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- 💰 3 Steps to $2M
💰 3 Steps to $2M
Steven Young
February 06, 2024
Together with
🤫 The Next Big Thing In Business…
A new type of business has emerged in the last decade…
In my opinion, it will be the most profitable business model we have ever seen…
What’s the business?
You've probably used a few of them yourself...
Product Hunt... Kickstarter... Skool.
These community-based businesses leverage two things better than any other model: Attention and Access.
And they’re unique in that their product is the user themselves.
Today, we’ll talk about 5 businesses that make millions leveraging their community, and how you can steal their hacks to make more money.
Here’s what we got for ya:
👥 3 Steps to a $2M Community
📚 Alex Hormozi’s Biggest Bet
💰 The $1B Trend
Read Time: 5 min 31 sec
👥 3 Steps to a $2M Community
In 2011, Product Hunt was nothing but a weekly newsletter with a few dozen tech nerds.
13 years later it’s the largest online tech community and worth over $2M.
Their business model is simple - Build a community of people interested in tech, then charge startups for access to that community.
Here are the three steps Ryan Hoover (founder) took to bootstrap the Product Hunt community from 0 to 10 million users.
#1 - Friends and friends Of friends
For the first few months, Hoover had about 50 email subscribers - most of which were ‘friends and friends of friends.’
Every week Hoover sent Product Hunt development updates and asked for feedback on colors, landing pages, copy, etc.
The goal: Make your community feel like they’re building with you.
Within a year, Hoover had almost 10x his list as people felt a personal responsibility to help him grow.
#2 - Townhall
As his list grew, Hoover used these three tactics to grow his list and maintain his tight community:
Started a podcast and interviewed users about their tech startups
Sent Product Hunt stickers to new subscribers
Created the Product Hunt blog where he would connect users working on similar projects
The goal: Grow by facilitating conversations between members.
PS - He calls this the ‘Townhall’ stage because it was almost like a little town of tech guys who knew each other.
#3 - Platform
Once Hoover finalized the Product Hunt website in 2013, Hoover gave users the ability to build profiles and comment on projects.
Today, tech startups are more than willing to pay Hoover to showcase their startup to his community.
But this is just one way to leverage a community. Let’s talk about the 2nd way with 10x more potential…
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📚 Alex Hormozi’s Biggest Bet
Over the last 3 years, Sam Ovens has built an online community named Skool.
Some call it “The OnlyFans of business”
Why? Well, just like OnlyFans…
Creators post on the platform and charge viewers for exclusive access to their content.
(But in this case, it’s mainly business content.)
Skool is similar to most community-based businesses in that it leverages access to a group of people.
But there are two key components to Skool that other platforms are missing:
Creators own their audience and can monetize it on 1 platform
Skool’s organic growth structure.
With Product Hunt and other community-based businesses, creators pay to access the large pool of users.
But with Skool, creators can own and monetize their exclusive audience and potentially sell it.
On top of this, Skool has ‘gamified’ its platform by launching competitions between creators.
And no one loves competition more than entrepreneurs.
Then there’s the Skool affiliate program which is now their #1 growth channel.
Creators get a 40% discount on their subscription for every user who signs up via their referral link.
If enough people sign up to cover their fees, any additional sign-ups transfer to cash.
As you can imagine, Skool is growing extremely fast. So fast, that “host payouts are growing by 62%...PER MONTH”
And that’s probably why Alex Hormozi (CEO of Acquisition.com) has placed his biggest bet on Skool.
On that note, Alex Hormozi recently launched The Skool Games where anyone can compete to build the largest Skool platform.
The top 10 winners will get a chance to fly to Vegas and get 1-on-1 advice from Alex.
💰 The $1B Trend
Here’s how 3 businesses used these community-leveraging hacks to add thousands to their sales while maintaining their original business model:
#1 - Gym Shark
Gym Shark spends less than 9% of their advertising budget on ads. Instead, they spend most of it paying affiliates and influencers.
Why?
Because Gym Shark knows that it will have a higher ROI leveraging fitness influencers with a community that already identifies with them.
As a result, most who own Gym Shark clothes believe that Gym Shark represents people who look and act like them.
#2 - Loom
Similar to the early days of Product Hunt, Loom has a feedback board where users can ask for specific features.
Once a feature hits a certain amount of votes, Loom adds it to their software.
#3 - Red Bull
It’s common knowledge that Red Bull does not taste the best. Yet, it’s one of the top 3 most-bought energy drinks globally.
How?
Because people don’t buy Red Bull for the taste. They buy it to be a part of the Red Bull community.
AKA hot girls and extreme sports
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