Ep. 80: How a YouTuber's study group grew into a profitable business ft. Kaelyn Grace Apple

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (0:00)
In 2020, the business just took off. My phone just kept blowing up, and I just remembered looking at it and being like, oh god, what did I do?

**Francis Zierer** (0:08)
Tell me about this, why you started it and what you offered.

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (0:11)
I basically figured out what the formula was. I have a notebook where it has a full business plan mapped out. It included a potential community, it included one-on-one coaching, and it included the YouTube channel.

**Francis Zierer** (0:23)
Okay, let's talk about your YouTube for a little bit.

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (0:24)
I studied how to do it, I studied thumbnails, I studied editing, and I remember making that video and saying, I am never doing another video like this ever again. It was so much work.

**Francis Zierer** (0:36)
What was the tipping point?

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (0:37)
I just kept looking at it, I was like, but at what cost? That was the point when I made no money. And this is where things went terribly wrong.

**Francis Zierer** (0:47)
Welcome back to The Creator Spotlight Podcast. My name is Francis Zierer, and today we're speaking with Kaelyn Grace Apple, known to her 131,000 YouTube followers as the Redhead Academic. She is the creator of Accepted Society, which is a 500 plus member paid community for scholars in training, as she says. And she's also the former head of product development for Ali Abdaal. I want to speak with Kaelyn because she is a true creator entrepreneur who has also somehow managed to do all of this while pursuing a PhD. It's impressive. This is a great conversation about balancing all of that and also building sustainable, lasting, highly engaged paid communities. Accepted Society is to quote, I think this is on the website, an online community for those that love learning. And it's a pay to access community that you started, I believe, five years ago, correct?

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (1:41)
That's correct.

**Francis Zierer** (1:42)
And when you started, it was an eight attendee co-study community that you started because you were at the beginning of your PhD in 2020, right?

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (1:52)
You've done your research.

**Francis Zierer** (1:52)
I have this is this is just the beginning. Walk me through the stages of the evolution from eight person study group to now, I believe you're a bit over 500 members, I'm assuming that they're all paid.

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (2:04)
Yes. So current. Okay, let me back it up. So back in 2020, I had started my PhD. And the thing I missed most was just being in the library with my friends. It was the one thing that I could always rely on to get my work done was if I could just lock in in a space with my buddies. And I just decided I would put up a link on YouTube. And I just said, basically, if you want to come study with me, I'm going to put some times on my website, you can pay $5 and come join me. Because I knew that if you had some skin in the game, if you had a little bit of money on the line, that you were more likely to show up. And then people started coming quite regularly. I think I was starting to do them probably like twice a week. And then it started evolving from that. And it started with eight people. And then it just kind of grew to a regular 10, and then a regular 15, and then a regular 20 And it was in the summer of 2021, when I started thinking, okay, maybe I should start formalizing this. Like we don't have a way to chat. And currently we're just using, you know, my Zoom account, and we're only able to do it when I'm available. And at this time, I had just started hiring. I had hired a girl who had been one of my first clients for Accepted Consulting, which was a separate business.

**Francis Zierer** (3:26)
Yeah, we'll get in there.

**Kaelyn Grace Apple** (3:27)
And I basically had her start running sessions along with me. We ended up moving everybody over to Slack. And I really didn't like the format of Slack personally. It just, it felt very corporate.
It didn't really like Discord. It felt really disorganized. I think we were on Slack for about a year, or like a little under a year. And that was the point when I discovered Mighty Networks. We moved on to Mighty Networks. And that was when I would say we officially became what I would term a community. Because before the way I would market it was like, oh, this is a co-studying space. This is a co-working space. This is about accountability. The study sessions were themselves called Accountability Workshops. And that was essentially all that we offered at the time. And then we moved over to Mighty Networks and I started doing monthly resets. My team had expanded. We started running regular sessions. I think it was like about three times a day, Monday to Friday.