Welcome to
Build a Community Business 🚀
Start a Community Business You Love in 12 weeks or Less
A course with monthly group coaching to support you through your first community launch. Learn a step-by-step process to start a profitable and fulfilling community business.
You are a thoughtful, ambitious coach, online teacher, or membership leader...
who wants to grow a business that centers community in your own nerdy way...
and needs a clear roadmap to get started, live support, and friends for the journey.
There’s a process to building a values-aligned community business that needs less and less of your time.
We’ve taken our hands-on experience in helping online business founders scale sustainable community businesses and put it into BACB.
You’ll learn and implement the strategies that have worked for our business and for our clients.
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Design
Use your own experiences in community and connection to build a unique experience only you could’ve come up with.
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Validate
Our validation process reduces risk and increases your confidence in the success of the community you’re building.
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Launch
Launches don’t have to require sleazy marketing tactics and they don’t have to be a stressful marathon of activities.
“After running a free Facebook Group for 7 years with almost 5000 members, we wanted to explore if there was a way we could transition from a community to a community business. We had launched our community 2 months prior to joining but needed guidance (and maybe confidence) that we were headed in the right direction.
Tatiana is truly an expert in this space. I appreciated the opportunity to join Office Hours sessions to get curated support from Tatiana and the community on my questions.
We have invested more resources into our paid membership and reached a big milestone of surpassing 100 members shortly after our launch. We've also experimented with running different formats of events (like a town hall) and leveraging different platforms for marketing (like Instagram Live) thanks to the what I learned in BACB.
After all of us have been socially isolated in one way or another over the past few years, community is more important than ever. No matter where you are in your journey, BACB is there to help you every step of the way, from learning from your peers to modules that walk you through the framework of how to business your community and monetize it in a way that helps you support even more people."
Tiffany Yu, Founder of Diversability
The 12-Week Launch Process
We take through a 12-step journey in lessons and step-by-step actions to take as you prep for your launch.
Each week, you’re invited to commit to one focus as you bring together your community.
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1
Plan & set up
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2
Gather resources
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3
Your business model
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4
Validation
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5
Design a beta
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6
Regroup
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7
Marketing plan
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8
Tech stack
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9
Writing a landing page
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10
Email marketing
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11
Catch up + bonus lessons
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12
Launch 🚀
The 12-week process is meant to support you in making progress in a sustainable pace. Many of our students choose to launch much faster than 12 weeks. All lessons are available to you right away, so it’s up to you how fast you go through them.
This course is for you if…
You’ve never started a course, group coaching, or membership business and aren’t sure where to start. Or…
You already run a successful course or coaching business and want to add community to what you offer.
And community is core to the experience you want to bring to your members and students.
What you’ll learn
All the content in the program is divided into the 5 pillars of building a community business. We use these pillars to focus on setting a foundation for long-term growth.
The 12-week journey to launch take you through lessons in all 5 of these topics.
Each lesson comes with a pre-recorded video as well as written materials and exercises in the workbook. As you fill in your workbook, it becomes your launch plan and guide as you bring the community to life.
LEADERSHIP
Solidify your community values, growth mindset and level up.
The first pillar is about reflecting on how we (a very broad we) got here in the first place and how YOU got here, and what that means about the community you're building. Lessons:
• Belonging & Connection
• Gathering Your Resources
• Defining Your Values
BUSINESS MODEL
Stress test your current business model, explore new ways to structure, and position your offer for long-term growth. We'll start by learning how to identify who your ideal members are, what they're looking for, and how to find and iterate on a community offer until what you provide is attractive to potential members and feels right to you. Lessons:
• The 4 Types of Community Businesses
• Your Business Model Story
• Validation
• Member Interviews
COMMUNITY EXPERIENCE
Build an experience that doesn’t rely on you. Introduce member leadership, codify your culture, and find scalable structures that work for you. This is where you'll start to put the pieces together of how it'll feel in your community and how you can ensure that you're addressing a diversity of member needs as you determine what programs you'll offer. Lessons:
• Growth Journey
• Beta Design
• Onboarding
• Engagement
SALES & MARKETING
Explore your growth channels, build a marketing process that works long-term, landing pages, email sequences, and partnerships. How can your community business make money while staying true to your values? How is selling community different from selling other products on the internet?
This pillar addresses the unique challenges of growing a community business and how it's different from other internet products. You'll build your community funnel and design a marketing experience that takes your members on a journey that is thoughtful and ethical as you invite them in, even if you’re starting with no audience. Lessons:
• Community Funnel
• Launch Buffet
• Landing Page
• Email Sequence
• Beta Sales
OPERATIONS
The last pillar is all about the internal processes that keep your community running. You'll learn how to choose your community tools, a system to project manage a launch, and craft a roadmap for your first beta launch in 12 weeks or less. Lessons:
• Build Your Tech Stack
• Member Flows
• Your 12-week Roadmap
Live Support
Sometimes you’ll have specific questions about the unique community you’re building.
Our monthly group coaching calls are meant to get you unstuck on whatever you’re working on and answer any questions that come up as you implement the course lessons.
All of the questions submitted in advance are answered on the call, no matter how long it takes.
These support sessions usually happen on the fourth Tuesday of each month at noon ET and you’ll have access to them for 6 months.
If you can’t make it live, everything is recorded and annotated. Listening in to others’ questions is also a great way to learn answers to questions you didn’t know you had.
From our past students…
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“"I don't think I could've brought [GCL] into existence in a way that feels so organized and aligned without the support of this course and community. I can't recommend it highly enough."
Lis Best, Girls Club Collective
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“Tatiana provided a framework that grounded every step and connected every piece of the community building (and growing!) process. Her content and insights are unparalleled in this emergent industry."
Ainsley Brittain, Director of Community at MBS.works
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“The way that Tatiana lays out the content and talks about boundary setting and taking care of yourself and also communicating this as a boundary to your members was very very helpful. And the course content was amazing, I learned so much."
Nivi Achanta, Founder of Soapbox Project
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"I highly recommend this course for community builders who want to avoid the overwhelm and feel supported on their building journey. If you show up and do the work, you will make a lot of progress! Tatiana is THE expert on this and has an incredibly calm and supportive manner which makes it all feel possible."
Sonali Nigam, Founder & Community Builder at Petminded
We believe…
Community is about co-creating a new future.
Connection is a skill that we can learn and practice.
We should all start spending more of our online time in private communities instead of on social media platforms.
Founders matter and leadership isn’t interchangeable.
What brings a community together doesn’t have to be a social issue in order for it to have a huge social impact.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be risky.
Connection is valuable and people are willing to pay for it.
If this resonates, we hope you’ll consider joining us!
Join Us
It’s time to launch the community business you’ve been dreaming about.
By the end of this course, you’ll be ready to design, validate, and launch your community business.
Includes:
📝 A 12-step plan to customize to your own community business with 20+ lessons each full of actionable steps to take as you build your community business.
👩🏻💻 6 months of access to monthly support sessions where you can get coaching on your unique launch.
📙 A detailed workbook on Notion or Google Docs to follow along on.
It’s everything you need to go from zero to launch on a community business you’re proud of.
One-time purchase
$480
Hi! I'm Tatiana.
COMMUNITY STRATEGIST • BUSINESS COACH • CIRCLE EXPERT
When I was 10 my family immigrated to a suburb of NYC from a small town in Brazil. I didn't know anyone and didn't speak English. I remember feeling a deep need to belong in this new place and to find a way to be accepted.
That period of my life shaped who I am and what I care about.
Since then, everything I've done has somehow been related to connecting people. When I built out international sales territories, I did it by building deep 1:1 relationships. When I led the software teams, I prioritized building community within the team, with our users and through the product we built. In running my own community business, I constantly find new ways to help people find each other and connect.
Why am I telling you this?
Because your unique approach to belonging and connection has also already been showing up in your life. The things that make you weird, the experiences that only you can claim, and what you see clearly that everyone else is confused about... those things really matter!
I believe you should build your community business in a way that feels just right and works for YOU.
I have 15+ years of experience building communities online and off. I've personally guided hundreds of community founders in launching and sustaining profitable community businesses. And that's what I'd love to help you do too.
Love from our friends and community…
FAQs
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This is a course that teaches you all you need to validate and launch a community idea in the next 12 weeks. The content focuses not just on blindly following a playbook, but infusing your own values and ideas into a community that makes money and feels good for you to run.
At the end of 90 days, regardless of where you’re starting, you should have a beta version of your community business up and running and a clear plan on how to grow it.
The highlights:
- This course is for you if you’ve never started a course, group coaching program, or membership, or if you have, but haven’t yet built a community for that business.
- The lessons are self-paced so that you can go at your own speed. We’ve had someone launch in 14 days!
- To help you strategize, there are monthly group coaching sessions with me where you get individualized coaching.
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This version of Build a Community Business is self-paced and doesn’t include an asynchronous place to connect with others.
Our goal with this course is only one: to help you launch a beta of your community business as soon as possible. We wanted to simplify the process of launching and be able to offer it to those who are still exploring at a one-time investment.
We include monthly group coaching as an opportunity for you to get your questions answered directly. These sessions are also a contained way to meet and connect with others who are at the same stage and get inspired to work towards your next milestone.
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90 days or less! You can binge the course content in just a couple of days. The time you spend on the recommended reflections and exercises for each lesson is up to you. If you’re planning on launching in 12 weeks and are starting from scratch, I’d recommend at least 5-8 hours per week working on your business.
Note that this is not time just watching videos and doing busy work. All the recommended exercises are meant to help you take action on your business.
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We believe in being very scrappy, especially if you’re just getting started. For a bare-bones beta version of your community business, it’s possible to spend no money by using free tools, templates and doing the work yourself.
Most people spend money on a tool to host live meetings like Zoom and a community platform, which can cost less than $100 for your first month.
In our operations lessons, we share recommendations for each stage and budget.
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Our group coaching support sessions will usually happen on the fourth Tuesday of each month at noon ET.
The calls are meant to get you unstuck on whatever you’re working on and answer any questions that come up as you implement the course lessons. Listening to others’ questions is also a great way to learn answers to questions you didn’t know you had.
You’ll have the opportunity to submit questions in advance. All of the questions submitted in advance are answered on the call, no matter how long it takes.
We also take questions that come up from those who are present live.
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Your success with the course will depend on your commitment. If this resonates with you and you put in the work, we firmly believe you'll achieve the results you're looking for.
That being said, sometimes things aren't what we expect! If within 14 days of joining the course and watching the first few lessons, you find that it's not for you, email us and we'll refund you.
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You’ll have access to the entire video library as well as updates and additions to the content for as long as you’d like. You’ll also have 6 months of access to our monthly support sessions.
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Email us at hi@friendlynooks.com
“BACB has provided me with much-needed direction and accountability in my community-building journey.
Tatiana's style is both refreshing and intentional, steering away from unnecessary rush and ensuring a focused approach. What sets BACB apart is its commitment to genuine learning and development – it's not just a program; it's a true learning, developing designed for tangible results.
Tatiana's passion has played a pivotal role in shaping my own community, and the supportive atmosphere within the BACB community has fueled my confidence in creating a program that not only shines but is an enhancement to my community the Purpose Den.
This unique blend of guidance, passion, and support makes BACB an indispensable resource for anyone looking to build a thriving and meaningful community business..”