Thrive's Reimagined Community Experience

Today marks exactly four months being full-time in Thrive.?

It’s been a journey so far, and one that I’m definitely grateful for.?

To be honest, I’m just as nervous as I was four months ago. I don’t think that feeling is ever going away.?

But I’m just as ready, and more confident in what we’re building toward than ever.?

We’ve spent a long time listening and genuinely understanding this business from the lens of the member.

I’m excited to share that last week, we launched the community experience that we’ve spent the last four months reimagining.?

This team is building a different type of business, and I’d bet on them 10/10 times.?

Thank you to the people who have been part of our story—we’re just getting started.

Why the experience needed reimagined

For seven months, the Thrive community was just a slack workspace.?

Don’t get me wrong, I love slack, but it didn’t work for us.?

And it certainly wasn’t moving us any closer to achieving the mission we’d started on.

For the first few months and a half after leaving my job, I sold whatever consulting work I needed to in order to keep the ship above water. We had a lot of success there, but we didn’t build this business to be a consulting firm. We built it to be a community.?

In November, we began analyzing everything about our existing community product.?

I talked to people within it nearly every day, researched other communities, read books: you name it, I was doing it.?

It was overwhelming, but necessary. Here’s what I learned:

1. Hosting through Slack, and for free, is too limiting: more often than not it can feel like a massive group chat rather than a place that creates meaningful conversation and provides real resources.

1. We need to be more consistent with our resources and communication: our events, series, and content work, but not when they're off schedule, and I knew I couldn’t do that alone.

1. The additional offerings need to feel less one-off: our mastermind, courses, and coaching opportunities feel more connected to myself than they do to Thrive.

And here are the actions we took as a result:

1. Thrive has transitioned from Slack to our own platform actually designed for hosting communities, where members will have their own unique login. Shortly, we’ll have a Thrive app available on the Apple and Google play stay where members can have a mobile experience.?

1. Thrive hired Christian Allen to be its Head of Community (beginning January 8th). His responsibilities include growing our community and providing the experience our members need to beat the odds.

1. We transitioned from a free community to a paid one. Membership is $10 / month and includes a 14 day free-trial.?

Making this shift was scary, but I knew it was absolutely the right choice for the business. I brought our consulting work down to just two clients and have been fully focused on building this business.?

What’s different about this experience

The short answer about what’s different: this experience will genuinely help bootstrappers beat the odds.?

I will admit that our Slack group simply wasn’t doing that.?

And that’s only partially on the limits of the platform, the rest of the accountability falls on me.?

The new platform includes three main features:

1. Discussion circles. We’ve simplified our discussion circles into conversations we actually think will move a business forward. This way, bootstrappers can share their questions and get immediate, actional feedback from people who know exactly what it’s like to be in their shoes.?

1. Accountability challenges. If you’re a member of Thrive, we are going to do what we can to hold you accountable to building a business that beats the odds. Each month, we’ll have challenges that our members can participate in that will push them to make meaningful changes to their business.?

1. Weekly meetup events. Every week, we host two meetup events, facilitated by credible entrepreneurs. That’s 16 hours of education every month that our members get access to: from people way smarter than me. Those topics range from everything like building awareness on a budget to pitches that actually sell. They’re the real deal.?

I'm a member of quite a few communities, and a challenge I always ran into was being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people within them.

Don't get me wrong, it was cool to know that there were that many like minded folks I had access to, but I found it really tough to know who the right ones for me to connect with actually were.

As we were re-designing Thrive's membership journey, tackling this was something I had a personal interest in.

In our new experience, we'll be able to make personal introductions to folks within the community who we think can add real value—and a different perspective—to your business.

It will take the guess-work out of finding your circle of entrepreneurs and make it easier to get real support at scale.

Before we went live, I called my old co-founder (from my first business) and asked him a simple question: “do you think this community could have given us the traction we needed to get our first business on track?”

He responded: “I think you and I would have seen different components of this to be specifically valuable and used it in our own ways. But yes, absolutely.”?

I knew we were ready to go—so we went live, and have grown every day since.?

Why I believe Thrive will beat the odds?

It’s not the product, and I may get some hate for saying that.?

The product is really good, and it will continue to get better over the coming months, but that is not the thing that will move us forward.?

It’s the team.?

This is the best team I have ever been on, and I’m fortunate to have been on some really good ones.?

Christian and Matt work harder than anyone I have ever met—these guys have the mentality you need being the first team members of a startup.?

Brian has the ability to connect us with people I could never get in the room with and start meaningful conversations.?

Roy understands small, local business owners because he is one—he always knows how our decisions will impact them.?

Bryson knows B2C better than anyone I know—he saves me countless hours of guess work and testing.?

Sam has a better understanding of how brands catch fire than some CMO’s that I know—he knows how to allow the audience to be part of our story in a way I just struggle to do myself.?

Michael makes our entire operation more efficient, and turns those opportunities into revenue. This guy should cost half a million dollars to employ—I mean it when I say he’s the smartest person I know.?

This team, these people, and what we’re building toward, is very special.?

I don’t know what challenges we’ll face in the next handful of months, but I know that they will come at us fast.?

And they will be tough to deal with.?

And through it all: I will bet on this team every day.?

The next five months

I brought my whole team together in January to plan out what the first six months of the year needed to look like.?

Six months may seem like a short amount of time, but a lot is going to happen between now and then.?

I’ll never understand how some startups can make three to five year goals straight out of the gate, lol.

I’ve always found that as long as you have the vision and mission, the short sprints are what you need people zeroed in on.?

Thankfully, we know ours.?

Thrive’s mission is to help bootstrappers beat the odds.

Our vision is to prove that the global economy lives and dies on the success of bootstrapped businesses.

And our six-month objective is to achieve product market fit among 1,000 paying members by July 1st, 2024.

We’re working on some additional tiers in the background, and should we be successful, will be ready to bring even more powerful resources to our community this summer.?

But for now, we’re laser focused on finding bootstrappers looking to grow their business, connecting them with folks who know exactly what it’s like to be in their shoes, and giving them the experience that helps them do what 90% of companies fall short of.

Building a profitable business—against all odds.?

I’ll keep you in the loop along the way. We’re just getting started.?