How to Build a Successful Paid Community with Jay Clouse

**Jay Clouse** (0:00)
That month was the highest month of membership revenue. The following year, February, was our highest month of churn ever. The strongest marketing levers sometimes are not exactly what people actually need.

**Dylan Redekop** (0:11)
How do you think about scaling a membership like that? It's doing really well, tons of engagement, people are loving it. But do you settle in for a little bit and then think about growth?

**Jay Clouse** (0:19)
I really care about retention more than anything else. When somebody discontinues their membership, like I do feel it sort of personally.

**Chenell Basilio** (0:27)
What is a strong marketing lever for a community?

**Dylan Redekop** (0:30)
Who shouldn't launch a membership?

**Chenell Basilio** (0:37)
Welcome Jay.

**Dylan Redekop** (0:37)
Yeah.

**Jay Clouse** (0:38)
Hey, we're doing it.

**Dylan Redekop** (0:38)
We're doing it.

**Jay Clouse** (0:39)
We've done a whole collab. I love it.

**Dylan Redekop** (0:40)
Yeah.

**Chenell Basilio** (0:41)
Chenell, you've been on Jay's podcast one, two, three times. Two if not three. You guys did like a Becky collab.

**Jay Clouse** (0:48)
Oh, okay. Count the bucky, the bucky. Count the Becky collab. And yes, three times and arguably three of our most popular episodes.

**Chenell Basilio** (0:56)
Wow. Well, maybe this will be our most popular episode.

**Jay Clouse** (1:00)
I have a strong feeling it will be.

**Dylan Redekop** (1:02)
Love it.

**Chenell Basilio** (1:03)
Love the confidence.

**Dylan Redekop** (1:03)
That's awesome. Yeah. Well, I thought it would be fun to get you in here and talk kind of memberships, offline events, in real life stuff.

**Jay Clouse** (1:10)
Sure.

**Dylan Redekop** (1:10)
Because I was just part of your second annual offline event for The Lab.

**Jay Clouse** (1:15)
Yeah.

**Dylan Redekop** (1:16)
Which is your flagship community.

**Jay Clouse** (1:18)
Yeah. What did you think?

**Dylan Redekop** (1:20)
It was amazing.

**Jay Clouse** (1:20)
Okay, great.

**Chenell Basilio** (1:21)
It was fantastic. It sucked, Jay.

**Jay Clouse** (1:24)
Yeah. I feel like it was an improvement over last year, which is hard because it was rated a 9.4 out of 10 by the people who attended last year. So like not a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like it was. I haven't heard any constructive feedback yet, which means people are either being really nice or I'm missing something or it was great. I don't know.
We'll send out the survey this weekend and get some data on it. But from my eyes, everything went without a hitch and I was more calm and in it, but I thought it was great.

**Dylan Redekop** (1:53)
I like it. So yeah, how did you, I guess, let's go back a little bit. How did you start, decide to start The Lab? Like what was the transition point where you were like, you know what, I think it's time to launch this.

**Jay Clouse** (2:05)
I've been doing community in some fashion since 2012 And at that time, it was all in person. Like I was an organizer for Startup Weekend, and I facilitated global Startup Weekend events. And so those events were like weekend long. We would have like 100 to 120 people in Columbus. Every time we did this, we did three a year.
And we like really galvanized the Columbus startup and tech community through this.
And then when I left tech and started doing my own thing, I was facilitating mastermind groups, mostly online, but also most of the early folks who were doing that in 2017 were in Columbus.
So through that mastermind program, at the time, I mean, this sounds crazy, but in 2017, doing community on Slack and video calls on Zoom, both uncommon things, I had to literally teach people how to download and use Zoom. And on the back end of our weekly calls and our 12 week cohorts, we just continued to let people hang out in Slack. So over the course of four years, we had 120 ish people who had gone through a 12 week cohort, and they were all in Slack. One of the people who went through that program was Matt Gartland, when he was independently running an agency and he had like a product idea. So he went through that 12 week program experience, the program itself experienced how we were doing things in Slack.
He was later acquired, like joined forces with Pat. They got an early access beta to a platform called Circle, decided they were going to use that in 2020 when the pandemic hit. They're like, okay, pandemic is hitting. They had done FlynnCon the year before. FlynnCon is not going to happen with the pandemic. Let's accelerate our plans to do online community. We're going to use this platform. He brought me in to consult on that. So we designed and built, which at the time was called SPI Pro in 2020 They asked, hey, can we just hire you to lead our community team? Because this launch went really well, the launch of SPI Pro did really well.