From courses nobody finished to a six-figure community business

Ernie Svenson had courses lawyers were buying but not finishing. The problem wasn't the content—it was the isolation. When he built community around those courses, everything shifted. Members started showing up not just for lessons, but for each other. Today, The Inner Circle has 300 members generating six figures annually, with around 100 of them on a $239/month premium tier driven almost entirely by AI learning.

The dirty little secret of course building is that at best 4% of people actually finish what they buy. Ernie knew that. He built something to fix it.

In this episode:

• Why Ernie stopped giving his best asset away as a free lead magnet—and what happened when he put it behind a paywall
• How he got skeptical professionals (lawyers, specifically) to trust each other enough to actually post and participate
• The weekly poll tactic that drives engagement regardless of the topic, and how AI tools now let him run the whole community himself

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 0:03

Welcome to Behind the Build, the series where Circle creators share their biggest breakthroughs and what it really takes to build a thriving community business. My name is Mathilde, I'm the head of community here at Circle, and today I am thrilled to be joined by our guest, Ernie, also known as Ernie DeAturney. He's the founder of the Inner Circle, a membership community for lawyers that started about three years ago on Circle now. This community has quickly become a reference in its space. It has it is thriving, it adds tons of value to its members, it's highly engaged. And so there's a lot that we can all learn from this community and its story. Ernie, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Oh, thank you for having me, Matilda. I really appreciate you inviting me. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Thank you so much for accepting our invite. And I'm really excited to be talking to you today and learning a bit more about the inner circle. So, how about we start with your story? So, can you tell us a bit about yourself and maybe what motivated you to start this community in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Sure. Well, um, I'll just say right off the bat that what I really wanted to do was help people, help lawyers use technology. I didn't necessarily want to start a community. Um, it's a lot of work to have a community, and I had a Facebook group and I didn't really like that. So I wasn't really looking to have a community. Uh, but I didn't want to help people. I wanted to help lawyers. And I myself was a practicing lawyer. I was in a big firm for a number of years here in New Orleans. And because of technology, I was able to do my work more efficiently, more enjoyably, and do a better job for my clients. And I thought, well, other lawyers would want to do that too. And I found that not other lawyers, not all other lawyers gravitated toward the technology part of that. You know, yes, they want to help their clients, but they didn't want to learn new things. And so I had to figure out who were those lawyers who were willing to do that. And what I found was it was mostly lawyers in solo and small firm practices. I left my big firm to go solo because I just figured it would just be easier for me to do what I wanted. And so that kind of set the scene for me to be able to help lawyers with technology. And I did that in a number of ways. I ran my own uh live programs and gave lawyers continuing legal education credit. Um, that was good, but cumbersome, expensive, and you could only do it certain times of the year. Uh then I started doing online teaching that was better. Um, I created I set up a ThinkIhic. Um, it was on ThinkIphic. And that's where I was putting courses. And that's where there was a time when a lot of people would buy courses more easily, including lawyers. But the missing piece was there was no community. And like I said, I wasn't looking for a community, but I realized that dirty little secret of course building that, you know, at best 4% of the people actually go through the courses was happening in mine. And I wanted to help them. So I knew if they don't go through the course, they're not getting helped. And I learned about Circle. I saw that certain high-level people that I trusted, um, like Pat Flynn and others, Jay Klaus and whatever, were going there. I thought, okay, if they're going there, that's probably you know what they're doing. And it was a big move. You know, my members, you know, in the Slack community that I was running next at ThinkIphic, they kind of were, Ernie, why are you doing this? Like you're making us jump through another hoop. We don't really like this. But I knew it was the right decision. I couldn't convince anybody or explain it, but I just knew in my heart it was. And I was there when you guys pretty much started. And so I've seen everything get added and I've been able to learn it as it got added. And in the end, I realized, like, no, I actually do want to have a community that is the best way to help people, if all of the components for that community are there, which they are in circle. So I kind of skated to where the puck was going to be without knowing that I was human skating or that there was a puck.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

I love that. I love to hear the the origin stories behind community businesses. And yours is very personal, right? From a lawyer yourself, practicing lawyer, to uh an educator in the space, to an accidental community business founder from what I'm hearing. So really fantastic to hear your story. Um I'd love to get a sense of what your community is like today. Uh, maybe before we we take a look behind the scenes, can you tell us a bit about its size, number of members, and maybe the business model as well? So how much they pay and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yeah, I well, I've had to kind of pivot around and try different things to get what works well for this group. So it's about 300 members total. And I have two levels of membership. The basic level, if people want to join that at the current rate, it's gonna go up in next year. But the current rate's $300 a year. Um, and that's kind of the way I get people in so that they can get a feel for the community. And then the next level is they pay per month, and it's currently $179 a month. It's about to go up to $239 next year. And that's actually if it felt like it was kind of high to me because I know these are solo and small from lawyers that have limited resources, including money. Uh, and I want to help as many as I can, and I'm not really doing this to become, you know, massively wealthy or grow the biggest community. So I'm trying to keep it, you know, the right way. So that has worked out. It took me a long time to get to that point to know that that's what I need to do. But, you know, the there's about a hundred people that are in the higher level, and more and more people are converting from the lower level to the higher level. And the main driving force for that now is artificial intelligence because I help them understand how to use AI, specifically like ChatGPT and those kinds of things. And there's a huge demand for that. And the best way to learn that is to use the tool, but also to talk to other people who are using it. So again, voila, you know, I happen to have the perfect situation to help people learn. And it's it's my community is really growing pretty organically and easily now because of those factors.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Fantastic. And speaking of growth, um, I'm curious to hear how how your how new members um get to know about the inner circle and and how do they join? So what's your maybe your marketing or is it word of mouth?

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Yeah. Um, well, I started the fifth lawyer blog ever in 2002 called Ernie the Attorney. And that was, again, it was totally accidental. I was just playing with technology to see how it worked. And that was kind of the beginning of my journey of people knowing about me, inviting me to conferences, inviting me to be on podcasts. Eventually I started, you know, my own podcast. I started publishing some YouTube videos, although not really so much on YouTube. But I would say podcasts and being invited on people's podcasts and publishing um gets the word of mouth out there. I also have spoken at a bunch of different events. And because I started so long ago as one of the early lawyer tech adopters, you know, people see me as, oh yeah, that's Ernie, you know, the OG of legal tech. So I have a lot of momentum that's naturally uh available. But what made it work better again was that I have a community because websites were good, and I, you know, I took advantage of that for a while, but to try to attract people to your website, that's a very difficult thing on an ongoing basis, especially with all the noise out there. So LinkedIn is another place. I post pretty regularly on LinkedIn, and that's pretty much it. LinkedIn podcasts, interviews, and um word of mouth.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Got it. So that's your kind of marketing stack and and then having built that that brand in the first place has been really helpful, it sounds like. Um amazing. Um I'd love for you, I'd love for you to show us a bit about your community and how it comes together behind the scenes. If if that's okay with you, um, I would love for you to share your screen and take us on a quick tour.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah, sure. Let me uh share my screen. So, yep, there it is. Um and uh, you know, the name is funny. I called I've thought about calling it different things and using different profile pictures, but I notice that when other people's circle communities are there, it's always an icon. And I feel like mine pops and also it signals this is me. I'm there's a person here, and that's my picture. So that's probably the first thing I think that's important. And it took me a while to settle in on making that um the way I I operate there. But um I think the things that I probably would say is the start here thing, and I guess I could um pretend to be somebody I have um I have a fake personality called UI Guy, which is like looks like, you know, test spot. And if I um view as UI guy, uh we can see that if you go to the start here onboarding course, this is something it took me a long time to work out. And I don't really have any videos or very many videos, because I really just want people to go through this quickly and get a sense of how to operate in the community. And so, you know, I tell them welcome, you know, look for message notifications. I you know, tell them um, let's see, I tell them it's important to have a profile. One again, one of the things it took me a long time to do is once I had enough people in with a profile picture, I screen captured that and then just put them in here as a way of saying, look, everybody else is doing this, you should do this too. Um, you know, get the smartphone app. The last thing, other than rewards, you know, we talk about the um gamification, which at first I wasn't sure that that would matter to lawyers, but it's weird. Lawyers are humans, and I think humans like to have games and play them, but also there has to be an actual reward. So at the end of the year, I reward them based on the total accumulated number of points. And then the last thing I think is important is, and this again, it took me a while to figure it out, is to identify what is where is the person when they join the community and how can I help them get to another level. So first I have to classify them. And this I did using uh AI, Chat TBT specifically. I have uh I use a tool called ScoreApp. I've developed, again, over the years of it's an increase, a 50 question comprehensive assessment of what tech they use, do they use outsourcing, how do they market? And then I classify them into one of these categories. So when they think, okay, I'm gonna be classified and he's actually gonna help me, that motivates them to then um want to do um those that that assessment. Um and then what else is important? Um let's see. I think the other thing that's important is just to know that they can start at the top and then work their way down. That was another thing it took me a while to realize. And if they're if they're not in the you know, in a certain level, they see the lock screen, which is good. So I want them to think of like you progress by by opening up more things, which means you have to go to the next level. So those are kind of the main things. The other thing that I'll show, um, not as UI test guy, but as me, um is is the poll. So the poll is something that I I stumbled upon. And now every Wednesday I have a poll. And what I realized by accident, just trying it a few times, is that it kind of almost doesn't matter what the poll is once it's relevant enough. Because what happens is it causes people to engage in a way that they otherwise wouldn't. So this question about are you using bookkeeping services, I learned about this because somebody asked me about it. And I realized, okay, that's a pain point for people. And I remembered, all right, you know, that people have different ways of solving this. So I created a poll for it. And then, of course, I can see who voted which way, they can too. But then it starts generating commentary. And you know, it was a simple little thing that I just didn't realize how powerful that would be. Um and then the last thing I guess I would say is the AI agent, I have an AI agent, so basically the whole community is a repository of information. And I can go in there and see, have people ask questions. I test it sometimes with my own questions. And then yesterday I asked it, like, can you find me some quotes from comments about how enthusiastic they are about using this tool called Whisperflow? Because I knew there was commentary, but to go search for it would be a pain in the ass. And it gave me that information. That was one. Then another one I asked, you know, I knew we talked about Mark Andreessen. Where is that? And it gave me the information. So it's not just the members using it, it's also me um using it as well. So the AI chatbot has it's just been huge. I mean, I was kind of reluctant, uh, you know, is that really gonna work? So a lot of this is just I'm sort of sort of a victim of the same mindset that I tell lawyers they shouldn't have, which is like thinking too much, having too much resistance. You just don't know how something's gonna work until you try it. And as I've been trying the AI chatbot, I realized this thing, I could run this community by myself and get a lot of stuff done. And I was mostly running it by myself, but I do have a full-time VA now. And it's great because she has access to the AI chatbot. So together, we just deliver so much more value, so much more easily. And but being able to see what people are asking questions about, that was a thing I didn't appreciate. Like I just thought, oh, they'll ask questions and the AI chatbot will answer it for them. But yeah, I know what they're asking about. So that's huge.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

I love this, Ernie. Thank you so much for this tour. It's really great to see how how your members are getting value through courses, through polls, the gamification aspect. I love the onboarding and how easy you made it, but also how how creative it is, how personal it is. So you really lead by example with you know screenshots of your, your, your members and the completed profiles. Before we move on to the next uh section of this conversation, I'm I'm a bit curious about what you shared about the gamification. So you said that every year you reward the higher the most engaged members. So what does that look like in practice?

SPEAKER_00 14:21

So this is the first, this will be the first year, because gamification hasn't been out that long. I think it was maybe two years, but this will be the first year that I'm actually going to give them rewards. So first I had to figure out all right, what do I call these levels? And that was another one where I thought, you know, I can use AI for this. I just said, let's make it themed around Star Wars. So each level is named after some Star Wars concept. And that was the first thing. And I thought, well, they don't they're not going to really care about getting rewarded with the title. Um, but I do need number one, I need to acknowledge that they did it. And the first 10 points they get is they get for going through the onboarding course. So when they do that, I have an automated workflow that says, congratulations, thank you for doing that. You've been awarded 10 points. And then I tell them, if you accumulate so many points throughout the year, here are the things you can win. I had to figure out what would they want. What would they want that was easy for me to deliver? Because if it involves mailing it to them, that's friction. So I thought, well, if I give them like a free session with me, if I, you know, give them an unlock in some way. So I had to play with those things. And the thing is, you know, I overthought this and I worried about what they would think if I change things. The reality is in the beginning, they weren't really paying attention. So I could change things without even announcing it. And that's when I got the idea, like, well, I'll just make it at the end of the year, because that'll be easier. At the end of the year, I'll send you an Amazon gift card or whatever. We'll sort all that out at the end of the year. I have my assistant to help with that. And I think that what's happened in the past six months, I would say, people are posting more on their own. And I don't know exactly why that's the case. But I think gamification plays some role because when they post, uh, I always send them an automated message. Thank you for posting that thing that you posted. And so they're constantly being reminded that it's, it's, um, it's in play. It's not something that, you know, it's on the back burner. It's, it's, it's there. So yeah, and now that they're engaging with each other more, that makes it even better for me because I don't have to think of all the questions and things to talk about. They do it. And the more of them that there are that are trained and you know, onboarded, indoctrinated in the right way, the more self-executing it is. And it's not that I don't want to be the one to do everything, but I just think it's better for a community if everybody's engaged and helping each other. But it's tricky when it's online and don't know each other. So it you have to use everything available to you to make that happen.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Totally. And what you're saying really makes me think of how sometimes in in our work as community builders, we might do something for a long time and then suddenly it it works, right? And so it's kind of the combination of small actions that really compound and then make the community's culture, make engagement. Um, but you have to try it and you have to experiment until this point. So, you know, it's it's it's interesting. And this is why also this series is called Behind the Build, because we want to spotlight, put a spotlight on all the work that goes on behind the scenes for a community to be to become highly engaged, or for a community business to start really grow and thrive. And so, yeah, I guess that leads me to my next question. And I'm I'm curious to hear if there was any breakthrough moment or tipping point in which you you stopped and started to think, okay, this is really working. This is a real community or a real business uh and something worth investing more of my time into the I think there were a couple of different moments that were pivotal.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

And the first one was realizing that I shouldn't just let everybody in and do it too easily. But I think a lot of people when they start a community or something like this, they're desperate, you know, or they're, you know, very anxious about getting a lot of people in. So I invited a lot of people in on a free trial, and and that was not a good idea. What was important was for me, and this is Jay Klaus saying this in a podcast. I I'm not in his group, although I'm sure it would be great, and maybe I will be one day, but it was him saying when you have a group of people, you have to identify something that they want. And then you have to that's communal, right? They all want the same thing. And then you have to make it very clear that they're gonna be able to get that more easily in this community. And that's very easy to say, and it's obviously important, he knows, but it was hard for me to interpret that in a way that was useful for my group. Part of that was realizing that the score app assessment, which I had been using as sort of a lead magnet, was like, no, no, you need to make this, you get this if you join the community. You know, if you join the community, then I will, you know, evaluate it and give you feedback because that's time and effort on my part. So then I think more people were willing to join, and when they did, they understood, you're gonna tell me what what type of lawyer I am, where I am in terms of using technology, and what the kinds of things are that I should do. You're gonna give me a roadmap. I mean, this is so easy to say and so obvious when you say it, but how that works in anybody's particular community might be different. So I had to work that out. Once I worked that out, then I saw sudden growth and more engagement by people, and I could see, okay, this is what I need to be doing more of, is finding ways to signal to people that I'm willing to help them. So then the next thing that was a big um thing that I didn't think was gonna be big was I decided instead of having all this formal programming, Fridays, I'm usually like relaxed, it's the morning. I was like, why don't I have a Friday coffee chat? Like around 10 a.m. my time. And I there's no programming. You could the rules are you come in when you want, leave when you want, you don't even have to say goodbye or hello. We're just gonna chat about whatever. And there was a small group of people that would show up, and we would just do this, and it was it was fine. It was it wasn't huge. But then more and more people started showing up, and then I made it exclusive to the higher level, and the idea is it's more candid conversation. I got great ideas about programming from that. I figured out who the most engaged members were, and that was probably the biggest thing up until the AI chatbot, which now, you know, that just amplified the potential. And because I'm teaching Lures AI, and I'm saying, like, one of the things you want to do is you want to create a repository of very good data that can help you answer questions. I can say to them sincerely, like, we got three years worth of posts and lessons and all of that, which would have been harder for you to consume or figure out where things were, but now you don't have that problem anymore. You asked the AI chatbot, and so all I have to do is show them how to use it. But I also now have learned it's not as simple as saying that once or twice. I have to continually remind them and show them wherever I can, as much as I can, especially the people that come in. So in the onboarding, that's an example of another small thing. Like I realize, oh, in the onboarding, I need to go add that in and show my best example of how the AI chatbot works so that they learn it first there and then build it out. So a lot of times it's just thinking, oh, I need to go back into the onboarding course and add two or three sentences. Or over here, I need to add things. But you just need to be constantly thinking about the places where people are coming in or circulating. And then the last thing I will say, I forgot about this, is that once a week I send out the this what's this is what's coming this week. And it's uh both a post, and then I now that I'm using the email marketing uh option, which is great, I can send out. It out that way, and it's really easy to copy over one to the other. But that post saying, here is what's coming that goes to all of the members, I've refined what that template is over time, that's made a huge difference.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

I love that. It looks like you've really tweaked and experimented a lot with your content, your offering, your rituals, and you have a really good mix of those three things in your community experience. What would you say is the primary thing that makes people buy on the higher tiers in particular? Because I feel like oftentimes in our industry, we hear people buy content. They come for the content. They might stay for the community, but they buy the course and then they stay for the community. What would you say three years in? Um would you say this is this is true for you as well? They buy the content, they stay for the community, or would you say Yes, they don't know what a community is and they don't know what my community is.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

And they're lawyers and they're skeptical, and everybody, you know, everybody has the idea of like, I'm gonna create a community. I have all these people I run into, they oh yeah, I'm gonna create a community too. And I'm like, do you know how hard that is? You know, like, do you know uh you think you're gonna do that in 30 days or 60 days? That's not realistic. So the thing that I have to have to do is when they get into the community, it's it's human nature psychology. Like, how do we get people who don't know each other? And in my case, they're lawyers, like the they're professional skeptics. Caginess is in their DNA. So, how do we get people who don't come for the community to realize that the community is actually the most valuable thing, right? So you kind of have to, you know, guide them in. And this is again where having the Friday coffee chat was good because that allowed me to rehearse what an informal session was like. And the more I got comfortable doing that and realizing what worked there, I could apply that to the formal sessions. Like I wanted the formal sessions to be more like that. So then I realized, like, well, if I if the formal sessions are, we show up and, you know, I start a presentation, you know, and I, yeah, there's a QA at the end, but they they're not talking to each other. But if when we're coming in, before I start recording and start doing my presentation, I bring that same mentality and vibe that I do elsewhere of like, hey, it's good to see you about what's the weather like where you are? Oh, what's going on? We have our little informal chat. And if somebody's new, I introduce that new person, or if they've if they're new and have only attended a few, I'll remind people that they're new. I'll find ways to get the new people comfortable. And yeah, it's just, it's just a lot of experimenting. But I would say people don't realize if they want to learn something or improve in some way, what they really want is to be around other people that are trying to do the same thing. They really do. Like, and I, I, that's what I want, right? Everybody wants that because you hear what other people are struggling with and think, okay, I'm not the only one. Or you hear them make an offhanded comment about something they tried that worked, and you go, oh, that could work for me. And it's so much different that if I'm the only one recommending everything, even if they trust me completely, even if they're, you know, they regard me as the greatest OG of legal tech, which not, you know, not many of them do, but some do, even if they do, that doesn't get them across the border. They need to be in a community with other people. And then as the next step, really for me, and maybe I'm anticipating a further question, is I'm thinking about how do I get them to talk to each other in a better way. And I know you have this new feature coming out where you can connect people. And that I definitely want to explore. But also I've started to connect them one-on-one and say you two need to talk to each other. And then I have to kind of be the bridge and talk to them together until they start talking to each other. And now all of a sudden they have a deeper connection, right? So it's a lot of psychology, it's a lot of tweaking, but it's not, you know, it's not automated everything. You have to be careful about automating things that involve relationships between people, you know.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

I love what you're saying about, you know, the value of community and connection, but the fact that sometimes people don't even realize that's what they want. And so our role, oftentimes as community builders, community managers, or founders running communities is to really just make that very visible for people through the experiences that you build, through the Friday coffee chats, through the informal connections that you facilitate behind the scenes. So it sounds like you've you've started cracking the code of making that possible for your members and you want to build on top of that uh in the future. Um so you're about three years in now, right? Is there anything that you would do differently if you were to start over? I know you've already started you've already shared some some things that you've iterated and experimented on, but if you were talking to the Ernie from three years ago, what would you what would you tell him when it comes to starting this community?

SPEAKER_00 26:59

I would say have more one-on-one connections with people when they first come in. So I I was, you know, in this mindset of, oh, the greatest thing about a community is you set it up, they talk to each other, and you dive in when you want you want to, and otherwise you're free to romp around and enjoy your life. And the thing is, it's not really, you know, there's it's not that burdensome if you run the community the right way. And I'm sure if I had a community of 10,000 people, this would not apply. But in communities of a certain size, and mine is definitely in that size, unless there are so many people coming in in the beginning, you know, each week. Like, you know, now probably let's say I had 10 people coming in each week, which I don't currently. But if I did, I could totally handle that because I've learned that what I need to do for every one of them is say, look, let's get together with one-on-one Zoom. After you do that score app assessment, I'll I'll email you, I'll tell you, you know, what you what the what that shows because I have an AI chatbot or AI GPT that evaluates it automatically. My assistant can send that part. But for me to meet with them one-on-one, I've learned they'll tell me what they're really concerned about in a way that they're not gonna do otherwise, right? Like that's when they open up and say, hey, listen, could I just hire you and work with you one-on-one? And the answer is sometimes yes, you know, usually no. But I I find out what they're really concerned about. And so the idea that you're gonna know what people really want without doing that is just completely unrealistic. And with in the beginning, that is your job. The more you do that, the better. And I think about the people who founded Stripe, Patrick Collison, he gave a Google talk one time. And, you know, Stripe is now well known. It's huge. You know, they were the youngest billionaires ever, and they're super smart about how they do things. And he was saying that in the beginning, when you have a company, it's often more important, or it's usually more important, to do things that don't scale. And he said that they used to like answer their customers', you know, emails. They would build things for just one person. They did all this stuff that was a lot of extra effort in the beginning. And he said, that's what you have to do. And I didn't appreciate, again, I heard him say that, but I didn't think about how that applied to my community. And after a while, I was like, oh, yeah. I'm trying, I'm not, I'm not engaging with enough people one-on-one. And it's not that hard. They set up, you know, county appointment. It's all, you know, all that can be automated. And sometimes they reschedule. It's all very easy. And they also don't all descend on me in the first week. Sometimes they want to take a month before they do that. So it all works, but you have to engage with people. You just do one-on-one. You're the community. So unless your community is so big, and when you're starting out, I think you should do it no matter what.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Such a great reminder of doing things that don't scale and not being afraid of putting in the work of doing the small things, the things that really involve one-on-one conversations. Uh, and even as the community scales, I think there's always times, always moments where you can find pockets of time to make that possible, to keep learning and to keep iterating your offering based on what your members need. So really great reminder. Ernie, looking ahead now at next year, we're recording this episode at the end of the year in December. I'd love to hear what uh what do you wish for your community business in the year ahead?

SPEAKER_00 30:14

So the one thing that I haven't taken advantage of, and I know I can and should, but I just haven't had the bandwidth, is the there's the affiliate um reward system, which I don't know that the lawyers in my community, most of them, are gonna be, oh yeah, I want to join the affiliate thing and be rewarded. But what they can do is find other people, recruit other lawyers that would be a good fit. And almost by definition, anybody who's in the community who's been, you know, well uh onboarded and indoctrinated into how we do things, and who is, you know, willing to recommend it to other people if I give them the opportunity in the way to do it, anybody like that is almost by definition going to find the next perfect member, or at least a really good candidate. So that's really important is to find the right people, because if you get too many people in that aren't a good fit, now you could have a problem. So I'm going, I created in the paywall an affiliate link that's specific for members, and it gives uh a $1, 30-day free trial, or not free, 30-day trial for a dollar. And then after that, they pay a discount off of whatever the normal price is. And that's the way that they can say to people, look, if you want to join, I have a way for you to try it for 30 days. It's not free. You have to give us a dollar because then you can auto you know, auto-subscribe after that. And that was something I read that somebody had done in the Circle Community. I thought, that makes perfect sense. But you you have to be thoughtful about how you implement that. And what I've realized is the best way to do this is to just remind people. And I will do this in my weekly, you know, post and email. By the way, you know, if you want to find other people, here's an opportunity. And then if you are an affiliate, there is an area, a secret space that you know lays out how that would work and what email to send people. And I've crafted a really good email that's very low-key and conversational. And I also post that sometimes to show people that you can just use this to email people and if you want to try it. And people have said that they're willing to do that. And I know that the trick will just be to remind them regularly on an ongoing basis.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Love this. Growing through affiliates and referrals is such an important strategy for community business owners. Um, so we are we're nearing the end of this conversation in a few minutes. So is there any parting piece of advice, any last tip you would give to someone else who is just starting a community business today? Maybe somebody who's like yourself trying to build a community uh or building a community around their own expertise, maybe a professional network or learning community. What would you what would you like to say to them?

SPEAKER_00 33:00

I would say join other communities, especially in the that are hosted on Circle, and just have the experience of what it's like to join a community that you are not running, because it just opens up a whole different set of insights. And then when you're looking at different communities, you can compare them against each other and say, I like what this one does. Oh, look, all of them do this or several of them do this. And having that experience, and then also when you join them, try to become an active member, right? Like it and look, the circle community is like the perfect place to do this. For a long time I was a member and I didn't really take advantage of it. And then I thought, wait a second, this is my opportunity to experiment, but I'm a a a member, right? Like, what is Circle doing here? How can I learn from them? And the lot the other thing I'll say is that a lot of times I had questions and it used to be hard to figure out where in the circle community to find it, but you have an AI chatbot. And so I go in there and I ask the AI chatbot all the time. Like, find me this, tell me about this. And it answers the question, and that also helps me understand how to use the AI chatbot in my own community.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Such a great piece of advice. Not just using the circle community, which anybody should do. Yes, I agree, but also putting yourself into the your members' shoes, putting really trying to wear the members' hat on. So I love the the this piece of advice, joining other communities. We also have Discover now with Circle, where you can discover amazing communities built on Circle and join them. So fantastic advice. Well, Ernie, this was incredible, very inspiring, very practical. I know the community is going to be going to love this episode and learn tons from you. So, where can people find you?

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Well, they just have to search the word Ernie the Attorney on any search platform, and you'll find my website, which now I'm trying to figure out how to move that over to Circle and have Circle as my main uh place because I don't really need a separate website. I'd rather just manage one thing. But you if you type in Ernie the Attorney, you'll find my website or the circle community. The circle community is called, you know, inner called inner circle. So you can find it. It's not hard. That's one thing about me. I'm easy to find on the internet.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Amazing. And we'll also add all those links in the episode post so people can also connect with you, maybe in the circle community if they so wish. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

Sure, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 35:25

Fantastic. Well, Ernie, thank you so much for taking us behind the bill today. It was it was an awesome conversation.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.