I spoke with my friend Tom Ross recently. He's the founder of Learn.Community, and one of the smartest community thinkers I know. So when we get together, we have fun looking at things from a 30,000-foot view AND getting into the weeds.

He shared an idea with me that I can't stop thinking about. He called it "responsive onboarding," and it's pretty simple to understand: Instead of onboarding every new community member at the same pace, your onboarding is shaped to the speed and needs of the member themselves.

Onboarding itself is one of my favorite subjects in the world of community building—and I like to think I'm pretty good at it. Between the work I did at Smart Passive Income in 2020-21 and in my own business since, I've helped shape what effective onboarding looks like online. However, I've always had a linear approach to onboarding: do thing A, then do thing B, then do thing C. Every member got the same onboarding instructions and within the same period of time (because I automated sequences in email and direct messages).

Responsive onboarding is catered to the individual. Instead of just telling you to DO things, I could ask you to tell me things. And depending on your answer, I may recommend you skip thing B and go straight to thing D! Not only that, you may onboard yourself in just a few hours while someone else experiences onboarding over the course of a week.

I'm obsessed with this idea. After hearing it, it sounds so obvious. I've always known that people move at different paces, but I was limited by my tools. Today, all of the tools available to us have gotten much smarter.

But then I started thinking a level higher: This responsive vs. linear idea is actually a lens I can view all of my audience, customer, and client experiences through. One thing I'm noticing in my current Build A Beloved Membership live cohort is that my students are taking my slides and call transcripts to share with their own LLMs and complete the homework. The result is that students are keeping up with the pace better and coming up with personalized, creative solutions to complex problems.

This is the future.

We're in the final stages of redesigning The Lab's member experience now. We've had the doors closed to new members for over a month, and we're planning to reopen them along with our new member experiences at the end of August.

If you're a full-time creator who cares more about building a strong business than finding the latest trending hook, get on the Waitlist. We'll be letting Waitlist folks in before we make our formal public reopening.

PS: My entire conversation with Tom was recorded and released on the podcast this week! Links to the full episode are down below.

Here’s a pattern we see constantly with creators: the content is genuinely good, the value is there, but the channel still won’t grow.

Maybe a video occasionally takes off, but you have no idea why, or how to repeat it, and so the next upload drops back to normal.

This is exactly what the 1of10 strategy team are experts at solving.

They’ve worked directly with creators like Ali Abdaal, Will Tennyson and Kallaway, generating 2B+ views and $10M+ in client revenue.

Take Nathan, a mortgage broker who had been making solid videos for years but was stuck below 1,000 views per upload. 1of10 helped turn his channel from broad mortgage content into a clear acquisition channel for his business. They identified the questions potential customers cared about, built videos around them, and sharpened his titles and thumbnails to get the right people clicking.

Within three months, he was regularly averaging 10,000–50,000+ views per video, and YouTube was bringing hundreds of qualified buyer leads into his mortgage business.

Nathan’s result is exceptional, but that process is the system 1of10 builds with clients: ongoing support from a real YouTube expert, including dedicated Slack access, regular calls, and a focus on what actually moves the needle: ideas, titles, thumbnails, and positioning.

They're selective about who they work with. But if you're serious about YouTube growth, they offer a free discovery call to explore whether it's a fit. Even if it doesn't make sense to work together, you'll walk away with real feedback on your channel.

My guest this week is Tom Ross, the founder of Learn.Community, where he helps community builders design learning experiences that actually stick. His clients have reached millions of people and generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Tom has been building online communities for 20 years, and he's been a member of The Lab since 2022.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why an application process might be the most underused retention lever in the membership world
• The “bacon medicine” framework for making your membership both sellable and sticky long-term
• Tom’s “delight, direct, connect” onboarding philosophy — and what almost every community gets wrong
• How he rebuilt his course into learning pathways, drove completion from 20% to 50%, and turned a siloed module into the main engine of community engagement

By the end of this episode, you will understand exactly why most membership churn is decided before someone joins, and what to actually do about it.

Keep going,
Jay

PS: We've just started potty training with our daughter. Keep us in your thoughts, and feel free to share any advice that helped with your kids!