Role Alert: Chief Membership Officer
Nerd out over an IRL social graph
The TL;DR: We’re hiring for a Chief Membership Officer to build out our member engagement strategy. Get in touch if you have anyone in mind or APPLY HERE, and as always, membership applications are here. Read on for more background . . .
The origin of Maxwell was a dinner party series Kyle and I started 8 years ago called Supperclub. We scaled it from San Francisco to New York and London and every dinner had 8 cohosts that had 8 invites each, we banned small talk and had interesting questions of the evening.
It was our first testbed, a petri dish of community as we tweaked how we formatted dinners, what questions we asked, who we sat next to who and measured, albeit informally, customer satisfaction.
One thing we noticed was that people churned if they didn’t make one brand new good friend on their first dinner, so we had a 30 minute cocktail hour at the beginning (allowing people to meet each other standing up), assigned seats at a table (making sure you didn’t end up stuck sitting down with the person you just met out of social necessity), switched the seating in the middle of the dinner, and ended with more cocktails at the end of the night.
There were 4 opportunities, we called them “scene changes” to make a new friend, and if someone did, they’d come back a second time.
We also noticed that once someone hit 3-4 friends they’d become a regular — saying yes to a dinner invite was now a low-stress decision. They didn’t have to decide “do I want to meet new people tonight,” which no matter how extroverted you are, is always an intense situation, they just had to opt-in to seeing their existing friends. An obvious way to get to 4 friends was to only accept people who who had a minimum of 2 existing friends in the group — you were better able to hit a home run because well, you started on 3rd base. It was rare that someone brand new came in and stuck around long enough to make 4 new friends.
These types of insights have been at the core of how we’ve built community at Maxwell from the beginning, but up until now, we haven’t had a person 100% committed to it.
So we’re hiring a Chief Membership Officer to focus explicitly on this.
How do you design and measure the success of our onboarding process? How do you measure network health? What is churn risk and how can you reduce it? How do you measure community fit based on interests, career stage and demographics? How do you make strategic introductions? How many existing friends/references do you require so that the club doesn’t have to do the entire job itself and we start on 3rd base?
This role is sometimes a glorified concierge/Maître d'hôtel at other social clubs — clubs that literally have “do-not-approach” rules aren’t necessarily fretting over how many new friends new members are making.
But we’re looking for someone who can be truly hands-on, understanding the nitty gritty in the club but also designing systems and technology to help measure community health.
If you know anyone or are yourself that person, please reach out and APPLY HERE — we’d love to chat, and as always, throw us a membership application here if any of this seems up your alley and you’d like to apply and follow us on Instagram:
Cheers,
David, Kyle and Joelle