How to use transparency as your community strategy to get 100s of paying members in months

John Faulkner-Willcocks built a 250+ member paid community in just 4 months with an astonishing 1.5% churn rate.

His inspirations? On Deck and World of Warcraft (yes the video game).

He's the cofounder of Open Org, a paid community for progressive People & Culture leaders who believe in the radical new idea of leaning into transparency as a way of building companies.

We spent an hour diving deep into his "transparency playbook" for building highly engaged communities, including:

- How they get 3-5 high quality responses within hours for every question
- Why he prefers a monthly pricing model over an annual one
- Giving personalized onboarding quests to new members
- Why they chose Slack over other community platforms
- Running community hackathons
- Lessons from World of Warcraft

If you enjoyed this episode, you should sign up for Beginner Maps to get the "magic sauce" of top creators like Carrie - https://beginnermaps.com/

Resources:

• Curated Connections, the automated matchmaking tool - https://curatedconnections.io/
• Open Org community - https://www.openorg.fyi/community
• John's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfw/
• Nityesh's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nityeshaga/

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
03:46 John's Productivity Hacks
10:04 Who's in OpenOrg
12:11 Competing with free HR communities
19:16 Onboarding new members
21:16 Building a mini database of members
24:21 First 100 customers
27:23 Embracing Transparency with pricing model
32:04 Member Selection
36:21 Secret sauce: Personalized Quests
41:18 Why Slack wins as the Community Platform
44:55 Building an extremely engaged community
50:08 Community hackathons
55:35 Lessons from On Deck
57:46 Lessons from World of Warcraft
01:01:29 Final piece of advice