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I shut my membership down last year at this time. What's emerged from its shell has been way more interesting than anything I would have purposely created.
Why is this? I find myself wondering, as I build my current membership.
There's some magic in letting go of something you were holding too tightly but there's also some fascinating human behavior factors that I've been observing and want to share with you here.
Before we talk about what's happening now, let's talk about what Growthtrackers was.
Why I started Growthtrackers
Growthtrackers was born out of a gap I saw in the creative service provider market where a lot of cool, smart people were banging their heads against the wall using marketing strategies that were never gonna pay off. Having experienced this myself as a solopreneur, I craved a community I could turn to to workshop my marketing experiments.
Anyone who's ever been an entrepreneur knows that the game is half knowing what you're doing and half believing that you know what you're doing. Growthtrackers solved for both sides.
Why was I the person to solve this? I used to lead experiment-driven growth projects at companies like Gusto, Nissan, Macy's, The Black Tux and Burner. I worked for an agency Eric Ries co-founded with Ian McFarland and Joi Ito where we taught market experimentation at big Silicon Valley companies—what we used to call lean startup in the enterprise. Between that and my several years in actual startups, I've seen what it looks like to waste time and money on bad go-to-market and grow-in-market ideas. Towards the end of my career in tech, I was a sought after growth expert to bring in for solving revenue, conversion and churn problems. And I did it quite well until working in tech made me lose all hope in humanity and I had to quit the industry altogether.
Post-tech, I dabbled in web design and online marketing services and eventually landed on the idea that I should do this membership where online business owners could have our own marketing braintrust.
What Growthtrackers was
Growthtrackers was all about building channels for client acquisition by trying different ones to see which suited you best. I hosted weekly sessions where members would share what marketing tests they were running. I taught different marketing techniques like guesting on podcasts, creating a referral program or building partnerships, with the help of many guest experts.
I had around 50 companies participate in the program, largely solopreneurs and a few boutique agencies. The membership cost $499/month in its final stages. Most of my members stayed for many months at a time, some for over a year. Some paused and came back. We had very good retention which is the only reason why I was able to make it my full time job for two years.
But towards the end of that second year I started to get really overwhelmed.
I brought on a Community Manager named Linda Vinod who was a true community innovator and such a pleasure to work with. We tried several of our own experiments, mostly geared towards getting results for members and enticing members to participate more. I also spent a lot of time refining the sales funnel.
All ventures have these moments where you have to decide if you want to keep solving the problems in front of you or if it's time to hang up your hat. I really believe that any venture can work if you keep working at the Rubik's Cube. But sometimes you just feel like you've tried every configuration you possibly can think of and it's time to set it down for a while. That's how I felt about Growthtrackers in April 2024.
So I made an ill-advised play to see if the Growthtrackers would want to take over running it themselves. Basically exploring some type of community ownership model (which, hilariously, is what we have now, but I probably framed it wrong then). They said no thanks Lex and we shut it down in June 2024.
What's happened since we shut Growthtrackers down
I ran Growthtrackers on the Mighty Networks platform, which I cannot advise you enough NOT TO DO. Mighty is expensive, and I hated it towards the end, so we chose to move to Slack which has a free tier. I moved all our materials into a sloppy Notion archive I haven't looked at since.
Members told me they weren't sure they were going to use Slack and I admit I did expect it to die off pretty quickly after the membership closed. But it's become way more active than our membership platform ever was.
Right now, there's 18 Growthtrackers alumni and 64 of our friends.
Since it's grown so much beyond it's original purpose, it was recently renamed to GrowthSlackers by a community vote led by Devin Lee.
What's new and different about GrowthSlackers
- Members can invite friends and they do. Since the community is free and invite-only, members will bring in their frequent collaborators or people they think would get along with the group. But it's just the right amount of growth and we're all mindful of the group's size and vibe.
- Members launch their own initiatives. Devin Lee recently organized a local meetup in Portland. Jess Milanes hosted an online get together for members to share what they're working on. Matt Herron offered us a workshop on running paid Facebook ads.
- Members hire each other way more. I can't honestly remember how much this happened in the membership but I can tell you it's happening very frequently now. Yesterday, our #wins channel had two different members talking about hiring two other members for different projects. Collaboration within the Slack is high. I also see this on LinkedIn where members tag each other in podcasts, events and service offerings.
- Members start conversations. This was always super rare on Mighty Networks. Most of our conversations happened in live sessions. But now, members are chatting all day in the Slack. We're sending an average of around 100 messages every week day.
What else we're trying in GrowthSlackers
- Coworking: We recently started coworking together and we just signed up for Tandem which lets any member start a coworking session. It's early days for that, but so far, it's been a great way for members to both get work done and get to know each other better. (A bunch of us actually met in a different coworking community called Groove and we still cowork there together too but Groove is winding down soon.)
- Real life meetups: I'm also starting to think about an in person get together for us next year in Brazil or Mexico. This would really be a Legends gathering but a bunch of the GrowthSlackers are also Legends.
Why it's working so much better than the membership
🦾 Members feel more ownership over it. Not everyone feels this I'm sure, but plenty of members step up to offer something, change something or create something for us. Can this happen in a paid community? Totally, it can. Legends suggest things to me too but I think more of the GrowthSlackers know they only need each other's consent and permission, not mine. Community is about people having real relationships with each other, and I just think there is something important about that not always being a transaction.
⚖️ Better balance of wins and fails. It used to really bum me out when members would only show up for sessions during a downturn. This is one of the biggest things that felt grueling about Growthtrackers. It was like pulling teeth to get members to recognize their wins and what was working but we spent a lot of time on what wasn't working. Because GrowthSLACKERS has such a wide range of business owners, and because people don't leave when they're doing well—another funny pitfall of a paid membership—there's way more celebration of wins. This has changed the culture to feel more positive to me. When more people are sharing wins, it helps other members recognize what might be going right for them. The opposite is true as well and I keep a close watch on our #venting channel which I think is probably overused by us all.
⏰ Slack was already a habit for most of us. Slack is already part of our day for other communities or at least it was an installed app for most of us. Also, Slack's interaction design with threads and reactions is also 1000x better than Mighty's. It would be very hard to convince me any community platform that is not Slack and maybe Discord is worthwhile. I don't think Circle or Heartbeat are better because they have the same habit formation problem. Platforms already in your members daily habit > new platforms they have to adopt.
A few other things we got right in our Slack community
The culture of Growthtrackers was warm, welcoming, helpful and humble. Seeding this Slack with people who already understood that continued that culture. New people who are added are onboarded into that, either by whoever invited them or by witnessing it in conversations.
Specific to Slack, we have some much loved channels like:
- #coworking: Getting even more useful now that we have a video call tool. Members use this channel to let others know they want coworking buddies.
- #gems: Add a 💎 to any post and it gets featured here for other members to see which posts members are most loving at a glance. (We use a Slackbot called Reacji to do this)
- #has-anyone-tried-this: Members share early experiment ideas here and get input from others who have tried it before.
- #share-what-youre-working-on: For in progress projects and screenshots.
- #venting: I stole this from Tommy Geoco's Design Creator Slack. Members vent about stuff that's going wrong. Easily our most popular channel.
- #wins: To counteract the vents, members share what's going great and they celebrate each other.
We also have volunteer community moderators and community guidelines. I increasingly find these are important as I don't want to make gut decisions on anything. I want all members to have clarity on the community purpose, who should be invited and what kind of behavior is welcomed/not welcomed. Through other Slacks I've moderated in the past I've learned that I can't just expect the community to somehow manifest this, it requires some leadership and perspective early on, which I took the reins on, with a bunch of community input.
Lessons I'm taking with me into Legends
I've talked a lot about moving from membership mindset to subscription mindset. A few months after I closed Growthtrackers, I opened Legends.
Here's a few things I'm trying to prioritize now:
- Convening the community: I am increasingly providing ways for members to get to know each other. I see this as one of the most valuable things I can be doing. It's less about access to me and more about access to each other.
- Letting go of control: Admittedly super hard for me but I am working on making more space for other people to lead conversations. This is more relevant in the journalism community I facilitate with Liz Kelly Nelson and I often stop myself from chiming in first on a thread, even though I'm chronically online and really want to 😜
- Releasing the outcome: I had a moneyback guarantee on Growthtrackers and took member results very seriously. Part of my shift into subscriptions is that I don't want to be responsible for anyone's results. It's too hard in a membership context to control that. I can't push anyone else's business up the hill. I'm here to help and to provide resources and that's my role now.
- Throwing fun parties: The Sad Creator PowerPoint party was inspired by a conversation in the GrowthSlackers Slack. My live mixers started as a way to bring Growthtrackers together with my broader network. Out of everything I do, these events get the most love and that makes me want to do more of them. This is also why I'm starting to think about a real life get together or maybe even...an unconference 😱 Kind of like Yes and Yes Yes but way less clicky.
Legends is a totally different project than Growthtrackers but there's a lot from the spirit of Growthtrackers (and GrowthSlackers) that continues inside Legends.
I really love the way this is all running. Having a free, invite only community and a paid, low cost subscription is an ideal set up for me. It's easier for me to temper my execution and not feel the need to be so on top of every member's situation. At the price point I operate now, I feel way more freedom to play and less obligation to deliver. I still feel responsible to all my members—I'm not gonna disappear for months on end to a remote island. But I also know that the community has each other and that's the most valuable thing I can foster.
