#284: I helped a YouTuber design his membership

Jay Clouse [00:00:00]:
Meet Tommy. Tommy has a YouTube channel dedicated to helping Americans retire to France. Tommy's done an incredible job attracting nearly 30,000 subscribers and 2 million views on his channel. But he needed help dialing in his product offer. Tommy is a member of the Lab, my invitation only membership community for six and seven figure creators. He scheduled a coaching call with me to work out how he can take his growing audience and design his product offers to both serve them and bring in serious revenue. This is that coaching call where I break out the whiteboard and discuss how his membership cohort based courses and retreats to France all work together. Enjoy.

Jay Clouse [00:00:38]:
Tommy, excited to chat about your signature product, the idea you have for a signature product. I read your post in the Lab and I have that next to me. Can you give me kind of the current state and what you're trying to work towards?

Tommy Sikes [00:00:51]:
I've been working through various iterations of a potential product, tried some things and you are responsible for me kind of rethinking this. I, I went back and watched the interview you did with Chris Hutchins on the Iceland retreat that he did for his, his audience. And I was just blown away by partly by the, the fact that it worked so well.

Jay Clouse [00:01:18]:
Yeah.

Tommy Sikes [00:01:18]:
But also like the amount of, you know, amount he charged, which sounded like an actual really good value for the participants. So, so that um, I don't know if you're familiar with Rick Steves who's like a very famous, he has a ton of travel books. He's like a very famous Rick Steves. Europe is like his brand. But I read an article about him in the past year or two that his travel group, they take people on trips all over Europe. They do something like 30,000 travelers a year to Europe on these tours and their, their revenues are like 120 million a year.

Jay Clouse [00:01:56]:
Wow.

Tommy Sikes [00:01:57]:
And again, these are just sightseeing tours. So not like specialized or you know, a focused group of people necessarily other than just the location. So anyway, this all got me thinking that part of my design restraints which you talk about in build a beloved membership, one of those design restraints for me, which I know I told you before, was I want to personally travel to Europe at France in particular at least once or twice a year via the business to do content and other things. But that restraint, I thought, well, instead of just me traveling, this would open up the opportunity to have these retirement retreats in France. And again, with the Chris Hutchins info, I was like, that could actually be a, a great flywheel, not only revenue producer but also a natural content you know, building machine testimonials for, you know, for the next year's, you know, trips or repeat travelers. So anyway, it just got me rethinking this whole thing about, because I was coming at it from the kind of the, the bottom up, you know, what's, what's like the minimum viable product I can do for the most people, generate some revenue that way versus what's something that is so kind of over the top valuable from an experiential standpoint that I can charge a premium price for it and then it makes it much easier than to work down from the top, if that makes sense.

Jay Clouse [00:03:39]:
Yeah. Okay, so to recap, you have products that you've sold before, but they were more price accessible, lower price to try to sell more of them. And you're saying, well, based on what I want to do, I think I actually want to go deeper with potentially fewer people, but at a higher price point.

Tommy Sikes [00:03:59]:
Exactly. And I've done paid workshops, you know, $100 for 90 minute session. I've done what I call boot camps, which is like a four to six week thing where we build kind of a simple retirement plan around this idea of retiring in France for, you know, 1200 bucks. And those things actually could still, I mean like the boot camp, if you buy the trip, they could be like, oh well this, this is either an upsell to the trip or, or you know, to a retreat or this is included in, you know, in the pricing. But yes, the idea of right now kind of start with that higher end experiential thing and then eventually, you know, trip, have it trickle down to these other opportunities versus the opposite, if that makes sense.

Jay Clouse [00:04:45]:
Yeah. And remind me, do you have a membership or a community in market right now at all?

Tommy Sikes [00:04:51]:
I do, I have, I mean, I have circle membership and it has been a repository for these boot camps I've done. So, you know, the boot camps are typically 15 to 20 people will do like group calls, talking about either the financial planning software. That's kind of the core feature of the, of the bootcamp. And we'll also have interviews and experts come in and do a presentation for the group which we'll record. And so the, the membership has purely been just a repository for those things. Very little actual engagement or interaction. And again, I feel like I can take a lot more advantage of that somehow. But again, as opposed to trying to figure out how can I get 500 people or 200 people in this membership, it's like, well, how can I start with something a little more exclusive? Higher Revenue generating so that I'm not.

Tommy Sikes [00:05:52]:
That focus goes away or that then the membership can become a later add on to people that want access to what the people on the trip maybe got or, or the expertise, the, the more details that they got on these retirement retreats.

Jay Clouse [00:06:11]:
Okay, well we're going to come back to how the membership exists today with those folks who are from the bootcamp who are in that, because that's probably something we're going to have to iron out. But based on what I'm hearing, there's a, there's a couple of directions, starting points. You could go on the membership front. You could basically say this is a membership for people who want to accomplish this thing and members have access to these retreats. We do. Or you could say this membership is about once or twice annual retreats that we do and you get access to these things as well. You see the difference. It's like which one of these things do we want to lead with the ongoing always available nature of what a membership provides or do we want to lean more into the offline experiences and then make the rest of the stuff kind of a bonus? Which way does your head go?

Tommy Sikes [00:07:12]:
Right now it's leaning more towards let's go for the retreat like the in real life experience and have the community as a supplement or complement to that.

Jay Clouse [00:07:26]:
If we do that and these are all valid, these are all valid directions, I'm just reacting. So if we did that, then the question on the mind of the buyer is well, what is the point of a subscription? What is the point of a membership if this is like a very distinct time bound experience?

Tommy Sikes [00:07:48]:
I see what you mean.

Jay Clouse [00:07:50]:
You know what I mean. So if I map this out, you either can say like we run these retreats. I forget what Chris's price point was.

Tommy Sikes [00:08:01]:
I think his were like 6,000.

Jay Clouse [00:08:03]:
Let's just call this $6,000 then for now we run these retreats and we have a membership. These things are extremely interlinked. And my thought is if you want to lean on the retreat side first, then this is what you market. And then based on the relationships that happen in the retreats, you say, by the way, if you want to keep in touch, I recommend our membership because not only will you keep in touch with these folks, but we do these things on this cadence, you know, like we, we do a monthly check in and we, we have support for you as you're trying to plan your own trips, whatever the value proposition is. And then of course, if these are actually distinct products, then the membership is Something you could sell all the time and you could market the retreat to people in the membership. So if a retreat is a core part of the membership, you could either say this is only available to people in the membership and therefore what I'm truly selling is the membership, or you could say these are distinct products that feed into one another. And I'll run this retreat and people on my email list and people who follow me on YouTube can be invited to it. People in the membership, maybe they get a preferred rate, maybe they save a thousand dollars on it or something, you know, that gives you something to sell all the time and something that becomes a really elegant way to get really high quality community members into the membership.

Tommy Sikes [00:09:43]:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Jay Clouse [00:09:45]:
Hey, real quick, if you are less than confident in your product offers, I can help. I'm about to open up enrollment in my first ever signature product Bootcamp. This is a four week live course for developing your signature product, something that you can sell with confidence for years to come. Enrollment is only open until December 2nd and we only have space for 50 creators. So check out the link in the description for more information.

Tommy Sikes [00:10:08]:
Let me, let me pose one, one other thing to you because Jay Acunzo, who I know you had on talking about, you know, have your premise. So I've been thinking about this a lot and, and tell me. Well, let me just explain it to you and, and I'll, I'll ask you a couple of things, directions we could potentially go. So from the YouTube, like creator standpoint, I'm kind of leaning, trying to lean into the fact that I'm a cfp, sort of certified financial planner. And I do talk about like taxes and tax treaties and the financial planning aspects of these things where most travel creators do not do that. They'll say, hey, you need to go talk to a professional at $300 an hour. I mean I have some individual videos but I've also created like some calculators. Like hey, here's a inheritance tax calculator for like if you're a resident in France.

Tommy Sikes [00:11:02]:
Here's, here's how the tax treaty works for Americans. If you're getting Social Security or an IRA income or like there's these technical kind of mechanical aspects of it. Do you think the idea of those kind of technical things, that premise is valuable enough to offer in a, in a membership? I know you've said before, like information itself is not, is no longer that.

Jay Clouse [00:11:32]:
Valuable, but I think, I think that information is very valuable. I think, I think building a respect from your audience that that is something that you help them with, that goes beyond what most people help with, that is valuable and that is a marketable, sellable thing. A membership as a form factor has this open question of why should I renew? So that alone doesn't give me a reason to renew in my mind is probably going to solve a, a big problem for me at one point in time, maybe a couple times, but I don't know that it's going to be like reliably every year. I need to solve that problem. However, it could be a really good entry point into the membership and then you earn their renewal in other ways. So I think leaning into that as a differentiator, it's a good idea for the brand and I think it can absolutely be one of the reasons why people join the membership. The question is why would they stay? And honestly, like the retreats is a big reason why they would stay. The connections that they have with the people in the community is why they would stay.

Jay Clouse [00:12:39]:
Being in a group of people who have the same like life and retirement aspirations, that's a good reason to stay. So I think your business as a whole is set up well for a membership. I think it becomes a little clunky to say like the value of the membership. Membership is strictly the retreats because then you're going to create seasonality in your business. It's going to be harder to sell that when there's not like an imminent retreat coming up. I think that in person experiences, and this is what we did with the Lab offline this year, I think in person experiences are incredible retention mechanisms. And if the experience is made external to the rest of your audience, people who aren't in the membership, it can also be a great new member approach. So the way that like your retreats differ from the offline stuff I'm doing in the community, the retreat itself is like the draw.

Jay Clouse [00:13:37]:
Doing this with people who know or somebody, a guide who knows what to do here does the planning. It's got like just the, the destination vacation sort of benefit. And when, when we did the LAB offline, that was all about like going deeper with people you've already met. So if I, if I would have made that externally available, it wouldn't have quite been the same and I would have had to have priced it in a way where it was intended to generate like a profit. Not just revenue, but a profit. I think you have a different opportunity with a destination style retreat event to think of these as distinct product offerings that feed one another.

Tommy Sikes [00:14:21]:
One other opportunity I think, and you kind of alluded to it is with these retreats because they would be location specific. So I've pulled my audience and kind of the top locations in France, the Loire Valley is just a top retirement destination. The French Riviera in Nice is huge. And then southwest France, there are these kind of naturally built in kind of interest groups within. So like the potential would be, hey, would you like to go to the Loire Valley retreat where we're going to see what it's like to live there specifically and you're going to meet other people who are planning to live there specifically. And then of course in, within the community that maybe comes along with it, hey, here's our chat group about the Loire Valley. So there's, there's opportunities to, I don't know, not niche down necessarily, but have specific groups within that to kind of strengthen those bonds as opposed to a generic Facebook group for expats who want to retire to France, which is like, you know, a lot of people in there, but very little kind of value, specific value for a specific type of person. Do you see that as a benefit to the community to have these kind of interest groups?

Jay Clouse [00:15:43]:
Yeah, for sure. And it's also, again, if you set it up as a two product system, the benefit of having looks like five different locations. You said, you said Paris, Nice, southwest of France, Loire Valley, and then that's four.

Tommy Sikes [00:16:00]:
Yeah. And then there's, there are potentially others, but, but yeah, those are kind of like the big ones.

Jay Clouse [00:16:05]:
So if you had four different locations, say you wanted to follow again your, your constraint of two trips per year, then you could visit two of these per year, two the next year, and then go back to the originals on that, that third year. And so that is great because on one hand you're not like building like this, just easily repeatable. We do this exact itinerary. But on the other hand, if I go to Paris and loved it, and then the next trip is to the French Riviera, I might be like, that was awesome. I'm going to go to the French Riviera also. And so people who have already purchased one retreat, I think are more likely to purchase a second, which is good for retention. And then by the time you cycle all the way back to that first location again, a lot of time has passed. You're going to be able to pull in new people into the community as well.

Jay Clouse [00:16:56]:
So I think that's actually great, although it will be a little bit of extra effort because each one of those locations you're going to have to come up with an itinerary for. And it's going to feel a little bit like net new work the first time you do each of those.

Tommy Sikes [00:17:11]:
I mean, honestly, I enjoy doing that kind of research and planning, so hopefully it wouldn't, hopefully it wouldn't get too old too quickly.

Jay Clouse [00:17:18]:
Yeah, I think this, this setup makes a lot of sense in general. Even just extracting beyond retreats, I could see this working with your bootcamp as well that you said you've run before as a twelve hundred dollar product that you said is six week cohort like I think, I think live time bound experiences just work really well with a membership because the value proposition for these time bound experiences is just very easy to articulate. You know, retreat super easy to articulate what the value of that's going to be. The bootcamp, super easy to articulate what the value of that is going to be. And then in that experience you earn a lot of trust as an instructor or as a leader, a facilitator and they have a peer to peer experience. And you can say if you enjoyed this, you should join our membership where we continue to have experiences like this and you get a discount on our retreats that we do twice per year. So a lot of the challenges people have with a membership as a product, especially an evergreen product, it's difficult to market the value of peer to peer experiences because it's hard for me to say you should join the lab because you're going to have a conversation with Tommy that changes your life and business. That could be true for some people.

Jay Clouse [00:18:42]:
It's not going to be true for everybody that comes in. So I can't be that specific to say you're going to have a great interaction with Tommy. I need people to have a peer to peer experience and love it to trust me to continue to curate experiences like that. So to basically use these different form factors as a lead into the membership is a great way to continue to sell an evergreen product that is difficult to market. The peer to peer value of that.

Tommy Sikes [00:19:12]:
Makes a lot of sense. How do you feel about the idea of the retreats as a, not only a money maker but as a kind of a content creator Flywheel, I think. I mean I love the idea of it as long as again it doesn't turn, I don't know, take the magic away from the travel. But it seems like natural fit to film the retreat film stuff we're doing there. I can just imagine group shots in front of the cathedral and over dinner while we're talking about the tax treaty and using that as just marketing gold.

Jay Clouse [00:19:49]:
Yeah. I think the trick to that is setting it up in such a way that it does not remove your presence from the trip and the people that are there. So I think the magic is in the pre planning to say what assets do we want to make out of this? Resourcing it with a videographer. At least. At least a videographer. And I think it needs to be basically that person's responsibility to be documentarian, to know what you're trying to create and to pull you or folks on the trip aside as few times as possible. So it doesn't pull people out of the experience, but gives you the assets you need to make videos. So I think it's a great thing to do.

Jay Clouse [00:20:38]:
You just need to plan in such a way that it's not going to detract from people's experience. And I think that means a dedicated third party videographer having at least a loose idea of what videos do we want to make from this experience. And not like every video you're going to make from this experience. But if, you know, like I want a video that shows what the experience is like from a marketing campaign capacity, that's going to be a different asset than I want to make a video that I can post on the channel. You know, because that's probably going to be like more of a storytelling vlog style. Look what this experience was like versus like social proof testimonials, people really selling it. And so you want to get ahead of that in the planning so that your videographer or producer or whatever can basically be. They are thinking from a content creator's perspective while the retreat is happening and you are acting as host, facilitator, leader and not producer.

Tommy Sikes [00:21:40]:
Right, Right. I think you did a great job of that with the videos and the testimonials I've seen from the lab in.

Jay Clouse [00:21:47]:
Real life, we had a third party guy and his goal was just to make that two minute video after the event. So he knew what he was doing. But I probably should have made more content there. The opportunity is there. And the nice thing is he had a mountain of B roll that now I have that also. So now we're making any video on the channel. We just have like a growing repository of B roll of members of the Lab in the wild that we can use. I think it's great, especially the first one.

Jay Clouse [00:22:18]:
If retreats are going to become like a product you sell. I think you should think from the standpoint of how do I make sure we Turn this into a compelling video for the next time we market this. This retreat.

Tommy Sikes [00:22:29]:
Let me ask you a quick question about potentially planning this first retreat, because I've tentatively promised the audience that next year we're going to do at least one of these. I already have kind of a wait list of people that, you know, want to hear details when they. When they come out. Do you have any ideas? I mean, I don't know if how. How much planning in advance, how far in advance you plan the lab in real life, but what kind of ideas do you have about actually putting some of this into action?

Jay Clouse [00:23:04]:
I first talked about the offline event in October of 2024. We ran it the first week of June. Ticket sales opened, I want to say April. We didn't seriously start planning it probably until, like, February. But I've planned a bunch of ticketed events to this point. And the secret is having enough details so that you can open ticket sales as early as possible, because ticket sales is always the most stressful, difficult thing. So you want to open ticket sales. But the reason that we couldn't open ticket sales for the offline event sooner was because I was trying to break even, which means I needed to have a really good handle of the economics, or as good of handle as I could have hoped for to make the pricing correct.

Jay Clouse [00:23:56]:
If this is intended to be more of a profit generator, then you can sort of overestimate, you know, and you can open things up earlier. Having an early bird rate is a good idea or maybe even, like, tiers of early bird. So you can be like, if you buy before this date, it's X amount off. If you buy before this date, it's Y amount off to start getting people coming. Because you also want momentum and you want people to see, like, okay, people are coming. I now have more FOMO to join the planning itself. It's kind of what you want to make of it, you know, like, you got to figure out accommodations. That was the biggest, hardest part.

Jay Clouse [00:24:35]:
That also had the biggest impact on the price. Food. That was the second biggest budgetary concern. But it was even hard to, like, do all the food decisions until you had a head count. So you don't want to feel rushed because to some degree, like, as you get closer, you're going to feel a little bit of panic and rush anyway. But the earlier you get things started, ticket sales and RSVPs, it just puts you at ease to feel better. Like, okay, I know there's probably going to be some number of people that you're like, it Needs to be at least as many people for this to make sense. And until you hit that number, you're going to be a little bit stressed.

Jay Clouse [00:25:13]:
So the earlier you open ticket sales the better, especially if we're traveling internationally. For most of these folks I think you want to have a minimum of three months notice. But really I think some people might appreciate like six months notice.

Tommy Sikes [00:25:29]:
Yeah, that, that, that's what I'm thinking because I have, I mean just having mentioned this in the newsletter, I've had a bunch of people, you know, respond and say, oh, we definitely want to do this. We need to know like what the dates are so we can like plan our vacation days for work or whatever. And it's like oh wow, like that's exciting. But also again a little nerve wracking. But yeah, I agree the as far as in advance as possible. But I do also like your idea of the tiers. Just to give a little, you know, a little bit of scarcity on the pricing.

Jay Clouse [00:26:03]:
Yeah, it's, it's a, it could be scarcity if there's like a limit on how many people can buy at that tier. It could be urgency. Like you gotta order by this time. If you only have like one early bird point, then you only have one point of urgency. So having like multiple points of urgency will help. You can do a deposit and then the remainder at some point if you want. You know, you just got to figure out like what are the absolute first things I need to know and lock in. And it's probably going to be that you have accommodations and what the, what the dates are and what the price point is going to be.

Jay Clouse [00:26:34]:
Because then you can be like these are the dates you can book your travel. Now you can put your deposit down which is going to lock in your room if you're covering rooms. And the sooner you do that the better.

Tommy Sikes [00:26:47]:
Excellent.

Jay Clouse [00:26:48]:
Also gives you quite a bit of time then to like figure out how you message this and how you position it. And if you want to do one on one outreach, you can do that. If you want to make YouTube videos around it, you have time to do that. So I would, I would aim for like a six month lead time for the first one which sounds like a lot. And if you land at five or even four, that's fine. But I, I would think about six months.

Tommy Sikes [00:27:08]:
Excellent.

Jay Clouse [00:27:09]:
Let's talk about the membership a little bit more. I see a note that you have a basic membership and a pro membership that says community. So talk to me about the existing membership that is in market right now, is it alone a paid product or is it just folks who have gone through the bootcamp?

Tommy Sikes [00:27:24]:
It currently is just folks who've gone through Bootcamp and your course, you know, having gone through it, I've resisted, you know, trying to take any shortcuts with, with long term value as far as opening it up to, you know, super low priced tiers for just simple access to a forum, things like that. So yeah, it has just been part of a paid boot camp. The boot camp again being six months, but then the membership, I basically said, hey, you're, you can stay in here for a year. Again, the conversations are not frequent, but during the boot camp it seemed like it was a well, well used resource. Like people are introducing themselves. Feedback I got was like, oh, it's really cool to meet other people that are like in the same situation, going through the same excitement as us. But again, it's only been a part of those boot camps.

Jay Clouse [00:28:26]:
Okay. And you did explicitly say you will retain access to this space for a year.

Tommy Sikes [00:28:33]:
There was an end to the boot camp members? Yes.

Jay Clouse [00:28:36]:
Okay, great. That was my concern because this is what, this is the pattern I see a lot of people take, which is like, I had this community experience, we communicated in this community tool and now they're in the community and they're in it indefinitely and they, they aren't paying for it in any way and it becomes kind of a mess. So it's good that you have like a natural endpoint. The, the thing that you're experiencing and a lot of people experience in this setup is these people joined for the bootcamp, which was a time bound, six week experience. They didn't join for the membership. So at no point where they're like, I'm excited to participate in this forum because that's not, that's not what they signed up and paid for. So the, the lack of engagement, participation is to be expected. But that also sets up like kind of a vicious cycle because if I didn't come in expecting to participate and I don't participate, I'm not going to renew because why would I? Nobody's participating.

Jay Clouse [00:29:38]:
So if we want to do this membership, I think we need to be thoughtful about what participation ongoing looks like. And then in the way you message it and talk about it, you need to make the community experience itself a big part of the expected value, so that people come in with the preset expectation that participating is necessary to extract the value they've been promised.

Tommy Sikes [00:30:04]:
Yes, that makes sense. And there are multiple ways I've thought about doing this. But again, it's hard kind of being inside the fishbowl to, to know what the, the external kind of value proposition is of some of these things. Like again, there's this, there's a financial planning software that is included with the boot camp. So although you can just get a financial plan made in real life, it's actually kind of an ongoing thing because like you, you get, you have children, you then have college planning stuff. You move from a big house to a small house, you have different things. And I've wondered if there's some way I can market the financial planning aspect of it more as an ongoing thing so that it could be more recurring as a community.

Jay Clouse [00:30:52]:
Yes, but that sort of suggests that it just seems like you're cutting a slice of the promise of the brand as a whole. So my understanding the brand as a whole now called American de France, right?

Tommy Sikes [00:31:07]:
Yep.

Jay Clouse [00:31:08]:
And reading the website, it looks like the. The brand promise is helping Americans plan their retirement in France. If the membership is going to be the signature product, I would make the membership's promise as related and close to that as possible. So I'm going to make this acronym American to France is your brand. And within that brand, again, helping Americans plan their retirement in France, you have membership and you want. If the whole brand is like this big circle and the circle is. Americans plan retirement to France, you want the signature product to have as much overlap with this as possible. And if you did like the financial planning, that's an aspect of this, but it's just like a small aspect of this.

Jay Clouse [00:32:18]:
So I would try to take this whole thing and be like this. Membership gives you personalized support on your retirement planning journey to France. Specifically, this is going to give you priority pricing on our retreats that take you to the locations. We will help you do your financial planning. And every year maybe they get access to a session where you help them revise and revisit that financial plan if you want to. But I would really make like the whole membership the promise be really close to. We help you plan your retirement to France. And this is like where you're going to get the highest level of support to all aspects of that planning, including the financial planning.

Jay Clouse [00:33:00]:
But I think that's the promise of the membership is like this is a journey, it takes time. We're going to help you do that and we're going to give you a community of people who are on the same journey.

Tommy Sikes [00:33:10]:
I know you talk about like theming different months, maybe for content sometimes. And that's another aspect of this from a marketing standpoint or maybe as a membership standpoint for to keep people in there where it's like, hey, this month we're focusing on, you know, healthcare in France as an American, like we're gonna interview a English speaking doctor in France and talk about that experience. We're going to talk about like if you're, if you're new, like after 90 days in France you can apply for healthcare. Here's the process to do that. Another thing in May could be, hey, French taxes are, are, are going to be due. Here's the form, like here's how to go through that process. Do you think aspects like that, because those to me are, would be inside of that circle for sure. And, and those could also again from a marketing standpoint like, oh yeah, this, this month we're talking about this thing and it, for the people that are like oh, that's something I want to hear about.

Tommy Sikes [00:34:17]:
That can be kind of like a natural carrot, if you will for sure. Does that make sense with especially an.

Jay Clouse [00:34:24]:
Evergreen membership, the challenge is like why should I join now versus some date in the future? So having anything that is time bound, real time, that is beneficial because basically your three levers for getting people to join an evergreen membership are scarcity, urgency and like status. And so doing those live sessions at times in the year when they make sense, that's a great way to create genuine urgency to say hey, next month we are focusing on healthcare. If you haven't figured this out, this would be a great time to join the American to France membership. Here's a link to do that. But you should also approach those events from the standpoint of after we do this, how do I turn this into an asset so that people can join at any time and have access to this asset premium content like that eventually like a year down the road you'll have done 612 of those events. Now those are basically in like self paced, consumable form and that's valuable, but that's not where renewal comes from. That's probably going to make it easier for you to get people in, but it's not going to make them stay. The thing that's going to make them stay is the community aspects, whether it be retreats, the forum, other live sessions.

Jay Clouse [00:35:33]:
And because this is such a niche specific thing, my guess is most of the people who watch your channel who are being or would be involved in this, they're like the only person in their life that is planning this. And so they want other people that understand the desire so I think it's a perfect community play. And I would really lean into that because these people are probably weirdos to their families and friends. Like, you're gonna leave the country and retire to France, or very possibly they don't have a lot of family or friends left and there's nothing keeping them here. So they're like, why not go? And so this becomes like their very real social support system. And I think you should lean into that. I think it's gonna be a huge value proposition.

Tommy Sikes [00:36:22]:
It's funny you mentioned that. I did a live session recently that was, it was on taxes, income taxes for expats. But just as a complete experiment, which you would appreciate at the beginning, I said, hey, I want you to write down, you know, where in France you're thinking about retiring and why is that important in your life? Like, what, what would that mean to you? And, and then what I did is I had, I just broke everybody out into like three or four person groups, you know, separate rooms. And I was like, this could be, this could go good or it could go really bad. And I got so much good feedback from this from people who were like, oh my gosh, there was another person in my room who is actually wants to go to the same like area. And, and we just immediately given each other our emails, like to stay in touch. And I thought, wow, that's like, that is powerful. It's hard to market that.

Tommy Sikes [00:37:24]:
Like you said, it's hard to, you know, that's not a features kind of thing necessarily that you can market. But the feedback was immediate.

Jay Clouse [00:37:32]:
I think it's increasingly marketable if it's differentiated and if these people genuinely lack like connection to people with the shared interest. It's difficult to market the value of community because there's like a lot of competition. And so like it's no longer community itself, is no longer a differentiator. But if these people feel like they don't have an outlet to other people who are doing this, then it becomes much more explicitly marketable.

Tommy Sikes [00:38:02]:
I love that aspect. I mean, that perspective.

Jay Clouse [00:38:07]:
Yeah.

Tommy Sikes [00:38:07]:
Because I mean, it's the same with me as an aspiring expat. It's like, you know, my brother in law is like, what are you, what, what are you talking about? Like, why would you even consider that?

Jay Clouse [00:38:19]:
And these people who join who are like, yeah, I want to, I want to move to the nice area once they're in France, they're probably going to move around and they're going to be excited to see, okay, there are people in this community who live in the. Would you call it the Loire Valley?

Tommy Sikes [00:38:34]:
Yeah, Loire Valley.

Jay Clouse [00:38:35]:
Yep, Loire Valley. Like, they're. That's awesome. Because now I want to visit that area and I want to meet somebody who knows that area, and they're going to think there are people in this community that I can talk to, who can show me around, who I've maybe even interacted with already from that area. So I think it's a. I think it's well suited for a membership. Yeah. I think of these as distinct products, but with benefits with it.

Jay Clouse [00:38:58]:
Like, I think you should give members the best price possible on these retreats, but I think you could also make these retreats a standalone product.

Tommy Sikes [00:39:06]:
Ironically, talking about the having connections, you know, in different places. I'm. I'm actually going to France in. In a two weeks to do a scout scouting trip of. Of the Loire Valley. And there was a. A couple of American retirees who I just got introduced randomly last year who came in as speakers for a boot camp. They were terrific, just outstanding.

Tommy Sikes [00:39:30]:
And so I just reached out to them a couple of weeks ago and I was like, hey, I'm going to be kind of generally in your area. You know, is there a chance we could get together for lunch or dinner? And they immediately sent back because they really enjoyed coming into the boot camp and answering questions. And they're just natural teachers. They sent me back, like, five paragraphs. They're like, all right, Tommy, we're going to pick you up at this train station.

Jay Clouse [00:39:54]:
Yes.

Tommy Sikes [00:39:54]:
We're going to take you to this market. It's like the largest market in the region for this one day. And then we're going to get back to our house. We're going to have lunch at our house that, you know, show you our renovated place in France. Then we're going to take you to this other town nearby, which got this beautiful cathedral and all this stuff, and you can take the train there back to where you, you know, you're staying. I was just like, unbelievable. Like, this is, you know, and just the feeling that gives me. I think someone else would appreciate that at least as much, 100%.

Jay Clouse [00:40:25]:
You got to think these people, they're either moving there because they have connections there, more stronger connections they have in America, or. Or they don't have connections here or there, but they just want to experience it. And if that is the case, they're still, for quite some time, gonna feel like they need or want stronger community in this new location. So when they have the chance to host and show people around, I think people are gonna love the opportunity to do that, as you've just seen. If you enjoyed this session with Tommy, here's another video. A lot like it. But what I really think you should do is, is join us in the lab. You'll be surrounded by hundreds of other six and seven figure creators, mostly in educational niches.

Jay Clouse [00:41:08]:
And you can get feedback from me just like this. You can learn more@creatorscience.com lab and there's a link in the description.