Ivan Misner, founder of BNI, has a good article on how to meet thought leaders. Networking is such a critical success factor for every business, yet most people don’t invest enough time into connecting with people.
Interesting conversation on creator communities, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), what would Substack look like as a community-owned DAO, and more.
Big Idea: The future of the creator economy is moving towards social tokens and crypto technologies. It’s still not mainstream yet, but it likely will be soon.
Another killer video from Noah Kagan. If you don’t know Noah, he’s the founder of AppSumo, the software deal site. Networking is a critical skill for success in every field, yet most people do it in such a self-serving and spammy way. There are smarter ways to connect with others. It’s a short video that’s worth a watch.
Paid newsletters on Substack are very popular now. The business model is very simple; Substack makes it easy for people to charge for newsletters.
A key to their success was focusing on professional writers in the beginning.
“So the early Substack team didn’t just focus their email newsletter on writers within the sea of people who need an email tool, they focused on building a tool for professional writers, not amateurs or semi-professionals.”
“One of the first writers on Substack was Bill Bishop, a tremendous writer who had very loyal readers of a longstanding newsletter about China.”
“At launch, Bill’s newsletter brought in six figures of revenue, and as Fiona told us, that use case “really opened up the door to kind of what might be possible with other writers.”
Business Lesson: Focus on a very narrow subset of your market that is best likely to demonstrate the value of your product. A good analogy is sports companies paying professional athletes to wear their clothes. Can you find that equivalent for your niche?
I love this idea and think it can be extended to many niches.
IndieLog is a community where you share short videos instead of text messages.
With the rise of remote work, everyone is feeling isolated and connecting with others is very difficult. A video-focused community is a great way to build deeper relationships.
Business Opportunities: There are endless niches where this type of community could stand out. Text-based forums are saturated, video is new and it will help forge deeper connections.
“Question #1: How many people want this product? To answer question 1, I looked at places where lots of paleo people hung out. Community sites like PaleoHacks and blogs like Mark’s Daily Apple all mentioned bone broth and its health benefits, while Google Trends showed some decent (and quickly growing) interest.”
“Question #2: Will people pay enough to make this a meaningful business? To answer question #2, I bought the domain “bonebroths.com,” had the stroke of genius to name the company Bone Broths Co., and set up a VERY basic landing page using Unbounce.”
“The number of people clicking the Order Now button on the Unbounce page was insane: 30% of people who hit the site from a cold Bing ad ended up buying.”
Wes Kimbell has a round of startup ideas found on other sites. There are a couple of really good ideas I like this week.
Substack for paid communities (Source: My First Million podcast #150, @jason): Instead of trying to build the community, build the tools to grow the community like a Substack made for communities. This could be a special service that builds a quick splash page that describes the community and encourages them to join as well as implement a payment system. You want it to work with all paid communities (FB, Slack, Clubhouse, etc).
Clubhouse for business teams (Source: My First Million podcast #149, @immad): As more and more companies employ remote workers, there’s a big need to connect them together in a more meaningful way than traditional tools like Zoom and Teams which are cumbersome and not personal. What if someone created a ‘Clubhouse for business’, connecting teams together in a meaningful, ‘water cooler’ way?
Taking online courses together with a group of people adds huge value to the learning process. Seth Godin has been pioneering this model with his AltMBA and other courses.
Instead of commodity courses on popular platforms that almost no one completes, you can charge premium prices for the community and mastermind aspects of students working together to learn.
“We are in the midst of the fourth wave of online education. Known as “Cohort-Based Courses,” or CBCs, this is the first truly Internet-native form of learning. It is the first to tap into the essential nature of the Internet: that it is open-ended and interactive.”
Here is a related Twitter thread from Ryan Gum, the head of growth at Teachable.
Shaan Puri and Sam Parr talk about the opportunities with paid communities.
“Why paid communities are good businesses:
– You can make them kinda fast (much faster if you have an audience) – Fun to run if you like the topic – Don’t need a lot of start-up capital and can have a lean team – Quite profitable”
I’m a huge fan of Dickie Bush’s Ship30for30 cohort-based writing challenge. It’s such a genius idea.
This interview covers how to:
– Gain your first 10,000 followers from scratch – Sell your first digital product by testing your ideas in public – Build a personal brand by using time-tested marketing frameworks – Get paying customers with simple research methods about their pain points and biggest dreams – Compound your growth by building a community of die-hard members who recruit others while you sleep