Job-based community

Nurse Life RN: 1.2M nurses, equity in Bala Shoes

Shaan profiles Nurse Life RN, a 1.2M-follower nurse meme account that gates membership by verifying you're a nurse. The owner took equity in Bala Shoes (the 'Nike for nurses') as its promotional vehicle, and could spin the audience into a job board or the next Incredible Health.

“But he partnered with the makers of Bala Shoes, which is the nurse shoe brand that's coming out that's trying to be Nike for nurses basically. It's Nike for medical footwear. And so he got equity in that company and gets paid every month because he is the promotional vehicle for Bala Shoes who wants to like penetrate this community, right?”

Niche paid communities: nurses, Google Sheets, senior engineers

Sam pitches paid communities around demographics with money on the line. Notes that the highest-revenue online courses are Excel/Sheets masterclasses, and a vetted senior-engineer group sharing how to scale a stack from 100K to 10M users works because that knowledge can't be Googled.

“And then the last thing is this, someone tweeted at me, a community of vetted senior engineers who talk about advanced engineering concepts, like how to scale a tech stack from 100K to 10 million users. Totally buy into that. Something like that, that is incredibly niche and incredibly high-end, where it— there's a— there's this other component that we didn't talk about with the community is you have to make it so that information that you gather in that group you cannot find online.”

Steal thisBuild a gated community around knowledge so rare or embarrassing that members can't Google it elsewhere.

Every job needs a community, especially new and fringe ones

Shaan argues any profession can sustain a paid community, and the newer or more fringe the job, the more it's needed. He cites David Spinks building 'the community for community managers' (underpaid, underappreciated, no playbook) and later selling it.

“And the more new and fringe your job, the more they— the more the community is needed. So like, I know that our friend David Spinks did this with Community.”

Steal thisTarget a newly-emerging job title with no playbook and no C-level champion, then build the network for it.