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Advice on Launching Paid Community

I’m decided to launch a paid community based on my natural market and need some advice. My book and podcast has gained really good traction (www.fiduciaryu.com) The community is going to be built for members of the retirement industry who want to level up, tap into the collective IQ of other smart people, and sharpen their skills. As a 401k advisor, my most natural market is other advisors and they would be the primary audience and target for members. However, I am thinking of offering membership to employees of industry vendors who I think would also really benefit and greatly expands the number of potential members. The downside is that allowing vendors to be part of it could create a couple of issues:

  1. Advisors have a fiduciary duty to the companies they work with and vendors do not. Advisors typically provide advocacy and provide an important level of accountability. I wouldn’t describe the relationship as adversarial but it’s important that these relationship are arms length.
  2. The risk that vendors could be constantly trying to pitch products and solutions which I want to avoid. Advisors also need to be able to have honest conversations with each other about these vendors.

Anyone have suggestions on how to navigate this? I am thinking of offering a couple of different levels of membership, one of which is just for advisors who would have a section they could only access. Or should I only build it for advisors?

Has anyone run into anything like this before? How did you handle this? Thx.

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    What does your gut say?
    What is your vision?
    How do you know if a person joins isn't a vendor? Could they do so secretly?

    I think much of this can be down to the:

    • the culture you want, build in moderation and rules of what does or doesn't happen in the community. This is a big reason people join paid communities.
    • your vision of what you want to achieve, does this need both groups of people? Would it be better to get people to understand that being good and human would be best for the community going forward? (or is this too much to ask of them? 🙄)
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      Thanks for the feedback @rosiesherry. Thoughts to your questions below:

      1. My gut is seeing shades of grey right now. I can see pros and cons of both approaches.

      2. My major goal in creating this community is to help the retirement industry level up and provide more objective advice/solutions and do a better job for American workers. It's a huge responsibility to be responsible for another person's retirement savings and experience. To do this, there needs to be greater trust and better collaboration/cooperation by both advisors and vendors. I can see the merits of allowing vendors to participate.

      3. My plan would be to interview each prospective member to vet them and assess their priorities/intentions. Assuming they pass the vetting process, I also was planning to offer provisional membership for 2-4 weeks (think trial membership) to give them a chance to see the community in action but also to see how they operate. Also, I would make clear in the code of conduct that promotion/selling isn't acceptable and everyone would be subject to having their membership revoked if they did not abide by these rules. I'm cool with people reaching out directly to one another but not using the discussion forums as a sales channel.

      Thoughts?

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