Weekend Club revenue, CEO Charlie Ward, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is charlie ward he's originally worked in ad agencies but four years ago pivoted to dec to tech becoming a product manager the new x reach researcher on the side he started a popular london indie hackers meetup called indy beers it's now part of indy london and from that evolved weekend club the weekend co-working club for bootstrappers charlie you ready to take us to the top yep absolutely all right that's not very you're also building in public via your twitter account what do you guys think now in terms of mrr so we just hit 2148 dollars in mrr about a few days ago and now let's build backwards what the heck are people paying you for what are you building yeah so we can clubs their weekend co-working club for bootstrappers um so every saturday we run one day sprints and it's for founders who have a day job but they want to get their side hustle done on a saturday so it's like a stand-up in the morning office hours halfway through the day to get some feedback and then a retrospective at the end of the day so if you're a founder and you're already building on saturdays it gives you um the structure the accountability and the kind of feedback um to basically ship your project faster and eventually be able to quit your day job but this is only on what every saturday yeah so it's run over slack and zoom um so it's every saturday it's in two time zones so we have it on gmt for european um and those in africa and also in america's time so uh 10 a.m to 5 p.m uh central time so we've got people from all over the world now this is so cool when did you sign up your first paying customer do you remember yeah it was uh october 2019. so i've it's always been on the side of having a full-time job um i recently went uh part-time um but yeah it's been about one and a half years and we've kind of picked up the pace in the last six months and how many how many i guess customers are now paying for this weekend club yeah we now have 60 paying customers 6-0 that's incredible and so how do you imagine most of these guys it's not just a club i mean it probably feels a lot like family right and you guys are like you probably celebrate when you say i finally was able to move to a part-time full-time job and i'm almost all time on my side gig right i mean these are what people celebrate yeah i mean it's one of those things where like people come for the events and accountability but they stay for the community like the format is means you meet people over video a lot and it's a great way to kind of build connections so yeah there's a lot of like fun parts a week in club as well like an active like memes channel that kind of thing but as you said yeah like there's a big part of it is like celebrating wins um you know that's a huge part of it as well and it can sometimes it's big things like um you know going full time and your project but sometimes there's little things like oh i just got it i got a customer today or something like that and that's cool and tell me a little bit more about building community right a lot of people they want to go build a community just because they want to sell 100 a month plans in a slack group right which is the wrong way to build a community how have you done this to be honest um it evolved quite naturally because i was running meetups in london for like a year and a half or so um before i started this um and so i was quite naturally kind of introducing people to each other kind of getting to know people and it was indie hackers as people i was you know personally interested in kind of getting to know um and it just kind of evolved very naturally like people said oh we'd love to we love like going for like drinks together but we love to hack on our projects in the same room and we just got it going um i've kind of about a year no maybe about three months in i realized i was in like the community world i started like meeting people who were community builders and i started realizing okay i need to kind of really think of this so look that's just coming down to like knowing really defining what your community is for who it's for and what you're basically getting people together for and once you have those things down there's a really good book on this actually get together which like talks about that basic framework um then that's the kind of foundation and then it's that there's like tons of like techniques and but ultimately the most important thing is make sure um building connections between other people it's not like a newsletter like an audience you need to make sure you're naturally building those connections and it scales beyond just you having to introduce people and you know a lot of people you look like a country club right they're paying a hundred thousand dollars a year for sort of axes do you ever look at this and go you know i i wonder if this would actually deliver more like you could reinvest more into the group if you made more money from it are you charging too little currently yeah i wouldn't say i'm charging too little um i think we probably charge on the slightly higher end of like kind of um bootstrapper-based communities that i've seen um but the reason we do that is like we can just offer a much better service um for that like as you touch on with like country clubs not saying we're trying to be like that but i just think we can offer people a lot more and also make it a lot more sustainable if we charge a bit more money originally i never planned on charging for community um you know i i used to think i would never do that but i realize i can just offer a far better service um if we do that and it's not like way more than everyone else it's just like a bit more and it means like i think people know we're going to be around like um like i think quite a long time something i struggle with with our slack community is when we do uh live uh zoom meetings right or things it's really hard to get everyone obviously to commit to like a certain time and that's only for an hour you've got these weekend sessions that start with a 10 a.m stand up and end with a 4 30 p.m retrospective do you get the larger majority of these folks are paying you actually live for six hours every weekend no people don't come every weekend like um it kind of it i wouldn't say it's that consistent like you probably get on average because you've got to remember it's also split across two different time zones as well i'd say on average each per member attends um two a month out of like obviously four or five a month basically um but it depends people people sometimes go in cycles like sometimes they'll do like three in a row then you won't see them for like a month or some people might just do it consistently every other um every other week or something like that do people do you see really high sticky rates do people churn frequently um no the churn rate in the last three months is about three percent um it's pretty low per month or over the fourth three months over the full three months okay got it so that's what three six nine that's like about 12 percent annual return something like that um oh actually you know what i don't think it is that high um lower that's incredible though lower than that's really incredible i mean there's a lot of people with these membership plans or these cohort based courses where the churn and the refund rate is way higher than that yeah i mean you're doing something special here that's what i'm trying to dig here and figure out it's you know honestly it's probably just it's you uh i i think it's because we've you know from the original community in london we already had like a really strong kind of group of people that like to know each other and like um you know and i think when people join they can just feel that they can feel that there is like a real community where people are like interested to hear like what you're working on and helping you even if you've got some people who are like you know much more advanced than others and in terms of their journey and they're very happy to just uh you know take time to help people out yep now are these always the founders in your groups or could these be like part-time people working on someone else's idea um so it's pretty much always founders yeah like 99 so did you have um i'm close with the console guys did jacob or matt or one of mack or one of them in the group oh very cool very cool they're they're they're they're obviously growing super quick so that's a nice success story you can point to yeah yeah it's a it's a great tool uh console do you use them to manage a weekend club um i'm just getting set up right now but you know from what i've seen so far i'm impressed by it very cool so how do you how do you grow this thing right or is that even an objective right like how do you grow this yeah well my objective the end by the end of the year is about 5kmr and that's roughly my ramen profitability if because i'm in london right so if i was in like thailand it'd be lower but it's quite high here um but in terms of growing to be honest we're picking up our growth efforts we haven't actually done a lot a lot of it's like either word of mouth or it's from um like posting on indie hackers and you know i do twitter threads on uh building in public and that's a lot of it but we haven't done much like original content we haven't really done ads so there's actually quite a lot of like you know avenues or levers to grow i think yeah this is super super compelling um what what sort of advice would you give for companies that are already established that are trying to launch a community right that usually they're way too focused on like conversions and they think about it way too much from an economic perspective what advice would you give them to launch something like weekend club but for say their own business yeah i mean this is i'm not as familiar with like uh brand communities like businesses launching community there's a really good book on this called the business of belonging by david spinks like deep dives on this okay um but generally speaking i think the key is just to kind of be clear on like um you know who you're who the audience is this why they are building a community like you know have giving people a reason to be getting together and just making sure it's not like too transactional basically it takes a long time to build an actual community where people feel like a sense of of belonging and just really kind of think long term about it and understand it is an investment but it can really pay off it can pay off in terms of like um like helping with churn helping reduce costs and customer feedback um can be helpful for marketing um and you know i think there's an example of duolingo like they get their members to create their own events to practice like languages and they there's like tens of thousands of these events a year and there's no way they could do this but with employees the only way you can do it with community so they're starting to get like uh really concrete examples of like community affecting business metrics so i think a lot more brands will do that in the future that's interesting now i think you'd be way more dangerous here if you're able to do this full-time i think you build something amazing um it's really sort of a capital question i mean if someone came to you and said hey listen here's 10 grand here's 20 grand will you quit your fault like your gig and like build weekly club full time and would you would you look at doing something like that or no um i think i'd have to think about it um i mean we've had an acquisition offer in the past but um i don't think we've really spoken investors yet but i'd probably consider it you know see what the terms are and that kind of thing you know i'm enjoying my kind of freelancing at the moment but like ultimately you know i can't i don't know some full time and we can club i'm not gonna take take us to the next level yeah yeah um what was the context of the acquisition offer what were they wanting to buy i mean it's really you right well um you know i didn't um i rejected it and so we didn't go into like the real details but it was basically i i think the terms would be so they would acquire like you know obviously we can club and the contracts and customers etc but i would continue to run it so i imagine there'll be some kind of i don't know if there'll be an iron out or whatever it would be but we didn't get that far but it would be for me to continue running it basically yeah yeah very cool man let's wrap up here with your famous five you've already given us two great books to read get together in the business of belonging any other business books you really like um i mean a pretty obvious one like the lean startup but everyone's read that at this point right yeah all right number two is there a founder you're following or studying i found one following us or studying um i like what andrew wilkinson is doing um sorry i probably shouldn't say that on here actually no i i do not i do not mind actually you know andrew's never met me and and it's it's fair right if you only read about me online and you've never met me in person you would think i'm this crazy person but know we can get like anyway it just pops into my head but like i'm quite interested in like um like what kind of my private equity kind of stuff and i've been quite interested in like kind of um the micro pe side of stuff so i've been looking at that recently i mean i haven't acquired anything but i'm just like still learning but i think that kind of portfolio approach is interesting yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building weekend club oh my favorite online tool i mean i mean the obvious one's slack because like everything's happening in slack um but like there's a tool i use a lot called whimsical which is really good for um prototyping stuff um but also for like um doing workflows and things like that um user journeys and so i i use that a lot thinking about like improving flows and stuff number four how many hours of sleep sleep do you get every night i probably do get a solid eight at night to be fair and charlie what's your situation married single kids um i have a girlfriend okay not married no kids yeah exactly that's not okay that's right and how old are you that's two 32. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 what i wish i was doing when i was 20. no no something you wish you knew hmm um honestly just like don't feel like um you need to be in this like this box that you're currently in and you're currently you can completely change your trajectory to something totally different um you know just and to follow your interests and to follow your natural curiosity i would say and i ended up doing that but i probably started doing it a little bit later than i expected has every saturday 60 folks building side projects and sas companies get together they do a full sort of sprint session together six hours long it's all because of this guy charlie 60 of these folks again paying about 35 40 bucks a month about 2 100 bucks and or 2 500 bucks in mrr today he's looking to scale to 5 grand a month so he can quit his full-time gig and build weekend club full-time a great community we'll see what happens charlie thanks for taking us to the top awesome thanks nathan great to be on there one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on 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