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...