The best creators experiment.
Creator Science goes inside the strategies, systems, and decisions behind the world's most successful creator businesses. Practical, specific, and grounded in what's actually working today—not what used to.
Each episode features candid conversations with creators like James Clear, Ali Abdaal, Tim Urban, and Codie Sanchez. We explore the experiments they're running, the data they're tracking, and the frameworks they use to grow their audience, build trust, and increase income.
Jay Clouse is the founder of Creator Science, a multi-million-dollar creator business, and was named Content Entrepreneur of the Year by The Tilt in 2023.
With 300+ episodes, this is growth for creators—down to a science.
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#319: How Tamara Grominsky Predictably Grows Her Membership Each Month
Saison 1 · Épisode 319
mardi 22 septembre 2026 • Durée 52:46
My guest is Tamara Grominsky, founder of PMM Camp — a private, application-only membership for senior product marketing leaders with 280+ members.
Tamara spent 15 years in product marketing, eventually landing at Kajabi as VP of Product Marketing. She went there with a specific agenda: study how the best creators build their businesses, then reverse engineer it for herself. She started a newsletter, surveyed her audience, learned the thing they needed most was connection, and launched a membership in March 2023. Six months later, she left Kajabi. Her model isn't always-open or quarterly-launch. It's application-gated, opens for exactly five days on the first of every month, and runs on Kit workflows and Circle. She's been on this monthly cadence for nine months and now forecasts her revenue 12 months in advance. She's hit every number this year.
Tamara is also in our Lab mastermind, which means I've watched this system get built in real time. This conversation is nine months of mastermind updates compressed into a podcast episode.
In this episode, we talk about:
How she went from VP of Product Marketing at Kajabi to building her own membership — and why leaving a job she loved was still the right call
The monthly open cart model: application-gated, waitlist-driven, four emails, five days, and why it turned a chaotic launch calendar into a predictable business
What a personalized onboarding document looks like, and how she gets 90%+ of new members onto a welcome call
Her hypothesis about why her conversion rate is stuck at 30% — and what she's testing next
By the end of this episode, you will have a complete model for running a membership like a product — with systems, baselines, and experiments that make revenue forecastable.
PMM Camp (Home)
PMM Camp Community (Membership + Pricing)
PMM Leadership Bootcamp (6-Week Cohort)
Newsletter Archive (188 editions, every Sunday)
Tamara's LinkedIn
Tamara's X
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Introduction
(01:26) What product marketing actually is
(04:43) From Kajabi to PMM Camp
(06:49) What she learned studying creators
(11:28) The decision to leave
(13:23) Finding the founding 25
(16:47) Inside PMM Camp today
(18:29) The welcome call and onboarding doc
(25:25) Why evergreen broke her business
(27:52) The monthly open cart model
(33:17) The Kit workflow behind the cart
(36:09) The conversion rate problem
(44:54) The visibility hypothesis
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#313: How Tom Ross Doubled His Community Engagement and Retention With Training Pathways
#318: The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU'RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
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💼 Connect on LinkedIn
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#318: The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox
Saison 1 · Épisode 318
mardi 15 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:00:01
My guest is Liz Wilcox, the creator behind Email Marketing Membership — a $9/month newsletter template subscription she’s kept at the same price for six years, that now generates close to half a million dollars a year.
Liz built the whole thing as a single parent with no support system and no reliable internet, working from library parking lots and Lowe’s lots during nap times. She launched in February 2021, kept the price at $9, maintained a 5% churn rate, and grew to over 4,400 paying members. She and her sister run the operation — no upsells, no masterminds, no group coaching. Just the membership. Then in April 2026, she quietly closed a deal to buy Smart Passive Income — the 18-year-old creator education brand Pat Flynn built from scratch. She spent five months operating as SPI’s director of community before anyone outside the deal knew it had happened.
This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Last week, Pat and Matt told the seller’s story. This week, Liz tells the buyer’s.
In this episode, we talk about:
Why the $9 price point has worked for six years — and why she’ll never raise it
How she grew a half-million-dollar membership without social media, using podcasts and a 50% affiliate program
What had to be true before she’d pull the trigger on buying SPI
How she’s thinking about merging EMM with the SPI community — and why she doesn’t have the answer yet
By the end of this episode, you will understand how a $9 offer can compound into a half-million-dollar business — and what it actually looks like when someone buys a legacy brand and tries to honor it.
Liz Wilcox
Email Marketing Membership
Smart Passive Income
Episode 317: Pat Flynn & Matt Gartland — Part 1
Superfans by Pat Flynn
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Introduction
(01:14) The $9 membership
(03:48) The retention rate
(07:54) Low stakes for both sides
(11:06) The four thousand member math
(12:39) AI and the membership
(14:55) Who this model isn’t for
(16:38) Growing without social media
(20:23) Single parent, no backup plan
(31:41) Buying Smart Passive Income
(34:51) What made the deal happen
(43:49) Why she hasn’t cross-promoted yet
(48:34) Merging the two memberships
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#317: Selling Smart Passive Income (And What We Can Learn From It) — Pt. 1 featuring Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
CONNECT
🐦 Connect on Twitter
📸 Connect on Instagram
💼 Connect on LinkedIn
📹 Subscribe on YouTube
***
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#317: Selling Smart Passive Income (And What We Can Learn From It) — Pt. 1 featuring Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland
Saison 1 · Épisode 317
mardi 8 septembre 2026 • Durée 54:11
This week I’m joined by two longtime friends — Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland.
Pat is the founder of Smart Passive Income, the creator education brand he started in 2008 and ran for 18 years. Matt came on around 2018 — first as an advisor, then as CEO — and spent years making SPI operationally strong enough to stand without Pat at the center. They spun SPI out into a separate entity called SPI Media, pivoted from courses to community with recurring revenue, and quietly prepared the business for a sale they weren’t sure would ever happen. In September 2026, they announced that SPI had sold. The deal had closed five months earlier.
The buyer is Liz Wilcox, an email marketing expert who spent those five months operating publicly as SPI’s “director of community” before anyone knew the deal had closed. The community doubled in size during that window. Part 2 is next week, with Liz.
In this episode, we talk about:
How Pat and Matt deliberately structured SPI over 8 years so it could be sold — including spinning out a new company, removing Pat’s face from the website, and making the community the hero
Why Pat turned down multiple VC and PE offers worth more than the final sale price
The deal mechanics: seller financing, no broker, 160 documents of due diligence, and how it closed in 6 months when deals like this typically fall apart
What creators who operate entirely under their own name are missing when they eventually want to exit
By the end of this episode, you will understand what it actually takes to build a creator business that could outlive you — and what the groundwork for an exit looks like years before anyone is thinking about it.
Smart Passive Income
Liz Wilcox — the buyer (she’s on next week’s episode)
Deep Pocket Monster — Pat’s Pokémon YouTube channel (2.4M subscribers)
Built to Sell by John Warrillow — the book that shaped their thinking on making a business sellable
Superfans by Pat Flynn — his self-published book, part of the deal’s licensing terms
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) The news
(01:44) The first seeds of the idea
(03:10) The VC and PE offers
(05:52) Building for optionality
(13:20) Running two companies at once
(18:11) Why real partnership is the unlock
(21:17) Who to hire first
(38:16) Why the negotiation wasn’t about money
(40:38) What seller financing actually means
(41:24) The due diligence process
(45:26) The transition strategy
(47:37) Part 2 preview: Liz Wilcox next week
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#122: Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland – Courses, community, and the future of education
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
CONNECT
🐦 Connect on Twitter
📸 Connect on Instagram
💼 Connect on LinkedIn
📹 Subscribe on YouTube
***
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#316: Kallaway’s EXACT System For Going Viral (Almost Every Time)
Saison 1 · Épisode 316
mardi 1 septembre 2026 • Durée 39:09
Meet Kallaway, the creator behind the Kallaway Marketing channel and the founder of Sandcastles — an AI research tool that helps creators find and validate viral video topics before they ever hit record.
Kallaway started 4 businesses. All 4 failed for the same reason: no one knew who he was. No audience meant no customers, no leverage, no second chances. So he made it his mission to understand how audience growth actually works.
He cracked short-form content at scale after years of building online businesses, and he built the research system he wished he’d had from the start. Now he has over a billion views, a 50% viral hit rate, and he built a tool to help other creators do the same. This episode is the full system.
In this episode, we talk about:
Content minutes — the framework for mapping how much trust your audience needs before they’ll buy at each price point on your offer ladder
The modern content stack: why short-form and long-form both need to funnel into email, and why that’s the golden goose
The 3 metrics that actually matter for content creators — ranked in order of importance, with views coming in third
A live walkthrough of Sandcastles: channel watchlists, outlier score, deep video analysis, and how to use the MCP to run research through Claude
By the end of this episode, you will have a clear research system for finding validated, high-trust video topics — and a framework for staying creative while using data to de-risk almost everything else.
Book a free discovery call with 1of10 StrategyTry Sandcastles for free
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Intro to Kallaway
(01:03) Introducing “content minutes”
(02:12) The modern content stack
(03:45) Why you want a narrow ICP
(05:40) The 3 metrics that matter
(14:38) Sandcastles demo: building a channel watchlist from scratch
(16:14) Why you study mid-size creators, not mega-famous ones
(22:18) Deep video analysis: hook formula, storytelling structure, contrarian angle
(24:59) Kallaway’s research flow
(30:47) Solving structure and scripting problems using your own channel’s data
(36:34) Data-enabled creativity: the thesis behind the whole system
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#303: Riley Brown — The AI Content Creator Who Doesn’t Write With AI
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
CONNECT
🐦 Connect on Twitter
📸 Connect on Instagram
💼 Connect on LinkedIn
📹 Subscribe on YouTube
***
SPONSORS
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#254: Caleb Ralston – Meet the Secret Strategist Behind Alex Hormozi and GaryVee [Greatest Hits]
Saison 1
mardi 25 août 2026 • Durée 01:14:26
Caleb Ralston is a strategist and brand builder for some of the biggest names in business. His breakthrough was back in 2018 when he grew GaryVee’s TikTok from 300k to 3.5 million followers in just 3 months. In 2022 he joined Alex and Leila Hormozi’s team as content employee #1, where he grew their audience from 1.2 million to 11.5 million. Caleb just doesn’t miss – and now that he’s out on his own, he’s here to help YOU.
In this episode, you'll learn the content strategy he used, how to improve your content, and where to start if you're feeling overwhelmed.
Full transcript and show notes
Caleb's Website / Twitter / LinkedIn / YouTube / Instagram
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) The Secret Man Behind GaryVee and the Hormozi’s
(01:11) How Often Do the Top 1% Post?
(03:31) The Brand Journey Framework
(05:18) Being Intentional With Your Content
(08:51) Is It Possible to NOT Niche Down?
(13:55) Say the Same Things in Different Ways
(18:07) Tracking and Analyzing Data
(22:36) Maintaining Quality While Increasing Quantity
(24:27) What it Actually Takes to Perform like the 1%
(27:21) Where to Start
(30:22) Building a Personalized Team
(34:54) Agency vs Full Time vs Contractor
(41:58) Developing a Content Strategy
(45:15) Width Content vs Depth Content
(46:55) Scaling Trust Using Educational Content
(50:02) Best Call to Action Strategy
(52:10) Email and Web Traffic Strategy
(55:27) How Caleb is Going About Hiring His Own Team
(58:53) The Correct Way to Give Feedback to Your Team
(1:03:17) How to Take Inspiration from Others
(1:04:55) Which Platform Has the Biggest Opportunity
(1:06:57) Audio Content Strategy
(1:08:47) Why You Need to Collaborate with Others
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
→ #175: Angus Parker – Ali Abdaal’s right-hand man shares a YouTuber’s guide to hiring.
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
→ Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU'RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
CONNECT
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📸 Connect on Instagram
💼 Connect on LinkedIn
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***
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💼 View all sponsors and offers
***
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💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify
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#315: Breaking Down Our $101,666 Launch: The Mechanics And Lessons Learned From Our Virtual Summit
Saison 1 · Épisode 315
mardi 18 août 2026 • Durée 59:11
Our first-ever 6-figure launch started with a cold email I didn’t respond to. Twice. The third time, I wrote back. A few months later, we ran a 3-day free virtual summit that drove $101,666 in revenue — with a $78,400 margin. This is the full breakdown of how it happened, what we’d do the same way again, and what we’d change.
Joining me for this behind-the-scenes recap is Anna Reich, the integrator here on the Creator Science team. This was Anna’s first launch — 3 and a half months into the job — and she was right in the middle of all of it. We ran this summit in partnership with a third-party team called After Harvest, who pitched us on the whole concept via cold email and worked on a 15% performance-based fee.
In this episode, we talk about:
The full mechanics: $101,666 in revenue, $23,300 in costs, and the exact offer stack that got us there
What we’d absolutely do the same — the VIP ticket, aggressive email volume, and the live pitch with a day-2 bonus
What we’d do differently — a simpler structure, a new webinar platform, and building the presentations before everything else
The 80/20 version: what a stripped-down, repeatable launch playbook actually looks like
By the end of this episode, you will have a clear-eyed view of how a virtual summit launch actually works from the inside — with all the numbers, the chaos, and the lessons on the table.
Work with Sean and the After Harvest team
Build a Beloved Membership — 50% off the self-paced version
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Introduction: the first-ever 6-figure launch and what this episode covers
(03:44) Registration and attendance numbers: 3,145 registered, 1,000+ live on day 1
(04:34) Revenue breakdown: $63K cohort, $9K upsell, $17K downsell, $11K VIP tickets
(08:29) Cost breakdown: After Harvest’s 15% deal, $1,800 in affiliates, $7,800 domain
(10:01) Timeline: cold email in February to contract in April to summit in June
(13:56) Things we’d do the same: VIP ticket, compelling web work, full offer stack
(16:12) Why the $47 VIP ticket was the biggest surprise of the whole launch
(20:54) The live day-2 pitch — 30 minutes, almost no drop-off, and why the bonus mattered
(24:30) Things we’d do differently: simpler structure, drop WebinarJam, build launch capability in-house
(36:24) The core mistake: building all the assets before locking the presentation content
(42:10) The 80/20 version: what to lock in before you open registration
(52:28) Skipping affiliates for high-ticket offers, and why one-click opt-ins backfired
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#144: Bari Baumgardner – How to create the perfect 3-day event (IRL or virtually)#191: Breaking down my $60,723 product launch
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
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#296: Meet The Man Who Solved YouTube (With Data)—Richard from 1of10 [Greatest Hits]
Saison 1
mardi 11 août 2026 • Durée 51:55
Richard is the co-founder of 1of10, a research platform built by YouTube strategists, and his team has quietly been behind the scenes for some of the biggest channels on the platform—helping creators accumulate over 2 billion views through a repeatable, data-backed system.
In this episode, Richard walks through his complete four-phase ideation system—audience identification, outlier research (using five distinct methods), idea remixing, and validation—and backs every step with real examples. We talk about what happens when the wrong audience floods your channel, why creators should double and triple down on formats that work, and how a single title change took one creator's video from 10,000 views to 150,000. He also shares data from 300,000+ YouTube outliers on the ideal title length (hint: shorter than you think) and where the sweet spots are for video duration across different niches.
Save 20% on 1of10 using code JAY20
Schedule a 1of10 Strategy Call
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(01:12) Where 80-85% of YouTube success comes from
(01:50) Phase 1: Audience
(03:19) When should you start a fresh channel instead of pivoting?
(04:09) The danger of going viral with the wrong audience
(05:40) Phase 2: Research
(07:37) Format vs. Interest Topic
(08:00) Method 1: Inside your own channel
(10:52) Tripling and quadrupling down
(12:33) Method 2: Inside your niche
(13:45) Method 3: Adjacent niches
(16:00) Method 4: Outside your niche
(17:37) The "Japanese Rule" format
(20:56) Method 5: External inspiration
(22:07) Phase 3: Remixing
(23:00) Escalation, inversion, and interest topic replacement
(24:10) Viral vectors: concepts that work across all niches
(25:28) Phase 4: Validation
(27:00) Optimal video duration by niche
(30:45) Why long videos are making a comeback
(31:39) Total Addressable Viewership
(34:36) Titles: Fear, Curiosity, and Desire as the three core drivers
(37:17) Data: Title Length
(37:51) Three methods for generating title angles
(42:11) Thumbnails: Composition and Elements
(45:11) It's never too late: title/thumbnail changes
(46:10) Live demo: 1of10 thumbnail generator
(48:10) The full 1of10 workflow
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
→ #282: David Altizer — How to Make Great Thumbnails (For Non-Designers)
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU'RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
CONNECT
🐦 Connect on Twitter
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💼 Connect on LinkedIn
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#314: Getting Unstuck: The Three Hidden Roadblocks Blocking Your Progress with Cat Mulvihill
Saison 1 · Épisode 314
mardi 4 août 2026 • Durée 45:42
Most productivity advice operates in one of two categories: you’re missing a skill or system, or you have a mindset problem. Cat Mulvihill thinks both camps are right — and both are incomplete. There’s a third category that almost nobody is talking about, and she argues it’s the one most likely to be the actual culprit when you’re stuck.
My guest this week is Cat Mulvihill, a speaker, trainer, accountability coach, and licensed Immunity to Change facilitator who has been leading workshops for more than 20 years. After being formally diagnosed with ADHD in 2024, she developed the Momentum Formula — a framework separating the reasons we fail to follow through into three distinct categories: logical, biological, and psychological. Cat is a longtime Lab member and led the second-highest-rated session at this year’s Lab Offline event in Boise.
In this episode, we talk about:
The three roadblocks to follow-through — and why the biological one is the category almost everyone overlooks
How to diagnose which roadblock is actually keeping you stuck, and why the order you check them matters
The “dreaded identity” — the hidden, subconscious version of yourself you’re afraid of becoming — and how it quietly kills follow-through
Why knowing your tendency from Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework changes which accountability strategies actually work for you
By the end of this episode, you will have a concrete diagnostic framework for understanding why you’re not doing the things you know you should be doing — and what to try first.
Cat Mulvihill — website and upcoming workshops
The Four Tendencies quiz by Gretchen Rubin
Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey
LinkedIn bookmarked search overview
LinkedIn
Instagram — @catmulvihill
X — @catmulvihill
The Momentum Experiment Podcast
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) “Are people going to think I’m a sellout?” — the dreaded identity, cold open
(00:19) Introducing Cat: the Momentum Formula and why the biological roadblock gets missed
(01:59) The 3 roadblocks — logical, biological, psychological — and where brain chemistry fits in
(04:29) Diagnosing which roadblock you’re facing: why Jay thinks his problems are “just chemicals”
(08:04) How to check the roadblocks in order — and the patterns that signal it’s not logical
(10:55) A real Lab member example: when great systems still don’t get used
(14:40) The Four Tendencies (Gretchen Rubin): upholders, questioners, obligers, rebels
(19:25) The “dreaded identity” — the hidden psychological block most creators can’t see
(21:14) Working through all 3 roadblocks with a LinkedIn example
(25:44) Energy management and the biological roots: dopamine, blood sugar, sleep, environment matching
(32:17) How to work with obliger tendencies instead of against them
(36:18) The Immunity to Change framework and next steps for going deeper
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#171: Nir Eyal – Writing books, persuasion vs. coercion, and how to be indistractable
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
CONNECT
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#313: How Tom Ross Doubled His Community Engagement and Retention With Training Pathways
Saison 1 · Épisode 313
mardi 28 juillet 2026 • Durée 56:51
Closing the doors to a membership is supposed to hurt signups. But one of Tom's clients did exactly that — closed it, added an application, doubled the price, then reopened. His next launch sold out in 4 minutes. Same community. Same people. Just different mechanics.
My guest this week is Tom Ross, the founder of Learn.Community, where he helps community builders design learning experiences that actually stick. His clients have reached millions of people and generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Tom has been building online communities for 20 years, and he's been a member of The Lab since 2022.
In this episode, we talk about:
Why an application process might be the most underused retention lever in the membership world
The “bacon medicine” framework for making your membership both sellable and sticky long-term
Tom’s “delight, direct, connect” onboarding philosophy — and what almost every community gets wrong
How he rebuilt his course into learning pathways, drove completion from 20% to 50%, and turned a siloed module into the main engine of community engagement
By the end of this episode, you will understand exactly why most membership churn is decided before someone joins, and what to actually do about it.
Learn.Community
Tom's Community Compass Framework
Tom's YouTube Channel
The Lab
Full transcript and show notes
***
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) “People inherently don’t know what they don’t know”
(00:29) Tom's background: 20 years building communities, what we're covering
(04:06) Most retention problems start before someone joins — the targeting failure
(07:51) Application process as the biggest membership lever — and how to handle rejections kindly
(10:09) Closing doors creates demand: one client’s launch sold out in 4 minutes
(14:43) The “bacon medicine” approach to membership positioning
(24:28) Tom’s “delight, direct, connect” onboarding framework
(29:01) Responsive vs. linear onboarding — why static sequences break
(33:01) Learning pathways: reinventing the traditional course
(36:47) AI agents, deep worksheets, and vibe-coded SaaS tools inside the pathways
(40:02) Turning off course comments and routing engagement back into the community
(50:49) Real results: completion up from 20% to 50%, churn down, engagement way up
***
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#260: Detailed Breakdown: Our First Offline Event (And What We’ll Do Differently Next Time)
***
ASK CREATOR SCIENCE
Submit your question here
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
📬 Creator Science Newsletter
🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)
🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)
🧞♂️ Get a Personalized Offer
***
CONNECT
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#312: Everything We Learned From Our Second In-Person Event — The Good, The Bad, and The Full Economics
Saison 1 · Épisode 312
mardi 21 juillet 2026 • Durée 01:01:26
This week, my wife Mallory joins me for only her second podcast appearance ever to break down everything from The Lab Offline Powered by Circle — our second annual 2-day in-person retreat for Lab members, hosted June 8–9 at Hotel Renegade in Boise, Idaho. Mallory planned essentially everything: seating charts, venue contracts, menus, swag, run of show. She's been at it for roughly 6 months.
In this episode, we talk about:
The full economics of running a community retreat (we lost $8,300, which is actually an improvement)
How we took breakfast from a 4.8 to an 8.1 rating — and what we'd cut to reduce costs next year
What ranked #1 for attendees 2 years running, and why trivia (our favorite activity) came in 7th
Whether we'll keep doing this in Boise — and what Columbus, Toronto, and doing 2 events per year might look like
By the end of this episode, you will have a clear picture of what it actually costs to run a high-quality community event, what's worth paying for, and what we'd do differently.
Circle (event sponsor)
Hotel Renegade Boise
Craft and Commerce Conference
The Lab
Full transcript and show notes
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TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Cold open: people were moved, tears were shed
(00:53) The Lab Offline explained: 2-day member retreat, goals, and agenda
(06:44) Initial impressions: a reunion feeling, smoother logistics, zero fires
(13:08) Attendee feedback numbers: 9.3/10 overall, 91% returning, 34% said underpriced
(18:46) Event economics: $30,459 revenue, $38,800 costs, $8,300 loss
(23:05) Top cost drivers: hotel catering, travel, venue rental, dinners
(26:52) Planning challenges: acoustics, dietary restrictions, every decision is a trade-off
(36:52) What to keep: assigned seating, Kat's Immunity to Change workshop, Fighting Off the Sleepies
(42:04) What to improve: more mastermind sessions, less solo writing, better acoustics
(47:49) Open question: should the event stay paired with Craft and Commerce?
(53:49) The case for Columbus, 2 events per year, and an international option
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RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE
#260: Detailed Breakdown: Our First Offline Event (And What We’ll Do Differently Next Time)
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