John Faulkner-Willcocks built a 250+ member paid community in just 4 months with an astonishing 1.5% churn rate. His inspirations? On Deck and World of Warcraft (yes the video game). He's the cofounder of Open Org, a paid community for progressive People & Culture leaders who believe in the radical new idea of leaning into transparency as a way of building companies. We spent an hour diving deep into his "transparency playbook" for building highly engaged communities, including: - How they get 3-5 high quality responses within hours for every question - Why he prefers a monthly pricing model over an annual one - Giving personalized onboarding quests to new members - Why they chose Slack over other community platforms - Running community hackathons - Lessons from World of Warcraft If you enjoyed this episode, you should sign up for Beginner Maps to get the "magic sauce" of top creators like Carrie - https://beginnermaps.com/ Resources: • Curated Connections, the automated matchmaking tool - https://curatedconnections.io/ • Open Org community - https://www.openorg.fyi/community • John's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfw/ • Nityesh's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nityeshaga/ Chapters: 00:00 Intro 03:46 John's Productivity Hacks 10:04 Who's in OpenOrg 12:11 Competing with free HR communities 19:16 Onboarding new members 21:16 Building a mini database of members 24:21 First 100 customers 27:23 Embracing Transparency with pricing model 32:04 Member Selection 36:21 Secret sauce: Personalized Quests 41:18 Why Slack wins as the Community Platform 44:55 Building an extremely engaged community 50:08 Community hackathons 55:35 Lessons from On Deck 57:46 Lessons from World of Warcraft 01:01:29 Final piece of advice