Private Opening, Public Launch
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Jay Clouse's preferred way to start a paid community without the pressure of getting everything right on day one. Instead of a big public launch with a detailed sales page, you drip breadcrumbs into content you already publish and invite a small group of people who already trust you to join site unseen, usually with an incentive. Because there is no public promise attached, you can freely experiment with programming, formats and cadence while real members are inside. Once those members have had good experiences, their off-the-cuff stories become the raw material for the first public sales page. The public launch then sells a proven promise backed by testimonials rather than an untested feature list.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Drip breadcrumbs into existing content
Mention the thing you are building inside the newsletter, podcast or videos you already publish, without a formal announcement. This reaches only people who already follow and trust you.
Pro tip Name the product early so the name gets familiar before anyone can buy it.
- 2
Invite the first members site unseen
Ask people to reply to an email, send a DM or click a link to become one of the first members before any sales page exists. Attach an incentive for going first.
Pro tip Keep the ask personal and low-friction: a reply or a DM converts trust better than a checkout funnel.
- 3
Make no public promise yet
Because you are only calling out to people who already trust you, you do not have to commit publicly to a specific delivery mechanism, schedule or feature list.
Watch out Anything you do state publicly at this stage becomes a commitment you will feel obliged to honour later, even if nobody would notice you dropping it.
- 4
Over-invest in the first experience
Design what happens immediately after someone joins so that it feels magical. A great first experience buys you months of goodwill while you figure the rest out.
Pro tip A surprise one-to-one call or personal welcome at the moment of peak excitement is the highest-leverage thing you can do.
- 5
Experiment with the delivery in the open
Run the sessions, events and spaces you think will work, drop the ones nobody attends, and increase the ones people love. These members expect experimentation.
Pro tip Tell members explicitly that this is an experimental phase so changes read as progress, not as broken promises.
- 6
Harvest off-the-cuff success stories
Ask happy members for unscripted video testimonials that complete a sentence like 'before this I... and now I...'. Collect specific outcomes, not general praise.
Pro tip Coach people not to write a script; the unpolished delivery is what makes it feel honest.
Watch out Scripted, read-aloud testimonials can be counterproductive because viewers sense the performance.
- 7
Build the public sales page from promise plus stories
For the public launch, the page is a compelling promise backed by member stories with specific outcomes from people the reader can identify with. Keep the delivery description general.
Pro tip Lead with video testimonials if video is already your strength.
In the wild
Jay opened the doors to his membership in March 2022 under a different name, the creative companion club, before the business itself was branded Creator Science. The community was later renamed the lab to match the science motif because it is a place where members experiment together. Roughly two years in, the 200-person capped membership does about half a million dollars in revenue per year, and its sales page is dominated by member testimonials, many of them video.
→ A capped 200-person membership doing around $500k per year, sold largely on member stories.
Before any sales page existed, Ali had been running a free-for-all alpha of the productivity lab for a few weeks, facilitating a weekly review every Sunday and hosting occasional Zoom co-working sessions. Nothing had been promised publicly, so the format could be changed at will, and he was finding that hosting the sessions made him do his own weekly review and make progress on his own work.
→ A live testing ground for formats with zero public commitments to unwind later.
Common mistakes
Launching publicly before testing delivery
A full public launch locks you into the programming you guessed at before a single member has experienced it. The private opening exists precisely so you can be wrong cheaply.
Waiting for a big audience
Jay argues you only need five, ideally ten, people to start. Waiting until you can fill a launch means never running the private opening at all.
Treating founding members as beta testers to be ignored
The first members are the source of your public launch testimonials. If their experience is mediocre, you have no stories and no proof.
From the transcript
“can I tell you about one of my favorite strategies for putting this out into the world that even gives you some more cover so…”
“then you don't have to make any type of public promise because it's only calling out to the people who really inherently trust you already”
“the better the initial experience somebody has after they swipe their credit card the more coverage you have to kind of figure out and make…”
From the episode
How To Build An Online Community - Jay Clouse
Jay Clouse