Recently, everyone has been rushing to launch online courses. However, it turned out that good money in this area is buried in courses lasting 1-2 years with high checks. And what is an online community if not a long course? 😉 Especially if its members are striving to achieve a goal, rather than just gather to chat. It seems that communities built following the example of this startup are reviving the old hype in a new format.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
Sidebar is a community for those looking to advance their careers. Not from scratch, but from already achieved heights, because members of the community can be individuals who have already accomplished something.
Despite the significant membership cost ($3,600 per year), not everyone is accepted into the community — only those who have passed an interview with the “admissions committee”.
93% of the individuals who managed to join the community claim that Sidebar has helped them make significant breakthroughs in their careers.
The community doesn’t function as one massive entity, but as a collection of small groups of 8–10 people. These groups are formed by a special AI tool that takes into account the profiles of participants and their goals—so that people of the same level with similar aspirations end up in one group. In the community, for instance, there are groups of “super leaders”, “product leaders”, “doers”, “motivators”, and “nonconformists”.
The primary tool of the community is online group meetings, held twice a month under the moderation of Sidebar representatives.
During meetings, group members should sequentially move along the “path of ascent”, which is the development concept adopted by Sidebar.
First, you declare your readiness to dedicate time and effort to this process, reporting to “your personal board of directors”, consisting of other group members.
Then you work on removing the obstacles that hinder you. Then learn new things that are beyond your previous experience.
Then set goals that you wouldn’t have dared to attempt before — and use new knowledge and a new approach to life to achieve them.
Then evaluate what you’ve accomplished — to better understand who you are and who you really want to be.
And then start the journey all over again, but from a new level.
The task of the moderators is to ensure that group members consistently set specific goals for themselves and share the results of their accomplishments with other members during each meeting.
Members of the community express their tasks not only by voice during meetings. They should enter them in their task list on the Sidebar platform and mark every achievement on the way to their completion.
The task lists of participants and the number of achievements reached are constantly displayed in the sidebar during online meetings of participants — so that everyone remembers why they gathered here for discussion.
The effectiveness of each group member’s meeting is at the very top of the community’s priority list — the duration of each meeting should not exceed 90 minutes.
For this, Sidebar has developed a special meeting structure, which is monitored by a moderator. In addition, during the meeting, a timeline of the meeting is shown on another special panel, which motivates participants to stick to the meeting plan.
The startup was founded last year, and its community currently has only “several hundred” active members. However, demand has clearly been identified, as more than 5,000 candidates are already in line to join the community.
Now Sidebar has raised its first round of investments — and immediately for 13.55 million dollars, which is very good, especially for such an early stage.
What’s interesting
The idea of communities for self-development is not new. This topic was popular at some point, but now, it seems, its popularity is beginning to revive.
For example, not long ago on Twitter, I saw that the founder of the Hustle newsletter for entrepreneurs, which was bought by Hubspot in 2021, created a new Hampton community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs.
Why did the topic start to revive? I think there are two main reasons for this, caused by just one global change — the recent pandemic and quarantine.
Firstly, the pandemic and quarantine made a large number of people reflect on what they are doing in life, and for what purpose they are doing it. This led to an unexpected rise in resignations in 2021-2022, a period even dubbed the “Great Resignation.”
However, resigning alone is not enough. One must also decide what to do next — where to grow and develop now. Many people find it difficult to handle this on their own, so they began to form communities dedicated to solving this very problem.
Secondly, before the pandemic, such communities usually met in an offline format. It seemed that no online communication could replace this.
But the same was thought about B2B sales and investments. However, during the quarantine, people were forced to sell during online meetings, and investors met with startups regarding investments in the same manner. It turned out that it works. Since then, online has become the main channel for communication and interaction in areas where it was previously considered unacceptable.
The same happened with communities. If before their members were forced to meet offline, which imposed restrictions on schedules and the geography of participants — now offline restrictions have evaporated. This has made communities much more convenient and scalable.
It’s worth noting that Sidebar helps people who have already achieved certain success to grow further. The high membership fee in the community is a barrier for everyone else.
Lately, there’s been a rise in popularity of such “not for everyone” communities. Athena Alliance – a community for women leaders, with membership costing from 2.5 thousand to 9 thousand dollars per year. This community raised 3 million dollars in investments.
Also, the community for upper-level women leaders Chief comes to mind, which attracted 140 million dollars in investments, and its valuation exceeded 1 billion dollars.
Where to run
Remote work has made people more free, but sharply narrowed the circle and reduced the frequency of communication with other people. Therefore, the topic of online communities has become quite relevant, and it’s a direction worth considering.
However, very often creators of online communities think that it’s enough to create a group or chat — and then it will somehow start up and work on its own, people will start communicating and discussing something. Which usually does not happen 🙁
Therefore, the most important components of a community are a) the goal that its members strive for and b) the presence of a way to achieve it and c) nudging and moderation in the process of moving participants along a certain path to a certain goal.
Sidebar’s structure meets these criteria. Moreover, they are targeting an audience that can pay them decent money, so they can earn decently 😉.
The relevance, structure, and financial aspect seem to have converged in Sidebar’s model, making it a quite suitable example for replication.
Indeed, it’s unlikely that such a community will be singular; there will probably be many — both very similar and slightly different ones. This implies that, by engaging in such a topic and doing everything neatly and correctly, gathering a sufficient number of members will be quite feasible.
Moreover, there was a boom in online education a while ago. All “experts” began launching courses. However, it later became clear that decent money here can only be earned with high fees and long courses, designed for 1-2 years. And what is an online community with a goal and a path to its achievement if not a very long course 😉 Especially since, as we see, high fees are also possible here.
Perhaps such online communities are a revival of the online education hype, but in a new format?
About the company:
Sidebar
Website: sidebar.com
Last round: $13.55M, 19.10.2023
Total investments: $13.55M, rounds: 1