The formula for building communities that scale quickly
Plus the GPT prompt to help you do the same
Hey Part-Time Creator 👋,
I share write-ups that help you build work on the internet that you love—alongside your day job. Consider going paid to get access to 50+ write-ups of tactics you can use to build better on the internet.
Good business is about understanding the market.
Today, I want to talk to you about a paid community that pulls in $10k+ in a niche you’ve probably never heard of; in fact, most people probably didn’t even know it existed.
So, you’re scratching your head thinking about how you can make some extra cash on the internet alongside your day job. You don’t want to make YouTube videos, you think you want to start a paid community, but you don’t know where to start.
Here’s the deal… you won’t stand out on the internet by doing what everybody else is doing — that tactic means you get sucked up with the noise.
The top Skool creators?
Learn Calligraphy — 1,200 subs ~ $9 a month — $10k+/month
Learn Pickleball — 995 subs ~ $39 a month — $38k+/month
Menopause community — 1,400 ~ $49 a month — $68k+/month
AKA probably not the things you were expecting (I certainly wasn’t)—And that’s sort of the point. Big topics are saturated, if you’re starting today, it’s getting harder and harder to exist in big, broad topics. For instance, gardening, creating, writing, and business in general.
What you have to do is carve out a space within each of those areas — you have to capitalise on a space that is yet to be captured by anyone.
Your job is to think 2-things:
What can I overdeliver on (aka what does my experience and knowledge give me a unique advantage on)?
What saturation presents an opportunity (aka where is the attention, why is it there, and how can I be different)?
BTW whenever is the right time for you, here are more ways I can help:
The Medium Blueprint — used by over 600+ writers, the exact strategy I used to go from 0 to 90,000 followers on Medium.
The Part-Time Newsletter School — used by over 100 creators, everything I’ve learned from my MSc in behavioural science, and application of my product-led strategy to turn subscribers into paying customers.
What do you mean?
So let’s make it real—you work in the corporate world as an HR executive. You’re an expert in performance management, disputes, and management support for staff underperforming.
You’ve got 5 years’ experience in dispute management in an FTSE 100 company.
You’ve got all the qualifications that HR execs need.
What you then want to do is find a space with high emotion and a high need to solve a problem. What I’ve noticed about the most popular, most successful communities in Skool is that they occupy 2 spaces:
Highly specific, outcome-driven areas — Calligraphy (learn modern calligraphy), pickleball (a new trending sport).
High emotion, *feeling* based spaces — The Lady Change (space for menopausal women)
And what I’m seeing over and over again is that the best communities marry the two together:
Calligraphy — Learn Calligraphy, sell the emotion: "Calligraphy is the most relaxing hobby I’ve ever had."
The Lady Change — Find a community of women going through menopause (high emotion) and learn to lose weight (outcome).
It’s the blend of the two, in a specific niche, that makes things interesting, that generates the traction.
Notice above, the most specific community above, is the one that generates the most money. Why? Because where else can you go, if you’re struggling with menopause, to lose weight?
Most creators would not dare to be that specific, so the creators who dare, capitalise.
By being super-specific, you become the only.
Creating your community
So you’re an HR executive with bags of experience — where do you start? Practice with this prompt: