model is more lucrative than charging members directly.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road)
Three Paid Community Niches [00:00:00]
Sam: Let’s talk about three groups that I think this could work for. I’m going to start with the bottom one on my list — or actually I think it’s the best one, it’s just last on my list. Nurses. We’ve talked about nurses a ton. It’s an interesting demographic.
I think nurses are kind of cool for this space for two or three reasons. First, work might pay for it. Second, nurses — I’ve spent time around nurses — they’re typically women, and they typically feel downtrodden. They feel forgotten. Overworked, underpaid, underappreciated.
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: Groups that have that us-versus-them mentality, like “we don’t have someone speaking for us” — there are a lot of successful communities built around that. I’ve looked into it. There are so many successful women-discussing-X-Y-and-Z communities. This is just like that. And the third reason is there’s a ton of nurses.
Nurse Life RN: The Instagram Case Study [00:02:30]
Sam: Have you seen this Instagram account, Nurse Life RN?
Shaan: No.
Sam: It has 1.2 million members on Instagram. It’s run by this guy — I think his name is Eb or Ebby, I’m not sure exactly how to say his name. He’s a black nurse. They just went private. Used to be public, but now you have to request access so they can verify you’re actually a nurse before letting you in.
Which is part of something communities do well. You know that quote — “I don’t want to be a part of any group that would accept me.” The better the gate at the front, the more people value being inside.
This group mostly posts nurse memes. Being underappreciated, coming home and realizing you still have something on your shoe — just relatable content from the eyes of a nurse. That’s how they keep members engaged. It’s a good inside joke for the community.
But here’s what he did — he partnered with the makers of Bala Shoes, the nurse shoe brand that’s trying to be Nike for nurses, basically Nike for medical footwear. He got equity in that company and gets paid every month because he is the promotional vehicle for anyone trying to penetrate this community.
It’s not a paid community as such, but it is a private community. And on top of that — what would Incredible Health pay? The startup that raised, I don’t know, $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz and all that. What would they pay to access 1.2 million engaged nurses who trust this brand and trust this leader? They’d pay a lot.
Nurse job boards. If this guy’s ambitious, he could create a job board. He could create the next Incredible Health. He could take equity in Bala Shoes and be a part owner of the shoe brand. I think that’s where this goes.
Sam: I think that’s a great example of one that could crush. That guy is sitting in a gold mine. If you fast-forward ten years and he’s turned that 1.2 million person Instagram page into a $100 million company, I won’t be surprised.
If you go start Truck Life RN right now — I think that’s what’s going to happen after this pod. That’s the move.
Google Sheets Community [00:06:45]
Sam: The second one — and this is shocking to me — Google Sheets. There’s this guy who tweeted at me. He started something called Sheets Con and had 6,700 people sign up.
I guess that’s shocking because I know probably 100 million people use Google Sheets, but it also doesn’t surprise me because I am a Google Sheets nerd. And some of the most profitable online courses in the world are “become an Excel master” type courses. If you look at charts of the most profitable online courses by revenue, Excel is always in the top five.
Shaan: The founder of Teachable told me one time there was some guy making a million bucks a year and he was the biggest earner on Teachable — on Excel exactly.
Sam: So Google Sheets — I 100% think you could do a paid community. It would have to be cheap, because it’s the math of how much money do you make from Google Sheets. But I think there’s absolutely something there.
Senior Engineers Community [00:09:00]
Sam: The last one: someone tweeted at me about a community of vetted senior engineers who talk about advanced engineering concepts — like how to scale a tech stack from 100K to 10 million users. I totally buy into that.
That’s incredibly niche and incredibly high-end. And this gets at another component of communities we didn’t talk about: you have to make it so that information you gather in that group you cannot find online.
For Tiger 21 — not that many people are going to talk about “how do I gift my child $15 million without the government getting their hands on it?” That’s not something you’re going to tweet because it’s embarrassing. Same with 100K to 10 million users. There are simply not that many people who have done it, so you’re not going to find a lot of reputable information on that.
That’s another trait of these paid communities, and why I think this particular one is interesting.
What Makes a Good Community Niche [00:11:15]
Sam: Any job can do this, but some will be better than others. The more people, the more potential. The more insider knowledge needed. The more that group feels downtrodden — feels they need to take action to level up — the better.
So nurses is a great one, but this could also work for designers. I could see somebody making a community of professional designers at all these different companies — designers from Figma, from HubSpot, from Okta, from GitHub. If you’re a designer at one of those companies making $150K to $200K a year, why wouldn’t you want to be part of the best network of other designers at your level? Sharing tools, tactics, salary information, job opportunities.
Every job, I think, needs this. And the more niche your job, the more the community is needed.
Sam: Our friend David Spinks did this with community professionals. There’s no chief community officer at these big companies, but all the great companies say it’s all about community. Facebook says it’s all about community. Twitch says it’s all about community. But who at your company is actually in charge of community? There’s typically not a C-level person running it.
David Spinks said, “Look — there are all these mid-level people running community at big companies. There’s no playbook for their job. They’re underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked trying to run all these events. I’m going to make the best community for community professionals.” And so he made the community for community people. It grew pretty large. He ended up selling it. I don’t know how big of a business it was, he might have been a little early. But that’s a great example of just taking a job and making it happen.
The $10K/Month Side Hustle Case [00:14:30]
Sam: That’s my idea. I just wanted to talk about communities because I think they’re actually kind of cool businesses. A lot of people think they want to start one, but there are a lot of mistakes made — like charging too little.
I wanted to show a few examples of companies that generate a quarter of a billion dollars in value from communities, because I think they’re genuinely cool. So that’s all I’ve got on communities.
I’ll leave it with this: a lot of people — I think the majority of people who listen to us — would love a non-nine-to-five way to make $10,000 a month.
Shaan: I read that in your survey results.
Sam: Yeah. And in general, that’s the number one thing I think people listening to this would grab right away. They don’t all want to be founders of billion-dollar companies. But if you said, “Hey — this is outside your nine-to-five, it’s a side hustle, it doesn’t take up all your time, and it’s going to bring in $10,000 a month” — to me, right now, this is the number one way to do it.
There are other ways: e-commerce, drop shipping, newsletters, paid newsletters. But if I was going to choose, I would do a community. That would be my fastest path to $10K a month right now.
And the reasons are all the things you said — it’s not that much work to run. Members provide value to each other. It’s not all about you creating content all the time. It’s not that hard to spin up. You just have to be smart about which group you’re choosing and where you have an edge.
The downside is it can’t scale super large, but that’s not your goal anyway. You’re just trying to get to $10,000 a month of free cash flow from your side hustle. That’s super achievable. $20 a month times 500 members and you’re there.
How Shaan Built Club LTV [00:17:30]
Shaan: I said before that I do think communities can scale, but not all of them. Some can. I’ve built a paid community that makes many millions of dollars a year in recurring revenue. I’d say it’s actually really hard to start, because I had to create a lot of the content early on and had to create the culture of the community. But now I barely post, and it has its own culture.
Sam: So once it’s taken off, you create that flywheel and it works.
Shaan: Right. By the way — I just did this in e-commerce. I’ve probably put in a grand total of maybe eight hours into this thing. Let me tell you what it is.
I wanted to create a community for people who have e-commerce stores. So I created a gate at the front: your e-commerce store must be doing $100,000 a month. It doesn’t even have a website. It’s called Club LTV. LTV is an inside term in the e-com world — lifetime value. Every e-com store owner wants their LTV to go up. So I called it Club LTV: people trying to increase their LTV.
You have to have $100K a month in revenue. I tweeted it out — I had a head start because I have an audience — and that brought in the first 35 members. They just sent me a screenshot of their dashboard. “Yep, here’s mine from this morning.”
Shaan: What I did was make it free to join for the store owners, but you had to be this far ahead in the game. Then I went to sponsors and said, “Hey, I have a group of 75 store owners ranging from $1 million to $50 million a year in revenue. They all trust me, like me. I meet with them once a month. Would you like to sponsor this?”
I have one sponsor on board. They pay me $5,000 a month. At the event, I do my intro and then say, “Let me pass it to the guy who makes this group possible,” and he says his thing for two minutes.
The sponsor is Mercury Bank — that’s who I’d use for e-commerce projects anyway, and they have a big push in e-commerce. From our group, five out of the 75 e-commerce stores switched to Mercury just from the sponsorship. Including one company that’s a $2 billion company. So they’ve definitely gotten their money’s worth.
Sam: Is this still going?
Shaan: Yeah, this goes every month. All we do is about one hour of prep and then 90 minutes of the actual event.
The one hour of prep: Ben goes and gets a Cameo from a different rapper every month. The rapper shouts out Club LTV — like we had Sean Paul do one, and he’s saying, “Hey, it’s your boy Sean Paul, big ups to Club LTV, you guys are all doing so great with your e-commerce stores.” It doesn’t even make any sense, but people love it because it’s goofy. So we get one Cameo ordered, he sends the calendar invite so everyone has it, sends one reminder email, and that’s the prep.
After the event, he says: “If you learned something really useful that you’re going to implement in your business, email me the one line — the most useful thing that happened for you in the hour.”
The structure of the event is we break everybody up into groups of six. You’re with six other store owners doing $1 million to $50 million a year, and the format is: one thing you did in the last month that’s really working and driving revenue up, and one thing you’re struggling with that you might want help from the group on. Afterwards, Ben takes all those emails, compiles the top insights, and sends them to everybody. The whole follow-up takes one hour.
Sam: Why wouldn’t you charge for that?
Shaan: Because I can actually make much more off the sponsorships. I’ve been approached by companies that build e-com stores on their platforms, people who want you to use them for email marketing, influencer marketing, Facebook advertising, data tracking — all these companies are each willing to pay multiple thousands of dollars a month. I just have to onboard them now that I have the group. The group is where the value is. That’s the honeypot.
It’s the same thing you were talking about with Eventbrite — they have a free group but make $25 million a year on sponsors. Actually more than that. Sorry — $25 million is the profit, they’re making $200 million. That’s the same model I’m using here. Don’t charge the members. Just make sure all the members have successful businesses.
Sam: Do you care if this grows, or…?
Shaan: I’ve put zero effort into it since then. We have 75 people who show up every month, which is like 80–85% of the members showing up every single month. They’re getting value out of it.
I bet if I told Ben, “Go cold email 250 or 500 e-commerce stores” — it’s very easy to get lists of successful e-commerce stores — we could triple the size of the group if we put some effort in. But I don’t really care about it. It’s more for fun. But it’s cool because it’s just free money every month, and it’s a good group to be in. I want to learn what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not, and make these connections.
Different Philosophies for Community Building [00:25:00]
Sam: That’s badass. I’ve built a community as well, but every time I hear you talk about how you do it, it’s so different from how we’ve done it. It’s neat to hear a different perspective on how to get it done.
You optimize for “how do I spend the least time and get just enough value.” Whereas I think for us, it’s like “this is going to be a multi-million dollar thing and we’re going to make it awesome.” Which is awesome, by the way.
Shaan: If I had to start over, I would have done it differently. I would have charged way more money. I’ve learned that you have to add a ton of people to build a big business, and a ton of people for certain groups isn’t necessarily good. You want to keep the quality high.