The freemium pivot that unlocked 6K members

Joana Rocha and her co-founder had 400,000 social followers and a paid community that wasn't getting traction. Nobody was joining. Nobody was engaging. The pivot to freemium changed everything—and the conversion system they built inside Circle to turn free members into paying subscribers is something most community builders haven't seen before.

Today TechTalk UK has 6,500 members, a 20-minute founder welcome call for every new paid member, and a model built around connection first, content second.

In this episode:

• Why giving away free content builds the trust that leads to paid conversion, not the other way around
• How Joana built an onboarding automation that converts free members to paid without feeling like a sales pitch
• What she learned from launching two community hubs at once, and why stripping it back was the right call

The conversation doesn't stop here—join the discussion and ask the guest your own question at community.circle.so/c/behind-the-build

Behind the Build is a candid conversation series with the people behind thriving communities. Most communities look polished from the outside—this show goes inside. Each episode, we sit down with a community business founder and dig into a specific win: the real numbers, the honest decisions, and the messy middle that made it happen. No theory. No highlight reel. Just the actual story.

Hosted by the Circle community—where community builders come to build, grow, and connect.

New to Circle? Visit circle.so to learn more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Behind the Builds, the series where community founders share their biggest breakthroughs and what it really takes to build a thriving community business. My name is Mathilde. I am the head of community here at Circle, and today I'm joined by Joanna Rocha, the co-founder of Tech Talk. Tech Talk is a community helping over 5,000 professionals break into tech and grow meaningful careers in the tech industry. But it's not just an online community, it is a real career accelerator, offering a mix of resources, expert coaching, and accountability to help members achieve real results fast. So today we're going to unpack the story behind Tech Talk, how it came to be, but most importantly, what made its success and recent growth possible. Hi Joanna, welcome and thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Well, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

So to start us off, I'd love to hear a bit about you, who you are, and what motivated you to start Tech Talk in the first place. Let's start there.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Yeah, sure. So my story is a bit off a bit of everywhere, but I'm originally from Brazil. I've moved to the UK about nine years ago, and this is where I'm based now. Came here to study, started my career in marketing. So I worked all my way up to marketing director. And then at some point we realized that there was a big gap in the market in terms of people trying to break into tech companies because in the UK there's a massive difference between when you say you work in tech, people in the UK assume, oh, you're a software engineer. In the US, it's completely different. Like people know that you work in the tech industry. So then we kind of wanted to increase awareness of the non-coding roles in tech, like marketing, sales, operations. And we started posting on social media, on Instagram. That's how we started. And then from there, we saw this huge need, especially with AI, of people to try to break into any jobs in tech companies, like from sales to software engineering, because people are struggling a lot to differentiate themselves, really stand out in this market. And then we started posting more and more and more about it. Right now we have over 400,000 followers across social. So we really grew a lot in the past two years. And that's really when we decided that okay, we want to do this full time. So we we left our jobs to really dedicate on tech talk. And then we wanted to build a community on top of that. That was always one of the things that we wanted to do the most. And we actually managed to launch it about six months ago.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Wow, that's impressive. And when you say we, so you have one co-founder, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yes, I have one co-founder as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

And did you meet? Um, how did you meet? I'm just curious, what was the that that moment like?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Yes, our journey is very interesting, actually. So we met at university um here in London. We studied international business, but we actually became friends when we went to live in China together because as part of our degree, we had to go live abroad. So we went to live in Beijing for six months. We left and we lived in the same flat. So basically, we we shared a lot of the culture shocks and a lot of the journey there. And that's when we became really, really good friends. And a couple of years later, we just decided to start Tech Talk together.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

I love this. Thank you so much for walking us through that. It's really great to start with the origin story of every community and getting a little bit more personal. So um let's get a bit more concrete now. Can you break down the tech talk membership for us? So your offering, what members are paying for, um, and what the core experience, uh core experiences look like today.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Yeah, for sure. So right now, tech talk, the way that we started is because we're in a business where we need to have a lot of data, we decided to have our community be free to join to start with, but we do gate a lot of things inside of the community. So we promote webinars every single week. We have about four events every week that we host between workshops and QA sessions and webinars with external speakers. But we decided to host webinars every single week. And this is basically the lead magnet that we have to get people inside of the community. Then they can get in for free on certain channels, but a lot of the channels where they actually get insights from, for example, all of our in-person events, online events, all of our trainings, all of that is gated behind a membership. So, right now, for you to become a full member of the community, you need to pay a subscription of 49 pounds a month. And that's how we structured it a couple of months ago and how it's working the best for us now.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

Got it. I'm trying to do the conversion in my head. 49 pounds a month, maybe $60. I don't know, something like that. And you and do you have an annual membership as well? Um, I'm curious about any different tiers that you have. Um, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah, right now we have monthly and quarterly subscriptions because when we look at people looking for jobs, usually they are in the job market for a short period of time. So let's say three months, four months. So it doesn't make sense for us to have anything biannual or annual. But we are actually, we're gonna launch this next month, but we're expanding our community and opening a complete new hub to our community, which is not only going to be focused on people looking for jobs because the retention is not as high, there's a lot of churn. But also when people start lending jobs, and this is what we're seeing now, is like, okay, I lended a job, how do I succeed in that job? So, what we're gonna focus now as uh a second phase of the community is launching this complete new hub with new resources, new events. So then when people finish that job search journey, they can go into the career growth hub, which is what we're gonna call it. And then after that, when they're looking for a job again, then they come back to the job seeker hub. So basically creating a full circle there. And for the second one, we're probably gonna have an annual subscription as well because these people are more likely to be looking for support all year round.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

That makes so much sense. I love that you have tied that you've thought about the duration of your memberships or your different tiers of memberships, and you've made that proportional, I guess, to um, well, uh the the time frame that people need the actual community for. I think it's very important to tie your transformation and the duration of the community to how long it takes to actually reach that transformation. So I will definitely want to hear a little bit later in the conversation uh about those next steps and this new hub that you're planning. Um, but just to look back uh in time a little bit more, um, I'm curious. So at what point did you realize, okay, this is working? It's not just, you know, maybe a project, an MVP. It is a real business that I'm gonna be able to grow. And I know you mentioned that you decided to quit your full-time job to focus on tech talk. So tell us a bit about when that happened and what was there a specific moment or breakthrough point where that motivated you to do that?

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Yeah, for sure. I think when we started Tech Talk, because I always say we officially started beginning of 2024. So this is when things really started picking up. We started posting more consistently, we start selling our first products. So we started selling info products mainly. This is what we were doing. We were selling coaching as well, so one-to-one services and also the digital products that we had. But then at one point, we realized that one thing that we really love is building connections with people. We're like, okay, we don't just want to be selling products and like getting people to do these things. We want to help them because we know that in the job search journey, and this is from talking with thousands of people every single day, when someone is looking for a job, they're very frustrated. Like it's a very frustrating job market. They have the feeling that they're doing it alone, they have the feeling that they're not moving forward. And we saw this need of people bringing people together. So towards mid-2024, we started thinking about launching a community because we really wanted to bring people together in person, but also online and create that type of environment. And we knew that if we wanted to do that, we wouldn't be able to do it with our full-time jobs because it was taking a lot of our time. We had a big team, both me and my co-founder as well. So we basically had to make a decision. It's like, okay, either we decide to go full in on tech talk and we invest in this because we see the traction. We left as well at a point where we felt safe leaving our jobs because I feel that's important. If you're considering leaving your job, you need to have a business at least on some level of getting some revenue, because otherwise you go into this business journey and you're feeling very frustrated, you're feeling very scared because you don't know if you're going to get paid next month or not. So we waited for us to have a really good position in terms of where we're at. And then we decided to leave. And that's when we really focused on the community. And about like a month after we left, that's when we launched the community because it was mainly because we wanted to launch the community and we knew we wouldn't be able to do that having our full-time jobs.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

That makes sense. So you were picking up on signals from your from your larger audience and the the offering, I guess, even if the community hadn't launched, you had already invested time into probably researching and offering value and you saw a real opportunity and you decided to go for it. That's uh that's amazing and and and and brave and uh very curious to hear about the launch. Um, but maybe let's get into your community now. I'd love to see what it looks like in practice. If you could walk us through maybe some of the cornerstone uh experiences, so the main ways your members are getting value today.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Yeah, so this is what the community looks like right now. We have some key spaces inside of the community to better guide people. But I would say that the most important spaces and the spaces that I love the most are our events. This is we do a lot of events in-person and virtual as well. We do about four or five events every single week, and we do at least two in-person events as well every single weeks. So we have all of our events here. Um they are coming up. We have webinars as well with external speakers. Other than that, because we're in the job seeker space, we also want to cater for different people in different departments. So we have spaces for every single person in a different department, whether in marketing finance or customer support, you can get into dedicated space and basically get a lot and basically get a lot of knowledge from other people in those spaces as well. And then that's where we have the hubs. So we have the job seeker hub, we are launching the career growth hub, but in the hub is where we do all of the support, where we have a lot of the resources, the trainings, the courses, everything that you can basically consume to be as equipped as possible to get a job in this market. So I think overall, there's probably more than 30 hours of content in there. But this is more or less the way that the community is structured.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Love that. And so as a paying member, what do I have access to? So I have access to all the events, but I believe those are also lead magnets. So curious to hear as a paying member, what are what are the different things I have access to across resources, experiences, connection? If you had to just describe like in in different categories, what's the value prop?

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Yeah. So as a paying member, the first thing that you get access to is a 20 minutes call with us because I like to do that with everyone that joins the community. One, because I want to understand my audience. I want to understand what are their pain points. I don't think this is something scalable. We're going to be able to do it forever. But while I can do it, I want to be talking to everyone that gets in, just so I have a sense of if we're being able to help these people. Then the other thing that they get access to are events. So our workshops, we have four workshops every week, everything from preparing for interviews, creating and creating your CV, LinkedIn, all of our webinars as well. The other thing you also have access to is our in-person events, which we do very regularly in London. And also you have access to our courses and our training. So we have more than 30 resources inside of the community for people that are looking for jobs, anything from templates, cheat sheets, and anything like that. And then we also have our career accelerator course, which was the product that we were selling before we opened the community, which is a 10-hour course that is very detailed on how to go about job searching. So I would say it's everything from training and all of the resources, but also getting support from us at the same time from other people as well. And then networking and connecting with these people at events.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Yeah, tell me more about that, the networking, connection elements, and whether there's anything that you've done in since you launched the community that has been really helpful. And because again, a community is, you know, lives through its content, its resources, but also through the connections and mainly through the connections that you make in it. So curious a bit about uh that that aspect of things.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Yeah, I love our in-person events the most because I really like creating that connection with people and like being able to see them, being able to touch them because we are on Instagram, we grew on Instagram very, very quickly, and we never were able to have this type of connection with people. Like we have people coming to us sometimes that we see of like, hey, like I've been following you, but we love having this type of connection. So one thing that worked really well for us since we launched the community was what we call our breakfast club. So we basically run a breakfast club every two weeks in the community in different places in London. So we basically go around London to try to accommodate, get closer to people. And in those breakfast clubs, we keep it quite small, so about 10, 11 people, just to make sure that people are able to connect with each other. They're able to have very minimal, meaning, meaningful conversations with each other as well. So I would say that this is the thing that has worked the best in terms of connecting people inside of the community.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

I love that. And so those events, I guess, as a non-paying members, I still sign up to the event through your circle community. I get exposed to is that how it works? I guess you or is it just for paying members?

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Sorry, the the in-person events is just for paying members. As a free member, what you can access is our weekly webinars. So we have a webinar which is free, which is every Tuesday, where we're talking about specific points because our mentality, and this is the same thing that we do on Instagram, we like to give a lot of content and value for free. Because essentially, like if people just want to have the knowledge, they want to go ahead and implement it themselves, they can do it. That's great. In the community, I want people that want to be in that type of environment, not just because they want to learn from a course, otherwise, I would be selling a course. I want people in there that want to connect with other people. So a lot of in terms of value and what you need to do, a lot of these things we give for free already on our Instagram through our webinars. But if you want to be part of that more intimate type of environment, then you need to become a paid member.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

Got it. So if you want the connection, belonging, all the good things that we typically find in a thriving community, you become a paid member. That makes a lot of sense. Uh talk to me a bit about automation and how you actually manage this community with so many members. I'm curious to hear if there is any workflows or automations that you can leave without as a as a founder of a community business.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah, we have a lot of automations going on. You probably, if you go on my automation um window, you want to find 10,000 of them trying to organize myself a little bit better. But a lot of automations that we use, I think one of them that is really helpful is the onboarding automation that I have set up, which usually has about four or five steps when someone joins the community. And this is for free, trying to upsell them from paid, and then after they join from paid as well. But the thing that has worked the most with our onboarding journey is that we split between sending messages from the tech talk user, which is we have like a basically admin user. Then I have my own user, and my co-founder has her own user as well. And what we do is that for everyone that joins the community for free, we basically give them challenges every single week to complete. So, like, okay, this week you have to do this challenge. Next week, this is the challenge that you need to do. So we can better help people as well navigate and like they don't get into the community completely lost on like what am I supposed to do? And what we do as well is that I send a personalized message, of course, through an automation to people and basically asking what is the biggest challenge that they're having now, why was it that they joined the community? And then I can start having a conversation with them and then potentially upsell them. And for anyone that becomes a paying member, we send a personalized message from my co-founder, which is basically like, yeah, welcome the pay member. And it's like trying to create that personal connection between us and the people that are joining the community as well. And then whenever someone leaves the community, we have an automated trigger that sends a survey for them to fill out on like, okay, why did you leave the community? What did you like? What you didn't like? Because also collective feedback is really, really important for us. So this is one of the automations that we have for people that actually become a pay member. And you can see here we have a lot of messages that we're sending to them throughout a period of time. So every four days, every seven days. The first message that we send to them is basically a welcome on welcome to the community. And like I was saying before, we do schedule a 20-minute call with everyone that joins the community. So we just send that link automatically so people can book in that call, that 20-minute call. From there, we just add a tag, and then a couple of days later, we just send a reminder, and this is a challenge as well. So I see here ready for your first challenge. So basically, we send them a challenge to complete in the first week that they join the community. Here are the resources that you should be looking at, and then we just send them what the challenge should be. A lot of the times the challenge as well is to engage with the community because we want people to engage in the different channels. So, like either sending a CV to someone to review in a specific channel or anything like that. And then we start going to the more personalized messages. So on the second week, we actually send a message from my co-founder just saying, Hey, welcome to the community. Just wanted to check in, see how things are going with you, just to see if they have any questions or anything like that. And then the rest of the sequence is basically with other challenges as well. So we do we try to do one every week for the first four to five weeks just to make sure that we're trying to keep people engaged. They're coming to our sessions, they know what they're supposed to do. And it ends about here. So yeah, I would say it's about four to five weeks.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Thank you so much for walking us through that. To drive, you know, members to actually do the actions that we want them to do to have them experience the value of the community and then upgrade and you know, all that good stuff. So super, super helpful.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Yeah, we're definitely seeing that with the um just with the calls and these like the calls that we book with members, like this increases engagement by so much. So just having the automated message sent to them of like just book a quick 15-20 minute call with us. And we saw like the difference was huge in terms of people engaging more in the community, staying more in the community as well, just for retention. So yeah, that's that was something that we did quite recently that just really improved our numbers.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Speaking about numbers, maybe not engagement this time, but more like member growth, I'd love to dive into some of your learnings there. You mentioned doing four webinars every week as a lead magnet. Um, is that your main growth channel today? Do you have any other growth channels? And if that's your main growth channels, I'd love to hear a bit more about any learnings that you've got in the process of running those webinars.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Yeah, for sure. So, in terms of how we get people in the community, we have a couple of different ways because we do have our social accounts. So we have like more than 400,000 people in our social accounts. So we do drive a lot of people from there. We also have a newsletter, so we have 40,000 subscribers in our newsletter that we got in the past two years as well. So we do send a lot of notifications there. The way that I have set up the notifications to our community members is that every Monday I send an email about the events that are happening that week to my database. So basically, what all the workshops, all the webinars, if they want access to them, some are free, some you need to upgrade. What do you call it? We have our newsletter as well that happens every Wednesday. And on our newsletter, we're also promoting the events that we have. And then every single week we have one webinar that is free for people to attend because we already tried doing two, it's a little too much to promote. It's better to do one a week. And we promote it every week as well on our socials through our database as well, and we get people signing up. Usually we do a webinar on Tuesday, so we start promoting the next one on Wednesday. That is gonna happen the Tuesday after that. And then the Wednesday, we start promoting the other one. And then through that, we manage to get a lot of people to join the community for free. And then when they join the community for free, we do on the webinar as well, we talk about the specific topic that we're talking about. And then at the end, we always talk about you can get access to the recording inside of the community, but just as a paying member, um, we have all of these events coming up also in the community and basically trying to get people to see the value in the paying community with the webinars as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

I love that. It's such a great strategy to get people in, free members. It's kind of low, low effort, low pressure, but they can still experience some of the value and see what the community looks like from the inside. So I think that's a really great strategy that we've seen work well across the board.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Yeah, it's always a battle between making the community, because I've spoken to a lot of people that have a community as well on circle of like, do you make it free? Do you not make it free? And like I was saying, for us, the only reason why we made it free to start with is because we need the data, because we also do partnerships with a lot of companies and a lot of people they're hiring. And if we have the tool of candidates of like, okay, we have this amount of candidates in our database that we can connect with companies. So there is this different angle where for us, having that data in is better. But I know that for some people it doesn't make sense to have a free community and then upgrade it to a paid one. But just in our specific case, that works well.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Totally. It's it's every community setup and model is obviously different based on your goals, what you're trying to achieve, and totally get that getting all those people in, get data about. Being able to re-engage with them at different points in time is very important for you. So, Jonathan, community building is never a linear path, right? It's always, you know, trial and error. And I would say uh we never get it right the first time. As a community founder myself, previously before circle, uh, I have many stories of failures or of pivots. Was there a moment in time where you had to pivot, or maybe a mistake or misstep that you made made that you learned a lot from? And if you were if you're happy to share that with uh with a circle community.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

A lot of pivots and a lot of mistakes, especially when we launched. I think we undermined how much work having a community would be in the beginning. So definitely we thought it would be easier in terms of the workload, but it wasn't as easy. The first thing that we tried to do at the beginning was having a paid community from the get-go. And that didn't work for us because we weren't managing to get traction because we didn't have anyone in the community to start with. So we're like, okay, how do we get a certain amount of people in the community so we can actually get some value, some engagement to attract other people? So that's why we made that switch to the free community. We made that like in the first month when we started because we saw that we weren't getting traction just with having paid. So that was the first thing. The second thing was we were trying to do the launch of the Job Seeker Hub and the Career Growth Hub at the same time we launched the community, but we are mainly known for job seekers audience. We are not known for the career growth one. So we tried to do both launches at the same time, didn't work out. We basically had to remove all of the career growth part of the community because we weren't getting traction and engagement there. We decided that we needed to grow the job seeker one first and then try to implement the career growth. And that's why we are only doing that next month now, as opposed to when we launched it in July. Um, a lot of other mistakes in terms of workflows that we did, how we were setting up the community, how we were doing a lot of events that were the same and it weren't aggregating a lot of value in the long term. Because if you're always doing the same events every single week, then okay, why do I need to stay here for two months? Like I get all of the value in the first two weeks, three weeks, because we're very value-driven. So we had to learn how to spread things out to actually get people to want to engage with us on the long term. So I think like those are some that come to mind, but there are definitely more.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

No, thank you for sharing that. Uh, it really resonates with me what you're saying or what you said earlier about trying to do too much too soon. And I that's a mistake I made myself, and that I've seen a lot of community founders make. It's like you know your audience and you know they have all these needs and all these challenges. And sometimes it's easy not to get too excited and think, okay, we're gonna like solve all those challenges at once. So it looks like you taken a step back, reprioritized, focus on focus on the job seeking kind of like challenge and and maybe persona or however you you call them. Uh, and then once you've delivered value for that persona, then you were in a good position to expand and solve a different problem. So super interesting. Is there a specific piece of advice you would share with someone who's just getting started? Maybe someone who's looking to build a membership community like yours, maybe in a professional space. Uh, if you had to share one top thing with them when it comes to getting started and building a membership community, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Oh, that's a hard one. I think there are so many things that you need to do, but I think the most important one is uh speaking to people as much as you possibly can before you start and then once you start as well. Because I do think this is what made a huge difference for us at the beginning, especially since we were growing. Like before you even have like 100 paying members, you have the bandwidth to be talking to those people on a regular basis. And you have the bandwidth to add something to the membership that maybe you already have a brand somewhere on social account, people already trust you to some extent. So, like, try to offer something like for the first maybe 50 people or 100 people that join, just to get them to feel more special and for you to also get more insights into why these people are joining to start with, and what is it that you need to be building in the community to fulfill what is it that they need? Because I think at the beginning you have this idea of like, I can only launch a community when I have all of these things, like all of these courses, all of these resources. Like, no, you don't need to have all of that. Start small, like start with the basic, like the things that really are gonna move the needle for other people, and then you can start building from that. But disconnect with this notion that you need to have everything to launch because you don't. You just need to have a really good offering and you need to attract people that again want to have a connection with you as well. And then you can start having those conversations if you want to offer a 20-minute call and they join the community or anything related to that, just so you can gather more insights and you can build a more personal connection with them. And then they're gonna start indicating you to other people as well. I think at the beginning is a lot of word of mouth on too when you're you're growing the community. So I think that would be the key thing that I would say.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Very good advice. Not over-engineering, but also not trying to launch with all the bells and whistles, really focusing on gathering a small group of members, uh renailing your offering. I love that. Did you have a beta launch yourself, or did you launch with a small group of members first? We didn't really talk about that, but now I'm curious to hear after what you've just said, if that's what you've done. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

So the way that we did it was actually that we do a three-day live program that we do every six months, usually. And this is one of the digital products that we used to offer before we opened the community. And it's something that people really love because over three days, we're basically doing a huge masterclass going over every single one of the topics that people are interested in to getting hired. A lot of people do these things for free as well. We do it paid because there is a lot of value there. And what we did is that we did one in June, end of June. And for all of the people that paid to go into this masterclass, we put them in the community for one month for free. So, in that one month that we launched, we managed to put already like a bunch of like a couple of hundred of people inside of the community. They started engaging, they started seeing the value. We started testing what are the things that they're using, what are the things that they're not using. And at the same time, we were promoting externally because we already have all of this pool of people inside that we're already engaging with them. So it would be easier to tell someone, like, hey, like we have this community with a bunch of people in, they're already getting a lot of value. Like, do you want to join? So we decided to do this way because to be honest, like I couldn't think of a better way of doing it to attract as much people as possible in a small time frame. But I think like there are a lot of other creative ways that you can go about it. But for us, this just really worked because people were able, we were able to get feedback, first of all, before we like officially launched, and also because we were able to add a lot of people at the same time, which usually I feel like the problem in the beginning is always trying to get some traction.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Exactly. The chicken and egg problem, right? There's no one, there's no, there's an offer. Where do we start? I love that. So you really started specific with that program, and it's almost like you bypassed a little bit doing uh maybe a full-on launch in the first place, uh, if I'm hearing correctly. You started with this program that's working well, people are getting value. Uh, let's use that as our proof point and validation kind of point, and and then let's build from that. I think it's really smart.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

Well, it worked. So it worked well. Yeah. What's uh Joanna, what's next for tech talk? So launching that career growth hub for people to succeed in in the job that they found through with the community. Is there anything else or is that your main focus for this year?

SPEAKER_00 29:54

I would say for this year, this is the main focus is to launch Net Career Growth because it goes beyond our audience right now. Like our audience is mainly people that are looking for jobs. So we're really gonna have to expand not just the community but our brand. How do people see us? Not just helping them get a job, but also helping them get promoted, helping them create better visibility for them at work. And I think just logistically as well in the community is a lot because the way we decided to set it up is that we have two hubs, we have two different types of memberships. People can buy different memberships at the same time. So there is a lot of operational overhaul as well. So we just need to figure out like one, getting the same adoption that we got on the job seeker side to start with. That one's got probably going to be a little bit slower. But then from there, understanding if we're actually providing the amount of value to get people to stay in the community. Because I think retention is probably the thing that communities struggle with the most. And this is something that we struggled with the most at the beginning. Still something that is challenging for us because in the space we're in, the churn is very high because people get jobs. I mean, well, our goal is to get people jobs in three months. So then we need something else to get people um hooked and to stay in the community. So I think launching that is really going to be a turning point for us in terms of the community, in terms of retaining more people and really scaling the community to the level where we want to scale.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Fantastic. Well, it's certainly an exciting plan. And we'll be uh following your journey from the sidelines in the in the circle community. And on that note, uh, I'm curious to hear if you could connect with anyone uh building on Circle, anyone who's maybe um building something similar or maybe a few steps ahead. Who would you like to meet to connect with? And we'll do our best to connect you as this episode uh releases.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

Oh, this is a good question. I don't know a lot of people that I mean the community that really inspires me and inspire me to start with Circle because I'm your marketing is David Gerhardt's. So exit five. So this is a community that a lot of people doing B2B marketing, like they know about him, they know about his community. I took a lot of inspiration in terms of branding as well, because I think like he is great at branding. This is where he's built his career. So I wanted to make my community look nice just because I saw like how his community looks so nice. So this is definitely a person where I took inspiration from. I don't know a lot about the people that have a circle community, but he's the one that is always top of mind.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

I love that. We'll definitely ping the Exit 5 team uh a note uh and let them know that they inspired you. They inspired a lot of us here at Circle. And uh definitely though those really thoughtful, intentional marketing communities that have done a great job at not just building value, but also marketing and branding that value. Uh, really great uh people to to learn from. Uh amazing. Thank you so much, Juan. It was a great conversation. I know uh people who are watching this episode are gonna learn tons from you. Um, let's continue the conversation async. So we will have uh a QA in the comments of this episode where people can uh ask you more questions, maybe pick your brain about anything that they're curious about. But thank you so much. It was really, really insightful. Nice, amazing. Well, thank you for having me.