Ryan Wardell is the CEO and cofounder of Startup Sauce, a private membership for SaaS founders outside of Silicon Valley doing $5k+ in MRR.

This community is special for a couple of reasons:

1. It's members are super accomplished CEOs who only have extremely nice things to say about the community

2. The guy who runs it, Ryan, is not a "startup expert". In fact, he has never even been a SaaS founder.

In this episode, Ryan shares his "magic sauce" that has allowed him to get there.

Resources:

Beginner Maps, our free email course containing the "magic sauce" of top communities - https://beginnermaps.com/
Startup Sauce, Ryan's community for founders doing $5k+ MRR - https://www.startupsauce.com/
Ryan's master list of 320+ places for SEO backlinks - https://www.startupsauce.com/list
Ryan's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwardell/
Nityesh's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nityeshaga/

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

02:43 Startup Sauce stack

05:47 Aha-moment masterminds

07:58 Magic number for a mastermind

10:23 Making introverts feel comfortable

14:30 Magic sauce: matching people

20:18 Facilitation tricks

20:57 Tangent: Hiring a rockstar community manager

23:06 Facilitation tricks contd.

23:50 Giving people a reputation

27:10 Don't pretend to be the expert

28:26 Getting ridiculous retention

30:45 But why $33/month???

33:18 Screening calls for new members

36:29 How he really makes money

42:13 Ryan's future end game

44:00 Why the 5k MRR barrier

48:45 The idea

52:12 First 20 customers

01:01:05 Content marketing miss

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