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In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk to Dr. Katy Peplin about how to run a successful online community for graduate students. We discuss how to build this type of community and how to keep its members engaged. We also talk about how to keep going when engagement challenges appear.
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Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #21 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics change the world through online business. This is a show where we provide you with the systems and framework needed to create your own online business, so you can increase the impact you make in the world. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking to Dr. Katy Peplin from the Thrive PhD community about how to run a successful online community for graduate students. Katy, thanks for coming on the call.
Katy Peplin: 00:38
So excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chris Cloney: 00:39
Awesome. Dr. Katy Peplin founded Thrive PhD because she believed that grad school could be better and that grad students could live human lives while going through grad school, which is a myth that I’ve heard quite a bit as well, so I’m happy somebody’s fighting that fight.
Katy has a Master’s from the University of California and a PhD from the University of Michigan. I know her from the Self-Employed PhD group, which I have mentioned a couple times on the podcast, and it’s been a couple years now that we’ve been watching each other’s businesses grow.
Chris Cloney: 01:07
I’ve seen Thrive PhD go from pre-launch to picking names to what it’s become today, and I appreciate the way Katy does business. She’s very open. She’s very helpful. She’s also a beast on social media, if you follow her on Thrive PhD, on Twitter or Instagram. She’s one of the people I strive to be like on social media, but we’re not quite there yet with GradBlogger.
Chris Cloney: 01:28
In this episode, we’re talking about how to run a successful online community. I want to pick Katy’s brain about what Thrive is and the technology behind it. What do you need to be thinking about if you want to build this sort of community? You’re thinking about how this is part of your business. As always, we’ll have the transcripts uploaded at the show notes, which will be at gradblogger.com/21.
Chris Cloney: 01:48
We’ll pull out a cheat sheet with tips for increasing community engagement inside of a community like this, and we’ll pull that through this discussion. So, Katy, I think a good jumping-off place here is- what is Thrive PhD today? Then we’ll get into your background a bit after that.
What is Thrive PhD?
Katy Peplin: 02:03
Yeah, so Thrive PhD is the overarching brand name that grew out of a community that I started for grad students just about a year and a half ago. Thrive PhD, the community, is a 12-week program for grad students where there’s daily accountability and, also, curriculum. We cover everything from how to do a diverse career search to how to optimize your schedule and how to deal with stress and anxiety.
Katy Peplin: 02:30
However, the magic sauce is the community members. You have a small group inside of the community. I think about it a lot like a summer camp and then a cabin. So, everybody’s in the same summer camp in Thrive PhD, but then you have a small cabin of about eight to 10 people, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less where you get to know that cabin well.
Katy Peplin: 02:52
So, inside of that cabin, there’s a daily accountability post on weekdays where people can say what’s working, what isn’t, and ask for support. But then there is also the benefit of the big camp, so we do have coaching calls with everybody. Once a week, we post those. There’s the curriculum that I mentioned. There are big network-wide threads, and it’s been a successful cornerstone for what’s now grown out of that, which has been online courses and some individual coaching.
Katy Peplin: 03:23
In the future, maybe all sorts of other things will be done too. It’s always growing and shape-shifting with that community at the center.
Chris Cloney: 03:30
Awesome. So, the core element is a 12-week program, plus curriculum, plus community, and having people to support you while you’re making these decisions and moving through life. Do you run it every semester or something like that?
Katy Peplin: 03:47
Yeah, so we start right about the first week of every quarter, so January 1st, April 1st, July 1st, and then October 1st. The secret is that you join it for 12 weeks, it’s the base price, which I’m happy to talk about pricing and stuff because it’s complicated with communities.
You do have the option to continue and repeat the program as many times as you like. We have a couple of people who have been in the program since my very first beta, and then we’ve had even more people who have joined it and then graduated or moved on to whatever is coming next.
Katy Peplin: 04:23
We have a whole program called alumni where people can stay engaged in the community if it’s useful for them as long as they need.
Chris Cloney: 04:32
Very cool. I want to get into a lot of the background for Thrive on technology, on pricing, like you mentioned, those sort of things. Before we even get into that, though, how did Katy Peplin end up creating a community in the first place? How’d you get started online and where did Thrive even come from?
Can You Tell Us How You Got Started Online And How Thrive Came About?
Katy Peplin: 04:47
With everybody’s career story, business story, there are 1,000 different ways to tell the same story. I ended up in a city because I’m married to a partner with a very specialized skill set and knew that I was going to need to have some flexibility in terms of what I could do because I was probably not going to have full and total control over the geographic location of my family. So, I trained extensively as a PhD student in what’s called in the field of educational development and professional development. I was a teacher for teachers, basically.
Katy Peplin: 05:25
I consulted with people in teaching. I did a lot of work and researched how to build inclusive classrooms, have inclusive practices in your teaching, and use technology effectively. At the same time, I was doing my PhD, and I was in a group that I found useful. It was a place for me to go every day. It became part of my routine. I would say, “This is what I’m up to. I got to know some of those people.”
Katy Peplin: 05:52
All of the people in my group, however, were frustrated by the fact that it was stale and that any of the meaning that we got out of it, we were bringing to each other as opposed to the things that the platform was setting up for us. As I was thinking about what I wanted my business to be, I decided that I wanted to create a space for graduate students to meet each other. I wanted to provide a curriculum and do the work of facilitating, but I also wanted to build one-to-one relationships between students as much as I wanted a relationship between me as a coach and grad students as a client.
Katy Peplin: 06:40
I’m definitely involved in Thrive. I comment on everybody’s progress every day and run work-togethers, and I’m definitely present. But if I were to, say, take a sick day, the community continues on because I’m not by any means the sole meaning-generating person there.
Chris Cloney: 07:00
Yeah, I think there are some important points there. You were saying that your journey through grad school felt a bit stale, and that the real support was coming from the community, from your peer connections, from your peer groups, and now you look to generate that for others today through this community, which I think is important. You’re not just making this up and creating some idea and then trying to sell as a business to the world. You’re going for a need that you’ve identified because you’ve lived it.
Katy Peplin: 07:28
Yeah. I have a poster that says, “Create the things you wish existed,” and that is my motto for my business. It’s the litmus test that I run all of my products through. Is this something that I wanted to have existed when I needed it? This is definitely my first and most robust path towards making what I wish I’d had as a grad student.
Chris Cloney: 08:01
I love it. The power of that affirmation is pretty important, so I’ll even highlight it. I do that all the time. Katy remembers the days when I had motivational posters and tons of whiteboards and lots of plans. I’ve cleaned that up a bit, but I always try to keep something in my space to remind me. Right now, for me, it’s about certain individuals who run their business in a certain way.
Chris Cloney: 08:28
The question right in front of me asks, “Would such-and-such do this today or would such-and-such make this decision?” It’s a constant reminder when you’re growing your business. There are a lot of moving parts in GradBlogger and DustSafetyScience and those motivational quotes are important. I encourage that.
Katy Peplin: 08:57
Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely a lot of power in making it easy to remember the things you want to remember whether that’s the stuff you need to do that day or the overarching things you want to stay in alignment with, is how I would describe it.
Chris Cloney: 09:15
100%. So that’s a lot of background on the Thrive community. I think it’s important because I want to encourage people to check that out. I’m on Katy’s email list, so I see every time they open.
I haven’t been a member of the community myself, as I’m no longer a grad student, and I’m not sure if the committee’s only for grad students, but it’s interesting to see it grow and develop, and I want to dig into how it got set up. What has been the biggest challenge challenges of growing the community?
What Challenges Have You Encountered Growing the Community?
Katy Peplin: 09:47
I think the first biggest challenge was that when I entered the academic coaching space, I was not the first person to coach. I also won’t be the last person. There are definitely dissertation coaches. There are all kinds of coaches. So, the first question was, “What is going to make my offering different?”
For me, the answer was that it would be a space that was easy to access in terms of obligation and pricing. So, I have very specifically chosen to work with graduate students.
Katy Peplin: 10:27
One of the reasons you’re not in Thrive PhD is because you are not a grad student. We do have some postdocs, and we do have a little bit of flexibility, and I’m thinking about expanding that audience, but at least right now, it’s important to me to keep my offerings directly for and about grad students because it helps me with scope creep, right?
The instant I start talking to all academics, my message gets a little muddled, so I think the first thing I thought was, “What’s going to make this specifically for grad students and what’s going to make it specifically mine?”
Katy Peplin: 11:01
I said that if I was going to do grad students, I was going to keep it at X price. Right now, it’s $10 a week, and I’m committed to that $10 a week being the upper limit. I know there are many grad students for whom $10 a week is not nothing, and I take that investment seriously. So, I work hard on my end to make the management of the business as streamlined as I can, so that I can justify the prices that I have.
Katy Peplin: 11:38
The hardest thing for me to do is balance the running of ThrivePHD and providing coaching at this price point specifically with what that means in terms of my time to money ratio. So, I would say that the second biggest challenge is that I wanted to take very seriously the idea that this was going to be as far as I could make it, knowing that I was going to continually fail at this inclusive space. I wanted it to be accessible, I wanted it to be available to people in different situations, and there was going to be space to absorb that.
Katy Peplin: 12:30
There are people in the community who are unemployed and looking for jobs. There are people who are underemployed and adjunct in between campuses. There are people who have families. There are people who are caretakers. There are people who have full-time jobs. There are people who have full-time jobs and they’re secret. So, there are a lot of different things that impact somebody’s ability to do grad school, so I wanted to make a space that could hold all of that.
Katy Peplin: 12:56
But for me, part of the danger in having a space where people can be open is being able to protect that information. Anybody who’s ever had an anonymous Twitter account knows that you can be a lot more open if your account is not linked to your professional identity.
I searched high and low and looked at a lot of different options whether it was building it myself or using Facebook groups, but I ended up prioritizing, building a platform in a space that wasn’t linked to social media.
Katy Peplin: 13:32
My users can set their own usernames. The only thing I need to know is their email and their username and then that’s it, which means that I regularly forget where people are located and what their real names are. Sometimes people give me a shout-out on Twitter, and I’m like, “I have no idea who this person is,” and then I respond and I’m like, “Oh, you’ve been in this community for 16 months, and I don’t know because I see you as this other avatar.”
Katy Peplin: 14:01
I would say that the two biggest challenges were “How am I going to price this in a way that feels inclusive?” and “How am I going to set it up so that it’s a space where people feel like they can bring themselves to?”
Chris Cloney: 14:13
Yeah, I think there are a couple things there. You mentioned one key thing that I want everyone to think about when they’re getting into this online business space, because a lot of people start with a service they can provide or create a product or a course or something and try to push it into the world. The first question you need to ask yourself is, “Why am I unique? What makes me special or what makes me different?”
Chris Cloney: 14:42
Then you need to find the audience that your offering applies most to and don’t let yourself be- you said the word “scope creep.”
When I started, I needed to decide whether or not I should only go for PhD students as my main audience or if I should do something more general. When I say students, I mean, people who have PhDs. I decided on my audience being people with PhDs to avoid that sort of scope creep.
Chris Cloney: 15:11
I think it’s an important point. Then there are the challenges that you’re mentioning around pricing in an inclusive space and allowing anonymity. Those are all values-based decisions, and they may not apply for everyone. You need to do some soul-searching there. I would suggest that you set yourself up with some struggles on a business sense that you don’t know who your customer is in some of the cases, right?
Chris Cloney: 15:36
That’s okay. It’s just the way that things get set up being anonymous upfront like that. But I appreciate you sharing the struggles. Those are struggles that you’re going to come up with if you’re getting into the space and creating your own communities. I’m sure there are other people on the call right now who are listening and going, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about doing this sort of community, and I had those same issues,” so that will resonate with them.
Chris Cloney: 15:57
So $10 a week is your pricing, but what would you say to someone who would like to pay more for extra help or more help in certain ways. Have you thought about that a bit?
Katy Peplin: 16:12
Yeah, and that’s the reason why ThrivePhD has expanded beyond the community into individual coaching and other places. There are some people who start with me in the community, and then sometimes we move into an individual relationship on top of that or in place of that. There are definitely people who are like, “I want to go deeper into this topic than the curriculum does,” and I’m like, “Great. I’m happy to put this through.”
Katy Peplin: 16:40
However, I am also always thinking as a business person. I ask questions like “How am I going to make this sustainable for me, one person?” The real rub for me is that any time I’m doing things one on one in real-time, it becomes a real question of pricing. Even though it’s an incredible value, the amount that I would have to charge in order to make a one-to-one model work for the majority of my business is something I’m not comfortable with.
Katy Peplin: 17:14
So, if X number of people say, “I want to know more about how to set up a dissertation chapter,” I can say, “Okay. Well, I guess it could work individually with people one on one as an editor,” and that would have to be pretty expensive, or I can spend a certain number of hours up front making a course about it, and then I can release it, so that people can access it on their own time, and they’re not beholden to my schedule and my constraints.
Chris Cloney: 17:43
I love that you’re thinking through that because I’ve seen communities where that’s been a big detriment: you don’t provide for the person who wants more help and can pay more for it, and then they get stymied too. No matter what your community is going to be, there’s always going to be that 10% of your audience that wants to pay 10 times more, so that’s a challenge. I like that you’re creating these courses to address those because then you’re creating assets for the business as well.
Chris Cloney: 18:13
Those courses can be released as evergreen assets, and their lifetime value is a lot more than just the one-on-one hours you could spend with somebody.
Katy Peplin: 18:23
Absolutely. People join the community because they’re drawn to me and the way that I think about things, and there is always this tension, and this is where I see a lot of people who build communities struggle. They think, “I want a community where people can support each other, but people are there for me, the expert.”
I want to create a community around X skill that I am helping people build, but I make a pretty clear distinction when I’m coaching in my community. These are things that I expect peers to help each other with.
Katy Peplin: 19:03
I expect that a peer could say to another peer, “Good job. You met your goal that day,” or, “I’m so excited,” or to follow up on a life thing that’s happening. I don’t expect peers to be able to say, “Here’s a thing that you posted about what’s going on in your life this week. Here are four different strategies to try.”
That’s my job because I’m the coach. But if you are building a community around how to proofread your own writing, for example, there are some issues that people can help each other with, but what’s the incentive for them to do that?
Katy Peplin: 19:42
If people in the community are paying to access you and your knowledge in a more cost-effective way, then the community part of it is never going to work because it’s just a forum for people to ask you questions. There’s a lot to think about in terms of the dynamics, and that’s where a lot of my skills in classroom development and curriculum development shine.
I’m used to thinking, “Okay, I made the space. Now, people, go be a community,” as well as “How do I nurture those interactions? How do I structure things so that those interactions are easy for people to make? And how do I clearly delineate how people are supposed to interact with each other?” Because very rarely do people just figure it out in the way like you assume.
Chris Cloney: 20:37
Yeah, having run a 300-member Facebook community (GradBlogger Connect!) for over two years now, I know that it gets very difficult to manage, and it grows in its own, right? The community members are not children, but the community itself is like a child. You watch it grow and blossom and change, and as the community owner, you’re there to guide it, but you don’t have full control over how that grows.
Chris Cloney: 21:02
You mentioned a couple things that I wanted to dig into. I want to present some tips that people can use to increase engagement in their communities, and you mentioned one part of this is just nurturing the interaction and getting people to connect. Do you have some ideas and things you’ve tried that have worked to increase engagement?
What Tips Do You Have For Increasing Engagement?
Katy Peplin: 21:19
Before I address that, I’m going to say that all of these tips fall underneath the number one rule that I have for community engagement, which is to make people have a reason to be in that space. Anybody who’s ever made a website knows that in order to drive traffic, you have to have a relationship where your users expect a certain amount of content to be released on a certain schedule, and then you uphold your side of the bargain by delivering that, and communities are no different, right?
Katy Peplin: 21:52
If you only update the material in that community once every month, but you’re expecting that people are going to be there every day, it’s a mismatch. So, all of these things fall under the umbrella of “have people have a reason to be there,” but I think that encouraging side-to-side interactions can also be helpful.
Katy Peplin: 22:16
There was a question in the community the other day. One member wanted to learn R, and because certain groups are private, I had to go in and say, “Oh, well, X member works in R pretty regularly,” and I tagged them in that question. I could also facilitate like a group chat: “These three people are all interested in R. Maybe you guys can have this space.” So, sometimes it’s about creating the connection and then letting people talk as they will, like a meet-up.
Katy Peplin: 22:49
It’s like setting people up on a date, but it’s also encouraging and adding positive reinforcement when you do see those interactions happening. If somebody posted a question and then another member answered it. I would probably go out of my way to thank that member for answering that question, just so that they know that that effort is seen and appreciated. The more that you model that behaviour, the more it tends to spread.
Chris Cloney: 23:20
Yeah, I love it. There are a lot of good points there. Early on in the podcast, I talked about the book Tribes by Seth Godin. When he talks about creating this movement, there’s a big emphasis on allowing the community to speak with each other and that a community will be stale and won’t move forward unless you allow them to do that.
Chris Cloney: 23:47
A lot of these things you’re talking about: engaging with people who are highly engaged already, saying thank you and trying to encourage that is one way. Just connecting with people when you think they can help each other is another.
Going back to your thoughts around some of the challenges of identifying gaps in knowledge in the community, what everyone’s asking for, and creating that, I’m part of a community for online business that does that quite well. Every month, they do a training for the community members, and it’s based on the questions that we’re asking.
Do you have a specific onboarding process, like, “You’re new to the community. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. I’m Katy. This is what you should do next, and this is how you get involved.” Is that part of the workflow?
Katy Peplin: 24:40
Yeah, I guess I wasn’t explicit. I do run Thrive PhD on Mighty Networks, which is a paid service. In case anybody’s curious, I’m usually pretty open about how and when I do things. I’m in the middle tier of Mighty Networks, so not the highest tier and definitely not the free version in case you want to know, like what my tech is, and I also paid for a Zoom subscription, so that I can have longer chats with people. But those are the only two paid things that I use for Thrive PhD. That’s it.
Katy Peplin: 25:15
It’s part of how I keep my costs low. In Mighty Networks, you can set up a sequence of articles that will either be e-mailed to people or be more visible in their feed, so I have a “Welcome to Thrive PhD. Here are all of the rules.” I do have a member agreement that says “These are the codes of conduct. It’s just that everybody is clear about that.” I do onboard them into their small cabin, like I talked about, and there are getting-to-know-you questions to build rapport as much as I can.
Katy Peplin: 25:48
I would say that I spend more time in Thrive during those first two weeks than I do anything else. I’m very careful to say, “How’s it going?” I also follow up with people, to tag people and things. I reinforce the idea that I’m invested in them. Learning how to use this space effectively is key to people feeling like they can be comfortable enough to just jump right in.
Chris Cloney: 26:25
Yeah, you probably find the holes in the system pretty quickly if you’re using it yourself. The things that annoy you are going to annoy your community members, and in Mighty Networks, you may not be able to change some of those things, but you may be able to come up with information that can point people in the right direction or even a frequently asked question or something to alleviate them.
Katy Peplin: 26:44
To keep the community as fresh as possible, I have a weekly coaching call where people can submit questions, and we talk through things. There is also a weekly article that comes out, and that’s usually much more directed like, “Here’s something that I saw coming up for everybody this week” or “Here are some thoughts.”
Chris Cloney: 27:11
In my own community, I use polls and get-to-know-you information where people can easily provide opinions. They’re a great way to get more engagement. Another good way is to allow people to share their history. This is one area where Facebook does not shine.
Chris Cloney: 27:36
It’s very hard to track historical information. Other communities I’ve been a part of do it well. You could create your own thread and maybe track your own progress. You create your own thread and say, “Hey, this is who I am. These are my goals for the next three, six, nine months,” and then in that thread, you post your progress on the goals. That allows somebody else to look at your history and say, “This is what this person’s done” and get to know you a little bit. Allowing people who track individual history is a great feature.
Chris Cloney: 28:10
I’ve seen it done in Mighty Networks. I don’t think it’s the perfect platform for it, but it can be done with some threading. In the GradBlogger Facebook group, we have a sharing post says, “Share something you’ve created or you put in the world.” In Thrive, this could be like, “Share your biggest achievement this week or share your one goal for the week that you want to get done.”
Chris Cloney: 28:38
Those are some other thoughts I had on ways you can increase engagement in your community. Are there any other ones that might be worth trying to get out there?
Katy Peplin: 28:48
Yeah, like we definitely have a weekly wins thread, but I think that the most important thing is not so much the content of the threads. Yes, there are certain kinds of things that get more engagement than others, and you should always aim to replicate the things that have the most engagement, but keeping things consistent is also important.
Katy Peplin: 29:11
There are certain people who check in every morning. There are certain people who do it at the end of the day, but you need to set up your things so that they can be as flexible as possible. It should not be a case of, “This is your 15-minute window, and if you miss it then you’re out for the week” because that is exclusionary.
Katy Peplin: 29:52
Keeping things open and recirculate them so that people can adjust their behaviours, so that this fits into their life as opposed to trying to fit their life around your schedule.
Chris Cloney: 30:06
No, it makes a lot of sense. Those are great tips on how to improve engagement inside a community. I think you could use those whether you’re running a Facebook community or whether you’re running this as part of your business. They’re all things that could and should be integrated. I hope the listeners take a lot away from that. I know you’re very open about building your business, so I thought of a question that came up because I’ve experienced it myself.
Chris Cloney: 30:31
When I was growing my Facebook community, I became very attached to it for a while. When things weren’t going on, when things were quiet, when people weren’t around, it beat me up a little bit. How do you detach yourself a bit? You want to deliver for people, but at the end of the day, if you feel beat up, that’s not a good way to go either. Do you have any thoughts around that?
How Do You Respond to Engagement Challenges?
Katy Peplin: 31:08
It’s definitely hard. I’ll be open and honest and say that the Thrive enrollment continues to grow, but it’s not a linear path. Some sessions are better than others.
I’m lucky that I have a core group of users who are invested in the platform and helped me. It definitely wouldn’t be the space that it is without them. But it goes up and down. Sometimes we have four new groups, and sometimes we just have one new group. It does fluctuate, and it’s easy to take that personally.
Katy Peplin: 31:40
So, the question that I always ask myself is, “Am I upset about this because I know that I’m not doing what I need to show up in the space that I built? Or am I feeling good about what I’m bringing?”
This is a natural reaction to the ups and downs that are always going to happen. I find that getting support from my peers and people who I look up to helps me show up in the space. I have a mastermind group full of the most amazing badass people. We support each other, so I can say, “Okay, I’m feeling low about this. I need to check this with a group of people who are separate from my business.”
Katy Peplin: 32:30
We can work through that because it’s not the job of my community to make me feel confident about my business. The job of my community is to uplift its members and for me to hold that space for them.
Chris Cloney: 32:40
Yeah, your job is to show up, right?
Katy Peplin: 32:43
My job is to show up in the way that I said that I was going to, if not above and beyond. I would say that it’s definitely natural to go through cycles of thinking, “This isn’t working” or “This feels stale,” but if you’re more invested in the metrics, remember that metrics are only so useful. There’s a lot of wisdom in the idea that you have to collect enough data for that thing to be significant. I ask myself if this flip is statistically significant or could it just be an off-week or an off-session.
Chris Cloney: 33:19
Yeah, sure. You need to detach yourself a bit from it in order to come up and show up the next day to be helpful again. So, I appreciate you going through that.
Chris Cloney: 33:38
Just to close off, I want to ask you the following question. If someone’s interested in building their own community today, what’s the first step they should take towards this type of vision for their business?
How Should Someone Start Out?
Katy Peplin: 34:01
The amazing part and the dangerous part about starting a community is that it’s incredibly easy to do so. You can have a Facebook group in 30 seconds if you wanted. I would say sit down and make a list of the things that you want your users to get from that community and then say, “Which of these things are from me, which of these things are from each other, which of these things are from resources that I can put in there?”
The clearer you can get about the aims of that community, then the more specific you can get. The more you can build the platform to deliver those aims as opposed to just saying, “I want a community in setting up the space,” and then being like, “Okay, what do we do in here?” Set up the space so that it helps you do the thing that you want to do.
Chris Cloney: 34:59
I love it. That’s a great tip, and I think that’s a great place to leave off on. I would encourage anyone to go check out Katy. The website for Thrive PhD is www.thrive-phd.com. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram with just ‘Thrive PhD.” I would follow her on there because just watching her on social media, I know that you’ll learn a lot about how to interact with your customers, how to be open, how to interact with your audience.
Chris Cloney: 35:31
If people are interested in learning more about Thrive PhD, is there one place they should go?
Where Can People Learn More About Thrive PhD?
Katy Peplin: 35:40
I would say go to the website and browse through it. I am also pretty approachable and responsive on a variety of different platforms, so you can send me a DM. I also offer free 30-minute slots for people.
People hop onto my schedule to ask things like, “Hey, can you look at this community and see what’s working?” or “Hey, I have this specific question.” People are welcome to pick my brain. It’s there for the picking.
Chris Cloney: 36:27
We appreciate that, and I hope you get a lot of people taking you up on that, although, hopefully, not so much that it crushes your calendar! But that’s great to hear. Definitely check out Thrive-PhD or look up Katy on social media because she’s there to add a lot of value in a grad student’s life, and she’s a great business person as well.
Chris Cloney: 37:03
As always, I appreciate having Katy on, and I look forward to the opportunity to get her on for some other topics in the future. Thanks, Katy!
Katy Peplin: 37:11
You’re welcome. Have a great day!
Chris Cloney: 37:13
You’ve been listening to myself, Dr. Chris Cloney, and Dr. Katy Peplin, and we’ve been talking about how to run a successful online community for grad students. Katy brought up a lot of important points. We covered what Thrive PhD is and how it helps grad students. We also talked about how it got developed over time, and how her thought process went from coaching to individual, to growing this community out.
Chris Cloney: 37:42
We talked about hard topics like pricing and the technology she uses. We talked about scope creep and how do you go about increasing engagement for your community. We hit maybe seven or eight different ideas for that, so we’ll pull those out and put them in a cheat sheet that you can get at gradblogger.com/21.
Chris Cloney: 38:04
As always, you can get the transcripts of this episode there as well. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I want to thank Katy again for coming on, and I look forward to talking to you again next week on GradBlogger.
Resources
Dr. Katy Peplin:
Thrive PhD
Twitter
Instagram
Companies:
Dust Safety Science
Groups:
GradBlogger Connect
Books:
[Affiliate] Godin, Seth. Tribes
Previous Podcasts:
GBP003: Causing a ruckus – create the change you want in the world
GBP002: Three steps to build a community around your blog
