Finding your first 20 course or membership students

Alexis Teichmiller: I am really excited about this panel. We have Circle power users, creators. I admire each one of you have built really impactful businesses and in several different ways. And today we kind of get to take it back to where you started. Right. there's so much around the success that you've built.

And we hear a lot of those stories, right? We hear a lot of the five, six, seven figure businesses. And, for anyone that's in the chat, that's, that is excited about learning from these three grades. So the capital G, they're going to kind of take you back to where they started, where, where they began, how they launched their first course or first membership.

And it always starts with a few members, right? It doesn't always just jump right from zero to 100, or in some of your cases, hundreds. but before we jump into that, I want to just give everyone a little bit of background on our amazing panelists today. Can you all see my screen? Okay, great. So, up first we have Sun.

He is the founder of night owls. He has been a Circle customer since April of 2022. So pretty new. I'm excited to hear like. What has evolved for you over the last couple of months and night owls is an award winning boutique digital branding and marketing agency and Sun and his team have worked with entrepreneurs like Mel Robbins, Jay Shetty, Gabby Bernstein, just to name a few.

Very excited to have you with us today. And he has over 700 members in the night owl nation right now. So welcome Sun. I'm really excited that you're here. Thank you for having me. Of course. And then next we have Stephanie. I want to give Stephanie a warm welcome. Stephanie Carton. She's the co-founder of Entreprenista.

She's been a Circle customer since December of 2021. She's the founder of SocialFly, a leading social first digital and influencer marketing agency based in New York city. And the goal and the heart behind Entreprenista is to impact the success of women by celebrating and sharing the stories, lessons, and business insights of female leaders.

Welcome Stephanie.

Stephanie Cartin: Thank you so much. Excited to be here and chat with everyone.

Alexis Teichmiller: Of course. And just to highlight, Entrepreneista has over 900 members in their membership and course platform. And then last but certainly not least, we have Tiago Forte. If you've been watching with us live the last couple of hours, we've mentioned Tiago a couple of times and use his, his, membership as an example.

Tiago is the founder of Forte Labs. He's been a Circle customer. Early adopter April of 2020. It's been amazing to have you with us since pretty much the beginning of Circle. He's the author and course creator of building a second brain and he's worked with brands like Toyota, Fiat, Nestle, among, Over 25, 000 online students.

So he has over 5, 000 members and that have gone through, at least on the Circle side that have gone through, his building a second brain, course on Circle and welcome to Iago. Very excited to have you here.

Tiago Forte: Yeah, it's my pleasure. I'm a huge Circle fanboy and could not be more excited for this event.

Alexis Teichmiller: I love it. Well, let's dive in. So I'd love for you to take us back. how, how did you launch your community and when, and Stephanie, I'd love for you to go first. Sure.

Stephanie Cartin: So we launched the Entreprenista league, which is our membership community for women founders and leaders in May of 2021. It was actually May 4th of 2021.

And we initially launched our community as a result of our podcast. So we had started a podcast called Entreprenista several years ago in November of 2018. And our podcast really took off really from that first episode. We were fairly early in podcasting and the women's entrepreneurship space. And then when everything happened with the pandemic in 2020, we were getting so many, you know, messages and requests from our listeners and our followers on social, really needing more help with their business and Courtney and I, my business partner, Courtney and I, we realized we really needed to do whatever we could to help all of these women.

And that was our. Initial, you know, inspiration for wanting to start our community. So we could provide all of the resources and tools and access to all of the experts in our network and everything we have been able to use to build our first business social fly and provide that to all of these women at scale.

So that was our inspiration initially behind starting the entrepreneur league.

Alexis Teichmiller: I love that. And I love how you had already built a community, through the podcast. And it's like, how can we actually build more engagement with our listeners? And then taking that a step further into the entrepreneurial league.

I love that example. Sunfor you, what was the beginning of Night Owl Nation as an agency and now, and now into the membership space, what was that transition like?

Sun Yi: So basically I started in April, like you said, of this year. Before that I had a little bit of community in my Instagram. My background is my agency works with personal brands.

So we do a lot of branding for people who sell courses and like huge, huge, massive, massive brands. And I wanted to start my own course about two years ago. And I kind of stopped because something wasn't right. And the thing was that I knew that I knew that I can sell a course. I can market it. I can get the students.

But is it actually going to work? Because I knew from my experience that about 80 percent of the students are not going to finish the course. And if they finish the course, they're not going to take action. So I knew that wasn't going to work. So I took a year long break. I went to a whole and I was depressed.

I came out and the new idea I got is, okay, let's do a membership. I want to create. I want to recreate my environment and my agency. Because our employees go from interns to starting their own agency within three years, and they go work at Google as creative directors, they go work at Netflix as creative directors, so I wanted to create that environment.

How can I do that? And what I came to was, it's the culture, it's the inspiration, it's the day to day conversation, it's the daily mentorship, overhearing me talk on the call. It's those things that makes it happen. So my new thing was, okay, let's start a membership where people are always there, always hearing and always engaging, so they feel like they're not just taking courses and then they just disappear.

And I got stuck, I get stuck and I have questions, I don't know what to do. Like, that's why I started a membership. So I did three for one month in April, and then in May I started charging 5 a month, and it worked out beautifully.

Alexis Teichmiller: That's amazing. And it sounds like you were really searching for that consistent energy to sometimes launch.

Like you said, it doesn't necessarily have the, the engagement, the, the chatter, the, the, the, you know, the fire behind it doesn't have that energy. I love that Yeah. For you, Tiago, what, what was that transition like for you? Cause you've been in the core space for quite some time and how, how did you shift, how did you start in the very beginning?

Tiago Forte: Yeah, I've been through a couple, a couple of phases, a few phases. so I actually have had online courses going way back to 2000. 13. going back, it's been almost a decade. I cannot, cannot even believe I'm saying that, but I started with self paced courses and that was great. That was, that was the era of self paced courses.

and actually my first course, which is a productivity course that I put up on Teachable at the time, did super well, really took off, paid the bills for a good year. But I, I was, Kind of arrived at this place where I realized that the success that I had achieved wasn't the kind of success I wanted.

I wanted something where I interacted with people. I didn't want to, you know, be sitting on a beach in Bali, you know, as people learned off on some server somewhere. I wanted to get to know them. I wanted to teach them and coach them. I wanted to see the impact they were making. I wanted to have them teach me stuff.

I didn't have this language at the time, but what I was really looking for was a community. The way that I kind of made Intermediate steps in that direction was teaching what's called a cohort based course, a live course, making it expensive, making it a premium high end course. I wanted to attract people that were my peers, that they could join a zoom call and I'd be like, okay, I'll teach you some things, but then you teach me right back.

and it's taken some time that the new course that I created is called building a second brain. The first beta cohort I did like a, like a. Prototype. I was like, I don't even know if I can do this. Let's just get a few of my friends and acquaintances and people I'd met at, you know, meetups in San Francisco.

See if they'll enjoy this. So around, I think, 15 people, I took them through a three week curriculum in like December of 2016. And it's now been five, six years of teaching one cohort after another. We're right now in the midst of cohort 15, if you can believe that over 5, 000 people have taken it, and about two years ago, we, you know, we were on a platform called, discourse before, which is like an open source community platform.

Which was sort of a predecessor to Circle, but just not polished, not easy to use, like, really overly complicated and overly, like, you had to, like, configure things manually. One time I almost lost my, my entire community, all the data. I came this close to losing it because I had wanted to set up, like, the server backup myself instead of hiring someone to do it.

So luckily they were able to, like, retrieve it from, like, a Some backup server in Australia. But after that, I just thought I am a teacher, not a database administrator. Let me just, let me just find a platform that is just taking care of this, taking care of all this. And when Circle arose at the beginning of 2020, it was just exactly what we were looking for.

I talked to Sid, the, the, you know, your founder and, and he invited me on as one of the first communities. And I was, I was just like, sign me up, say no, say less.

Alexis Teichmiller: I know

you're a Circle evangelist, I would say, I love hearing that journey to through, through your experience with the, with the cohort based courses.

okay. So let's, let's zero in on the beginning. So we kind of talked about how you got to where you are now for those first, let's say 10 to 20 members. What are some tactical elements that you did ? That you know worked to be able to communicate the value of it because it's a new sometimes it's a new concept for someone to communicate the value and then deliver on it and and really bring those first 10 to 20 students and Stephanie all I'll start with you what were what were some of those tactics for the Entreprenista league.

Stephanie Cartin: Sure. So we offered a founding member rate for a limited time. so that's something that we shared through social media. We also talked about it on our podcast as well. And, you know, I, I still remember when we put it out there that first day, like being so nervous, like, are people going to join checking?

Stripe to see, are any already members coming in and like, thank goodness, you know, right away from the time that we posted that members started joining right away because we did post teasers that the entrepreneurs elite was coming soon and that something was coming soon. So we did build up that hype and momentum ahead of time, but definitely having that founding member rate, which we only made available for the first couple of weeks, definitely worked.

I do have some links I can put in the chat to just show you some of the posts that we did, if that's helpful. Yeah. It does look like I can post in the chat for some reason.

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah, for some, for, oh, let's see, allow. Hmm. It, yeah, it's, it did the same thing to me as well. Whenever I, if you send them to me after Stephanie, I will, I will drop them in the chat.

Okay,

Stephanie Cartin: perfect. Or I can put them in here. If I post it here now, can you post it? Yes. Okay. So I'll post it to you and then you post it.

Alexis Teichmiller: Okay. Perfect. I love that you, you tease your existing audience. I want to zero in on that. Like if you are watching and you have an existing audience, even if it's a hundred people on Instagram, how can you leverage an existing audience build, kind of anticipation with them before you launch something so that when you launch, you don't feel like there's going to be crickets?

Okay. Awesome. And Stephanie, I got that and I'm sharing that for everybody in the chat right now. for you, son, what were some of those tactics? I know you said you started with a free month. Tell me more about that decision.

Sun Yi: So one of the main things in our community is that we have what's called Sunday service and we meet every Sunday, the entire community on Zoom.

So that's actually the center of what we do. So what I did was the first four weeks I did Sunday service open up to everyone publicly. And then that's how I got the members. But what I can't stress enough is a lot of people, when they start building a community, they think scale first. They think, okay, 100 members, 1, 000 members, 10, 000 members, what do I do?

I can't stress enough how much you shouldn't worry about that right now. When you're first getting started, you've got to scale the unscalable. So what I did was, I would literally individually DM every single person. And after the Sunday call, I literally DM'd every single person to thank them for coming, and I did that for four weeks.

And when I started, people were saying, son, why are you charging 5? I would charge, I would pay 500 a month for this. That's what people were saying. So, I would say scale don't sell unscalable in the beginning. A little bit, a couple months in, what I did was, every Sunday service, I would have my editor like, or I'll just edit out a 15, 30 second clip of the best stuff from that clip, post it on TikTok, and every time one of those videos goes viral, that would just bring me a flood of members.

And the beauty of charging 5, I know you're going to get into pricing, is that a lot of times, somebody will find me that day, and sign up for 9 On The Nation that day. Like they just learned about me today and they'll sign up today. That's the beauty of a low ticket price.

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah. It shortens the decision gap.

They don't have to think about it. Okay. Love that Tiago for you. What were some of those tactics getting, I know that you had kind of, mapped out what you did for your very first cohort. What were those tactics and getting those first couple of members to join that, that first cohort?

Tiago Forte: Yeah, I guess my situation is different because this was 2016 2017 long before Circle existed.

So, and at the time I didn't think of them as members I thought of them as, as it was, it was a transaction it was. three or four week program, and then they were finished. We sort of evolved over time towards an annual subscription membership. but it's funny. I, I, I totally see the genius of the 5 price point.

I'm kind of jealous at that very short decision gap. But this is such a funny illustration of how completely opposite strategies can work. We did the exact opposite. I said, Let me make this so expensive that people are sort of shocked. at the time, I think the first cohort we charged 500, but this was a time when like 50 felt like a lot for what people were used to, which was self paced courses.

But what it allowed me to do ironically is the same thing that Sunwas saying, which is at 500, even today it's 1500, but even at 500, you can absolutely justify getting on a call. Multiple calls with each and every person and you must have to that is the best research and learning you're ever gonna find those first early adopters.

They're like intrepid wilderness explorers. They're taking a chance on something that has no social proof that has no track record. You have no credibility. You want to study them like an anthropologist. Like what is happening in these crazy people's heads that they're willing to commit to you at such an early stage.

So I would meet them in person. I wouldn't, you know, oh, you're in the Bay Area. Luckily, the Bay Area is kind of a central, you know, point where people find themselves. I crossed town to go, you know, have coffee with someone. I would, in, in the, in the online discussion forum we had at the time. In fact, for the first, probably five, six cohorts, the first two years, I responded at great length to every single forum post.

Every single one when I finally had to let that go when it was like hundreds a week. It was like, oh, it was so heartbreaking because I had to sort of create this management layer between me and the students. But I would say if you're just getting started, you know, this is something that's so easy to miss when you're just getting started, there's things there's privileges, you have just getting started that later on, you're going to be like, oh, I missed that time.

There's like, I can't afford to respond individually to people on the discussion format. Like, I wish I could, you have that chance now and you're only going to have it for a short period of time. So take advantage of it. See it as a time limited opportunity to really be a human and to have that human connection with, with your most important followers and supporters.

Alexis Teichmiller: That's great advice. Like studying the connection, studying what's happening and what's helping the decision move forward, what's hindering the decision to moving forward. And I'm sure also through a lot of those conversations, you were able to make the content even better. You were able to evolve and so that you could become more valuable, more transformative, and giving yourself the freedom to allow the student to guide like the learning experience, for, let's bring up pricing.

So As we navigated how you were able to find your first 10 to 20 students, how did you know what to price and what went into that pricing decision for you, Stephanie, I'd love for you to take take lead on this.

Stephanie Cartin: Sure. So something that was very important to us when we launched our Entreprenista community was making it affordable and accessible to people who were just starting their business because of the lot, a lot of the, messages that we are receiving from women as we were.

formulating what the league was going to be. We are hearing things like I lost my job during the pandemic. I want to start a business. Can you help us? Or I need help pivoting my business right now. We did not want to create a community that was, you know, 20, 000 a year to join that community for someone that's starting out.

It was very important that it was accessible and we provided a lot of value. So we were thinking between that like 300 and 400 range for the year in terms of all the value that they were going to. Get from the community. and then I had a moment. I thought, you know, if it's under 365 a year, we can say that our membership is under 1 a day to be part of our community.

And you can't afford not to be in this community. If you want to be able to get access to everything that you need to launch, grow and scale your business. So we did launch with a founding member rate of 324 for the year. Our membership rate is now 349 for the year. If you pay upfront for the year, and then we did end up launching a quarterly payment option for people who did not want to pay upfront for the whole year, they're still committed to the full year, but they have that option. If they want to pay quarterly,

Alexis Teichmiller: I've noticed a lot of, at least on the Circle side of things, I've noticed a lot of memberships and course creators shifting to that quarterly model. So it's interesting that you also adopted that. For you, son, you mentioned a little bit around, you know, finding you that the discoverability to making the decision to join your membership. What else went into the decision around the $5/month?

Sun Yi: When I, when it came to pricing, I looked at all my followers and most of them, most of my audience was in India and Nigeria. And I have a huge audience in Southeast Asian countries and like a lot of developing countries. And for these people, I know for fact, I've worked with some of them.

Like a lot of them make 200, $300 a month. So if they can make a thousand dollars a month, it's literally life changing. It's literally life changing for them. Yeah, and that's what I wanted. So I didn't want, and I knew a lot of them are struggling to pay even $20 for a course, let alone like a hundred dollars, $200 course, a $20 course.

So I knew that I had to make, I saw that Netflix was around four something in India. So, and I did a lot of research and I saw that the first cut off of the pricing, once you go up about 5, like the drop off, like there's a big drop off in, in membership. So I made it 5. My mission at Night Owl Nation is to scale mentorship, meaning in our community.

You pay 5 a month, you do your homework, you get stuck, because a lot of times people take a storytelling course, they're like, okay, follow this chapter, and you try to write it, and you get stuck, and you're like, oh, oh, that made sense in the course, but when I try to apply it to me, it doesn't really quite work.

I got stuck. I need to ask a question. That's where learning happens, right? But, If I have 10,000 members, a hundred thousand members, how are they gonna all ask me? That's $5 a month is not gonna happen. So what we did was we created small groups. So we have small group layers, small group leaders, and small group coordinators.

Mm-Hmm, . And each small group is six people. So these people, without me doing anything, they meet every week. And all I do is I try to train the small group coordinators, the small group coordinators train the small group leaders. So every human being. Every student in the Dal Nation pays $5 a month, and they have a human being that can talk to whenever they get stuck.

Whenever they get stuck. How amazing is that? That cannot be done through just the course. It has to be a community. So that's why I charge 5. For all the people that ask me, how are you charging 5 a month? I'm charging $5 because I do it like that, and we want to change the world. We want to fix online education once and for all.

Alexis Teichmiller: And you are, you are, you are, you're, you're spearheading that. And something I want to call out that all of you have mentioned is just how well you know who you want to serve. And I think that that's where pricing comes in. Like son, you had an immense amount of clarity on who your existing audience was and who you wanted to serve and how you wanted to impact the world.

And so that impacted your pricing, same for, for you, Stephanie. So I think that's a, a really important nugget from this conversation is sometimes we can get really warped around pricing and, and, and money in general. And so going back to who you're serving and how you want to add value to their lives is a.

Big piece here. Tiago, I want to hand it over to you around this conversation around pricing. I know that you, you are, it's like almost, it's a high ticket offer. So what went into structuring that? And how did you make that decision?

Tiago Forte: Yeah, I think for me it was really this desire I wanted to to leave the entire culture of self paced courses, which at that time and kind of still today in some ways, there's there's a lot of exceptions to this but a lot of it can be very gimmicky sort of cheap.

sort of, I mean, it's, it's self paced. So at best case scenario, it's completely up to you. Good luck. Here's 50 hours of video. Have fun. You know, like has been mentioned, no support, no mentorship, no accountability, no coaching just here. And the way the world is going, people have less and less free time, less and less self discipline, less and less willpower.

And they just want, they want to learn fast and not just kind of muddy through, you know, through trial and error. And so when I looked at different models. I wanted to be in this new echelon like I wanted to frame myself as competing against a completely different tier of programs. You know, think of like you go to a conference.

Okay. If you go to a weekend conference, you're dropping in a major city in the United States with travel and food. The cost of the conference itself is easily 2345 grand. And then I thought, okay, well, does my month-long, very intensive program where I am pouring everything I have into this have the same impact on someone's life or career as two days of conference?

Definitely, like not a question in my mind. Well, then why shouldn't my program cost the same? Or actually it costs one tenth of that 500 at the time. Think of coaching, you get a good life coach. Easily, 150 an hour, 2, 3, 400 an hour. How many hours am I giving to the students in that program?

Multiply it out, easily justifiable. I want it to be compared, like these days, we're explicitly framing ourselves against MBAs, professional, you know, what does that cost? Professional seminars, you know, continuing professional education. Conferences, retreats, all these things easily cost between thousands and tens of thousands.

And compared to that, I feel like it's quite affordable what we're doing. So even I see myself as affordable.

Alexis Teichmiller: Of course. Yeah. And it goes back to, you know, who you're framing your content towards because of the quality of the content. And, I love that comparing it to the. court and sorry, the conferences because they can be very, very expensive and they add up.

and sometimes you don't always get a lot from the content. You get more from the connections than you do from the content itself.

Tiago Forte: Exactly. Which is why it should be a membership, right? Like everyone knows the conference. The best part is the conversations in the hallways and at the bar, you know, in the evening.

So we just recreate that. Periphery of informal conversation in the course. And now suddenly a course is worth similar to what a conference is worth.

Alexis Teichmiller: Absolutely. So on the, you kind of touched on what you include, cause that, that, that plays a role in pricing and it plays a role in who you're attracting and getting your first members.

When you first started, how did you decide what to include in your membership? I know that some of you like the course element. Some of you have different, like events and experiences within your membership. So how did you decide? And did that evolve Stephanie? Go ahead. Sure.

Stephanie Cartin: So when we set out to create the Entreprenista league Courtney, and I really thought about all of the different networking groups, communities, and organizations we had been in over the years, as we were a growing social fly, we had joined one organization specifically for networking.

We joined another organization to learn how to get PR for our business. We learned, joined another organization for coaching and leadership training, and we were like, this makes no sense. How is there not? One community that specifically has everything under one roof and we searched and there wasn't one and we were like, we will create this.

We hear what everyone's asking for. We're going to build everything that we needed as we were growing our first business social apply and put it under one roof. So we wanted to be sure that we were able to offer our members first and foremost, the ability to network and connect with each other. And of course, using a platform like Circle, we've been able to execute that very easily.

and especially during the pandemic. You know, people were not going out and about and networking, and there were all the events were canceled, and we were able to bring everyone together from all over the country. And we do have members, you know, outside of the U. S. as well, which has been really great.

We also wanted to give our members the opportunity to get featured and really get their business out there. So our members get featured on our website, Entreprenista.com. We feature our members on all of our social communities as well. and these beautiful profile pieces. And then we ended up launching another podcast called startups and stilettos where we feature our members on our podcast as well.

And then we do virtual learning events every single week. So we listen to the type of, you know. Information that our members were looking for, you know, best practices on accounting and bookkeeping and legal like you name it everything you need when you need to launch, go and scale your business and we created a programming calendar so our members can come live to those events.

And then a big selling point is that of course with the Circle platform we can record everything and then house all of that content and information really under one roof. Really, we created it based on what our needs were as we were growing our business and listen to what our, you know, early members were looking for as well to, to build for them.

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah. And, and also hearing what was resonating it, like it, that's the big thing I want to call out is you continue to listen and then you continue to create things based on what your, what your members valued and what they needed. I love that. It's really cool too, to hear how you research, you couldn't find what you were looking for.

And so you created it. And so that's resonating for you in the chat. This could also be your light bulb moment. If you're wanting to create something that doesn't exist yet, you've been searching, you've been researching. This is your moment to, to start creating, to create it for yourself and create it for people that are looking for it too. Oh, go ahead.

Stephanie Cartin: I'll jump in and just share one other thing. We really, really listen to what our members are looking for and what they need. So we launched the Entrepreneur's League May of 21. And a few months ago, we created something called the Entrepreneur's League Power Groups, which are smaller, more intimate groups and cohorts within the community.

Because our members were asking for that. So, we just launched one, an agency owner group specifically for women who own an agency business. And then that really, that is an additional product within the entrepreneurship community. That's essentially an upsell if you will. So we started with the basic membership and now we're adding on other products based on what our members are looking for.

Alexis Teichmiller: I love that. Thank you for mentioning that too. It's always interesting how you can add the upsell levels based on how you are evolving the membership, Sun for you, how did you, you started with the Sunday, the Sunday, church lessons, so how, how did that evolve? Where is it now? And what did you decide to include?

Sun Yi: Yeah, so it's a lot similar to Stephanie. I, we added, we listened and added on things as we go. One of the mistakes that I made was I added too much too early on because like people are like, Oh, I want this. I want this. I added it. So that was for the first three months was really like 1. 0. We just launched 2.

0 this week and 2. 0, we just took out all that shit. And we just streamline the one that I know for a fact is going to help them at work. And so 1 thing I would say is don't go in expecting anything. Whatever you plan, you think is going to happen, I guarantee you, that's all going to be thrown out the window in three months.

What happened to me was, I wanted to create a community for introverts, because I'm a super introvert. I'm probably the most introverted person in this room right now. so I wanted to do it, but a few months into it, I did a poll. And it turned out that my most hardcore members, the most active ones, are the extroverts.

And what I realized is that extroverts actually learn really well from introverts and vice versa. I would have never known that if I just went in like, okay, there's a community for introverts. Glad I didn't do that. Later on, I found out that people are struggling with telling stories in terms of, we're a storytelling course, so people have trouble telling stories like, Making it interesting, having a hug.

So I started teaching that. But when we actually started doing the exercise, what I realized where everybody gets stuck is they don't even know how to connect the dots and structure the story's beginning, middle, and end so that it's cohesive, right? So it's like, it's very like there's all these moments of bells and whistles in the story, but at the end you just feel like that's it.

I don't know what was the point of the story. That's how you feel. So over the first four months, I realized, okay, this is what everybody struggles with. This is what everyone's so I broke that down and I created a weekly exercise to do that. And I created a rubric where you say, okay, here's your assignment for this week, write a story about this.

They write it, they come back, they compare against the rubric, and the small group leaders, the small group will assess each other's, and then you assess your own. And that's where the learning happens, right? Like where, oh, I actually think I did pretty good, but after I review everyone else's and they review mine, actually, I sucked.

I need to do this. That's how you learn. And every week, that's how they improve. And so right now I'm just sticking with that. And then later on, I'm going to add on. So one of the things I want to tell you that's really cool is, um, There's so many, so many stuff I could share, like what?

Alexis Teichmiller: I know, we could just have a summit with each of you individually, I know we could.

Sun Yi: I add all of my members to close friends in my Instagram. And if you add them to close friends on your Instagram, every time you post a story, a green ring will show up. Instead of a red ring, it'll be a green ring. The members feel special, like, Oh, this is special content just for me. So what I do is every time I answer, somebody will post on Simon Circle, I reply and I say, Oh, you did great there, but here's, here's my feedback.

I would take a screenshot of that posted on Instagram story, close friends, and they put a link there. So to keep driving back to Circle, right? So there's so many little things that I do here, like that keeps engaging, keeps driving engagement back to Circle. And. Like, I utilize all of that. Like, another thing is I do a question, so I'll put the assignment there.

So people are sharing their assignments. I re share that assignment to everyone else. And I say, if you want to continue this, continue it in Circle, so you can write the full story. So I do so many things like that, where I just keep getting people engaged in Circle.

Alexis Teichmiller: I love that. Demetrius said, that's hot.

Stephanie Cartin: I love that

Alexis Teichmiller: idea. I agree, that is hot. That's a hot tip from Sun. Tiago, for you, how did you decide, you know, being more on the course creator side and then shifting to cohort? And then there's the experience side of the membership. How did you decide what to include when you were getting started?

Tiago Forte: Gosh, well, when I first got started, the course was really based on my content. I would just look at what blog posts are resonating, what kinds of comments do I get, what do they ask? And in a funny way, it took me a couple years to even, I mean, I remember like around 2000, I think 14, I wrote this blog post that was like everything that I think about how to, at the time, how to organize Evernote.

And I was like, let me just give it away. Just this is my gift to the world, put it out there. And I really thought this will answer everyone's questions. No, it did not. and I was kind of dragged kicking and screaming. I would have never arrived at the idea of creating a course on a topic that, to be honest, didn't exist.

You know, PKM, Personal Knowledge Management, also sometimes known as digital note taking. Who even knew that there was demand for such a thing? Who knew that that would be a long term interest that people would want to engage in over and over again? Who knew that they would have so many questions and not just like Technical practical questions about how to use software, but really, once you get inside, it's all about the psychology.

It's all about the emotional blocks, the creative blocks, the psychological blocks, your traumas, your past experiences, your failures, your disappointments. It's like all about that stuff. and we've just taken it honestly, one cohort at a time, each car, we just ask, okay, followers, subscribers, past alumni, what do you want to see?

Add those into the next cohort. Test it. I think we've tested over 130, over 130 individual like features in the course. And only like less than 10 percent of them sort of survive the trial by fire. And so we just keep distilling. It's like we're constantly refining kind of like, like Sun was saying, like distilling down what's working, what's working, what's working, just keep and double down what's working, remove what's not.

And the end result of that is a, is a program that we could have never, ever designed upfront. It never would have occurred to us. It's almost a surprise. It's like a organic, it's like an organism that came to life somehow one generation at a time.

I love that. It's like giving yourself permission to experiment and to not hold And, and like, you know, the, the clinch fence, clinched fist mentality of like, this has to work, whenever you really like be more receptive to things, being able to evolve and change, it's almost like sunset, it's, it's never going to be what you think it is.

You always have to give yourself time. We have a couple more minutes. I have one more question for all of you. If you could go back and give yourself a piece of advice, you're starting over, what would it be? Stephanie, go ahead.

Stephanie Cartin: I think we would have already figured out how to launch our membership ambassador referral program when we initially started the Entreprenista League.

We didn't launch our membership referral program. It was probably like six months in, maybe even longer. we found our members were organically referring their friends and found their friends to join our community. and that is such a big, you know, referral source for us to be able to get new members.

I wish we had had that. All together, ready to go when we first launched.

Alexis Teichmiller: Okay. Launching with the referral program in place. Love that as like, you know, being an affiliate marketing nerd. I'm like, that's a great, that's a great piece of advice. Sun for you, what would, what would your piece of advice be? If you were starting over?

Sun Yi: Well for almost everybody, the biggest advice I can give is don't assume anything, just jump in the water and you'll learn how to swim. Don't worry about it. And the thing is, scaled unscalable, right? Talk in the beginning with my members. I know all my founding members, like, personally, right?

so I did that. What I would do differently is probably, I would probably start outum, a lot simpler. I would, because in the beginning, I had too much of a grand plan. So I would start out much more streamlined and just, like, get one thing, like, properly working before I had the next one, and so on and so on.

Alexis Teichmiller: Okay, I love that. Starting small, keeping it simple, not overcomplicating. Tiago, what about you? What's something that you would do differently if you were starting from scratch?

Tiago Forte: There's so many there's so many things, but what comes to mind is kind of what Stephanie was saying, you know, looking back, there were just a handful of people, like, in the 1st, like, 2, 3 cohorts that would be sort of the super evangelists.

I didn't realize it at the time because everyone was so hardcore and everyone was so committed at the beginning. I just kind of took that for granted. But there were just a handful of people, like 4 or 5 people that I think I should go back and look this up. But I think have probably each been responsible for dozens and dozens and dozens of years.

of new people. and I'm friends with them today. Like I've eventually caught on and just became buddies with them. but especially with a high end program, a high ticket price, especially with something that's recurring, especially a membership where you are going to be spending time with these people, right?

Like you want to know, okay, like what kind of people are in there? Are they weird? Or like, are they like people I would want to spend time with in real life? You know, like they want to know those things, word of mouth, which is in general, the most important, you know, promotional tool ever is even more important than for other kinds of products or services.

Cause, cause that's the word of mouth. It's just like it. That's how communities grow in the real world. It's how relationships happen. And so I would have just doubled, like, pay more attention to it, noticed it double down on it, really invested in those people supported them. And I think that would have saved me a lot of pain.

A few cohorts later when I tried to sort of ramp up marketing and customer acquisition using all these kind of artificial means when the whole time in the background was this organic word of mouth just kind of chugging along. And

Alexis Teichmiller: Okay. I love that. Thank you all three of you so much for your time today, your expertise.

I admire and respect all three of you for what you've built. And it, it just, it's an honor to have you here and share at the future of courses summit. Before we wrap, I would love for each of you to share, where can people stay connected with you? Where can they connect with you online or check out your course membership?

Stephanie, go ahead.

Stephanie Cartin: Sure. So you can join our entrepreneurs to lead community. It's entrepreneurship. com forward slash the league. And I believe Casey or Ashley on our team is posting it in the chat right now, because I'm unable to post the chat. So definitely check out our community and then feel free to follow me personally on Instagram.

I'm at. Steph, Jill Carton, S T E P H J I L L C A R T I N. And our Instagram is at Entreprenistas E oh, here we go. E N T R E P O E N I S T A with an S at the end on Instagram. I personally reply to all of our DMs on our entrepreneurs says Instagram and my personal. So please reach out and introduce yourself and looking forward to connecting with everyone.

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah, I follow her on social and Entreprenista on social, definitely follow what they're building on Entreprenista. It's fantastic. Sun, what about you? Where can people stay connected and join Night Owl Nation?

Sun Yi: Yeah, so everything I do is in my Instagram. So if you go to my Instagram at Sunyi. I just want to add 1 more quick tip for everyone.

My sister is starting a new community on Circle right now, and she's a little bit different from me because I had a following already. She's starting from scratch and I would imagine a lot of people are starting from scratch. And I gave her this tip and she's doing it right now. It's working like a gangbuster.

What she's doing is she's going to Facebook groups. She's a music education teacher. She's going to Facebook group for music education. She's going to LinkedIn groups for music education. And she just asks them as friends every day. 20, 30, 40, 50 people every day. And then she just DMs them to come into her version of Sunday service.

And it's been working out really like you can probably get your first 20 members in a month like that. I love

Alexis Teichmiller: that. It's going back to the unscalable at the beginning, like really just putting in, putting in the hours and reaching out to people. I love that. okay. Yeah. And thank you for dropping Sun's Instagram in the chat, Alexander.

For you, Tiago, where can people stay connected

Tiago Forte: with you? Yeah, all my stuff is at building a second brain dot com. We have my book that I published a few months ago. The course, I have a podcast blog and an email newsletter that goes out every week, all related to second brains.

Alexis Teichmiller: I love it. And Julia, thank you so much for dropping that link in the chat.

You can stay connected with Tiago there. Stephanie, Sun, and Tiago, thank you again for spending your Tuesday afternoon with us. Very, very grateful and appreciative. Hope you have a great rest of your day and the recording of this will be uploaded in the Circle customer community and we'll also be sharing this panel replay with everyone via email as well.

So, if you want to go back and rewatch this panel, which is filled with nuggets, gold nuggets, you can, you can have access to that. Thank you all so much. I hope you have a great rest of your day.