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

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I share what we’ve learned so far about building a community from the wins to the awkward missteps. We’ll talk about what’s worked, what definitely hasn’t, and some of the little moments that have surprised us along the way. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that the session recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are available over at sellersummit.com. If you missed the event,

00:27
you can now get instant access to every keynote, workshop, and panel. Now on to the show.

00:40
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about communities because this is something that has been very heavily on my mind and I actually just implemented a Discord community for my class members. And I’m thinking in broader terms now because email is getting less delivered, SMS is even getting less delivered. And so what’s the best way to get people to listen? It’s by building community.

01:09
It’s about being a part of a community and this is all new to me. So I’m just kind of winging it as we go along. So, yeah, let’s talk about the community you just launched. First of all, we’ll talk. go granular and then we’ll get bigger picture for people, because one of the things that you did that I think is super interesting is that even though you’ve had Facebook groups for people that are in the course and then like the general population, you created a community on Discord. Why Discord?

01:39
So honestly, Discord is like the platform for geeks. Like they have an awesome API. You can make bots, you can code in all these features and it’s free. So I think the free part is what appealed to you the most probably. Actually, the extensibility is what appealed to me the most plus the free made it a no brainer. Plus my friend is pretty high up at the company. So I know initially because this community just launched very recently and

02:07
Initially, I know you had some people who had trouble getting in. So I do think there is a little bit of a tech barrier for people. How is that going now? It’s been about a week. Okay, so that’s an exaggeration because any time you have any new platform, there’s always going to be someone who cannot do it. could be Gmail and they can’t get Gmail working. So to be fair, I did a very soft launch just to people who actually attended office hours live. And we had two people

02:37
say that they couldn’t get on and whatnot. Whereas the other, think we attracted 45 members that day. And of that two people could not get on due to, one, we kind of narrowed it down to an email deliverability issue. Like they couldn’t receive the password email, which I think is on their end. And the other person, we never figured it out. Cause I didn’t want to spend the whole office hours. Did they ever get in the community or are they still in limbo?

03:04
That I don’t know. We actually have office hours today and we’ll find out. Okay. So how do you have it structured inside Discord? Right now? Right now, it’s, I mean, it’s literally a week old, right? So there’s one room for discussion. So let’s talk about why I hate Facebook groups first. That’s more fun. Facebook groups suck. Like people would tag me on there and let’s say I was like in the car and I couldn’t get to it.

03:33
later on when I was not in my car, sometimes I wouldn’t be able to find that message again. It’s just not laid out well. then the fact that it doesn’t show you everything in your feed just kind of defeats the purpose. would also say the search featuring groups is terrible on Facebook. like, because what I found is that you, same thing, right? You’re somewhere, you see, you get a notification that you’ve been tagged in something.

04:00
you don’t have the ability to respond. Maybe you even take a peek at it, right? And you’re like, oh, this is gonna require me to sit down and think, right? And then when you go back to find that, and it’s not readily available, right? Because there’s activity in the community, it gets pushed down, whatever. Even when you try to search, it often, you can’t find it, right? Because the search is so janky, I think, in Facebook. So for me, that’s a huge negative. The other huge negative for me in Facebook groups is it requires getting on Facebook.

04:31
And so for someone like me who I don’t like to spend time on social media, especially not Facebook, once you get on to go into the community to answer a question, then you’re on Facebook, then you’re like, oh, someone tagged me in a photo from high school that I don’t want on the internet and someone did this and now someone sees that you’re on, so they try to message you, right? So then what becomes a simple answering a question now turns into 30 to 45 minutes of time wasted.

04:59
on social media because now you’ve been sucked into the Facebook vortex. I don’t know if that’s fair to say. Well, first of all, number one, you love Facebook because that’s your demographic, Tony. We all know that. Second of all, I think any community platform requires an app or something to get on it, right? That you have to have on. And then it’s pretty easy to get lost in like a Discord community also, because then you end up looking at all these other questions. that’s different. That’s different, right? Because if I’m

05:27
So the only thing I know on Discord is your community. don’t have any other, if I do have a tie on Discord, I don’t know about it, right? It’s something from like five years ago. So when I go on Discord, I’m only interacting with that community. I’m not being distracted by like, are they getting divorced? Because he’s posting all these pictures with this. got it. Oh, look, oh, look, she’s lost 100 pounds. And oh, look at this. oh, you know, there’s none of that, right? I’m only on there to look at the community. And then,

05:56
I’m done, right? So I think I’ve checked into your community maybe four or five times for about a week. And so I go in, I answer, if someone’s tagged me, I try to answer that question. And then I look through the other questions and see if there’s anything and then I’m done, right? There’s nothing else to distract me except for the stuff inside the community. So if you’re the community owner, I think it’s great because you go in, you deal with the community. If you’re using a separate platform, doesn’t have to be Discord.

06:24
And then and then there’s nothing else to take your time away. I can see that. mean, granted, right now it’s literally 45 people out of 6000. Right. Once it goes out, I don’t know how many people actually have discord. I was actually shocked. I think I can’t remember how many people are in office hours that day, but I think a good two thirds had discord, which shocked me. people that come to office hours, though, are a little more nerdy.

06:54
in general. Maybe. It’ll be interesting to see when it goes out to the whole group. But that brings up, I think, the first important point about a community and one that I don’t think that you’re actually prepared for, if we’re going to be honest about things today. Sure. Tell me. Tell me what I’m not prepared for. time it takes to run an active and healthy community. You joked right before we started recording, maybe ChatGPT can run the community for me.

07:22
Well, like we were joking about other things that Chad is doing very well. And while I think there probably will come a point where that is going to be a component, right? Where it can, there is some AI in it, right? And I’m sure like, especially with Discord, if you have the ability to like code things in, I can see maybe some like canned responses, things like that, the ability to sort of implement things that we do with email and customer service.

07:50
I have a solution to this problem, by the way, and it was not chatty. That was just a joke. But I do think one of the tough parts about a community, and I know a lot of people who’ve grown huge communities, right? Think about our friend Jen Garza, who had her, you know, 100 plus thousand keto community. Tiffany Avanosky had 70 plus thousand, you know, fashion based. It takes a lot of work to be in those communities, keeping it from getting spammy, making sure the discussions are

08:20
productive and positive, especially like right now, 45 people, that’s not that hard, right? But for most people, 45 people in a community is not going to move the needle in your business.

08:32
I’m not even thinking about the business part yet, but the moderation part is actually fairly straightforward. that I can see, this is why discord is valuable. I can write a little code that pipes in certain responses directly into open AI, get a sentiment analysis and then automatically ban someone or put them in like a suspension. don’t know if you can do that with any other platform where you have access to all that. Maybe you do, maybe it’s possible.

09:00
And then for the moderation part, I think once the community gets going, th there’s students that come to office hours like every week and they’ve been coming every week for five years. I would just ask them for help. Like if they want to moderate it. And I’m pretty sure I can find someone to help with that. Right. I can think of one person in particular who’d who’d love to do it in particular. Uh, once it gets off its feet and whatnot. So.

09:26
So back to the platform, like I think I was originally gonna do this on slack. Yes, because I love slack I have it on and it’s the search is great The huge disadvantage of slack is you got a paper member Which is ridiculous Granted I guess that’s probably not what slack was designed for it was probably designed for small teams You know working together but yeah, those those caught like if you had like a 5,000 member community be like

09:56
$50,000 Which is absolutely nuts. I actually asked ChatGBT, I said, hey, give me some places to host a community. Because I know we know of some, but I was like, there’s probably some that we haven’t heard of. Of course, their number one answer was Facebook groups. I think that’s been where communities have lived for a really long time. think the problem is, the other problem is you’re still relying on Facebook. You were saying,

10:25
You don’t see everything, not everything shows up anymore. And I mean, know people who’ve just been, their groups have been banned, right, or disbanded, right? So they’ve had issues with Facebook sort of just locking them out of their own. It’s not theirs, obviously, it’s Facebook’s. But, you know, so I think Facebook groups are still, they’re still popular, but I think there’s a lot of downside. And as these other platforms continue to become more popular and grow, I think Facebook groups are gonna become

10:54
less ideal, but they’re free. And that’s, think, the biggest draw. I mean, that’s the understatement of the century. I think Facebook groups suck. Once upon a time, they were great. And actually, grew mine, my regular, wife quit one to, I think it was like 14 or 15,000 people. Spam got out of control. Like they literally nerfed the reach, like in your feed, because they want to run more ads, right? And this is a long time ago.

11:23
That My Wife Quit group of 15,000 people is pretty much defunct. And it was defunct as soon as Facebook made those changes. Well, and it used to be one of the benefits of the groups was that when someone joined their group, if they were just casually on Facebook, they would get notifications about the groups. And that doesn’t happen anymore either. I think you’re right. It’s a lot of downside. They also talked about Discord, which we’ve talked about. One that they talked about that I’m not familiar with, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of, is called Geneva.

11:52
Never heard of it. It’s apparently free. It has chat, video rooms, all that stuff. So I don’t know if it’s even worth checking out if people have heard of it. It was one that was a complete shock to me because I had never heard of it. And I feel like I’ve done some research on this. So I think the important thing is that whatever platform you choose is kind of mainstream. Like I know you guys are starting a circle community. I feel like it’s not mainstream.

12:21
Meaning, like if I were to ask like a friend who’s not in the industry if they’ve heard of it before, they would probably say no. But you ask them if they’ve heard of Discord before and they will say yes. So I would agree with, I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know because most of my friends are in this world so everyone knows what Circle is. So I don’t have a lot of friends outside. Well, no, no, no, your friends like- have many friends outside of people in the internet space. No, no, no, the ones that you hang out with that I met, they’re not the only people I can ask.

12:50
Right, exactly. Whereas here, all my friends aren’t in this at all. So here’s what I think about that, though. So Circle is one, School is another one. That’s a really popular one. Mighty Networks is another popular one. Those three, think, are probably the most popular paid versions. They all have the free trial, but I don’t think any of them allow you to do anything that’s long-term free, like minimum sign-up type thing. So I think it doesn’t necessarily matter if people have heard of it because

13:21
I know a lot of people who are in communities and they don’t necessarily know what the platform is. They just know they click here to log on. So I think as long as you make it easy for people to join the community or to get into the community, the hosting of that community is probably not as important if it’s not a tech-based group.

13:44
This is what I mean by that. A lot of people already had Discord apps on their phone, surprisingly, right? So it makes it less friction. It’s kind of like joining an affiliate network, right? It’s like, oh, do I want to join another affiliate network or do I just join the one that I’m already on that I know about? I think it’s similar, but yeah, you’re right. Once someone’s ingrained in the community, the platform doesn’t matter. And I think for you, it’ll be really interesting if you open this up to everybody in the course.

14:09
how many, like, because right now you’re dealing with such a small sample size and I would say these people do lean tech heavy based on like who I know is in that group. It’ll be interesting when you open it up to the 6,000 if you’re still seeing that level of like, oh, I already had Discord. I think a lot of people are gonna be like, I have no idea what we’re doing, which is fine. I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out for sure. Well, I’m doing it slowly because I wanna see what the moderation is like and that way I can write those routines appropriately.

14:39
Not that anyone is like rude or anything, but people do occasionally post like self-promotional stuff, which sometimes is okay to me. Like I don’t usually care. But then there’s people who try to sell services, you know, or tools that I don’t want happening. Like of their own, of course. So I guess the next question is, your community is going to be free. No, it’s just a course. Oh, I thought you were going to open it up to anybody who wants to be.

15:09
Oh, okay. no. So first of all, this is only going to be course members for a long time, not for a long time, but for at least the rest of this year once, because I got to get to know the code base and what I can do and what I can’t do. And, you know, it just makes sense to roll it out slowly, especially since I’ve never done this before. Like, I don’t want to get destroyed, you know, inundated so far, and it’s only been a week.

15:37
Like people have already emailed me, know, of those 40, I would say 10 or 15 % have emailed me saying, hey, this is great. Like I can just message someone. I can message someone easily. messaging me. get an answer. So let’s cut this I said, it’s been great for me too. So I guess that’s my next question because I think a lot of people, I think this seems interesting to a lot of people and it’s actually on its own, a standalone business model.

16:04
You can have a paid community. But I think the gateway is to have, there’s a free level. Now for you, you’re kind of doing it the reverse way. You have a paid product, the community comes with the paid product. But at some point, you’re probably going to use the community to convince people to upgrade to the paid product. So people that aren’t in the course, to get them in. So what’s the strategy for that?

16:34
Is there strategy yet? I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. I seriously have not. Like the goal of this is not lead gen at the moment. The goal is to just make make a community of students that can ask questions and interact with other people easily. So here’s why I think that’s valuable for you and anyone. Right. So like we’re reversing this. Right. So instead of having a paid community, you’re having a free community for people who’ve already paid. I think the community will help people make progress.

17:03
Right, so it’ll help people continue to move forward with finding their product, getting sales wherever they are in that funnel. And I think anytime you can show success when you sell a service, you sell more services, right? So the better success stories you have, the better you sell. And so for this case, I think the community becomes a great marketing tool for, you know,

17:30
people seeing better success, being able to use that in your case studies, as well as just another selling point for being in the course, right? It’s not just a bunch of lessons, it’s also this community that’s very active, people are getting their questions answered within 48 hours, whatever it is, and being able to continue to make for progress in their businesses. Yeah, yeah. In terms of opening it up, I think I will need a lot more code in place to moderate stuff.

18:00
If anything is like the Facebook groups where every other comment was spam, that’s going to be infinitely worse on Discord. I will need to… There’s already a bunch of code written actually. I probably just need to adapt it to do the moderation. Which actually brings me to my question. Why are you guys on Circle? Is it a paid community only? So we are building a paid community. There will not be a free tier.

18:29
We’re doing the opposite. We’re bringing people in on a very low-priced offer with limited, I don’t want to say limited, but you’re not getting 450 lessons. The community is the lower hanging fruit and getting people in and then upselling them within the community to higher tier offers. We’re reversing what you’re doing basically.

19:00
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

19:30
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

19:40
Well, I mean, I might just charge like a buck. Yeah. So our right now we kind of have our entry price at nine dollars a month, which is ridiculously cheap. Probably not going to be that way for very long, but that’s I mean, I’m probably going to do that, too, just so it vets like the outright. And that’s where I think, you know, I actually went back and forth on the free paid. How much do you charge kind of thing and did a bunch of like forecasting models and things like that. But I think the one thing about people

20:09
that makes a difference is that it does keep out a level of spam. It’s not going to be, I mean, unless you’re charging $500 a month or something like that, you’re still gonna get problem people, right, at some point. But I think even at $1, $5, whatever, you’re going to minimize that from the start, which is why I think charging like a very small amount is not a bad idea. And honestly, for like a my wife quit her job community,

20:39
I think the charging is actually pretty smart as well as here’s my worry for like my wife quit her job because you already have an established group is that the new people coming in will annoy the old people. know, actually the old people, it’s all locked like the course members have their own. that’s what I was saying. If you’re doing something like this, you do need to have that locked area where the premium tier, whatever you want to call it. Right.

21:09
that they have a space to go to where they’re not. Because we’ve found that when we, every once in a while, we open up our Friday check-ins to all of YouTube. And all of our paid course members get annoyed at the questions that come in because usually they’re new, which is fine, or they haven’t gotten started, or their questions are very basic. They haven’t watched even a handful of YouTube videos, right? So you’re getting sort of this like hodgepodge of people.

21:37
Not all the time, but definitely happens. And so you want to make sure that you have like that safe space for paying customers to be able to have those higher level conversations. I mean, I want to save space myself. Opening this up. This is why I’m curious. I mean, you’re going to have this problem at a low price point. You’re going to have a moderation problem. Yes. Right.

22:01
Does Circle have built-in ways to moderate sentiment? It does. I’m still digging into everything that Circle has to offer. One of things that I say is a huge downfall of any of these paid products, School, Circle, Net, all those people, all those network type things, is that the more you’re willing to pay, the better the features are. Right? the basic plan is garbage. so the higher, like we were setting it up yesterday. Actually, we were getting

22:31
a few people into the community yesterday and realize that there’s nowhere to put if you have, like, is it, you you fill out your bio when you join the community and there’s nowhere to put like a YouTube handle, which to me is like a huge fail, right? Like most people are working and growing on some sort of like YouTube type platform. Yeah. And that wasn’t an option. was like Instagram, Facebook, whatever. So it’s not until you go to like the two hundred dollar a month option that you have

23:00
Shut up, you have to pay. So I was like, that’s garbage. Shame on you, Sturkle. To put it, that’s ridiculous. I know, further entrenching you in your Discord love. yeah. No, no, actually, I’m not in love with Discord. I just think it’s a great tool for the price point.

23:22
Right, and the extensibility. and I think if you have the ability to do some of the coding and technical stuff, either you personally do or you have someone on your staff or team or you can hire someone on Upwork, whatever it is. I definitely think it’s a great option. If you don’t want to do that, then I think something like a school or Circle, you know, one of the things that school does really well and Circle has the same component, I just haven’t used it yet, is that ability for people to see what’s locked.

23:52
which I think is like one of the greatest incentives to get people to upgrade is seeing what they can’t have. And I remember Digital Marker, I don’t know if Digital Marker still does this, but remember when you would buy like one of their $9.95 mini courses and then when you went to log in, it showed all the courses, but they were all grayed out so you couldn’t click on them.

24:16
And then you could always upgrade or you could get the package and get like 10 of them or whatever. But like to me, that was genius because it’s like you’re on there for 15 seconds and you’re like, oh, they have a YouTube tutorial. Like so to me, like I think and probably Discord has some ability to do this. But I think Circle and School do it really well is you can see like what you can’t have. And then also basically earning like it’s sort of the gamification.

24:44
where you earn points to be able to unlock different things, right? So based, yeah, you can do a Discord. But I think those types of things in communities are very effective is, one, for getting people to interact because there’s a reward system built in, and then two, I think for you, especially if people that come in and aren’t a part of the course can get a little peek at what’s happening and…

25:11
sort of like the next level stuff. To me, that’s obviously your course is expensive, so it’s not like a spur of the moment purchase, but I think people seeing that will be effective in getting people to convert at some point. Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. Like, I’m not even thinking that far ahead, like for the randos, so to speak. Just because I’ve just had this horrific experience with Facebook groups in the past with spam, right?

25:38
And there’s no real easy way to moderate that outside of going through each comment and saying deny, deny, deny, or whatever. Uh, this is one of the reasons why I like discord because of all the hooks. Like even if circle was free, I’d probably still go with discord actually, uh, based on the, I only took a very limited trial of circle to be fair. Uh, and then school, I actually didn’t try that thoroughly because

26:05
You guys had said some things about it. think Circle’s better than school. They’re priced about the same. I’ve worked now in both. I think Circle just has some better features. But I also think it’s one of those things too where, I mean, we’ll use Liz as an example. She started the Fluencer Fruit on Discord because that’s what the company wanted it to be on. And they were supposed to help with some things. And it ended up that they didn’t really have the bandwidth to help.

26:33
do some of the integrations and so she was kind of stuck and not able to do some of that so she ended up moving over to Circle. So I do think a lot of it is just personal preference and what you’re comfortable in because if you are gonna be the one managing and running the community, you have to wanna log in and deal with it every day. It is not intuitive, Discord. Some of the things are not intuitive. Like you’re attaching bots to what, mean.

27:02
Like I had to watch some videos just to even understand what the heck was going on, you know. But once you get it, it’s cool. It’s like anything in life, I think. I also don’t love that Discord is black.

27:14
Is there a way to change that? That’s just like, that’s just such a I wouldn’t even put brain power into that. I don’t really care how it looks Well, because I don’t like the black screen with the white text personally to read. That’s just a personal preference, which I don’t know. I’ve never seen a way to have Discord not look like that. And maybe that’s just the interface. I’ve not spent any brain power looking at that, but it’s probably true because black on white saves power on your phone.

27:43
That’s probably why they do it, yeah. Right? For certain screens, right? Because black doesn’t use power. I got these old eyes. got to.

27:55
But you’re right about the platform risk also, right? We’re beholden to Discord, Circle, and whatnot. And we’re beholden to Facebook. So unless you want to start your own platform, which is ironically something I had with the class before, that was a big time pain in the butt. I won’t do that again. I would say, unless you’re just so geeky and love

28:24
doing those things, coding up your own community. I didn’t code it up. It was just a standard off-the-shelf platform. didn’t Oh, I thought you did. Was it Andrew who coded his up? Somebody. No, no one’s coded theirs from scratch. They’ve modified what’s existing, which is what I did. There’s just all sorts of issues with that. It was also very ugly. You have to host it yourself. Oh, yes, I know it was ugly.

28:52
So also, I don’t know if you know this, but LinkedIn actually has a community option for LinkedIn groups. I did not know that. I’m new to LinkedIn. too. I just I’ve I did a deep dive into LinkedIn after. So last week we did a hot seat with Charles. And one of the things that he has been having some success with are these like many LinkedIn newsletters, which I was.

29:21
very interested in and so I basically spent the weekend sort of digging into like what can you do on LinkedIn, know, what ability, once again, you’re still building something on another platform, right, you don’t own anything on LinkedIn, but they basically do have little private groups where you can invite people in to chat and build a community. I’m not sure like what the limit is on it, like how many people can be in the group or anything like that, but.

29:48
That might be something too, where if you’re just getting started and you don’t want to invest any tech or anything like that, it just like, I wonder how many people would be interested in this. I think that might be an interesting option. doesn’t seem like it’s too difficult to set up. It’s basically just you just create the little group. So let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about nurturing the community and keeping it up.

30:15
My experience with that was I remember, like I was one of the first members of Andrew’s group over at ECF. And I remember in the beginning, Andrew was posting every single day in that group. So what are you guys doing? You have people paying 10 bucks a month, but even at 10 bucks a month, people expect value, right, as soon as they sign up. So what are you doing? So one of the things we’re doing is we’re actually holding a 45 minute like office hours every week.

30:43
in the community. That’s the bigger benefit. Obviously, the community will have conversation, but that’s our big draw is this 45-minute accountability session, a weekly accountability session. However, I think as we stand up this community, I do think you have to be in there every single day. I don’t think there’s a way around it, especially if-

31:13
Yours is a little different because these people already were in a community before you just kind of moved locations. But when you’re starting from scratch, I think you need to be in there or you need to have a dedicated person. It doesn’t necessarily have to be you on a daily basis, either starting a conversation every day or replying to conversations that will continue to grow. Right. So sort of open ended type things.

31:41
You know, the person who I think is so good at this is Tiffany Ivanovsky. You know, she’s done this in Facebook groups for years. And of course she’s got a very different type of group, right? It’s all clothes and fashion based. So it’s really about building like friendships and trust. And so she posts, you know, crazy things like when Paul goes to the store and buys 500 poinsettias, cause she said she wanted some color on the front porch, right? So she’s able to put like any kind of thing in there to drive engagement.

32:10
I think if you’re trying to build a business-based community, which we are both doing, it needs to be pretty focused on the types of business. So for you, obviously lately it could be anything involving tariffs or trade or stuff like that, stuff that just engage the people that are in there and start conversation. One of the things that I think we had someone post yesterday, basically like, hey, here’s this really great podcast. If you start listening at 40 minutes and whatever,

32:40
There’s a really good commentary on XYZ that we had talked about previously. So I think anything where you’re just like adding value, educational content, and then making sure that you interact when people post is really important, especially in the beginning when you don’t have like self-appointed community leaders. So right now, presumably you don’t have a ton of members and you’re doing these office hours for accountability. What happens when it gets to even like a hundred members?

33:09
That model will break down, right? For accountability? Yeah. Yes and no. I’m not sure. I mean, the community is not live. only people in there are invite only right now. But yeah. I mean, just looking forward. I think it’ll change a little bit. Either there’ll be multiple accountability times to accommodate, and it won’t always be run by us. So the goal would be to raise up people within the community to lead.

33:39
not for free, either for an exchange for community access, things like that. I’ve seen that work successfully in a lot of other groups. A good example of this is Ezra had a Facebook ads group for a long time. I don’t know if it was exactly Facebook ads, but it was some sort of ad-based group.

34:07
Was it Molly’s or? I of theirs. They were both attached to it. And it was pretty expensive, like several hundred dollars a month to be in the community. you know, and I think this is good and bad, like Molly wasn’t in it a whole lot. It was other people sort of leading the group. Now, I think the problem becomes when you sell it as so and so is going to be in here giving you advice versus like because. Right. And the crazy thing is that it’s not like the people that were in there.

34:36
didn’t know as much as anybody else, they did, they knew a lot, but when you pitch it one way and then deliver something different, I think that becomes problematic. We’re never pitching this community as Liz and myself, right? This is always a group type thing. So I think that’s important too, and I think for you, with the community, same thing, right? I would never pitch it as Steve answers all your questions in the group, right? Definitely not, not for the.

35:04
Well, for the course, yes. not for the like, it’s it’s a you really have to pitch it as a community of people like and I think I don’t know, like real life, like I used to be in a runners group. Right. And when I had a runner question, we had a group text. Like I wanted to know, certain pair of socks. Like I didn’t care who answered me in the group text. I just wanted. So I think you have to build it in that way where everybody in the community is going to add value and help other people in the community.

35:34
Yeah, that all sounds very idyllic. I think it’s maybe my space, but as soon as like I go live to everyone, I’m sure all these people want to use it for marketing. Right. And that’s where it’s just going to go to hell. So this is why I’m not going to do that for a while, because I need to research all the anti-spam bots and everything that I can implement first, because that’s what it’s going to be one big Festivus.

36:03
of spam. I can definitely see that. think another tip for people who are thinking about doing something like this is to join some communities, even if you have to pay inexpensive, and see how they manage those types of things. Everybody has different ways of managing. I know when Marie Forleo does B-School, there’s a pop-up community that lasts during the B-School period. Amy Porterfield does similar things where she has these pop-up communities.

36:32
And they seem pretty good about not having the spam. And obviously, I’m not in there 24-7, and I’m not monitoring them that closely. there’s clearly something that they’re doing to keep it. Well, yeah, it’s called, I bet it’s one person watching it all day. Not even joking. I’m willing to this is where you hire an overseas VA, honestly. This is where you pay someone overseas to monitor that.

37:01
Honestly, if if chat GPT can handle like 80 % of it, that’s it’s pretty easy for AI to spot like whether it’s going to be promotional. the other thing I think is and this is why I do think you should consider charging something to the non course members is that I think when people pay, they’re less likely to be when there’s like clear parameters set up before beforehand.

37:31
they’re less likely to do that because they don’t want to get kicked out. So I, yeah. Plus they’ve skinned the game. So I do think even having people pay something is worth it because, you know, I think it just clears out a lot of the problems. But yeah, I do think you have to monitor it pretty closely, especially with what you’re doing. The other thing that everyone has to deal with potentially is

38:00
You know, once you start charging monthly, like people’s credit cards, people complaining like, oh, you know, I couldn’t get into discord for like the last week and I get a pro rated. It opens yourself up to that stuff too, which is fine. I don’t know. I’m not even thinking that far ahead. Like if I can get my class community up and, and then I’ll consider looking at the moderation first. And then once I get the moderation down, then I’ll open it up. That, that, that’s my sequence.

38:31
I’m genuinely curious to see when you open it up. You’re just going to sit there with popcorn and laugh. I’m going to start drinking martinis and just sit there with a dirty martini. Even with ECF and Andrew, he has flare-ups happen all the time. These are people paying a of money. don’t know how much it A couple hundred dollars a month or something. A couple of hundred dollars a month.

39:01
Yeah, and I think, I don’t know, I’ve been following all the WNBA drama, so I’m all drama filled right now. I think sometimes drama’s okay as long as it’s moving towards a productive resolution. There have been some things in ECF that I did not feel were very productive and that were really, and I think that’s where as the community owner, you have to judge, is this in general going to make the community better or worse? And

39:29
even though some of it might be painful and might be hard, some of that’s okay to have happen because people do need to be able to have a place where they can speak, especially like a community like ECF where it’s a space where a lot of people don’t feel like they have anywhere else they can have these conversations. But there comes a time when it’s just bashing or just something that’s just really negative. And in that case, to me, you just have to shut it down, that conversation, that thread, whatever.

39:59
Well, one of the negatives of Discord is it’s hard to have dynamic threads. It’s basically one long chat, right? That’s a big negative. You can create separate rooms for certain topics, but it’s not like a forum where you have individual threads where people can comment. So I don’t know. have my only experience with all this is with course with courses. And I think for the course, having one long

40:29
thread works because oftentimes there’s not enough interaction with individual threads. Like when I had my other forum with threads, it just wasn’t that dynamic. So the conversation is better. when, but when you open it up to, don’t know how many people, let’s just call it like the size of my old Facebook group. Let’s say it’s like 15,000 people. Good Lord. I can’t even imagine.

40:59
what that’s going to be like. Yes. I’ll be interested to see if you decide at any point to open it up and you get to that point, does it work as a funneling tool? There’s so much work that’s involved in that. One is the moderation and then the payment processing part. Then there’s onboarding. Does Discord connect directly with a stripe or anything like that?

41:25
I’m not worried about that if it doesn’t. I’m sure it does because people have charged stuff like mid journey and whatnot. That’s all. I don’t fear that. Like writing code now is a snap because of chat. So anything I need, I can probably pump out really quickly. I don’t fear that at all. Like I don’t even have to read the documentation anymore. I was asking more for the general public, not for your own fear of that one. I’m sure there is. The answer is I’m sure there is.

41:52
Any platform will have an integration, for it to do exactly what you want, there’s some intricacies with payment processing. You might want to give them a 10-day free trial just to check it out before it kicks in. Some of those things might not be… I haven’t looked at it, so I didn’t want to comment.

42:19
Well, we’ll see the types of questions. It can be annoying. Like even then those Friday check-ins that we’ve done where we’ve opened it up to the YouTube channel. What’s annoying about that sometimes is that people are just asking very basic questions that are literally covered in like the first couple lessons in Some of them are covered in the free mini course. That is correct. And of course, if you’re a paid course member where you’ve already done the work, you know that

42:49
That can be negative. It’s almost like you need to have a beginner area, an intermediate and then advanced topics only. There’s a lot to think about here, which is why I’m not prepared to unleash it to the rest of final thought before we wrap this up. As we’re talking through this, I’m like, what if we just opened the community for webinars and put all the chat for the webinars in the community?

43:19
That was my next step actually. Because those people are already engaged. I’m not even there yet though because even those people… You’ve seen some of our live chats on our workshops get out of control. That would be the next step of It’s an interesting component to add to a webinar. I wonder if it would increase the sales.

43:50
Oh, you mean for people to ask questions? they, they not during the webinar, obviously, because you can’t monitor a chat and like discord more on the webinar. But I’m saying like for that, you know, let’s see, say webinar pitch starts on Wednesday, you get in the community on Monday, you’re in the community until Sunday, and then you’re out if you don’t buy the course. You see what I’m saying? I see. I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was thinking about having them as permanent.

44:19
unpaid members of the discord doing the moderation that you just suggested of kicking people out is tough unless you just destroy the discord server after you’re Cause then you need to know everyone’s handle and then you need to write a routine that fishes those people out and make sure and make sure they’re out. I don’t, I don’t know if that’d be worth my effort to do that.

44:48
Anyway, there’s a ton to think about. And if you guys are listening, we’re just at the beginning stages here, just talking things through. I think your community will go pretty smooth, right? Fingers crossed. it doesn’t get out of control quickly, right? There’s worse things that can happen if it grows quick, I would say.

45:07
I’ve been growing quickly, honestly has always been a problem for everything, for, for, for everything that I’ve ever done. Right. When there’s anything that grows like seven X like that one time we went on the today show that sucked. Um, and then that, when I got an influx of course members in my first, first webinar, that was kind of painful too.

45:32
because I realized I didn’t have good onboarding or anything. It’s nothing like the influx that shows you everything that’s broken in what you’re doing. Well, yeah, it’s stressful. Then you got to scramble to get it up. So we’re in the beginning stages, folks. We’ll report back. And if you’re listening to this and you’re interested in a community, let us know. Send us an email.

45:56
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Send me a note. At some point, I’ll be opening up the Discord to people who are actively selling right now. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 596. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email.

46:24
and I’ll send the course right away via email.