Felippe Nardi’s 6-figure membership funnel strategy
A six-figure launch of a course is awesome. Selling out 50% of the spots before even opening enrollment is even better.
🕵🏼 So, what’s the secret to a successful launch like this?
Converting a prospect into a paying member means showcasing the value of your community, something especially crucial for cohort-based courses. Felippe Nardi, founder of the Inside The Show community, has designed a way to get there, and he wants to share it with you.
Inside The Show supports presenters, coaches, and creators with the skills to uplift and revolutionize their online sessions. As online experiences have become the new norm, Felippe saw that many new community builders and creators had great content but needed help tailoring the presentation style to an online environment.
Inside The Show gives its members access to one-on-one support, training, workshops, and events to help them uplift and revolutionize their online sessions. The community has had over 2,000 members from 55 countries and just launched its tenth cohort-based course, priced at $2,197 per enrollment.
In this post, we explore Felippe's six-figure new member acquisition strategy—from the prep work to opening enrollment.
What is a membership funnel?
Before we jump into Felippe’s strategy, let’s run through some quick foundations.
Think about a real-world funnel for a second.
The top of the funnel is the widest part, where your potential members come in from organic or paid social and ads. At the bottom of the funnel, you convert the prospect to a paying member.
Your membership funnel stages will vary depending on how you engage with your potential members, but most membership funnels share the same core four funnel stages:
Communicating the value of your community
When Felippe and his business partner were developing their membership funnel strategy, the big question was how to communicate the value of their community.
Felippe describes Inside The Show as an ecosystem that helps creators transform online sessions into incredible live virtual experiences.
- 🤔The challenge is that the community has a lot of content and resources. Short demonstrations weren’t working, and the team realized they needed a strategy to help people understand what it is like to be a part of the Inside The Show community.
- 💡The solution is the Inside The Show Test Virtual Audience Masterclass Week. Felippe and his team have created an experience that gives potential members the experience of a one-year membership in a one-week free event.
Instead of a free trial with access to the community’s resources, Inside The Show provides specially designed resources for the week-long event. The event engages and connects potential members to demonstrate the course’s value and fill the cohort’s 100 seats.
With over 400 active members, the strategy is working. Let’s dive into what makes the Virtual Audience Masterclass Week such a (repeatable) success.
Inside Felippe Nardi’s 6-figure community funnel
As we said earlier, it’s not a free trial of the community. Instead, Felippe and his team have created a custom-designed version of the community and course content designed to showcase its year-long value in one week.
🧪 It’s basically a tightly curated version of “try it before you buy it.”
In the lead-up to each cohort, the Inside The Show team uses paid ads to drive sign-ups for the Virtual Audience Masterclass Week. It’s 100% free and gives potential members a compressed version of what being part of the community will be like—from discussion forums and support to homework and giveaways.
The goal? Driving signups from the cohort to become paying community members
This approach allows potential members to evaluate the course’s value before committing, significantly boosting enrollment rates.
Let’s dive into Felippe’s 8-step process for creating these six-figure revenue-driving cohort experiences.
1. Getting your community space ready for your guests
This is the most critical step in Felippe’s strategy—creating a week-long experience that showcases what being in the community is truly like.
The team investigated what made Inside The Show valuable to its members. Then, they worked back from that to create a unique space inside Circle for the masterclass week that includes:
- Announcements
- Onboarding
- Resources
- Q&A
- Lessons
- Events
- Homework
It’s great content, but it’s not all available on day one. That’s where your potential member’s journey down your membership funnel begins.
2. Onboarding members
Successfully onboarding members is critical, whether after they’ve paid to join or during a virtual masterclass week like the one from Inside The Show. One of the best metrics for successful onboarding is community engagement.
How does he do it? He asks each participant three questions:
- Where are you from?
- What kind of virtual interactive experiences are you planning on creating?
- Share any links you have — social media or websites.
Asking questions is only part of the work. Felippe and his team personally respond to each potential member’s answers to inspire more engagement.
💡 Protip: So, how do they respond to over 1,400 discussion posts? Felippe developed a Google Chrome extension powered by ChatGPT. It reads the answer and provides Felippe or someone on his team with a suggested response they can edit to their voice and respond with.
It’s a scalable way to respond to potential members personally, demonstrating the one-on-one support that being a paid member of Inside The Show delivers.
3. Unlocking the Bonus Area
The Bonus Area is unlocked once the potential members complete the onboarding stage. In this area of the community, Inside The Show posts new content each day during the masterclass week.
This content includes posts on preparing Zoom for Virtual Audience Experiences, the Inside The Show gear recommendation lists, and example sessions to help prep for homework. They post new content daily to help drive return engagements during the masterclass.
4. Providing interactive experiences with events and lessons
Since the Virtual Audience Masterclass Week is a one-week experience of an entire year’s worth of membership, Felippe and the team have created a series of events and lessons that take creators from basic Zoomers to super-powered presenters in a week. All hosted directly in Circle!
It’s more than just watching pre-recorded lessons (although Inside The Show’s pre-recorded lessons are amazing). The masterclass live sessions allow potential members to engage with their cohort and instructors to master the material.
5. Inspiring engagement with homework and giveaways
The masterclass homework isn’t just busy work. Participants are encouraged to share their homework in the masterclass space to get feedback and advice from Inside The Show and other potential members. Felippe says it’s an opportunity to create a sense of belonging and community.
They use giveaways to encourage sharing homework in the space, including an awesome Inside The Show box with an Elgato Streamdeck and LED light. Every potential member who shares their homework gets their name included on a wheel that Felippe spins to pick a winner.
Getting potential members to share their work in the space also generates social proof for Inside The Show. Felippe says many potential members share their homework on social media, demonstrating the community's true value to prospects for the next cohort.
💡 Protip: Just because one funnel is in progress doesn’t mean you can’t start setting up for the next one!
6. Offering support
Support is one of the core components of Inside The Show’s value. If you’ve ever presented before, you know that something will always go wrong. Inside The Show offers one-on-one support through a WhatsApp group so they have the confidence that they won't get stuck if something goes sideways.
To simulate the community experience even more, they created an area called “Ask Felippe and The Team,” where people can ask questions and get answers. It’s open to all masterclass week participants, further showcasing the community’s value.
7. Creating a sense of FOMO
We’re reaching the bottom of the membership funnel with FOMO—fear of missing out. Inside The Show has spent the last week demonstrating the value of a one-year membership. They let potential members know they have a few days left to access their cohort's resources and homework examples before they’re taken offline.
8. Stop. Drop. Open up registration.
The strategy's last stage is closing the community's masterclass space and opening up enrollment. Felippe uses a live event to open enrollment and quickly fills all the seats in his last few cohorts.
💡 Protip: Inside The Show has members from over 55 countries, which means dealing with many time zones. Felippe lets all potential members know they can reach out if they cannot join the live enrollment event. Before the event even started, Inside The Show had already filled 50 of the 100 seats in this last cohort.
Key takeaways
Felippe’s strategy for his six-figure membership funnel is built around demonstrating a year’s worth of membership in one week. So how does he do it?
- It’s not a free trial. Create a tailored experience that takes your potential members from point A to point B. It’s a sliver of what they’ll get from a paid membership, but it’s a big sliver.
- Onboarding is job number one. If there’s one thing we learned in our 2024 Community Benchmark Report, it’s that great onboarding leads to conversions.
- Create FOMO. Once your potential members feel the value you offer, they’ll be much more inclined to become paid members.
By adapting and following these ten steps, creators like you can develop a cohort-based membership funnel strategy that transforms your audience into a thriving community.
Circle brings together your members, discussions, events, courses, and content—all in one place, under your brand. Plus, you get access to our customer community full of handy resources and over 10,000 community builders on the same journey as you.
