Mar 12, 2021 · 1h 26m · my-first-million
MFM #160: How to Build a Paid Community Making $20M a Year
Shaan Puri · 32m spoken Sam Parr · 23m spoken Dave Selinger · 19m spoken Intro / Outro Song · 11s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Sam Parr and Sean Puri break down the high-margin business mechanics of paid communities and executive masterminds, followed by a featured interview with Deep Sentinel founder Dave Selinger on revolutionizing physical security through AI and live remote guards.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 73.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.8 Guest teaching 2.6 Guest disagreement 1.2 The hosts pushing back 2.2
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:21:51 Selinger firmly corrects host valuation metric
When Sam expresses confusion over ADT's $6B market cap on $5B revenue, Selinger interjects to correct the framing, explaining that its $10B debt load sets enterprise value at $16B.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 19:49 Shaan rejects SoleSavy venture scale potentialShaan firmly pushes back against the premise that SoleSavy could become a venture-scale business, arguing that chat group exclusivity collapses as member numbers increase.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:08:15 Selinger details ADT false alarms versus verified dispatchSelinger educates the hosts on how traditional alarms produce 99% false alarms causing police to ignore them, contrasted with Deep Sentinel's verified suspect descriptions.
The host holds their own ▶ 35:01 Shaan reveals real financial mechanics of Club LTVShaan demonstrates authoritative domain expertise by outlining how he structured Club LTV to generate $5,000/month per sponsor with almost zero operating overhead.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening Banter: Camera Looks and Sarah's Prank | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Sam and Shaan break down Tiger 21's business model, citing specific membership asset thresholds ($10M) and annual fee figures ($30k). The exchange between co-hosts is collaborative and informative rather than combative. | |
| Paid Community Economics: Growth, Churn, and Scaling Paradoxes | 7 | 2 | 1 | 3 | The hosts debate paid community churn and math mechanics, contrasting monthly 7% churn rates against annual renewal rates and cohort scaling issues. Sam and Shaan challenge each other's retention calculations constructively. | |
| Case Study: Aventa, Vistage, and C-Suite Masterminds | 7 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Sam outlines Aventa's acquisition metrics ($375M sale at 12x profit) while Shaan shares firsthand knowledge of Vistage's cold-call recruitment playbook for executive networks. | |
| Evaluating SoleSavy: High Passion vs Financial ROI | 6 | 1 | 1 | 4 | Shaan pushes back against venture scalability for SoleSavy, analyzing why high-passion hobby communities hit hard ceilings compared to communities tied to direct ROI. | |
| Untapped Community Opportunities: Nurses, Spreadsheets, and Specialists | 6 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Shaan and Sam identify niche community opportunities, citing Nurse Life RN monetization, Excel/Google Sheets courses, and David Spinks' community playbook. | |
| The $10k/Month Side Hustle Playbook and Club LTV Breakdown | 7 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Shaan walks through his real-world case study of Club LTV, showing how a free community of verified 7-figure e-commerce operators generates $5,000/month in pure sponsorship revenue from Mercury. | |
| Overcoming Life Inertia, Burning Boats, and Listener Hotline | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | The co-hosts explore the psychological trap of inertia and strategies for breaking momentum, including burning bridges, forcing functions, and anti-charity commitments. | |
| Deep Sentinel Interview: Reinventing Home Security with AI and Live Guards | 4 | 7 | 2 | 2 | Guest Dave Selinger explains Deep Sentinel's AI-assisted human-in-the-loop security guard model (1 guard per 100 properties) and his background co-founding Redfin and working at early Amazon. | |
| Deep Sentinel Protocols: Verified Police Dispatch and Crime Stoppage | 4 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Selinger educates the hosts on ADT's 99% false alarm rate, police dispatch protocols, and ADT's debt-loaded enterprise value, while hosts pitch investment interest. |
Statements from this episode (26)
Parr: Tiger 21 has 850+ members paying $30k/year, generating $24M+ in revenue
“Basically it's a peer group where you have to have at least ten million dollars of investable assets in order to join. It's very expensive. It's 30,000 dollars a year. I wouldn't call it a mastermind because mastermind has a certain connotation, but yeah, it k…”
Parr: Tiger 21 does $30M–$40M revenue, sold to PE, and retains 90%
“By my calculation, I actually would bet they do 30 to forty million in revenue, and they recently sold to private equity, and so it's a relatively big business, and I actually read about read up on it, and someone said, like, there's 90% retention rate”
Puri: $4M annual rolling fund generates more value than podcast ads
“You know, I started a rolling fund largely off of the audience from this thing that said, hey, I've listened to this guy a bunch. I trust him. He has a good track record. And so now that rolling fund is four million dollars a year that I get to invest into sta…”
Puri: Past paid community had a 7% monthly churn rate
“By the way, my paid community just for real numbers, mine was seven percent a month was churning”
Parr: Roughly 80% of Trends' first cohort renewed in year two
“80% of people were opted in to renew in year one or in renew in year two in our first cohort. Ballpark, ballpark, about 80%”
Puri: Exclusive communities degrade at scale due to noise and lost exclusivity
“The scale gets worse for two reasons. One is exclusivity. So if the reason to be in this group was that it's exclusive, the more people in the less exclusive it is, or, If the value is that, oh, I really like this conversation. This conversation was really, re…”
Parr: Executive network Evanta sold in 2016 for $375M on $23M profit
“They have 18,000 members and check this out. They sold in 2016 for close to three hundred million dollars. It was three hundred seventy five million dollars they sold for. And it was for 12 times profit, which means their profit was twenty three million dollar…”
Parr: SoleSavy has 5,000 members, $160k MRR, and raised $2M
“They get, because they have a group of, I think they have 5000 members now, so it's 160,000 in MRR because they have this contingency of 5000, like, really big shoe fanatics, they can probably give them special access to X, Y, and Z. They can do interviews wit…”
Puri: SoleSavy cannot scale into a $200M+ venture-backed company
“I think you did good by passing on it. I think it's a cool business for the person who owns it. It's definitely not a, as constructed right now, that I don't see how that becomes a super large business worth investing in. Worth, why they need two million dolla…”
Puri: Paid drop communities dilute value as member count grows
“Also the more people you let in, then the more people who all have access to the same information, the same tips, the same drops that they're trying to go buy, The harder it gets for you to actually go buy anything that's valuable.”
Puri: Paid communities succeed when members make financial ROI
“The key characteristic is it's not just like I'm a big fan of the, you know, the Golden State Warriors, so I'm going to join this paid community for them. Typically that doesn't work as well as if I join this group, I'm going to get tools that are going to hel…”
Puri: Excel courses rank among the highest-earning online courses globally
“Some of the most profitable online courses in the world are become an Excel master how to use Excel, become better at Excel. Those are like, if you'll go look at the charts of most profitable online courses, highest revenue online courses, Excel is always in t…”
Puri: Niche communities are the fastest side hustle to reach $10k/month
“But if I said, Hey, this is something outside your nine to five, it's a side hustle. It doesn't take up all your time and it's going to bring in 10,000 dollars a month. I would say that this to me right now is the number one way to do it. I think there are som…”
Puri: Mercury's Club LTV sponsorship converted five e-commerce companies
“So Mercury bank is the sponsor of it because that's who I would use for e-commerce projects. And they're, they have a big push in e-commerce. And so they've had at least from our group, Five different five out of the 75 e-commerce stores switched to Mercury ju…”
Parr: If rebuilding his paid community, he would charge far more money
“By the way, if I had to start over, I would have done it differently. I would have charged way more money. Because I've learned the mistakes that you have to add a ton of people to build a big business and a ton of people for certain groups isn't necessarily g…”
Puri: The clean-slate two-question test to evaluate your company and team
“So this was my test. It's if this project ended tomorrow for whatever reason, the company had to fold, would I wake up tomorrow and start working on the same project? And the second question was, if the company had to dissolve the investor, you know, the compa…”
Parr: Actively burn bridges to create forcing functions and break inertia
“The way that I get out of this is I do two things. The first is I burn bridges. So a lot of people say don't burn bridges. I say, no, I actually do burn bridges. So quit your job or move to another city or do something drastic. Because for me, I've said, I can…”
Selinger: Deep Sentinel has 2,500 customers split between residential and business
“We have about 2500 customers across the country. About half of them are businesses and half of them are residential.”
Selinger: Deep Sentinel operates with one guard per 100 properties at $100/mo
“We have a ratio of about one guard for every about a hundred properties right now. And that's how we make it so that it's affordable because it's a hundred dollars a month, kind of our starting price point.”
Selinger: Alarm market is $20B and security guard market is $20B-$30B
“So the alarm side's about twenty billion dollars. And then the guard side's like 20 to thirty billion dollars.”
Selinger: 99% of alarm company police calls are false alarms
“When alarm companies call the police and ask for dispatch, it's 99% false alarms.”
Selinger: Redfin invented interactive mapping
“Redfin's really, really cool. We invented interactive mapping”
Puri: 'Super services' scale service businesses by pairing AI triage with humans
“They should be called likes, you know, super services or something like that, because it's taking a service and it's scaling it like a superhero where it's like, oh, what if that security guard could not just watch one house, but actually could watch a hundred…”
Puri: Legacy security giants cannot build AI services and must acquire startups
“ADT and these guys, what are the other security companies, the big ones? I've looked into this before, but they're all multi-billion dollar sort of sleeping giant incumbent types that, for them to do something like this, they either have to buy you or they hav…”