SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
YEC Lands Forbes Partnership, 1000's of Paying Members Early EP 232
12 Apr 2016
Chapter 1: What inspired Ryan Paugh to get into community building?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 2: How does Ryan drive revenue for his community initiatives?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Rich Jones. Okay, Rich Jones, he is stuck in corporate. He wants to break free.
Chapter 3: What is the cost to join the Founders Society?
He's binging on the show. For your chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning, simply subscribe to the podcast right now on iTunes and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Coming up tomorrow morning, Top Tribe, you're going to hear from Robert Moore. He hustled in his attic for five years before hitting a million dollars in revenue.
Now he's doing well over $4.8 million annually with his company, RJ Metrics.
Chapter 4: How many members are currently part of the Forbes Partnership?
Okay, Top Drive, good morning. Our guest today is Ryan Paw, and he's been at the forefront of building highly curated technology-enabled communities for ambitious professionals. He first co-founded Brazen Careerist, a career management site for high-achieving young professionals and ambitious college students, where he led the company's community development efforts.
Brazen Careerist was recognized as one of the top social networks for Gen Y entrepreneurs by Mashable. He's now at YEC.
Chapter 5: What role does technology play in building communities?
He's going to tell us the story. Ryan, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. Awesome.
Chapter 6: How does Ryan's team enhance member experience?
Awesome. Well, first off, thanks for coming on. I know you had six kids a week or two ago when we first had scheduled. So I'm glad you came on and tell us real quick right now. What are you focused on as a brazen careerist or YEC?
Chapter 7: What are the membership fees for Founders Society and Forbes Councils?
Ryan, we can't hear you. Are you there?
I'm here now. You went dark for a minute.
Okay, I'm going to re-ask the question so Sam, our editor, can edit it out.
Chapter 8: How does Forbes benefit from partnering with Ryan's communities?
So Ryan, what's your main focus right now? Is it Brazen Careerist or YEC?
It's YEC and CommunityCo, which is our portfolio company for all the communities that we're building, just like YEC.
So is CommunityCo like a piece of software technology that can kind of power any community?
No, Community Co. is more of a collection of ideas and philosophies and yeah, some technology baked in as well. But what we do is take everything that we've learned through building YEC about helping people Build social capital and use it to their advantage as an entrepreneur and apply it to other areas. Business owners being just one of those verticals.
It could be people within a Fortune 500 company. It could be a solopreneur. It could be a CEO or an entry-level type individual. We want to... to take advantage and leverage social capital and understand and benefit them in their career.
So we had Scott Gerber on, obviously one of your founders of YEC back in episode 37, where he broke down how you guys grew to a 1600 member organization with a 90% plus annual retention rate. So we've got that story down. That's amazing retention rate for a membership site. For you specifically, what are you focused on while Scott's doing the other half?
Scott's our biz dev guy. He's the one who is out pounding the pavement, being able to share our ideas with people that we'd like to partner with, like Forbes, who we just started working with and are building a dozen professional communities for in 2016. Does Forbes pay you for that, by the way, or is that just your goodwill? Indeed, it's a joint venture, not just goodwill.
We're nice guys, but we're not that nice. Not a charity, right? Right, right. Yeah, so I'm the COO. My job is more behind the scenes. We've got a great team here, 50 plus people in Boston and then around the country, helping us build community and helping us make sure that the experience that our members have from...
The first time that they hear about one of our networks and get on the phone to hear about the story to the moment that they become a member and the lifetime of their membership with us is just remarkable. And what that really entails is a combination of having really great technology that allows us to know ourselves.
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