Vetting is the product.Charge €199 for the room.
You run a seven-figure store and other operators want to know what your Meta ROAS looked like last quarter, which 3PL you left and why. In a free Discord that room dies in a month: agencies pitch, beginners ask what Shopify is, the operators go quiet. A paid room with an application, a revenue band and a cap is a different thing, and the best ones in this niche charge $199–299 a month with a 30-day trial and lose two or three percent of members a month. This is that room, with the teardown, the advisory hour and the benchmark letter around it.
Free to start. You keep 80%. Access is granted on approval and revoked the day someone stops paying.
Founders and owners of €1M+ DTC brands. No agencies, no vendors, no beginners. Discord, 60 seats.
Jonas reviews applications on Fridays. If approved, your 30-day trial starts when you accept the invite.
The room they apply to
instead of the free Discord.
The community page says who it is for and who it is not for, in one line. The application underneath is a free lead form: store URL, revenue band, role and ownership. You check the store, you approve or decline, and the approved get the invite link that starts the 30-day trial. Sixty seats, yearly plan on, waitlist when full. The cap is not scarcity theatre; a vetted room stops working past a certain size and the operators know it.
How paid communities workApproved, declined,
or “come back at €1M”.
Vetting takes ten minutes a week on a Friday. The pipeline is the admissions board: new → contacted → qualified → won (admitted) → lost. You open the store, you check the revenue band against what you can see, you look for the agency tells. Approved gets the invite and the trial. Declined gets two honest lines. The €600k store gets “not yet”, a tag for next year, and the €149 teardown if they want your eyes on the PDP now.
Store checks out: 140 SKUs, DE/AT/CH, reviews consistent with the band. Operator, not agency.
Agency. Declined in two lines; the room is operators only and the page says so.
Good brand, too early for the room. Tagged “2027”; sent the €149 PDP teardown, which she took.
41 admitted · 3 on trial · 1 cancelled · 6 on the waitlist · 60 seats
Five products,
switched on in this order.
The room first, because it is the business. The application that vets it goes live the same day. Then the teardown and the advisory hour, which monetise the DMs from people inside and outside the room, and the quarterly benchmark letter that the room's own data produces.
- 1Day one · Community
Vetted operators' community, cap + trial €199 / month · cap 60
Discord or Telegram. Sixty seats, 30-day trial, yearly plan on, waitlist when full. Access is granted when you approve an application and revoked automatically on cancellation. Monday operator thread, monthly roundtable, quarterly survey.
- 2Day one · Leads & CRM
Apply to join: revenue band, store URL free
Store URL and platform, trailing-12-month revenue band (required), role and ownership, one line on what they want from the room. Pipeline: new → checked → approved → admitted → declined. Tags by band, platform and country.
- 3Week two · Forms & Requests
Tear down my PDP / email flow €149 · 3 days
A product page URL or a Klaviyo flow export, one question, a Loom or written teardown within three days or an automatic refund. For applicants who are not ready for the room and for members who want your eyes on one thing. Cap at six a week.
- 4Week four · Bookings
Operator advisory hour €500 · 60 min
Intake: store, revenue band, the decision they are facing, the numbers that matter to it. Two slots a month. Meet link, reminders, 48-hour cancellation policy. Operator-to-operator, not consulting; the template says so.
- 5Month three · Newsletter
Quarterly benchmark data €20 / month
The room's anonymised survey, once a quarter: CAC by channel, ROAS bands, email share of revenue, return rates, by revenue band. Monthly in between: what's working in Meta this month. Included for members; €20 a month for operators outside the room.
Q3 benchmarks — 44 stores, €1–10M, what CAC actually did this quarter
44 of 47 members. 61% Shopify, 23% Shopify Plus, the rest WooCommerce and Shopware. Median trailing revenue €2.4M. DE, NL, UK and the Nordics.
Blended CAC rose 9% quarter on quarter in the €1–3M band and fell 4% above €3M. The gap is email share of revenue: 31% vs 19%.
Median, upper and lower quartile for Meta ROAS, Google ROAS, blended CAC, email share of revenue and return rate, in three revenue bands. The tables and the CSV.
Three members' creative tests with spend, ROAS before and after, and the one format all three moved money into. Brand names with permission, numbers exact.
Six on the waitlist, two seats opening in November. Applications reviewed Fridays. Two advisory slots left this quarter.
What the quarterly issue
actually contains.
Once a quarter, the room's own survey turned into benchmarks: who answered, the headline, then CAC, ROAS, email share and returns by revenue band, with the CSV. In between, a monthly note on what is working in Meta with real spend and real numbers from members who agreed to be named. Members get it as part of the €199; operators outside the room pay €20 a month for the data, and it is the letter that fills the waitlist.
The agent drafts the tables from the survey export and the narrative from your notes; you check the numbers and cut what should not leave the room.
The rhythm that keeps
operators talking.
Curated rooms at $200 and up lose two to three percent of members a month; the average paid community loses almost six. The difference is not the content library; it is that vetted peers show up on a schedule and vendors never do. ApplyForm handles who is in the room and whether they have paid. The rhythm below is what you run, and quarterly billing or the yearly plan is what makes it stick.
- MondayOperator thread
Ads, 3PL, cash flow, hiring: one thread, real numbers. Anything that needs a Loom becomes a €149 teardown.
- WednesdayVendor channel
Members review agencies, apps and 3PLs they actually pay. No vendor has ever posted here, which is why it works.
- MonthlyRoundtable, 60 min
One theme, one moderator, eight to twelve founders on camera. Recorded for the room, never outside it.
- QuarterlyBenchmark survey and the letter
Twelve questions, anonymised, becomes the quarterly issue. The reason people who are “too busy in Q4” still renew.
Numbers from
the market.
eComFuel: $199 for seven-figure owners, $299 for eight-figure, after a $1 30-day trial, billed quarterly. Must own at least 25% of a $1M+ store. Vetting is the offer.
$13bn in combined revenue and a forum plus 25,000 vendor reviews. The paid room at this price point is a proven business; a room of sixty at €199 is the size one founder can run.
Million Dollar Sellers: $1M+ trailing revenue to apply, $1,995 a quarter, 60-day refund, weekly sessions. Refund guarantees are expected in this niche.
Against 5.8% for the average membership community. Vetting and a fixed cadence are what move the number, not the size of the content library.
Members who pay yearly or quarterly leave at about a third of the rate of monthly payers. Turn the yearly plan on from day one.
Hampton: $3M+ revenue or raised, $8,500 a year, groups of eight meeting ten times a year. Declining most applicants is what the members are paying for.
Market figures from published industry and platform data, September 2026, rounded. Your prices, volume and retention will differ.
“Why would anyone pay €199
for a Discord?”
They are not paying for the Discord. They are paying for who is not in it. Sixty founders of €1M+ stores who answer a cash-flow question with their actual numbers is a room that does not exist for free anywhere, because free rooms fill with people selling to them. The application, the revenue band and your Friday review are the product; the chat software is where it happens.
Some will try. The store URL and the ownership question catch most; the Monday thread catches the rest within a week. Decline without apology and say on the page that the room is operators only. One agency in the room costs you more members than ten declined applications.
Anonymised benchmarks and named results with written permission, yes. “Join and add €1M to your store”, no: that is an earnings claim, the FTC is tightening the rule on them and card processors flag the wording. The letter is data; the sales page describes the room. The agent keeps the two apart.
The niche expects one: 30-day trials and 60-day refunds are standard. The trial here is 30 days; write your refund terms on the page. Most members join as businesses, so the EU 14-day consumer withdrawal right rarely applies, and the checkout asks for explicit consent to start when it does.
Vet the room.
Charge for the seat.
Tell the agent your X or LinkedIn handle. It reads what you post, proposes the community page, the application questions and the teardown with prices from your niche, and sets them up when you create the account.