Thrive's Biggest Week To Date

This was Thrive’s biggest week to date.?

Our membership grew more than any other week since we started.?

I received so many thoughtful messages about becoming an ambassador yesterday.?

And my team just felt locked in.?

Not every week goes this way, but when they do, it feels fucking awesome.?

The Good

Last week, I started deep-diving all of our performance data, including:

• Who our most active members were, and what stage of entrepreneurship they were at
• What channels have been converting higher than others?
• What types of posts have been performing highest within those channels?

I’ve never really been someone to use data to guide my decisions (sorry, Michael), but doing this was really worthwhile.?

I’ve heard Sam Jacobs say before that if you don’t have data, you don’t have anything.?

I think I agree after going through this exercise.?

Here’s some interesting things I learned:

First: almost all of our most engaged members are within their first 2 years of entrepreneurship.

That’s not the case for everyone, but for the vast majority.?

I started asking folks to describe what building a business in their first year was like, and most people used words like “alone” or “isolation.”?

That resonated with me—and I only built solo for three months.?

But yeah, I felt isolated literally everyday lol.?

Second: We have a 95% conversion rate to someone becoming a member if I had a real conversation with them.?

Communities are designed around relationships, so while this should have been obvious, it wasn’t to me.?

We pivoted all of our outreach to building relationships with people who are in their first year of entrepreneurship, and I started having real conversations rather than just sending them the info on our community in hopes that they’ll join.?

Should have known from my last job that telling your story is what wins business.?

Third: I knew how good of a channel LinkedIn was for us, but we really doubled down on it this week.

I’ve been rather inconsistent with the type of content and frequency in which I post.?

It was suggested to me that letting people understand my own story, and putting my own face out there more on social media would be good for the brand.?

Communities aren’t a lifeless entity—by nature of what they are, someone’s running it.

I realized that for me, posts with a photo outperform posts without by a whopping 300%.

Absolutely wild to me.?

I started finding photos that mean something to me, and designing the post around that.

I’ve found it to be easier to ideate, more fun to post, and something I actually enjoy doing.?

LinkedIn is something I am going to continue to take seriously: it’s been a game changer for us.

The Bad

I’ve been quite focused on selling the value of Thrive, but haven’t put as much energy into the customer experience as I need to.?

Christian on our team is excellent at this, but like anyone, he needs me to support him in the right way.?

Here’s what went wrong:?

First, since we added a lot more people than normal this week, something became very clear to both of us: we suck at onboarding.?

Not that we don’t have the talent to do it, just that we’re literally not doing it.?

We had a lot of questions come through this week.

“How can I check the status of my membership—I can’t find that on the platform?”

“Which discussion circle does this type of content belong in”

“What do I search to download the app”

“Am I allowed to put Thrive on my LinkedIn”

“Where are all the recordings for previous meetups”

“How can I request a 1:1 with the Thrive team?”

It was a bit overwhelming—and made me realize how much of a learning gap we have.?

The first 72 hours of someone’s community experience essentially help them decide if they’ll stay or not, so it’s not an option for us to be bad at it.?

This coming week, we’ll implement an onboarding call that Christian will do with all new members to ensure they know how to get the most out of Thrive’s community experience.?

Second: we just had a lot of silly, stupid mistakes add up on us.?

Sam discovered that our second most visited page was an error page on our website because one of the buttons was incorrectly linked.?

A member literally told me that a couple of weeks ago and I just forgot, but still annoying nonetheless.?

We launched a merch website that looked normal on our end, but for some reason didn’t load all the items correctly, and of course, we sent it to a good amount of people.?

Things like this obviously aren’t the end of the world, it can just be frustrating when you add up all of them.?

It’s a great reminder for me to pay more attention to the small details, and to take my own advice—do the hard things first.?

Next Week

We’ve got two kick-ass meetups planned next week.?

Zoya Lehrer is running one on Monday and sharing what she’s learned while bootstrapping her own business the last 10 months.?

Christian Allen is running one on Friday and sharing why he left his old career to become employee #2 in a startup.?

Both are really applicable to our theme this month: helping folks to discover and share their why.

I’m going to continue optimizing our growth strategy by using data.?

No big pivots next week, just building on what’s working well.?

But we’ll cross 200 members.

The biggest focus for us is making sure we tighten up the customer experience.?

The onboarding call will help a lot, but I know there’s a ton more for us to do and learn.?

I’m hopeful we’ll see a positive impact in doing so.

This week was insanely fun—and I’m grateful for what my team achieved and learned.?

We’ve got our foot on the gas, and are doing everything we can to build a community that genuinely helps bootstrapped entrepreneurs beat the odds.?

We’re going to grow this community to 1,000 members by July 1st, and prove that the global economy lives and dies on the success of bootstrapped businesses.?

Thank you to the people in our corner—we’re just getting started.

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