Hello and welcome to Community Case Studies. This is a look at how belonging is really built. I'm your host. My name is Seth Resler, and here's what we do on this show. We bring people on who are actually in the trenches. They're on the ground building communities, and we talk to them about what their experience has been like so that you can learn from them. I am very excited about my guest today. My guest is an expert in paid subscription models and is the publisher behind Revenue Rule Breaker, which features the lifestyle stories of solopreneurs. Revenue. Rule Breaker is backed by nearly 400 paid subscribers known as The Legends Network. So we're gonna talk about the Legends Network, but before running Rulebreaker, they had a membership for solo business owners that, uh, were experimenting with lead generation. That was called Growth Trackers. And we're actually gonna talk about the evolution from Growth Trackers. Two Legends. Please welcome Lex Roman. Hi, Lex.
Oh my God, a live audience. Thanks for having me, Seth.
Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to, to talk to you about this in particular because, uh, you know, in my experience, you are very candid, you are very transparent, you are very open about talking about what you're doing and what is working for you, but also what is not. Uh, and I've been fascinated in going back and reading about your experience, uh, especially because you come from the world of content creation, uh, dipping into community and the lessons that you have learned along the way. Before we get to all that c can you just start with revenue Rule breaker? What is it? Why did you start it? What's it all about?
Yeah. Revenue Rule Breaker is about how solopreneurs make money.
So I cover small businesses specifically from the revenue side, and it is, it's almost a public exploration of how small businesses, solar printers specifically make money. So we look at different revenue streams, like digital products, recurring revenue, like subscriptions and memberships. We look at client services, we go inside different businesses, not just mine. I interview people, I enlist guest writers, and we really look at what's working for solopreneurs and micro business owners today.
And it's an online publication, so it's a blog. You can read it on the web and it's also a newsletter and a community. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about what led you to starting this and what were you doing before
I, so the, the summer that I started Revenue Rulebreaker, I decided I wanted to become a full-time creator
before Revenue Rulebreaker. As you mentioned, I was running a membership called Growth Trackers, and I shut that down in June of 2024.
When I closed that, I didn't, I didn't actually know what I was gonna do next, but I knew I wanted to become a full-time content creator. And if you go back in the Rule Breaker archives, uh, you'll see that summer I wrote about what that mean, what those revenue streams could be, what that might look like. And I experimented throughout the summer of 2024
with things like events, with things like writing newsletters. I started to shape this idea of should it be sponsor backed or subscription backed. And October, 2024, I launched Revenue Rule Breaker. I announced it to everybody who knew me before I launched a paid subscription called Legends, which I'm still running. And that was, that was sort of the genesis of how this came about. The premise at that time was very much, I'm still experimenting and you're sort of coming with me into this live experimentation of how I'm gonna make money. So it was, it was like fairly me-centric in the beginning.
Now it's much more like community-centric, user-centric. It's more about other businesses, trends in the space, things that are happening in the world and, and less about my business specifically.
So I wanna dive into that and I want to hear about the transition that you made. Um, before we do, let's let's level set and, and define a couple of terms. 'cause there are a couple of terms that you use a lot in your writing. And I, I, these are words that we throw around, but I don't know that we ever stop to really discuss what we're talking about. One of 'em is subscription,
one of 'em is membership, and one of them is community.
Talk to me about what you mean by each of those three things.
Yeah.
When I shut down Growth Trackers in the summer of 2024, growth Trackers was a membership. I made a video about the difference between membership and subscription, as I see it,
like you said, lots of people use these terms interchangeably.
Uh, the way that I see it, a membership signals higher cost and more hands-on. So it's typically you're getting access to the creator of the membership. The founder of the membership, you're working with them, or they're hosting events for you. You're in some kind of shared community space. It's, it's much more high touch a subscription, which is, which is more common in the media space, um, than in things like client services or program space. A subscription is lighter touch. You're, you're not usually getting access to the creator or even to a community. You're, you're often just getting access to a resource, to content, um, like you're getting videos or you're getting courses or you're getting newsletters. Um, and when it comes to a community,
you're getting access to other members in your shared space. So I actually, you know, misspoke earlier I said that I run a community. I do sometimes say that because I do think community is shorthand for what we're doing inside Legends, but I actually define Legends as a network, which is a fourth term you can add to the list there. The Network is, uh, a group of people that are all promoting their businesses and they have loose connections to each other, but they actually don't share common space the way that we think about community. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. That makes sense. Um, you know, one of the things as you talk about membership is, you know, subscription. I, I, I, I think of it the same way you do it. It's content, right? That's what you get. I pay and I get content membership. I feel like I see it used in both ways. Sometimes I'm a member and I'm getting content, sometimes I'm a member and I'm getting access to, like you said, that shared space where people can gather. Uh, and sometimes it's a combination of the two. Uh, but I've, I've seen it used and, and that's kind of why I wanted to ask 'cause 'cause I've seen it used in multiple ways. I was on a, a webinar recently with, uh, YouTube. And YouTube was, uh, introducing some of their new features for podcasters. And they were talking about membership, but they were very much talking about it in a, uh, membership gets you more content. Right? Right. Not necessarily membership gets you access to other members and, and those connections.
So let's go back to Growth Trackers. Let's start there. What was it, what was the idea when it started and what did you do to get it up and off the ground?
Yeah.
Growth Trackers was born out of my background as a business owner and as a tech employee, a tech worker. Um, so my like career background is as a, as a growth designer in tech. And I spent many years over a decade validating startups and learning lean startup principles. How do you validate a customer base? How do you validate product market fit? Um, and so I had this intense training and experimentation in revenue validation and growth.
Uh, when I started my practice, my solo practice in 2019, I was a consultant doing that work. And then I started to wanna pivot my business model. And so
in 2021, I went out and started working with small businesses. I found that that transition from working with tech companies to working with small businesses was really hard. I've written about this quite a bit,
and it, it forced me to learn lead generation and market validation in an entirely new way. So out of that, I created Growth Trackers. I realized how painful it was to validate different markets that weren't these huge companies that were, that just had obvious buying power and obvious need to bring in consultants, people like me.
And I wanted to work with small business owners to help them make that easier. So Growth Trackers was started in 2022.
The premise was you're experimenting with how you grow your audience. And, and those were all service providers. So they're looking at client audience growth, right? Not content creators. So they're looking at things like growing their email list, or should I get into speaking, or is podcasting away for me to find clients? Uh, should I bother with social media? And the answer is very personal, right? So
I could give you a recipe. I could say, I think you should do email marketing and speaking inside memberships, and you should also be networking.
But Instagram really works for some people, right? Some people really love hosting a podcast and find that that work is worth it if they get clients. And so it's very personal what that recipe looks like. And so the Space of Growth Trackers was about learning what those options were and experimenting with them to see which ones work for you.
Got it. And so were you bringing other people who were essentially faced with the same challenge that you were together, was the idea and and Yeah. To learn from each other?
Yeah. So it started with past clients of mine. 'cause I had been doing digital marketing work before Growth Trackers. So it started with past clients of mine who wanted to keep working together but didn't necessarily need me to execute for them.
That was like the initial cohort of growth trackers. And then we kept attracting, you know, new business owners who, not business owners that were new to business, but new business owners for us who wanted to experiment with that. Maybe they were tired of the way they were getting clients. A lot of what I heard back then was, I'm getting a lot of referrals, but I feel like I'm, I can't control it and I want a little bit more control over my lead gen or over my client choice.
Um, and then it, it grew a little bit through word of mouth and through some of my experiments, but
towards the end of the program, when I, when I wrapped it up in 2024,
um, I started to feel like it was hard to grow growth trackers hilariously, and I was sort of hitting an upper limit, which is part of why it it shut down. Yeah. Before we get to your decision to shut it down, um, talk to me about the transition from being a consultant where you're primarily working one-on-one with clients, to now being in an environment where you are working with multiple people and, and kind of moderating discussions and, and helping them connect and learn from each other.
It's, yeah, it's a completely different style of work, right? Um, I had been, in my career, even in tech dating back to like 2013, I had been running workshops and doing a lot of community work in tech, even just as a professional. So I used to host a lot of meetups in LA and in San Francisco I did have an online community that proceeded Growth Trackers that was for growth designers, tech people who worked in growth.
Um, and so I had been like dabbling in community before, I would say I never made it my, my, um, my income until growth trackers. But I had some experience with things like, you know, running a Slack, moderating a Slack, what it might look like to onboard and offboard people. Um, what kinds of things keep people around? What kinds of things attract people into a community?
So I was familiar with those things before, but the transition from being a consultant that works with a client individually to running a membership
was bigger than I anticipated it would be.
And I think the big thing that I learned doing that with Growth Trackers was it's very easy to add more. Like, you know, you want to offer people everything you possibly can. You want to give them the most of everything.
And so you're like, I'm gonna add all this curriculum and we're gonna have guest speakers and I'm gonna do office hours and I'm gonna do one-on-ones, and we're gonna have this amazing community space and I'm gonna make you videos. One of the funniest things I did with Growth Track, when I look back and think like, this was a real mistake that I made,
I professionally shot videos for like the first several months of the program. I like went to a studio, scripted a bunch of videos, and had these like highly produced videos
that people could, you know, watch inside the platform that onboarded members. I had all these like gifts that I would send people. It was like an extremely overproduced, uh, membership.
And so the big thing is like when you're working with a client,
you scope that project and you have a very clear set of deliverables and maybe you over execute something. Like you give them more design choices than you would normally, or you give them more essays than you would normally, or you give them, you know, a bigger presentation than you might normally. But
it's, it's easier to sort of temper your effort in a scoped project way with Growth Trackers. It's like, if people aren't coming to the sessions, why aren't they coming? Was the session bad? Did I not remind them enough? Was the last session bad or do they hate me? Are they just sick of this? Are they giving up? You know, it's like any number of things and you're not necessarily getting that feedback from them the way that you are when you work with clients.
Right? Right. Uh, you know, I, I feel exactly what you're talking about, especially coming from a content creation background. There's this temptation to always sort of fall back on your strengths and just create
more. Uh, and sometimes that's not necessarily the right answer. You used the word that I love, which is over executed.
Um,
I mean, looking back, was the answer surprisingly to do less sometimes?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because the, the catch 22 about memberships is you think if I deliver more, I can charge more and people will be happier. But the reality of them, whether we're talking about any of the terms that we discussed, right, memberships, subscriptions, or communities,
is that it, the more that you provide, the more people feel like they need to take advantage of. Right? If I give you a gift basket and it has fruits and crackers and chocolate and pizza and hamburgers in it, you feel like you need to be tasting all of those things. But if I give you a gift basket and it's just chocolate, then you're like, okay, if I eat like a little bit of chocolate, then I've experienced this thing.
And so one of the big things with, with all of these models where you're, you know, sort of one to many shepherding a group of people through an experience of some kind is
they always are looking at what's my utilization of this thing, right? Am I getting what I need to out of it? And the more you stack in there,
the harder that becomes for them to fully utilize it. Right? Right. Yeah. It can also, I found actually overwhelm people. I, I mean, people can actually get to the point where, you know, like, oh, going to four years of college is great. Okay, then let's make it 20 years of college and we can charge more. And they're like, wait a minute.
You know what I mean? Like, I don't, I don't know that I wanna do that much. Right? I mean, it's, uh, yeah, I, I I I think that I, that was what was stood out to me was, it was so interesting to watch you. And, and not only was that true in terms of content, but you actually then made a decision to scale down the tech that you were using. You got a lot simpler
with some of the technology that was involved in hosting this space.
Right? I started Growth Trackers on Mighty Networks because part of the inspiration for Growth Trackers was, I, I have a law firm that I've worked with since I started my business in 2019 called Council for Creators. And they run a subscription, like a legal subscription using Mighty Networks. And I really loved their model and their setups. So I was drawn to Mighty Networks because of them.
I also love that Mighty Networks had an events calendar alongside, like chat rooms and course content. So I could sort of put all these things in one place. I think that's really appealing. Um, however, I learned that Mighty Networks really kills conversations. So it was great at hosting courses, it was great for the events calendar, but nobody really ever talked in there. Um, the conversations were just constantly dead and people were coming to sessions. I had pretty good session attendance
and they were really engaged in sessions, but
outside of Sessions, nobody was talking in Mighty Networks. And so when I wound Growth Records down, we moved it to Slack and we had a meeting about it, and several people were like, Lex, I'm not gonna use Slack. Which people will say to you, I'm not gonna use Slack 'cause I hate it. I have like, you know, PTSD from corporate life or whatever.
Uh, but our Slack, which is now an alumni Slack, which has growth trackers in it and friends, um, and is free, it's just an invite only community. It's super active and it's become really rewarding. And it really has made me think about, you know, spaces that people that are already in people's behavior like Slack or Discord or Facebook groups, whatever that is in your, in your realm, right? Uh, versus something like Mighty, which was on my own domain that people had to specifically choose to go to. Yeah.
You know, one of the things that I hear, a question that comes up with new community builders is they actually sometimes wanna start with the tools, you know, and so their first question is, which platform should I use? You know, should I use school or Circle or Mighty Networks or whatever? And, and I always
try to say, look, the first thing is get the right people in the room. 'cause if you've got the wrong people in the room, it's, it's not gonna matter if you've got the right people in the room, they'll meet in a parking lot, right? I mean, it's, yeah, it's fun. I couldn't agree more.
I couldn't agree more. We get so, you know, bogged down in the tech and it's like, you know, these tech tools that are luring us in with all these, oh, you can do all this thing and you can have all these payment plans and you can have a fancy welcome video. And it's like, yeah. It really doesn't.
The, the bottom line is what you said. It's about people connecting with each other and them connecting with you. And, and that can happen wherever. And you, you don't need to get bogged down in the tech because it's just a waste of your time and often a waste of your money.
So, talk about the decision to, um, it to, to essentially stop growth trackers. 'cause you have a great blog post and a video that you did from around the time, uh, actually I think you did the, the, those videos and posts about a year after it when I was reading. But talk about what went into that decision and was that a hard decision to make?
Yeah, it was a super hard decision to make because Growth Trackers was
like both my livelihood and my life's purpose during the time that it was running. I was really excited about it. I had some really fantastic members and we had some amazing wins in that program. Just shifting people out of, you know, feast or famine lead cycles and feeling like their business wasn't gonna succeed to overcoming that, finding a, a better rhythm, finding a more natural rhythm for selling their work. Uh, finding clients that they were really excited about working with, finding marketing that didn't feel like a drain. So, you know, it had the impact that I wanted it to have for the people that participated in that. And I, I did really enjoy running it. However,
because Growth Trackers was a hands-on high touch membership, I was running events a lot. And in the beginning, I actually started pretty simple with the events. But by the end, towards the end of, uh, you know, the end of the program in 2024,
I was running events often, um, at least once a week. When you do that, it's really hard to take a break. It's hard to go on vacation. It's hard to pull up from the execution mode to think, okay, where do I want this to go? How should this program grow?
Um, I found that really challenging. At one point I brought in an outside community manager
to help, help me think about some of that stuff. Help me execute so that I could pull up and do more of that work. We spent a lot of time revving on things like, you know, how were we gonna get new growth trackers in? How are we gonna make sure that current growth trackers were getting the results that they needed? And I just sort of felt like by, I would say like April of 2024, I had sort of experimented to the end of the earth about
all of the things that needed improving,
and I didn't have any more in me. I couldn't think of anything else to try. I was sort of like, at the end of that road,
I held like a town hall for the membership.
And I, I tried to get the growth trackers to like move to a community ownership model where they would like run. 'cause a lot of the sessions had almost like an open source playbook of how they could be run. They didn't necessarily need me to guide them. This was a practice that I taught them all. And so for the, you know, 50 or so people that were there, um, many of them could have continued that practice without me, but they were all kind of like, we don't really wanna do that Lex. And so we decided collectively to shut it down.
Um, we had like a really nice graduation, and interestingly, a lot of people have stayed with me, uh, in the, in Future Ventures and in current ventures now.
So I think that's so interesting because it, it, it sounds to me like where you were with it is
you felt like a lot of the value had to come from you.
Um, but the fact that the people have stayed,
uh, and and I I assume stayed connected to each other, in addition to stayed connected to you, they're finding value in each other as well. Is that, is that right? Is that, would that be accurate?
Totally, yeah. And they did, you know, throughout the program as well. I think,
I think the thing is that I, you know, I think one thing I struggle with, and I'm sure many, many folks struggle with this, is if you're paying me, if I'm the one receiving all of the money, then yeah, I certainly feel on the hook for delivering the outcome, right?
And that's one thing when I, when I shifted from membership to subscription, the mental shift that I made was, if I'm charging you a lot less, and this is a subscription that you access where I'm not necessarily promising an outcome here,
then I don't feel on the hook for delivering an outcome to you. And that means that, you know, it can have more community participation and I don't necessarily feel like I need to be always on, uh, delivering all that stuff. But in Growth Trackers, I really felt very responsible for people's
outcomes, right? Were they reaching the kinds of clients they wanted to reach? Was marketing getting easier for them? Were they getting what they needed to outta the program? I felt really responsible for that. So it was hard for me to make that
mental shift. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then talk to me about the evolution to Growth Slackers. Uh, and then where does Legends come from? I mean, what is the story from here on out?
Yeah, so Growth Slackers is the alumni Slack group.
Uh, when, when we shut down Growth Trackers, like I mentioned, we shifted everybody over to Slack. That's because Slack has a free tier. Mighty Networks doesn't. So I wanted to stop paying for Mighty Networks. It's, it's pretty expensive when you're not making any money. So I moved everyone into Slack, and then people kept calling it Growth Slackers because it's in Slack. And so now we have a little sticker and a new logo. So now it's called Growth Slackers. And like I mentioned, it's a, it's growth Slack, growth Trackers, alumni
and friends. So they'll invite people who are like-minded people, um, you know, in the Growth Trackers ethos and now in the Legends ethos.
So Growth Slackers has been running since June of 2024, so over two years now. And that's just a free community. I moderate it along with some other volunteer moderators, um, but it's not something that we talk about that much publicly. Um, even though it's been awesome to stay connected to everybody there.
When I launched Revenue Rulebreaker in October, 2024, I launched Legends alongside that. I had previous to this sort of alongside the Growth Trackers evolution, gotten really interested in what journalists were doing with media subscriptions and specifically launching independent outlets that were audience backed.
So I wanted to do something like that. I had been studying that for long enough that I felt confident in doing it.
So I took the email list that I already had
from Growth Trackers, from Low Energy Leads, which was my podcast that ran alongside Growth Trackers. And I just announced to everybody, I'm doing this thing called Revenue Rulebreaker, and I'm launching something called Legends. If you wanna be a part of it, you can join us for $99 and you'll have a lifetime membership to whatever Legends becomes. And I don't remember what I promised initially,
other than I'm gonna host some mixers. You're gonna be part of this forever. You're gonna have access to all my posts. It, I was a pretty high level. I was gonna do stickers, which I have done,
but it was a pretty simple perks list, and people didn't really know what they were getting into. But the first person who joined is someone named Lauren St. I will never forget getting her email because I was like, wow, okay, maybe there's something here.
Lauren and I were in a community called Group, which was a coworking, it was a tech company actually, that ran a coworking app.
And Lauren and I met through that, but Lauren wasn't in Growth Trackers. We didn't have a close relationship. So the fact that she was opting into being a founding member of this thing, I was like,
maybe this can really work. And then I got 40 people in, you know, in the first couple weeks of that announcement to say, yeah, we wanna be legends. We wanna see where this goes. Lex. Like several people would write me and be like, whatever you wanna do, you know, Allison Coward, who was a growth tracker,
she was just like, whatever you're doing, I'm in. You know, that kind of stuff. And so I was like, this is really exciting. And then I was like, oh, okay, maybe this really can work. And then I started taking it seriously as a business, and now it is my business.
That's amazing. I, you know, uh, I,
I wanna point out something that you mentioned that happened even before Legends, which is the fact that they adopted the name Growth Slackers,
which to me is actually pretty meaningful, because that, to me suggests that people are, are seeing this as part of their social identity and part of how they identify themselves to other, and, and the fact that you've got a logo and there are stickers and, and stuff like that. I mean, it's, it's like when people say, Hey, I'm a Swifty, or people say, Hey, I'm a deadhead, or whatever, you know what I mean? Or, uh, uh, that kind of thing. Like, I, I, I, I don't know. I I think that's significant. I don't think that's a small detail, so I don't want to gloss over that.
Um, I agree, I agree. And it's funny though, Seth, 'cause I don't
necessarily know what I did to deserve that, or like what conditions were set in place
to make people feel that way. I will say like, I'm very lucky that I attract,
like, super values aligned, wonderful human beings. So everyone in Growth Trackers was just someone with a generous heart, you know, thoughtful, kind with a, you know, smart ethical business.
Um, and Growth Slackers and Legends have continued in that vein. And so,
I don't know, part of it feels like luck, um, but maybe those early groups of people have helped seed that culture a bit. Um, the growth trackers were amazing people. So Growth Slackers had a really warm, connected culture off the bat that I think is hard to create from scratch in a community,
right? Everybody knew each other, so there was some trust there.
And when someone would get invited in, it was like, there was already a conversation going and everyone automatically trusted that new person because they were vetted, you know, vouched for by that other person.
But people ask me a lot, like, how do you attract such amazing people? And it's like, I don't know the answer to that, and I really should try to figure it out because every new person who joins Legends, and when I was doing Growth Trackers, every new person who joined that was just awesome. One thing I will say, other than what I've already said is like, I do think there's something to be said for the kind of people that invest in projects that are semi unknown. So with Legends specifically,
you know, people and Growth Slackers, even if you're willing to jump into Growth Slackers, which has no landing page, no online description, like you're literally just hearing about it from someone else,
then you're a risk taker, right? Like, you're, you're ambitious, you're interested, you're curious. And so they're, it's sort of like qualifies people out a bit. Yeah.
Well, and, and that matters, right? I mean, it's about getting the right people in the room, not necessarily the most people in the room, uh, right. Because Exactly. You, you want those folks.
Talk to me about Legends. What roles do events play in the In Legends,
I got this question today from someone, they were like, I'm thinking about joining Legends, but I wanna make sure I can make all the events. And I was like,
legends is not really about events. When I stopped running Growth Trackers, it was really important to me that I didn't set myself up to have this, like, to be on the hook for events all the time.
Legends cost at this point, $99 a year, that's not a lot of money. And I wanted the bulk of that value to come from editorial work, right? Our stories, our newsletters, the stuff that we're producing. So I didn't really want it to be events. Once you get into events territory, I feel like you're back in the membership space now. There's a line there, a blurry line, lots of people run subscriptions that include events that includes publishers, right? Lots of journalists are doing events, uh, and still running what they would call a subscription,
but I didn't wanna be on the hook for events. So the Promise of Legends was always, I'm gonna run mixers a couple times a year so you can meet each other.
And that's, that's the promise. At this point. We have mixers three times a year, and then I run quarterly earnings calls, which are open to all paid subscribers
where I like run down how the business is doing. I talk about the projects we've executed and what's up for the next quarter. Those are optional, and they're, they're,
they're well attended, but it, you know, it's like out of 400 legends, maybe
30 come to that. Whereas like the mixers, it's usually a hundred or more that come to those. Those are the best attended, uh, thing
either well attended is that they only happen a couple times a year, so people prioritize coming to them.
Other than that, I run separate events, but they're public events, so anybody can come to those. You don't need to be a legend to come to those.
When I charge for those legends, get discounts on them, and otherwise they're free.
Got it.
So how are you thinking about the role of connection, um, and content and how do they, you know, play off of each other in this,
you know, in, I really want, I really want, um, I really want legends and rule Breaker to feel very content driven. And so that's a big reason why I'm, I'm not doing events. It's a reason why we don't have a Slack or a Circle or a Mighty Networks community, because I want things to be driven by the editorial. So for example, in May we started doing something called Ask the Legends. It's a column in Revenue, rule Breaker. It's an advice column where legends answer the questions. So
the idea there is people submit their questions or I come up with questions, I put it out on the blog, it gets featured in the newsletter, and then Legends answer the question. Uh, I just had a question go up last week, which was, what was your first paid speaking opportunity? And legends are sharing their stories. Then I pull those and I plug them in the newsletter featuring those legends in the newsletter. I really like that loop because it creates editorial content for us. It highlights legends, it features their expertise, and it gets them seen in front of each other and in front of my broader audience. So I, I really try to come up with stuff for Legends that is serving the editorial purpose of Revenue Rulebreaker, which is to keep more small businesses in business while serving the legends as individuals. Other examples of that are,
we do classified ads for legends. So Legends can promote stuff in the newsletter. We celebrate wins and milestones in the newsletter. We offer collaboration requests. So you can say, I'd like to do a newsletter swap, or I'd like to have podcast guests around this topic, and I feature those on the site. And in the newsletter we also have a directory, and I concierge introductions between Legends. So
Legends is a fairly advanced business community. It's not really for people that are pre-launch or at launch stage. Most of our folks are five years plus in business, and they're busy and they don't wanna like, have to keep up with a bunch of conversations. So it's more about looking for opportunities to connect them when it makes sense. Uh, a quick example of that is, I just got a note before we started recording from an entrepreneur in Toronto. She's doing a really cool event in Toronto. And I immediately was like, there's another legend in Toronto that I need to connect you with. And that connection I think is way more valuable than either of them having to sort of like, dig through archives or dig through, you know, a bunch of Slack conversations. And so to me it's more like high signal connections that
I take great care to provide opportunities for people to, to have. Yeah. And it sounds like you're using the content to help make those connections. I, I mean, so one of the things I wanted to ask you is how are you not over, over executing this time round? Um, and it sounds like part of it is that, uh, you know, while you may be shepherding the content,
uh, some of it is coming from the members themselves, right?
Yeah. And I think more of it should, I definitely still struggle with, you know, how do I lean a little bit more on the community? I've definitely had legends come to me and say like, we could be doing more here, Lex. And I recognize that, and I am looking for opportunities to involve legends more. I have hired legends to do guest written pieces. I just commissioned a legend to do one, actually. Um, that's one of my favorite ways to involve legends in the editorial. And that takes a huge, you know, lift off of my plate.
I will say I do think I'm still over executing. It's like the plight of my life that I will continually over execute. Um, there's a joke in my family about
my mom going to an HOA meeting and walking out, having committed our family to producing an entire original puppet show. And that is just like the, that's where I come from. I just come from a family of over executors. So I do still think I'm over executing. Um, and when I look at the Perks list for Legends, I think this is too long and it's a little hard to go back on the things that you've already promised. But I am, I'm conscious of that, and I'm always trying to cut that list back, or, or flex that I will say
like, logistically day to day, it feels much lighter to me. And I also just, I'm not on the hook as much for an outcome. And, and so, like, for example, I took a break in August and I, I took a week off and I just,
I, I didn't think that hard about it. I was kind of like, it'll be okay. And I just sent a note to everybody, this is what my break is gonna look like, and,
and I'm not gonna publish. And everybody was fine with it. People were like, that's great. Legs,
you took a break. What? Yeah. Um,
but, but you know, I I I I'm glad you're highlighting this. 'cause I think, and again, especially for those of us who come from content creation and, and, and these, you know, roles where we are the engine, we drive everything. Um, sometimes you're
reluctant to ask for other members to participate and step up. You feel like you're calling in favors, right? And like everything is, uh, will you do this for me? And I'm not sure that
the members feel that way. Like, I think they're actually happy to step up and participate. Has that been
your experience?
Totally. Yeah, of course they are. 'cause they're amazing people. I also, you know, I look to other publishers who run community style things as inspiration. And one of the publishers that I'm always looking at is Escape Collective, which is a cycling publication.
And they run a community. They, they have a really excellent membership design, and they call it a membership. You could call it a subscription. Um, but they have, you know, a live forum. They have ways that their members are interacting Right now. They're on a member trip to Japan
and they have volunteer moderators in their community, even though Escape is a paid membership.
And so there's plenty of examples for me to follow there. And anytime I ask legends to do things, they're more than happy to help. We're running a, we're running something cool right now, it's called Five Star Fest, where legends are submitting their podcasts, their newsletters, their freebies, their courses for reviews so that everybody can get more reviews on their projects. Everybody always needs more reviews
ahead of that. I asked Legends if they would donate or give me a discount on power hours courses, you know, offers for people that are launching their own podcasts or books or newsletters as prizes for Five Star Fest. And so many legends stepped up to do that, like super generously being like, yeah, Lex, I'll give you a free power hour, you know, that you can give away as a prize. And it's like, that is incredibly generous for them to do. Um, so yeah, people are always super happy and I need to utilize that more because I think it makes the community a lot stronger. Yeah, yeah. But, uh, it is, it is hard to get used to that idea that it's okay to do. Right? I mean, I, I,
I struggle with that too.
Um, it's super hard.
Talk to somebody who is at the beginning of this journey. What advice would you give to them?
I really like your point about, it's about the people that you're bringing into the room. I think the most important thing is to think about who those people should be
and why you want them in that room together. The other thing that I think about a lot is, is it about their relationship to each other? Or is it about the relationship to you? Right? I think about someone like Josh Specter who just shifted his newsletter into a paid membership. Like you, in order to be on his newsletter, you have to be part of the paid membership. Josh really positions a lot of his stuff as access to him, access to his expertise, um, versus, you know, somebody who positions something as you're getting access to a community space like Escape Collective is doing.
So I really think about that, and I would think about that as you're setting up what you're doing. You mentioned Seth earlier, podcast, memberships, podcasters.
It's often your connection to me, the podcast creator, um, versus like a professional community as I just said. So that's, those are two things I would think about. I would also be so, so so aware of over executing. I think it is something that all of us do when we're trying to scale something like this. We're like, okay, I should just do more events. I should do, you know, one-on-ones for people. There should be merch. Like, I should have a community space. We should have a billboard. I should fly everyone to Tokyo. Like, you just think about all this stuff and you get really excited about it, and you start executing it, and then it puts you on this treadmill of having to execute over and over again. So once you know who it's for, I would really think about just the one or two things they need to get out of it and focus on delivering that. If you can deliver that,
you'll be golden.
Yeah. You know, uh, I'm a radio broadcaster, i, i I for many years, and so
silence freaks me out a little bit. You know, this sort of dead air,
like, like when I hear it, the, the, the hairs on the back of my neck go up because it's just a reaction to that. And
sometimes the silence is okay, and like, sometimes there's supposed to be
space because that lets other people step up that lets other people talk that lets other people contribute. Uh,
but that's something I've had to get used to because it's something that, you know, again, as a content creator, you, you always kind of feel the need to,
to fill that and to do more. Oh, I gotta do more. Um, yeah. Well,
this is so fascinating. I, I mean, I, I really appreciate, especially because like I said, you are, you are so candid about this and it's been so interesting to, to watch the journey, uh, and I really appreciate you taking the time to come on here and, and share it with us. So, um, if people wanna know more about revenue Rule Breaker or legends, uh, where do they go?
Go to revenue rulebreaker.com/newsletter and tell me that you found me through community case studies or through Seth. I'd love to know that. Yeah. And, and actually let's, I, I mean,
who exactly is a, a good candidate for revenue rule breaker, or, or for Legends? Totally. Yeah.
Solopreneur, creative Solopreneurs who, you know, are post-launch. I have a lot of designers, copywriters, marketers, writers, journalists, um, who are interested in connecting with other business owners, collaborating with other business owners, uh, and getting their business out there. It is often service providers, but I have some content creators and certainly a lot of community builders as well. Cool. Well, Lex, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the story. I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me, Seth.
