Before you start a community, read this.

And then make your members so happy they sell it for you.

I was on Alessandro Di Ruscio's Escape 9-5 show recently talking about community, and I said some things that I want to say again here in slightly more joined-up form. Because I get asked about this a lot and I think there's a version of the advice that sounds encouraging but sets people up to fail, and I'd rather just be honest about it.

Let's start with the uncomfortable bit.

If you don't have an audience yet, a membership community is probably not your next move

I know that's not what people want to hear, because communities are genuinely wonderful things and the idea of building one is exciting and motivating. But I've spoken to a lot of people over the last couple of years who tried to start communities and failed, and the pattern is almost always the same. They built something good, they opened the doors, and nobody came. Or a handful of people came and then quickly left because it felt empty and quiet and like they were paying for a ghost town.

When I launched The HoLT in June 2022 I already had well over 100,000 followers on LinkedIn. I'd spent two and a half years before that pouring into the LinkedIn community for free, building trust, building relationships, building a reputation for actually knowing what I was talking about and for being someone who worked hard for the people around her. I don't think I'd have launched if I didn't already have all of that in place. And I definitely wouldn't have sold out a hundred founding member spots in four or five hours if I had.

The math of a community is also worth thinking about practically. If you charge £100 a month and you need twenty members to make it worth your time, those twenty people need to know you, trust you, and believe you'll deliver something worth paying for every month. Getting those twenty people when you're relatively unknown is genuinely hard. And a community with twenty people in it feels very different from one with five hundred, in ways that make those twenty people less likely to stay.

So what do you do if you don't have a big audience yet? You build one first. You establish yourself as someone with real expertise in your space. You get known for something specific. You make yourself trustworthy before you ask people to hand over their credit card details on a recurring basis. That part takes time and it's not glamorous, but skipping it and going straight to monetisation is how you end up with a community that never really gets off the ground and a lot of frustration about why it isn't working.

The waiting list is not optional

If you do have an audience and you're ready to launch, the single most important thing you can do before you open the doors is build a waiting list. Not a vague "coming soon" page. An actual campaign where you are actively telling people what you're building, why, what will be inside, when it's launching, and how they can get early access. You talk about it regularly. You let people feel like they're part of the process. You ask for their input on what they want from it.

My copywriter did some research on this and the average waiting list converts at around ten percent. Which means if you want to launch with a hundred members, you need a waiting list of roughly a thousand people. If you want fifty, you need five hundred on the list. That number feels daunting, but it's useful because it tells you what you need to go and do before launch day rather than hoping for the best and being disappointed.

We still run the waiting list model now. We open twenty-five spots a month, they sell out in about ten minutes, and we close the doors again. That scarcity is partly practical and partly intentional, because it keeps the quality of the community high and it keeps demand warm. People who've been on the waiting list for a few months arrive much more motivated and engaged than people who could have joined any time they felt like it.

What to put inside before anyone arrives

One of the fastest ways to lose your founding members is to launch with an empty community and assume they'll generate the content and conversation themselves. They won't. They'll log in, look around, feel vaguely let down, and quietly cancel after the first month.

When I launched The HoLT I had a two-hour LinkedIn webinar ready to go, LinkedIn clinics where members could get Q&As with me directly, and eight to ten weeks of masterclasses already booked in from external experts, so people could see exactly what was coming and when. I'd also put over five hundred content ideas for social media into the library myself, so there was a substantial resource available from day one. If someone joined and felt unsure what to do next, there was always something concrete to start with.

There's also something worth doing with the language around early members that I think is underused. Founding member status genuinely means something to people. Being one of the people who believed in something before it was proven, who helped shape it from the beginning, who's been there since the very start — that has real value to people. We now offer our original founding members who are still with us the option of a lifetime membership as a thank you, because their loyalty and their trust in me at the beginning is part of why we are where we are now.

And the flip side of the founding member thing: be honest with those early members that they're helping you test and shape something. Ask for their feedback. Respond to it. Show them you're listening. The community will be better for it and they'll feel ownership over something they helped build, which makes them far more likely to stay and to tell other people about it.

Your members are your best marketing. So treat them like it.

I was standing in a queue for coffee at an event last year and the woman in front of me was telling the woman next to her about The HoLT. Going on about how brilliant it was, how much she'd got from it, saying she really should join. She had absolutely no idea I was standing directly behind her. I had a genuine internal debate about whether to just stay there quietly and let it happen, because it was both wonderful and slightly mortifying, before I tapped her on the shoulder and nearly gave her a heart attack.

That moment was worth more to me than any marketing campaign, because it was completely real and completely unprompted. She wasn't getting anything for saying those things. She just meant them. And that only happens when members actually get significantly more value than they expected from what they're paying.

We do also incentivise referrals more formally. Members who refer five people in successfully get extra one-to-one time with me or a gift, depending on what they'd prefer. We allow members to bring people in via what we affectionately call Back Door Barry, our entirely fictional security guard, which gets a laugh every time but also communicates something real: that we trust our members to vouch for the people they bring in, and that their reputation is on the line if those people turn out to be nightmares. Nobody refers in a knobhead if they know it reflects on them.

We track who referred who, partly so we can thank people properly and partly because it creates accountability. Members who've brought people into the community have a very different investment in making sure those people have a good experience. It builds a culture where everyone feels some responsibility for the quality of the environment they're all in together, rather than leaving that entirely to me and the team.

The other thing I'd say about members as your marketing is that word travels both ways. Negative experiences spread faster than positive ones. I hear whispers from people about communities that disappointed them. Communities where nobody was talking. Communities where the founder showed up once a month for a Q&A and called it done. Communities where people felt like they were paying for a library of content nobody was curating anymore. Those whispers are death for a membership, because the people hearing them will never join and the people saying them have already left.

So the answer is unglamorous but straightforward: be in there. Every day. Not necessarily for hours, but consistently and visibly. Know what your members are struggling with. Celebrate what they're achieving. Make sure no reasonable question goes unanswered. Treat the person paying £65 a month with the same care and attention as you'd give someone who paid you thousands for one-to-one time, because in a community model, that £65 person is every bit as important to the health of what you've built. Actually, they're more important, because there are five hundred of them.

The metric I care about most isn't new members joining. It's members staying, and members leaving with good things to say even when they do go. If you get that right, the growth takes care of itself. I'm standing in coffee queues being talked about by people who don't even know I'm there. That's the goal.

Watch the full episode below.