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Growing a paid community through events

One of the things I'm trying to do is to get better at just pushing stuff out there.

I've almost had this paralysis. That I want to do more, I want to create good resources, do a podcast, create some videos, and more. However, often I get stuck at the point where I feel like production work becomes too much to deal with.

I feel like I either need to process the production, or hire someone to do it. And, tbh, neither of those things fill with me joy. I got stuck in paralysis of what to do. I hate not making progress.

Embracing spontaneity

So, I've started going down a different route — embrace spontaneity and the roughness around the edges.

I run Rosieland, which is a community for community builders. It started out as a newsletter and over the past year I've been transitioning it over to a community.

It's been at a slower pace as I would have liked (hello pandemic, complete home renovation and new job!), but I'm still plugging away and heading in a direction I feel happy with.

Perhaps if I didn't have a full time job I would then explore polishing the content up. Right now I just don't have the capacity.

Growing community through events

One way to bring growth into community is to do events. However, doing events when the paid community is still relatively small can be challenging to get people to attend.

So, I've started doing events that are free for paid members and a relatively low fee for people who are not a paid member.

This has a number of benefits:

  • A deadline keeps me accountable: I work to deadlines, for better or worse. It makes me create stuff that I would normally put off.
  • Excuse to shout about it: personally I feel more comfortable promoting it when it's available to anyone
  • Non-members get a taste for what we do in Rosieland. They may or may not be up for becoming a fully paid member, and that's ok. Maybe one day they will sign up, or maybe they'll stick around in our Discord.
  • More people attending the events gives a better experience.
  • It's an asset for later that I can sell and also provide for paid members, it's a win win. It's not a polished course, I won't sell it as one, but it still has value.
  • It pulls new paid members in, there was definitely an uptick in paid members since I started doing this. So, I'm going to keep going!

I charged $20 to attend live plus access to the records, 60 people signed up. It's now available for $49.

I'm not set on a format just yet, I'm going to keep experimenting on formats and topics. Some are more talks, others I'd like to be more exploration of topics.

Some I'd like to do completely for free, experiment with pricing, and try out different types of events, e.g. accountability meetups.

At the moment I have two coming up:

Tools of choice

My first event was using Zoom, but I've totally switched over to Butter for all my events now, which means I use Lu.ma, Butter, and Miro as my main tech stack. And of course, I have Orbit hooked in for the community data side of things.

🙏🏽 I hope this has been helpful.

  1. 1

    Wow!

    This is a great write-up. Especially because some of these tools I haven't heard of yet. I'm currently using circle, but not quite thrilled with their live stream functionality (as of yet) I think they are working to make it better. Anyhoo, I'm happy I've come across this post.

    1. Because you are a community builder, and I think I can learn a lot from you. Woop. and

    2. These apps are hope that I can create an event experience I'm proud of. ✨

  2. 1

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