Founders with Kids…Building A Paid Community with Sarah K. Peck
Founders with Kids…Building A Paid Community with Sarah K. PeckDescription
Maybe you’ve toyed with building a paid community as part of your business model. Or you gave it a shot and later shelved it because you just couldn’t make it work. Start-up Parent Founder Sarah K. Peck goes deep on how she built three paid communities:
How she chose the initial idea that morphed into her company and multiple highly engaged (paid) communities.
Why what looks like overnight success (260 applications for 25 spots) was actually years of experiments, trials and listening to a consistent audience.
How she looks at experimenting today—and why a one-year commitment keeps her focused on the best outcomes for her members and herself.
The role that lighthearted fun—joy even—can play in the success of your community and your own happiness.
The intersection of motherhood and business and finding your sweet spot between the two.
LINKS
Sarah K. Peck LinkedIn | Threads
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
BIO
Sarah K. Peck is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of The Startup Parent Podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more.
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TRANSCRIPT
Sarah K. Peck
I started interviewing folks who have big careers and are working at startups who have gone through pregnancy. That's why it was Startup Pregnant. I wanted to learn from folks. And about three years into the project, I realized that I didn't want to talk to only moms and only women. It was like, the shifts that happen when you're pregnant are just the beginning. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Like you're a parent for the rest of your life.
Rochelle Moulton
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I am so excited to welcome Sarah K. Peck to the show. So Sarah is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of the Startup Parent podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more. Sarah, welcome.
Sarah K. Peck
Oh, it's so great to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you.
Rochelle Moulton
I was having so much fun in the green room that it was like I just had to stop and hit record so we could get some of this. So we talked a few years ago on my other podcast, but I've been watching you, and I've been fascinated by what I see as a very measured and successful approach to growth and how thoughtfully you've developed multiple professional communities, at least three that I'm aware of, that are at the intersection of motherhood and business. So I'm just thrilled that we can talk about this.
Sarah K. Peck
That's really lovely to hear. It always feels, I think, on the inside, I'm sure other entrepreneurs can relate, that things are going so much slower than you want them to go. And it's taking forever, and you're trying some things, and then it doesn't work, and you try some new things. But yes, community has always been really important to me. And I have, since I was in my mid-20s, joined a number of communities that have really been supportive and helpful to me. And it's something that I really enjoy doing. It's like matchmaking. I think if I were living in a different era, I might have been a matchmaker.
Sarah K. Peck
But I just really enjoy connecting people and bringing them together. And I recently took the StrengthsFinders, and it says that one of my skills is individualization. So it's like seeing people as individuals and then really getting to know them. So I'm glad that I was doing something that I'm good at.
Rochelle Moulton
Well, yeah. And plus, you know, it's nice to have somebody come in and look at like your last 10 years of work and just be able to see it all in one fell swoop. It's a lot harder when you're doing the actual work in the trenches. So before we dive into Founders with Kids, which is your newest community, and why those two key words are compatible, would you share a little bit about how you got here? I mean, I know that you had a lot of writing and communications experience in your early days, but it looks like you've been an entrepreneur for a big chunk of your career so far.
Sarah K. Peck
No, it's so surprising to me. I never knew that that was a path you could take until you reach that point where you want to make something exist that doesn't exist, or you're tired of other people telling you what to do. And so you branch out. But my background is in psychology and then architectural design. I got a graduate degree in urban design and landscape architecture. And I worked for five or six years in that field. And one of the things that i noticed and started to observe was that these brilliant people who are dreaming up the future in visuals they're able to do plans and design.
Sarah K. Peck
were speaking in jargon. You know, when they got up and to write about what they were doing or speak about what they were doing, so often no one could understand them because it was like, well, the precipitous back channel of the blank blank is something. So, and I was like, I don't know what that means. Like, tell me in English, what is this? Speak to me like I'm a 10 year old so I can understand. And I ended up shifting and working in communications and through everything I was learning paired with some new startups at the time, like General Assembly and Udemy and other places to start teaching these skills.
Sarah K. Peck
And eventually my journey into entrepreneurship was through freelancing. And I started my own thing. I brought together a writing community. I taught folks how to write and I did a lot of ghost writing for CEOs. So taking the brilliance that people had, the deep expertise in helping them craft thought leadership essays before it was really known as thought leadership. And things evolved because I learned how to set better boundaries with clients. I learned contracting and marketing. And then I started to learn how to build a very small team. How do you have an assistant and how do you lean on consultants or other folks to help you really narrow in on what you are uniquely good at?
Sarah K. Peck
versus trying to do everything yourself. And learned a lot through that, by the way. One of the things I tried to hire out was I tried to hire writers and I did not realize how difficult it was to hire out for something that I'm uniquely good at. And I really should have hired out for other things. But in the early days, I just did not see that that was one of my strengths. I thought this was something anyone could do. And I had to do more CEO stuff and organization and operations, which is not my strength.
Rochelle Moulton
Classic.
Sarah K. Peck
So lots of learning that got me on the path of entrepreneurship.
Rochelle Moulton
So you did all those things. I almost feel like some of the communities you created followed where you were in your life stage, right? Because I'm thinking startup parent was startup pregnant first. Yes, that's right. Yeah. How did that sort of unfold for you?
Sarah K. Peck
I was working and I built a number of online writing courses and communications courses and I was partnering with some folks and running my own business. I ended up actually joining a startup, a venture backed downtown Manhattan. It was a codi
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