The sales page lied. In a good way.

Read time: 4 minutes

Hey, happy Tuesday!

I’ve been writing about (and for) online business owners for more than a decade. Everything from landing pages to sales sequences, to registration pages for dream coaching retreats. (No word of a lie.)

I've walked the tightrope between business value and the emotional triggers that actually get someone to buy — without overpromising.

But one of the most nagging, annoying “unprovables” about both writing and online businesses is that even though you’re supposed to “show, not tell” — there’s just so much you can’t show.

• You can show your credentials — but not how that makes you better than a different business coach.
• You can show your clients’ successes — but you can’t put into words the hurdles they had to overcome.
• You can show a screenshot of your community via a collection of Zoom squares — but you can’t show the collective transformation that happened between those people.

Will Mannon, who heads up Circle Studios (and previously spent 5+ years running a wildly successful writing cohort program called Write of Passage), has a name for this split: secular outcomes x sacred value.

Secular value is the thing on the landing page that gets the credit card out. Sacred value is what actually happens once people are in the room. You can't put "you'll meet the people you invite to your wedding" on a sales page — it reads like a lie. It just also happens to be true, over and over, for the businesses that pull it off.

Photo: Various Write of Passage meetups over the years.

While Will was running Write of Passage:

• Dilip joined to write about his founder experience of closing a Series B. He left having written about being a new dad — and having found two other founders in his breakout room going through the little kid trenches at the same time.
  
  
• Linart, Will's operations associate, took Write of Passage to "become a better writer" — having skimmed right past the part on the website that talked about "meeting your best friends," figuring that's the kind of thing every course promises and none delivers. But two years later, the friends were the whole point.

This emphasizes why communities can be so difficult to market outside of word-of-mouth or referrals. Because the value of a great course, cohort, or community is in both the secular outcome (“learn to write”) and in the sacred, and harder to measure value (“meet your best friends”).

As a community business founder, you have to provide both.

The airplane (or wedding) test

Here's a pattern Will noticed about Write of Passage that indicated undeniable sacred value:

1. Are your members getting on a plane to see each other?
2. Are they showing up at each other's wedding parties?

At Write of Passage, both of these happened — cross-country flights for meetups that were never on the syllabus, cohort-mates standing in each other's wedding parties years later, even a couple who met at one of the program's meetups and are getting married this year.

TLDR: Lead with secular outcomes — anchor on sacred value

Here's what I want you to take away from this:

Market the secular outcome. It's still the reason people click. "Learn to write," "grow your business," "get your CPA" — put that at the top of the page.

But create the conditions for sacred value. Design for it on purpose: the shared goal, the room, the risk you're asking people to take together.

“When like-minded people undergo shared challenges in pursuit of meaningful goals, deeper bonds will form as a result,” said Will.

And here's the part I actually think is underrated: sacred value is a second net. Someone who doesn't land the outcome you promised — the book deal, the promotion, the six-figure year — can still walk away giving you five stars, because the friendships and the transformation made the whole thing worth it.

That's not a lucky accident. It's what protects your NPS and your referral rate when the outcome you're selling has a high bar to clear.

Lead with what they want. Build what they really need underneath it.

What needs to be true for you to create collective transformations

Will is clear that you can't force this one — trying to manufacture sacred value is a bit like trying to make yourself fall asleep faster, or willing a garden to grow. But you can build the conditions for it. From our conversation, three things had to be true, every time, at Write of Passage:

1. Like-minded, genuinely exceptional people in intentional rooms together. Not just anyone who could pay.
2. A meaningful shared goal — something hard enough that finishing it actually meant something.
3. Some amount of productive risk or failure. At Write of Passage, that was the act of baring an imperfect first draft to exclusive members in a private community. Their own post-cohort surveys backed this up: it was consistently the writing feedback exchange, not the lessons, that people credited with the lifelong friendships.

Will's team engineered the top of that — cohorts grouped by interest, geography, time zone, some deliberate randomness in breakout rooms — and then let the rest blossom on its own.

Most founders I see end up strong on one side of this and weak on the other. The instinct that gets a business to scale — repeatable systems, clear promises, predictable revenue — isn't naturally the same instinct that builds a room people would get on a plane for. If the only thing you're measuring is the secular stuff — signups, revenue — you're measuring the part that got people in the door. The part that keeps them is harder to see, and worth designing for on purpose.

Build with us on August 25 & 26

Two days, absolutely free, no catch.

Day one is strategy, straight from people already doing this at scale — Melyssa Griffin, Chris Donnelly, Jade Bonacolta and Ben Meer, Jessi Jean, Lara Acosta and Jake Ward. Day two, we build together. A hackathon-style session where you actually stand up the structure of your community — discussions, courses, events, payments — live, with Circle AI and real humans from our team in the room to unstick you.

Register here for free →

What I’ve read lately

1. Will wrote A Trojan Horse of Transformation on leading with what people want so you can deliver what they actually need. If anything you run has a landing page, it's worth five minutes.
   
   
2. Speaking of Trojans: I’ve been trying to finish The Song of Achilles before the Toronto Public Library claws it back from my Kobo eReader. Did it bring me straight back to uni, studying Ovid’s Metamorphoses? Heck yes, but in a much more engaging way. Highly recommend.

Coming up: when building the roster is as intensive as coming up with the programming. I go behind-the-scenes with Trisha Donofrio, our Community Program Manager to find out how she built (and what she learned in the process) the Circle community’s $1M mastermind.

If you run a community: what's the "wedding test" moment for your members? The thing that happened that you never could've promised on a landing page? Hit reply, I want to hear it.

Arina Kharlamova
Lead Editor, Circle Newsletter

P.S. If you sign up and attend the absolutely-completely-insanely free Build Summit, you may receive up to 2,500 free AI credits to build your community. Just sayin’.