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a founder, creator, coach, teacher, entrepreneur, builder
is primarily online, knowledge-driven, and tech-enabled
is radical, disruptive, and challenges the status quo
Knowledge-driven entrepreneurship has to change if it’s going to survive.
It’s never been easier to grow a thriving business built on what you know, whether that’s through courses, membership, coaching, communities, or apps. And you have!
But right now our industry is stuck using strategies that are a decade old; delivering derivative products; and making money off of inefficiencies, fear, and FOMO rather than prioritizing innovation.
Social media as we know it may soon be a thing of the past. Online ads are no longer a reliable source of cheap leads. Silicon Valley owns the means of production, and venture capital dictates success. AI apps are churning out content and images to compete with creators. Consumers have caught up with digital sales technology, and can smell a fake deadline funnel a mile away (kill it with fire).
Something’s gotta give.
You want your business to serve a purpose, and to take responsibility for the impact it has on the world. You want to build a legacy with your work, and you’re ready to push beyond the status quo to craft something that will last.
And you know that growing the kind of business you want to run isn’t only a pragmatic issue, it’s also a philosophical one that requires you to interrogate your assumptions and beliefs about the kind of life you want to live and what you want to leave behind.
You’re ready to work together to change the way we do business now, and claim your role in shaping the future of the knowledge business world.
You’re ready for Think Tank.
Think Tank is a curated community of founders, creators, entrepreneurs, and curious minds crafting the future of knowledge-work entrepreneurship. It’s a mastermind, a learning cohort, and a (well) think tank: a place where we question, grow, and build together.
Through workshops, experiments, lectures, discussions, and more you will not only grow your business, but also situate it within the context of our swiftly changing world, ensuring that you lead with your values as you serve your customers and build your legacy.
If you want to know what’s working now and create the future of online knowledge-driven business, Think Tank is for you.
Think Tank is a mastermind community where you can invest in the relationships, skills, and curiosity that will help you build your business and your legacy.
The community is designed to be both practical and philosophical. You’ll develop tangible strategies alongside asking big questions about the role of work; the responsibility of your business; and the future of the online, software-facilitated world.
As you already know, growing a business is not one-and-done, especially when you’re trying to get somewhere off the known map (here be monsters!). It’s a process that requires experimentation, feedback, a place to land when it all goes wrong, and a place to celebrate when it all goes right. That’s why Think Tank is an ongoing membership: we’re not going to abandon you at some arbitrary date and hope for the best.
When you join Think Tank, you’ll enter an ecosystem designed to support your development in four primary areas:
Build effective courses, programs, and products rooted in what you know to help your customers activate their potential
Intentionally grow your audience and your revenue with human-driven sales and marketing strategies
Situate your business in the sociohistorical, structural, and breaking news contexts that impact your outcomes today and tomorrow
Actively create the industry (and world!) you want to work in by honoring your values and consciously challenging the status quo
I’ve worked online for seven years, have served well over 1,000 clients in my courses and memberships, and impacted tens of thousands more as a content creator…
And the old way of doing things isn’t working.
Facebook ads are no longer cheap and guaranteed, driving up acquisition costs. Social media as we know it is in its death throes, and may have only a few years left (or maybe months with Twitter, lol). Algorithmic discovery is flattening creativity, leading to copycat businesses and a deeply concerning stagnation in innovation. SaaS platforms have given us powerful scalability tools, but without a praxis of application, are leading to alienation and burnout.
I believe the future of work is, for many of us, online and knowledge-based. But as the explosion of so-called AI chatbots, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and the TikTok hearings in the U.S. Congress have shown us, that future is anything but fixed.
Knowledge-based businesses like yours need to know what’s working now to reach their ideal customers and sell effectively. But they also need to start designing the future, which can only be done through wrestling with great questions, and the space to actually ask them.
I don’t have all of the answers. But I know that something has to change, and that we stand a better chance of creating a better future if we work together.
That’s why I’ve founded Think Tank. We need to learn not only how to build sustainable and scalable businesses today, but also how to unlearn our assumptions about work, critique their origins, interrogate our tools, and build the tomorrow we desire.
Think Tank has a distinct perspective: we believe that you need more than just growth hacks and product-market fit to create a sustainable, future-proof online knowledge business. Our program model is built on the three foundational pillars that are required to face the challenges of the rapidly changing market.
The market is changing, but we don’t want to chase fads for the sake of it. You deserve simple and effective strategies and systems that are designed to adapt to the future rather than lock you in to the past. You need to learn how to leverage the powerful tools available to you without alienating yourself from your business in the process.
Asking deep questions will actually help you grow a more successful business. If you don’t know what you believe or what you desire, you can’t make it happen. If you don’t understand the historical and structural influences on your business, you can’t challenge them. You must understand the why behind the how in order to deconstruct the business status quo and grow a more sustainable business that truly represents you and the future you want to live in.
At your level of business, it’s critical to be surrounded by other experts who understand the challenges of trying to be true to yourself and your values as your business grows. You need a network of peers to support you and hold you accountable to your vision. Community is also a requirement if you’re going to move beyond the personal to the collective legacy that you want to help build.
Events are at the core of Think Tank. We know that, even in the age of Zoom fatigue, connecting across the globe to share ideas and support each other is pivotal in online business growth, and leverage both live and asynchronous experiences. Your membership includes discussion opportunities with Sarah, lectures from guest experts, business book club, and more that we’ll discover together. You’ll even have opportunities for small group masterminds and to present on topics that you’re excited about so you can test new ideas for your business or just nerd out with folks who get it.
Think Tank is your ticket to monthly workshops, presentations, and courses taught by Sarah and guest experts on a variety of topics pertinent to knowledge work entrepreneurship. We focus on bringing experts you can’t find elsewhere and for whom this isn’t just another stop on the online program webinar circuit. Our programming so far includes knowledge product design, online course pedagogy, writing founder bios that convert, the future of online platforms, post-social media sales, and more. These programs will grow our educational library, creating more value over time that you can continue to access throughout your membership.
The whole point of Think Tank is to think—and act—together. That means sharing what’s working, what’s not, and what we’re using to get results. Your community has a growing resource library of templates, strategies, experiments, and more curated by you, the members. Think Tank also has “rabbit holes,” a list of the media related to knowledge work entrepreneurship that’s actually worth consuming, and live videos and essays from Sarah exploring noteworthy news and discourse. Growing our resource library is like a group project you actually want to be a part of.
It’s easy to keep up with Think Tank, whether you are reducing screen time or just enjoying your life away from your computer. In addition to the community smartphone app, you also have access to a private podcast feed just for Think Tank members. This is home to the audio versions of workshops, trainings, essays, and more so you can listen whenever and wherever fits your life best.
It’s hard to break out of the echo chamber of your own mind, but in Think Tank you’ll be surrounded by other curious and creative deep thinkers who can share their knowledge and benefit from yours. Peer support as well as the opportunity for feedback from Sarah and guest experts will keep you on track and help you get the answers you need to take aligned action in your business. And more than that, it’s only in community that we can try to solve the collective issues impacting our industry. We cannot do it alone.
The Think Tank community is fully integrated with our educational offerings on a private platform accessible on your smartphone or browser, so you can have a distraction-free way to learn and connect.
Subject to change
As an online business owner, your team is likely to be remote and distributed across time zones. Despite the loud objections of traditional CEOs, remote teams have the capability to be agile and effective, allowing you to build a healthy and values-driven business—if you know how to hire, motivate, and support your team from afar.
In fact, growing a remote team is one of the best ways to future-proof your business, giving you access to the best candidates for a role, and helping your business to stand out as large companies force workers back to the office. In this on-demand presentation, Sibi will share his experience from helping hundreds of online-first-companies scale so you can skip the mistakes and effectively grow your remote company.
Sibi Murugesan is an expert at building remote teams, and has held roles at companies like Slack and Calm Fund where he was Chief of Staff for a fully distributed team.
In this talk, Katherine will explore the history of copyright and explain how copyright law shaped the development of now-familiar platforms and still-new forms of AI. Plus, she will explain the relevance of recent cases such as Warhol v. Goldsmith and Graham v. Prince to our everyday lives. And we’ll discuss why patterns from the past can help us make decisions about the future.
Katherine de Vos Devine is an attorney, art historian, and the founder of Implement Legal, a virtual firm for creative clients. She has helped hundreds of artists, writers, and coaches build businesses, protect their creations, and collaborate with ease.
In the dying days of corporatized, data mining-driven social media, how will you find your customers?
Whether your customers are businesses that are more digitally accessible, or consumers who need to be reached through affiliates, partnerships, and other secondary connection points, cold outreach can be leveraged to bring humanity and service back to the sales process—no “hey hun” required.
In this presentation, Robert will guide you through the foundational frameworks of cold outreach that gets results without spamming people or getting stuck trying to build relationships on dying social media platforms for months on end.
Robert is the Head of New York Wholesale for Boisson, an alcohol-free beverage marketplace and brand incubator startup.
Teaching online can be a radical act. The internet allows us to bypass traditional education, gatekeepers, and credentialism to directly impact the people who want to learn what we can teach.
But online education is not inherently radical. In fact, much of it is rooted in infantilization, skewed by market demands, and frankly not very compelling for adult learners.
In this workshop, Think Tank founder Sarah M. Chappell will introduce the core components of radical and critical pedagogy. You’ll learn how those values can influence your courses, memberships, group programs, and other educational products. We’ll explore how teaching online can specifically open us to a more autonomous and respectful mode of education, and brainstorm techniques to test in your offerings.
You have big dreams, but that doesn’t mean you want to get lost in a big program. Most online communities are designed for thousands of members. I ran one of them! That style of program can be a great fit for some kinds of learning, but makes it challenging to build culture and explore the deep questions that have brought you to this page.
Think Tank has been consciously designed to stay small, with a limit of 200 active members. This cap means that, once we hit 200 members, new members will only be invited once an active member chooses not to renew.
Why 200? In my experience that’s enough people for a variety of connections to grow and experience to be shared, but not so much that it’s impossible to know everyone you’re engaging with. The cap also lets me focus more on serving you and less on selling, while helping me to prioritize the kinds of writing and teaching have the biggest impact.
No. If you’ve had a business before or were an early hire at a start-up and are making something new, sure. But the fundamentals of starting a business are not covered in Think Tank.
This community is for founders and subject-matter experts who already know what they do and how they do it. You most likely work full-time in your business, are paying yourself, and know how to sell and market—even if you’re seeking new approaches in anticipation of our swiftly changing technological world.
If you’re ready for Think Tank, you already have the basics covered. That’s how you know it’s time to go deeper into the role your business plays in your personal and our collective legacy, and to address the practical and philosophical challenges of knowledge-driven online business head-on.
Maybe! The people who will get the most out of Think Tank are those who have decision-making power in their organization. The lectures and workshops cover a wide range of topics, and if you’re eager to participate in building the future of online work, then you’re welcome to join us.
Definitely! Many of our members have businesses that operate in both physical and digital space, and we’re big fans of bridging that gap. (And we’re very much hoping to have some irl Think Tank events in the future!) If your business is knowledge-driven, leverages tech, and has an online component, Think Tank is for you.
If you run a business that is entirely in-person, Think Tank will likely not be a good fit.
It’s ok to be shy! But Think Tank is a community program, and we expect members to actively participate and commit to attending events, engaging with discussions, and generally showing up.
If you’re a lurker who is ready to come out of your shell, then Think Tank will be a good place for you. You will, for example, have to introduce yourself on our platform in order to access all that Think Tank has to offer. (Like, literally: your introduction opens up the rest of the Think Tank spaces. Automation magic!) You’ll be with other intense and gifted visionary founders. You may find that you’re ready to participate because you’ll be with people who get it.
Members who engage, share, ask questions, and offer their own expertise will build the strongest relationships, get the best feedback, and learn the most inside of Think Tank.
This is not private coaching or a small group program. That’s it’s power, actually: after leading dozens of cohorts and courses, I’ve seen that a group experience helps most people get better results. There is built-in accountability and mirroring that accelerates the business growth process.
You will have the opportunity to join a curated small group mastermind based on your type of business, business stage, and growth focuses. But much of the experience in Think Tank is communal.
And a lot of what we’re exploring in Think Tank is collective, not individual. You cannot solve problems like the future of work and the role of online business in our economy alone. It’s something we must do together.
As long as your membership is in good standing! Think Tank is like Netflix: you are able to access all of the tools and resources while your membership is active. If you choose to cancel, you will lose access on the last day of your completed payment period.
Of course! You are free to leave Think Tank at any time.
There are no refunds for payments already submitted, so be sure to reach out before your renewal so we can process your cancellation request. You can email us at [email protected] with any questions or cancellation needs.
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