💰 My first $1200 from my Fluent Community 🎉 Lessons Learned So Far 🧠
I launched my Fluent Community on 10-25-25. I have my first 18 paying members and have earned $1249 in revenue so far. 🎉
Below are lessons I’ve learned so far. Happy to answer questions!
I launched a $33/mo membership to a mailing list of 3500 people.
I find my subscribers, clients, and members through SEO: by writing blog posts, making Youtube videos, and occasionally showing up in AI search.
At first, it was crickets. 🦗
But after the first signup, and once I started sending “behind the scenes” emails with screenshots and explanations of the membership’s features (one feature per email), they started to trickle in 1-2 per day.
We do not offer a free community. In a way, you can think of our Youtube comments section and posts page as that.
My only other way to work with my team costs $10k+, so $33/mo is a hugely affordable alternative.
Lessons so far:
Getting members to post has been harder than I thought. I created a Community Builder Challenge with prizes to motivate people to post.
I should have tested my Shop’s services checkout flow more thoroughly. I lost $1k+ in sales due to erroneously set up (by me) coupons.
I should have set up my post-purchase automations before selling services! It’s been a manual scramble.
I had my first refund request. He posted a super-rude message in the community feed, insulting me and my team’s hard work. It really hurt my feelings. 😣 I will need to recover more quickly from these moments moving forward.
It’s “unscaleable,” but I’m offering free 15-minute Welcome Calls to each new member for my first 30 members or so. It’s been great to connect with them.
I’m hoping to earn at least $3k from my Fluent Community by end of the year.
My Stack:
- Sureforms: forms
- SureCart: checkout + services shop
- SureMembers: content restriction on website
- Ottokit: connects SureMembers to FluentCRM
- FluentCRM: tags SureMembers to give them community access; community-related emailing
- Fluent Community: courses + community
- Pie Calendar: events
- SurelyWP add-ons for enhanced functionality of SureCart
- WPFusion Lite: considering this to give me pay-per-post functionality using tags so I can sell view access to individual posts (sample application essays)
Well done! Here's to many more orders!
Helmar Rudolph thank you!! 🥂
Awesome!!
Thomas Oates thank you!!
Dont let the rude refund request get you down as this is the nature of the beast. Keep putting out solid content and keep getting good backlinks. Seo does take time, but once it kicks in. Then you will be busy before you know it. Adding quality content to your community will help along the way also.
David Scurlock thank you for the encouragement and the advice!
Kaneisha G. head up! Those people exist and you never can please everybody.
My experience is that when I write an very appreciateive polite answer and maybe acknowledging, where he is wright and proposing to change that, either they answer as politely and say sorry for their rude tone (everybody can have a bad day) or both comments stay there speaking for themselves and other readers see, who is the “good” guy. 😌😅
After all, it’s free counseling.
Congrats, Kaneisha G.!
Thanks for sharing your experience!
It's not easy, but the best is coming for you!
Jose Luis Duron love that gif! Thank you!!
It’s amazing Kaneisha. Your work is incredible and you are truly building a nice community. I am jealous of your stack, my developers used woocomerce and it’s more complicated than I thought. Sure platform is more fast and easy.
I have 700 members now, I had many rude refunds. You need boundaries and motive to move forward!
keep up
Ioannis Glossopoulos thank you for the very kind words and for sharing your experience. I love hearing about how others’ communities are going.
Re: Woocommerce, I found it absurdly confusing. Sorry that you are caught in its web.
Congrats on 700 members. That’s amazing! Sorry to hear about the rude refund requests. I’m building up my boundaries and protecting my energy!
Hard work and doing things well always pay off. Keep it up. Congratulations!👍
José Carlos Estirado thank you!!
Thanks for this. Always hard to know where to start, but feedback like this is invaluable
Kevin Trye I’m glad you find it valuable!
I have always loved your transparency and find it very motivating. Thanks for sharing & congrats on both your hard work and the new customers! 🍾
Charlotte D thank you!! 🥂
After the emotions settle a bit try to find the truth and/or opportunity to improve in the rude refund requests. I had one a while back that really offended me but also highlighted a flaw in my offer I was able to shore up and things have been much better ever since.
Chris Davis yes, good advice! He needed a lot more context and handholding for navigating the community and understanding what it contains.
This is indeed great @kaneisha. Well done
Sophia S thank you!!
Congrats and great work...
Well done you. What you posted is great feedback things I would hope could be built in going forward.
Great job and thanks for sharing! It's great to read about struggles as well (like how hard it is to get people to post) instead of easy success stories (which are never actually that). Helps to see that others are struggling also and get over it by working hard.
As always, the start is the hardest. If your current members find value in your community, I'm sure they'll spread the word. Oh, maybe plug FluentAffiliate in there later to help you out and give free subs to people spreading the word?
Congrats, Kaneisha G.!
Congratulations 👍
Thank you for sharing! And somehow you never get used to the rude ones, sadly.
Thank you very much for sharing Kaneisha G. 🙏 Really appreciate it!
Congratulations 🎊
I'm in a similar position regarding my regular services and wanting to add a community.
Concerns:
- Tons of work (which I don't mind doing because of the topic)...
- Hard to get members to engage (just as you mentioned)
- Is the juice worth the squeeze?
So that's my question... is it worth the effort if you charge 10k to your clients and this is so much work for such a small return...?
By the way... this is my second online community... and even with my previous free community, it was difficult to get people to engage...
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Stephen Sovenyhazy in short, yes, it’s worth it to me — for now. My first milestone is $3k in revenue from membership subs and shop sales. I hope to hit that by end of 2025. $6k is my second milestone. I will keep evaluating if it’s worth continuing.
Re: engagement, this podcast episode gave me an appreciation for my lurkers.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7C7vYnfN28OtkS6POCldHd?si=wlWii3kIQlmqAm6xwYuvlg
Congrats
I enjoyed reading this. Thanks for sharing so openly!
Great work thanks for sharing
Thank you for sharing. I'm currently going through the process. Best of luck with your endeavours!
Love seeing this and seeing you make this live! Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us, it is so motivating and inspiring!
Hey thats awesome!!! Congrats. You're a model. Continue with posting recomendations, thats great. Hope the best for your community.
For someone who is planning to launch soon, this is what I need. Question Kaneisha G. is suremember an external app or hosted on your website?
Vanessa Mbamarah hosted on my site.
Very informative. Thanks for sharing. And congratulations on your success!
interesting thanks
My community has a free zone and a paying members zone.
a bit of work to configure but more attractive for future paying members (free members see the members space but cannot access it)
Christian Vanhenten have you seen a lot of upgrading from free to paid?
Kaneisha G. : yes kind of 10% from free to paid (gross evaluation, don't have precise number)
You use «sure» products. Already thinking to adopt fluent cart?
Christian Vanhenten no because I’m all set up on SC and they handle subscription billing which saves me .7%.
But I bought FluentCart in case it develops quickly and ends up having more features that work well for me. Switching subscriptions over would NOT be easy, though.
Congratulations on your launch Kaneisha! Your insights while you were building were also a big help. All the best going forward!
Mel Brown thank you!!
Which theme youre using?
Rosvaldas Nudas Blocksy
Thanks for sharing your experience thus far. Best wishes for continued growth and success. Cheers!!
Curious where the 1249 came from if it's only 18 members at $33/m. Wouldn't that be $594? Unless you have upsells or something.
Bob yes! I have a Shop: https://app.theartofapplying.com/shop. 2 members bought editing or coaching calls from the Shop.
Historically, when my Shop was built using Learndash + Buddyboss, revenue was split evenly between subs and Shop purchases. I earned ~$50k over 2 years from my membership before migrating it to FC — after a period of dormancy.
Do you notice any performance slow down with that stack?
Bob not with the stack listed above. I installed Gamipress (free), and it slowed my site way down. I had to ask my husband to roll my site back to undo it. It was giving me Buddyboss flashbacks!
Bob I did not add WP Fusion as I have not yet needed it.
Kaneisha G. Good to know!
Kaneisha G. That usually doesn't slow things down too much unless you have a lot of members and run some of their cron events, but they are usually very good at keeping things optimized.