Founders with Kids…Building A Paid Community with Sarah K. Peck

Maybe you’ve toyed with building a paid community as part of your business model. Or you gave it a shot and later shelved it because you just couldn’t make it work. Start-up Parent Founder Sarah K. Peck goes deep on how she built three paid communities:

How she chose the initial idea that morphed into her company and multiple highly engaged (paid) communities.

Why what looks like overnight success (260 applications for 25 spots) was actually years of experiments, trials and listening to a consistent audience.

How she looks at experimenting today—and why a one-year commitment keeps her focused on the best outcomes for her members and herself.

The role that lighthearted fun—joy even—can play in the success of your community and your own happiness.

The intersection of motherhood and business and finding your sweet spot between the two.

LINKS

Sarah K. Peck LinkedIn | Threads

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Sarah K. Peck is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of The Startup Parent Podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more.

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TRANSCRIPT 

Sarah K. Peck

00:00 - 00:25

I started interviewing folks who have big careers and are working at startups who have gone through pregnancy. That's why it was Startup Pregnant. I wanted to learn from folks. And about three years into the project, I realized that I didn't want to talk to only moms and only women. It was like, the shifts that happen when you're pregnant are just the beginning. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Like you're a parent for the rest of your life.

Rochelle Moulton

00:31 - 01:11

Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I am so excited to welcome Sarah K. Peck to the show. So Sarah is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of the Startup Parent podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more. Sarah, welcome.

Sarah K. Peck

01:11 - 01:14

Oh, it's so great to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Rochelle Moulton

01:14 - 01:47

I was having so much fun in the green room that it was like I just had to stop and hit record so we could get some of this. So we talked a few years ago on my other podcast, but I've been watching you, and I've been fascinated by what I see as a very measured and successful approach to growth and how thoughtfully you've developed multiple professional communities, at least three that I'm aware of, that are at the intersection of motherhood and business. So I'm just thrilled that we can talk about this.

Sarah K. Peck

01:48 - 02:27

That's really lovely to hear. It always feels, I think, on the inside, I'm sure other entrepreneurs can relate, that things are going so much slower than you want them to go. And it's taking forever, and you're trying some things, and then it doesn't work, and you try some new things. But yes, community has always been really important to me. And I have, since I was in my mid-20s, joined a number of communities that have really been supportive and helpful to me. And it's something that I really enjoy doing. It's like matchmaking. I think if I were living in a different era, I might have been a matchmaker.

Sarah K. Peck

02:27 - 02:44

But I just really enjoy connecting people and bringing them together. And I recently took the StrengthsFinders, and it says that one of my skills is individualization. So it's like seeing people as individuals and then really getting to know them. So I'm glad that I was doing something that I'm good at.

Rochelle Moulton

02:45 - 03:16

Well, yeah. And plus, you know, it's nice to have somebody come in and look at like your last 10 years of work and just be able to see it all in one fell swoop. It's a lot harder when you're doing the actual work in the trenches. So before we dive into Founders with Kids, which is your newest community, and why those two key words are compatible, would you share a little bit about how you got here? I mean, I know that you had a lot of writing and communications experience in your early days, but it looks like you've been an entrepreneur for a big chunk of your career so far.

Sarah K. Peck

03:17 - 03:57

No, it's so surprising to me. I never knew that that was a path you could take until you reach that point where you want to make something exist that doesn't exist, or you're tired of other people telling you what to do. And so you branch out. But my background is in psychology and then architectural design. I got a graduate degree in urban design and landscape architecture. And I worked for five or six years in that field. And one of the things that i noticed and started to observe was that these brilliant people who are dreaming up the future in visuals they're able to do plans and design.

Sarah K. Peck

03:58 - 04:33

were speaking in jargon. You know, when they got up and to write about what they were doing or speak about what they were doing, so often no one could understand them because it was like, well, the precipitous back channel of the blank blank is something. So, and I was like, I don't know what that means. Like, tell me in English, what is this? Speak to me like I'm a 10 year old so I can understand. And I ended up shifting and working in communications and through everything I was learning paired with some new startups at the time, like General Assembly and Udemy and other places to start teaching these skills.

Sarah K. Peck

04:33 - 05:19

And eventually my journey into entrepreneurship was through freelancing. And I started my own thing. I brought together a writing community. I taught folks how to write and I did a lot of ghost writing for CEOs. So taking the brilliance that people had, the deep expertise in helping them craft thought leadership essays before it was really known as thought leadership. And things evolved because I learned how to set better boundaries with clients. I learned contracting and marketing. And then I started to learn how to build a very small team. How do you have an assistant and how do you lean on consultants or other folks to help you really narrow in on what you are uniquely good at?

Sarah K. Peck

05:20 - 05:51

versus trying to do everything yourself. And learned a lot through that, by the way. One of the things I tried to hire out was I tried to hire writers and I did not realize how difficult it was to hire out for something that I'm uniquely good at. And I really should have hired out for other things. But in the early days, I just did not see that that was one of my strengths. I thought this was something anyone could do. And I had to do more CEO stuff and organization and operations, which is not my strength.

Rochelle Moulton

05:51 - 05:52

Classic.

Sarah K. Peck

05:52 - 05:57

So lots of learning that got me on the path of entrepreneurship.

Rochelle Moulton

05:57 - 06:12

So you did all those things. I almost feel like some of the communities you created followed where you were in your life stage, right? Because I'm thinking startup parent was startup pregnant first. Yes, that's right. Yeah. How did that sort of unfold for you?

Sarah K. Peck

06:12 - 06:58

I was working and I built a number of online writing courses and communications courses and I was partnering with some folks and running my own business. I ended up actually joining a startup, a venture backed downtown Manhattan. It was a coding and skill building startup where you taught people how to build with Ruby on Rails and Python and, and more. It was there that I got pregnant with my first kid and nobody in the tech startup world was talking about how do you do this while pregnant? Like you would occasionally see a woman with a perfect belly on the cover of a magazine and being like, hell, this founder earned $50 million and didn't skip a beat while pregnant.

Sarah K. Peck

06:58 - 07:31

And I was like, that seems very watered down. You think? Yeah. Excuse me, but how? I was too curious and also too dubious. Just say, that does not make sense to me. How does this work? Meanwhile, I'm making this map across Manhattan of all the places I've had to secretly puke because I'm so sick during my pregnancy. I was like, that trash can I puked in, that bush I puked in, that Whole Foods. You know, it was all I could do just to get to work as sick as I felt. And I was like, this is nothing like what people describe.

Sarah K. Peck

07:32 - 08:12

And so I started interviewing folks who have big careers and are working at startups who have gone through pregnancy. That's why it was Startup Pregnant. I wanted to learn from folks. And about three years into the project, I realized that I didn't want to talk to only moms and only women. And also that it was like the shifts that happen when you're pregnant are just the beginning. It's just the tip of the iceberg, like you're a parent for the rest of your life. And at least the next 20 years are fraught with challenges of raising children and continuing to figure out how do you make all of this work together?

Sarah K. Peck

08:12 - 08:54

And, you know, what balls can you drop safely? And, you know, what do you do when you feel completely overwhelmed? And also I wanted dads in the conversation and all parents in the conversation. So we shifted and rebranded to startup parent. I still run a women's leadership community because I think gendered spaces are useful and important. But when it comes to parenting, the thing that I've heard and talked to a lot of people about is you really don't need gendered spaces after the first six or 12 months, right? You need some postpartum support groups. You probably need some birthing support groups, but everything out there is mommy and me branded and these dads don't have any places to go and they need to be a part of the conversation.

Sarah K. Peck

08:54 - 09:19

So the more that we can make it about parenting in general, the better I think we can be. And we can have subgroups where it's like, this one's specifically for moms with trauma, or this is specifically for single dads. But it's way too siloed. So that's how I started StartUp Parent. I've been running that company for five years. and building it. And recently, this last summer, we launched the Community Founders with Kids.

Rochelle Moulton

09:20 - 09:39

Well, let me just say, as another woman, it's about time that men get drawn into the parenting conversation because a lot of them want to be. Yes. Right? And a lot of these communities are kind of exclusionary, not in a bad way, but parenting isn't a one gender thing. No,

Sarah K. Peck

09:39 - 09:57

it's not at all. And also there's, you know, folks that don't even identify as being a woman or a man and, or a mom or a dad, they're parents. And what about step parents and bonus parents? Like there's so many. additional people that we need. And if we want to have any semblance of the village back, we can't make it about one person.

Rochelle Moulton

09:57 - 10:28

Yes. I speak as a step-parent. I didn't birth any babies, but I do have a lot of the other things that go along with, in this case, now grown-up children. But still, I think, yeah, it's important to bring a lot of people into those conversations. Exactly. So before we go more there, because I do want to go, I do want to ask you this question I love to ask guests that have built their own businesses. Do you remember when you hit your first $100,000 when you started running your own business versus working for other people?

Rochelle Moulton

10:28 - 10:33

Yes. Was that like a milestone for you? Do you remember it? Yes.

Sarah K. Peck

10:33 - 11:13

There's a couple parts of that. I remember both hitting it. I think we did like $40,000 the first year. It's funny. it's not up into the right. It's not a single line because there have been different years where different things have happened. Like way back when, when I was leaving my architecture job and moving into being a freelancer, I had made $30,000 in side projects in selling writing courses. And I was like, certainly I can double this if I have full time to spend on this. Like if I don't have a job and I was making about $50,000 a year at that job, And I look back and I'm like, how did I do it?

Sarah K. Peck

11:13 - 11:55

I was like, roommates and buses, you know? Yeah, in Manhattan. I mean, design does not pay very well. But I remember that. I remember benchmarking against the job and then saying, at least if I could make that much. And then realizing, oh, wait, that doesn't account for half of what I need to make up for. But I also remember the milestone of, Realizing when $100,000 is not enough, like it's actually completely, there's so much out there. It's like, oh, and then once you make six figures and I want people to think beyond that because there's like, what are you reinvesting in your business for growth?

Sarah K. Peck

11:55 - 12:29

What are you reinvesting for? a rainy day for volatility? What about learning and an education? What about taxes? There's so many places this goes. What about long-term savings and retirement? There's so many more things to think about that when I talk to people, we can map out all of these different pieces, and then we start to map out What's a luxury item for you? And the coolest thing is that people aren't like, I want a private plane. They're like, you know, I really want to like that fancy gym membership. That's $300 a month. That would be so cool.

Sarah K. Peck

12:29 - 12:55

And you're like, great. That's $3,600 a year. So it's very tangible what would make a difference for folks. And then they can find their number, whether that's $140,000 or $180,000, but they can find the place or, you know, $500,000 because they want to be somewhere else or a million, wherever you are. But when you get to the specifics of it, you can find that life-changing number for you.

Rochelle Moulton

12:56 - 13:01

Oh, yeah. Well, we could have a whole conversation about that. I call it your enough number, which gets

Sarah K. Peck

13:01 - 13:01

you

Rochelle Moulton

13:01 - 13:36

everything that you want for the life that you've planned. But I think of the hundred thousand for these kinds of businesses, for a solo business, as once you hit that on some kind of a regular basis, you've got a sustainable business, right? If you can do that on a regular basis, you know, it's sustainable. And then you can start to experiment even more with things that are going to push you through that plateau and get you to whatever your magic number is. And they're all different. I mean, even when people have the same number, what's in that number looks very different from person to person.

Rochelle Moulton

13:36 - 13:37

Yes.

Sarah K. Peck

13:38 - 14:09

Oh, I love that as the sustainable metric. I work with someone who teaches that there's validation, there's kind of the spaghetti, throw it on the wall phase where you're trying to figure out what works first in product offerings and like what you can you actually sell. And then in terms of marketing, you know, is, do I go over here? Do I go over there? Like, where can I reliably find folks? And when you get to a place where you can reliably and predictably, she says within a 10% kind of gauge, say, I'm going to do a sale at this point.

Sarah K. Peck

14:09 - 14:15

This is how much I'm going to sell. And I can predict it, give or take plus or minus 10%. Then you're onto something.

Rochelle Moulton

14:16 - 14:16

Yeah.

Sarah K. Peck

14:16 - 14:18

You've got to get to that point, because otherwise it's like

Rochelle Moulton

14:18 - 14:51

a hobby. It's not really a business. Yeah. OK, well, let's go back to where we were a little bit ago, because I think that you have a lot that you can teach our audience about this idea of community. So you had the Startup Parent Community. You still have the Wise Woman Council Community. And now you've started this third one, Founders with Kids. So I have to tell you, I did a double take. I just want to make sure I read this correctly, that you did a soft launch and you had over 200 applications in three days.

Sarah K. Peck

14:52 - 15:11

Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. About 50 of those applications had dripped in early and then we just, I announced it and then we just, boom, got another 150 and it jumped. It was like 260 by the end. Wow. That was really wild to me how quickly we had people throw their hat in the ring. I

Rochelle Moulton

15:11 - 15:47

can just see people listening to this going, I want to do that. So obviously you struck a nerve, but we all know that building a community is more than, you know, just having the right idea at the right time. I mean, you've...