I tried to create my own "member's only" club for founders... here's how that went.
And why I'd approach it as a "community concierge" if I could get a do-over.
I’ve talked ad nauseum about the “why” behind my idea to start a member’s only club for founders, and did a little bit of “building in public” by asking you all to validate the idea for me before I kicked it off.
Part of what frustrated me about models like Hampton or Chief are that they could best serve founders who don’t have the capital to spend $12,000 a year on being part of a special Slack channel. I explored joining Hampton, candidly, last year— I couldn’t morally fathom how I could spend that much money on networking.
On some level, I wanted to make something similar that better served the people who have no access to community in the structured, monetized and externally-organized sense, but who deeply need it— people just starting their businesses, people in the ugly middle bits with no clear outcome on the horizon, people who are gearing up to sell for less than they’d hoped or who are on the other side of a sale and trying to find a sense of identity and agency in a weird new world.
The response was swift and enthusiastic. I got a lot of emails. And once I opened applications, I got a lot of those too!
Enter: The Corral experiment!
I match-made a bunch of peer groups, set people up with other founders I thought they could learn from or relate to, hosted a series of virtual AMAs, and created a shared online community for existing, former and aspiring founders.
And now, after two messy months, I am very much on the other side, as are the 50+ respondents who applied to participate.
Has my opinion changed since trying to do this myself? Well, kind of, yeah…
Read on for:
How icky monetizing community is… and where I got it wrong
Expectations vs. reality
What all aspiring founders have in common
Digitizing community: Slack, Geneva, LinkedIn, a group text…
The biggest learning of all— how I’d do this all differently if given a mulligan
Sharing my learnings and failings with paid subscribers below— let’s get into it!