How to find the first members for your paid community?
- Use your existing audience or network to get early members. See who matches the definition of your ideal member or has interests aligned with the goal and topic of your community.
- Build in public to get visibility and reach.
- Use paid ads to promote your community on social media, groups and channels where your ideal members hang out.
- Create content that matches your community. Use lead magnets to capture reader emails. Promote your community to them.
How to build and maintain engagement in a paid community?
- Run contests
- Host live events
- Use gamification
- Diversify content
- Host AMA sessions
- Reward active members
- Partner with other creators
- Build community challenges
- Interview community members
- Share valuable (curated or proprietary) resources
How can communities be monetized?
- Books
- Courses
- Native ads
- Workshops
- Job Boards
- Sponsorships
- Affiliate marketing
- Paid memberships
- Donations and crowdfunding
- Live in-person and virtual events
What are examples of freemium communities?
- Micro SaaS HQ shares research-backed profitable Micro-SaaS ideas. It has an exclusive community of paid subscribers.
- Nomad List is a global community of remote workers. It has a lifetime plan that lets you connect with other members via chats and meetups.
- 100 Days of No Code helps members learn no-code tools. Paid plans unlock a private Slack channel, bonus lessons, a member-only newsletter, live calls and more.
- Trends.vc shares new markets and ideas. It has free and paid reports. Paid reports give access to a private community of successful founders who build profitable businesses.
- Finsweet is an education-focused community of Webflow professionals. Its paid plan gives access to advanced courses, private events, live streams, monthly calls and more.
- Rosieland is a community for community builders. While its weekly newsletter is free. Paid members get access to cohort-based courses, workshops, accountability sessions and advanced resources.
- Starters is a community of sports technology founders. Its free plan gives access to its forum and member directory. Its paid plan gives access to its exclusive Slack channel and AMA sessions with industry leaders.
What are the most popular platforms to use to host a paid community?
- Discord • Create invite-only channels for paid members
- Circle • The all-in-one community platform for creators and brands
- Slack • Get people, tools and communication in one place
- Tribe • Customizable community platform for businesses
- Discourse • Open-source forum and community platform
- Mighty Networks • Build courses, memberships and communities on iOS, Android and the web
- Hivebrite • Customizable online community platform
- Vanilla Forums • Build a custom forum with polls, groups, gamification, event scheduling and more
What are the most helpful tools (besides platforms) for community managers to use?
- Toasty • Run interactive virtual meetings
- MailerLite • Email marketing tools and automation
- Levellr • Build a thriving fan community on Discord or Telegram
- Canva • Create visuals for your community posts, tools and courses
- Notion • All-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis and databases
- MemberSpace • Turn any part of your website into members-only with just a few clicks
- Outseta • Payments, authentication, CRM and email tools for your website, SaaS or online community
What are 7 ways to measure the success of a paid community? What are the pros of each approach?
Get direct feedback. This is the easiest way to see what members like or dislike. Use polls, surveys and direct messages to get insights.
Measure the retention rate. See how long paid members remain in your community.
Measure active daily, weekly and monthly users. See how many members are actively contributing to the community on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can define “active” members as those who post, comment, take part in events or simply log in the community.
Measure the growth rate of new members. See how many new members join the community. Paid communities have friction in form of pricing, isolated platforms and vetting mechanisms. If your churn rate is higher than the growth rate, your community may die over time.
Measure the amount of user-generated content. If you advertise your community as a place to grow and learn together with other members, you should live up to that expectation. Otherwise, you risk looking like a blog instead of an active community of like-minded peers. See how much content is actually created by your community members, not the community managers. Be mindful of what you view as content. Likes are hardly content. Posts and comments are user-generated content that you’re looking for.
Measure the number of mentions on social media. See if people share success stories, tools and resources, or the entire community with others. Check the number of likes, comments and shares. Analyze the comment sentiment – see what people say. Do they like or dislike your community?
Measure the number of sales of complementary products. See how much members spend on complementary products and services that are exclusive to your community. These are digital products, courses, events and more. A growing number of sales can tell that members are invested, engaged and trust the quality of your exclusive products.
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