Creating A High-Ticket Mastermind Program And Onboarding 50+ Paying Creators

Melanie Deziel

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Published: November 15th, 2023

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Melanie Deziel

Founder, Creator Kitchen

Founders

Employees

Creator Kitchen

creatorkitchen.com

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started April 2023

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Canva

G Suite

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Want more updates on Creator Kitchen? Check out these stories:

Hey there! I’m Melanie Deziel co-founder of Creator Kitchen, writing on behalf of myself and my cofounder, Jay Acunzo. We’re both international keynote speakers, authors, and respected experts in the content, marketing, and storytelling spaces. Jay is also a prolific podcaster, while I tend to stick to the written word. (Hence, I’m here talking to you. Hi.)

Creator Kitchen is a mastermind for entrepreneurs, marketers, and creators learning to craft more valuable, more original content. We ultimately teamed up to bring the mastermind to life in early 2023, and we now have 50+ amazing creators from all over the world cooking with us and mastering their craft. (By the way, we’re really into the whole extended kitchen metaphor so prepare for more of that.)

We teach members in live masterclasses and workshops, bring in inspiring expert guests, host weekly roundtable discussions and open office hours, engage in an always-on Slack community, and offer access to a growing library of tutorial videos, templates, prompts, and more. All of this is to help seasoned creators become stronger storytellers, hone their craft, and feel more confident in their creative skills.

As of our most recent member survey, 100% of members said that joining the Creator Kitchen met or exceeded their expectations, 100% of our members said they were stronger creators than when they joined, and we haven't had a single member churn.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Jay and I had been friends for probably 6 years before we ever decided to work together and launch Creator Kitchen, having interacted a ton on the speaking circuit and floating in the same professional circles.

But in early 2023, Jay and I both happened to be in a unrelated masterclass call, where we realized that we were both interested in doing more coaching, serving more senior creators focused on quality over quantity, and had a lot of shared values and philosophies.

Jay and I are two of the world’s most creative and accomplished business storytellers & content creators, with 40+ years combined experience as authors, keynote speakers, podcasters, and facilitators, including in-house creative and marketing roles at brands like Google, Hubspot, The New York Times, ESPN, and more. We realized we had been geeking out and high-fiving each other at conferences, and then going back to our separate but very similar and complementary businesses and audiences.

It was a lightbulb moment. Teaming up to create a community and mastermind for senior creators just made sense.

Jay had had the idea for what he calls a “beautiful little corner of the Internet” for quality-obsessed creators for quite some time, and I had run a few small mastermind cohorts for content creators in the past, too.

As we talked through what this could look like, Jay kicked things off with a basic sales page built in Squarespace so we could get our first beta users (at a reduced rate). It contained both of our bios, descriptions of who we thought was a fit, and details about the types of skills they would be working on as members.

The Creator Kitchen started to take shape in real time, and we started to build alongside our beta members to craft a mastermind that would serve their needs and bring them value.

Describe the process of launching the business.

What The Creator Kitchen Looked Like At First

When we first launched CreatorKitchen.com, we sourced beta members through direct outreach to our networks and audiences. We were open with our beta members and early members that we were experimenting to see what would work best for them. This made it easy for us to get feedback and to iterate as we learned and grew.

At launch, and for a few months after, The Kitchen was positioned as a membership, not a mastermind. A lot of the copy and language was focused on the monthly value, and we had a few more payment options then (monthly, quarterly) because of that positioning. We chose pricing by looking at what similar memberships charged, and what payment plans they’d offered. (We ultimately increased pricing as we added features, and reduced the number of payment plan options to reflect what was being chosen.)

Because we were trying to pitch monthly value, we were throwing a LOT at it to see what sticks. (We affectionately call this time the “spaghetti on the wall days”.) We were updating our sales page copy at least weekly, but often daily. It was a little chaotic, admittedly, but it was an important part of our process of trying and adjusting based on feedback; we wanted to trust the member data instead of just our guts.

What’s Changed In The Creator Kitchen Since Launch

One of the biggest changes we made since launching was implementing what we call “menus” (because we love a good extended metaphor). Menus are shared focus sprints focused on transferable creative skills, like personal storytelling, branding big ideas, premise development, sharing ideas through public speaking, and more.

We do 6-to-7 of these menus per year, which means we focus on a given topic for roughly 8 weeks at a time, with all the various benefits focused on that theme: masterclasses, guest speakers, roundtable discussions, tutorial videos, office hours, Slack community conversation, etc.

It created a more cohesive feel, and a greater collective focus, and helped us go deeper into our work, versus flitting from topic to topic without getting to get deep.

As much as you might like a specific feature or benefit, it’s ultimately up to your audience to tell you what’s worth starting, continuing, or stopping.

What The Creator Kitchen Looks Like Today

The Creator Kitchen as it is today is a lot more focused and better positioned as the mastermind that it is, serving as an ongoing source of education, inspiration, accountability, and community.

Here are the features that currently come with membership:

Weekly small group roundtables (Hosted by Jay), where a few members get 20m of dedicated support on whatever their key question is during a video call.
Weekly office hours (Hosted by Me), where any member can join the video call any time as needed for extra help, feedback, questions, and more.
Weekly emails with schedule reminders, links, recordings, and resources.
Always-on Slack community where members can ask questions, share their wins, support one another, and be reminded of all the various other features.
Monthly live sessions: masterclasses where Jay and I teach a subject on a video call, workshops where we offer interactive learning on a video call, and/or guest interviews where we interview an expert live on a video call while members can listen and ask questions.

Access to our content libraries:

Recorded masterclasses
Recorded guest interviews
Addition video tutorials & personal process videos
Templates & prompts to help members master the various skills needed to become stronger storytellers

All live video calls are hosted on butter.us, the content library/member site was built in Squarespace, and email is managed through Outseta.

For the members who join at the VIP level, there are also quarterly 1:1 coaching calls with Jay, as well as some other perks.

It feels like we’ve hit a good rhythm, and this batch of features seems to be working for both us and the members. That’s not to say we won’t change things up more if member data says we should, but it feels like we’ve cracked product market fit and we’re now focused on growth.

Creator Kitchen Video

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

First, it’s probably helpful to get a good picture of who our customers are. Here are some stats from our most recent member survey:

Evenly split between independent professionals and in-house creators and marketers.
Evenly split between members who focus on side projects vs. members who focus on their day job in the Kitchen
55% write regularly, 40% host podcasts regularly, 35% produce videos regularly
75% have been working (post-graduation) for 10 or more years
100% of independent professionals in the membership sell services, not products
85% serve an audience of professionals (meaning their content is about work-related topics)
They identify as authors, bloggers, podcasters, newsletter writers, speakers, artists, coaches, consultants, and more.

How Our Members Find Us

Most of our members are folks who have seen Jay or I speak on stage, present on a webinar, or heard us on a podcast. Because part of the appeal of the mastermind is access to the two of us as coaches, seeing us in action like that tends to do the best job of showing folks the value we can provide once they are inside.

Since we know that our members come to us after seeing us in action, we’ve prioritized… well… being in action.

Both Jay and I continue to speak regularly at relevant conferences and give talks on related topics, both virtually and IRL. We’ve also been giving presentations in similar membership groups and communities where we can add value. I’ve greatly increased the number of podcast interviews I do, sometimes giving 3 or more interviews a week.

It’s not always easy to track the exact conversation rate of a single event or podcast appearance, but anecdotally, it’s working well and lots of members say that they found us this way.

More measurable though: Jay has started hosting his own free and low-cost webinars and roundtable discussions each month, and roughly 13% of his attendees become members of Creator Kitchen afterward.

The other amazing thing is that our members are pleased with what we offer, so we’ve also had a good number of folks come in through word-of-mouth referrals. We try to incentivize this by offering our current members the best available discount code for their friends and colleagues and reminding them about it regularly.

These things work together as well: When one of our members’ clients asked about the Kitchen, the member suggested she join Jay’s low-cost storytelling workshop. After attending, that member’s client immediately signed up for a VIP subscription.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Our costs remain low (like, under $600/month low) since we don’t have physical space to maintain any physical products. We just have the fees associated with the various tools and software we use to keep the community running and to deliver the content. We also haven’t spent anything on advertising yet, and have relied on word-of-mouth and growing awareness through organic channels, to date.

Because of that, we were able to hit profitability while running our beta group back in March 2023, before we even officially launched publicly in April. As co-founders and partners, we don’t take a salary, and we instead split the profit each month once expenses are paid.

We currently have 55+ paying members members split across two membership tiers, each at different price points: Standard or VIP. (The second “Standard” Membership option shown below just represents Standard members who brought before us updating some settings, as well as some free accounts for Jay & me to view and test things.)

We had expected the standard membership to be, well, the standard, but the demand for VIP was higher than we thought. We had initially capped the number of VIPs at 10, and have been working to add more open VIP slots each month as we’re able to since we’ve noticed that members tend to opt for the VIP tier, over the standard membership tier, if there are any VIP slots available.

The stats we look at, as founders operating a community, are different than the typical performance metrics you’d see from an e-commerce or brick-and-mortar business. We’re not focused on driving massive amounts of traffic to our site or increasing time spent on our single public-facing landing page. We instead focus on our reach to potential members, which we increase by boosting the number of presentations and public events we do (see prior section.)

A lot of our focus is more qualitative and focused on current members. We get so excited to see member feedback that reinforces that we’re helping them or to see their praise on social media where they’re telling others about the growth they’ve experienced.

Now we plan to shift focus to growth and continue to bring in new members to the community.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Listen to the data, even if it’s telling you something you don’t like. You have to be prepared to “kill your darlings” as they say in journalism. As much as you might like a specific feature or benefit, it’s ultimately up to your audience to tell you what’s worth starting, continuing, or stopping.

We ultimately had to cut back on some of the original member benefits and features we launched with, so we could focus more on the features that are most valuable to members.

For example, one feature that I loved that didn’t cut was something we called “Co-Working.” I would open a video call for members to join, and I would moderate a series of 3-5 timed focus sprints, each ranging from 45 minutes to 60m minutes. We would mute our mics and each focus on our respective tasks, but keep our cameras on to create the IRL coworking vibe. It was fun, but attendance dwindled after a few months, and member feedback ultimately told us to focus on increasing the frequency of some of the other more valued features.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

The main member site that houses our content library is built through Squarespace. I wish I had some elaborate market analysis to point to why, but to be honest, both Jay and I run our websites through Squarespace and it just made sense to use a tool we were both already familiar with.

We integrate the Squarespace site with Outseta (an all-in-one membership solution) to manage which content on the site is gated, to power member emails, and to handle the tiered and recurring billing. We keep members informed of available coaching opportunities, recurring discussions, and live events via a shared Google Calendar.

Our weekly video calls (roundtables and office hours) and our live events (masterclasses, workshops, guest interviews) are all hosted on Butter.us, which is like a happier and more fun Zoom, with a bunch of great built-in tools that make meetings more fun and engaging: slideshows, music, polls, collaboration whiteboards, timed agendas, etc. We use Wistia to process, host, track, and organize our recorded video assets. (Jay actually appeared on the Wistia CEO’s podcast recently.)

The community portion happens on a dedicated Slack workspace, where we have separate channels for members to introduce themselves, celebrate wins, and share things that inspire them. There’s also a behind-the-scenes channel where Jay & I pull back the curtain and share the changes we’re considering, the challenges we face while building, and other things going on, well, behind the scenes. Some of the activity here is aided by Zapier.

In the background, we also use some other tools. I’m a huge fan of Notion (Jay calls me “Obi-Wan Ke-Notion”) and Jay tracks his tasks via Trello. Other tools we use sporadically include Loom, Miro, and Canva.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

We have a whole channel on our Slack community where we all share the various media that inspire us, so it’s hard to pick just one thing. But the inspiration for the name of the mastermind,” Creator Kitchen,” comes from Jay’s longstanding admiration for masterful foodie and storyteller Anthony Bourdain. He’s written about it — like here, and here — if you want to go deeper on why Bourdain influenced the way we framed the work we do in the Mastermind as making master chefs and master storytellers, like Bourdain.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

If you’re going to work with a co-founder (or cofounders, plural) be sure to do actual proper due diligence before making that commitment.

Yes, even if you’re already friends.

Yes, even if you’ve known each other for years.

Yes, even if (whatever other excuse you just thought of).

Diligence is a must.

Jay and I had known each other for 5+ years when we were considering working together, but we still checked references and interviewed each other’s past collaborators and coworkers before making the call to team up. We also spent a LOT of time discussing our respective working styles, work philosophy, priorities, financial situations, broader life goals, and more to make sure we were aligned before we got started.

Not only did this make us feel more comfortable committing to collaborating, but it also set the foundation for an ongoing collaboration style based on openness, vulnerability, and understanding of one another’s strengths and weaknesses.

I can tell Jay we don’t have the bandwidth to make that new piece of content even though it sounds like a lot of fun, and he can tell me I’m stuck in analysis paralysis, and it's time to just do the thing. And not only CAN we say those things freely, but we appreciate and expect each other to say those things to help us perform our best.