Beginner Maps

This guy bootstrapped a global community conference out of his own pocket. And it worked. Francisco Opazo is stubborn—his words, not mine. And thank goodness for that, because his relentless drive has taken a one-man newsletter and turned it into a global movement for community professionals. In this episode, I take you inside the madness that is Community Week / Community-led World Summit - in-pe...

Paz Pisarski has cracked the code on growing a cohort-based community business. She has taken The Community Collective from a meetup group to a community membership that had 102 people in its latest cohort. While most cohort based programs struggle to find customers after the first cohort, her cohort size has been consistently increasing for 5 cohorts. Her secret? A "hidden curriculum". In this ep...

Running Remote is the best case study in building a paid community of practice. Run by Kasia Triantafelo, this is community of 250+ remote work leaders from companies like GitLab, Dropbox, and Zillow who share everything—from compensation strategies to retreat venues. In this episode, Kasia tells how she slowly shifted the culture of this community over 3 years to the one of radical openness. We d...

Building a 5,500+ member paid community isn't easy. Abbey is one of the rare people who's managing just such a community at Health Tech Nerds. This episode is a must-watch for newsletter creators who are looking to turn their audience into a paid community. We cover: - Why direct member outreach drives 10x better results - How to collect and act on member feedback effectively - The power of consta...

John Faulkner-Willcocks built a 250+ member paid community in just 4 months with an astonishing 1.5% churn rate. His inspirations? On Deck and World of Warcraft (yes the video game). He's the cofounder of Open Org, a paid community for progressive People & Culture leaders who believe in the radical new idea of leaning into transparency as a way of building companies. We spent an hour diving de...

As Program Director at On Deck and now founder of Next Careers, Anthony Nardini has helped 1000+ senior operators navigate career transitions. In this episode, he shares his playbook at Next Careers, where senior execs pay $2k to join a community that helps them land their next jobs — and 60% of them refer their most talented friends. With 700+ applications for 100 spots per cohort, his secret is...

Carrie Melissa Jones shares the blueprint for building successful online communities. Carrie is the author of Building Brand communities, founder of the CMJ group where she offers consulting services to organisations like Discord, Google and Airbnb, creator of her own community membership for community builders and leaders and a Youtuber! In this episode we cover: - Sneak peak into Carrie's own co...

Ashley has managed to turn on-demand courses into a community experience that supports 1200+ paying members of Smart Passive Income’s All-access Pass community started by Pat Flynn. She has created an innovative "accelerator" model that allows her to deliver the benefits of a cohort-based course without the hassle of doing live lessons. We spent 75 mins exploring her community management...

Jordan Godbey has built communities for world's top creators like Justin Welsh and Ali Abdaal. He helps experts start a new business line by helping them build Circle communities at his company Growth Community. In this episode, he discusses his strategies, philosophies and tactics that you can use to start a $10k MRR community. Resources: • Work with Jordan at Growth Community - [https://grow...

Stephanie Baiocchi is the community team of one at IMPACT where she manages the membership behind the bestselling book - They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. She single-handedly manages a 3,000+ member community, runs masterminds, hosts 2 annual conferences, and creates manages the on-demand course library. We spend an hour diving deep into her playbook for building a thriving community around...

Bri Leever is filled with actionable frameworks for building a profitable community. She has honed them over the years by building communities through her consultancy - Ember Consulting. In this interview, we explore some of these frameworks. We discuss: • Why you don't need a huge audience to start a community • The key differences between "transformative" and "networking"...

Scott Amenta might be the most experienced person you'll ever met when it comes to building community businesses. He's simultaneously running multiple 7-8 figure community businesses through Sylva, and building software to help community founders scale. Listen to this episode to understand: • How he identifies healthy community businesses as an investor • Why Slack is still his preferred p...

Shin Takeda is changing the game for creators by creating done-for-you membership Slack communities for them. Creator funnels their audience, Shin handles end-to-end operations of running their paid community. That includes events, moderation, content, website, strategy and everything in between required to make sure these communities thrive and customers stay happy. Obviously the creators love it...

Jordan Cutler (@jordancutler) has done what most of us aspire to. He grew his newsletter to 50,000+ subscribers in just one year. Along the way, he has made $35,000+ in “passive” income, with $20,000+ coming from a cohort-based course on Maven. Resources: • Beginner Maps for more such case studies - https://beginnermaps.com/ • High Growth Engineer newsletter - https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/...

Ryan Wardell is the CEO and cofounder of Startup Sauce, a private membership for SaaS founders outside of Silicon Valley doing $5k+ in MRR. This community is special for a couple of reasons: 1. It's members are super accomplished CEOs who only have extremely nice things to say about the community 2. The guy who runs it, Ryan, is not a "startup expert". In fact, he has never even been...

Shreman Shrestha is the Head of Community for the Friends of Lenny’s Slack community. This community comes bundled with the Paid subscription for Lenny’s Newsletter and at the time of recording there are 17k+ members in here. In this episode, Shre discusses how this community is able to organise 200+ in-person meetups per year, challenges with organising a great mentor matching program, working wi...

Daniel Vassallo is the cofounder of Small Bets - a private community membership for indie hackers, solopreneurs and wanna-preneurs. This community recently crossed 5000+ paying members and has been doing $400k+ in annual revenue every year since its inception ~2 yrs ago. Daniel is a guy filled with hot original takes. He does things differently in this community and it works. Things like charging...

Kyle Hagge led the community efforts at Morning Brew's Learning division as a Director of Community. This interview is a “reflection episode” where Kyle takes us back to this time and shares his “magic sauce”. Among other things, he shares how his team decided which courses to pilot, why he chose Circle to host the community and why it's a good idea to automate connections. Resources: • Ou...

Charlie Ward is the founder of Ramen Club - a private community of 300+ bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneurs that gives them the support and education to grow their business. In this interview, Charlie shares the origin story of Ramen Club, how he organises the masterminds, how he organises in-person meetups in different cities of the world and more. Resources: • Curated Connections (our tool to connec...

Erin Halper is the founder/CEO of The Upside - a private community of top independent consultants that gives them the resources and the support that they need to grow their business. The Upside uses Circle as their community platform. In fact, they were recognized as one of Circle's top performing communities out of more than 10, 000 communities that are hosted there! In this interview, Erin r...

Clara Ma is the founder of Ask a Chief of Staff, a community membership business that helps Chiefs of Staff level up in their career. If you are one of her 23k+ followers on Linkedin, you will know how full her events calendar for the community is. So, it came as a shock to me when she told me she and her EA were the only people working on this business. This episode is a masterclass on building a...

Ece Kurtaraner is the community consultant for Generalist World, a fast growing community membership business that helps generalists grow in their careers. Along with this, she also works with Rosieland - another private community for community builders. So, safe to say, Ece knows the secrets of building a community business. Her key insight - "Don’t overthink it, don’t try to make it perfect...

Michelle Varghese is the community manager for Small Bets, the largest private online community for entrepreneurs with over 5000 members. She has also helped in managing some iconic communities like Write of Passage and The Pathless Path. Along with this, she is also the creator of "Turn your layoff into a sabbatical" course, host of the Build a Wealthy Spirit podcast and a frequent writ...

Anthony Castrio is the founder and CEO of Indie Worldwide, a private community of bootstrapped founders. In this interview he shares his revenue, how he attracted new members in the early days using a challenge, tips for organising a good event and goes deep on the challenges with being an entrepreneur. - Learn how people build community businesses - https://beginnermaps.com/ - Join Indie Worldwid...

Grace Ling is the founder and CEO of Design Buddies, a free community with >64k members on Discord and a total audience of >150k. Here she leads a vibrant online community, does in-person meetups around the world, sponsored partnerships, helps designers land jobs and is even organising a conference. In this episode, Grace does a deep dive into how she started this community, how she grew it...