Murtaza Bambot: One of the other questions that was popping up a lot in the Zoom chat was, what is the like size of community that you need to have to be able to do these kind of partnerships? I have some thoughts, but I'd love to hear it from you. I
Sophie Bujold: you want a hard number. So this community I picked specifically, 'cause he literally started getting his partnership offers with 50 students in the community.
So if the value is there, the number of people doesn't matter quite as much as you think it does in. Let's say a more normal scenario where maybe you're still figuring out your value. I'd probably wait till you have maybe, I don't know at least a hundred people in there, but I would also make sure that your offers are very targeted If you're wanting to stick to a very small size.
If you're going after like mass market players, They're going to want to see larger numbers in your community. So you need to adapt, I think, a little bit and be realistic when you're just starting out on sponsorship specifically of where your sponsors, again, it's coming back to that balance.
Where's your sponsor at and what are they used to investing in and how much would they be interested in the size of our audience?
Murtaza Bambot: Yeah. And like one thing that I've even seen like on my end is it also you do have to play out the value that the sponsor is getting to. So for example, like a lot of you don't know this, one of my, the first communities I ran was a business community In college we had 70 people and we raised $35,000 in sponsorships, and I was doing most of the sales.
Now, the reason we were able to get that much money is because what they were paying for was access to this really high quality talent pool that they could actually hire. And so they were making their money back on hiring. And the r o i from that, But if you're thinking about a larger mental health community that wants to do a partnership with Calm, realistically, a calm subscription is 70 bucks a year.
So you are not going to get a massive, $10,000, $20,000 paycheck unless you already have a couple thousand members in your community. So you also have to play it out a little bit and understand like what is the actual like dollar impact that the sponsor is gonna get from sponsoring your community.
Sophie Bujold: It's similar to, if you, for any of you who are doing podcasting when you're first starting out, your podcasts are at strategy, you're not going to get to the, star player shows necessarily really quickly unless you have something so exceptional that it catches their attention. You have to build over time and start with a first tier.
Of podcast hosts and then build your yourself up to bigger and bigger audiences. So it's similar here, like if you're just getting started in the sponsorship realm, you have a small community. In this case it was a healthcare niche, so the sponsorships were bigger because there's more in it for.
The partner at that point, but really weigh in what is the value I have to offer and what are, what's the realistic r o i that people can get from it?
Were there any other questions before we move on?
Murtaza Bambot: No, I think there was just like a lot of questions around what exactly do you need to have set up in your community, like what kind of things do you need to put together? And what I really wanna like stress for everybody here is that I think what Sophie is really getting at is that it's slightly different for each community and part of it is you also just have to test it, right?
Like you don't really know until you actually try it. So when you're at 50 members, try it. When you're at a hundred members, try it. Heather asked a great question. Is it number of members? Is it email list? It really depends on the level of engagement. A really highly engaged email list is worth way more than a very low engaged community.
So there are different meter sticks around this, but the biggest thing that's gonna resolve all these question marks in your head is just shoot out some emails and test it.
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