What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of,
so the rest of us can do the same.
Today I'm talking to Jay Klaus. Jay first popped onto my radar when he posted on IndieHackers
that he sold his community to Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. And you typically don't
see communities get acquired. And that's because acquirers are really investors. They want
to buy your thing, and then they want to see it get much, much bigger in the future. And
communities are kind of a tricky beast where there's no guarantee they're still going to
be good as they grow. In fact, a lot of communities get worse as they grow. So something that
might be working really well at 100 people or 1,000 people might turn into complete and
utter chaos at 10,000 people or 100,000 people. And so to be able to sell your community means
that whoever's buying it has the utmost faith and trust in you, and they really think that
you're a badass, and you're going to be able to not only grow this thing, but hold the
ship together as it scales. And Jay is indeed a badass. So in this episode, we talk about
his journey as a creator. We talk about these new audio platforms, Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces,
how to use those to build your audience. And we talked about the journey from basically
making $0 as a creator to being 100% financially independent and able to do whatever you want.
Enjoy the episode.
I got like a million and one things I want to talk to you about, but you had like kind
of a cool year. I mean, you described to me a few weeks ago that like, this was your biggest
year as a creator. He said you first hit the first year we hit six figures in revenue.
It's cool. If I share that, could I say that? Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Six figures in revenue
as a creator. That's great. That's enough where you don't, you clearly don't have to
work a job for the man. You can do whatever you want. That's true. And then I went and
got a job for the man. Yeah. You got a job for the man basically, but like the good man,
you know, there's like, there's like the bad man that you don't want to work for. And then
there's Pat Flynn, who's like the ideal sort of person to work with. So I guess that's
the second exciting thing is that you tweeted about this. You posted on Andy hackers about
this that your community got acquired and the exact way you phrased it. And your tweet
was let me pull it up. He said that your virtual accelerator and private community just got
acquired by smart passive income. And we talked about this. So which one is more exciting
to you? I guess the fact that you had this huge year as a creator or the fact that despite
having a huge year, you now technically have a job and your community got acquired.
Oh man. It's, it's tough to say they're both equally exciting. They're both interplays
so well that let's start with the creator side first. Cause this is, this is like crazy
to me. I mean, for the last four years, I was trying to get to a point where I was like,
okay, I want to be very comfortable independently and have a lot of optionality. And really
honestly, even just like the last four months had been where that really, really came on.
And then at the same time I kind of unlocked that optionality, like hit that mythical six
figure mark, but the opportunity that I had with SPI and what I could do there while also
being encouraged by them to continue my creative work. It was just like having my cake and
eating it too. It was, it was amazing.
So is this what you mean when you say optionality? Like you don't want to have to quit anything
or you want to have as many like possibilities. Like why, why go for optionality?
So I kind of, this, this SPI thing happened like the perfect time where I was like, okay,
well, I proved that I could do this. And now I have this great financial economic engine
of my own building over here. That's growing an audience that's continuing to build upon
itself. But at the same time, I see this really special opportunity at this point in time
to focus what I've learned about building community inside of an even greater ecosystem
to prove out a lot of the theories that I have around community and serve even more
people, which theoretically could also feed into some of the stuff that I'm doing. So
it just felt like this is a really good fit for me. I remember, um, I have a good friend,
David Sherry, he, he and I have been good friends for a long time. He started death
to the stock photo. And he told me one time that he thought my super power was building
community. And this was like three or four years ago. And I just like wrote it off as
like, yeah, but who cares about that? Like that's something I do. And I like doing it
at power stuff, but nobody cares about that. And now people care about that.
Yeah. It's like, Oh, now, now this seems like something I can like really step into as a
strength and step into it credibly and not feel like I'm fighting upwards to say, like,
pay attention to me for this. It's more like, I've done this. I'll write about this. You
can pay attention if you want, but I'm like very confident that I can step into it and
talk about these things.
Right. I don't want to say sell out, but why sell like why? Like you have, you know, this
entire career life you built for yourself. You finally got six figures in revenue. You've
got maximum optionality. You can do anything that you want. You literally have no one who's
telling you what to do. You can quit anything. You're totally free. How do you even think
through whether or not you want to sell your community to an acquire or stay independent
and do other things?
I wasn't thinking about it. I wasn't shopping around. I wasn't seeing like, what would the
market value of this thing be? Honestly, I had been working with the SPI team for like
six months and we had the beginnings of something pretty special with SPI pro, but I was a contractor
and we were getting to a point where it's like, we were both looking at like, well,
okay. So what happens now after the transition is already go to another contract.
So you're supplementing like all of your creator stuff. Cause you also have like a podcast.
You also sell courses and you've got community. So you're supplementing that with doing contract
work with SPI and presumably other clients too.
And mostly SPI they, I had mostly dialed back to just working with them and then earning
enough of an income from my other stuff that was enough to get by. But it got to the point
where Matt was like, well, what it looked like for you to join the team full time. Is
that something that you'd be interested in? And I was like, ah, I don't know. I got too
much stuff in flight. Like I got this community. I've got my own projects. It's all going really
well. And he's like, well, we're really interested in this, this, and this. What, what if we acquired
Unreal collective? And I was like, Oh, well, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about
that.
So you got a very tangled web here of a million different things that you're doing. And I
want, I'm curious, like how does it all start? If I want to be a creator like Jay Klaus,
like, you know, what's the very first thing that you do a podcast, a course, a blogging?
Not a podcast. I love podcasting have a course on podcasting, but podcasting is a really
long game and it's good to get started now because it's going to take a while for you
to build an audience for sure. But to me, you start with services. You start as a freelancer
or you start if you have like some authority and some recognition and people who would
already want to pay for something. Unreal collective, the accelerator program was basically
a mastermind program as a coaching program. And in that I got to scale my time across
five people at a time, which was a pretty great hourly rate, which saved a lot of time
and space for me to create these assets.
So it's like being a service provider. Like let's say you're a software engineer for like
one company at a time. Like you can make a decent amount of money, but not that much
because it's one client at a time. But if you decide to like teach five people, you
can bring them all into one community. You can basically charge five times as much because
you got five people at a time. Where do you get those first five people for unreal collective?
How did anyone even know that you were offering this thing and decide to pay for it?
The first thing that I did was I did a 12 week program for free for five people that
I thought were working on something interesting that would stick with it and show up even
though they weren't literally invested in it and would have interesting stories coming
out of it. And so after I worked with those five people, I documented their stories and
their progress. I put that into a sales page and then that became what I went out and had
as social proof to do the first paid program. And even then for the first couple of cohorts,
it was a lot of outbound emails. To be honest, like I had already built a relationship over
years with a lot of people in my own city who are business owners because I was organizing
like startup weekends for years. And I sent a short email to people who I thought would
be fun to work with, who I thought would benefit from the program. And I said, Hey, I have
membership opening for unreal collective. It can help you go from A to B on what you're
working on. I think it would really fit, fit you well. Uh, zero pressure is your expectation,
but if you have any interest at all, let's get on a call like very short. And the win
was let's get on a call. And then I would ask them a lot of questions about like, okay,
so what's going on in your business? How are things going? What's a priority for you? They
would talk and talk and talk in a good way. And I would learn a lot about their struggles
and I could very quickly see like, Oh, you're actually dealing with the exact same thing
as a net who's also in this cohort. I think you would get a lot out of this. We'd love
to have you again, zero pressure expectation. Like I never hard sell anybody. I just affirm
for them, like hearing your situation, I can tell you that this will work for you if you
want to do it. And if you do, that'd be great. And that, and that worked for the most part.
And then it got easier. Every, uh, following cohort got a little bit easier because there
was more social proof. Like I did a really good job of capturing testimonials from almost
everybody who went to the program and turn that into a success story for like everybody
who went through the program and did a testimonial. So you go to the website and you're like,
is Jay like just blowing smoke? Is this really work? And you're like, Oh, here are 40, 40
people who already did this 12 week experience. And this is the results that they saw. This
is great, but services income is always going to be the fastest way to income, but you need
to embrace being a business owner. You need to embrace being like a freelance business
owner so that you're actually getting yourself enough money and time to build the thing that
you want to build.
I love this like high touch model because a lot of people start and they just want to
start like step five. Like I'm building a scalable software product as an indie hacker.
Like that's really hard. You got to kind of like market it. Like people like they don't
really know why they should use your thing. And it's competing against all this other
scalable software built by other people who have bigger teams in you and bigger budgets
in you. But if you're just like literally reaching out to people one at a time, and
you can give them this like really crafted pitch of like, I know exactly what you're
working on. And I want to hear your hear about your problems and your challenges. You're
just going to be able to provide something way better than somebody who's trying to make
some sort of one size fits all product. And you can also charge more out of the gate.
Like you're probably charging at least a few hundred bucks or something whether whereas
like people with software try to charge, you know, five or 10 or 20 bucks a month.
Yeah, I did. I mean, I did the math in the beginning. I was like, if this is 12 weeks,
which the program was, how much would I have to make from how many people and do this three
times a year to get by if this was my only means of income? I did the math and over time
I literally doubled the prices. I started at, I think $400 for 12 weeks of just the
group calls. And at the end it was 9.99 for the base level. But I knew that I was going
to have to deliver this experience in this outcome for people. And I was going to be
staring at him in the face for an hour every week for 12 weeks. I wasn't going to try to
sell them into something that I didn't think was going to set them up for success. It's
not going to be a fun time for anybody. And because it's a group call, if they're not
having a good time, they could very well make it so that other people in a call weren't
having a good time too. So you genuinely had to make sure that they were a good fit. And
the best way to do that was to have these calls.
Would you describe Unreal Collective as like, you described it as an accelerator. You described
it as a community. I guess it is a community because kind of the value comes from the people
on the call. It's not just you like monologuing at them and telling them what to do. They're
each talking to each other. What would you say is something that you learned about community
by running these communities that, you know, the average person doesn't understand.
And the other reason that why it was a community was after the program, you were still invited
to stay in the Slack channel and it was incredibly active. Like everybody who had gone through
the program was still in there. And because it grew like 15 to 20 people at a time to
answer your question, everybody got to know everybody really, really well. And it wasn't
like all of a sudden the people who would invest a lot of time and energy into this
community were now overwhelmed with a hundred new people who wanted to do things a different
way or didn't know the etiquette. It was, it was all very smooth and slow and you could
integrate people well. And so like, this is, this is the thesis of joining SPI is now that
I've seen how to take small groups and build a community slowly and have high touch connection
and make them really love it. How can I meet in the middle with a large audience and a
larger community to try to scale that experience, which is like an inherently very difficult
thing to do, but you have to have experience at the low end to be able to try.
It's like you started your own miniature, like Y Combinator, like I'm gonna get a bunch
of founders and entrepreneurs and put them together in these little cohorts and help
each other and connect into each other. And you don't need like a huge brand to do that.
You just need to like these sales emails and your own personal reputation and kind of these
testimonials from people who've done it before. And it just becomes more and more valuable
the more people you get into it because like you said, they're all in the slack group.
And then I think there's so many, there's like so many ways to capitalize on that. Like
you can just charge basically a straight fee like you were doing to different people. There
are also these like really huge communities. I don't know if you're familiar with like
these executive peer groups, there's YPO, a young presidents organization, EO, entrepreneurs
organization. And like people are often like sleeping on how big these things can get with
their membership fees. So for example, YPO, it's like only for CEOs, you have to be a
CEO to join, they have 30,000 members, and it's like $3,500 a year or something to be
a member. And the people who joined are all CEOs are all super rich. So like, of course
I'll join this thing. And they're making that's like $100 million basically a year that they're
making from a community that's really, really scaled up. Entrepreneurs organization is kind
of the same. I think they're also like you have to be a founder, or an owner of a company
that's doing like a million in revenue or something. But it's like 2500 bucks a year,
they have 10s of 1000s of people, same thing. And then they have kind of like the scaled
out community experience like you did, where they just have like these discussions with
like five to 10 people. And they train like volunteers from within the community to lead
these discussions. So it's super scaled up. And they just make a ton of money and also
provide a ton of value from people who want to like meet their peers. So like that's kind
of one way to scale community.
Some of the things you're pointing out is like underlying important things to understand.
Knowing who your people are and what like their threshold for what meaningful versus
non meaningful membership dues is, right? So like with unreal, because my people were
early stage creative service providers, I'm not gonna be able to charge $3,500 a year.
This is not gonna work. There's like an inherent ceiling on what I can do for membership dues.
So that's important to know if you're trying to build a paid community is like, who are
these people and what can they actually pay? Because there needs to be a match of price
to value to like where they are. As far as like how to scale things, I really do think
that you need to put a lot of energy into very unscalable aspects of it. Like one of
the things that I that I call back to a lot is the idea that when we think about building
an online community, we aren't thinking often enough about like, well, what worked offline?
Because if you start to think about your online community as a meetup that happened in your
hometown, when people show up to that meetup, they probably drove across town, they probably
put 15 to 20 minutes into getting there. As soon as they get in the door, the first thing
they do is they look around for people they know, and are familiar with. So they start
to feel comfortable in the space. But if they don't see that, they'll probably stick around
because they already made the trip in an online community. If they show up and they look around,
they don't see anybody they know, and they don't necessarily feel welcomed right away.
So easy to leave, so easy to leave. And you never you might not even know they came. So
it's really about like, how do you welcome people into the space and get them to feel
like they belong there, and that they know somebody there. And if they go missing that
they're going to be missed. And it's really hard to do without putting like a lot of intention
and honestly, like resources into it, whether it's people or money, it's all kind of the
same thing.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of advice nowadays, like you should build an audience, like get
a giant audience. Whereas a community is not necessarily an audience. It's like people
talking to each other rather than just listening to you. But I think it's super valuable because
there's a sticky connection of like the people in your community, if you do what you're saying,
and like make sure they're welcomed, and they feel missed if they're gone. They just develop
these relationships with each other. And they're like, probably not going to leave. Because
like these relationships are so important and hard to find elsewhere. Whereas with an
audience, if like the only value you're getting is like a message that somebody is writing
or emailing to you, like that's super easy to find elsewhere. And you could easily just
leave and like no one's gonna miss you. And so I think, you know, if you're starting a
community, it's super important to do what you're saying and basically realize that like,
yeah, the value comes from these connections. But you got to do a ton of work upfront to
make sure that people are forming these connections, and eventually it becomes really scalable.
Like eventually, I won't say that you don't have to do very much. But like, you know,
with audience building, you always have to be putting out content, you can never really
get off that treadmill. With community, you can eventually sort of sit back a little bit
and people will talk to each other. With like these other organizations I mentioned, basically
the people that they're training who have paid these membership dues are the ones leading
the sessions. With any hackers, we had like our offline community, which was all these
meetups pre COVID. We're having like 67 meetups a month. I'm like, I didn't tell anyone what
to do. Everybody just sort of did, you know, their own scalable thing. And I think that's
the value of community, like the scalability, but you can't really skip ahead.
That's such a good insight. Because I think, I think community scales when the community
scales itself, like if you're trying to scale it as the one person pushing it forward, like
it's probably not ready to scale yet. One of the things I think about a lot in this
space too is like, as creators, we can look at the growth of the music industry and artists
in that way as like where things can go. Because think about the Beatles, it had a ton of fans,
they had an audience and the audience would go to the shows. And like, that almost looks
like a community because now you can have interaction with these other people, but you're
still actually there to see the main attraction. The Beatles weren't like, how do I get my
fans to talk to each other? That wasn't really the concern. But if you think about yourself
as a creator and you are the Beatles in this world, people that might be showing up for
your work because they love your work, but like, how do you make sure that they're actually
talking to each other? That takes some intention and design around the space because otherwise
you're just like, Hey, I've got an audience of 2000 people. I now have a tool that's a
digital community platform. If I throw the two together, that doesn't make magic happen.
They might come and they're like, where's, where's Jay? Where's the attraction? And it'll
be fun and exciting for like 30 minutes. And they'll be like, okay, where do I go? Where's
the food on board? That's, that's it. And that's that we're going to see a ton of that
over the next two years as people just throwing their audience out of platform, not understanding
why it isn't sticking. Right. And people are going to get a bad taste in their mouth.
Yeah. It's like when I get to a conference, uh, often it's a combination of like audience
building and community building where people will essentially come for like a talk ostensibly,
but then the talk's over and you go into the hallway and that's kind of where the community
is. Everybody's talking to each other, entertaining each other, but online, like that doesn't happen.
Like you send a newsletter and you're like, all right, everybody came to my talk. They
read my newsletter. And then I got like a link to a forum, but like, no one has any
real reason to talk to each other. They're not going to naturally bump into each other
like they would at a real event. I mean, that's one of the things that makes Twitter great
and why people love Twitter is because it seems easy to bump into people and send them
a DM. And it's like, Oh wow, we're actually communicating now that that's what happens
at in-person events. A lot of times there's a speaker here and I can talk to him. Access
is there. You can have serendipitous access. If you put a little effort forth, it doesn't
happen as much in most online spaces. So let's talk about tools for a bit because you are
building the smart passive income community on circle, which is a super cool tool for
community builders. You built Unreal Collective on Slack for the most part, and I guess Zoom
calls as well. And then what else we got? We got Twitter, which is like hard to build
a community on, but easy to build an audience on. And then there's Clubhouse, which I don't
know if you've used, but it's obviously been blowing up all year. I think they've got like
1 to 2 million active weekly users or something crazy. And they just got like a billion dollar
valuation and everybody thinks Clubhouse is potentially the future of community. So let's
talk about maybe Twitter. You've got like 5,000 Twitter followers. How are you using
Twitter to build an audience to sort of feed into your role as a creator?
I hadn't really thought about it very intentionally. Like I just kind of felt like I've got to
exist on these platforms for a long time. And luckily I did build an account in like
2009, which is relatively early for Twitter, but I haven't really put a ton of effort into
it until maybe the last year and more even so, like the last couple of months. And honestly,
what I'm realizing is you look at the way people use Twitter and like you see some clear
patterns of, Oh, if you do this type of content, if you have these types of threads and you
talk about these types of things and you get retweets, you get picked up, you get follows,
yada, yada, yada. It just doesn't fit for me, which sucks because like I can see the
recipe and I get the recipe. I'm equipped to do the recipe, but I don't want to do the
recipe. So for, for me, I'm treating it more like a community. Now, honestly, the things
about community are like ask questions, get people's opinion, engage with people and they
engage with you, like be helpful to people, connect people. You can do all that on Twitter,
like really, really well, just the same way that you would in your community. And so that's,
that's more and more what I'm trying to do lately.
I love the question based approach to Twitter, because if you ask a question where it's obvious
that the responses will be valuable to read through, it's a win-win for both people who
want to participate and who want to just like read. So if you're like, Oh, how did you get
your first like 10 users or something and everybody shares, like it's not just cool
to share because like you can share and maybe promote your product and what you're doing,
but also you want to like read through that as somebody who's reading and almost no one
is using Twitter that way. It's super rare. Almost everybody's using Twitter to like build
an audience for themselves rather than to sort of connect their followers to each other.
It's actually could be helpful. Like you can crowdsource things super quick. I genuinely
asked like yesterday, I'm like, how do you guys turn your brain off at the end of the
day? Because like we're all living and working in the same space. So like when the day's
over, how do you know? And how do you like switch off? I have a very hard time doing
that. And I got a ton of responses and a ton of ideas and that was really great. What are
you going to do? I really liked the approach that a lot of people said of like mark a clear
time at the end of the day and then have like a ritual at that time. And that ritual could
be like, I'm going to spend the next 20 minutes checking my email and make sure there's nothing
super fire based, but I'm going to close out chat. I'm going to close out everything else.
Um, a lot of people said like, just leave your phone in the bedroom, which like is the
obvious answer. And like, I should do that. I used to be able to run because it was warm
enough here in Ohio that I could run after work back in the good old days of not winter.
Yeah. And that was like a good transition. So that was really great. And it just feels
more natural and more helpful to me than to be like, I'm going to construct a 12 tweet
thread. I mean, profit, proselytizing something like I get that it works and it could be valuable,
especially if it's like thoughtful and it's like genuinely helpful, but it's just not
the format that I like.
No, it's not super fun. And I know, I know a few people who are really good at Twitter
threads and they talk to each other about how to be good at Twitter threads that are
going to like maximize retweet ability. And like none of them are having a lot of fun
writing these things. And I think they get shared really widely. They have like mass
appeal because so many people were just reading through Twitter. And if you come across like
an entertaining story or like a bunch of like random advice, like, yeah, I might as well
retweet it. But like, I don't think that necessarily translates into like if you're tweeting these
it's super fulfilling or that the people who follow you are going to later on like feel
like they want to buy your products or use whatever you make or talk to each other. So
I'm kind of right there with you. It's hard to use Twitter that way. And I think the people
who do it, it's hard not to compare yourself to them because like you have the same unit
of measurement like how many people follow you or how many retweets that you get. But
like, ultimately you're doing different things. And if someone's got like a hundred times
as many retweets as you're hitting, but they're doing something you don't want to do then
like you're better off just like not comparing yourself to what they're doing.
Yeah. Well, I actually love your take on it recently too, where you're talking like if
you're building a Twitter audience to maximize optionality for optionality sake, like it's
just not necessarily useful or serving you like why are you doing it? It can be a huge
time suck and it's and it's not an asset that builds on itself over time. You know, like
if you put that same amount of effort into writing a really great essay that maybe even
is constructed for like a key search term, the last, the last like big essay that I wrote
was about building community and why I'm really bullish on circle. And that has brought me
so much value in staying power and has introduced like really interesting people into my life
and like actual monetary reward too. So I want to tend towards that. Like if I'm going
to put effort into thinking through something that has a bunch of structured points, I'm
going to put it on something that can live evergreen and continue to generate some sort
of benefit.
So what do you think about clubhouse? Have you, have you used it at all? I kick myself
every day for not spending time on it. Well, you don't have to do that because well, and
to deconstruct that, like I love audio and I love podcasting. I think I'm, I think I'm
a pretty good speaker and it just feels like this plays my strengths and I've been looking
for years at what is the thing that's going to pop up that I can hop on early and build
this unfair advantage that so many creators tell me that they had when they started writing
in 2008 and like clubhouse is the clear answer. The first one that's come around in a long
time and I'm just not spending time on it. And I don't know why other than like, it seems
like a big time suck and it's hard to go from a mindset of like, I want to craft 45 to 60
minute, highly produced, beautiful pieces of dense, useful audio for creative elements.
But then I'm also going to go on clubhouse and just like speak for two hours with no
clear agenda. I just don't get it. But businesses I talked to were just raving about how incredible
it's been for like introducing them to a larger audience and building their audience. And
I knew it would come someday and here it is. And I know that I'm adept, like I'm suited
for it, but I can't get myself to get into it. I'm skeptical that people are building
really big audiences on clubhouse. I think they're building, well, let me change that.
I think people are building big audiences on clubhouse that stay on clubhouse. I'm skeptical
that people have built big audiences on clubhouse that have like then translated into like thousands
of podcast listeners or Twitter followers or mailing subscribers. Maybe a few people
have my thoughts under this. I've been spending some time in clubhouse. Number one, it's live,
which is super fun. Like if you were to pop in and just try it, like you probably get
addicted and would be a time thing for you because just being able to like, on demand
pull a few of your friends into a room and have a conversation about anything you want
is super addictive. And it's really hard to do that anywhere else. Like even for you
and I to talk, we're like, Oh, let's schedule a zoom call and put it on the calendar and
shift it on clubhouse. It's no like, Oh, Jay's online. Let me ping him. We just start talking.
That said, if you build an audience on a live platform and you go live, like a very small
percentage of them actually ever see what you have to say. So like on Twitter, like
I've got like 38,000 followers. If I tweet something, I might get a 50,000 impressions.
Like not only does my audience see it, but like a bunch of other people end up seeing
it on clubhouse. It's like 1%. You can have a million followers on clubhouse and you're
going to get like, you know, 10,000 people see it. You're gonna have a thousand followers
and you get a hundred people who are going to see it. And it's just not, you know, 10
people are going to see it. And it's just not like, that's kind of how live is everywhere.
YouTube, I've seen a lot of YouTube channels where people have like, I don't know, a hundred
thousand subscribers and their live videos have like a thousand views. So if you're used
to doing things that aren't live, I think clubhouse is going to be kind of a kind of
sad because such a small percentage of your audience actually sees those things. And then
it's totally ephemeral. People don't save or record clubhouse conversations. And then
unlike a podcast, they joined in the middle of it. So you're like halfway through talking
about something and like people don't even know what you're talking about and they join
up and it's kind of disorienting and confusing. And then, uh, I know I'm just like a nonstop
hate fest right now. There are good things about it too.
I'm also interested to see like what, what is the impact on podcasting generally? Cause
I think audio is kind of like a zero sum game. Like you only have 24 hours a day. You're
probably going to dedicate so much time to like listening power. So if club house continues
to pick up and that's like the audio people like to tune into as like their form of radio
and intimate audio connection, is that going to tank certain podcasts? I don't know. Or
will they rebound and say like, this was fun for now, but like, I actually do miss people
respecting my time and intention with like thoughtful, highly prepared conversations.
Yeah. Yeah. The other thing about clubhouse is the fact that like there's so much guest
participation. So even if you do prep a lot for a clubhouse call and you bring on like
the right people, people will kind of get upset if you don't bring random people onto
the stage. And then like random people onto the stage usually aren't that well prepared
and they don't really often add a lot to the conversation. Like it's like one in 10, you
know, really add a lot to the conversation. So as a listener, I'm much more into podcasts
and audio books where I know I'm going to get a particular thing, but as a speaker,
I like clubhouse because it's so on demand and so easy to just jump into a conversation.
If I was going to jump into clubhouse tonight and I wanted to be a guest in a conversation,
how easy would it be for me to be able to get into conversations that are happening
and contribute?
It depends entirely on who your friends are and who you know. So if you know someone on
the stage and it's a topic you want to talk about, uh, what will happen is that they'll
probably follow you and you will show up in the little following section and there's a
pretty good chance they'll be like, Oh, Jason, let me invite him up to the stage. I know Jason
smart guys got stuff to contribute. If you're joining rooms or you don't know anybody, then
it's going to be hard because you're going to be one of like, you know, 100, a thousand
people who like might be raising your hand or trying to get on the stage. And like some
rooms are super open about it, but those are often like not the rooms you want to join
anyway, because it's just a bunch of random people talking about stuff. Like you want
there to be some curation, like for unreal collective, your community, like it's curated,
like not everyone on earth can join. Like certain people can join who you know, have
a lot to contribute and clubhouse, like any random person with like a millionaire get rich,
quick scheme, get on the stage and start, uh, you know, motivating about whatever their
strategy is. And it's not that valuable. Yeah, I just, uh, I don't know. I just can't, I
don't know if I can get into it. Well, what about, let's talk about circle, then circle
is a platform you've been raving about. Uh, it's a community building platform. It's kind
of like, you know, you've got different options. You can use Slack, you can use Facebook groups,
you can have chat based communities on WhatsApp or telegram, uh, and in circles, like a fully
fledged kind of like web based community. Why are you so bullish on, on circle? Well,
first and foremost is because the team understands me as the customer and as the user, they know
my motivations and they know what I want out of the platform and they have experienced
building platforms like that before, like they come from teachable. So I know that the
team knows the use case. It's my use case. They know what I want and the things that
they're going to be shipping and shipping quickly are the things that I care about.
About three years ago when I was doing unreal and I was thinking about it as a potential
community and like place where I make a living, I was really frustrated with my choices of
what software to use. Slack has a clear limit of how many people can be in there and how
it can stay tightly knit as it is. I think you get beyond 200 people in Slack and I wouldn't
be able to have the same relationship with them that I did with unreal. And the other
options were like discord, which is Slack for gamers or discourse, which is like a kind
of a gnarly old school looking forum, but like very functional, but felt very out of
workflow and mighty networks, which actually seemed like it should be a great solution.
So I'm sitting here as like a community builder that really wanted a different platform. I
thought about building it. This is like the closest I came to getting really into indie
hacking was like, okay, let me just build something. And I pulled together like the
smartest a UX designer that I knew in town. I brought together two incredible developers
in town and like a really great strategist and we just whiteboard it all day. I'm like,
here's what I want to do. Here are things that I want to do. Here are the things that
we can compare it to. Like, here's what is great about a subreddit. Here's what's great
about indie hackers. I brought any hackers up and I just couldn't come to a solution
of like, why doesn't mighty networks work, right? Just use that. What would I build that's
not mighty networks. And so I just gave it up. And honestly, like circle is a forum software.
It's not functionally much different than discourse, but the UI is better. They understand
this specific customer better. I know as they get into, like they just launched the iOS
mobile app yesterday, as it moves into Android also, like that experience is going to be
really good. I know that to scale a community, you need something that is more searchable
and threadable and can be broken down from like big into small. So a lot of what we do
in, in SPI pro, the SPI community, everyone in there is an, is a member of SPI pro, but
then we start to segment people into different topic areas, into different clubhouses, actually
is what we're calling them now and to, into masterminds that are like real time meeting
groups. So there are a bunch of different ways you can engage in small groups inside
this larger group. And you can't really do that in Slack effectively. You can't really
do that and other things like again, mighty networks just should have worked, but I could
never get into it and I don't know why. And now it's as they're becoming more of like
a holistic business platform. It feels like it's even moving away from the use case I
wanted and it feels kind of slow and almost like bloated. So circle just feels like the
most directionally correct for me as a creator and the use case that I have.
Yeah. You know, one option you didn't mention is Facebook groups, which I've seen a lot
of people build communities on. It doesn't seem like it's tailor made for communities.
It's definitely not tailor made to like break people down into these subgroups as you try
to scale up your community and you know, you need it to still stay personable. In fact,
almost none of these tools are except for mighty networks and circle. Like Slack is
not made for communities. It's made for, for companies, but there is an advantage to something
like a Facebook group that almost none of these options have, which is distribution.
So if you want your community members to be like active and to basically like just kind
of in the course of their normal lives, stumble across the conversations and things happening,
Facebook group is a pretty good option because people reflexively check Facebook and they'll
see a conversation on their newsfeed and be like, Oh yeah, I'm part of this community.
Whereas with something like circle or Slack or mighty networks or even any hackers, I
have this just challenge of like trying to get people to develop an entirely new habit
to visit a community that's not in some place where they already visit on a routine basis.
Yeah, I didn't, I didn't talk about Facebook groups because I barely think about it. And
honestly, the creative elements listener group is on Facebook because I wanted to learn what
it was like and I hate it. I don't hate the community. I hate like the product because
yes, if you are not thinking about how do I make such a great experience that people
want to show up a Facebook group is a great solution for you because people are going
to show up anyway, but there's no threading. It feels like chaos. You can have tens of
thousands of people in there and you feel like, Oh, it's the thriving community, but
like there's 20 posts a day and they're all in a single feed. Uh, it's on Facebook, which
to me is its own because I don't trust, like I don't trust the company on trust where it's
going longterm. The younger generation doesn't have Facebook and it's just rented land. I
think, I think people have more respect and appreciation for a private space that they
think the creator has a lot more control and authority over. But yeah, I mean, Facebook
is really great. If, if you want something that is just going to show up in people's
spaces, whether they are thinking about it or not.
So we've talked about scalability and growing communities, which is tough because you've
got to probably have to figure out a way to break it down. Like EO is done, like YPO is
done, but there's other like things that go into community scalability as well. Like you're
one of the very few people to have sold a community that you built. I did it with any
hackers, Stripe owns it. Ryan Hoover did it with product hunt, which was acquired by Angel
list. And there's been like a few others, but I think the vast majority of communities
are like not that scalable and also like not that interesting to acquirers. And so when
you posted about selling and joining the SPI community on any hackers, like I had a long
comment about my thoughts on like getting a community acquired, like what's it look
like and why most acquirers typically don't want to buy a community business.
And a few of my points, probably the biggest one is that it's, if you think about an acquirer,
they're typically, they're basically an investor, right? They're not just buying something because
they want it to stay the same size all the time. They're buying something because they
want it to grow and scaling it bigger. And unlike a software product, a community actually
changes in nature when it gets bigger, you know, tends to become a little bit less personal,
a little bit harder to run a little bit more unruly, a little bit less like exclusive,
a little bit less curated with who's in it. What are your thoughts on having a community
be acquired?
There are, there are a couple cases you could make. You could look at the really bullish
case and say, well, a paid community is ARR, like it's, it's MRR or ARR. It's, it's recurring
revenue potentially that could be like an incredible investment. But we looked at it
more so from the standpoint of in a paid community, the product you're selling and the benefit
people are getting is out of your hands in a lot of ways. Like it's coming from user
generated content and relationships and, and things that are happening in there. And so
it's a really tricky line to tow because there are likely some members of any paid community
that you would be happier to let them have it for free. Then for them to leave because
they are so valuable as a community member and unreal is this incredible community. We
weren't looking at it as like an immediate profit center of like, well, this is what
we can expect in membership dues. It was more about these people are really well connected
to each other. We know they are incredible community members. We want to make an even
stronger base of SBI pro with some incredible, incredible members who are the same type of
person. And I told the unrealers, I'm like, you know, everything we're doing here, we're
going to be able to do at SBI and even more so because we have more resources. We get
a whole other, you know, we have a community manager, Jillian, who's incredible. So there's
two of us now that our whole focus is making an awesome experience for you. And not only
that, like you're in the space, but we're expanding the horizons because frankly, the
average SBI member is further along than the average unreal unrealer was. So like it's,
it's all upside, but it's scary. First of all, slack to circle is kind of a culture
shock. It's a very different community experience and it's scary to move, but it was, it was
scary for me to tell these people, like, this is not like the investment of, we know this
is going to immediately turn into membership dues. We didn't require a credit card for
them to get in there. We're like, we're giving you access for a year and let us prove to
you over the next 12 months that you want to be here. And this is an even better experience
than what you're used to. And if you want to continue membership after that, awesome.
We'd love to have you, but it's hard because a lot of communities, like they're, they're
fragile that they, they have a lot of ownership over their space. And if you're like, by the
way, actually I own this, this is not a co-own space. It's, it's, it's a scary thing. And
so I think you have to go into it with the right reasoning and not just like disappear.
Like if I was like, Hey guys, they own, you know, later. Uh, no, I'm, I'm, I'm in there
every day. Like I'm genuinely still putting all my energy into making that a great experience.
And now it's like, not only are you guys in here, you guys paid for the 12 week accelerator
mastermind experience of unreal collective. That's a part of SBI pro membership. You can
have that now. Like just, you can have it. It's all upside in that way. And we think
that, you know, this is a really strong base to continue to build from of really kind,
thoughtful, smart, generous people who want to get back to each other.
I mean, I think about the communities that have been acquired, none of the founders of
the community organizers just pieced and said, goodbye, you now are property. All of us have
ended up going to work because we're sort of a crucial part of the community and people
like it's fragile. The community is going to have positive network effect. You get more
and better people in the door and the community grows, but they can also have like negative
network effects where people say this place is dead. It's, it's going down the drain and
everybody convinces everybody else to leave. And there's been a lot of really big communities
that seemingly died overnight because it's kind of a revolt among the people. And unlike
in real life, where if you revolt against your government, like it's very hard to go
somewhere else online, it's super easy to be like, you know what? Dig sucks. We're all
going to Reddit or you know what? Like, and the hacker sucks. Now we're all going to whatever
the new thing is. So you have to be super careful about not upsetting people, man, negative
network effects. I've never, I've never thought about that terminology, but that's exactly
what I'm talking about. Like with paid communities because yeah, it can, it can go to zero really
quickly. And so like as a creator of a potential community, like if you're thinking about having
to be a paid community, you need to take really seriously your own investment of time and
energy in the beginning to get things going and to continue to stoke the fire and make
it an awesome place because there's no value there. If people aren't finding value there,
it's kind of a, you know, chicken and egg type of thing.
So let's talk about branding real quick. Then I'll let you get out of here. Nathan Barry's
been like a really big figure in the creator space well before he started ConvertKit, which
is a tool that a lot of creators use to send email. Like he was doing his own writing and
blogging and had a newsletter and release books and et cetera. And he has one called
Authority where he talks about like, how do you brand yourself as a creator? And there's
a few different ways you can do it. Like you can create something that's like a quote unquote
larger than yourself and you create some brand that's not you. So with like indie hackers,
literally indie hackers, the Portland sign in the name, or you can, you can basically
name it after yourself. So someone who's been super successful at doing that as somebody
like James Clear or Nathan Barry himself, where essentially everything James Clear does
is on jamesclear.com. Every blog post he writes is on his website. His books are authored
under him and people follow him because they really like what he's doing. And Nathan Barry
kind of came down on the side of like, you should name it after yourself because as you
work on multiple projects, let's say you write two different courses and three different
books, it sucks to have to create like a different website for every single one of them and everybody
like none of like the brand affinity sort of a cruise from one to the other. Um, and
so he just decided like, that's the best way to go. The counter argument to that is like,
how does it ever become larger than yourself? How do you ever, you know, escape from that
if you want to do something else? Has anybody else ever buy that or acquire that from you?
Like you're wrapped into the brand. Like it seems like that's inextricable. What's been
your approach and how have you thought about this?
It's been kind of a both, honestly, your name, your identity is something that you'll never
separate from and that you won't sell, you know? So like, I'm really excited about freelancing
schools, this platform that I'm building that is not me centric that I'm building as like,
I think I can make an asset here. That's a cash generating asset that maybe could be
sold someday. And, and just like very easily and very effectively and very like there won't
be like a lot of consideration outside of like people know like, Oh, what happened?
But I'm still getting benefit from it because the thing is generating the value for me and
not the person. On the other hand, I know that my connection to a lot of the people
supporting me as a creator are supporting me as a creator. You know, like an interesting
corollary here is like on lower at nest labs. She has a named thing, but like she is so
central to that still. So in that world, like, I don't, I'd be interested to talk to her
about, about that because like on one hand, it's like, Oh, you build a thing with a name
and that should be its own thing. But if you're still so central to it, is there any
difference? I don't know. So I have like my courses. I have a couple courses under freelancing
school that like, that's an asset and I instruct them, but it doesn't really matter. I have
a couple courses. Now they're on a jclos.com platform. My writing goes on jclos.com. I'm
thinking long-term, like I want to build jclos.com as an asset that attracts new audience and
people that I can help and will continue to do that. But that will evolve with me and
whatever form or fashion. So I'm kind of hedging and doing both because I know I need, and
I want to personally connect with my people. I love that when I write an email every Sunday,
I'm just writing to friends. Like I literally, it feels like I'm writing a zanga post sometimes
and I can just be me and it's so easy and it lets you be more prolific instead of putting
on like the freelancing school hat. It's just different. That's such an interesting approach
to do both at the same time. And also like a good point that you made that just because
something is named differently than you doesn't change the fact on the ground that it might
just be that you're central to it. So with Anlar, she's very central to everything she's
doing at Nest Labs and the maker buying communities she's created. An opposite example might be
someone like Lenny Ruchitsky. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's got
a very popular newsletter that's named Lenny's newsletter. But if you look at how he runs
it, he takes questions for like, how do you become a better product manager? How do you
do whatever? And it's not like he's this super genius. He knows all the answers. He'll go
out and find the best person and have them do kind of a guest post on that topic. So
theoretically, even though it's named after him, a lot of the value is coming from the
people that he's kind of the curation that he's doing and bringing to the table and someone
could come in and basically do his job and not be Lenny. And you wouldn't know because
it's not necessarily written in his voice every issue. It might be written in someone
else's voice. So yeah, maybe it's less to do with what you name it and much more to
do with how you run it. We haven't even talked about your podcast and like all the cool stories
you could probably tell about how you got Seth Godin and James Clear to be your first
interviews and stuff like that. So hopefully I can have you on again. But maybe to wrap
things up, like you've been through quite a lot as a creator, obviously had your biggest
year ever this past year, you've had an acquisition, you've got big plans for the future. What's
your advice for other creators slash indie hackers, you know, people who want to make
content or community and actually make a living for it online? What's something they can take
away from your story? I think taking like relentless action. I don't think that I did
anything special. I feel like every single day of my creator business has just been a
struggle. Honestly, like it just feels like this is all going so slowly. And I look at
other people around me and it's like, Oh, they're doing one thing and they're doing
it really well. And they're going faster than me. But like at the end of the day, progress
compounds. So if you show up every day and you put in the time and you work hard, you'll
get to a goal line, maybe slower than some of your peers. And that's okay. Not everybody
can be the breakout success, but if you, you know, expand the surface area of your luck,
something's happened.
Yeah. I like that. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find more about all the
different things that you're doing about what you're doing at SPI and your courses and your
content and podcasts as well?
Let's go to Twitter. Go to a at J Klaus on Twitter. I'm also at J Klaus.com. Pretty easy
to find if you search for me, but we'd love to hear from you.
Cool. I'll put some links to that in the show notes. Thanks again, J.