People Magic: How to Build a $1M Community

The biggest challenge with a newsletter and an audience based business is that you are missing out on connecting people within your community and making your life easier. While an email newsletter seems easier, you’re still creating a lot of work. As more and more people create newsletters, people don’t have the time to read them and it makes it harder to stand out. Retention and scale is really hard when all you’re solely creating is content. Creating People Magic through community is scalable.

When we do something alone it feels so much more stressful. It’s easier to get overwhelmed or feel like a victim of circumstance. That’s why a co host could be a great 50/50 partnership or it might look a little different... In today’s episode Gina reframes how we delegate and approach building relationships and communities. Look, we are all more distracted than ever which makes meeting people even more challenging. In addition to having a co host, we can rely more on software, and yes, AI, to help bring people together.

Content seems to be king right now but in order to build for the future you want to focus on relationships. We are told to create more and more content but it’s more beneficial to create the least amount of content so you can focus your time on building relationships with other people. The minimal amount of content you build every week opens up your time to create connections that can change your trajectory and theirs. Organize a dinner, go to a conference. Your content can still be a part of what you make but make sure it’s in service of facilitating what’s really important, your relationships.

You don’t need one thousand members to make your community highly profitable and highly valuable for its members. Your people and your people's people are enough to start. You want your founding members to also be highly motivated to be in your community. If you feel like you have to convince someone to join, they probably aren’t your ideal member, let alone your founding member. The pitch is: we’re going to build something amazing together, so that we can create our best year ever. 

Everyone gets burnt out but understanding when you’re feeling depleted and need to take a break is so important. Having the ability to look at yourself and your energy critically and being able to make adjustments is vital for longevity because we are all only human. In today’s episode Gina lets us into what she does when she is feeling burnt out and how she refocuses her attention. You get to decide what is possible and impossible and the people you surround yourself with will help you dream bigger and be more ambitious. That’s the power of community.

Knowing who you are serving is the first step towards growing your business. If you’re not clear about who your audience is, you can get clear by finding the people who need your community the most right now and who you’re the most excited to bring together. Being profitable within the first week of launching is possible but you should not make a huge investment if you do not have clarity around who you’re serving and why.

In today’s episode, Gina is joined by Zack Honarvar and Kate Ward. Zack and Kate work together in representing and collaborating with some of the internet's top creators. Kate was drawn to Zack’s approach with one of his clients where instead of building the product first and then finding ways to market it and find its audience, Zack did the opposite. He created engaging content and added a product on top of it. In the last couple of years Zack and Kate have embarked on Creator Now, an always-on learning community for creators growing on YouTube.

It’s really hard to venture out on your own as a business owner or an entrepreneur because we are making it up as we go along. In this episode, Gina shares one of her favorite goals and goal setting exercises as well as which traps to avoid. The more clarity you have when it comes to building your future, the more likely it is that the future you’re working towards will become your reality.

If you’re finding yourself at zero and aren’t sure where to start, this episode is for you. When starting with zero the single best thing you can get clear on is your ideal member. Who needs your community the most right now and who are you the most excited to bring together? Remember, it’s not about your content or your social media following. You can start with your network. and as you start to bring together the first 10 people, and then your first 10 people’s people, your community will grow.

Nicolas Cole is the co-founder of Ship 30 for 30 which is the largest writing program on the internet as well as Premium Ghostwriting academy which is a premiere training program for freelance writers to reposition themselves as premium Ghostwriters and he has self-published 10 books. In this episode Gina and Nicolas break down Nicolas’ 10 principles to monetize a business - from courses and communities to products. Both he and Gina agree that while you will always find success stories that contradict their beliefs, the conclusions he has made are very similar to Gina and Mighty Networks’ findings.