Can my community handle anonymous posts without spiraling into chaos? With Amanda Northcutt, CEO of Level Up Creators

In this episode, we’re hearing from Anonymously Anxious About Anonymity. Our letter today deals with a community builder who has seen firsthand how opening a community to anonymous posts can go downhill fast, and wants to know if it's possible to do so without that outcome.

To better help Anonymously Anxious, Amanda Northcutt, the CEO of Level Up Creators, as my guest expert. She is a six-time executive with over 20 years of experience in building and optimizing recurring revenue businesses. She is brilliant (.25 speed is encouraged for this episode, we won’t judge!) and has seen it all in the community spaces.

So, tune in for how to leverage anonymity as an asset in your community and where challenges might show up, how to effectively gamify your community, and the essential ingredients for creating a high-ticket community.

In this episode:

(03:50) The communitea: Anxiously Anonymous About Anonymity’s letter

(04:33) Amanda's experience with TexAgs, an anonymous discussion forum

(07:00) Cases where allowing anonymous posts can work, and what to consider

(09:55) The value of having members opt into anonymity

(11:50) What you need to have in place to stop your community from spiraling into chaos

(14:09) How to handle negative feedback and prepare your community for doing it right

(18:20) Badging and the power of gamification in community

(20:48) The importance of experimenting before fully implementing

(23:53) The role of gamification in habit formation

(27:52) The different moderation needs of low and high-ticket communities

(32:25) The essential ingredients for building a high-ticket community

(39:12) When in doubt in business, test

Resources Mentioned:

🎧 Go down the moderation rabbit trail next, listen to Dear Bri Episode 7 with Andrea Middleton, Community Empowerment Leader at Reddit.

❤️ Sign up for Heartbeat. Bri’s recommended all-in-one community platform.

💛 Join Ember. The place for go-getter community creators building community-powered businesses.

Amanda Northcutt

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Bri Leever

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Want your story to be next? Submit an anonymous letter about your community conundrum, fiasco, drama, or other dilemma here.

*Dear Bri is produced by Ideablossoms.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Usually I made both to package episodes a little bit more cohesively. But the conversation in this episode was so delightfully ranging. What started as a conversation about anonymity and communities and how to leverage it as an asset and where the challenges might show up, all the way to the end, where Amanda is sharing the essential ingredients to creating a high-ticket community. So I hope you enjoy this episode. It was such a delight to facilitate this conversation and pick the brain of someone who is truly brilliant and seen it all in the community spaces. Enjoy. Welcome to Deer Bree, an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos, and drama. This season of Deer Bree is sponsored by our friends over at Heartbeat. Heartbeat is an all-in-one community platform, and it's the one I chose to host my own community. Your members can finally have events, conversation, content, and even courses in one distraction-free, intimate, customized home. I chose Heartbeat for three reasons. First, Heartbeat is unparalleled in their events management features. Events are a core part of my community architecture, and their features make my life so much easier. Second is segmentation. It's super easy to break my community into smaller, more niche subgroups and create a more customized experience for that group in Heartbeat. And finally, their courses. Being able to host my educational materials and learning journey in a community-first platform makes my community that much more valuable and retention that much stickier. I'm an affiliate with Heartbeat, which means when you sign up through my link in the show notes, I get paid a small amount and no extra charge to you. Thank you for supporting my work in that way. And finally, I usually record this podcast from Hawaii Island. So a special thank you to the Kanakamale people on whose land I currently reside. Our guest today is Amanda Northcutt. She's a six-time executive with over 20 years of experience in building and optimizing recurring revenue businesses. We love the sound of that. She left her Silicon Valley executive role a few years ago and co-founded Level Up Creators, where Amanda and her team of experts help individual creators and subject matter experts build sustainable businesses with predictable income. Between the Level Up Creators podcast, her weekly newsletter, Level Up Creator School, and her flagship program, the MRR Accelerator, Amanda and her team have made a habit of building businesses into multi-five-figure MRR machines.

unknown 2:57

Woof.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

So excited to bring your brilliance. On to this episode. Amanda, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me, Brie. I am really excited to be here. And before I go any further, tell me the community that you managed, that you like built up.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yeah, I was a second employee at TechSags.com, which is like Texas AM University. It's the largest university in the United States at this point. And it's like a, it's the largest, TechSags is the largest collegiate media property in the world. And so I got to be on the very front end of that by accident, like how most careers go, very nonlinear winding road. You never know what's around the bend kind of career. That's where I started.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

That's so good. Especially the community careers. That's always you fall into it by some size, shape, or color that was unpredicted. Yeah. That's amazing. Well, I'm so excited to have you on the episode. Are you ready for the letter that I have prepared for you?

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Dear Brie, I'm debating whether to introduce a way for members to post anonymously in my community. On the one hand, I know anonymity can create space for vulnerability and truth telling. On the other hand, I was in a community once where they opened up anonymous posts and it spiraled fast. People weaponized it, and the trust broke down overnight. So now I'm hesitant. How do you know if your community can handle anonymous posts? Is there a way to build it in without it becoming a dumpster fire? Signed Anxiously anonymous about anonymity. Can you relate to this letter? Is this something that you've dealt with in communities and programs in the past?

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh man. Okay, well, we'll start with tech sags. So that is still an anonymous discussion forum by and large. And some of that is a flaming, big, fat dumpster fire. And some of it in that the subject matter of that community is very light, right? These are collegiate sports. They don't take it lightly. Okay, to be clear. But on the on the whole, with some perspective, the subject matter is quite light. And there's a lot of ridiculous fan banter, as you might expect, is predominantly male. And so that's the vibe. That's the culture. And there are certainly rules, and there are tons and tons of moderators, but the subject matter, very light, doesn't really matter who you are. You're going to get banned if you're being a jackass or breaking the rules or anything like that. But that's the culture. And so that totally makes sense. And as you were reading that letter, this story popped into my head. I don't know why this is burned into my brain of all the things that happened, silly, ridiculous things that happened at TechSags, but I remember one of the owners of the website, Brandon Jones, he had an anonymous username. And people didn't really like know who he was back in the day. Now they do for sure. He's one of the site celebrities as community goes. And I remember somebody calling him out on the discussion forum for not showing his face or something like that and calling him like a nutless wonder, I think is the phrase. This was a long time ago. I guess I'd never, I'd probably never heard that phrase since a nutless wonder. So Brandon calls us all around, finds this guy's phone number, calls him at work, and does this speaker phone call with all of us there. And it was so funny. Like he just called this guy to the carpet and said, Hey, Brandon Jones, like nutless wonder here. And I wish Zoom had been around at that time and that would have been like a video call because I'm sure the blood just rushed out of this guy's face because his ass got called out. You can't just go and be that way on a discussion forum and have zero accountability, depending on the culture. So that's one very far end of the spectrum. I wish we knew the subject matter of your letter submissions, like whatever community they're managing. But so that's just the first story that came to mind. And then I've got you drive here, but yeah, we got a lot in the bank.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Yeah. So let's start with what are the pros and cons of having like the ability for people to post anonymously? Where do you see it as like a positive? Where do you see it as a little bit more of a risk or a liability? Is it ever a risk or liability, or is that just like a part of the game of community? Like you're in the arena, so might as well go all in. Tell me a little bit more about how you think about the feature of anonymous posting in a community.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Yeah, I'll use a recent client example, actually. So one of our clients, they run the top marriage podcast in the world and a big company have been really successful, do a great job for everyone that listens to them and buys their products and services. And we just set up a membership community for them on Mighty Networks. And we were going back and forth about should we allow anonymous posting? What's the branching logic here? What could happen potentially? And the reason for that was people don't want their real names attached to their like dirty laundry in their marriage. And we wanted to create an atmosphere and a culture of psychological safety and where you can come and bring up the tough stuff and actually say what's really going on and not have someone tag you on LinkedIn the next day airing your dirty laundry. And so there is some safety and security around that in the right environment. This is a smaller membership community that is very carefully curated, and there's personal relationships with the community owners slash managers. And I think ultimately what we decided is to run an experiment. And I think that's where we get to in business anytime we're not sure. Okay, how can we reduce risk and run a limited experiment in a container, assess our results, and then it's fifth grade science? So that I felt was a really compelling argument for anonymity within that specific discussion forum community because the subject matter was very sensitive, it was very personal, and can be moderated because of the size that the community is now since it was just launched about six months ago. So that would be a case in favor. I can also think of in a business kind of community where people are coming to get help with problems, and maybe these are more prominent business leaders and they need a safe space. Perhaps there's a way to submit questions and things like that anonymously. And it could be a hybrid, also something we could discuss. Like you could have a way to submit anonymous questions or scenarios or situations for discussion on like a group call, uh, and then have your actual name associated with the discussion forum itself. But it's total sliding scale. And there's a number of different kind of decision-making factors and criteria I would be considering. But ultimately, as a business owner, you want to be asking yourself, what is the potential risk? What is the likelihood that any of those things would happen, you know, on the bad side of the spectrum? And then what's the potential reward and what's the likelihood and path toward that side of the spectrum?

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Yeah, that's really good. I heard you say, like, is anonymity in our community enabling people to show up more fully, or is it enabling them to hide and hide from accountability? And it might be a little bit of both. Yeah, yeah. I know that's where it's so tricky. But I hear you saying in the example you gave of like the marriage, the community for building a better marriage, you've got by posting anonymously, our members might be able to show up a little bit more honestly and a little bit more fully. I similarly had a client who we built a community for people who are recovering from eating disorders or disordered eating patterns. And it was really important for us to give them that option and in the onboarding to make that an important distinction and say, hey, this is like what's gonna happen in this community is you are the only one who knows what you need. And at this moment, when you're joining the community, we're gonna ask you to decide like what's gonna serve you better. Is it to show up like with your real name so that you can practice owning your own stuff like fully, even in this space, or is what you need to be anonymous for this time being so that you can show up more fully until you're ready to embrace it? So I think prompting your members to make that decision, but making it intentionally and not just by accident, because I think when it's made by accident, that's when people we're always gonna default to hide. Like we're not gonna default to do the brave, courageous thing. Right. Some people might, but by and large, like you have to actually prompt people to consider what they need in that environment.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Yeah, I think in a more mature environment, that is a very specific use case where yeah, that does that's a community that lends itself to having an option to be anonymous if you're not ready to kind of step into that fully and put your name behind it. And the size of the community definitely matters, I feel like, in terms of moderation and control and making sure that you've got a good ratio of moderators to hosting members. And in any community forum, at least the statistic used to be that's usually 10% or so of members actually are active posters. Is that still an accurate statistic?

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Yeah, it tends to do the like 10 9 1. Or sorry, 90 nine, 99-1, 90, 10.1. Yeah, yep, somewhere in there. Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

So you have fewer people to moderate that actually post, but then you have the risk of the vocal minority and someone who maybe is a jackass or is not going to be supportive coming in there. And so that's where moderation and having user voting and a flagging system for moderation comes in handy so that things can be caught very quickly and potentially be piped into your phone or to your Slack message if somebody, if a post has been flagged. And so how you handle situations that arise when someone abuses the privilege of anonymity or whatever the case may be. If someone is misbehaving and they are disrupting the culture of your community and they do that repeatedly, you've got to remove that shrapnel from the engine so that it can come along nicely as it's supposed to, and to preserve the culture and psychological safety that you have worked so hard as a community owner or manager to create. So it's setting expectations from first touch in your marketing, right? Top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, user agreement, discussion forum rules for sure. And then, yeah, onboarding, designing your onboarding as you're saying earlier, to make sure that people are super, super clear and are going to be respectful and they understand the consequences. And usually if you threaten to ban people with no opportunity for a refund, you know, if they break the rules or three strikes and you're out, people will tend to comply. But you know, there will sometimes be a bad apple that needs to be surgically removed so that the system can keep running as you've designed it.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Yep. Those are really good guidelines. So what I'm hearing you saying is if you're going to go this route, make sure you have the moderation to support it, make sure you've got the community guidelines in place. Your onboarding is tight so that people are postured well when they come into this community and have a system in place for when the line is crossed. How do we handle and navigate this as a team? Do we, and this is actually, I just had this discussion with Lindsay about do we remove negative posts? Do we not remove negative posts in a community? So I'm actually, I love like your two cents on that. And maybe once it's like an anonymous post, like the negativity, maybe that's like a different situation than just somebody posting like negative feedback in the community about their experience. Do you always remove those? Do you never remove them? What's the line? Obviously, there's going to be like in an ideal world a very clear boundary in your community guidelines. But once we enter into that fuzzy place of not quite positive, but maybe they're trying to make the community better, what do you do?

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Yeah, that gray area can be difficult. So if they are following the rules and they're posting what they believe to be constructive criticism, if you want to foster an open culture with communication being a two-way street, if they did not personally attack you, any other member or your staff member, certainly not like libel or slander or anything super nasty or inappropriate. If it's nasty or inappropriate, remove it and potentially remove the person if it's reasonable, like that like very occasional Google review on a restaurant that is actually written by a reasonable person with more than two brain cells, and the owner will go on and actually like address them as another adult, as a peer, and apologize and try and make the situation right. So I'm thinking back to super old book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And so you can agree and disarm very skillfully. And again, if they're nasty and they've crossed a line, remove it for sure. And if people bring up, like, hey, what happened to that post? You can just address it and say, hey, here's the vibe of the post. Here's the reason that I removed it. I'm addressing this one-on-one with this person. We take feedback seriously. And the way to do that in a public forum is in an altruistic, assume the best kind of a way. And assume that everyone has good intentions here. We're all trying to row in the same direction toward the same goals. We are in the same curated community, after all. And some feedback is okay for the discussion forum and for the group. And some of it as a professional courtesy and to create a more conducive, less defensive environment. If you have a problem, please send me a DM or an email. And we have structures and systems in place for this. I value what you have to say. We're committed to making the community the best that it can be. And there's a right way and there's a wrong way to go about that.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

I think every community needs like their own onboarding module on how to provide feedback to each other in a community. It's something that I think is so, and I think this I actually have a lot of fun with this with my clients because I always try to come up with some type of creative spin on feedback, whether it's like a little emoji shorthand on this is the type of feedback that I'm looking for, all the way to like, you know, more. Sometimes I have communities with just like a lot of masculine energy. And I don't mean like a lot of males, but it's like they're just they're here to spar and make each other better and like coming up with our own unique framework for like how we do that, how we spar fairly. I think so many communities are missing that. And it really helps us in these situations when you've proactively addressed how we share feedback, both with our community team, but also with each other, you have a foundation and a common language upon which you can have the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

I love that idea. That is a great idea. And that makes me think about in a business, I'm a big fan of having values, like defined core values, and then being clear with your team about how those values should be lived out. If we're in like super B2B SAS jargony world, this is like operationalizing your values. And so it's showing examples of here's the value, here's examples of what's good. And yes, full on, full steam, do these things. Here's what's okay, here's what's not okay specifically. And so you could do that with whatever the appropriate amount of humor is, depending on the subject matter of your community, and provide silly examples in that onboarding module. And maybe you have to do a quiz or something to be able to actually post in the discussion forum. I'm also a big fan of badges in a community that clearly demonstrate authority in some way or level of respect and therefore credence that a specific person's post should be given versus one who maybe has a little bit less credibility in the community. And that's a very community-driven engagement chess move that I feel like works really well. You got to be stingy with your badges, maybe just have three or something like that in your community. But as funny as that is, there's something psychological to badging in communities that's very interesting, creates a lot of FOMO, super weird.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Yeah, the whole game layer. Let's go down that rabbit trail. I think that'd be a fun one. So tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on gamification within communities. Is it something that you are like usually enacting? Is it something that you normally incorporate into the communities that you build, or is it does it depend on the community? And where do you see gamification being really powerful? And where do you see it like not being as important? That was like six questions, but I think she can handle it, folks.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

I'm sure I will not remember all of those, but in general, I'm a fan of gamification because of the psychology and the research that backs that up. But it totally depends on what the intent of your community is. Why do people join your community? And we use gamification in all manner of applications in B2B and B2C and just in our everyday lives and habit tracking apps and all kinds of things like that, in order to drive a specific behavior. So you want to encourage specific behaviors and discourage behaviors that you don't want, and you're providing some sort of reward, whatever that may be, if it's a badge or a star or participation trophy or ribbon, just kidding. But it's what's the point? Why do people join? What are the value outcomes and transformation that the people who join your specific community are seeking to achieve? And is there a gamification play to be made that will drive specific behaviors that you want your members or community members to do? And then it will discourage bad behavior. So if it helps you keep people on pace toward the specific goal, which tracks with the reason that they join your community, that can be a really powerful lever. That can also be seen as really like icky or kitschy or cheesy, depending on subject matter of your community and therefore the individuals who are joining it. So that's another, it depends, but I think it's a worthwhile pursuit. But in anything, if you're not sure about, again, in business, run an experiment. So you could say we're rolling out this trial program or we're testing a beta program or something like that. And here's what we're gonna do, and we're gonna take your feedback seriously before we consider rolling this out. I think people, business owners in general, don't think about working in iterations, but are like, okay, we make a decision. And so how are we gonna go all in and get this thing done? Whereas there's usually a way that you can reduce risk significantly, bite off one piece of the elephant at a time, if you will, design an experiment in a container, get feedback quantitative and qualitative. So you can track action and inaction based on click-throughs, participation, any responses, whatever it is. And also in action, if people did not participate in your experiment, then probably not for your community at the gamification piece or anything else. But that's how I would approach it. And it really depends how you present things to your community members as well. So if you present something as a trial or an experiment or a test or a beta program, we think about that very differently in our brains than we're doing this thing. And also it's a community. You want to Work with people. You want to build with people, not for them. Say, look what I made. Here it is. We're changing this thing. So people who are part of a community typically have buy-in. They have affinity for you and one another. There's some relationship to be had there. So working iteratively in that way reduces your risk as a business owner, but then also provides all sorts of interesting psychological benefits to your community.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

This podcast is sponsored by Ember Consulting, where I'm the founder and head community creator. At Ember, we help people who are familiar with running their business on content, coaching, or consulting become community powered. As you hear in this podcast, creating a community is really tough, and managing it can be even harder. So don't do it alone. Whether you're looking to launch a new community or pivot your strategy, our one-on-one consulting helps you skip the learning curve and do it right the first time. And when you're ready to belong to a space just for community creators learning, testing, and growing their communities together, check out the Ember Community. Now, back to the episode. It's the beauty of the community model. I think the biggest value proposition that a community has for an organization is this is your landscape for testing. This is now your playground to figure out what do your people want, what do they not want, what's the problem look like today, and how is it evolving tomorrow? I haven't found like another type of offer or container that does it as well as community. So for the scientifically minded business owner who loves to run experiments, community is a great investment for you. I know some people who can help. No, that was so good. I did a really deep dive on designing your community for great engagement using habit formation principles. And what I think is important to acknowledge with gamification is it's like the icing on top of the cherry when we're talking about habit formation broadly in your community. And I think people, my only caution with it is people can jump to it as like the main course. And really what gamification represents in your community is so is it's really such a small piece of the pie because there's three ingredients to any good habit: your prompt, your action, your reward. Now there are like other habit formation models that there's like a fourth one. Do you know what I'm talking about? I can't remember it, but yeah, I'm like more of the James Clear habit.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Yeah, that's my go-to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Yeah. So we've got our prompt, our action, our reward, gamification is, and then within the reward, we have actual rewards or we have recognition as a reward, which year after year in the community industry that I come from, direct sales, where people are like earning incomes, like full-time incomes from their work in direct sales. And do you want to know the number one motivation for them in their work in direct sales every year? Recognition. It's not the money. It's I'm seen, I'm recognized for the work that I do. And so we have recognition, and gamification is like one form of recognition. It's a really like sexy form because it's automated. And we love that because we don't have to track it. We don't have to. So, insofar as your gamification mechanics are incentivizing people to take the actions that you want to see in your community, awesome. I'm unfortunately a little bit more skeptical with like how well gamification mechanics in our current technology can actually get us there. I think they overpromise and underdeliver a little bit. But I am totally here for the experimentation. And actually, I'm so pleased to share this. We just launched Ember Summer Camp in my community. And it's the only, we don't have gamification in my community, but I wanted to test it out. And the inspiration was from growing up. My mom would do like a summer point system. And for some people, like my partner, like introducing a summer point system, he's like, What is this? Is this supposed to be motivating to me? This is so stupid. And then you have people like myself who were like, Live. I just picture 10-year-old Brie waking up at the butt crack of dawn with her list. I had a to-do list and like my strategy for how I was gonna earn the most points that day. Like, you got 10 points for weeding a row in the garden, and you got seven points for brushing your hair by 10 a.m. Like I had a full strategy. So I was like, you know what? Let's test this in the Ember community. It's gonna be super manual this one time. We could automate in the future. And we're doing it just for a week. We're doing like five days of challenges. People earn points when they do their challenge. We have a big juicy reward, a free year in the Ember community, which I like never ever offer. So that's my little experiment with gamification and points, but I like really customized it because I wanted it. I and I wanted, I just wanted to see. Does anybody jump at this? I would jump at this. There might be a lot of personalities that are like, ew, what?

SPEAKER_01 27:14

I think that's a great idea. And what a fun and playful concept. I love that. I think you and I are cut from a very similar cloth. That sounds like young Amanda for sure.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

Amanda's got her strategy to maximize her points potential in any summer day.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Yes, mine was probably earning money. How can I earn the most money any given day? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

That I was right. Yep. I think we would get along. Test versions of us and be friends. Oh, I love it. Well, anything else on in terms of I the other rabbit trail that I think we could go down briefly is in terms of moderation. And I'm actually curious because you've like myself, you've seen both sides of the community spaces, and now you're building community as a product, as monthly recurring revenue. And I, for one, have definitely noticed in these more not that they're always intimate, but they, at least in my perspective, they tend to be a little bit more intimate communities, maybe higher price point. The moderation needs and mechanics are so different compared to like these massive forums. So I'm just curious from your own experience, if you can riff with me on like the difference between the moderation needs and what you think contributes to that, obviously volume, but I'd just love to hear your thoughts on moderation in both differing types of communities.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Yeah. And just to be clear, so everybody's clear on what my point of view is, I am high-ticket, high touch, low volume primarily. And so there are a few exceptions to that rule in our client work and the services that we deliver at level up creators. And so I feel like there is inherent value in that and that you're able to provide more value to your customers in the higher touch environment. And in a high touch, high-ticket environment, you're pricing a lot of kind of tire kicker folks out and those who are going to come in and be less than kind. So it's maybe$15 a month and they're doing it for shits and giggles, and they think that's super funny to go in and screw with people and ruin other people's day. That's one thing. And it's an entirely different thing to pay two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine hundred, a thousand dollars a month for something that feels much more like a mastermind group or similar or a group of high-level peers that has been carefully curated. So you can price your way right out of moderation problems. And so I'm a really, really big fan of that. Otherwise, yeah, there's a few variables that you should be thinking about as a community owner when you're thinking about how moderation should work and function. I think we've touched most, if not all of them, today, but it's like, what's the goal or intent? Why are people joining your community? Are you incentivizing behavior to that end specifically for the 10% of your community members who do post? Have they reviewed your rules? Have you operationalized your rules and values by saying what's okay and what's not okay, and providing examples of that on an ongoing basis, making an example of people on occasion when the need arises, and having a ratio of, again, the number of people who post, the number of moderators, and having some sort of system where people can upvote or downvote, and then you get an alert when it's like lead scoring almost in marketing automation. Like three down votes gets pinged to Bree's phone, and she's got to go in and take a look at the post really quickly. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I would think about it. But you are like the culture curator of your community, and so don't ever feel like an imposter or being afraid of oh, they're gonna churn if I take their post down or they're gonna say something bad about me. Let them let them go, let the money go. You've got to let go of that like desperation and scarcity mindset because think about the damage that a toxic individual can do to everybody else in your community. And so it's very important to again remove the shrapnel, go in with surgical precision, pick out the weeds, whatever you want to call it, in order to continue to shape shift, just turn by turn, at every opportunity, call out good behavior. And there should be consequences for bad behavior. And I think that's ultimately kind of the path to shaping the culture of your community. And the more you do that and the more selective you are, the more upmarket you go. There's an inverse relationship there between what's opposite ways. There we are. Higher ticket, more upmarket, closer knit community, you're gonna have fewer problems across the board, honestly, and lower turn also, which is the opposite of what most people think. But that's a very important piece. As long as you're providing that recurring value in exchange for that recurring revenue, your high ticket folks who took longer to probably buy in, a little bit longer sales cycle, but your LTV, your customer lifetime value is going to play out big time as opposed to trying to collect on$29 a month and needing hundreds or thousands of members to be successful.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

That's really good. I want to go down that rabbit trail next. The case for the high-ticket community, who it's the best fit for. What are the pros? What are some of the challenges that you sign up for in that model? Because I think within the paid community space, you can go for depth with fewer or breadth with more and the volume strategy. I'm really curious to hear that. And I just want to add to what you said. There's a great follow-up episode to this. If you're like listening and you want to go down the moderation rabbit trail, you got to listen to Andrea Middleton's Deer Brie episode next. She has a we have a fabulous episode on what to do with troublemakers. And she worked with the WordPress community for years and years. So, and she's at Reddit now. So go listen to that episode if you want to go more down the moderation rabbit trail. But tell us more about high-ticket communities and who is that a good fit for? And because I see a lot of our listeners who maybe are like aspirationally, they want to get there, but they're like, if I slapped a thousand dollar per month price tag on my community tomorrow, like I'd have no members. How do I get there? What are the pros and challenges? Tell us more.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

That is a big time loaded question, but I can provide some insight in the time that we have today. So there are five key areas that you need to have extraordinary clarity on in your business. And that is who you are, your positioning, what painful, pervasive, urgent, expensive problems you are uniquely equipped to solve based on your experience, expertise, and passion. Okay, who are you?

SPEAKER_00 33:54

I'm not gonna ask you to repeat that, but I am just gonna ask our listener to rewind 10 seconds and play that at 0.25 speed. Because that line was so good. Please continue.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

All right. So who are you? Your positioning, and then who needs those problems solved that you actually want to help? Who is your ICP, your ideal customer profile? Who are you and who are they? And at what transition point or pain point specifically? Again, painful, pervasive, urgent, expensive problems. Because you can have positioning and you can have an ICP, but your ICP is not best positioned to buy from you just at any time. There's usually a specific moment, circumstance in their life, in their job, in their relationship, in their finances where they need a painkiller. The knife is in, somebody has turned it, they're gonna bleed out if they don't get the help that they need. So that's the best time for you to intersect and meet them because that's when you have the opportunity to provide the highest value outcomes and transformation. So who are you? Who are they? What's your methodology? What's your secret sauce? How do you get them from that pain bleeding out space to solution land, to value outcomes and transformation that are highly desirable? And by value outcomes and transformation, like quantitative outcomes, qualitative outcomes, and psychological outcomes specifically. We know we do a whole episode just on those things. So we won't get into that any further. But you need to have, again, firm positioning. You need to be a magnet for the right people, but that side of the magnet that attracts really strongly. And you need to be as equally opposite repulsive to those who are not your ICP. So I'm big on going narrow and deep, going narrow and deep with one subset. So who are you? Who are they? What's your special sauce? Your methodology takes them to from problem to solution. And then step four is what is your product ladder? Basically, what's the wrapper you put on your methodology? So maybe a community is your entire business model. That's totally fine. Maybe that's just part of your product eye service offerings. Okay. And then number five is your go-to-market strategy. How do you get clients? So once you have clarity on those things, and the more narrow and deep you're willing to go, and the more repulsive or polarizing you're willing to be with people who are the wrong fit. And if your ICP has a lot of discretionary income, and/or if there is a B2B case for your community, is there a learning and development or professional development budget that's available for this, or is it more of a mastermind community, or is it some sort of professional coaching certification, continuing education? I am always looking for the B2B application of anyone's skill set because B2C sales is tough. You're like fighting for a very limited pool of discretionary income and individuals are so impacted, or at least psychologically, by macroeconomic factors. And it's hard. It's just really hard to build a business, a B2C business, unless you've got a really high converting funnel, tons of followers or huge ad budget, something like that. Whereas if you are selling into a business, again, even with the community, the potential impact that you might have in that business environment with the individual who joins being the conduit to those value outcomes and transformation, those might be 100x the outcome of the same exact thing, same exact type of community structure as if you were offering it to an individual or even a solo practitioner. So what's the highest and best application of your knowledge and methodology? Again, we want to work with people that we actually want to work with. And so it's not just like, who's the highest bidder? Go for them, because you could end up with a bunch of jackasses. So I wouldn't do that for sure. But if you can figure out who you are, who your customers are that you actually want to work with, ideally they're inside of a business and the business is paying the bill. And if you can build a product ladder with productized services, community totally included in that and be very formulaic and structured. And if those productized services earn recurring revenue, like a community, then you have serious upmarket potential, especially when you think about the curation piece and the ability to put people in a room together, a virtual room together that need to meet one another. There's infinite applications of community in the B2B world. And so that's where I would certainly push everyone, especially if you're wanting to go higher ticket, higher touch, lower volume.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

Yep. That's brilliant. God, you such a brilliant way of explaining it. It's so simple. It's not easy. Like nothing about what you said is very easy, but it is very simple. And what I heard is like just the little nugget is like for people who are interested in maybe migrating into a higher ticket community, maybe you already have one, but you're like, you've been oscillating between this deeper with fewer or wider with more strategy, and you're like, which way do I go? I heard the shortcut is like, can what I'm offering be a business-to-business solution? And if so, there could be a pathway forward to exploring a higher ticket, deeper with fewer. Is that fair to say? You got it.

unknown 39:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Okay. Amazing. Thank you so much. That was just delightful. Is there anything else that you want to add? Any words of wisdom for our dear letter writer? And I'm going to say their name correctly, anxiously, anonymous about anonymity. Any words, just parting wisdom for them.

SPEAKER_01 39:29

Oh man. Do a test. That's it. That's the answer. Anytime you're not sure about something in business, it's what can I run in a container that has a hypothesis? What materials do I need? What are the steps? How are we assessing results? And then you can make the next right decision with updated information. And anything in business, any decision, your job as a founder and CEO is to reduce risk at every possible turn. And so, how do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time. What is the smallest possible experiment that you can run that will give you outsized data from which to make the next right decision? Work in low-risk iterations, and your likelihood of success will increase exponentially. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

That's such a good word. It's the science and the art and the dance of community building all in one. Amanda, thank you so much for joining us for the brilliant work that you do. I love y'all. Amanda's LinkedIn is popping off. So make sure you go get the frameworks and tips that she shares there because they're so good. And thank you for doing this work and sharing it, sharing your brilliance with the with our audience. Well, you too. Thank you so much for having me. It's really fun. Thank you, Brie. Thank you so much for sharing some space with me on this episode. Please like and review wherever you find your podcast. To submit your own community conundrum, fiasco, or other drama, go to the link in the show notes. Aloha and catch you next time.