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24d (edited) • 🔬 Research Lab
📌 August Community Research Project
This Month's Focus: Monetization 🧪
Every month, we study one part of our communities together.
Not by guessing.
By researching what works, running small experiments, sharing what we learn, and measuring what changed.
This month's question:
💡How do we design a community that can sustain itself without ever making a member feel like a transaction?
This month, we are not just studying it.
We are building something.
You will choose one real person you could help.
Not a persona, not an avatar.
Someone you can picture.
And over four weeks, you will design something specifically for them, one stage at a time.
By the end of the month, you will have written an actual invitation, in words you would really use, to a person who really exists.
Whether you're following along in the free Research Lab or building alongside us in the Build Room, you're invited to learn with us.
Your 30-Day Research Journey
WEEK 1 • DESIGN FOR CLARITY
Understand what they actually need.
Inside this week's Build Room we'll:
💚Revisit the SKOOLME Framework, with attention on the M stage and why it sits so late.
💚Choose the one person we're designing for this month.
💚Name the real problem they want solved, not the one we assume.
💚Get honest about what we already give away.
Outcome:
"I know exactly who I'm designing for and what they need."
WEEK 2 • DESIGN FOR DISCOVERY
Design how they would ever find it.
We'll:
💚Explore how people come to understand what you're worth.
💚Look at real examples, including affiliate and referral models that lead with the gift.
💚Work out how your person would discover you could help them.
💚Decide what evidence we'll collect.
Outcome:
"I know how they'd find their way to me."
WEEK 3 • DESIGN FOR TRUST
Ask honestly whether they trust you yet.
In the Build Room we'll:
💚Work through the three trusts: trust the guide, trust themselves, believe it's possible.
💚Find which one is thinnest for your person right now.
💚Share observations and troubleshoot together.
💚Adjust what we're building.
Outcome:
"I know where the trust is thin, and I'm working on it."
WEEK 4 • DESIGN FOR INVITATION
Write the thing you'd actually send.
We'll:
💚Review what we've built.
💚Write the invitation, in real words, to a real person.
💚Read them out loud to each other.
💚Decide what to improve next.
Outcome:
"I have something I could send, and I don't dread sending it."
THIS MONTH'S REFLECTION
The Goose Nobody Fed
You know the story.
A couple owns a goose that lays one golden egg a day.
One egg. Every day. Without fail.
And somewhere along the way, that stops feeling like enough.
If this much gold is coming out of her, they reason, imagine what must be inside her.
So they take a knife to her.
And find nothing at all.
And now there are no more eggs either.
That's where it usually ends.
Greed ruins what you love.
Roll credits.
But there's a question the story never asks.
Where did the eggs come from?
Not the gold. The eggs.
Somebody fed that bird.
Somebody kept her sheltered through winters and safe from foxes.
Somebody did the ordinary, unremarkable, daily work that lets a living thing stay alive and keep producing.
The story treats all of that as invisible background.
It isn't background. It's the whole mechanism.
The gold was never stored inside the goose.
It came from the conditions around her.
That's what this month's Community Research Project is really about.
Not extracting revenue from a community.
Building the conditions that make revenue a natural consequence of care.
Because people don't buy when they trust the opportunity.
They buy when they trust the guide, trust themselves, and believe the transformation is possible.
Which means your generosity isn't the warm-up to your monetization.
It is your monetization.
As you work through this month, reflect on these questions:
💙 Where in your community are you holding a knife you think is a strategy?
💙 What's the real value you deliver? Not the features. The thing that actually changes for someone.
💙 Of the three trusts, which one is thinnest for the person you're designing for?
💙 If you're honest, does your current offer feel like an invitation, or like a push?
💙 And the big one...
💡What would you have to build so that charging felt like the most natural thing in the world?
THIS WEEK'S EXPERIMENT
✅ Choose one person you could genuinely help. Someone real, someone you can picture.
✅ Reply below using their initials, or a number since our community is public.
✅ Name the one thing they're stuck on that you could actually move.
One person.
One real problem.
One month designing something worth their yes.
Build Room members also receive:
✅ Weekly live sessions
✅ Guided implementation
✅ Community experiments
✅ Accountability
✅ Progress reviews
Every month, we research one area of community health together.
One experiment.
One improvement.
One month at a time.
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📌 August Community Research Project
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