#76 How Chenell Basilio of Growth In Reverse Crushed Her Community Launch
Chenell Basilio is the Creator behind the Growth In Reverse newsletter. Every week she reverse engineers how a top creator has grown their email list to 50k subscribers.
Her "deep dives" have become wildly popular, Chenell was a keynote speaker at Craft + Commerce this year, and her newsletter has grown to 38,000 subscribers in less than 2 years.
For months she has wanted to build a community for her subscribers – a place where they could learn and connect and improve their email marketing, newsletter growth, find more sponsorships, and more.
But instead of rushing into launching, she carefully crafted a plan to build the right thing. She did her research to better understand who was subscribed through 1:1 calls, surveys, and other available data.
This week she launched her membership, Growth In Reverse Pro, but not to everyone – only to a hand-picked group from her waitlist.
In this essay I'll dive into each step that made her launch a success. And why I'm betting on her to have a top membership making her multiple 6-figures.
Waitlist Strategy
Ahead of launch Chenell has been building a waitlist of people interested in joining the community... but instead of just saying "thanks for joining the waitlist" she sends them to a survey.
I assume on the backend (ConvertKit) she tags them to the waitlist no matter what for clicking the link.
By collecting data such as the stage of the newsletter, list size, and why they want to be part of the community, Chenell was able to curate invitations to the best fit participants.
Have you ever joined a community and realized everyone around you is 10 steps behind you? That's not the best experience.
When you're first starting it's important to curate to a specific stage and group, then later as you have more interest from other stages, and it makes sense, you can expand.
Simple Offer
When I work 1:1 with clients on membership strategy one of the first things I typically suggest is slashing half of the offer.
Chenell kept it simple:
"In short, here's what you can expect:
A community of passionate creators building their newsletters to have real conversations about growing a newsletter - what's working, what's not, experiments we're trying, etc.
Live Q&A calls to ask questions, get feedback, etc.
Opportunities to collaborate with other members."
I pasted the above directly from her invite email. What I love about this is the way she described the community ... not "a community to connect with other likeminded individuals" *yawn*.
This description of the community is so specific that it will resonate with the right people.
In addition, she teased her ideas for the coming months...
Group challenges
Live calls with top creators
Hot seats
1:1 member matching
Member-led sessions
She didn't promise anything on a specific cadence – "monthly live calls". You don't need to do this to get people in the door. Keep it vague so you have room to experiment.
Pricing Options
Chenell offered two different prices for her founding members:
Founding Member ($500/yr) – All access to the community, calls, challenges, and workshops
VIP Member ($1,500/yr) – includes a custom newsletter audit & quarterly 1:1s with Chenell
Things that I love about this:
Two price options – By offering two different pricing tiers your prospect customers compare prices to the plan options versus other things in their life. The higher tier makes the lower tier look "smaller" and therefore increases conversion.
Simple differentiation – She's not gatekeeping half the content or experiences from the lower tier, she's simply providing services in the higher tier.
Founding member pricing – She added clarity that you would be locked into this price for life, meaning if and when she ends up doubling or tripling the prices, your price remains the same year after year.
Member Cap
Chenell has a huge, highly engaged audience with 38,000 email subscribers. If she opened up to all of them, that could be chaos. Instead she capped this first beta group to 100 members.
She reviewed the survey submissions for the waitlist and handpicked people to send the first sales email to.
This is important in community building to be able to craft the culture.
It is SO hard to design culture, but with careful decisions like curating that first group, you can do so. Chenell shared that she believed every single person she invited will bring value to each other.
Onboarding
New members are immediately asked to book a 1:1 welcome call with Chenell. I LOVE when membership creators are willing to do this.
For the member it feels like a super high end experience and for the founder they have an opportunity to learn the greatest current challenges of their new members.
Things you can learn from 1:1 onboarding calls:
What questions do they have about how to interact in the community – helps you set expectations in onboarding flow
What challenge is top of mind for them right now – helps you plan programming
Why they joined and what sparked their decision to hit the buy button – helps you improve your marketing
In addition to the calls Chenell had a section in the community for how to get started. She gave everyone direction to introduce themselves and fill out their profile.
This is the kind of thing a lot of people skip because they think it's "obvious" but you'll get a much higher amount of people doing these things if you directly tell them to.
Lastly, Chenell automated a DM from her welcoming each new member into the community. She shared that it was automated but that she was excited the member had joined and gave them a CTA – "when you're ready, introduce yourself!" (linking the introductions space).
Simple Interface
A lot of people over-engineer the design of their community. Keep it really simple in the beginning so you can see what kinds of themes there are before creating additional channels.
While Chenell is starting to organize resources, the community spaces are simple:
Introductions
Announcements
General Chat
Events & Recordings
No one has to guess where to go to ask their first question or connect with other members. It's just simple and obvious.
Model the Behavior
In the introductions space, Chenell really wanted people to post intro videos – these are a group of creators (albeit writing creators) after all.
She wanted people to post intro videos, so she posted an intro video, and gave them tips on how they could do the same (like using loom).
The result so far... about 50% of new members are posting introductions with a video. That's a pretty great result!
Welcome Event
Chenell sent invites starting on Wednesday and had a call on the events schedule for Friday called "Community Hang" which was framed as a casual welcome call.
In her second sales email she used this call to drive people to get in quickly (in addition to the 100 person cap).
This part blew my mind – with only 2 days notice at best, over 60% of new members attended the community hang.
Sometimes we put way too much effort into planning an event months ahead – just make it quick and dirty. This welcome event captured the momentum that new members felt from signing up that week.
Here's what I loved about the agenda (yes, I attended):
She opened up with a great question – "What is one thing you'd change about your newsletter right now if you had a magic wand?" – this gave her GOLD for planning future programming.
She opened the floor for ideas for the community – modeling co-creation with members.
She said the phrase "I'm excited to build this with you" and made us all feel special by sharing we were handpicked from the waitlist.
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It's not about Chenell
She isn't building a fan club.
Yes, people will join because they love her newsletter BUT Chenell has done an excellent job of bringing in other experts like Dylan Redekop to help out... and hand picking a group of members that bring their own expertise to share with the group.
Chenell is the facilitator and connector – but it's not all about her.
During the community hang welcome call one of the members mentioned creating member meetups to tackle unique issues.
They already aren't looking to Chenell to have all the answers, they're looking to each other.
This is a culture creation strategy but it starts with framing and branding. Chenell writes under Growth In Reverse – not the Chenell Newsletter.
Surprise & Delight
Chenell offers an audit service which currently costs $697 where she goes through your newsletter landing page, welcome sequence, and more to give you feedback on what you can improve.
Within the community she created a self-audit checklist (as a course) with 22 video lessons with examples that can help you immediately improve your newsletter experience.
The best part?
This was a surprise.
It was an even bigger surprise for me to find my newsletter was roasted in examples (just kidding Chenell asked my permission).
When you set the bar lower than the reality of the experience, your customers will be blown away. This is what leads to referrals and word-of-mouth growth.
She didn't promise 100k worth of value and then deliver an underwhelming forum.
Quick Wins
The best way to get active community members for life is to give them immediate and frequent wins when they join.
Chenell is doing that in a few ways:
She has responded to many people's introductions with a helpful tip either based on the challenge they shared in their intro, or by reviewing each member's landing page and looking for opportunities to improve.
She offered the course mentioned above – if you watch the first module and make those tweaks, you've already improved your newsletter.
During the welcome call if anyone's challenge had a quick answer, it was answered. At least a few members left the call feeling like they already had a new idea or strategy to try in their newsletter.
Sustainable Growth
Let's assume 20% go for the higher tier (a typical assumption) – that means Chenell will make $70,000 from this initial launch. Not too shabby, right?
If Chenell were to create a full marketing campaign and launch to her entire list of 38k people, she could, but it could hurt the long-term success of the product.
The quick wins I mentioned above? That would be impossible at this kind of scale. Ask any entrepreneur that has had fast success and they'll tell you that if you scale too quickly, you'll break everything.
Practicing restraint allows for a longer-term sustainable revenue strategy. And as I often mention, building community is a long game.
This is why you've got to launch your products with a beta strategy. And if you need help developing one of those, I've got you.
🌶️ Spicy Takes
Chenell roasted me so I might as well roast her, right?! What could she have done differently or what could be better?
Product Positioning
While the framing of the community as the core offer will work for getting in those early ideal beta members, it's not going to work forever.
People don't buy for community, they stay for community.
That course that was a bonus? She probably needs to lead with that in future launches or another curriculum experience.
People buy for curriculum, engage through programming, and stick around for community and connection.
Vanilla Design
While I love a simple interface, Chenell could infuse more brand personality into the design and onboarding experience.
Banner images that add some color to a space that otherwise feels very black and white.
Channel naming – is there anything more general than general chat? ... what are the group chats you're excited to open in your phone called? Probably not general chat.
Ok that was just for fun – all of this doesn't really matter until after her beta phase – she crushed it!
Does Chenell's community sound right up your alley? You can apply to join Growth In Reverse Pro here.
If you loved this, you can subscribe to the weekly newsletter here for free! I send a bunch of resources & share a bts happenings of my business in the email version.
In case you missed it, or didn't realize the connection, Chenell and I were recently on the Creator Science podcast by Jay Clouse together. We talked about how to build raving fans and real connection. You can listen to that here.