How Jay Clouse Built a $500,000 ARR Community (in Less than 2 Years)

September 21, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

How Jay Clouse Built a $500,000 ARR Community (in Less than 2 Years)

The Membership Model

Jay Clouse runs Creator Science, a business that studies top creators and translates their strategies to people on the cusp of breaking through. His flagship product is "The Lab," a paid membership community that generates roughly $500,000 in annual recurring revenue. He launched it in March 2022.

The Lab is capped at 200 members. Clouse set that limit deliberately: "That just felt like based on the experience that I designed what I could sustain myself without bringing in like a community manager or kind of change the expectation of what the community looked like." He offers two tiers — standard at $1,999 per year (community access plus all courses) and VIP at $2,999 (adds quarterly one-on-one calls). After hitting the cap, he opened a lower-priced tier for educational materials only, without community access.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Opening & Maven Accelerator** - Jay and Greg reconnect and discuss their shared experience in the Maven cohort-based course accelerator.
2 (05:30) **Jay's Creator Business & The Lab** - Jay defines his role as a meta-creator and introduces his flagship product, the Lab membership community.
3 (10:44) **Defining a Membership Community** - Jay clarifies the difference between a membership community and a course.
4 (12:27) **The Lab's Business Model & Design Choices** - Jay breaks down the pricing, cap, and revenue of his flagship community.
5 (17:49) **Top of Funnel Strategy: Discovery vs. Relationship Platforms** - Jay explains his approach to attracting new audience members.
6 (22:45) **The Power of Viral Hits** - Jay and Greg discuss how a single viral post can transform a creator's business.
7 (24:35) **YouTube Strategy: Guest Selection & Packaging** - Jay explains how he decides which podcast episodes become video for YouTube.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Today Greg is joined by Jay Clouse of Creator Science. In this episode, Greg and Jay talk about the upsides of cohort-based courses and what strategies Jay uses to achieve his 95% retention rate.

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LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Production Team:
https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.com
Jay Clouse
https://twitter.com/jayclouse
https://creatorscience.com/

SHOW NOTES
0:00 - Intro
5:40 - How Jay studies top creators
12:10 - Courses vs. Membership Community
19:30 - How Jay attracts audiences
24:20 - The secret dividends of viral posts
30:40 - Being a distributor vs. being an artist
43:30 - Why retention is the golden metric