How Creative Crew Monetizes a Free Community with Over 4,000 Members

Creative Crew is a free community for web designers created by Brad Hussey that boasts more than 4,000 members and has a unique monetization method. It serves as both a hub for collaboration and a resource for creative agencies looking to grow their business.

Let’s dive into how Creative Crew operates.

BACKGROUND

Brad Hussey is a web designer, digital marketing agency owner and creator with a significant online presence. He runs two YouTube channels with 53.9k and 25.5k subscribers and has coached more than 600,000 students on Udemy. 

Creative Crew was a natural extension of his online presence with the focus of bringing in more revenue for freelance web designers and agencies. 

THE DETAILS

Community: Creative Crew

Platform: Circle

Members: 4100

Membership cost: Free 

Revenue generation: Sponsorship

THE COMMUNITY

Creative Crew is a B2B community specifically created for web design agencies. By targeting agencies, Brad effectively prequalifies his audience as higher-value members, which naturally increases the overall value of the community.

The community has grown to over 4,000 members, but what makes it particularly unique is that it’s free to join, an uncommon approach for a B2B niche community. This raises an intriguing question: how does Creative Crew generate revenue? Let’s explore.

When you have a highly valuable and niche audience, companies take notice. Creative Crew's main monetization method is a partnership with Wix Studio. Wix Studio is featured throughout the community, with mentions in visuals, a dedicated space within the platform, and inclusion of their products in some of the learning materials.

EVENTS AND RESOURCES

Creative Crew hosts frequent events for its members, despite offering free membership. They conduct 1-2 live classes every week and run a monthly bootcamp called “Scale Without Overhead,” a 3-day event that requires an application to join. Even the bootcamp is free, with monetization once again driven by their partnership with Wix Studio.

Additionally, Brad has created a course on Typography which also doesn't employ the traditional video-first format for courses, instead it is text-based.

Creative Crew has grouped the available resources from the community into Learning Paths allowing the members to have quick access to categories of resources. 

They also offer a video library and a resource center, which includes articles, resource roundups, and software deals. While their partnership with Wix Studio likely limits the number of other partnerships they can pursue, this could be a valuable avenue to explore further. Expanding partnerships could generate additional revenue while providing more value to their members.

One thing I noticed is the incredible unified visual identity for each post, event and banner in the community giving the community a premium feel without diving into the value of the content and connections.

Onboarding

When you join the community, you receive an automated DM from Dave - a brief, one-sentence message welcoming you and asking how you discovered the community. This is a great opportunity to guide new members toward a specific action, such as introducing themselves or exploring the "Start Here" section to get oriented.

The “Start Here” section clearly explains the community’s value drivers: 

1. To help you succeed in your creative business;

2. To connect you to other creative entrepreneurs.

Then, it is followed by a text-based quickstart guide on 9-steps you can take to get familiar with the community. 

That is followed by 6 posts that dive deeper into each aspect of the community with a text and video guide from Brad.

I'd argue that nowadays using a course feature for onboarding might work better to get people engaged. I'd also focus on generating actions from the users instead of providing an all-around explanation for every single aspect of the community. 

I'd divide them into 2 parts - a quick actionable guide to get members to introduce themselves, connect with others and potentially an additional step custom to your own community. 

Then, I’d create a separate course that dives deeper into the various aspects and features that the community offers for people who actually want that. That being said, Creative Crew has done excellent work providing members with plenty of information. 

What I really like is their pinned post on their Feed which is the page you're directed to every time you return to the community. It gives us a reminder video about how to use the community, what events are coming up and some recently shared resources.

SPACES

As far as the discussion spaces go, Creative Crew sticks to the best principles - be intentional and minimalistic. There’s a General discussion space, a Collaboration space (where the members can share any work opportunities) and a space to Share resources, tips or best practices.

All of the spaces are labeled with a single word ‘Discussions’, ‘Share’, ‘ Collaborate’ and each space group is assigned its own color-coded icon. 

Each space group is also creatively labeled based on the overall theme of the space - The Lobby for getting started and introductions, The Lounge for discussion spaces and The Lab for learning resources.

To make the community even more valuable, I’d focus on fostering 1-on-1 connections between the members. As an example, Exit Five has a member matching program. Using Matcha, they’re facilitating bi-weekly matchmaking campaigns where users are prompted to schedule 30 minute meetings based on their industries, niches and interests. A similar program could definitely be integrated in Creative Crew.

TAKEAWAYS

• Free. There are some obvious downsides to free communities (financials, level of engagement and commitment being the most obvious ones), but Creative Crew is an example that they can work with the right audience and a sensible strategy to monetization. 

• Visual identity. You’d expect a web designer community to have good design, but unified design elements and identity across the platform can seriously increase the perceived value of the community.

• Bootcamps. Frequent bootcamps are a great way to add value to the community and even increase the revenue without taking up too much time and resources from the founder, if constrained to a short time frame.