Growing a passion project to $300k ARR with a $0 CAC

How Mallory Contois mastered the community-led growth (CLG) flywheel through experimentation, design and trusting her instincts

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.

My next guest, Mallory Contois, is many things: software exec (Mercury, Cameo, Pinterest, LinkedIn), INFJ, cancer survivor, instructor, proud generalist with ADHD. But perhaps the coolest thing about Mallory is that she turned a passion project — a community called the Old Girls Club — into a $300k ARR business with a $0 CAC. She did it by building a community-led growth (CLG) flywheel, which she says is “the most powerful, flexible and accessible growth lever of them all.”

Read on to learn the epic story behind the Old Girls Club — and how to apply Mallory’s CLG flywheel to any brand or business, regardless of stage, model, or industry. You can go deeper with Mallory’s top-rated Maven course, Community-Led Growth (she’s offering $100 off for Growth Unhinged subscribers with code KYLExMAVEN).

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Whether you’re building a passion project, a SaaS business or the next great consumer app, it’s time to understand community-led growth as more than just a channel. Amidst challenges across most traditional marketing channels and strategies, CLG has emerged as one that might stand the test of time. We’ll start with a story, and end with some in-hindsight learnings that I hope you can use to realize your wildest growth dreams.

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How I built a $300k ARR passion project at $0 CAC by mastering community-led growth (CLG)

Follow me back to January of 2022. We were learning to unmute ourselves on Zoom, virtual coffees were becoming a new norm, and the power of distributed virtual spaces and connection was becoming clearer by the day. Mostly, though, things were weird and uncertain.

At the time, I was the COO at an early stage gaming company. We’d just closed a $25M Series A (I know, it was a different time), and I was reflecting on my journey up until that point. As I’d moved from IC to manager to chief of staff to executive across companies, I’d gotten lonelier and had fewer confidants. As you become more senior, you have fewer peers, and even fewer of those peers are women.

I knew there were other women in senior roles that felt similarly, and the idea for The Old Girls Club was born. The truth is that I never intended for it to be a business — rather, a solution for my own challenges that I knew I could bring to life with a few quick tools. I sent an email to some of my favorite female leaders who already knew and trusted me, posted on Linkedin to gather some additional initial interest (at the time I didn’t have a following so it was truly just a shot in the dark) and spun up a free plan Slack workspace with a (very bad) logo made in Canva.

I was anxious — I felt like I was hosting a party with a group of people I really wanted to become adult friends with (you know how hard adult friends are) — so I put a lot of care into designing the Slack space before I invited anyone to join. I kept it simple — a welcome channel that explained the goals of the space and how to use each channel, and six channels that each represented a need I knew I had, and felt others would have as well.

• #member-intros: So everyone could introduce themselves and quickly find others who had similar interests to them. I encouraged folks to introduce themselves like they would at a gathering of friends, vs. a networking event.

• #help-work: So we would have an inviting space to ask for help with our work, ex. Has anyone built a P&L like this before? Does anyone have a template for this type of pitch deck? Has anyone built a referral program? etc.

• #help-personal: There would inevitably non-work related questions people would want to ask each other — those would go here.

• #help-intros: Asking for warm intros can be intimidating, so a dedicated space would help normalize the behavior.

• #open-roles: How amazing to be able to hire from a pool of driven, talented women and non-binary people who had been pre-vetted?

• #yell-in-caps-here: This was a last minute follow-my-gut add, but would turn out to become one of OGC’s pillars of success. Sometimes you just need a place to yell about stuff.

I let the ~75 women who’d expressed interest into the space, and there were immediately asks to invite others they knew. I was nervous about being the only one with eyes on potential joiners, so I spun up #member-referrals, adding a public element and additional accountability to referrals that were made.

The space grew to 1,000 members in 60 days — not surprising, given it was free, well-designed, and filled with amazing humans. The rub was that I had a very demanding full time job, and that I hadn’t intended for this to be more than a small passion project.

The only solution seemed to be to put up a paywall. I assumed most folks would leave at that point, but I hoped some would stay. I socialized a $10/month price point with the folks I thought really embodied the ideal member, and they seemed unfazed, so I did some quick research, landed on Memberful as a reasonably priced option for subscription management, and notified everyone that access to the space would require a $10/month membership beginning in 2 weeks. I explained my reasoning, explained my doubts, and brought everyone along for the ride of building the best version of this space. The response was solid, and more than 50% of members elected to stay and pay.

Amazing! Except, now I was taking people’s money and I was terrified. I hadn’t meant to start a business, but here I was, exchanging dollars for value. I took that personally, and between then and now (three years later), I committed to a slow and steady approach of consistent improvement, upleveling and building in public so it would always feel like it was worth more than what members were paying for.

I added Disco to collect information from new members at onboarding and add them to custom channels, MeetWaves to archive our chats into a searchable database, Trova to create rich member profiles and a useable directory, and Curated Connections to help members find the types of connections they were searching for. I started a newsletter digest to help members sort through a high volume of posts and re-engage at a regular cadence if they were having a hard time remembering to log in regularly.

I tried a lot of things that failed. We tried small group cohorts, but most members weren’t quite sure what to do in those groups vs. in the larger spaces where they’d get more input. We tried a new channel naming convention, but members immediately told me it was confusing so we switched it back. We tried community all hands events, but live events were so hard for this group to prioritize against their busy work schedules. Every time I could sense folks weren’t into something, I shut it down.

Today, OGC has 2,300 members paying $15/month or $130/year. We raised prices for the first time this year as I brought on a couple of amazing part-time team members (all of whom had been members already) to help me with member onboarding and virtual event logistics. It’s an incredible space that reflects every value I hoped it would from the beginning. I’ve spent $0 on marketing and I’ve learned the community-led flywheel inside and out.

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The community-led growth flywheel

I hope you enjoyed that short version of a very long story. If you skipped it that’s cool too! Here’s what I learned, and what you can take away from all this regarding driving organic, word-of-mouth led growth.

I call this process the community-led growth (CLG) flywheel — and, if you can get it spinning, it’s the most powerful, flexible and accessible growth lever of them all.

1. Develop and hone your unique perspective or POV.

None of the below advice will work if you aren’t building something interesting. It has to be interesting in format, function or fashion, and that interest is going to come from you doing the work to develop a well-informed unique POV that will catch people’s attention.

2. No growth hack will save a product people don’t love.

The good news is that designing a product people love isn’t luck — it’s skill, effort, and ego control.

• Skill: Learn the art of user experience design and user psychology. Focus on function over fashion. Understand exactly what your users are missing in their lives, and build a solution that so clearly fills that void.

• Effort: You’re not going to get it right the first time, so you have to put in the work. Talk to as many of your users as possible, forever. Understand how their needs might be changing, or how the ecosystem is affecting how they’re using your solution. Consistently evaluate whether your product is doing what they expect it to do — has it gotten too complicated? Is your messaging still resonating? What are your users asking for? Listen to them.

• Ego control: You have to marry the problem, not the solution. Many of what I thought were my best ideas for OGC failed — I let them fail quickly. Even though I’m my own ICP, I’m not always right, and being nimble has made my community feel I’m listening to them and growing with them.

3. Find your champions, acknowledge them, and activate them on your behalf.

• Find them: If you’re live with existing users, your champions are often hiding in plain sight. They’re the ones tagging you on social unprompted, answering other users’ questions in your Slack, Discord, or subreddits, stretching your product in creative ways you hadn’t imagined, or logging in daily because your tool has become mission-critical. If you’re still pre-launch, your future champions are the people already obsessed with the problem you’re solving: so clearly aligned that building with them, not for them, feels like the obvious path. At this stage, don’t think in terms of scale, but rather, think in terms of signal. You’re not chasing influencers, you’re searching for superusers.

• Acknowledge them: Reward them however you can. Sometimes a heartfelt thank you is enough. Public acknowledgement is powerful. People do still love free t-shirts. Strategic recognition turns private enthusiasm into public momentum. This isn’t about perks for the sake of it: instead, it’s about rewarding behavior that supports your growth loop: content creation, referrals, feedback, evangelism, etc. The best recognition feels earned, specific and public. It’s not about sending gift cards or generic swag, it’s about making someone feel like a hero for what they’re already doing. Some other examples of rewards you can use are:

  • Public recognition and personal brand building support via social, newsletters, product updates, or events (I have a shoutouts channel and I empower members to run their own educational sessions)

  • Inclusion in customer advisory boards or beta tester groups (I have a few private groups within OGC that I beta test new things with)

  • Tiered recognition (badges, titles, exclusive channels)

  • Co-marketing (case studies, testimonials, creator spotlights)

  • Invite-only leadership programs or ambassador tracks

  • Early access to features or roadmap sneak peeks

• Activate them: Give them the tools to effectively tell others about what you’re building, and to bring them into your universe. Here’s where the flywheel kicks in. When early champions are contributing, amplifying, and feeling rewarded, their activity becomes public, visible momentum. Some examples of activation enablement loops are:

  • Media kits or shareable assets (I helped members with copy to add OGC to their Linkedin)

  • Clear and easy invite mechanics (our #member-referrals channel created an easy and clear path to inviting others)

  • Referral programs that align with your brand identity (I’ve always opted out of referral programs because of misaligned incentives — quantity does not always equal quality — but they work for many scenarios)

  • Embedded loops in public (e.g. users sharing templates, playlists, boards, etc.)

  • Shareable experiences built into the product (collaboration, leaderboards, challenges)

4. Treat pricing like what it is — a literal exchange of value.

The guidance I always give folks on pricing is that you should be able to comfortably sit across the table from any one of your users and explain why what they’re getting is worth equal to, or more, than what they’re paying. What are some equivalent price points you can reference in the real world?

With OGC, I think folks are regularly getting at least the value, if not more, than three networking coffees per month. No matter where you live, three coffees outside your home are going to cost you around $15.

5. Vibes are real, and important.

Don’t tell anyone, but I barely look at data when it comes to OGC. There are, of course, lots of metrics you can track for this type of business — logins, engagement rate, replies, reacts, lurkers vs. participators, RSVPs, attendance %, etc.

The reality though, is the only thing that matters is how it feels to existing users and new members. Does it feel interesting, exciting, useful, unique, effective? Does it feel like a secret you can’t wait to tell your friends about? Does it fit into your life in a sustainable way where there’s no reason you’d leave?

These are the filters I run new features and programs through, as well as the existing member experience. The only data I watch closely is churn rate and referral rate — are people staying and are they telling their friends?

6. The community-led growth flywheel, if you can get it spinning, is the most powerful, flexible, and accessible growth lever of them all.

You can run it with $0 (highly recommend), or with millions behind events, content, rewards, etc. Think of it as a real-life, lower-cost version of a lookalike campaign, but instead of targeting anonymous segments with paid ads, you’re using your most aligned users to attract and activate more people like them.

It’s not just about building community for community’s sake; it’s about designing your product and go-to-market strategy so that your more passionate and active users help drive acquisition, retention, and advocacy. Whether you're building a SaaS platform, a fintech tool, or a consumer app, this flywheel helps you turn customers into champions, and champions into growth.

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Go deeper into CLG

• Join Mallory’s (free) lightning lesson on how to grow your brand with the CLG flywheel.

• Take Mallory’s course on CLG. It’s a two-week, cohort-based course on Maven teaching you how to design your CLG strategy from the ground up.

• 📖 Your guide to PLG and community [Growth Unhinged]

• 📖 Case study: Lovable’s path to $30M ARR in 4 months [Growth Unhinged]