Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en let’s talk about three groups that i have that i think this could work for so if you’re going to start picking me i’m going to start with the bottom one or i actually think it’s the best one but it’s fun i’m 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 reasons or three reasons the first work could pay for it maybe i think work would maybe pay for it second nurses are typically i’ve spent time around nurses so they’re typically women and they typically are people who feel like downtrodden like they feel like they’re forgotten because they’re not worked overworked underpaid or underappreciated yeah and that is so groups that are the um whatever you just said i guess i don’t know how to explain it but groups that are like the us versus them like we don’t have someone speaking for us typically that’s like there’s a lot of like i’ve looked when i was researching communities there’s so many successful um women like women discussing x y and z communities this is just like that so i think that they have that uh us versus their mentality and the third reason is there’s a [ ] ton of nurses yeah have you seen this instagram account nurse life are in no how many is it it’s 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 you say his name and it’s this guy this is black nurse and um private they just went private uh they used to be public and i think you have to like you have to request so that they can make sure that you’re a nurse before they let you in um which again is part one thing that communities do well the you know what’s that quote it’s like i don’t want to be a part of any group that would accept me um you know the the better your gate at the front uh the more people will value being in the group and so this is a group and they they just post mostly like nurse memes so it’s like you know if you it’s like being underappreciated or whatever they’ll make a joke out of it or like you know coming home and realizing you still have whatever you know on your shoe and uh it’s just you know relatable memes from the eyes of a nurse so that’s how they like keep their members engaged it’s just meme content that’s a good like inside joke for the community but he partnered with the makers of bala shoes which is the nurse shoe brand that’s coming out that’s trying to be nike for nurses basically it’s nike for medical footwear and so he got equity in that company and gets paid every month because he is the promotional vehicle for the forbal issues who wants to like penetrate this community right so um not a paid community as such but it is a private community and on top of that they do this now what would incredible health you know the startup that’s raised i don’t know how much money 25 million dollars from entries and horowitz and all that what would they pay to access 1.2 million nurses that are like engaged and trust this brand and trust this leader of the community they would pay a lot right uh nurse job boards like so so if this guy’s ambitious he could create a job board he could create the next incredible health uh he could take equity and balance shoes and be a part owner of the shoe brand like i think that’s where this goes for for nurses i think that’s a great example of one i think this could crush i think that guy is gonna that guy’s sitting in a gold mine that like if you if you fast forward 10 years and tell me that he turned this 1.2 million person instagram page into 100 million company i won’t be surprised right if you go and start truck life rrn right now uh i i think i think that’s what’s going to happen after this pod truck um the second one this is shocking to me okay google sheets there’s this guy who tweeted at me and he started this thing called sheets con and he had 6 700 people sign up is that i mean i guess that’s shocking because like i know that probably 100 million people plus use google sheets but and i guess it doesn’t and i guess it also doesn’t track me because i am a google sheets nerd and like i’ve dorked out about what i want and some of the most uh profitable online courses in the world are become an excel master uh how to use excel become better at excel those are like if you go look at the charts of uh most profitable online courses highest revenue online courses excel is always in the sort of top five yeah encore the founder of um teachable teacher one time one time told me that uh there was some guy making a million bucks a year and he was like the biggest earner on teachable on excel exactly so google sheets i 100 think you could do a paid community now it would have to be cheap though because it’s the same it’s the math of like how much money do you make for google sheets i think that there’s absolutely something there um and then the last thing is this someone tweeted at me a community of vetted senior engineers who talk about advance advanced uh engineering concepts like how to scale a tech stack from 100k to 10 million users totally buy into that something like that that is incredibly niche and incredibly high-end where if there’s a there’s this other component that we didn’t talk about with the community is you have to make it so that information that you gather in that group you cannot find online like um for tiger21 not that many people are gonna talk about how like because it’s embarrassing how do i gift my child 15 million dollars without the government getting hands on it like that’s not something you’re going to tweet because that’s embarrassing same thing with 100 000 to 10 million users there’s just simply not that many people who have done it so you’re not going to find a lot of reputable information on that so that’s another trait of these paid communities and why i think this one in particular is interesting i think any job in any any job can do this so nurses is a good one because you have some are going to be better than others because you have uh you know the more people the more potential and the more um kind of like insider knowledge is needed the more uh downtrodden that group feels i’m trying this is kind of a negative word but kind of what you’re saying like sort of like they feel that they need to take action um in order to like level up in some way uh the better and so like you know this could work for nurses but it could also work for designers i could see somebody just making a community of you know professional designers at all these different companies it’s like yep we have designers from figma and from hubspot and from octa and from github and you should if you’re a designer at one of these companies you’re making 150 a year 200 000 a year um why would you not want to be a part of the like the best network of other designers like you where you can share tools tactics salary information if you’re looking for new jobs opportunities if you’re looking for new jobs like every job i think needs this and the more new infringe your job the more they the more the community is needed so like i know that our friend david spinks did this with community because community was like this there’s not really like there’s no chief community officer at these big companies but all greek companies say it’s all about community facebook’s like it’s all about community twitch is like it’s all about community and uh what does that mean and who in your company show me your who’s in charge of community at your company right and there’s typically not a c level who’s in charge of community so david spinks said well look there’s all these like kind of mid-level people who are community they run community for these big ass companies and there’s no playbook on how to do their job they’re underpaid they’re underappreciated and they’re overworked trying to run all these events i’m gonna make the best community for community professionals and so he made the community for community people it grew pretty large he ended up selling the thing i don’t know how big of a business it was in terms of a business outcome he might have been a little early but i think that’s a great example of somebody doing this just taking a job and making it happen so there’s my idea i just wanted to talk about communities because i think they’re actually kind of cool businesses i think a lot of people think that they want to start one but um i also think that there’s a lot of mistakes made of like charging too little and i wanted to show a few examples of companies that make like a quarter of a billion dollars of value off communities because i think they’re kind of cool so that’s all i got to say about communities i’ll leave it with this which is a lot of people i think the majority of people who listen to us they would love a non nine to five way to make ten thousand dollars a month and if i was gonna write or uh i read that in your uh your survey results yeah um yeah which we could talk about that but but in general that’s that’s the number one thing i think people listen to this would would just grab right away they don’t all want to be founders of billion dollar companies or 200 million dollar companies or whatever um but if i said hey this is something outside your nine-to-five it’s a side hustle it doesn’t take up all your time and it’s gonna bring in ten thousand dollars a month i would say that this to me right now is the number one way to do it i think there are some other ways right you could try e-commerce or drop shipping or something like that you could try to do a newsletter or paid newsletter i would do a community if i was gonna that would be my fastest path to that right now and i’ll tell you the reasons why are all the things you said which is like it’s not that much work to run the members provide the 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 what where you kind of have an edge what’s your group and then the last thing the downsides of it are that it can’t scale super large but that’s not your goal anyways you’re just trying to get to ten thousand dollars a month of free free cash flow from your side hustle and so that is super achievable you know uh 20 a month for for 500 members and you’re there you know so i think that is where i think this business fits in and i and i and i said before i actually do think they can scale but not all of them can some of them some some of them can but i i’m someone i’ve built a paid community that makes many many millions of dollars a year in recurring revenue and it is i would say that it’s really hard actually to start because i had to create a lot of the content early on and i had to create the um the culture of the community but now i barely post and it has its own culture so yeah once it’s once it’s taken off yes it you you create that flywheel and it works or not by the way i just did this i just did this in e-commerce and it probably i’ve probably put in a grand total of maybe eight hours into this thing and i’ll tell you what it is so i wanted to create a community for people who have ecommerce stores so i created a gate at the front that said your ecommerce store must be doing a hundred thousand dollars a month it doesn’t even have a website there’s no website um it’s it’s called club ltv ltv is like an inside term in the e-com world lifetime value it’s like what every e-com store owner wants is their their ltv to go up so i called it club ltv it’s people trying to increase their ltv and so i said you have to have a hundred thousand dollars a month of of revenue i told so i tweeted it out so i definitely had a head start because i have an audience so that brought in about the first 35 members you said yep and they would just send me a screenshot of their dashboard yep here’s me this morning okay so so what i did was i made it free to join for the uh the store owners but you had to have this much value like this much you had to be this kind of far ahead in the game um but what i did then was i went to sponsors and i basically said hey i have a group of 75 store owners ranging from 1 million to 50 million uh dollars a year in revenue and all of them trust me like me and i meet up with them once a month and um would you like to sponsor this so i have one sponsor on board they paid me five thousand dollars a month um all i do is at the event i say boom i do my intro my high energy intro and then i say hey let me pass it to the guy that makes this possible that makes this group possible and he says his thing for two minutes he’s had uh i can’t say the names but um i don’t know if i should i guess i just give him a free plug so mercury bank is the sponsor of it because that’s who i would use for e-commerce projects and they’re they have a big push in e-commerce and so they’ve had at least from our group five different um five out of the 75 e-commerce stores switched to mercury just from the sponsorship so they’ve gotten their money’s worth out of it including one companies that’s a two billion dollar company has switched over to them and so uh you know they definitely got their value out of the sponsorship but is this still going yeah this goes every month and so all that we do we have we have about one hour a month of of prep and then 90 minutes a month of the actual event and the one hour of prep is that ben goes and gets a cameo made from a different rapper every month and the rapper’s just shouting out club ltv he’s like so we had like you know um we had uh sean paul do the cameo one month and he’s like hey it’s your boy sean ball just one of the like big big ups to club ltv you guys are all doing so great with your ecommerce store and he’s like you know just it doesn’t even make any sense but it’s just like a video that plays and people like it because it’s like i don’t know it’s kind of goofy so we do one we get one cameo ordered and he sends the calendar invite so just make sure everybody gets it sends one reminder email and then the last thing is that after the event he just says hey if you learned something really useful that you’re going to implement in your business um email me the one line of the most useful thing that happened for you in the hour because the structure of it is we break everybody up into groups of six so you’re in a group with six other store owners who do between 1 and 50 million a year in revenue and then the the format is you say one thing you did in the last month that’s really working it’s driving revenue up and one thing that you’re struggling with that you might want help from from the group and so afterwards they all email him the most useful things he just comp he just takes he just takes that sheet and he just sends it to everybody so hey here was the top insights from the group so that whole thing takes in one hour what’s that why wouldn’t you charge for that because because i can actually make much more off the sponsorships for example i’ve been approached by you know the companies that want you to build their ecom store on their platform there’s the people who want you to use them for email marketing there’s the people who want for influencer marketing who are you using for facebook advertising who are using what’s the agency that manages your your um your data tracking like your pixel stuff so all these companies each are willing to pay multiple thousands of dollars i just have to onboard them now um because now i have the group and the group is where the value is that’s the honeypot it’s the same thing you were talking about where eventa they have a free group and they might they have they are making 25 million dollars a year on the sponsors who want to talk more than that oh sorry that’s the profit they’re making 200 million but um that’s the same model that i’m using here don’t charge the members just make sure all the members have successful businesses and once they think this is going to get or do you care i mean i put zero effort into it since then but like we have 75 people who show up every month to the thing and um which is like 80 85 of the members show up every single month to the event so they’re getting value out of it and so i bet if i told ben hey go on twitter and just reach out to these 250 cold email these 250 or these 500 e-commerce stores because it’s very easy to get lists of e-commerce stores that are successful um i bet we could triple the size of the group if we if we put some effort into it but don’t really care about it it’s more for fun but it’s cool because it’s just free money every month and uh it’s a good group to be in i want to learn from these people i want to learn what they’re doing what’s working what’s not and make these connections that’s badass well you uh you know i it’s funny i’ve i’ve built the community as well but it’s like every time i learn something like you the way you’re doing it is a lot different than the way that we’ve done it and it’s really neat to hear a different point of view and perspective uh on how to get it done right i optimize mine for how do i spend the least time but get just enough value whereas i think for you is like a part of your business you’re like i’m gonna this is gonna be a multi-million dollar thing and we’re gonna make it [ ] awesome which is awesome by the way if i had to start over i would have done it differently um i would have charged way more money right um because i’ve learned the mistakes 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 right i feel like i can rule the world travel never looking back [Music] uh