624: Why I’m Building An E-commerce Community (And What I’ve Learned So Far)

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. Now in this episode, I’m sharing a project that I’ve been quietly working on behind the scenes and that’s building a community for e-commerce entrepreneurs from the ground up. I’m going to walk you guys through why I’m doing this, the vision I have for it and the biggest challenges I’m trying to solve before I launch. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online,

00:29
This is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches. People who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. There are no corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people.

00:56
so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if you’re doing over $250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high-level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be, so if you want in, go over to SellersSummit.com and grab your ticket. Now, on to the show.

01:29
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today we are going to be talking about a cool project that we’ve been working on for quite some time and that is developing a community. It’s tough. Let’s just put that out there in the very beginning. Well, it’s tough because like that’s generally not my personality. it’s tough. I should have said it’s tough with you. No, I’m totally joking about that.

01:55
Yeah, so I think this is interesting and I wanted to talk about this today because you and I are both in the middle of community building. one of the like the first thing I want to talk about is both of us are building communities off of Facebook. Well, we were building communities off of Facebook. You like we’re not off of Facebook. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I see how that was misinterpreted. Yes. Our communities are not living on Facebook. There we go. Right.

02:23
And I have chosen Discord as my platform and you guys have chosen Circle. Circle. Yeah. Right. So I thought it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Well, I mean, I think we’re going to talk a little bit about the platforms, but I think I have found that even and I talked in depth with Liz about this yesterday is that, know, she had a pretty active community on Facebook and she so this is a completely separate community. She had a very active community on Facebook. She has tried to move it to Circle.

02:52
and she is struggling getting people into circle. I know for you, there was a private Facebook group for both courses actually. The one for Profitable Online Store has always been a little more active, but there’s a lot more people in it, so that makes sense as well. But I would say percentage-wise, you’ve struggled too to move people over to the Discord community. Of course, because people, a lot of people don’t want to be on Discord who are on Facebook, right?

03:21
The same could be true also. A lot of people don’t like being on Facebook. So there’s always been like a uh fraction of the people on Facebook period from the people who sounded for the class. Right. And I think there was a time um and I think about our friends, Paul and Tiffany, who do have a community on Facebook. There was a time when building a community on Facebook was the be all end all. Right. Facebook gave a lot of priority to communities and groups. They sort of helped with your reach.

03:50
But that seems to have come to an end. And so some of the advantages of building on Facebook has disappeared, in my opinion. I mean, that came to an end like years ago. Yeah. Like five years ago, they already started sucking. Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen people with groups work. Like one of the most popular ones is this million dollar sellers. I think they charge like five thousand dollars a year and they’re still going strong on Facebook. Yeah.

04:18
Yeah. And I will say like there are terms of service with Facebook as far as like charging for a Facebook community. have to you have to circumvent that. You can’t just have a community that you charge for on Facebook. You have to offer something else. And I know Million Dollar Seller does. But yeah, there’s definitely some some things you have to watch out for. But I would say you chose Discord. Let’s talk about why you chose Discord, because I did not choose Discord. Yes. So number one, it is free. Yeah. But more importantly,

04:47
It’s got the best backend ever in terms of what you can do with it. It’s like communities for coders. And that’s why I chose it. Which makes sense because a lot of the groups that are very popular in Discord seem to be more tech-focused and based. From what I’ve seen, I’m not a Discord expert. I’m not either, actually. But it started out as a gaming platform, right? Right.

05:16
I actually, when I first got introduced to Discord, it was because I was playing games with my buddies and there’s ties to it. It knows who’s logged into what game and then you can just chat on Discord as you’re playing the game. How can you chat as you’re playing? Is it audio chat, I guess? Oh yeah, it’s audio chat. Yeah, not video Trying to envision you typing with one hand and playing the game with the other hand.

05:40
But like you can integrate like a payment platform you can integrate we’ve integrated like Steve bot and Tony bot and whatnot and we are moving this community also over to our conference the seller summit and We should have done this a long time ago. It’s just I got too many projects But you know anytime someone goes to an event they want to be able to keep in touch with people afterwards And so we have seller summit bot also which has read in all of the talks

06:09
and you can query it like a chat should be T. I’m actually excited about that because we do get a lot of questions about talks and it’s like, I can’t remember what year. In fact, I was talking last week at ECF to Dana who gave one of our closing keynotes and I was like, yeah, 2024. And she’s like, no, it was 2023. And I was like, no, 2024. And she’s like, no, I’m pretty sure it was 2023. And then I was like, you’re right, Bill was 2024.

06:34
So I just, you know, it’s too much information, right? I don’t remember all of that off the top of my head. Who spoke on what, when? I don’t even probably don’t even know what I spoke on what, when. I think the content is the problem, right? Like, oh, I remember that speaker said this one thing, like, what was it? And now you can ask it. Yeah. So I will say as someone who’s new to Discord, watching you build it and then being in the community, I do think that it’s

07:00
pretty cool everything that you can do and all the features and the different groups. I’m still learning how to use it. I’m definitely not a power user of Discord, but I can see the appeal from your end because you can figure out the back end of it. I mean, it’s like really, it’s just slack on steroids is really what it is. Yeah. Right. But let me tell you, it’s a lot more engaged than Facebook for sure. Like Facebook was crickets.

07:28
Whereas like on the discord group, I see messages come in all the time people using the bot people interacting with each other and just the other day for the very first time actually I saw two people in a voice chat room together. Oh That was the first time I’d seen that I’ve seen it happen once or twice on there, but I think that’s pretty cool Yeah, so one of the things that I think is interesting about using any platform off Facebook is as the admin as the moderator

07:58
I know for me, because I’ve moderated in many Facebook groups, if you get tagged in something, you get that notification, it comes through with all of your other Facebook notifications. So Facebook notifications from my mother and when people comment on a photo or memory or whatever it is, right? So I’ll open Facebook and it’s like, have 300 notifications, right? And so to find where people are mentioning you in a group that you are managing.

08:24
and potentially people are paying to be in, it gets really tough, right? It’s very easy to miss stuff in a Facebook group. Every time I get tagged in Discord, I know it, right? It’s very clear to me that someone is asking me a question or mentioning me. So I do think, and I would say the same goes for other platforms as well outside of Facebook, but I do think that’s one of the huge positives of building something off of Facebook is that as the moderator, your ability to see what’s happening seems to be greater.

08:54
I mean, the downside, of course, is not many people use Discord comparatively, right? And for some reason, think Discord’s onboarding is a little messed up. Yeah, so let’s talk about that. Because that is where I have seen a lot of people have an issue. And maybe it’s because we’re only letting certain people in. You have to be a paid course member. I’m not sure. You could talk about how you set that up and what people are struggling don’t that’s the problem.

09:21
Just the people? No. No, no, no. It’s got nothing to do with the people actually, because I actually managed to reproduce one of the problems that someone had. And it stems from the fact that if you don’t have like the app installed, no, no, I think if you have the app installed on your computer, but you’re using the web interface or some combination of the two, it’s been a couple of weeks now, when you get invited to a group, it like tries to create a new account for you, even though you already have one.

09:51
and then you end up with like a million accounts. oh That’s the issue. It didn’t happen to me, it didn’t happen to you, but I did reproduce it by just creating a whole new account on a fresh computer. Well, I did have a glitch getting into the seller summit account, then I was actually… Anyway, it can be glitchy, I have found. um But also when I get a technical glitch, I just assume it’s me.

10:20
All right, so here’s what’s cool about Discord. In the backend, you can approve people to be able to see certain threads or groups, right? And you can automate that pretty easily. basically, within the course, like the membership site where you have to log in, there’s a button that you have to push to get approved. And then after you hit that button, which can only be accessed if you’re actually a member, then you get access to all the stuff.

10:50
Let’s just say that I am me. How hard is it for me to build what you’ve built on Discord? I mean, I think it just depends, because I didn’t know anything about it. I basically vibe coded my way through it. OK. And even though I was vibe coding my way through it, it actually was very confusing.

11:13
because uh Discord has all this terminology and all this stuff, so it’s a little hard to understand. So now I’m a little more familiar with it, but when I first started, it’s actually a little intimidating. It’s not like your typical Vibe-coded project, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. So you could do it. I’ve seen you and Liz create apps and whatnot. You could do it. It’s just not… There’s a learning curve, basically. Yeah. So let me compare that to Circle, because that’s what we’re using. um

11:42
You know, obviously there’s a big differentiator in that Circle is not free, right? You pay monthly. And the one thing that Liz and I were chatting about yesterday that I don’t like about Circle is that there’s a couple tiers, and we’ve talked about this a lot in the course, Companies nickel and dime you, right? They give you the base thing and you get like bare minimum and then it’s like, oh, but if you pay $50 more a month, you’ll get this feature. But then if you want the really cool feature, so one of the features that I wanted was to be able to like,

12:10
send a blast notification when um accountability starts, right, our accountability hour or half hour. And of course, that’s on a tier that we’re not on, right? And we’re not willing to pay for that right now. So obviously everyone’s in ConvertKit. I can email them from ConvertKit. It actually is not that big of a deal, but it would be really nice to have that feature um as part of the plan that we’re paying for, but it’s not. I would say setup wise with Circle, um like the Uber, it’s like,

12:40
ordering an Uber, so simple, right? It guides you through everything, tells you exactly what to do. um One of the issues that Liz ran into that she finds is like a pet peeve for Circle is that every single thing that you build in Circle requires a different size graphic. And they don’t resize it for you, so you have to then resize your own graphics and put them up there. So nothing is a standard across the board. So if it’s like an events page, it’s this size graphic. If it’s this kind of page, it’s this size graphic.

13:08
Which, you know, that’s one of those like nitpicky type things. um I feel like Circle could fix that very easily, right, in their own back end. But, you know, if we’re gonna do a true review of it, that is one of the negatives. um But I like it because it’s very similar to Discord in that you can have different buckets of people, right? So, like where you and I see like everything in Discord, um you know, I see everything in Circle. If you’re part of, you know, one group.

13:35
that’s a totally private group and it’s not seen. And I don’t know about Discord with this, but like the two people that got on the phone call, right, the voice chat? Can someone else just automatically join that chat or is it private between those two people? They can join, but they can say, hey, this is a private chat and then that guy would leave. Maybe. Maybe, maybe not. Well, I mean, worst case, they would just DM each other and then join the private chat. Like the ones that are…

14:02
that I saw were like technically like meeting rooms within the Discord. They could easily just have their own private conversation on Discord if they wanted to. Yeah. So, you know, so basically you can do those private rooms where, you know, only certain people have access to, which you can do in Discord because we have different buckets of people. Like if you’re in seller summit, you don’t have access to the profitable online store unless you’re also a member of that course. So there is a lot of flexibility with those types of things.

14:29
And I would say just overall, if you have zero tech experience, if you don’t want to vibe code or haven’t figured that out yet, Circle is a good option. It is expensive. I think the plan we’re on is $100 a month, which is that’s expensive. But the people who join don’t have to pay, obviously, right? So we it’s a paid community. yes, they do have to pay. But they don’t have to pay to use Circle. Correct. Yeah, that’s what I meant. And that’s all integrated. Right. The payment.

14:57
plan and everything is integrated within Circle, which I know for you, think you had to integrate, you’re gonna have to integrate that at some point. Yeah, yeah, I will, yeah. For Circle though, is there an app also, like a phone app that works pretty well? I think there, I actually only use it on desktop, but I can only assume there is a phone app, so yes. Okay. I would just think that Discord has more of a user base than Circle, right, just because Discord’s been around longer.

15:25
in a different community. I guess my only concern is like these guys are not pro, because I have some, have a friend who’s pretty high up over there. Pretty sure they’re not making any money. And they’ll need to, well, you know, it’s just one of these venture backed companies designed to grow, grow, grow, right? So. You know, and then it’s going way, way back. mean, I remember when you, when I first met you, you had your community on a forum. Yeah, that was the biggest disaster ever.

15:56
But I can’t even remember, was that something that you built within WordPress or was that something? No, I didn’t build anything. It was just a plugin. It was a WordPress plugin that had a nice forum on there. And I think the problem was that in order to respond, you had to log in, post your reply, and no one was logging in. And that’s why I asked about the app. I think the app is important because when people have it on their phone, like I do, you get a little notification. You can mute certain threads, you can mute certain people even.

16:25
Am I muted on your Discord? That way when you get a notification, you can just reply to it right away. Yeah, so that’s it’s interesting because so one of my clients moved to Slack a couple months ago. They were using Voxer, which I did not love at all. ah And I really hesitated putting Slack on my phone because typically I’m in front of my computer every day from eight to five.

16:53
you know, you know, bathroom breaks, whatever. But what I didn’t want was to be away from my computer, you know, at 730 on a Friday night and have like ding, ding, ding, you know, slack, slack, slack. I feel a little bit the same way with Discord as the community owner, right? Like not as a user, but as the owner, I feel like I really don’t want to, because my personality type is one, if someone says something, I feel very obligated to respond, right? I feel very obligated to interact like immediately.

17:23
And so I don’t like having it on my phone because I feel like that’s sort of the boundary. But I also ended up when I was traveling, putting it on, putting Slack on my phone because I was like, well, there are going to be times, you know, that I don’t have my computer open and I want to be able to answer people’s questions in a quick way. But yeah, I don’t know. The phone app to me is as a user, though, I think it’s a really cool feature. Yeah. 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.

17:53
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 obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away.

18:20
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

18:27
Yeah, I mean, I think an app is essential because if there’s any friction at all in responding, people just aren’t going to respond. And what’s also important is that you get like a little email saying you have un-responded requests and whatnot. Yeah. Just little things like that. I don’t know, you know, for many years I’ve resisted creating like a community, but I think because of AI, it’s more important than ever to do so. And so that’s why I’ve changed my tune as of late.

18:56
Yeah, I do think that you bring up a really good point is that the more AI, the more people are using AI and it’s becoming just part of our everyday life, having that community interaction is really important. um I felt that way a little bit at ECF this year, right? It was just really nice to see people and talk to people and not ask Chad GBT all of my life questions. um Actually, our friend Dana was telling me that she’s created like a whole um like therapy.

19:24
session with chat GPT by inputting a bunch of different things. It’s way too complicated to get into right now, but um I don’t know. I feel like when I have any kind of question, I immediately ask chat before I ask anybody else now. um So to me, it was like really nice to sit and talk to people at ECF. Well, isn’t chat nicer? Not that ECF people, very, it’s like seller summit people. They’re all very, very nice. But yeah, so one of the things that you’re doing, so My Circle community is paid.

19:54
uh Liz’s Circle Community for Fluencer Fruit, you get it with the tool, right? So you’re doing something similar with that. If you’re in the course, you get the community as part of the, I don’t wanna say it’s a bonus, but it is a bonus. uh I think those things are great bonuses if you are doing a course, having that community is a great add-on to add value to what you’re selling. But you’re thinking about, and I don’t know where we are on this, but you’re thinking about adding it as an option to people.

20:23
who are not in the course, they’re not, now before everyone in the course flips out on me, they’re not in the course community. There will be another, there’ll be another bucket of, we’ll just call it, know, another bucket of people who aren’t as cool as our course members. Let’s just make that very clear to our course members uh who will have access. Let’s talk about that a little bit because that feels like a huge uh gamble as far as your time.

20:48
It’s not a gamble. I worst case, I just refund everyone and call it a day, just shut it down. I made a terrible mistake. I don’t want to talk to you. OK, so here’s the problem. So I’ve been raising the price of my class over the years, and I just literally raised it this past week. What is it priced at now? I’m curious. It’s $2,500 now.

21:11
Okay, in the world of courses, that’s cheap. Most of them are $5,000. I actually added a $5,000 tier also. What is that? They get to come to your house and play croquet? No, they get quarterly one-on-one consults for the year, and then they get a tear down of their business. I’m not involved in those consults, right? Just making sure you didn’t put my face on that. Actually, you’re the one giving the consults, and I was going to give you a little cut. Right, right. Here’s your $17.

21:40
for your your hour consult. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes. But I think the purpose of that, even if no one signs up, is that it anchors the price higher so that when you just pay for the regular course, seems cheaper. Yeah. So it serves two purposes. why do you get so many people sign up for that? You’re going to be like, just kidding. I’m refunding you all $2500. Well, yeah, we’ll see how that goes. But I think.

22:07
If someone signs up for that, I know they’re gonna be serious. And when that happens, I’ll probably wanna talk to them, because I know that they’re serious. We get this question a lot, actually, in webinars, is how much is it just to talk to you? I mean, I would say that question, it’s come up in every single webinar, usually multiple times, and usually also in email questions, we get it as well. And we’ve always said, we don’t do that.

22:34
Right. It’s just not we don’t have the bandwidth. So now you’ve changed that for profitable online store to what is it quarterly? You quarterly. Yes. OK. Yeah. I mean, we’ll see how it goes. If it’s overwhelming that I’m just going to take off the tear. It’s very simple. Just climb, climb down from your pile of money. I’ll just say sorry. We’re not doing this tier anymore. oh Anyway. OK. So back to the community. So the reason why is because I’ve been raising the prices and literally the price went up

23:03
like this week and just before like the day it was gonna go up, I got a bunch of emails saying, this is so expensive, like I can’t afford it, why are you like gouging people, you know, whatever, comments like that. And I was thinking to myself, okay, well, you know, I’m not willing to lower the price and maybe the solution, the real solution is to have a tier that’s much more affordable for those people who can’t afford it, who actually still wanna learn.

23:33
And I thought the best way to do that would be to create a community where they can ask questions and I can chime in with answers or the community can chime with answers. And then we have like just like one time every week where we go live and just kind of answer questions as a group. Right. And yeah, I mean, that’s that’s the purpose. Also, the secondary purpose of having the community is to just.

24:00
get to know more people and just kind of understand what people are looking for. Like I’m always living in this bubble since I don’t like I told you before, like I’m not really a community person. And so I think that hurts me because I don’t really have a strong pulse on what like people want or what they’re looking for or what not. So. Yeah. OK, so so if someone joins the paid community, they’re not a course member, so they don’t have access to the lessons.

24:30
They don’t have access to office hours. Right. So so they’re getting questions answered in the community as well as you’re going to go live once a week and talk. So they get a number of things. OK, so they’re going to get the the Steve bot of the blog portion so they can instantly look up anything that I’ve ever answered on the blog really quickly and it’ll link them back to the post and answer the question. They’ll also get the podcast bot, which allows them to query any podcast with anyone that I’ve ever done.

25:00
with their questions. And they’ll also get my YouTube bot, which has all of my YouTube videos that I’ve ever done about e-commerce. I’m probably not going to create the bot for my, I like to call them my fluff pieces or my rants and whatnot. don’t think that’s useful. But any tutorial I’ve done on YouTube, I will create into a bot also. And so they’ll get, I guess like an encyclopedia of everything that I’ve done outside of the class, obviously.

25:30
So what do you have a price yet on this or are you still mulling that? No, no. I we just got back from ECF, Tony. I haven’t thought about this. I’m trying to think of like I’m just thinking to myself, what would that be worth to somebody? feel like so podcasts are terrible to search, right? YouTube videos are hard to write. Like so to me, the value in the blog posts are probably the easiest thing to search. Right. You go to my wife, quit her job.

25:56
to the blog, you put in a search query, you’re probably going to get an answer, I would say, most likely. I think you would probably just more likely search Google. Well, if I wanted to know your opinion on something. It’s not easy to even find the blog post, right? Because a lot of times you have one specific question, and you don’t want to sift through like a 2,000 word post to find that answer, right? True.

26:18
But I would say like having searched your blog meant for many things before because I’ve used it in like promotional stuff and looking like the blog search to me is the is the least valuable not to say it’s valuable, but it definitely will cut off time But the podcasts and the YouTube to me are huge right because there’s no possible way I’m gonna be able to search your YouTube for something ah And same with the podcast as well. So to me that are two extremely high value

26:46
So my concern for you, as our as we’re friends, is that what’s an acceptable price point that keeps the community full of people that are truly wanting to learn and start a start a business or grow their business versus like the looky-loos? I’m not even worried about that at all. Really? Yeah, because I’m going to start it out. She’s going to ban them and review. You’re just like refund Steve today. I’m just going to refund them. It’s no big deal. It’ll start out cheap.

27:16
I don’t even know what that price is gonna be. And then if it’s popular, then I’ll just raise the price. uh Like if it gets overwhelming, like that’ll be my threshold. Like if I feel like this is like running on a treadmill, then I’ll just raise the price and reduce the demand. That will be six people in the community guys, just so you know. He will be overwhelmed. ah But I mean, there’s benefits for me too outside of just the money.

27:43
The money to me in this particular case, at least in the first iteration, is gonna be what I call maintenance costs. I’ll probably use that money maybe to hire a moderator to just make sure things are okay. And then uh what’s nice about the community also is they’re gonna be asking me questions, they’re gonna be asking me what tools I use, so that leads to affiliate. It’s also kind of like a gateway drug into the main classes.

28:10
It’s also, you know, if people get to know each other, they probably want to hang out in person. So that might lead to more people coming to seller summit, you know? I mean, there’s a lot of benefits outside of just the membership fees. So that’s the way I think about it right now. And it’s not like, you you decide on one thing and it’s in stone, right? Right. Like if it’s overwhelming, you just. My biggest fear actually is the spam problem. Even if you’re paying, like there’s always going to be people who

28:39
who cause a ruckus. Like I’ve chatted with Andrew who runs ECF about this. I mean, it gets out of hand like all the time. And that is my biggest fear. Is the ruckus. Is the ruckus. And, uh you know, as another mutual friend that we know, like you can’t just like ban someone because then they’ll cause an even bigger ruckus outside. Like, so one of our friends for all these, for anyone who’s listening, he got canceled basically. Yes. uh

29:09
saying something on the forum and then, you I think he ended up just banning the people at first. Yeah. And then those people who got banned, like just causing even bigger ruckus. And it just got way out of hand. Yeah. And that can happen very quickly if you’re not careful. You know, I will say Andrew must do a great job of helping with uh the spam because I rarely I don’t ever see anything. Now, I’m not in the forums every day either, but.

29:35
they obviously do a great job of moderating over there. And he has a full-time moderator too. He does. He has a full-time moderator. And I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of AI element, which is like my backup plan. Like I’m going to have this bot that will query everything that people ask and give me a number on the scale of like one to a hundred in terms of promotional or abusive. That’s the part that’s a little tricky. And then it’ll just…

30:03
Instantly ban anyone not ban anyone but suspend that particular message if it’s like above a certain threshold is what I was thinking So I do think that one of the things that is really cool about this and and I don’t know for me personally It’s a motivator. I can only assume it motivates other people as well is the whole scene what you don’t have access to Right, so I remember there was a website. I can’t remember whose website it was. It might have been smart marketers No, what was Ryan Dice’s?

30:32
Oh, a digital marketer. Digital marketer. Like if he used to sell these like $10 courses, right. And really they were for if you owned a business, you bought like the Facebook course for your Facebook person. Right. And they took that course and went through it. But when you so I bought one of the courses one time, I don’t even remember what it was. And, know, because it’s like 999. Well, when you log into your course page, I think we’ve talked about this before. It had.

30:58
all of the courses that they had available, but they were all grayed out and only the ones you had paid for were like bright and you could click on it and you would access that curriculum. And I’ve seen other people do this over the years. And to me, that’s like super effective, right? And there was also some like bundling components to it, right? So it’s like, well, if you buy one more course, that’s another 9.99. But if you want to buy this whole suite of like social media, then that’s, you know, a price that’s cheaper than everything bought, you know, individually.

31:26
And I felt like that was a huge motivating factor to upgrade. I’m sure it was, I mean, they did very well in that time period. So I’m sure it was a very effective way. So I feel like getting people in the community and seeing like, oh, look, there’s all these other places that you could be, but you don’t have access to right now, will be a motivator. Does Circle have those, the ability to moderate like programmatically? That I don’t know.

31:53
I would assume probably not the way Discord does, just based on how the platform is built. Right. Like on Discord, you can literally read in everyone’s messages, run it through AI or whatever you want to do, and then take action on whoever that person was. Yeah. I don’t think to that level at all, for sure. I mean, not to know if that’s necessary even. I’m just like a paranoid guy. Yeah. You know, I always plan for the worst, hope for the best.

32:22
Yeah, I will say for a, and obviously we know people who have, mean, Andrew’s community is not cheap, but we know people who have, getting people to pay definitely helps with a lot of that, right? Like you’re removing the, because we see this on webinars, right? Where people will spam and sort of, we don’t get it a ton, but it does happen. But with a paywall, you’re removing at least 50 % of that, if not more.

32:51
I think more than that. think even like a dollar makes a huge difference just getting someone to open up their wall at all. Now will you have will this be like a monthly recurring or yearly or you haven’t thought

33:06
That’s a good monthly with a year membership being like obviously a discount to the monthly. It’s very cheap right now, but um that’s our plan is to do monthly with uh pay for a year and get a substantial discount. Yeah, I think with monthly, like there’s always this huge hassle of credit cards expiring. Yeah. And all that. I mean, I have it. I see it right now with my payment plans. Yeah. Kind of a pain in butt.

33:31
Like assuming you want people to continue paying, right? Obviously. If you don’t care about money. If you don’t care, like they lose access and then whatnot. But I mean, a lot of times, you know, want to get, they’ve already opened up their wallets, so they’re willing to pay the money. And so you almost need to have a person like reminding them to, update their credit card and whatnot. So that’s like another hassle, probably at the price point that I’m thinking for the mic media. I probably just, I probably wouldn’t even care. Probably just.

34:01
For the class obviously it matters because we’re talking hundreds of dollars a right, right, right And you can send out an automated email, but it just doesn’t work as well as when you just send an email that says hey look, you know Right. Yeah, I’m actually glad we’re talking this out because I haven’t spent too much time On the monetization part like I just know it needs to cost something right because if someone opens up their wallet They’re probably not gonna be like overly promotional

34:30
Mm-hmm or as much as like someone who’s just in there just to spam and run right right right and plus I will have their you know information right so You know I can easily ban them in the future ban on their life. So I think my only When I’m thinking through what you’re doing because you have this really high price product at $2,500 so let’s just say you charge $49 a month for the community

34:58
Right, that’s that’s completely made up number. um That seems so cheap, right? Do you think people will, do you think this will, so I can see this affecting the sales of the course initially. I don’t think long term it will affect the sales of the course because I think when people get into the community and realize that like the course actually has all these, you know, I don’t even know how many, we have almost 300 lessons in our course and it’s way newer than what you’ve been doing. um

35:25
I can imagine people thinking like, well, let me try the $49 a month option because $2,500 is steep and then maybe not convert or maybe this is the way they do convert, right? Like, I’m not sure which way it’ll go. Have you thought about that at all? That’s a good question. I think what’ll happen is like I make most of my conversions these days on like the three day workshops that I do, right?

35:53
because that’s what I can show and demonstrate like the true value of the full class. And so the way I see it is you get someone in the community and then you get them to join these free workshops, then they’ll see the value. So like I said, it’s kind like a gateway drug and it’s easier to get people into that workshop if they’re already in the community. So I really don’t see that as a detriment. And for those of the community is gonna be useful, but it’s not gonna be nearly as useful for getting answers.

36:21
as like the full class, obviously, right? Because you’re depending on the community to answer and then you have the bots not for the detailed lessons in the class. Here’s the problem with podcasts, YouTube and blog. Let’s just take YouTube for example. You cannot go into too much depth on YouTube on the actual implementation or the solution. Otherwise that video is gonna bomb. YouTube is kind of meant for the masses.

36:47
Likewise with the podcast, we’re not gonna go into this huge in-depth tutorial on the podcast, right? Interview with anyone. Whereas the class, you can actually get a lot more in-depth on the actual implementation. Yeah, actually I have perfect example of this. So right now we’re talking about communities, we’re talking about Discord, we’re talking about Circle. Liz is gonna come on to Profitable Audience in a couple weeks and give a full breakdown of Circle. The setup, the in-depth. So for people who are considering it, this will be your guide.

37:14
to whether this is the right decision or if you’ve sort of already made up your mind, here’s some cool things we found that it does, that kind of thing. We can’t go into that on the podcast, right? It’s just not feasible. Also, know, obviously this is video recorded, but we’re not screen sharing, we’re not showing, demonstrating types of things. So I totally agree with you. The depth that we go into in uh the lessons in both classes is far greater than we could ever do in a podcast or on a video. uh

37:44
YouTube video. So yes, I totally think that’s the case. I just hope I Don’t know. I think it will be the gateway drug as well for people like they get in there They see how much input it’s kind of like when I took your course a million years ago, right and I took your mini course right 2014 I think it was and The amount of information you gave away for free in the mini course in my mind was like well If this is what you’re giving away for free, what in the world would I get if I paid?

38:13
Right, it was like this, it was a complete motivator based on how good the information was in the free product and we teach this all the time, right? Like you want that information that you’re giving away for free in your lead magnet or in your flow or YouTube series, whatever. We want that to be the best because if people see what you’re giving away, to me it means what am I gonna pay for then? Like how amazing is this going to be? Like what’s the level of service if the level of service is already so high on the free tier? So.

38:40
I think that’s what will happen, but I’m curious to see it because. Here’s actually how I see the community. It’s like a much more improved version of an email list. Right. Because you’re getting all these people together who you actually know and you can interact with.

38:58
And they’re much more likely to respond like when you tag everyone, for example, which is something you have to pay for in Circle, which I think is ridiculous, by the way. Yes. Yes. I said, I said there’s a lot of things that I feel like are dumb for sure. So I can just go at everyone on Discord. Hey, I’m giving a workshop or hey, I’m to be speaking at this event and whatnot. And people instantly get their notification on their phone, which in theory should have much better deliverability on email, which has gotten a lot worse over the years. Yes. Right.

39:28
So actually what I’ve been torn was, you know, on my YouTube videos I always say, hey, if you want to learn about e-commerce, take my six day mini course, which is my email lead magnet. Maybe the right thing to do is to say, hey, join my discord group or something So that’s what we’ve been doing on our TikToks is join, um you know, join. Well, we actually have them take the lead magnet quiz, but our push is to the community. Our push is not to the email.

39:55
You’re asking for a payment right off the front. Yeah. Now we’re going back and forth with that. Right. Like are we going to do we would be rather. And since we are basically starting from zero. Right. um You know we’ve gone back and forth. So now we’re kind of experimenting between take the quiz and you know join the community. Our community price is so low we have had people just join the community because it’s very cheap. But eventually it’s not going to be right. It’s not going to always be this this less this inexpensive. So

40:24
At some point, I’m charging right now. Nine dollars a month. So it’s like a no brainer. Yeah. But I say that hopefully it’s still nine dollars a month when you listen to this podcast. But it should be. You’re like, I got 10 members. I’m overwhelmed. I know. It’s like I’m paying for my circle fee. We’re good. But no, but like to me, our quiz is really good. Like, I feel like our I feel like our lead magnet is exactly what it.

40:50
I felt like we really nailed that. And so to me, part of me is like, I don’t know, we’re also converting people into the community from the email list. So one of the things that we’re doing, because we do a weekly accountability chat, basically, where people, basically, one of the pieces of feedback I got from Lars at ECF was, my wife has joined a lot of communities, but she feels like it’s just all fluff and no action. And so one of the things that we’re really focused on is,

41:17
Having people take action on the next steps and whatever they’re doing right because um our community isn’t for digital content creators It’s for any like female ceo. So it could be you know managing a team or um doing something completely different than like what we do with our courses, um But our so every time we we just started this so I have no I don’t have any data but To remind people about the accountability check-in. I send an email

41:46
but I send it to the whole list, which is not very big. um And as the list grows, probably will not be able to do this long term, but as the list is small, I say, hey, guess what? Today or tomorrow, whenever I send it, our accountability check-in is this day at this time. um Can’t wait to see you there. Oh, but by the way, if you’re not a member of the community, you can join so you can be with us in that accountability chat. Click here, right? And I think we’ve converted two people off of that from an exceptionally small list, so to me, that’s a win.

42:16
So, and I think at a low price point, that is a way to convert people, right? So for you, probably more difficult because your main. I tried that accountability thing. It ended up being a disaster. Well, I wouldn’t say disaster, but, you know, people would purposely not show up because they didn’t want to be. They didn’t want me to ask. Yes, we’ve experienced that for sure. But people are people. the people who are joining our group are only joining for accountability. Like, that’s the point of our whole program, right? Is we take your archetyped.

42:45
and your archetype and we help you figure out your pain points through your type A architect. anyway, um but I would say that might be uh a ploy for you because you have a large general email list, right? When you launch the community, let’s just say you’re doing your check-in or your ask me, let’s call them ask me anythings, right? So you’re doing your ask me anythings Thursday at 10 a.m., right? Let’s just say. So.

43:09
at Wednesday night, you send out an email and say, hey, don’t forget to join us for Thursday. Ask me anything. Oh, not in the community. Join here so you can be with us tomorrow. Right. Yeah. And if the price point’s low enough, for it’s very low for us, I’m sure for you, it’s going to be a very affordable price point. That might be a way to get more people into the community. Right. Is that urgency like, hey, we’re going live in 12 hours. Right. Or whatever it is.

43:34
You know, I talked to Spencer about this. He actually left his community free in the beginning just to get people in and chatting and whatnot. I don’t think I’m bold enough to do that because that’s just inviting spam. Like I’ve I’ve had like many Facebook groups before that were wide open and like they get spam. It’s just I had to close my my wife quick community, which I think it has like 20,000 people. Yeah, it got big. But you had so much spam in there. I remember that.

44:02
Yeah, so the point is like I had to approve every post towards the end. so like huge time. So I can’t handle that. I can’t handle that at all. So that’s why I think it’s important to charge a little bit. So I’ll probably charge like super little just to get, you know, yeah, some people. That was our theory is like charge a little bit in the beginning, get your founding members type thing in. And then obviously they get grandfathered in on the pricing, but then you just continue to creep it up.

44:30
Yeah, and my mentality is like an alternative email list. So I don’t really need to profit off of this, to be honest with you. I just need to be able to pay like a moderator, I think. And it will just be a way to communicate with a lot of people. And I don’t know if that’s your goal with yours, but for me, I actually don’t care about the money that comes in per se in the beginning. Yeah, our goal is a little bit different. Our goal is

44:58
the community is the goal, right? So, but a very focused, know, not just female only, but type A female. We had a couple type B females reach out, very disappointed. I said, well, we’re not qualified to make a type B community, because neither of us are. But our goal is different, right? Our goal is to build the community into a pay, like a revenue source. And so, I think.

45:22
And that way we’ll probably build it a little bit differently. But I think in the end, the goal is always the same. Right. You want an active community where people are actually getting help and benefiting from being in there and being willing to continue to be a part of the community and be like the way communities work is that it’s not just me and you investing in the people in discord. Right. It’s the people in discord investing in each other. And so that’s our goal with what Liz and I are doing as well. But, you know, the way you have to do that in the beginning is definitely

45:50
you as the owner have to be in there. You have to be investing and you have to be making it something that’s exciting for people to be a part of. mean, I can already picture what’s going to happen with mine in my in my dark mind. Like I’m going to see a bunch of agencies and whatever join. Yeah. Yeah. And then just try to be very helpful and then slip in. Oh, by the way, I run into it, you know. Yeah, because we teach that. So I’m thinking to myself, OK, well, how am I going to prevent that from happening? Right.

46:19
So maybe I’ll have to screen to see what people do. So that’s why, in my mind at least, this is feeling like a lot of work in the beginning. So we’ll see. That’s why I’m fully willing to just refund the person and call it a day if this experiment doesn’t work out. But I think it’ll be fine. I think it’ll be fine. Will there be a big announcement when people can join? I’m sure you’re going to get emails like, can I join? Where is this? Let me join right now.

46:46
Are we going to do a big announcement when this happens? Where should people look to find out when this is available? I mean, just join my email list right now. So if you just go over to mywifequitterjob.com and then just sign up for the mini course and then you’ll be on my list at that point. And then I’ll make the announcement there as well as text also. So and before we close it out, I have to give a shout out to someone I met at ECF. I was having a conversation during one of the parties with our friend Danny, who actually is my neighbor.

47:15
I didn’t know we live so close to each other. his former business partner was sitting there and he said, your voice sounds so familiar. And I was like, it does? you know. And he’s like, hear you on. He’s like, are you on Steve’s podcast? So shout out to Patrick, who recognized my nasally, gross voice. ah That was pretty fun. was like, oh, that’s kind of fun that someone recognized me from my voice. ah

47:42
Also a little a little weird but very very exciting so that was I think the first time it’s ever happened like people know me from the podcast obviously but that was the first time someone just hurt had only heard me and never seen me and Recognized the voice. I thought that was kind of And there we go. The easiest way into Tony’s heart is just recognize her voice She just wants to be recognized just want to be recognized

48:06
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Once everything is live, you will all be the first to know. For more information and resources, go over to mywipequitardop.com slash episode 623. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com.