How To Build a $1000/year Membership with Jay Clouse

Joe Casabona: Can you build a business off of a Twitter challenge? Perhaps it’s not as simple as that, but the core concept is there: create something for people to rally around, and you have a community. Participate with them and you have engagement.

Jay Clouse knows a thing or two about building communities and successfully launched his own membership called Creative Companion—a membership I recently joined—by basically starting with a Twitter challenge called #Tweet100. After comparing notes on how we manage our podcasts, we get into the crux of the matter: using Twitter in a helpful way, then building your business. We talk about mission, pricing, engagement, and tools in this absolutely packed episode. Plus, in Build Something More, we’ll talk about workshops vs. course creation.

This is Episode 270. You’ll be able to find the very packed show notes over at streamlined.fm/270. You’ll also be able to find our sponsors Nexcess, LearnDash, and WP Wallet, which you’ll learn more about later in the show or whom you’ll learn more about later in the show. But for now, let’s get on to the intro, and then the interview.

[00:01:18] <intro music>

Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:01:42] <podcast begin>

Joe Casabona: All right, I am here with Jay Clouse. He’s the founder of Creative Companion. I’m really excited to talk to Jay here on episode 270 because I kind of followed you on Twitter, but then I was like really introduced to you during #Tweet100. We can talk a little bit about that. But spoiler alert, I gained like 300 something followers over that time, which took me like a year to get 300 followers before that. So it was super effective for me.

Jay Clouse: And you made a great review video that I really appreciate. I don’t know what was happening. Sometimes, you know, you may be… Maybe you do this or maybe I’m a psychopath, and no one else does that. I’ll open an incognito window and just type in a project name that I’m working on to see like what else comes up. And it came up with a video that you posted like the day before.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Jay Clouse: And I was like, “Wow, this is awesome.” So thank you for that.

Joe Casabona: Oh, my pleasure. And if you are psychopath for doing that, then so am I because I do that all the time. I’m like, “How am I ranking?” You know, you can use tools to see how, but nothing beats like a clean browser just checking.

Well, Jay, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Jay Clouse: Hey, I’m excited to be here, Joe. Thanks for having me on. Two hundred and seventy episodes, that’s crazy. Crazy.

Joe Casabona: Thank you very much. You know, maybe we can workshop this conundrum real quick, because I have a lot of bonus episodes that I didn’t number properly. So like in Castos, my episode number is like 380 something or 280-something rather. And I want to do something cool for episode 300 but I’m trying to figure out if it should be like the numbered 300 or the 300th episode and I should just like skip like iPhone 10 style to Episode 300.

Jay Clouse: I mean, today actually I released episode 100 of my show.

Joe Casabona: Nice. congrats.

Jay Clouse: And I have seen this cliché where It’s I have I think 122 or something things that have been released on the feed. And I think I did a good job of not adding an actual episode number within my host, which is Megaphone. I append or prepend… What’s the word if you do it at the beginning of sentence?

Joe Casabona: Prepend. Right? Yes.

Jay Clouse: Prefix. I prefix every episode that I want to count with an actual number. So that’s why I’ve said today is 100. But I feel you and that’s my advice, because that’s the choice I’ve chosen, obviously.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I appreciate that. I was doing like Episode 1 with Jason Coleman or whatever and I just had my VA update all of the episode titles to be more compelling than just that. But now all of my… the show notes for this page is going to be streamlined.fm/270. So I could like give everybody a heads up and then just say like, “This is episode 300,” but then I’ll have like a big gap in my URLs. This is stuff that probably just keeps me up at night that nobody actually cares about. Like nobody’s looking at the canonical URLs going like, “You skipped some numbers.”

Jay Clouse: That’s interesting. I wonder how that relates to mine because my episode number is… I use Podpage. My episode numbers are fine but I wonder what it does with like… All right, I’m gonna look this up actually because I wonder how this is handled.

Joe Casabona: So I create… I explic… well, I don’t explicitly. I have a WordPress plugin that creates a redirect when the episode is published. So I have like a custom field in WordPress for the episode number. Welcome to Tech Talk. I have a custom field for the episode number. And when the episode publishes, I have a little script that runs that, creates the slash episode number, redirect to the actual URL because a number is a terrible URL. But it’s really good for speaking on a podcast.

Jay Clouse: So this is kind of crazy. I think Podpage is just doing magic in the background because I have episode number 96 and that is with Nathan Barry. And then I have Episode 97 with Dickie Bush but in between I have a re-air of my original Dickie Bush interview, and Podpage automatically creates pages. So if you go creativeelements.fm/96, that’s Nathan Barry, I do creativeelements.fm/97 and it knew to go to Dickie Bush the new one. So I don’t know what it’s automatic page for the bonus episode is.

Joe Casabona: Are you marking it as a bonus?

Jay Clouse: Yes.

Joe Casabona: Because like in iTunes… This is so fun. People who are listening I hope you’re interested… I guess I’ll say all of this in the intro later. In iTunes, well, quote-unquote iTunes feed, you can mark it as a full episode, a trailer, or a bonus. And I’m willing to bet that Podpage takes that into account.

Jay Clouse: It must be because. I’m looking here… Now we’re sharing screens.

Joe Casabona: Oh, I didn’t even know you can do that in Riverside. I’m like freaking out over here.

Jay Clouse: I can see Podpage just pulls everything in from your RSS and automatically makes pages for it. So Nathan Barry I marked as Season 1 Episode 96. Dickie Bush, the re-air, I marked as a bonus and it didn’t pull in that metadata. So the next one is Season 97 as marked in my host, therefore my RSS, therefore, Podpage. That’s awesome. Man Podpage is an incredible piece of software, I swear.

Joe Casabona: That’s cool. I want to look into that because I’m on a crusade that every podcaster needs to have a good website and not just the crappy website that their audio host provides them. And I fully recognize that not everybody’s gonna want to set up a WordPress site because as much as people like me in the WordPress community are like, that’s easy, it’s not that easy.

I’ve been looking at Podpage, I checked out Caard, I think it’s Caard with two As, or maybe it’s Carrd with two Rs, and that’s really good. But Podpage is very purpose-built and super cool.

Jay Clouse: Do Podpage, please. I beg of you. Also you Joe listener, use Podpage. It’s incredible. It’s such an intuitive piece of software. It does so much of the legwork that I was doing manually by building a page on WordPress for the first year-plus of the show. It’s just phenomenal. One of my favorite pieces of software I found in the last year.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. It’s funny because as we record this I just recorded an episode of WP Jukebox for the WP Tavern, where we talked about why you should have WordPress as your podcast site. But again, that’s like a WordPress-specific audience. And if you’re worried about everything around podcasting, then WordPress is just another thing. And I’m a developer, so a lot of the headaches that you have as well as my audio host, which is Castos, fixes some of that. But if you’re not a developer with a custom plugin that you wrote, there’s a lot of headache involved in it.

Jay Clouse: My Podpage website—I’m looking at Ahrefs—it has almost as high of a domain authority as my personal website that’s like six years older.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Wow. That’s amazing.

Jay Clouse: It’s way, way, way younger. It gets organic traffic. It’s getting better all the time. The health score is lower than I would expect because I haven’t done much in a custom way. But the health score is lower than I would expect. There’s something happening that’s not making Google super, super happy. But from an SEO standpoint, that was one of my biggest fears was, well, if I rip this out of my personal website and just make it its own property, what’s it going to do my personal website? Personal website didn’t take much of a hit at all, and now I have this second property that has almost as much authority.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s like such an interesting thing. Right. I should say full disclosure, Ahrefs is a former sponsor of this podcast. I’m wearing the t-shirt that they sent me right now. It just says T-shirt. Because I struggle with that, too. I think it’s easy for… if you get like deep into the tools to like over-engineer a lot of things and so for a while… This podcast has its own website and has for a long time. But I have another podcast called WP Review that’s WordPress specific that was kind of going in this feed. And I’m like, “Should I be doing this? This is weird. Should I rip this out?”

My homepage for a while was just like a mega RSS feed of all the content I was publishing in other places and I’m like, “What is this doing to my domain authority?” There’s no custom content on here. It’s just like a bunch of redirects. And like what if those redirects break?” Experimenting is cool. Putting a little bit of thought into certain things is probably also important to do.

Jay Clouse: Yeah, for sure.

[00:10:35] <music>

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[00:11:32] <music>

Joe Casabona: This actually nicely sets up the two main things I wanted to talk to you about which is kind of what tools are you using. We can get to that later. Again, I was kind of introduced to you mostly because of #Tweet100, which was… I shouldn’t say was, it’s still going. It’s like a hashtag where you challenged people to I’m gonna say tweet helpfully maybe once a day, right? Because you can piss and moan on Twitter all you want, but that’s not gonna get you any followers.

Jay Clouse: I think the way I put is like share one good tweet per day for 100 days. And good is obviously a subjective term that means something to you, but it probably doesn’t mean tweeting. Number two, you probably want to put some thought into it. Because the idea is, if you want to join this challenge, chances are you probably want to build your authority and your profile on Twitter. And the only way to do that is if you are tweeting helpful, useful, enjoyable things. So this is the gamification of helping you to do that over a three and a half month period.

Joe Casabona: So it doesn’t necessarily… Because I think I did it… I think Christmas fell… No, I think I was done before Christmas. But I did a different challenge in December. But you know, holidays and vacations and birthdays and stuff fell in those 100 days, and I found a tool that I’ve since moved on from called Chirr App. Everything was like four bucks a month, and you could automatically tweet threads and you could add to those threads.

So something that I experimented with over that time was doing all of the tweets in a single thread, and I got feedback that that’s super annoying. So I stopped doing that. But it was really interesting to try because all of my tweets were related to… I tried to make all of my tweets related to podcasting except for I think like on 9/11, I tweeted something about some be nice and remember when we were united. I’m from New York. But everything else was kind of podcast leads. So I wanted them related some other way besides the hashtag.

And then I also set up a Zapier automation to log who followed me and each tweet so that I wouldn’t miss a day. I wanted to make sure. And that’s kind of what that video—I’ll try to link in the show notes—was about.

Jay Clouse: Nice. We were talking about experimenting a little bit before we started recording. And to me, Twitter is the ultimate experiment grounds. Because you’re not really committing too much when you’re sharing your ideas there but it’s such an incredible tool to get feedback on those ideas quickly at like a statistically significant level. Like mathematic.

Because, you know, I have all kinds of ideas for essays that I want to write, podcast episodes I want to create, projects in general that I want to take on. And it’s such a great place to just air a brief idea and see how people react to it. Because you can see over time which things got a more positive reaction. So whether it’s like a new lead magnet that I’m making or whether it’s an essay that I want to write. Twitter is just a great place to experiment with that stuff. And it really works best when you have this high velocity, high volume posting. And a challenge like #Tweet100 helps you to do that.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, I have since stopped using the hashtag. But the lessons I learned, I’ve taken. Now I moved on to a tool called Tweet Hunter. I’m sure you’ve probably seen that one around. I feel like a lot of people are probably using that one now. It’s a lot more expensive than Chirr, but it’s so good. Like, work super well.

Jay Clouse: Those guys build really good tools. And they’ve ripped off the entire #Tweet100 challenge.

Joe Casabona: Did they rip?

Jay Clouse: Yeah, they did.

Joe Casabona: I didn’t know that. Oh, man. It’s a little Twitter beef here.

Jay Clouse: It’s okay. I really don’t mind. It’s a free thing. It works well, and everybody who wants to do their version of it can absolutely do that. But yeah, #Tweet100 is a really good tool. Hypefury is a good tool. I kind of wonder, though, long term or even like kind of near term, because I’ve seen some mixed results, it’s very easy for Twitter to know if you’re publishing through a different platform to Twitter.

And it’d be very easy for them to change the rules for how effective your tweets are if they go through those tools. I would think it’s in their interest that more tweets is good for them. So there’s no reason to dampen that. But it’d be very easy for them to do so if they’re like, “You know what? We don’t like this industry that is being built on a platform. We’re going to make it so that anything that you sent through Hypefury or Tweet Hunter, anything else, typefury just doesn’t get as much organic reach initially.” I don’t know that that’s true, or will be true, but I’m a little leery of it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, it’s not like that far-fetched, right? If you’ve been around Twitter long enough you’ll know of like the great API reckoning of like the mid-2010s, where all of these apps could do everything that Twitter native could do. And then they were like, “Oh, well, we need to kill all this because we want to show ads to people.” So they really crippled some really good iOS apps especially.

Jay Clouse: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know that I’m seeing it now. I had some curiosity about it at one point, because it felt like the stuff I was putting through Hypefury wasn’t working as well as it once was. But a lot of people that I respect and model after are still using those tools. So I have to think that they’re not seeing those effects.

Joe Casabona: I read something… maybe this was from Tweet Hunter, but they have like the Twitter thread Delay where it sends a tweet every minute. And I guess my understanding, from what I’ve read based on that, is if you send an entire thread at once, Twitter doesn’t really like that, or some of it gets lost.

Jay Clouse: It doesn’t make any sense because it’s natively what’s built into the tool. I’ve heard that also. But it doesn’t make any sense, because that’s natively the experience when you tweet a thread in Twitter. And if I’m a reader and I see something is obviously a thread, and it’s going to be 10 threads long, it’s not going to take me 10 minutes to read the thread. So I’m just gonna get frustrated every 60 seconds. That’s not a good experience.

I’ve heard that also. I feel like there’s probably a little bit of engagement hacking, because when you delay it, now, each of those threads individually can show in the feed as a tweet as opposed to nestled under a thread. I can’t think that’s actually the preferred experience.

Joe Casabona: That’s really good point. Of course, Twitter with Twitter Blue, I don’t know if you’re a sucker like me and pay for it.

Jay Clouse: I am.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. So they have like that Reader View. So it would behoove at least that feature to have the whole thread ready to go at once right.

Jay Clouse: I don’t know. I don’t know if I buy into that. But I think there’s probably some truth in the engagement hacking aspect of it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Well, actually, again, since #Tweet100, I think, I’m like crossing like 1,000 new followers, which is wild to me. I was stuck in the 4,000s for a long time pre-#Tweet100, and I just crossed like 5,500 recently.

Jay Clouse: Wow.

Joe Casabona: I’m really psyched about it. And I guess complaining to brands isn’t the way to get followers. Tweeting helpful podcast tips is. Weird, right?

Jay Clouse: It’s weird. So weird that it worked out that way.

Joe Casabona: Not that I can’t help but tweet hot takes about a certain potential buyer of a certain platform that we’re talking about, but…

Jay Clouse: Ah, I follow. I follow.

Joe Casabona: So with #Tweet100 gangbusters, you set up a super cool leaderboard based on Airtable that kind of ranked how consistent people were. And then at the end of what I think was a your 100 days or shortly after, you decided that you would try to base a community, a paid community around this, right?

Jay Clouse: Yeah, yeah. It was at the end of my 100 days. So here’s the one tiny plug. Tweet100.com is where you go if you want to join this challenge. So there’s a free leaderboard there and it tracks… If you use the hashtag—you have to use hashtags so the automation can actually track that you tweeted today—it will increment your score by one and show you a percentage of, okay, of your 100 days that you’ve been in the challenge, here’s how well you’re performing. It’s near real-time, it’s gone on about a six-minute delay. And it will also track how many followers you’ve gained through the challenge.

So all throughout that people had a great experience. And I did too. And they’re meeting each other using the hashtag and chatting and they’re like, “You should make a community. You should make a community.” And I’m a community guy. And at the time I was working with Pat at SPI, helping them build SPI Pro, and I just didn’t have space for another community in my life. So I didn’t do it off the bat. I did a couple of like Twitter spaces to chat with people and help people meet each other.

And then, towards the end of my 100 days, I realized, Oh, I was the first one to start this challenge. I had a day lead on everybody. It wasn’t like an intentional thing but I just wanted to test the challenge.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right happens.

Jay Clouse: So I realized, as I’m getting to the end here, a bunch of people are gonna be getting to the end, they’re gonna wonder, what do I do next? So I made a couple of options. You can either just say like, “Okay, I did it, and it’s over.” No harm, no foul, that’s great. You could extend your #Tweet100 into a #Tweet365, which actually uses the same hashtags, just for a full year, and you could join the #Tweet100 Social Club, which is a paid community that I made just for this. It was $100 per quarter or $300 for the year. And it worked pretty well. We had like 30, 40 people join that.

But what I realized in running that community was, Oh, yeah, communities are a lot of work to do. And when I’m this specifically focused, you just have to really care about that thing. And I love Twitter and I enjoy Twitter, but not so much that I want to eat, sleep, and breathe it the way that a community kind of demands. So that community eventually transitioned into the community that I have now, which is the Creative Companion Club built around my newsletter and overall business.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So the Creative Companion Club is newer than the #Tweet100 Social Club.

Jay Clouse: Correct.

Joe Casabona: Interesting.

Jay Clouse: The Creative Companion was launched in March of this year. So just over a month ago.

Joe Casabona: That was the thing that, if you don’t follow Jay, I believe you were kind of teasing back in November maybe, that you were like building something and we could join early to see what you were building.

Jay Clouse: Yeah, yeah. So as early as I think it was October or November, I knew that I wanted to have a membership for my audience who are creators and creators who actually want to make this like a full-time thing. They want to be professional creators. So I knew I wanted to make a membership for them.

But it took me a while to design what that experience would look like and what the offering would look like. So I actually had a short-term membership that was in a discord where I said, “Hey, I’m going to make progress on this every week. Every week I’m gonna record an update, and let you know what I’m doing while I build this thing.” And it wasn’t until March that I actually launched.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. That’s really interesting. So let’s put some timeline pieces in place, then. You were working with Pat at SPI to build SPI Pro. You’re not still there, I don’t think, right?

Jay Clouse: No, not as of January.

Joe Casabona: As of January. Okay. So this was you were kind of getting ready to launch the Creative Companion Club. Was that like the main business model for you going out on your own?

Jay Clouse: No, my business was already supporting me mid-last year. So here’s the timeline. Beginning 2017, I was self-employed, and I was doing facilitated mastermind groups, and on the back end of that there was a community that was basically like, “If you went through this experience, here’s an enduring community built in Slack.”

Because of that, I met Pat’s business partner, Matt Gartland, and they were looking to build the SPI membership community and they asked me to consult on the project. So I did that in 2020, mid-2020, and it launched in June of 2020. In 2021, they acquired my community and my mastermind program to bring me on to the team full time.

So I worked with SPI through 2021, January through December, and then this year, I went back out on my own. Because the core of my business that was not the services. The things that were like content-related and digital products and sponsorship and affiliate revenue and royalties, all of that continued through last year. And I had the biggest year of my business last year while I was working full time with SPI.

So I just couldn’t do both anymore. And I knew that I was going to miss having community as part of my life. I built a small reputation as a community builder at this point also. So I needed to have a playground and a lab to experiment with things in. But I wanted to make sure I got the format and the model of it right.

Because there are two ways to do this. Like you could have a low-priced membership where you need high volume but more of your people are going to become customers. Or you can have a higher price membership where fewer people join but could be more immediately rewarding financially. So I had to come up with how to do that and how to message it and how to actually build it out.

I built it out of the #Tweet100 Social Club. So that was kind of a leg up because I had some existing members, I had some infrastructure already in place. But I did the rip the band-aid off transition in early March, and then launched publicly in late March.

Joe Casabona: That’s super cool. I love that advice. Because again, I’m kind of… I don’t want to beat this drum too much on the podcast of people who are listening week to week, they’re like, “Oh, Joe does his rag on WordPress.” But coming from the WordPress community, I feel like we are discouraged to charge a lot for anything, if that makes sense. Right? Like, you know, why would I pay you to do this? I’ve heard “why would I pay you when I can get it on YouTube for free?” And I’m like, “Well, I mean, if you don’t know that, then you’re not the person I’m talking to.” So kind of having a high price membership, right? I don’t want to say your prices on the show just in case they change. But it is-

Jay Clouse: Oh, we can. I don’t care.

Joe Casabona: All right. Cool. So standard membership 999 a year. And it offers a lot of community stuff. It gives you access to these workshops, which I want to talk to you about, weekly office hours with you, monthly hot seats with you. I’m really curious about this because I tried to do kind of open office hours using zipped message so people can send me a message or just grab a time on my Calendly if they don’t want to use it message.

And then I’ve been doing these like monthly crew meetups. I think one of the things that could kill a creator who’s running a membership is spending their time unwisely or trying to offer for sure too much.

Jay Clouse: For sure.

Joe Casabona: Now you have a high-priced membership. My membership starts at like 50 bucks a year and goes up to 200 bucks a year. So I’m in the low end, need a lot of volume. Maybe I’ll rework my pricing now. How do you decide where is it wise place to spend your time when it comes to your community?

Jay Clouse: I mean, there are infinite places to spend it, but ultimately, you know, I have the lens of all of my content is helping people become professional creators, but especially in the community. Like, am I going above and beyond to do something in depth that’s really moving the needle for these people who were paying me to be here? So a lot of it is scheduled in.

So office hours are now bi-weekly so that I could do more hot seats, because that was an experience that I recognize people really, really love both as the recipient and as a viewer after the fact. So it scheduled in though that I have two hot seats that are an hour long twice a month, then I have four to six… Sorry, two office hours twice a month. Then I have four to six hot seats.

And those get scheduled on like as applied basis. People say, “I want a hot seat,” and if there’s space they can schedule. There’s a limit on how many can be scheduled in a month between four and six. And then it’s just on the calendar. We do what I call a shared focus sprint every month or almost every month, which is kind of like a lightweight cohort-based course within the community.

So the first month we did a challenge or a sprint around creating a high-performing landing page or sales page. That challenge was three weeks long, there were three live sessions, I scheduled that Calendly as well.

Joe Casabona: Oh, nice.

Jay Clouse: This month we did a sprint around building a signature lead magnet, also three weeks, three live sessions. And besides the live sessions, I will record at least one video that is like educational that you can watch asynchronously to say like, Here’s how I’m thinking about it. So I did like a full presentation on a lead magnet thing and recorded that. And that’s a 20-minute video that lives as an asset in the community. You can go through all the videos any time after you join and still get the benefit of that education through that sprint.

So that’s where I focus most of my time. I do offer every new member who joins a 30-minute welcome call as well. And that takes up several hours a week at this point.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jay Clouse: But it’s worthwhile because again this is a higher price membership. That’s investing in the people, the culture of the membership, it’s annual only. So I know that if I invest a lot in the people as they join, they’re gonna be here for a year and that creates a strong core of people. There will be people who churn at the end of the year. I know that. But also now for the next still 10 months, more people are joining, relationships will form, they’ll be enduring because they’ll have many months to get to know each other before they even have the decision to renew or not.

So yeah, I just invest in good education for the people who are here, I invest in relationships with them. And because it is priced the way that it is, it acts as a filter for people who are more serious and it incentivizes me to do these things.

[00:30:16] <music>

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[00:31:14] <music>

Joe Casabona: When you came up with the positioning for the Creative Companion Club specifically… Oh, wow, Justin Moore is right on this page. I just signed up for his newsletter. It’s really good.

Jay Clouse: That’s pretty good.

Joe Casabona: I guess you had a mission kind of laid out. Positioning is always something that I struggle with because again as a developer by trade, I’m like, “Well, this is a good thing and you’re going to learn stuff, and so you should sign up for those reasons.” But that’s terrible marketing, right? You need to kind of tell the story and submit the painkiller or the vitamin or whatever.

What was that like for you? Because I find I have a lot of resources for creators as well over at Creator Courses. My positioning is not good, but I think it’s gonna get better very soon. Again, I kind of struggle with the how can I ask people who are not making any money doing this thing to give me a bunch of money to help them maybe make money?

Jay Clouse: Sure. For sure. Well, you need to have alignment with the thing that you’re offering and the people you’re offering it to, right? So very intentionally, I knew that if I wanted to price this membership at a level where I would be incentivized to do really good work even if a small number of people joined in the immediate term, I needed to make sure I was pitching it to people who actually had the funds to do so.

And that it wasn’t at a place of desperation where this was like, I need this to return 2x in the next month. That’s a lot of pressure. So you know, it also needs to align with my overall creative platform. And if my creative platform is helping people become professional creators, I felt like this was the place where not only am I helping you do that, helping you go pro, but you’re gonna get my most contextualized personalized help here.

And so all over that website, that landing page for the club, I talk about, you know, this is for people who are already started. Publishing is not an issue. Growth might be an issue. So when people come in, they already have a thing. They know what they’re talking about. They know pretty well who they’re talking to. They’re already doing it. It’s more now like, “Okay, so how do I do this at a higher level? How do I improve all these systems around me and just ramp things up?” That’s pretty much as far as I thought about it.

I will say that the term “creator” is a challenging term to customer because it’s actually very broad still. It’s like, “Well, does that mean video? Does that mean audio? Does that mean emails?

Joe Casabona: Podcasting. Yeah, right.

Jay Clouse: There’s all these things. And it’s like, Yes, could be all those things. So really, you know what I’m trying to tap into now and better explain, I’m not trying to help people get their first 100 TikTok followers. I’m trying to help them build the system around them so that whatever they’re doing on TikTok can actually reward them financially beyond the mean income that most creators make, which is just so small. I was just looking at this report from Linktree, and it was like only 12% of creators earn more than $36,000 a year or something. And it was like-

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jay Clouse: “That’s not enough.”

Joe Casabona: It’s really not.

Jay Clouse: That’s not really being a professional creator. So, yeah, the community is where I can spend time over time because I can’t help you get there in a pre-recorded course. I can’t even really help you get there in a cohort-based course. Because you need time. There are a lot of iterations you need to make. There’s a lot of contexts that we need for your situation. The landscape is changing all the time. We need time. So you know, you sign up to the club, we get 12 months together, let’s see how far we can go.

Joe Casabona: The club gives you time. I’m writing that down. Because here we go, dear listener, I’m gonna give you… You should never talk about your roadmap as far as I’m concerned publicly. What I’m thinking about, what I’m planning I can’t stand people who were like, “Here’s what I think I’m gonna do. Watch and see if I do it.”

But for a long time, my podcast offering Podcast Lift Off was about how to make money without getting sponsors. There are lots of ways you could do it. You don’t need sponsors, I think that’s particularly hard. The thing that I have found from validating my idea is everybody wants to know how to get their first sponsor. Like that’s what most people who want to make podcasting thing care about. Because that is hard but it’s also like the most visible reward, I guess, right? You get a paycheck, and then you get to talk about a brand.

So I’m like, “All right, well, I’m going to change my positioning now. And I thought maybe I’ll do a cohort-based course. But this is the thing I’m struggling with. An eight week cohort-based course, how am I going to teach people to find a sponsor, build their offering, launch their podcast, or relaunch their podcasts or whatever in eight weeks, and then be like, “All right, go and try to find your sponsor now.”

If they don’t have a sponsor, at the end of those eight weeks, my trust is diminished and trust in me is diminished. Right? So maybe what I need to do is position my membership around getting your first sponsor, then you have a year to do it. A year is perfectly reasonable amount of time to do it.

Jay Clouse: I love that. Yeah, it’s tough to do things that are big in a cohort-based session or program, because some of them need longer than your typical four to eight weeks. But once you go beyond, you know, eight weeks and you’re doing these multi-live sessions per week format, it starts to drag, it feels like a lot. Whereas a community, you know, there are seasons to it. And you can kind of jump in, jump out, ebb, and flow a little bit. And that’s all just kind of expected and good.

I’ll tell you something else I do in the onboarding for the Creative Companion Club that’s proven to be really valuable so far. Part of the onboarding process is every member completes what I call a starting snapshot, which is like a three page questionnaire that basically says, “What platforms do you care about creating content on right now?” And they’ll check like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, all the different platforms.

And then whatever they check, I say, “Okay, what’s your URL? What’s your profile URL? How many followers do you have on that platform today?” And then the same with revenue-generating activity. So I’ll say, “How do you generate revenue today?” And they’ll have things like affiliate revenue, royalties, sponsorship, digital products, physical products, memberships, cohort-based course.

Then again, I’ll say, what are the biggest two drivers of those points of revenue? How much revenue do you generate each month in total? Now, at the end of the year, I can have them fill that out again and say, “When you started, here’s where you were, here’s where you are today. Is that worthwhile? If so, like, maybe you should renew.

Joe Casabona: That’s brilliant, right? Because a lesson from early on in this podcast was kind of monthly versus annual membership. And my friend Brian Krogsgard, basically said, like, it’s easy for somebody to not see value in a month, right?

Jay Clouse: Totally.

Joe Casabona: Maybe they’re on vacation, and they don’t do anything with your membership that month, and then it comes time to renew. But it’s easier to look over a year and be like, “Yeah, I got value.” And like this snapshot basically forces them to be like, “Did I get value? If I did, then it’s a no brainer that I would renew.”

Jay Clouse: 100%. And for me as the community builder, I recognize that tension also. Like through no fault of my own, you might have some life stuff happen and yours in this mode of like, “Today right now I’m looking at my budget and I’m hacking out as much as I can. Here’s a recurring expense, I didn’t jump in there last week. It’s gone.” And again, if they would have stayed for a year, they might look back at the end of the year and be like, “Wow, that was wildly worth it,” maybe because of one conversation that happened, you know?

Joe Casabona: Right.

Jay Clouse: But when you introduce monthly pricing, you now have 12 decision points throughout the year that somebody has to decide, like, “Is this giving me enough value to do it again?” Whereas I find that I don’t know if it’s easier to get to somebody to commit to a year, but it’s certainly easier to get them to commit to a year than to commit to a month 12 times. And it just does a lot better things for the community culture as well because you’re not introducing all this volatility. Because if somebody leaves that I like, one, I’m going to be bummed that they left, and two, I’m gonna start wondering like, “Well, what do they know that I don’t know? Why am I staying if they left?”

Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah, right. So that churn maybe especially in a community that’s really kind of close-knit. Who else are they taken with them? That’s really interesting. Another kind of maybe strike against monthly is it does create that tension that creators feel to have to do something new every month, right? Netflix and again as I don’t want to… I guess I’m going to date this recording but as we record this Netflix is having a rough week.

But like, you know, Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, whatever, they all see that month-to-month churn when the show ends and people don’t want to pay for that anymore. But then they put out content later and they come back to it, the customer comes back. This is why all these streaming services are vying for live sports because live sports is is a churn preventer.

But again, if I’m forced to pay for Disney Plus… I mean, I paid for Disney Plus for the first three years when it rolled out because that was like a no-brainer for me. But if I’m forced to pay for Disney Plus for a year, then I’m like, Well, what comes out in the year? Obi-Wan, the Kenobi series, the Mandalorian, One Division, whatever, right? Like okay, well, there’s four shows coming out this year, that’s totally worth the 90 bucks or whatever.

Jay Clouse: Totally. Like I said, for me, I still do new things on a monthly basis, specifically those shared focus sprints, but that’s less about keeping you around. Like one, it’s a core value proposition of the community. So I’m gonna keep doing it. Two, by having that, I can then go to my audience, because I write weekly, but this is an evergreen, always open membership, so I can go at least once a month to my audience and be like, “By the way, inside of the community this month we’re starting a new sprint. It’s based around building a new lead magnet. If that’s interesting to you right now, this would be a really good time for you to join the community.”

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s awesome. All right. So this was really good insight. Maybe in Build Something More we could talk about what it was like doing the transition from the #Tweet100 Social Club and kind of how you mitigated that, right? Because it feels like if people are in on the social club, it wasn’t like a bait and switch. But it was definitely like, I signed up for this reason, the reason is changing and the cost is like 4x-ing. So maybe we could talk about that in Build Something More.

Which if you’re listening to this not in Build Something More, you can sign up over at streamlined.fm/270, it’s 50 bucks a year. It’s a yearly pricing, but that’s less than five bucks a month. I just paid six bucks for a coffee, so it’s worth it.

Okay. So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about tools. I love talking about tools. We opened the show, basically talking about Podpage. Like I said, I’m a WordPress guy but there are some things that I prefer not to do in WordPress. My community is not on WordPress because it’s like I don’t hate myself that much. What tools are you using, let’s say, to manage like the club’s subscriptions and then the community aspect?

Jay Clouse: Yeah, this is a lot more complicated than you probably expect, so let’s get into it. I’m a WordPress guy. All my websites are on WordPress, except my podcast, which is on Podpage and except Creative Companion which is now on Ghost. I put Creative Companion my newsletter and overall business really on Ghost because I decided I cared a lot about page speed and I want to learn new tool. So I’m gonna do it.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Jay Clouse: What I found out about Ghost is that there’s no visual editor. So the customizations that I make are just like so tedious, and have to manage versioning of different theme files and uploading that. So I’m actually learning a lot, but it was frustrating. And it takes some technical knowledge-

Joe Casabona: Are you a developer in a previous life? Are you familiar with like GitHub, HTML, CSS, any of that?

Jay Clouse: No, I wouldn’t go that far. I’m a product person. I was in product management for a long time. So I speak developer but I don’t go very far beyond HTML and CSS.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha.

Jay Clouse: So with this project, now that I’ve got it running, I made a lot of customizations to the Ghost theme, because there actually aren’t that many Ghost themes. And there weren’t many that looked like I wanted them to look for this project. So I found a theme called Ubud and I like it. I’ve done a lot of customization to it.

I decided that I wanted to use that as a CMS but also as membership management, because I liked the idea that using Ghost, subscribers could be quote-unquote, “free members” and could comment on things and have an account. And also there are no membership fees. So people could join the membership through Ghost and besides the payment processing fees, there’s nothing that goes on top of that.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome.

Jay Clouse: So for the community itself, I use Circle though. So I processed the payment in Ghost, your entire account is managed in Ghost. And actually the great thing about that, too, is you can gate certain content and ghost based on membership tier. So I can do all of my member management, member profiles, member onboarding, member dashboard. That all lives on the website in Ghost, and the actual community activity is inside of Circle for the most part.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I’ll jump in here. Maybe you are done. Maybe I’m not jumping in, maybe I’m just continuing the conversation-

Jay Clouse: Well, there’s one real last quick thing for context you might want to know.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jay Clouse: The Creative Companion Club page, landing page is actually Webflow on a subdomain.

Joe Casabona: Oh, interesting. Okay. Okay. Good to know. So let’s talk about a couple of… Ghost, was this open source project originally launched on Kickstarter or maybe it’s not open source, but it launched on Kickstarter-

Jay Clouse: It is.

Joe Casabona: It is open source. Okay. So it launched on Kickstarter, I believe, if I’m not mistaken, as kind of a WordPress alternative. I think this is the one that Matt Mullenweg like donated $10,000 to but then like rescinded it because it wasn’t as open source as he wanted it to be or wasn’t using the GPL. I think this is the project. So originally, it was like blogging software, if I’m not mistaken. Now it seems like it’s more in line with kind of, I’m doing paid content, which is really interesting.

Jay Clouse: Can be for sure. It’s definitely built for content creators who want to have memberships. And instead of doing like WordPress Plus Memberful, who are sponsors of Creative Elements, I like Memberful, but instead of doing WordPress plus a third party, this is an all-in-one sort of solution.

Joe Casabona: Right. And it’s kind of positioning itself as an alternative to Patreon and Substack and things like that. For comparison’s sake, my membership is managed on WordPress with… It’s like such a hodgepodge. This is why I don’t recommend anybody do this. But I have WooCommerce and LearnDash and WooCommerce subscriptions.

I was using LearnDash for the courses, but then they rolled out a membership portion. So I’m still tied to WooCommerce subscriptions because handling subscriptions yourself as a total nightmare. And I can’t get rid of this plugin or I’m gonna have to get everybody who’s subscribed to switch. And I’m like, the 200 bucks for the plugin is worth it for me. But now LearnDash manages the membership stuff too, because they have that. So like it’s a hodgepodge. If I was starting today, I would only use LearnDash or I would use a membership plugin separately. And then I’m also using Circle. So how are you connecting Ghost to Circle?

Jay Clouse: I have an invitation link created in Circle so that once you get through the onboarding inside of Ghost there’s a link to invite yourself into Circle. I do also dispatch an automatic invitation to the email address that signs up for a membership. But you know if their membership lapses or if they want to change anything, it’s actually managed inside of Ghost.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Okay, cool. Again, that’s I have Zapier. So when somebody signs up for a membership, WooCommerce, specifically with WooCommerce, and it triggers a zap that invites them to Circle. And what I like about that is like I can tag them, I can add them to specific spaces or whatever kind of based on what they buy which is nice. But again, like if that automation breaks, then everything breaks. So as a creator, the fewer links in the chain the better it’s going to be for you.

Jay Clouse: Yeah. I went back and forth a little bit because I actually love Circle’s pay walling functionality. It’s actually more flexible than the Ghost payment processor. Because Ghost basically allows you to do monthly, annual and that’s it. Circle allows you to do things like bi-annual and quarterly, which is interesting. But I wanted you to be able to log into your account on Creativecompanion.club and see your membership there in an honest way.

Because I could have said like, All right, you pay in Circle and we’ll reverse zap you into Ghost, but then your account is gonna show you that you’re like a complimentary member paying $0 per year and it’s confusing. So it was important to me to have that live in Ghost. I forgot where I was going with that…

Joe Casabona: Well, I think this is a good point too because I was kind of doing the same thing. I was doing all of my paywalls content in a Circle for a while. But then I realized like there’s no RSS feed for Circle. At least as far as I know.

Jay Clouse: No, there’s not.

Joe Casabona: I want my members to be able to get member only content where they want or at least get notified of it. So again, I started publishing everything on my WordPress website again, which makes more sense. But again, I was backing in like two memberships into this one Circle install. I can’t stress this enough: experiment but like plan just a little tiny bit.

Jay Clouse: Yeah, that’s all built into Ghost too. It’s all synced up. And I have integration with ConvertKit going back and forth so that if you sign up in either place, it’s synced between the two. But I could send emails directly from Ghost to say, “Hey, I just published a post, and it’s only available to members, and it’s gated by your member account. It only goes out to members, but it’s emailed automatically through Ghost.” There’s a lot to like about it. But there were also some limitations that I ran into.

[00:50:40] <music>

Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by LearnDash. Look, I’ve been making courses for a long time, I’ve taught at the college level and I’ve created curriculums for several different organizations, including Udemy, Sessions College, and LinkedIn learning. When I create my own courses, there’s no better option than LearnDash.

LearnDash combines cutting-edge eLearning tools with WordPress. They’re trusted to power learning programs for major universities, small to mid-sized companies, startups and creators worldwide. What makes LearnDash so great is it was created by and is run by people who deeply understand online learning, and adds features that are truly helpful for independent course creators. I love the user experience.

And now you can import Vimeo and YouTube playlists and have a course created automatically in seconds. I trust LearnDash to run my courses and membership. And you should too. Learn more at streamlined.fm/learndash.

[00:51:46] <music>

Joe Casabona: Let’s talk about some of the limitations if you’re comfortable with that first before we move on to ConvertKit and workshops.

Jay Clouse: The biggest limitation that I had with Ghost is that everything is a single column format. You can’t do like two column design on a page. There’s no visual editor. So if you wanted to do two columns, you’re either embedding an image that looks like it’s two columns, but not two columns or you’re completely uploading a custom built page into the code base, which is beyond my capabilities.

So that’s why I ended up creating my landing page in Webflow and putting that on the website as a subdomain because I could control the design a lot more and make it more compelling. And it still looked like the same domain because it’s just join.creativecompanion.club. And most of the theme looks the same but I wish that it didn’t have to be a separate platform. That’s a new subscription that I’m paying for every month just to do that.

Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So if I go to Creativecompanion.club, this is Ghost?

Jay Clouse: Correct.

Joe Casabona: Nice. And then, yeah, if you go to join it’s like inscrutable that they are different platforms. I feel like you effectively use subdomains, right? Because your… Is it workshops.jayclause?

Jay Clouse: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: One of your other… When I was trying to reverse engineer what you did, so I could do something similar, I was really impressed with your setup. And I was like, “Man, I just very nearly over engineered this whole thing.” So with that, let’s kind of talk about this other aspect of like, again, effectively using subdomains. You have a number of workshops for around $50 each, right?

Jay Clouse: Yes, they’re all $40.

Joe Casabona: Oh, $40 on the nose. Okay, I thought they were $49 for some reason. Okay. And they are evergreen? They’re essentially like videos that are delivered via ConvertKit’s digital payment platform, right?

Jay Clouse: Right. When they’re first introduced, each of these workshops, were run live on Zoom for $40. And then I took the recording of that and uploaded it to ConvertKit commerce and you can purchase the recording and watched on-demand still for $40.

Joe Casabona: Nice. So let me ask you then, because this is again something that I was bad at positioning, I just kind of made a page for workshops and didn’t really tell anybody about it or why they should buy them. I was just like, “Here’s some workshops,” and like set dates arbitrarily. Do you have a minimum threshold for if you’re going to run the workshop?

Jay Clouse: I don’t.

Joe Casabona: Okay.

Jay Clouse: It would be a bummer if fewer than five people showed up. I think I had one workshop where live only four people showed up and that felt like, “Mm, is this isn’t what I wanted?” Because even though like more than four people purchased, so the bottom line, for me like the amount of work that I put to create the workshop it was still economically worth it. But reputationally I don’t know that those attendees had a good experience. Because they’re looking around the room like, “Wait, am I one of four suckers who bought this thing?” So I worry about that a little bit. But ideally, you have like… seems fairly arbitrary, but like six or more people.

Joe Casabona: Okay. That’s like a lot lower than I would have expected. But maybe my expectations aren’t tempered because I’ve done like workshops for like these huge, long-standing communities where we’ve had a few dozen people in.

Jay Clouse: I’ve had all over the board. Like I’ve done workshops for Creative Mornings, three workshops and had more than 300 people show up live. For my workshops personally, I’ve had… Let me check real quick. My most popular workshop is my Community Building Crash Course, 236 people have bought it to date. And I think live we had like 60 people show up.

Joe Casabona: Oh, wow.

Jay Clouse: But again, on the other end of the spectrum, there was that one goal-setting workshop where I think we had four people show up live. So it can be kind of all over the board. I definitely prefer it in the more than a dozen people range, but it’s not a big deal to me either way if it’s beyond that.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. I guess, is there a minimum number of purchases then where you’re like, This is not worth it for me? Or is it like, well, they’re evergreen and I have the audience and it’s helpful stuff anyway?

Jay Clouse: I don’t think there would be a minimum level. I mean, it’s hard for me to believe that I would have less than six purchases on this thing. I’m sure there is like a theoretical level. But I wouldn’t make it in the first place if I wasn’t pretty certain that more than a half dozen people would want to buy it anyway.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Because you have a community of people who are probably asking you, “How do you do this or whatever?”

Jay Clouse: Yeah, it comes up quite a bit. There are ideas all the time. And for context, my email list is about 12,000 people.

Joe Casabona: Oh, wow.

Jay Clouse: Twitter, about 14,000 people. So I can reach the fair number of people. But you know, even if nobody showed up live, I would show up, perform it, save the recording and still upload that recording as an evergreen thing. And know that I made this workshop for a reason. This is an asset now that I can leverage even if the live portion didn’t go well.

Joe Casabona: Interesting. I like that a lot. So the last question I’ll ask you around this, just because I’m generally curious. Again, like workshops, webinars, webinars are supposed to be really good way to build your list, workshops are a nice way to generate some income as a creator. How long do you give yourself to promote a workshop or webinar?

Jay Clouse: At least two weeks.

Joe Casabona: At least two weeks. Okay. And I mean, you know, you’ve got a good reach on your list, but list size doesn’t necessarily connotate list quality, right? And I’m not saying that to denigrate you. I’m saying that because, as somebody with 1,000 people on my list, I feel like I have a good number of people who are engaged. And if you have 500 people who are engaged, it’s about an addressable audience and engaged audience more than the numbers.

Jay Clouse: For sure. The experimenting that I’ve done has shown me that within a week of lead time feels kind of intense, and like I wasn’t expecting this and now I have to carve out this time. More than two weeks, there were just diminishing returns in that third week and beyond [inaudible 00:58:26]-

Joe Casabona: Gotcha.

Jay Clouse: …people sign up. If it’s two weeks out, that feels like, Okay, I can slot that in or I get the recording and not having something sprung on me. If I go into promoting it for a third week, I’m really not getting new signups.

Joe Casabona: Interesting. I guess it’s a combination of hype… And if you’re constantly promoting this thing, maybe it seems like it’s not. Maybe it’s a psychological thing, or oh, well, it must not be selling that well, or whatever.

Jay Clouse: In this long game that is being a creator, I don’t want to create the habit or expectation in my audience that you can just kick the can for forever. You know, I’m like, I’ll wait for weeks to make this decision. I want things to be moving kind of quickly. And if you don’t jump on the boat, that’s totally fine. You don’t have to get on every boat that comes by. But if you’re interested in that boat, jump on the boat now, there’s no reason to wait.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. I love that. That’s such great advice. I have a lot to think about. This is why I have these podcasts, these episodes, right, because I’m like, I have questions. But this has been great. Jay, I really appreciate your time. I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jay Clouse: Trade secrets? I feel like ConvertKit commerce is maybe a trade secret. It’s so good. It’s so lightweight. It’s so easy to sell these workshops. I did some quick math and I’ve sold about $20,000 worth of workshops. These are 60-minute zoom calls essentially.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Jay Clouse: And a lot of that comes after the live portion has ended. And it’s so easy to put these up and sell it. I will say I’ve experimented the pricing a little bit. And I feel good about $40 too. I’ve tried up to $60 and didn’t convert as well. I even extended the workshop. So typically, it’s a 60 minute call, $40. My last workshop that I ran live was 90 minutes. So I said this is gonna be $60. And that pricing experiment didn’t seem to go well.

Joe Casabona: Interesting.

Jay Clouse: So my working theory is like $40 is still within kind of an impulse buy no brainer sort of place. Whereas I think once you cross 50, and I do think people quantitate 49, with 50, I think they’re smart enough, right? I think it becomes a different buying consideration.

And interestingly, you know, I built full five-hour courses that took a month and a half to produce and sold it for $200. And it’s easier for everybody to win with this workshop format, because for the consumer, the user, they’re paying $40 for something that they get tremendous value out of. Easy to get $40 with the value for something and you’re not paying your computer for five hours, like working through something really heavy.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Jay Clouse: So it’s easier for them to buy, it’s easier for them to feel like that value is worth it. It’s easier for me to produce. And even though it’s only $40 per person, the volume is a lot higher. So I’ve de-prioritized full-produced courses pretty heavily in favor of these workshops because everybody wins.

Joe Casabona: That’s the other thing we’re going to talk about in Build Something More, friends. As somebody just finished his 13th LinkedIn Learning Course, I love making LinkedIn learning courses, but I don’t have to… All I have to do is make the content. I don’t have to edit or sell it or anything. So that’s my favorite model. For my own courses though, I’ve done the same thing. I’ve de-prioritized? Is that what you just said?

Jay Clouse: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: I don’t prioritize my own full pre-recorded courses anymore, because it is a ton of work. But Jay, this has been great. I don’t want the main secret to get buried because I agree wholeheartedly. ConvertKit commerce is a trade secret. And it’s available on the free tier, right?

Jay Clouse: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: What a crazy thing!

Jay Clouse: I think there is like a small transaction fee.

Joe Casabona: Maybe it’s an extra transaction fee. But you can sign up for ConvertKit for free and start selling.

Jay Clouse: Yeah. But I think they market it as there’s not a transaction fee is just payment processing. But this even processing is 3.5% plus 30 cents. Processing is probably 2.9% plus 30 cents. So they’re probably keeping that point 0.6%, if not more, because they might have better terms with Stripe in general.

Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah, because you don’t even have to sign up for a Stripe account. They’ve got like that vendor or marketer account status.

Jay Clouse: Right.

Joe Casabona: Brilliant. Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly. When I need to set up a quick product, even though I have WooCommerce and WP Simple Pay, and a million other ways I can do it, ConvertKit commerce is the easiest thing for me to do. Awesome. Jay, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us.

Jay Clouse: Hey, thanks for having me, Joe.

Joe Casabona: Thanks to all of you for listening. If you want to catch the rest of our conversation where we’re going to talk about kind of merging two communities and courses in general… I want to be respectful of Jay’s time, we won’t go crazy, but it’ll be an ad-free extended episode. You can join the Creator Crew for just 50 bucks a year over at streamlined.fm/270, where you’ll also find all of the show notes, everything about Jay. I didn’t ask you where people can find you.

Jay Clouse: Jayclouse.com. Find me on Twitter @JayClouse. It’s pretty easy to find me. Just Google my name and pick whatever is most interesting.

Joe Casabona: Excellent. All of that will also be in the show notes, as well as our sponsors, which you should say thank you to because they help make the show happen. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.