How can paid communities quickly monetize?

If you pay attention to the circles around you, you will find that this year there are many large and small, cross-industry, and vertical paid communities emerging.

Almost everyone around me who is a little bit famous is running a commercial paid community.

Some people have started to transform from other businesses, so why are so many people starting to run commercial paid communities this year?

Before I share some opinions, let me tell you two things:

1. I suggest you read the previous article "7 Suggestions on Commercial Paid Communities", which will give you some basic understanding of how to run commercial paid communities.

2. Let’s define commercial paid communities: Commercial paid communities are different from paid communities organized by individuals. Commercial paid communities are for-profit and exist in the form of business organizations. They are teams that plan and purposefully operate in an orderly manner to meet the needs of community members for resources, growth, projects, etc.

01 Why are you all joining paid communities?

1. There are benchmarks in the industry with annual revenue of tens of millions

Creating a commercial paid community is also a business direction, but before that, most entrepreneurs focused on new consumer products, e-commerce, travel, self-media and other fields.

In the past one or two years, I know of seven or eight commercial paid communities with annual revenues of more than 30 million yuan, and the total team size does not exceed 50 people. Four of them are in Hangzhou.

One of them has been in business for nearly ten years. It has only five team members, but its annual revenue exceeds 50 million yuan, which is quite terrifying.

Another one is Shengcai, which recently caused the Planet server to crash. In one night, it had more than 30,000 paying members, and its charges start at 1,560 yuan, with a tiered price increase. It only took five years to grow from the initial 500,000 to the current 50 million.

There are also those that only run high-end commercial communities. The starting price to join the group is 30,000. I have seen groups charging 50,000, 60,000, 80,000 or even more than 100,000. There are three to five hundred group members, and the annual income is more than 10 million, so the profit is extremely high.

In addition, there are thousands of commercial paying organizations of all sizes, with fees ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand, and most of them have revenues of tens or millions.

2. Entrepreneurs need better services

Think about it carefully. In the past few years, we have always focused our projects on C-end users.

But after countless entrepreneurial projects have been washed away by the wind, only a few remain. What does this indicate?

This shows that many entrepreneurs have some defects in their abilities, resources, and projects, especially the founding teams and middle and senior managers.

When everyone is rushing forward, it is easy to neglect the building of their own team capabilities.

Commercial paid communities just make up for this shortcoming.

So now if you want to find traffic, money-making projects, video accounts, supply chains, Taoke, private domain traffic, and live streaming, you can find corresponding professional communities to provide you with services.

3. Vertical paid communities have strong sustainability

We currently see that most communities are created based on a certain field. The advantage is that they are more focused and easier to build barriers.

Moreover, practitioners in this field have a very strong demand for resources, information, connections, and learning. Even if they leave Company A to join Company B or start their own business, they will still join.

Compared with various imaginary entrepreneurial projects, business community organizations have a higher survival rate, which can also be described as the saying goes: the camp remains permanent, but the soldiers come and go.

It's a very simple truth. For example, my friend Lao Hu is running Taobao Park. The Taobao practitioners in this industry will change, the Taobao app projects will change, the Taobao gameplay will change, but the form of the business community organization will not change.

For example, there is an e-commerce community in the industry that has been around for ten years.

Starting from Taobao and JD stores, and going through O2O, micro-business, social e-commerce, short videos, live streaming e-commerce, community group buying and now private domain e-commerce, various e-commerce projects and practitioners have emerged one after another, but this commercial e-commerce organization is still there.

Think about it again, is this also true for your local or foreign chambers of commerce?

02 Is it really that easy to make money from paid communities?

In the past two years, I have invested no less than 100,000 yuan in paid communities, including more than 50,000 yuan this year. Excluding paid communities like this one that are run by individuals part-time, 80% of the commercial paid communities that people join are not particularly satisfactory.

1. Some people just want to reap the benefits

Paid communities are based on payment first and service later, and all services enjoyed depend on the written commitment and schedule of the community organization.

Unlike ordinary commodities, you pay the money and receive the goods with a real feeling.

Even if some communities promise to provide various information, from the perspective of commercial communities, activities and services must take precedence over content.

Otherwise, pure content provision without any interaction, links or case generation will have very poor sustainability.

Some nominally commercial paid communities that I have participated in charge a fee of 699, 899 or something like that. It can be seen that the managers are aiming to reap the benefits and do not care about renewals, only seeking new members.

2. Others think that commercial communities are too simple

Although community organizations can be sustainable for a longer period of time, the prerequisite is that your service quality must be reliable.

However, many teams that want to build commercial communities think this is too simple, believing that as long as they create a planet, a WeChat group, and find a few celebrities to endorse them, the money will come.

In fact, one of the biggest difficulties of the community is where the traffic comes from? Who will pay?

Maybe at the beginning, we can use the existing public accounts, WeChat groups, Moments, and the resources of several partners to get some initial users, which may cost hundreds of thousands or over a million.

Maybe this amount of money is quite objective for one or two people, but from the perspective of supporting a team and fulfilling service obligations, it is still quite little.

Assuming that the initial cost of one of our communities is 699, and we have 1,000 members, it would only be 690,000. After deducting distribution, tax points, and red envelopes, the actual revenue would be less than 500,000.

For most new teams, recruiting 1,000 or 2,000 paying members for the first time is already a difficult task.

More importantly, making community members satisfied with the service is the biggest test of the team members' abilities.

If you want to run a good commercial community, the most basic thing is the supply of content, which requires the team to have the ability to discover, judge, compile and disseminate content.

To run a good business community, you need to have the ability to provide user services, such as how to take care of one thousand or ten thousand community members, how to understand their information, collect their demands, and solve their problems.

To build a good business community, you need to have the ability to deal with things, and know how to match and connect each member based on their abilities, resources, and needs, and how to deepen their understanding, interaction, and even create partnerships.

If you want to build a good business community, you need the ability to upgrade and evolve. Now everyone is paying attention to private domain traffic, cross-border e-commerce, and live streaming sales. Can you provide courses and connections?

Everyone wants to gain further knowledge, resources and even team capabilities. Do you have a solution?

So, don’t think of commercial communities too simply.

3. Community is essentially a commodity

When we create a paid community, we are essentially selling a product, which is both a virtual product and a service product.

Since it is a product, users will naturally judge what value this product has for them and what problems it solves.

From the perspective of an operator, one must think from the perspective of a product manager and think about how to polish this product so that it has sales power and shareability.

4. Community is more than just a product

But the community product is not a one-time transaction. It is not like I spend money to buy a book or a pair of shoes, and the transaction is completed once I confirm receipt.

The service of a commercial community organization begins from the moment the user pays, and the organization needs to provide a variety of products to meet the needs of the user.

So we can see that in addition to providing some information, some business communities also have offline meetings, project training camps, resource matching, interviews, joint product creation, and even project investment and empowerment.

If you spend 1999 just to buy a material library, that is not a community; if an organization only has one or two products, that is not a community either.

A paid community in the true sense is a commercial organization. It is a platform that continuously produces high-quality content, continuously organizes online and offline communication activities, continuously enables community members to establish relationships, and continuously creates various benchmark cases.

5. Community is a continuous trust business, but also a one-time business

If you start a platform or product business, you will have many opportunities to start over again.

For example, if you make a beverage today and fail to make it well and go bankrupt, you can still make instant noodles tomorrow and people will buy them.

But if you start a business community, you only have one chance.

Whether users get unwanted services and products by joining your business community today will first affect renewal. Secondly, if you fail, it will be almost impossible to start another community next time.

I hope you don’t think of commercial communities as a way to make quick money. Most communities are about managing people’s hearts and connections. It’s different from selling ordinary goods. It’s not a one-time business.

For example, if you open a bakery and your egg tarts are not delicious, it does not mean that customers will not eat your strawberry bread, because the cost of user trial and error is extremely simple and selective.

However, the services of commercial paid communities are included in the one-time fee. If you have a bad experience once, you will not have the chance to pay again.

Therefore, the business community is a long-term service. If it grows bigger, it may be a Whampoa Military Academy, or it may be a large investment group, or an incubator for nurturing businesses.

Don’t excessively pursue so-called community monetization, otherwise the trust assets accumulated with great difficulty will eventually turn into community liquidation.

Okay, that’s all for today’s article.

Author: Analysys International

Source: Analysys International (yiguanguoji)