Have you read Paul Graham’s classic essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale”? If not, go read it now and come back to this lesson.

TLDR? Okay here’s the short version -

In the early days of any business, you should not hesitate to do things that might not scale in the future. Especially those that help you recruit new customers or delight existing ones.

This lesson will focus on a tried and tested technique that will help you both recruit and delight new customers for your community subscription - sending them an ultra-personal welcome video. In the end, I'll also share an underrated tool that is used by some of the top creators to scale this technique.

Why #1: Recruiting new customers

When Kyle Hagge opened the doors to the first batch of Morning Brew’s first cohort-based course, he made a personal welcome video for every applicant who was accepted. Before the applicant had paid them a single dollar! This meant that he ended up making personal video for 150 people.

Result?

“We surveyed people after, asking them, “Why did you give us money?”. So many of them said that it felt like you actually read my application and that you cared. I knew that the experience was going to be amazing because you had already put in the work before I had given you a single dollar.”

In our interview, Kyle said that it was an “obvious way” to increase the conversion in the early days of your business when you’re fighting for customers.

Why #2: Delighting new customers

Erin Halper, founder of The Upside, said it best in our interview –

Erin is a seasoned consultant who now runs a premium community membership for independent consultants. She compares her consulting experience with the experience of running a membership.

No matter how compelling your community’s landing page is, every new customer wonders whether they made the right decision after hitting the “Buy” button.

After all, buying a community subscription is not like buying a software subscription - there’s no immediate pain to be solved. Which means that know they won’t know the outcome of their investment until much later in the future.

So, if they receive a personal welcome from the founder at the start of their membership, you can bet that it will ease their anxiety.

How to make people feel welcomed

It’s not enough to just writing them a welcome message (or worse, send them a templated welcome message). In order to make someone feel truly welcomed, you have to make your message personal. That creates a 5-star experience.

How do you do it?

1. Hopping on 1-on-1 calls

Erin started by hopping on a 30-min call with every new customer. Who wouldn’t love a 30-min free call with a domain expert?

New customers loved these calls and gave her great feedback. Bingo!

But soon she hit the wall of scalability - when she started getting a good number of new customers per membership cycle, it became impossible for her to hop on a 1-on-1 call with all of them.

2. Recording a welcome video for each customer

Compared to a 1-on-1 call, recording a welcome video takes only a fraction of the time and can be done asynchronously. That’s what Erin does today.

In fact, operators 3/10 of communities that I’ve covered on our podcast at the time of writing this, are doing this - Kyle of Morning Brew, Milly of Generalist World and Erin of The Upside.

Note: it defeats the purpose if you just read the same templated message for everyone by just replacing their names. The key is to make it personal.

Both Kyle and Erin have said that they called out elements of the application that stood out to them when recording a welcome video.

3. Using a tool like Bonjoro to scale this experience

Recording welcome videos ad-hoc on your iPhone when you get a new customer can work in the early days. But as you grow, you’ll need to create a streamlined process to make sure that customers don’t fall through the cracks.

Bonjoro can help you do that.

“More than 80% of my customers replied to my Bonjoros saying that they knew they’d spent their money in the right place”

– Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income membership

Most people think this is a waste of time - that’s precisely why you should do it!

By connecting Bonjoro to your CRM, you can send quick personalized videos to your community members at key moments in their customer journeys.

This general idea goes beyond just creating welcome videos. You can extend it to any key moment in your customer’s lifecycle. Kyle said it best –