Sharing How I Built A 5-Figure Paid Niche Slack Community & Tips
Hey all, I know niche communities are becoming increasingly popular and are a great way to extend value to an audience, while also building revenue as an indie maker and/or creator. Since I've had quite a few people ask me how I built Everything Marketplaces as a Slack-based niche community for marketplace founders, I made a YouTube video sharing more on this that you can see:
It's quickly grown to 270+ members and as a paid community, is 5-figures and growing.
If you're looking to build a niche community, you'll probably find this video helpful!
Happy to answer any questions anyone might have about it here.
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Super helpful video -- many thanks.
Glad you found it helpful @robfitz!
Happy member. Thanks for sharing @yoroomie
Great to have you part of it @dru_riley and appreciate your support!
Very helpful - really appreciate you being transparent about everything!
Thanks @yoroomie. That was really helpful. Even I'm working on creating a niche community.
It would be great if you can share some insights on how you gained members initially? Did you start charging from the beginning? How did you outreach the targeted people and manage to convince the members to join the paid group.
Thanks again.
Awesome to hear!
To answer your question and also provide some context, I've shared quite a bit about building, launching, and scaling online marketplaces (on my YouTube and Twitter) so lots of existing content I've put out prior, along with building up a small following from doing so. Over time I've learned that 1.) People have found it incredibly helpful 2.) they keep asking for more, and 3.) I noticed there was a lack of marketplace founders sharing actual insights & building in the open to help others.
With the above said, the first step in building the group was inviting my immediate network of other marketplace founders to a Slack group (10-20). I then put in a ton of time to work with them all and jumpstart the group, started doing group chats every Tuesday with guests that founders were asking to have on (allows members to access domain experts from my network), and then office hours every Thursday (to solve their problems), etc.
From there I then built out a site (everythingmarketplaces.com), created a subscription page, repackaged and created new content as group resources that all members would find initially valuable (and specific to them) before even accessing the Slack (or even referencing later), etc. At this same time I started requiring subscriptions for all new members, then also messaged anyone that had joined prior to ask if it was helpful and if so to support with a subscription.
Lots of other initiatives I did like having to source deals for group (now $50k+), planning our new monthly workshops, etc. One of the biggest growth drivers recently has been when I launched "The Guide To No Code Marketplaces" (guides.everythingmarketplaces.com) for free and it drove 3k newsletter subs for our group newsletter, and probably 50+ new members that are super high quality.
The group serves as a flywheel for me and everything I'm doing and interested in with marketplaces. It doesn't at all feel like "work" and I'm sure anyone in the group can tell you how much passionate I am about marketplaces. If I wasn't, all of the above and how I built the group would be too time consuming and probably have burnt me out. Hope sharing more on it helps though!
That's really amazing. Thank you very much for taking the time and sharing the insights. It is really inspiring to know how you built from a close network of 10-20 people to a community of thousands.
Really inspiring.
Cool, thanks @yoroomie! I actually have a small mostly non-paid community going on now (for starting founders) called Enter Network, but thinking of how I can monetize this further. So this is very helpful!
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