Money mindset and pricing your Circle community

Rene (attendee): Okay, I’m joining from Denmark.

Mathilde Leo: Amazing. Really? I’m not too far. I’m in Lisbon in Portugal. 

Rene: Oh, yeah, I have been there. I love the country. 

Mathilde Leo: It’s beautiful, right? How is the weather? And is it rainy or is it still quite cold?

Rene: Some cloudy.

Mathilde Leo: Okay. Hello, everyone Barbara. Really welcome. It’s great to see you all. It’s nice to see people who are joining bright and early before the session starts. Let me know in the chat where you’re joining from for some of you I know. Copenhagen, yeah. Hey, Tatiana, Tyran. Welcome, welcome everyone. Awesome. Hello everyone. Let’s give it a few minutes to give time for people to join us. In the meantime, let me know in the chat where you are joining from today. Barbara is in central US, nice. Brooklyn, New York. Long Beach. We always travel with those chat prompts, right? We also test our geography. 

Well, thanks everyone for joining this expert workshop—pricing for Circle communities. How much should you charge? That’s the question we’re gonna explore today with our Circle Experts and friend, Tatianal. Tatiana, you might know her from the awesome workshop she’s already presented in the community or you might know her from her awesome work building a course called Build a Community Business. She’ll tell us a bit about that in the second.

But today really is gonna be about exploring pricing strategies for communities and in particular how you can charge more? How can you charge what your community is worth? Because when Tatiana and I were thinking about the session, we were like this is actually one of the best, one of the most important things that community builders can do to really build sustainable community businesses. Right? So Tatiana talks a lot about community businesses in her writing, in her course, so that’s what we’re gonna explore today.

But first a little bit more time to get to know each other. Let me know in the chat: Where do you call home? So I already asked you where you’re joining from but let me know where you call home. Maybe it’s a different place than where you are right now. And also share one thing that you were doing right before joining the session. What were you up to? Were you in a meeting? Were you outside? I’m making coffee. And I’ll start, so I have many homes. I’m from France from a small town in the French Alps, but actually lived a bit in different countries. So now I’m in Lisbon, Portugal. I also lived in London. So for me home is a bit everywhere, I would say. And right before this event, I was actually in a meeting with our head of product marketing to plan a really exciting release, the feature announcements that you’re gonna discover tomorrow. A little teaser: It’s about recurring events. So I don’t want to say too much but I think a lot of you, yeah, I see some smiles there, a lot of you have been waiting for this for a long time. So it’s happening. It’s gonna reach you tomorrow.

Awesome. Let me read the chat. It’s nice to see what people were doing right before entering the Zoom room that we all share right now. So Tyrone, home is the office for sure for a lot of us. Jenny says, was refining my sales script for my website. Samantha, close to the Rocky Mountains in Southern Alberta. That’s where home is, Canada, nice. My home is Costa Rica and I was in a meeting with the client 10 minutes ago. Diane, home is the US Virgin Islands, right before this call I was playing with my granddaughter. Oh amazing. Great. Thanks everyone. It’s nice to get a little bit of an insight into each other’s life there.

All right, a little bit of housekeeping for this session. For those of you who have joined workshops before, you know the drill, but if you’re new, we are together for about an hour. Make yourself at home, grab a drink. I have some Red Bull here for me, it’s 6PM and I need the extra caffeine.

If you can turn on your camera, it’s always nicer. The sessions are always friendlier and for the presenter as well, it’s nice to see, you know, their content landing and where we might be lost. So if you can, that’s always nicer. If not, no worries. You can be off camera, we understand that there are many things that might be happening that might deter you from putting your camera on, like people in the background, noise, Zoom fatigue or whatnot. So it’s totally fine if you want to stay off camera.

The replay of this session will be added to our video library in the community. So this is recorded. We’ll also add extra links and resources that Tatiana and I will share and mention in this session. And we’ll have a nice and friendly Q&A at the end. I’ll share a bit about that at the end around how you can ask questions. All right. And welcome to those who just joined us.

Cool, Tatiana, welcome back. It’s so exciting to have you back here to tell us and teach us what you know about pricing strategies for Circle communities.

Tatiana Figueiredo: Hello. Hello, I’m nervous about this one. Right before this, I was freaking out. That’s what I was doing before.

Mathilde Leo: Oh, okay. Let’s let’s all give Tatiana an emoji and some support, a heart. You got this, Tatiana. You always have awesome and practical content for us and just can’t wait for this session. This is probably not reducing your anxiety level but there we go. Awesome. Yeah, I love it. 

Tatiana Figueiredo: I feel like I’ve saved all my hottest takes for this session. So we’ll see how it goes. 

Mathilde Leo: All right, are you ready to get started and share your screen? 

Tatiana Figueiredo: Yeah, I’m ready. Just bear with me one second. Before I start actually, Mathilde, I wanted to tell you, the other day and this person was talking to me about Circle and I told them that I would tell you this. They said that they were moving from a different platform and they were looking at different community platforms and they decided to go with Circle and the reason they decided to go with Circle was the Circle community and you. So I told them I was gonna tell you. 

Mathilde Leo: Oh, that’s so nice..

Tatiana Figueiredo: And so this is me. I’ve done a few other workshops for the Circle community. I’m Tatiana. I’m a community business strategist. I run a course in the community called Build a Community Business and I’m also a Circle Expert. I always like to say the reason I do what I do is because I believe that community businesses have the opportunity to really fix a lot of crappy problems that we have in the world right now and they can only do that if the community business leaders are well supported and they’re getting paid well and they’re not burnt out. So that’s what my job is supporting you all on not getting burnt out and getting paid.

So that’s me and before we go into pricing, I wanted to talk a little bit about community businesses in 2022. Like where are we in this evolution of this kind of business model, this kind of business. And I believe we’re still at the very beginning of what’s happening here. We are coming out of hopefully coming out of a pandemic now, where online business in general was accelerated in the way that it’s done online. So there’s a lot of new platforms. There’s a lot of excitement around online businesses.

But I believe that in terms of community and people paying for connection online, we’re still at the beginning of people being used to paying for online community, paying for participating in a group where they’re being connected with other people like them. So I think that we have our work cut out for us because it’s still not something that everyone is familiar with but it’s also like a really big opportunity for us as the community of community people to come together and kind of define what that future can look like and define like what it means to be a community business.

We’re still very much in the beginning of what this can be and I believe that pricing is a big part of really claiming connection and community. Something that’s valuable and something that people should be paying for. So before we start with the strategy stuff and the heavier stuff that we’re gonna talk about. Well, this part is happy too because we’re gonna talk about mindset and we’re gonna talk about money.

So I wanted to start and reach out to Mathilde about this, I wanted to talk about what holds us back from charging what our worth is for our communities and for our businesses. So I hope that you have something to take notes on because we’re gonna take a couple minutes to answer a reflection question. So I’ll just put it on the screen just think about it for a little bit and I’ll share my story and if you’d like you can share yours in the chat also,

And so this is a question from Jerry Colonna from a book that I really like called Reboot. How did my relationship to money first get formed? And how does it influence the way I work as an adult? What was the belief system around money and work that I grew up with? So just take a couple minutes and then I’ll tell you what my answer is.

Okay, I invite you to go back to this question later on. This is something, this is one of the questions from that book that I go back to pretty often and think about—specifically how it’s having an effect in my life. And so I’ll tell you what my answer for this one was. And so I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and the positive side of that when it came to money is that the people in my family always felt like they could make their own reality. They always felt like if something was broken, it was up to them to fix it. So there was a lot of initiative in the way that they thought about money—if you didn’t have money then like let’s figure out a way to get money. Let’s figure out a way to make money.

The dark side of that is that I think I was taught that your worth, like your personal worth, was tied to how well your business was doing or whether you have money or not. So that’s a belief that I’ve had, and a belief that I think about when subconsciously thinking about how much to charge and want to raise prices and and things like that.

And so I’m going to go through a few of the beliefs, the themes, that I’ve seen that come up when people answer this question and you tell me which of these resonate with you and your experiences and how you grew up.

So these are things that hold us back. Number one that a lot of us have is scarcity. So whether you grew up with a lot or little you always feel like there’s a limited amount to go around and you always feel like if I don’t take what I can get then I’m never gonna get anything. So scarcity is one of those beliefs.

People pleasing is another one—the idea that in order for me to get what I need, I need to go against my values to make sure that everyone likes me and to make sure that I’m pleasing everyone. So you can see how that would show up in your pricing and everywhere in your business. Really. Yeah, Maria saying that for me it was scarcity 24/7. Yeah. That’s a really common one.

Another one that’s kind of the other side of the spectrum is like a riskier environment. So let’s put it all out there and let’s risk everything and the reward will come later, kind of like that toxic positivity outlook.

And then the last one is like hustling for your worth which was the one that I most connected with which was like if what you’re doing is not successful then you’re not worth anything. Like, that affects your worth. It was actually a big realization for me to separate those two things. Like even if I don’t have any economic value to the world, I’m still inherently valuable and that’s an idea that is revolutionary in a lot of ways and that’s an idea that I think is important for us to bring to our communities as well.

Let me read some of the comments. Maria recommended “The Psychology of Money” as a book to understand why we’re all different toward money. She said, “When you grow up broke with family from third world Dominican Republic, expectations are low as far as how much money one can make—hustling every day.” Yeah. I relate to that a lot. I grew up in Brazil. Paul said, “I was brought up to believe that money does not buy happiness, and it’s just there to help.” Yeah, that’s a unique one, but that’s an interesting one also.

So, I think it’s important for us to keep these in mind as we’re thinking about pricing. In the next section, we’re going to talk about pricing actually, and Mathilde, this is a good time for the poll.

Cool. Yeah, so you should see a poll on your screen. How much are you right now charging for your community? This is for me to get an idea and for everyone to kind of get an idea where we are. If you have something that is not necessarily like a membership community just pick the one that is closest to what it is. 

Mathilde Leo: We almost have all answers. Once we have most of them we can publish the results. Tatiana, is that what you wanted?

Tatiana Figueiredo: Yeah, that’d be great. And you I feel like I’ve been on other calls where people didn’t see the poll and it’s like a Zoom thing. So if you don’t see the poll if you feel comfortable you can put in the chat how much you charge for your community. And Barbara said my community members are part of a paid program. So I want to launch another paid community. Cool. 

Mathilde Leo: So look, we have most of the answers. So I’m gonna end the poll and publish the results. 

Tatiana Figueiredo: Someone said I have a paid option, but no one has bitten yet. Currently working on relaunching the community and better defining my tiers and the value within each one. Cool, Joy said wanting to charge $997 per year or potentially more for VIP membership. Cool. Cool. So a lot of people haven’t launched or are not sure yet. That’s great. They’re gonna radicalize you early on with this workshop. Less than 20 dollars a month. That’s 21% and then a good chunk of 21 to a hundred dollars a month and then a few that are more than 300 and nobody at 1,000. And then there’s more detail in the chat. Have a per month for overall community and a program, the Ted speaker tier is a flat fee for the program. Yeah, we’re going to talk a little bit about the different structures now and how to think about, you know, when your community has multiple tracks and things going on.

So again I mentioned in the beginning that I was nervous because these are all my hot takes on pricing. With everything that I share ever, I always want to say, you know, do whatever you want, like take what is helpful to you, take what resonates with you, take what you feel like would work for your members and completely ignore everything else.

In the numbers that I’m going to share don’t feel like you’re behind. Don’t feel like you’re not doing things right, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. We’re gonna share a vision for where we can all head as community business leaders, but it doesn’t mean that you have to be there right now. So don’t worry about anything that we’re sharing.

I’m also going to share some tips on next steps if you’re just starting from scratch or if you want to just only raise the price a little bit, you don’t have to completely change your business from night to day. Okay, we have a lot to cover. So let’s move a little faster.

So what I’m gonna do now is I’m going to share there are four types of community businesses and spoiler alert. These are what they are. One is membership communities. Another one is an evergreen course with office hours, number three is a cohort-based course and number four is group coaching.

And what we’re gonna do now is basically go through each of these. I’m going to show you examples of some that are like pure of each of these types and how much they charge and then I’m going to tell you the range for each of these for the target price that we’re hopefully moving towards charging and a lot of places that I’m going to share are very North America based.

So they’re based on a US salary. If you’re in a part of the world that has different earning power and your members are also in that part of the world, that’s something that you’re gonna consider in your pricing. But the main point of this whole thing is charge more. So if you take anything away, that’s what it is. Oh, did you have a question, Mathilde?

Mathilde Leo: No, just me playing around with my keyboard or doing weird things. Sorry.

Tatiana Figueiredo: So first, we’re gonna talk about membership communities. This is like what most of us think about when we think of a community. My definition is memberships are ongoing community experiences for people who have something in common and benefit from connecting and supporting each other. They often include perks, events, educational content like workshops with guests.

There is something that I talk about and I talked about in the last video that I did with Circle which is the connection to learning ratio. Basically when people join a community, there are two things that they’re doing in the community because communities are all about growth and people grow through both connection and learning and these different types of community businesses have different ratios of connection to learning.

So you remember in the last video if you watched it with the contest I talked about specifically the Circle spaces and separating the learning and connection spaces into library spaces and cafe spaces. This is also true across your community in the events that you host, in the emails you send, in everything else. So this is the ratio that I’m talking about here and membership communities have the highest connection percentage in this ratio. So it’s 80/20 connection to learning.

True membership communities, so that means that most of what’s happening in a membership community is members connecting with each other. It doesn’t mean that’s all that’s happening. There’s also a lot of learning there’s always that there could be guest speakers there could be content that’s involved. But the main point of it is the connection piece.

And then an example of this in real life. So I always like to connect online community stuff back to the real world because I believe that what we’re doing is really connecting people for real. It just happens to be on the internet. So I always like to think of examples that happen in real life and were already happening for dozens of years before the internet came out.

So I think a good example for this is Chambers of Commerce. So a lot of cities and towns in the US have a Chamber of Commerce and this is an organization that brings together the different businesses in that town and they share resources. It’s an opportunity for them to partner and connect with each other. So I think that this is a good kind of in real life proxy for what we’re doing online in membership communities.

Oh, I don’t know what happened to this slide. But hopefully the next one is better. Oh, no, this listed everything that’s included in this community, The Upside, which is what I’m using as an example for an online membership community. They are a community for very high-end consultants and most of what happens in the community is that people are connecting with each other, they’re bringing each other on to different projects that they’ve gotten, They’re asking for advice on negotiating with clients and things like that.

They do have expert sessions and there’s a little bit of content involved with it and there’s also office hours that are hosted but the main thing is the members connecting with each other. And they charge $189 a month and they charged this quarterly and they have I think close to 200 members at this point.

Oh, thank you, Mitchell put the link in the chat. Thank you. All the communities that I’m sharing here are communities that I’m either familiar with because I have worked with them. They’ve been my clients and I’m allowed to share about them or I’m in them and this one it happens to be they were both my client and I’m also in the community as a member.

So 189 a month. That’s how much they charge. So I think the target price range for this category of community business that we’re all building, again US-based, whatever the equivalent would be in your own country, I would make that conversion. But what I think that our target should be for these kinds of communities is $40 to $250 a month.

I think that if you charge any less than this, then you need to grow your community a lot in order for you to make enough money. And in order for you to be able to run the community efficiently as a leader, I think that we shouldn’t bank on communities becoming larger and larger, we should make it a good experience for less members and that comes with charging more upfront. 

Just some quick math on what that means. So if you’re charging $40 to $250 a month with a hundred members, that means that per year very roughly you’re making $48,000 to 3$00,000 a year. Yeah, and exactly people pay attention to what they pay for.

I think that we’ll talk more about this. But I think there are a lot of communities that start out cheaper because the idea is that later they’ll charge more. I have very rarely seen that transition being made in reality. If you started a very low price range, you’re attracting different members than the members you actually want if your plan is to eventually charge more. So you might as well just charge more, you might as well just figure out a community offer that is gonna be okay to charge more even if you don’t have a ton of members, even if you’re just getting started.

So the second one is evergreen course and office hours. So the definition of this one is of course with recorded lessons where students can set their own pace. And then they have a community platform and or events where they can get their questions answered and meet others.

Sometimes this is called a hybrid model of online courses. I think that in the online course world, this is done without a lot of investment in the community many times and I think there’s a big opportunity to have the thoughtful community around an evergreen course as a way for you to be able to charge more for the course itself.

Oh my God, all the images are here. But it’s kind of the best of both worlds in some ways because you don’t have to do a cohort where you’re teaching live. All your recorded lessons are there, but they still get some interaction with you as the teacher.

The connection to learning ratio for this one is much more on the learning side. So it’s 30/70. So people come for the course and then the community is just more of like an added bonus of what they get but there’s an opportunity for you to shift that ratio a little bit if you’re really thoughtful with designing what the community is. Unfortunately all the images—oh, no, it showed up. Okay, cool.

And so there if the real life example of this is Khan Academy, so even though Khan Academy is online what they’ve done is they make their they’ve shifted the way that education works in that they made it so that the kids would learn using the videos and then when they came to the to the classroom, they were practicing with with the teacher and the teacher was answering questions. And a lot of people say that this was like a big shift in education and it’s a way to better be able to better serve the students because the the teachers are there answering questions and helping them overcome problems instead of the teacher kind of saying the same thing every year and then they go home and try to solve the problems at home for homework.

So this evergreen course with office hours is kind of similar to that model. And then a Circle example is Notion Mastery. Again, sorry about this image. It should have an image on there of their Circle. And Notion Mastery is Marie Poulin, of course about Notion and it’s exactly this. It’s an evergreen course that’s actually delivered on Notion. So you’re learning Notion as it goes through the course and then there are not only office hours, but lots of other events that Marie and her team post so that when you get stuck you always have a place to go to ask. And there’s always programming happening in the community and you always have a place to go when you get stuff.

So especially for courses that are a little bit more technical. This is a really good option. The image came back. This might be a really good option and I think it’s one that hasn’t been explored enough. So if you have content, this could be a good one for you to explore. Notion Mastery, here we go back straight cost. $750 a year. You pay $750 and you get access to the course for 12 months. So you get access to both the course and all of the different events.

And here’s the image with all the different events. They have office hours, beginner office hours bonus sessions or workshops. This is when they teach cars parts of the lessons live, hot seats and then demos also so it’s almost like when you’re programming a TV channel, and there’s like the main show that you always that is like the prime time and then there’s like all these other shows that kind of help that show. Anyway, I’ll explain more about that analogy one day from when I used to work on TV channels.

So the Target price range for this one I think is $750 to $3,000 a year for this hybrid model of courses. I think that $750 is on the lower end. And that’s where Marie is, she can do that because she has a huge audience. If you’re not starting with such a huge audience, I’d consider starting a little bit more expensive if you can so if you’re the the range here. Again, if you have a hundred members, which you have to think about whether that’s realistic with your audience, and then per year you’re talking about $75k to $300K a year with a hundred members.

Mathilde Leo: They had a question to send that maybe we can cover in Q&A depending on the flow of your presentation. When you land on the higher price for your community, what’s the best way to find leads to join your community? And maybe we can discuss that in Q&A, like your thoughts around if you have a high ticket price, how does that play with finding members and attracting the right people?

Tatiana Figueiredo: I mean, we’ll talk about that at the end a little bit, but really quick, you’ll find that just talking about things that are for your members who are a little bit on the higher end of the spectrum will attract those numbers a lot of times. They’re already listening to what you’re saying and they’re just waiting for you to talk to them specifically and so it not as hard as it seems. 

But also what I recommend is starting really small. So I was a coach and a consultant working one-on-one before I ever launched the course or anything that was for more for like groups and I think that if you have something like a course or something that is based on your content or based on like something that you’ve created, delivering that one-on-one or in very small groups at first will make sure that first of all you’re getting paid from the beginning, so you’re not starting from that mindset of scarcity and I’m like waiting for someone to pay me. You can find a few clients that are kind of keeping you afloat as you build out the community and the program that you want to build. So I always recommend finding a way to start in that way and I’ll talk a little bit more about that at the end. 

The third one is cohort-based course. So this is cohort-based courses, sometimes are called CBCs, they are intensive short-term community experiences that bring together a like-minded group to learn a concept, hold each other accountable, and connect. So these are not communities that go on forever. They’re communities that kind of pop up and later sometimes they turn into membership communities, but this number three is really about the cohort experience.

They’re usually like four to 12 weeks on the longer end, and the connection to learning ratio 40:60 in my opinion. The real life example—what’s going on with the images? A real life example is a university course. So this picture was a picture of literally someone at the front of the class teaching at a university. I think of cohort-based courses as having a lot of parallels to this kind of learning. It’s like a group of people coming together.

They’re sharing ideas. And then they go on to the next course afterwards. And then the circle example that I had was Breakthrough Facilitation, which Gwyn just did a Show and Tell, which you can see in the Circle Community. It is I think a four week cohort that Mathilde was actually just in and I’m joining the next one. Oh yeah Mahtilde just dropped the link.

Mathilde Leo: Highly recommend the course but also watching the Show and Tell because it’s pretty awesome to see how a cohort-based course can be set up on Circle. And they had a pretty awesome setup and layout. 

Tatiana Figueiredo: Cool, yeah, It’s a course to learn facilitation, which I think is really cool. And I’ve collaborated with Gwyn in the past and it’s great. So she charges $1,500 per four-week cohort for the course. And Mathilde. I don’t know what happens with the community after the course. So are you still in the Circle community? Everyone just stays in there?

Mathilde Leo: You stay in there, right. You have access to all the resources, the alumni, you can still revisit the material and so on.

Tatiana Figueiredo: Got it. So that’s a cohort example for you to look at. Another example is Write of Passage on the very high end of cohort-based courses, and that is $4,000 to $7,000. They have a VIP option for their cohort. This is one of the most successful CBCs, they consistently fill their class. I think it’s like 150 per cohort. They do it a couple of times a year, and people all over the internet will talk about Write of Passage. I bet someone is talking about that in the chat. There are Write of Passage alums all over the internet, talking about how many people they met and how good the connections were from their cohort. So it’s a really popular one. 

I think the target price range for CBCs should be from $1,500 to $8,000 per cohort, depending on what’s included in the cohort, depending on how it’s structured, depending on the type of course that it is.

Courses that are much more around hobbies are harder to charge a lot more money for, whereas more professional courses are easier to charge a premium for. So again, with a hundred members, these numbers start going up a lot more. It’s $150,000 to $800,000 a year, assuming you have a hundred members.

And then the last one is group coaching, and I think this one is something that a lot of us are doing without calling it this and without charging as if it is group coaching. So as you kind of see what this is, think about the way to position what you’re doing and if you can kind of position it towards group coaching because that’s something that you can charge a lot more for.

Group coaching programs are small group experiences that can include content and structured regular meetings to help members grow and learn from the facilitator and each other. They can be ongoing or time-bound, and I think the connection and learning for this one is 50/50. I think it’s both. The in real life example is CrossFit. Any gym, any group gym program, this is basically what you’re doing. You get a lot of one-on-one support but within the group. And then the online example, this was a coaching program that I was in, and she actually wasn’t on Circle, even though I would like her to be on Circle.

She is a coach that focuses on the imposter complex and helping you think bigger and kind of heal some of those things that we’re just talking about from your childhood thinking about money so that you can go bigger, be more visible, show up more in the world. She charges $7,000 for a three-month program. I don’t have as much experience on the client side helping group coaching programs, but I think that there is so much opportunity to add really high touch community to these group coaching programs.

So I think that the target price range here is between $500 a month to $3,000 a month. I’ve seen even higher, and then I think if you go any higher than that, it starts to be a little bit scary. I did this with 25 members instead of a hundred members. And so if you’re charging these kinds of numbers, even with just 25 members, you’re looking at $150,000 a year to $900,000 a year. The numbers kind of go up a lot.

This is the chart of everything that we just talked about. Again, the ratio there is connection to learning and this is the range of the pricing. I’d love for you to put in the chat which numbers you are, and it might be more than one, like I’ve talked about them separately so far, but it might be that you have a membership community and a cohort-based course or group coaching. It could be different ones.

All the above. One and four. One and four. Not too sure right now but a bit of all. One and four, yeah. One, two and three. Membership community and potentially group coaching too. Membership. Cohort-based course. Yes, it’s really group coaching and ongoing evergreen. 

Yeah, so I’m going to talk about what my course is so that you can have an example of what this is, and you can know what to do with knowing which category you feel you fit into. So my community and course is really one, two, and three.

Even though it is a little bit of group coaching, but it’s growing a little bit too fast to be too much group coaching. So I think it’s gonna be more one, two, and three at least for the time being. And this is what that means. This is all the different things that we do and which category they fall into.

So in the membership community category, we host workshops, there are member-hosted events, accountability groups, and conversation spaces. This is for my course called Build a Community Business. And for evergreen course and office hours, we do have pre-recorded lessons, worksheets, and templates and we do one to two monthly office hours and we just started doing hot seats, that falls into the evergreen.

And then cohort-based course, we do have a four-week live cohort and it’s an interactive experience like there are interactive events and experiences two times a week during the cohorts. And then that is where kind of the small group coaching fits into it more.

The next cohort of the course is coming up and if you apply before this Friday, it just went up in price, but if you apply before this Friday, you get the previous price. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second.

But the thing I wanted to share about the price, so the price of the community and the course is $1,800 a year or you can choose to pay in 12 installments now for $180 a month. And the thing that’s important about this is if I told you I had a membership community and it was $180 a month, that’s on the higher end membership community. So that sounds expensive. Which it is, it is a membership community and it is $180 a month, but that’s more on the expensive side.

If I told you I had an evergreen course with office hours and it was $1,800 a year, that’s kind of in the middle of the range that’s kind of in the middle. And if I told you I had a cohort-based course and it was $1,800 then that’s actually on the lower end of cohort-based courses.

So in terms of how, if you are multiple of these, in terms of how your positioning what you’re selling it’s worth it to look at this chart and to think about which one is best to lead with because membership communities are always going to be thought of—well not always, hopefully not always but right now—they’re out of something as something that should be like $10 a month $20 a month. These higher price skills are still harder to get from membership communities.

But once you’re established, it’s much easier to get referrals and it’s much easier to charge $200 a month for a membership community. But until you get there, it might make sense, especially if you have content connected to what you’re doing, to think about reframing it as some kind of course that you can offer. Does that make sense? Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Aw Diane. Diane is talking about Build a Community. 

Joselin: Where did you begin? 

Tatiana Figueiredo: Yeah, so I mentioned I started doing a lot of this work one-on-one with people until I understood what the commonalities were and what the curriculum for something like this could be and I did a beta, It was about a year ago. I did a beta, it was like $600, and it was really to test the content and it was like 10 people that paid $600 and that was just a cohort-based course.

I didn’t talk about membership community at all because it was only 10 people and it didn’t make sense to pitch it as a membership community because it was such a small group. And then after that cohort there was the first official cohort, that was last fall, and then it started to more turn into a membership community and we started to add events in between the cohorts. Until finally after this cohort, that’s when we added the evergreen option where you could join at any point and take the course whenever you’d like and then you would be automatically enrolled into the next cohort. So the next cohort that we’re doing is starting in like a couple weeks and we already have the people who joined in between the last cohort and this cohort, to join this cohort, which is nice because we don’t have to do such a big launch.

There’s not all this huge pressure that people can only join in between the two weeks. The people who are joining this cohort are already in the community and we’ll get a bunch of other people joining because there’s also a push before the cohort for more people to join but no one had to wait to join the community. Does that make sense?

Joselin: Yes, thank.

Tatiana Figueiredo: So if you are interested in getting some more support and help, as I just mentioned, the next cohort starts on May 24th. And the last day to join is May 20th for this spring cohort. It’s a four-week cohort and it’s really fun. We do a lot of events and you kind of get a crash course on everything that you’re gonna learn and then you spend the rest of the year in the community implementing what you learn.

So if you’re interested and you apply before the end of this week, then you get the previous price which was $1,500. So you saved $300. One of the things that I’m doing every cohort is raising the price starting now, and we’re gonna end up at a much higher price point. You know part of telling other people to raise their prices is that you kind of have to leave and also raise your prices.

So that’s something that I’m going to do. And speaking of raising prices, I want to leave a little bit of time for a couple questions at the end, so I’ll kind of speed through this and if you have any questions, you can DM me on Twitter or Instagram, or email me.

But this is why you should raise your prices. Freemium is really risky for communities. People don’t tend to convert from freemium to a premium solution because as soon as they join their community, they already feel like they’re not being able to take advantage of everything that’s there. So it’s an assumption that’s really risky to invite people to a free community or a very low cost community and expect those people to convert to something. That’s more expensive.

The other thing, Mathilde already mentioned this in the chat, is it increases the member investment. So the more people are paying for your community the more they’re going to show up. We hear this over and over again, and I’ve experienced it and it’s definitely true. Your members are gonna have a better experience if they’re paying more for your community, which sounds like a scam, but I promise it’s not.

The third thing is resentment. When you feel resentment towards your community, whenever you feel resentment period, it comes from a lack of boundaries. And so whenever you feel resentment about something there’s an opportunity to set a boundary somewhere and pricing is a boundary. So if you feel resentment toward your community and think about pricing as a boundary and think about scaling back what you’re offering potentially to kind of balance that out a little bit better.

And then the fourth thing is like I mentioned in the beginning we’re all working on like a pretty new thing. And every time you raise your price you’re saying that bringing people together and connecting them is something that’s valuable and there’s something that people should be paying for and I think that is worth it.

One quick note about inclusive pricing, because I know you’re probably all thinking not all my members can afford something so expensive and that’s definitely true. Again, people live in different parts of the world, people have different disadvantages. We are all dealing with white supremacists, capitalism, and just a world that is not fair to everyone.

So these are three. I also wrote a piece about this but these are three ways to kind of offset that depending on what you want to do and depending on what kind of members you want to welcome into your community. Carrie Melissa Jones does this really well. It’s a really good example, she uses both scholarships and parity pricing for her course, that I think starts tomorrow the new cohort of her accelerator. So that’s a good example to look at.

And then finally just some ways to get started. Get very clear on your member growth Journey. So what is it that your members come to you for? Like what are they looking for? Where do they want to end up? And what is the in between there? And like how can you help them on that journey?

Again, what I already mentioned, starting really high touch with less members so that you can charge an appropriate amount so that you’re making money from the beginning is a good approach. And then raise prices 20% each cohort, if you have cohorts. You don’t have to raise prices for the members that are already in your community, but raise prices for anyone new that’s coming in.

That’s a really good way to kind of get started. If you want to see more of me and dig into more of the community offers and what it means for these four different types, I’m gonna be talking about that tomorrow in this free workshop that I’m doing. I’m also going to talk a lot more about the BACB there. So if you might be interested, that’s a good workshop to come to.

Again apply for BACB before this Friday if you’re interested and you’ll get that discount and DM me on Twitter and Instagram if you have questions.

Mathilde Leo: Awesome, let’s all unmute ourselves and give Tatiana some claps for the great content she put together. Let’s go. Unmute! That doesn’t always work. Sometimes… yeah. Thank you so much, Tatiana. Those were really great strategies. And I really love the way your typology of communities is really interesting in its own right. I think, thinking about the learning to connection ratio and to really understand what people are ready to pay for. We often say people are not necessarily willing to pay for connections, but oftentimes they are, as shown by your examples.

So we don’t have much time for questions, but what I suggest we do is let’s take maybe one quick question from the chat and then I will save the chat as usual, put in the replay. and how about we continue the conversation asynchronously? So Tatiana if you’re open to it, you could respond to the questions that were dropped in the chats in the replay once we post it? And as you mentioned, we can also join your follow-up session tomorrow and learn more. How does that sound?

Tatiana Figueiredo: Great. Yeah, I forgot to mention. You can also DM me on Circle if you have any questions or any ideas.

Mathilde Leo: Awesome. That’s right. I put your Circle Expert profile as well before so… I need to take a question. Which one will I pick? Let me see. Is there anyone that you saw in the chat Tatiana you wanted to kind of address as a bit of a closing remark and discussion?

Tatiana Figueiredo: I love that, Jason. I’m sorry, but did you just bash capitalism? His handle is W2 Capitalist? I did, sorry. 

Mathilde Leo: Let’s see. Well Matt was asking earlier. It’s actually just a bit of a clarifying question about your own business model for building community business. Do you have three models within the same community and price?

Tatiana Figueiredo: No, it’s only… that’s a good clarifying question. It’s only one price. It’s $1,800 for everything and we position it more as a course and community. But yeah, you get everything, all those three columns that are listed, you get everything and for right now, there’s only one tier, that’s the only thing that you get. I am working on something a lot more premium, but I’m not sure actually yet how that’s gonna fit in but it’s gonna be different.

Mathilde Leo: Mm-hmm. John asked a great question earlier. Could you discuss layering courses on top of membership and the way to upcharge it in a way that is interesting to attract people to it? It’s an interesting one, right, how do you, and I’m gonna post it again in the chat so it’s there for everyone, how does, because you know, as you described, as communities are hybrids, you have courses, you have membership both at the same time. Like, strategies or thoughts around upselling if I understand correctly, John, and maybe you can clarify what your question meant? Upselling from one to the other?

John: Yes or offering courses on top of membership and attracting members to those courses and or to other events or things that are premium in essence because I have a lot of offerings to my members generally.

Tatiana Figueiredo: In the workshop tomorrow, we’re gonna talk a little bit more in detail. What I would say is I always recommend you having one core offering and then you’re trying to get people to that offering for whatever it is. And the other you kind of figure out whether the other things are going deeper in that or if they’re leading people to that specific offer. Like where else do they fit on the spectrum? If you have everything in there kind of on the same plane and it’s harder for people. for your members. to understand in their mind and for you to also strategize what comes first. second, and third. But if you have one and you know where it fits, I think it’s a little bit easier because it can go both ways. If you can go from a course to a membership or from a membership to also offering courses, you just kind of have to know the one that’s your main one.

Mathilde Leo: Hmm. By the way, everyone, it’s not the last time we are doing a workshop on pricing or that we have those discussions because this is definitely a huge topic and arguably the most important topic for community builders these days. Because like Tatiana you said we’re just at the beginning of this wave of building community businesses. So you should really expect more sessions. We already started, some of you were there, every first Friday of the month we have a monetization office hours with Shannon from our team to understand and navigate Circle paywalls and how you can use paywalls to monetize different parts of the community, think about upgrading, and so on.

Tatiana, thank you so much. It was an awesome session as usual. I’m gonna join the session tomorrow. I am definitely interested to learn more and I definitely recommend for anyone interested in community businesses and monetization but also the mindset of building a community business, Tatiana’s course is amazing and I’ve seen it evolve cohort after cohort and and really improve and I’ve heard raving reviews from everyone, so highly recommend it. Tatiana, thanks so much. Thanks everyone for joining this workshop. It was great to see you all here, it was great to see your awesome questions. Like I said, we’ll continue the conversation in the replay and we’ll have more pricing sessions very soon in the community. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye. Have a great rest of your day.