hosted by Brian ClarkThe very first Internet buzzword, going way back to the 1990s, was community. As the online world moved forward, things became more tribal than communal, but the idea that the Internet allows like-minded people to come together is profoundly true (in good and bad ways).
For those running businesses online, community is a dual concept. There’s the community that you lead, and then the community you belong to for guidance and support.
For the last decade, online education and business coaching were supposed to be the solutions to getting what you need to effectively run and grow your business. And while that’s partially true, the “company of one can prove isolating to many who are living the dream.
Tara Gentile recognized the problem, and did something about it. She’s with us today to discuss CoCommercial, her community for coaches, consultants, freelancers, and startup founders.
The Show Notes
Transcript
Can Online Community Help Build Your Business?
Tara Gentile: I’m Tara Gentile. I did a religion major with a minor in trombone, and I’m unemployable.
Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one — and that’s putting it gently. In addition to this podcast, thousands of freelancers and entrepreneurs get actionable advice and other valuable resources from the weekly Unemployable email newsletter. Join us by registering for our Free Profit Pillars Course, or choose to sign up for the newsletter only at no charge. Simply head over to Unemployable.com, and take your business and lifestyle to the next level. That’s Unemployable.com.
Brian Clark: The very first Internet buzzword, going way back to the 1990s, was community. As the online world moved forward, things became more tribal than communal, but the idea that the Internet allows like-minded people to come together is profoundly true (in good and bad ways).
For those running businesses online, community is a dual concept. There’s the community that you lead, and then the community you belong to for guidance and support.
I’m Brian Clark and this is Unemployable. Thanks for tuning in.
For the last decade, online education and business coaching were supposed to be the solutions to getting what you need to effectively run and grow your business. And while that’s partially true, the “company of one can prove isolating to many who are living the dream.
Tara Gentile recognized the problem, and did something about it. She’s with us today to discuss CoCommercial, her community for coaches, consultants, freelancers, and startup founders.
Tara, welcome back to the show. How are you?
Tara Gentile: I am great. Thanks so much for having me back.
What Is Your Background?
Brian Clark: You have been up to some interesting things, so it seems like a good time to revisit. Why don’t we start a little bit with your background? I know we did that at the last show, but just to refresh the memories of listeners and new people.
Tara Gentile: Sure. I’ve been working in the online business space in one capacity or another for about the last eight and a half, almost nine years now. People generally think of me as a business coach or a business strategist, but really we’ve been trying to build something much, much bigger than that for the last few years.
I’ve run numerous business coaching programs, we’ve built a community and I do a lot of online business training as well with CreativeLive. I have a podcast.
As I mentioned at the very beginning, I did not come by all of this honestly. I don’t have an MBA, I don’t have any kind of formal business training. I come from a really unusual background in studying liberal arts and religious studies and music. Really for me, what that’s allowed me to do in the online business space is to approach how things work and what is going on, what the trends are, what the shifts are in our marketplace from a really human-oriented perspective.
Like we talked about in our last Unemployable episode together, I’m really big on listening and observation and just figuring out what makes customers tick. But I’m also just really interested in where the market goes and what that means for the individuals and the communities of people operating in it.
That’s not really a history of what I’ve done, but it’s kind of a look inside how I think about the business that I’ve built over the last eight and a half years.
What Courses Have You Created?
Brian Clark: Yeah. You’re really well-known for the courses you create, but you’ve moved into a more community-focused area. Let’s talk a little bit about the courses. Last time we spoke about listening — that was a great episode. Your Quiet Power Strategy, that’s a training course, right?
Tara Gentile: Yep, which we’re not currently offering. Like you said, we ended our course selling at the beginning of this year. But Quiet Power Strategy was a foundational business training program that we developed about five years ago. I’ve done everything from sell it to a group to sell it to a big group to selling it also as a certification program and training other business coaches on it.
Then I’ve done a number of other courses as well over the years, some of which I’ve sold on my own, but most of which I’ve developed with CreativeLive. A lot of people will have seen me there before. But I’ve been creating courses on building a business online and doing a lot of that for a long time now.
What Is Your Relationship with CreativeLive?
Brian Clark: What has your relationship been like with CreativeLive? Do you enjoy that?
Tara Gentile: I love CreativeLive. It’s so fun. I think the same things that I liked about the way I built Quiet Power Strategy, which is that it was a very live and interactive program, it was not a video course. It wasn’t something that we said, “All right, here you go, enjoy. It was something we really walked people through. I was there step by step. We had coaches that worked with me that were there step by step.
For me, CreativeLive is very similar in that when I get up on the CreativeLive stage, I’ve got a studio audience of 10 to 20 people that I’m working with live, that I’m answering questions from, that I’m using in hot seats, that I’m coaching along through the curriculum that I’ve developed.
But we also have this huge live online audience that I’m working with as well. So I get to actually use them to hone the curriculum as I’m teaching it and to make sure that what I’m presenting is what they need to hear too. Making those adjustments in real time, whether it’s in the Quiet Power Strategy program or whether it’s in those courses, it’s something that’s incredibly fun for me.
That kind of live experiential community-driven platform works really, really well for me. I find it super fun. I know other people find it really intimidating. But that’s where I shine as an educator and I think it’s also a really great learning environment.
And I think the other piece here is that I don’t really believe in that kind of “set it and forget it learning, because I think there’s a lot of forgetting it and it’s not just on the part of the course creator. It’s also on the part of the course customers.
I really love being in these environments where you can’t forget it, you are participating in it. You are actually helping create it as a customer, as a participant. I don’t just love it for me and what it does for me personally, but I also love it for what it does for the customer.
What is CoCommercial?
Brian Clark: Absolutely. So, CoCommercial, this is interesting to me. Give us the elevator pitch of what that is and what you’re trying to accomplish with that community.
Tara Gentile: CoCommercial is the business association for the new economy, as we like to say. Together with all of our members, we’re creating the web’s largest knowledge base for building businesses online, so that business owners can make better, more informed decisions about the next steps in their business: how to make more money, how to reach more customers, how to evolve their business into the future.
Our goal is really very similar to what other business associations or business networks do, which is bringing people together so they can trade notes and share their experiences and share stories, and share their expertise so that everyone benefits. What we see this as doing is really filling a huge gap in the business information space right now.
You can go and take a course on this or on that or the other thing, but what happens when you have questions about all the things in your business? Or what happens when you have a question that no one’s teaching a class on right now, or what happens when you have a question about the class that you took and the instructor isn’t there to offer it?
All of these holes and all of these problems exist in that business information space and our goal is to fill in those holes with something that’s really rich and experiential and created by the members that we serve.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Brian Clark: This isn’t just for any old small business owner. This is specifically for people who have online businesses or digital small businesses. Is that right?
Tara Gentile: Yeah, that’s exactly it. That’s what we call them, Digital Small Business Owners. And that we do define pretty broadly.
Some of our members are operating exclusively online. I would say probably most of our members are operating exclusively online. But some of them do operate in person, some of them have brick and mortar locations, some of them do local groups or local events. There are a lot of hybrid businesses as well, but what they all have in common is that they’re thinking creatively about how to use online tools to grow their businesses.
Sometimes that’s things like Skype or Zoom or Crowdcast. Sometimes that’s digital marketing like Facebook advertising or social media, but they’re all utilizing a set of digital online tools that let them grow their businesses in a way that small business owners haven’t been able to before.
What Is It Like Inside the Community?
Brian Clark: It’s interesting. Is this more of a combination of content and community or is it really focused on the interaction of the members more than, for example, included courses regularly scheduled education? Give us a feel for what it’s like inside.
Tara Gentile: This is what I’m so excited about, mostly for me personally. It does not include content.
At the beginning of the year, we made the decision to get rid of our content library, because the content library just couldn’t ever keep up with the needs of members. Instead what was keeping up with the needs of members was the contributions of other members. And we were like, “Why waste time and energy on maintaining this library when really what we need to be doing is getting people to share and talk to each other as much as possible?
We have a dedicated network space. We use a platform called Mighty Networks that’s absolutely incredible. That allows us to essentially create a very familiar social media space. It’s not a forum, it feels a lot more like Facebook, but without all the crap, than it does like a traditional membership site forum. And that’s then what really makes it easy for people to share their experiences, maybe what they’ve read, maybe what they tried last week.
So that’s where we put all our emphasis — getting people to contribute as much as possible. We do have a really regular schedule of events and additional features, but that’s all experienced-based. Again, instead being library-focused or content-focused, we’re really experience and events-focused.
We’ve been doing things like Q&A calls. We did a virtual conference in June where we brought together four speakers and myself and talked all about money and the new economy. We are rolling out a new feature called Flash Masterminds, where we’ll use Zoom and the breakout room feature on Zoom to get people together in small groups and get them feedback really fast. We’re doing co-working hours and top member chats and all sorts of things like that.
But again, it’s all about getting people talking and engaging and sharing what they know and from their own experience as opposed to a top-down content or library-driven model.
How Have You Marketed This?
Brian Clark: It’s interesting, because it’s conventional wisdom and even in my own experience, people will pay for the content, the training, and then they stay for the community. They don’t seem to value that aspect of it upfront until they get in there and they make those connections.
How have you gone about marketing this? Has it been as easy as you would have thought or has it been a challenge?
Tara Gentile: I think it’s been the challenge that we found that it would be.
I agree with you that in the past, and even still, people will buy the content and stay for the community or stay for the connections. But we’ve been doing our darnedest to get people to see the value of community and networking and relationship building as much as possible.
I think for me, in terms of our marketing and the kinds of campaigns we’ve run, what that really means is pulling back the curtain on how business insiders, the business leaders, the people you see, kind of the A-list crowd, how they actually have gotten to where they are.
It’s not just from buying lots of courses or buying expensive business coaching. That may be part of it, but what they do differently than so many other small business owners is that they talk to other business owners. They talk to other A-listers, they talk to other emerging leaders. They find out what’s working and what’s not working.
What I’ve found over the years and what a lot of our members tell us is that they do feel really isolated. They feel really alone. They don’t have people to talk to. They miss the boat on what the emerging trend is, because there’s no one for them to find out from what that trend is actually going to be.
By telling that story, we’ve certainly experienced a good bit of growth over this year and I think we’re still refining that message, and we’re still refining the value proposition. But I think we’re closer to it than ever before. Again, once people get in, like you said, then they get it.
Another piece of that part of the puzzle is that we’ve been offering a free trial and we’ll continue to offer a free trial. People can sign up for 30 days, check it out, and see if it’s right for them. But beyond that, I think a lot of our marketing has also been internal.
Just because someone signs up for a free trial, we don’t count them as a customer. Obviously, they’re not paying us yet, but we assume that if we don’t give them a helping hand, they’re going to cancel at the end of that 30 days. We’ve invested pretty heavily in community management and just helping new members learn the ropes and find what they need to find.
Our initial ask is, “You’ve got to hand over a credit card, but really we’re not going to charge you. Give us a try, just try it out. And then from there, we take on an additional element of marketing where we’re offering concierge support to make sure they’re finding the things that are going to make them want to pay that first month’s fee. I think the more we do of that and the more we actually engage our members around that, the more successful we’ve been with it.
How Does Your Site Compare with Facebook Groups?
Brian Clark: You mentioned the pollution of Facebook, and again, conventional wisdom would say, “Facebook groups are free, but is the value really there? I, for one, will tell you that I refuse to participate in any kind of Facebook group.
Your hypothesis was that serious business owners will pay a reasonable fee to be with people that they can trust to give them guidance. Your site says, “You are not alone, which is a very powerful message. Especially for those of us who work from home or on the go, we are kind of by ourselves.
Tara Gentile: Yes. That’s exactly what our hypothesis is. We’ve heard from so many members that because people have to pay to get in, because it’s sort of a naturally curated space with that requirement, that our space is a lot more optimistic, a lot more forward thinking, a lot more positive than any of the Facebook groups they’ve been in before.
I have heard story after story after story from clients, from members, about the free Facebook groups they’ve started and wish upon wish that they would not have started. Because they’ve taken on a life of their own and that life is not getting them new clients. It’s just creating headaches, because they’re constantly responding to people’s rants or ridiculously self-promotional posts or offensive things that people say in their free Facebook groups. We don’t have any of those problems.
In fact, we have to do very, very, very little moderation on a team side, because once people are into the space, they see the culture, they are there for the lack of riff-raff. That creates the space that becomes more and more valuable as that culture evolves.
That’s something you can’t do on Facebook. I’ve never been a proponent of Facebook groups. I was always skeptical of the free Facebook group trend that went around over the last year or two years.
What I see people using their Facebook groups as is sort of like bastardized email marketing, but without all of the benefits of email marketing. I think people have really gotten savvy to that and they don’t want to join more free Facebook groups. They don’t want to pay attention to what’s going on in there, but they do crave that kind of connection that comes from that sort of space.
Brian Clark: Yeah, you don’t have to convince me. Since 2007, this was pre-Facebook, we were preaching with Teaching Sells, and that was focused on education, but also learning communities.
Even though you’re not heavy on the content side of things, in essence this is an interactive learning environment. I was always saying, “People will pay to be away from the tyranny of free, which is anyone can show up, anyone can say anything and that quickly devolves.
Even back when it was just blog comments sections where we used to hang out, it was like, “The real action is happening behind the scenes, and you alluded to that earlier. That the people I came up with were always comparing notes and everyone else needs that same sort of opportunity.
It just can be difficult I think when you’re isolated. It keeps coming back to that. But that is a dominant theme.
Tara Gentile: Yeah. I think that social media landscape or the “tyranny of the free, as you put it, has only gotten worse in the last 6 – 12 months as well. And I think it’s cultural trends all over the world.
It’s certainly that way here in the United States where you go on Facebook and you are bombarded with rage and fear and ugliness. I think people, they go back there for a reason, but they don’t want to be there. They go because they have to.
I think there’s actually a lot of value in creating some place where people actually want to be. Hopefully, we’ve created that space for a lot of people.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s kind of depressing what a letdown social media has become. It feels like it just ruined the whole world, especially in the last 6 – 12 months, as you mentioned. It’s not a place for serious business. I am a firm proponent of that.
Do Members Become Advocates for the Community?
Brian Clark: I was really interested to hear what you’re doing with this community. Because on one hand, it seems like it may be difficult and it would be a tough sell, and yet you’re making it happen.
I think it’s one of those things where the benefits of membership, to steal from Amex, self-perpetuate themselves. Do you find that your own members have become advocates and evangelists for the community?
Tara Gentile: Yeah, absolutely. That is our number one marketing strategy moving forward — inside out growth.
We have someone who works on that outreach marketing for us, but we also have a community manager. I see her role as being in the growth and marketing department as much as anybody’s on the team. Because each person she touches, each person she turns into an evangelist for us, maybe 10, 20, 30 new members down the line, that’s huge. I certainly can’t get that kind of growth from social media anymore. It’s questionable whether I can even get it from paid advertising.
I think the members that come in knowing other members also are members who stick around longer. They’re much more likely to convert from their free trial and they’re much more likely to become really helpful members of the community. That’s not just good for us, that’s good for them too.
A huge aspect of our marketing energy is just put toward making our members feel awesome and then equipping them with what they need to tell other people about the opportunity to join CoCommercial.
I think that that’s not just a community building strategy. I think that’s something that whether you’re selling courses or you’re selling SaaS or you’re selling even something in your local community, if you can equip the customers who love you most and find more of those customers who love you most, but equip those people with what they need to spread the word — not just a business card, not just asking them to tell other people, but literally giving them the emails, giving them the t-shirt. We did a whole t-shirt campaign that was really big for us.
Really thinking creatively about what it’s going to take for those people to tell the world about how much they love your community or your product or your SaaS application, whatever it might be, I think that is going to be the future of social marketing. It might not be social media marketing, but I think that’s the future of really where we’re headed with social marketing. And really, that’s just basically going into the past to what’s always worked anyhow.
What Challenges Have You Faced?
Brian Clark: Yeah, that is true. You’re obviously an upbeat, positive person, but everyone who runs communities like this has at least one horror story of the crazy member or something. I mean, you’ve got to level with us. Tell us a good story, because it’s a hard job.
You work hard, but I think people go, “Oh, this would be a great way to make money. I’ll just charge people to join my community. It’s a lot of hard work and you’re dealing with human beings and there can be interesting things that come of that. Anything good you want to share with us?
Tara Gentile: Yeah, sure. First of all, no, this is not a great way to make money. Let’s just be clear on this. Eventually, this will be a good way to make money, but we’re still in the infancy of creating the growth that we need to make this insanely profitable. It is not a get rich quick scheme. That’s point number one.
I think we really do have amazingly smart, amazingly optimistic, amazingly positive members. And I honestly can’t think of a crazy member story. That said, we’ve made some mistakes that have created some craziness.
Brian Clark: That’s even better because that’s true too.
Tara Gentile: I think a really important thing about thinking about community building and using a community-driven business model is that every mistake you make is amplified by your customers, by your community, by your membership base.
The big mistake that we made at the beginning of the year, it was kind of a forced error. I’ll let myself off the hook a little bit, but we did a big rebrand in February. So this community of CoCommercial is not new. We’ve actually been running it for about five years. But up until this point, it was called Quiet Power Strategy — The Lab.
Quiet Power Strategy was too associated with me and I wanted this to be way bigger. So we resurrected a brand that I’d used for a co-working space and a story at Oregon, because I’ve always loved this brand. I always thought that it had more legs than what I was able to give it with the community or with the co-working space.
Because of a strategic partnership that we were working with, because of a campaign that we wanted to do, we took this rebrand really fast. Basically, we made the decision on day one. By day three, all of the wording was changed, by day five all of the colors were changed. It was very, very fast.
It was too fast for our membership and we confused the heck out of them. I’m basically telling them about all the new wonderful things that were coming, but didn’t pause for long enough to repeat multiple times, “You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to pay anything more. We’re just going to give you all of this stuff in addition, no extra charge. You just get it for what you’re already paying now. Welcome to this new space, this new experience. We’re so glad you’re here. We didn’t say that often enough.
So we had people leave, because they thought we were asking them to pay more when we weren’t. We had tons of customer support time dedicated to explaining in the way I should have explained it from the get go — what was really going on, what was still included that they didn’t have to do anything extra.
It brought out the crazy in some, a large portion, honestly, of our community because I made that mistake. I didn’t think through that change management thoroughly enough to make sure that everyone knew and that there was a real plan in place for anticipating people who wouldn’t understand what all the changes were going to be.
That was a big setback in the midst of what was supposed to be a big push forward. I’m sure other people have had experiences like that around rebrands and communication strategy as well. But man, it really knocked me down for a while and it really made me sick to my stomach, because I hate disappointing people. I hate confusing people.
Right now, we’re actually in the middle of changing some things again and we approached it much better and the responses have been 100% positive. I certainly learned my lesson, but it was a really great case study in what can happen when even one person in your community is confused.
Brian Clark: Man, I feel you on this, because we’ve done a rebrand. We did a lot of change in the last year and we have the experience to know that you have to explain and you have to explain again. And then probably a third time. It’s just so frustrating, because even when you feel like you’ve got ahead of it and that you’re adequately easing concerns and all that, you still miss some people. Or there’s still confusion no matter how hard you try.
I have also had the experience where I didn’t take it as seriously, like you didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, and it blows up in your face. So I’ve learned not to do that, but I think the lesson is you can never clarify enough when change happens.
People just don’t like change. They’re always concerned that it’s going to adversely affect them. And we’re always like, “No, nothing’s going to hurt. Everything is still good for you, but you’ll still get the support. A deluge of people who need the reassurance. It’s just the nature of the beast, especially when you’re dealing with these large communities of people.
Tara Gentile: Yeah, I mean, I love change. I have a feeling you also love change.
Brian Clark: I do, I’m weird, I guess. I don’t know.
Tara Gentile: Yeah. I’m always like, “Change. This is fun. Let’s do it. My team hates me I think sometimes. Most people don’t like change. If you find you’re one of those entrepreneurs who’s super forward thinking and always ready to do the next thing, just remember, no one else is doing that. You need the help.
Brian Clark: Yep. Tara, thank you so much. I know you have a webinar to get to. This is a fascinating project. I definitely see the need for it and I wish you nothing but success.
Tara Gentile: Thank you so much. It was great talking to you again.
Brian Clark: All right, Everyone, check it out. Cocommercial.co not com. This is right up a lot of your alleys, digital business owners. If you could use a little more advice than I can give you once a week on the podcast, then I think Tara’s community may be something to check out.
Thanks for listening and keep going.
