Micro-Community Hotline #1
I’ve created micro-communities. When can I start monetizing them?
A friend of mine is about to launch a micro-community project, something between talking circles and tactical group therapy. She sends me questions. I send her long voice notes.
Here’s one of them. She asked:
When can I start monetizing my community?
Below is the cleaned-up transcript of my answer. Raw, but considered.
In our case, we’re talking about talking circles that bring people together who have a shared interest or a common issue.
You can start monetizing them if there’s some kind of barrier to entry. For example, they gather for a specific type of content, a training, or around a physical event. You’re organizing something, offering logistics, a specific activity. That’s already a barrier. And if access becomes paid, the chances of someone copying what you’re doing are pretty low. Organizing events or offering a specific training isn’t easy or instantly replicable.
But if it’s just about gathering people around a shared interest, the moment you start charging, you’ll get breakouts. People starting the same thing on their own. Especially in the beginning, when you’re not known yet, when you don’t have a brand, when your facilitation style isn’t unique.
Here, I’m really talking about direct monetization, where people in the group pay you. I’m not talking about sponsors or ads, even though that’s another path. If you’ve got a small, well-defined group, with clear info on who they are, you could totally go to a brand and say: I’ve got a group of X people, I’m running video calls with them, do you want to sponsor me so I talk about your brand? That can work, even early on, but yeah, you’ll need some credibility. Anyway, closing that parenthesis.
So if you want people to pay you directly, you need a barrier to entry. And the first one, the one that cuts across everything, is your brand.
Building a brand takes time. The more you run your communities, the more you’ll develop your own way of facilitating, of handling topics, a way that’s just yours. That brand becomes strong and hard to copy. At some point, people aren’t paying for the event or the training. They’re paying just to be in your group. Because you’re the one running it. Because they know they’ll have a different kind of experience. You become a personality, and people are willing to pay to spend time with a personality.
The other option is to build a product or a service that these people, or others like them, will want to buy. When I say “these people,” I mean a persona, a marketing segment. It’s not necessarily the folks who attend your events today, but people like them, with the same traits.
And from there, anything’s possible.
– Training, which is the most common route because you can feed it with what comes out of your events
– Coaching, because through the group work you’ve seen the real pains, and your coaching content will speak directly to them
– Physical events, like a whole week with these people, workshops, maybe guest speakers, a real experience
– Physical products, if you identify a recurring need. But in that case, yes, you’ll need a way bigger community to make it profitable
So all of this is to answer “how to monetize?” But your question is really, when?
And the answer is, you need two things at the same time.
1. You’ve identified a problem for which people are willing to pay
2. You’ve reached a critical mass in terms of audience
That critical mass depends on your model.
– For a physical product: thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people
– For coaching: one person is enough to start
– For a training: maybe ten people or so
How do you identify the problem? By continuing to run groups for free
How do you reach critical mass? By continuing to run groups for free
The thing is, those two won’t always happen at the same time. You might see a pain point in your very first session but not have the audience. Or maybe your audience grows and you’re known, but you haven’t found a pain people will pay to solve.
So you have to keep going. The more you run groups, the more you’ll learn. You’ll accelerate the process. You’ll better understand the problems, and you’ll build an audience ready to pay for the solution you’re offering. At the same time, you’ll be building your brand.
And that’s key. The first barrier to entry will always be the fact that you’ve already run X number of groups. As soon as you start your second one, you already have a lead on anyone who’d want to copy you.
You need to outpace that imaginary competitor.
If you're building something strange, loosely coherent, or emotionally overfunded, and you have a question, feel free to drop it in reply. I may not have the answer, but I’ll take it on a long stroller walk and see what comes back.