We've got tons of awesome things happening inside the community, including the new column guides to support you in any stage of community building journey. So this is a really special episode. I'm very excited because over the past two years I've been really vocal about mighty networks and this amazing platform that's an all in one community platform that I've been using for my business since 2020 and they've helped over 80 leaders build launch and grow their course cohort er membership on this platform i with each year the platform has leveled up by offering a place for business owners to create a community that they own and charge members to access all inside one place that's branded and unique to the content and context to the community host is offering. And so that's why I really love my mighty and with that I'm really thrilled to interview two people, I've gotten to know a little bit over the last year, being an active member in the Mighty Networks, Mighty Host community, which is an online space exclusively for hosts who are who are paying customers of money networks that have their own communities that they lead.

Uh they share proven frameworks for creating growing and selling thriving communities online courses and memberships. I first met Jessica Shambaugh, Director of product management at Money Networks in 2020 when I was first launching. Finn come here community, she facilitates the thursday weekly workshop inside the Murray house community And she has been answering questions and supporting hosts by offering them a place to present their challenges and offering solutions in addition to tech support for the attendees of those sessions. Uh she's also connected with the Muddy Mastermind members in 2020 by offering to show up at a one of our virtual sessions and and do A Q. And I just with the fine come here members. So I was really grateful for that. Um and she does so many other things. She's like the face of like a lot of different money network events. So it's really exciting that she is joining us and also jane and I forgot to ask you how you say your name and I'm gonna guess it's aesthetic said, oh I can't. Okay set sick, thank you.

I knew it but then I like faltered but that's okay, senior Vice President of marketing for many networks. She focuses on creating content that converts elevating creators and encouraging leaders to launch purposeful communities that help others transform their lives in daily life. She's a Canadian american who went to a library school and ended up with a career in startup marketing, which I love that you say that on your on your linkedin, she loves learning for from creators and entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses and spark conversations. She has been together in the mighty host was supporting other members in there with resources for the community sharing posts and creating polls for engagement inside the community. And she is just amazing with creating these strategies and sharing how other community leaders can boost their networks shared on social media and she provides all the tools and resources to help uh mighty network builders make a powerful and impactful Mighty Networks.

So welcome to both Jessica and jane and we're thrilled to be here is the closing to the intro. This is super exciting Deb with everything you have done to kind of raise the profile of Mighty and help people be successful. That's what Jess and I are all about all day every day. So this feels like a good meeting of the minds and Hearts. Yes, it's wonderful to be here that it feels like such a great milestone and kind of moment in time to come back together with you after having known you for a few years now and um just getting to take stock of like how far we've come and also you know um all that we've got in the store, so I'm really happy to be here. Well thank you both um excited. So I want to start with Jessica here, tell me a little bit about your journey with Mighty um you know what brought you to Mighty and and what are you, what are you currently doing there is your role? Yes, I joined Mighty in august of 2018, head known Gina Bianchini, our founder and Ceo for At that point, probably at least 10 years we met when I was a reporter at Fortune magazine and um working on a story about the women of Silicon Valley and we profiled Gina.

So I got to know her there and then um I also helped to run um a really incredible community called the Fortune most powerful women and so we would have summits and in person events but that was where I kind of got my, a lot of my start around community and um and Gina was part of that, that group. So fast forward to uh yeah, 2018, I met up with Gina, we had coffee, I learned about what she was doing with Mighty and it sounded super exciting and fun and I just, the ideas just started like exploding and we um so I jumped on board um at first in a role that was kind of like a hybrid of like brand and a bit of marketing but also kind of special projects And as part of that helped Jenna get the community design master class um off the ground and was a producer for that course, um Gosh, I can't even remember exactly, probably starting in the fall maybe of 2019 and um we just started running cohorts of this five week course one after another and we just loved it.

It made us feel so connected to the creators and hosts that we were working with and who are using the platform and give us such fantastic insights into what they were trying to do the challenges they faced, how we could help build solutions um and then also provide strategy and help them really put together a structured approach to launching and growing um community and memberships and um all of the pieces that come with that with community design. So that was an incredible adventure. Um and so we did that, you know, right into the pandemic. That was also what a transition and interesting time in the world to be helping business owners and creators bring bring their communities online. And then um I actually sat on parental leave, came back about a year ago and stepped in as the Director of product management and that's the world I've been in and I partner with R. S. V. P. Of Product Tom Aaron to help um you know, drive the vision for what the product will, you know what we're gonna be working on, where we're going to be focused outlines with our goals for our hosts and their members and um and then, you know, we have an interesting model which I can go more into called the squad model.

So um the folks on my team are running different squads which are pushing the product forward on all different fronts. Um So that's where that's kind of my journey where we are today and so I'm coming up on four years and I just can't believe it's gone by really, really fast. So um and it's been so much fun. So great, thank you so much Jessica. Such a great journey that you've been on a fellow journalist, major, I went to school for photojournalism and spent 15 years as a journalist working for as a reporter and photographer for local publications and magazines. And I never ended up continuing on with that career only because I wasn't making any money, which you probably know a little bit of familiar with that, but look where you are now, you're leveraging all of the skills. So I feel like really you got the common, like wanting to tell the story, which is why you're really great when you do um share your, your journey. So thank you for that. I want to circle back to the squad that you mentioned, but I want to go over to jane and jane, have you introduce yourself a little bit, give it a little bit more background about what you do at Mighty.

Yeah, definitely. So as Deb said, I'm jane Stennett sick, I run the marketing team at Mighty Networks and my journey to Mighty is a little bit different than jess and I really have, you know, worked at startups for the last eight years prior to that I was a librarian in residence at an advertising agency and really what my career comes down to is I'm just curious, I want to learn more, I want to help other people learn more and that's kind of define my career and in startups when I, I went to twitter, I was really focused on small and medium businesses and just fell in love with this creator entrepreneur space, you know, creator economy creators is just another word for a different type of entrepreneur and every business starts as a small business, there are just so many fascinating stories, so I really connect with that audience, I just find it inspiring and empowering and interesting and I had a few detours, I was an online grocery for a while but when I heard about Mighty and what they were looking for, it just connected so deeply with how I want to empower this, this new future of creators and entrepreneurs and what Mighty is doing doesn't exactly that.

So I jumped at the chance to join and explore what the marketing or looks like and really what I think our role as marketing at Mighty is is to create more opportunity for people whether they haven't heard of Mighty, but they have an amazing idea for community or if they've been building with us and just need some help, you know, how can I be more successful? I think that's what the marketing or get Mighty can do and is doing and I'm super excited to do more, so I'm thrilled to be here. Great, thanks so much. Yeah, we're definitely going to get into marketing because I can tell you from uh leading the fun come here community for the last six months and working with clients who are launching or growing their their money networks that is, was what I do as a consultant, they really struggle with with how do I get, how do I get people to my membership? How do I even talk about it? What does that look like? What is the campaign or, you know, all of these things, I do want to circle back to that, but I want to make sure I go back to uh now what Jessica was talking a little bit about these squads, because I think that's a really great um uh next step to go to is talk about, like, how do you decide what products and that kind of, maybe the community design master class?

Um I don't know if that was like a way to to get a gauge of like, the products, or tell me, tell me a little bit more about how those squads worked and and how that relates to like what you're doing. Yeah, so the squads, in a way, we're like, you know, helps b they were part of the impetus for forming like, a product management function, that mighty. So, um so I guess it was kind of end of 2020 that we decided that, you know, we were growing as a team and we have a lot of surface area to our product, there's a lot that you can do with the Money Network, it's a powerful platform. Um and we wanted to make sure we were pushing forward on all fronts with the product, you know, that we weren't, for example, going in and doing a deep dive for several months on just one part, but then you know, maybe other parts weren't getting the attention that they that they also deserved. So bye bye. Kind of splitting our product team up into the sky Quads and I think we have about 10 of them now, we were able to kind of focus on different pieces and what I mean by that is like we have a group of you know, product manager, designer engineers, um focused on you know navigation or focused on analytics or focused on um things like we call it content, but it would be like chat and the the the editor, the post editor.

So you know, it really enables us to keep moving the product forward on all these fronts at the same time as opposed to like having to just focus on one thing. And so far we found that to be really powerful, really effective way to kind of get some of the things out there that we have been hearing from hosts for a long time that they wanted. Um you know, last year we we came out with the ability to sell multiple currencies so that hosts could offer um plans for sale to members that in their local currencies, which we know is really important. We also launched on live streaming for the ability to go live on video in your mind the network and just reach people directly huge way to engage the people inside your community, your members, um, in that very direct, immediate, exciting, you know, high energy way. So these are some examples of the different projects that we've tackled. Um you know, we've also done, you know, smaller things as well. Um you know, I I'm trying to think about just even, you know, maybe I don't call it small, but the ability to directly upload video to your money network, right?

It's a huge time saver for host. They don't have to, you know, go and upload the video and another spot and then come over and embed it. It's just, it's right there, it's a native experience for their members. So we're just constantly thinking about how can we make the product, the experience better for hosts better for their members at the end of the day, we want hosts to be successful. And so we're trying to identify what are those things that are really going to move the needle for them in terms of attracting new members retaining those members, Getting those members activated inside of the network? That's where we're really focused. How are the squad's determined? Can you just miss that in there? But like are you saying that those specific features like a chat feature is is specifically dedicated to a squad. Exactly one squad, Right. One squad would work on chat so that it would free up another squad to be focused on another part of the product, like having to do with plans for example, so how you sell things on a mighty Network, another squad might be focused on that.

So you know um tim and tom really kind of architected this vision, tom being R. S. V. P. Of product and tim being our CTO um and they looked across, you know, what were the key areas again of the product that we wanted to move forward and that was how they decided to set up the squad. So we're actually like often spinning up new squads. So last summer was when we spend up our live and media squads that we could focus even more on um like live experiences of the Mighty Network um or what kinds of experiences, you know, we knew how important it was to host to be able to um you know share media in a native way with their members so that's why we have a dedicated media squad now so it's really through listening to hosts again and understanding what their challenges are, what their needs are, where you know, how they want to connect and interact with their members that drives us around. Okay, we need a squad for this so we can really take a focused approach. Um and you mentioned the communities on master class and I would just say that you know, one of the things that that did for us, it gave us such a really deep and insightful look at, you know how our hosts building these businesses and what do they need to be successful with them and it gave us a direct line of communication into them and that's something I've been able to really fortunate to be able to continue with the thursday workshop as you mentioned Um where we have a group of hosts that come together every Thursday at one PM Pacific um tang host within the mighty host community, um some are regulars that come every week, some are, you know, just drop in when they have a specific challenge you're trying to solve, but the amazing thing is how many people come and they just want to listen, they wanna, they wanna, they want to be in community with other hosts and hear from other hosts and what they're working on and um people, you know listen and watch the replays as well and it's in those sessions, many of our actually our squad leaders will actually even attend those sessions so they can hear it directly from um from hosts as to what are their challenges or what are they trying to do and how can we make sure that the solutions were building are going to be a fit and and directly address the use cases that the hosts hosts bring their, so um I just really love having that time, it's some of my most rewarding time and it's just enabled me over the years to build these incredible relationships with our host, so I just love, I love having people come join us there and we all just come together at it to workshop and brainstorm solutions.

Yeah, that's what I love about mighty. Um, honestly, one of the things that made me, um, you know, so committed to too many networks, for example, is is your dedication and, and other people who are willing to give their time. I mean, there's not a lot, a lot of companies, like larger companies that you could just say, hey, like I wanna ask a question. Um, you know, without it being like a whole department of customer service or an entire community just, you know, dedicated to customer service reps who are just like managing the, you know, it's, it's more you offer so much more than just a support system, you know? Yeah. And we do have an incredible customer advocacy team. Absolutely. But I think there is something to be said for kind of everyone coming together, meaning members of our product team and other hosts coming together in an open forum to ask questions and brainstorm solutions together with each other because that's where, you know, I'll have other hosts will come up and say, well I've handled this this way in my network or this is, you know, one of the ways things that we've seen that's made this work and how we've driven engagement and a lot of that just incredible exchange and conversation and ideas that happens, um, you know, as well as just hey, getting people together to walk through here is a feature that you may not have explored or you might want to check out or try.

Um that's another thing that happens in those sessions as well. So, you know, we just we as a team gets so much out of the time with the host that we spend there. So um it goes both ways. Yeah, your team has grown a lot too, so I mean you're like you said earlier, the squads are helping you like really organize. Um there would be, I can't imagine doing this job without that. Yeah, it would be, it would be crazy. Yeah. And we're hiring, don't forget that. Yeah. Uh Cool. I wanted to, I wanted to say, so that's the magic of community, the shared wisdom that you get when you bring people together in an online, that's entirely why I created, that's why I exist in this space, because I know that is a powerful experience to come onto a zoom call and be able to connect with people across the globe and we each have a unique perspective that we bring to the table as soon as we enter a virtual space like this. Um that is just magic.

Um So I sort of make sure you say the love for communities. So yeah, and I will also say that during the thursday workshop, during the, during a lot of the lockdowns and the pandemic, like it was such a lifeline even for me, you know to be able to be talking to people even around the world about what their experience is like and how is everybody doing and just taking a moment to just check in with each other as humans? Yeah jane, how do you uh I wanted, I was thinking about this as Jessica was talking, I'm sure that like even um like the product people, you know the product teams and and these other people from the the squads are involved in this thursday workshop but is there uh feedback that you're getting from either the community Design masterclass feedback or feedback from you know, participants in in that session that you use in your marketing efforts or direction around like how to make choices with, with regards to marketing? Mighty Yeah, great question I would say everything that Mighty is a giant feedback loop. So one of the things I really love about working here is our commitment to rapid feedback and learning so jess and her team are funneling insights back to marketing and in turn were funneling insights back into product for sure, learning from what's happening in Mighty Community and then also, you know, we want to be looking outside of Mighty Networks to to understand are the are the concerns and questions that people who are already familiar with?

Mighty Networks having, are they the same concerns and questions that people have just in general around starting an online business or starting a community and how can we kind of use marketing to bridge the gap and make sure we're meeting people where they are because you know, the resources that somebody who's been on the business plan for three years and it's like launching their fifth premium course might need is going to be really different from someone who is like, I have an idea where do I go to start it, where do I go to make it happen? So feedback is super critical from the community and then we're also looking outside the community to just learn what's happening with communities in general and community trends to make sure we're speaking to all of those people as well. Yeah, give me uh that's right direct, right directly to where I wanted to go with, what do you see in the industry with the background, what you're doing with Mighty um in the next, you know, in the next year for for people who are maybe considering, you know, launching a mighty or or people who have been doing it for a while, oh my gosh, okay, you might have to cut me off because there's a lot we can talk about, I think um you know, one of the things that I'm really excited about and Jessica kind of alluded to it, where the office hours were a lifeline during the pandemic is I think, you know, back in the day, it may have felt like digital community.

Online community was kind of a second best option compared to meeting people in real life. And I think now we're finally at a time where it's it's just different, it's not second best, it's not like instead of or because we can't meet up, but I think the the barriers that have been broken down because people anywhere in the world can connect over a shared purpose or interest is really exciting to me, because I think it just opens up what a community can be, and of course, you know, it might be, we still want to support people who do want to meet up in person with in person events. But I just think there's so much more opportunity now that um the the power of community online community has really been just showcased over the last couple of years, as we've been kind of forced to embrace it. So that's that's one trend that I'm seeing. It's just there's no longer a, you know, a sense that this is like a second best option to gather people together online. In fact, sometimes this is just better because you can bring more people together.

The other thing that we're really interested in and just just at the beginning of starting to think about how the product Response to this is Web three, which is a huge rabbit hole that people can go down right with Google and myself have spent many hours kind of unpacking it. But what it means to us at Mighty right now is this sense of how can communities have shared upside where they're coming together, they're getting rewarded for participating together, they're building something together, you know, it doesn't have to go full like Cryptocurrency Blockchain but there's some really powerful ideas that are happening in that trend that I think Mighty is well positioned to not only welcome People who are new and thinking about community because they're excited by Web three, but people who have been building community on mighty for you know five years and are hearing about these new concepts and want to learn and understand how they can evolve to meet them. I feel like my tea can be a really interesting bridge there which is exciting to think about that's so can I just I know we don't want to go too deep in the hole there but but um I wanted to know like specifically could you give me a use example for for this context of how it would work with somebody like a mighty network host who's been, you know how to how to money for awhile.

Would this be an additional offering that they would be then promoted? Yeah, I wouldn't think of it as an additional offering. I would think of it as a way to frame maybe what they're building or just learn a little bit more about. So for instance I was on a call this morning with the dow that's building on mighty a decentralized autonomous organization which is a mouthful, I will tell you that but it goes back to that shared upside and this tao they're called mammals dow there really um they are basically building a community. So just like any other mighty networks host, they're using the product as it is today. So there are no secret product features they've turned on to make this happen. But basically what they're building is a community with a purpose where people are getting rewarded and incentivized for participating in the community in a different way and they're looking at ways where the community as a whole can make decisions together versus one person kind of directing everything that the community is spending their time on or investing in.

So that is a very rudimentary way of talking about it. But I would encourage hosts to just watch on our youtube. We have a great recording of a session that Gina, our Ceo and a woman named Zoe Scammon did with dan Runcie of trap. It'll and they talked at length about how this creator economy and this community economy are shifting towards these web three ideas and they do it much more eloquently than me. But I think it will start to kind of spark ideas and more questions which are great for the people who are interested in it. Yeah, the phrase that came to mind when you were talking, I was like, what's known in the community tech industry is Gamification or um, elevated badges or ambassador programs that are, you know, where you, where you get certain benefits if you're really engaged member, like there's different levels. Is that kind of, that could totally, yeah, that could totally be a part of it. You know, you can go full rabbit hole with like how do we create a currency for our community and people get a fraction of it when they do something.

But I think at a base level it's just how do we all get rewarded for participating in the work that moves us towards our shared purpose, which could be a multitude of things. And I don't even think honestly Deb that it's at the state anywhere, let alone it mighty that there's a shared concrete definition because there are just so many possibilities and as a curious person, that's what gets me pretty excited. I love it. I inside find calm here. Community. I just started a monthly spotlight to spotlight members and I've really encouraged the fun come here members because most of those members are muddy network hosts that come in and we support each other in different ways inside the community. They, I was, I was definitely having a conversation around. We should support each other's networks because I can tell you I've had clients that I really wanted to be in their community just personally because of the content or the context of the conversation and um there's communities that I have found and refer people to all the time.

I'll be like, oh my gosh, you would love this community, Here's the link, you should go check it out. Um Maybe my aunt Sue or or my my sister would love it. So um even if you have a community that might not interest me, I might know somebody. So I feel like that referral process is a really great just to transition a little bit, you know, of just saying like there's a lot of benefits, there's a lot of variations of benefits, I think that kind of goes to where people get, you know, just going back a little bit to the challenges of the complexities of um all of it, you know, how do you put in a community strategy together? What does that mean? Um You know, it's just very and the mighty. Um well it has, like we talked about all of these amazing things that have um became available and this might be a good question for Jessica then, um but just it's a lot and and they're like, this is amazing, there's so many opportunities to do so many things, but I don't know where, you know, that's what I get a lot of feedback about.

So I was wondering Jessica is there um I'm guessing there is there's some kinds of like thoughts you have around, like how to help people, because you're talking about, like how do we make it easier for the host? Right. Yeah. So, well, first of all we think, you know, we want to make things easier for the hosts, but we also we're really, you know, focused on how can look at the end of the day, The host wants members, right? I mean, what do you want is someone who's living in community. You want active members, you want members who are getting value out of the what you're putting out there, not only because maybe it's a revenue generator opportunity for you, but you probably got into running a community because you wanted to make a difference for people and you are driven by that impact that you can have for helping people make transformations in their lives, you know, that's really what it is, it's it's thinking about so how can we give hosts the tools to help them better run their communities, but also how can we give them the tools and levers to make it so that their their members get a ton out of the experience and want to keep coming back.

So we're constantly kind of thinking about all those pieces, Right? And and there's obviously trade offs to make, look, we have, like I said, we have this incredible platform, it's so powerful and there's, you know, so many different directions we can take it in as as jane was also kind of speaking to, so that's why one of the things that we do in the, in the community design of course, um and that I will often talk about in the thursday workshop two is keeping it simple, right? So there's yes, you can do a lot of the mining network and we want to give you lots of flexibility and options and um and for people who want to go kind of advanced mode, they can do that, but for people who are just like starting out, I would just say like keep it simple, you know, this is why we talk about things like a weekly calendar, because it's about making your community a habit and if you do the same thing on the same day of every week, a couple of days a week and people are going to get habituated to that and they're going to get used to it and they're going to know that on Mondays I come to this community to post my intention for the week, and on Wednesdays I come back for the quick lesson or you know, conversation or you know, maybe there's a friday question, it's really about that, those habits forming a kind of engaging ways of engaging your community, I mean, I just do this even with my own team where, you know, I try to be really consistent about Mondays are for what are our intentions and Fridays are for what are, what are our winds that we want to celebrate that consistency and then we also talk about filming um and themes, we tend to kind of anchor two months because you know, if you can move through different themes throughout a year and a half months, make up a year um you can help people feel that they are making progress on something.

So that's another really big, it gets into a lot of the psychology right behind feeling like you're making progress and moving forward and growing that we, you know, are supporting our hosts and doing so then within your mighty network, you have various tools to help you do this. Um you know, whether it's um an icebreaker question that gets people contributing right off the bat when they first joined the mighty network or you know, the ability to schedule posts is another super helpful tool so that you can just line up those questions that you want to have, you know, go up every monday or what. Um so that people again formed that habit. Um there's are welcome and featured sections so you can pin content that you want to make sure gets in front of people. Um so these are just uh you know, some of the tools that we give hosts to help them bridge that gap between how do you, you know, create a, you know, get something out there, get going, that's a big piece to write people kind of get in their own heads and they're all blocked around.

I don't want to start something unless it's perfect or you know, until I have all the answers and the reality is you're not going to have all the answers you actually have to start like co creating the community with your members and figuring out what they like and what works and do the testing and then they're going to give you that feedback and then you're going to figure it out from there. I mean, the best hosts, most successful hosts that I've worked with um are ones that were like, yeah, we tried this, it didn't work or we tried this and it worked great, and so that was how we knew that that was the thing that we were going to do um whether that's a, you know, um like a challenge, you know, we'll have host to talk about doing a weekly challenge, It helps bring people back or, you know, another great feature that we just um brought to the platform last fall was group chat. So can you create small kind of accountability cohorts with the group chat? Um so there's a lot of like, again we have lots of tools, it's picking a few to get started with and not trying to over complex if I start small, start with a few simple pieces and then um learn and evolve from there and I would add to that, I think everything you said jess is spot on and the thing about starting simple is start specific with your big purpose and like why are you doing this?

You know, Deb this is something, I'm sure you've you've had hammered home after community design, but there's a reason why it's the really first lesson in community design is because if you aren't specific enough at the start with who you're bringing together what you want them to achieve, then your community is going to be really hard to market because you know, I've seen people say I want to start a community for women and that is not going to, you're going to be struggle to find your audience because that is so broad and then it's really unclear all right, you get a bunch of women together, what are they doing? How are their lives changing? How are they moving towards a goal versus if you say I want to start a community for women in the restaurant industry who own their own restaurants and are struggling to scale and we're going to come together to learn things, learn lessons that we've all learned and share them too, evaluate new tools together to build a coop, you can get really specific and then you can almost picture that ideal member in your head and you're going to start to think about, where would I find that person who are the three people, I already know, who are that person and everything is easier from that, including what features you use of a mighty network to help you get to those goals.

Well, yeah, yeah. Like like nodding my head the whole time. Yeah. One thing I just want to add on to that, I mean, gosh, yeah, we're all kind of like nodding our heads together here um, is just like, it also helps people find their way to you because they see themselves right? Like to jane's point, if it's just like for women, it's like, well, I don't know, is that me? I'm a woman, but so are, you know, billions of other people in the world. Like when you get specific, then it helps people say, oh, that sounds like me. This sounds like a place for me. You know, this sounds like a place that I specifically belong or want to be in. And um, and I think that that's critical. I think we have a lot of hosts will say, well I don't want to exclude anyone. And if I go too narrow, then I'll, you know, I'm, I'm too narrow and I'll lose people and it's like actually want to start small and specific and then you want to grow the other direction, which is, you can, once you've nailed down that initial group of people that you're focused on, then you can start to like expand out. But if you start to broad at the beginning, it's, it's like kind of, if you're for everyone, you're really for no one because nobody knows like if they're supposed to be there or not.

Yeah, and this is this is the perfect segue Deb into some marketing things because I think it all starts from there. So if you'll allow me to geek out for a second, Yeah, I was going to ask you some questions but go for it. I I know we've got a hard stop soon, so I want to keep it ahead of the time. So yeah, but I think really, once you start to think about, okay, who is this ideal number? Right, So who is this restaurant owning woman who's struggling to scale if that's your niche? Let's just go with this example I made up out of nowhere, probably because I'm a little hungry. Um if you think about that woman, if that's your, your community and that's your ideal member, then you think about how would she talk about this to her friends, write testimonials, featured attendees or members for your course or community, whatever you're building, Having those people tell the people in their networks or be featured, just again, as just said, it helps somebody see themselves in your community.

And those are the things that I really think make marketing easier is if you are putting those faces in your marketing so people can be like, okay jane is telling me about this community, but oh my gosh, there's Olivia and like I've been to her restaurant where I saw her over here, it's just, it's so much more powerful and then the other thing that I know jess and the product team are working on is going even a step beyond, is actually making it a lot easier and more exciting and to incentivize those members to then invite other members, but you can see it all starts with having the specific focus of who this is for and the storytelling is so, so, so, so much easier. And another thing to think about is it helps you set expectations for people who are kind of like, I don't know, like do I have time for a community? What am I going to get out of it? It helps you set really clear expectations around how they will contribute and what they'll get out of it if you again have that specific person in mind. So it was like a community for women, I'm like, okay, do I just show up and I'm a woman and I'm here, you know, I can tell you that is a tab or an app that I am not going to open that much because I just don't know what my purpose is of going there, but if it's this restaurant, you know, owner community for women, then you can set expectations, like we're gonna have speaker series and we're going to feature a different member every week, it's a great opportunity to share your story and get feedback beyond the hot seat for somebody or you could say you know, the expectation is you're going to be able to, after a year of being in this community, we know you're going to get to a place where you're ready to open that second location or take online delivery or something.

Again, I don't know why I picked an example, I have no experience in, but all the challenges. I imagine our restaurant, maybe that's your dream, that's your dream baby in your career. I've got a community for you, I know exactly who to reference you for one of like one of those fine calling here members of the community, that's exactly about that, but not for women. Um it's not specific to women, it's more specific to new york city location using he's in new york city um okay, so I know we have like a few minutes left and I don't want to like cut you off, so like go ahead like one year and I just have one more point that really ties into what you just said about, you know, I know somebody who has a community like that is another huge, huge trend that we've been seeing and we're super super grateful that mighty community, which is our free community for people building community is a part of this trend is there are more and more communities for community builders popping up everywhere, like all sorts and of course mighty community is the best one, but I think finding those networks of other community builders is another really important way to help grow and find your members because like you just did they know other people who owe like I know the perfect person to be in this community even if they're not the right fit, they're going to grow your network and they understand the value of community so they are going to be better at selling the community if that makes sense.

True that Alright, Rapid rapid fire I'm gonna do some some ups real quick um facebook that you never heard of facebook, we're gonna talk about the big red elephant in the room. Facebook has groups facebook is for everybody that is the platform for everyone. So if you wanted to know which platform is for everyone, that's that's what it is, that's where the confusion is, that's where the distraction is, that's where the whatever you wanna say, toxic nous or however you want to title facebook to be. They have made lots of money off of people creating this space, bringing people together. Yes, but there's pros and cons to everything and that's the big shift of now, there's a lot of creators that want to leave um they see there's challenges with facebook, they don't own the content, they don't have control, they're you know, they're fighting analytics, they have to pay for advertising to pay pay to play all of those things um you know, relate to, you know, this idea of Mighty networks.

You have your own Facebook. I don't, I have, I'm a member of 70 mighty networks for example. And they're they're all, yeah, this is why I have like no time to do a special crown or something. But just to say that one of the most confusing things that I've had claims say is they think that when they log into their Mighty Network that they get then then it's like they can see all of the networks that they're a member of or something. And the only way you can do that is when your toggle back and forth on like the app. Otherwise if you're on a desktop you have to book market just to go into a little bit of techie stuff. But just to say that what that means is you control as a host you control who's who's a part of it, meaning it is exclusive. It's exclusive to who, what your purpose is. So the really great thing about a really good money network landing page or a sales page that goes to a money network is they're saying here's who were who here's who this is for and here's who this isn't for because then you can just go to that page and if this is for me, I can say great, I'm gonna click isn't easy.

It's simple, but if it's not for me, I'm gonna say all right, well this isn't right now or not for me, you know, maybe Sue is a better fit for this or whatever, giving that really clear point. I just want to hone in on that. And then pricing we didn't talk a lot about, but either one of you want to chime in here about how do you see pricing and you know how to, how the creators price their their offer with Mighty Cause great you, if you know who you're bringing together, that's great. But how do you ask them to pay for it? Is the is the challenge, right? Yeah. Well, I think probably capture my thoughts on these really quickly with two thoughts and then jane you you could probably go deep on facebook, I'm going to use one of your catchwords Deb, which is calm. You're not going to find calm in a facebook group or anywhere on facebook. And you know, I personally have turned my attention towards more intentional experiences across the board and I think that I've seen that trend and a lot of people I know, and it's only going to continue.

And so a Mighty Networks is an intentional space. It's a space that you go to because you have an intention, not because you're looking to be, you know, it's necessarily just distracted or you know, kind of like in a in a junk food, it's not that it's not junk food, it's there to, to, to feed you on some level and help you and and bring you along and in a real community space towards a goal that you have or something you're trying to do with your life. So that's what I would say about, you know, my diy network versus facebook and facebook has things, it's good at two, but you know, we think if you want to create an intentional community experience, you've got to do it in a mighty network. And then I would say as far as pricing goes, people pay pay attention to what they pay for, that's what we say. And so we think that, you know, charging for your mighty network is a way of showing that you value your time and what you're creating and putting out in the world and other people should too, and when they pay, they will invest themselves in it. So those are my thoughts. Well, I would add to that to not only do we say, people pay attention to what they pay for, but our data shows that it's true.

So 77% of hosts who have charged for something on the mighty network right. Whether that's a one time course fee or a member subscription, 77% of hosts who have done that have made a sale, which is in the world of conversion rates, that's bonkers in a good way. And then the other thing is the people who are the members who are in those networks who are in a course or a community, they've paid for their more engaged than someone who's in a free money network because their mindset is I want to get value out of this and they are getting value out of this which is great. There is so much more that I could say about pricing that will not fit in our two minutes. I would definitely encourage people to check out the community design master class. We have an entire in the accelerator. We have an entire module around pricing. There is also a great sneak peek on our Youtube channel, a video about how to price, how to charge that will give you some really great frameworks to think about The one kind of distillation of it.

I could do in 30 seconds is think about what people would have to pay for to get the results and transformation that they're going to get in your mighty networks. So is that a ton of books? Is it a personal coach? Is it a therapist? Right. What would they have to be paying for? Is it a gym membership to achieve the results that they're going to achieve with the amazing community and program and you've put together and think about that as your price point. Don't don't do the thing where you're like, oh if I just make it $2 for a cup of coffee then everybody is going to be cool to pay for it because psychologically, actually that's not necessarily the case. And again, so much more to talk about here. But check out some of those resources I mentioned because I think they'll be really helpful. Thank you. Thank you both. We will have show notes available. That will have some links into these places. So jane will sink back up with you in an email to make sure I get the right links that we can put in the show notes. Um Thank you both for being here. There's so much we could talk about and for sure if you guys are open, we might do a follow up episode that sometime later so that we can have like a topic specific episode.

I feel like it would be a good idea because I'm learning more and more that people want to know what dad, what episode you talk about, pricing that, what episode you talk about? Strategy. That what episode you say that? Um that would be a great thing to discuss further. Um but thank you again both. Thank you so much for having us. How much Pleasure And you know, jess and I as much as we work all day together, we don't get to hang as much as I'd like. So this would be a great opportunity for another hand. Let's do it. Cool. All right, well, thank you all for listening until the next time. I hope you're finding calm in this day, evening, afternoon morning Tuesday at lunchtime or wherever it is for you whenever find calm until the next time. Take care and we'll talk to you later. Bye.