Latest / Content, Briefly / Superpath Q1 2026 Quarterly Update and AMA

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Superpath Q1 2026 Quarterly Update and AMA · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
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• 1:26
  That's Userp dot I-O. Alex here, and welcome to the very first Superpath quarterly update.
• 1:33
  Since joining Superpath, I've been thinking of ways I could do a little bit of building in public, talking about what we've been doing and what's next, answering your questions about the community and the building process.
• 1:44
  And so I decided to start with this quarterly podcast. So the goal is every quarter I'll jump in on an episode to talk about all things Superpath.
• 1:52
  We'll go through metrics, wins, experiments, what's coming next, and some of the stuff that didn't quite work out as well. And every quarter, I'm gonna be taking questions from the Superpath Pro members too.
• 2:03
  So here's what's on docket for today's Q1 2026 Superpath quarterly update. I'll recap the quarter by the numbers with some reflections on this whole transition process.
• 2:13
  I'll talk about the different community programs we launched and what we learned, and then I will answer questions that the Pro community submitted over the past couple of weeks.
• 2:22
  It's been about three months since I acquired Superpath, and Jimmy, Eric, and Keisha have been incredible partners in the transition process.
• 2:29
  I've had so many incredible conversations with you all, and a lot has happened. So excited to dive in to this solo episode. All right. When I took over from Jimmy... So I'm gonna start with the numbers here.
• 2:43
  When I took over from Jimmy, the first week of November 2025, we had two hundred and ninety-eight Pro members and just over seventeen thousand newsletter subscribers, who I kind of think of as the broader Superpath community.
• 2:57
  Anytime there's a transition, you expect some churn or at least some kind of stalled growth. And for the first couple of months, our numbers stayed pretty steady.
• 3:05
  But in the last month, we started to see a big uptick in both of those numbers.
• 3:09
  So as of this recording, we have three hundred and fifteen active Pro members and added about a thousand new newsletter subscribers to take us over the eighteen thousand mark. Now on to what we shipped.
• 3:21
  So the main focus of this quarter was on the foundations, understanding how the business ticks and revamping some of the underlying systems and workflow.
• 3:30
  I have a good grasp of most everything now, and that's a huge credit to Jimmy, who's made himself super available and been just a fantastic partner in the process.
• 3:39
  Many of our awesome programs continue to thrive through the transition, thanks to the amazing team here. There have been some really great AI show and tells with Anton lately.
• 3:49
  Eric and Chloe are crushing it with the podcast. Eric's done a great job with, like, all of the other amazing things that Eric runs, from the newsletter, to monthly socials, to being our number one power user in Slack.
• 4:00
  Just incredibly grateful to him. And even though the operations kind of were the core focus of this past quarter, we've still managed to ship a few big things that I'm really excited about.
• 4:11
  So number one is our curated one-on-one matching program.
• 4:15
  So we've had the one-on-one matching program for a while, and we went from randomized pairings to curated matches, building a system that looks at your background, what you're working on, what you wanna learn, and pairs you with somebody who makes sense.
• 4:29
  Early feedback on this has been really, really strong.
• 4:32
  Members are telling us these conversations feel way more relevant now, and we're gonna keep building on this system and iterating each month to continue to make it better.
• 4:40
  So if you're a Superpath Pro member and you haven't tried it yet, March matches are coming up this week, so keep an eye out for that.
• 4:48
  We also launched Spaces, which is a member-led set of interest groups inside of Superpath Pro.
• 4:55
  Members are stepping up to run channels and host events around specific topics of interest, and we had a lot of great applications and four awesome hosts to kick things off.
• 5:05
  The conversations have already exceeded my expectations for what Spaces could be, and this is kind of part of a bigger vision within Superpath, where Superpath isn't just consuming content from one person, but letting members lead, share expertise, and build something together.
• 5:23
  So in Q1, our first cohort included Flourishing Freelancers, Culture Club, the Content Judgment Call, and Content Operations.
• 5:30
  And I wanna specifically thank the pioneers who led these monthly conversations, Ronnie, Anna, Carol, Lethia, and Anton. Challenges.
• 5:40
  So we've been running LinkedIn challenges, and that goes back predating my time here and is one of the most loved programs in the community.
• 5:49
  This is something that I think is really cool when you have just these accountability groups.
• 5:53
  So the concept here is members commit to posting daily on LinkedIn, and the whole group rallies around each other, liking, commenting, and amplifying.We just yesterday had someone share how they landed a new opportunity directly from LinkedIn posts that they wrote during a challenge, which is awesome.
• 6:09
  This quarter, we also tested a bingo card version, so going beyond just posting, but taking different actions across LinkedIn. That went well, and we're gonna branch beyond LinkedIn with future challenges.
• 6:20
  The concept of scoped accountability challenges, where we push each other and grow together, there's just so many different places we can go with this.
• 6:27
  So this month, we'll actually be branching out to work on personal websites and portfolios, so keep a lookout for that if you're in the Superpath Pro community.
• 6:35
  Lastly, and something that you might not know about, is this quarter we also wound down a few of the side products in the marketplace.
• 6:43
  So there's kind of several different marketplaces within Superpath, and some remain active to this day.
• 6:49
  But a few of them, we decided to wind down over the past few months, and that was intentional and planned since the early stages of the acquisition conversations with Jimmy.
• 6:59
  The reason for that is we have a really small team. I'm the only full-time person, supported by an awesome cast of part-time folks.
• 7:06
  But every hour we spend on something that isn't the Pro community is an hour we're not building for the people here. So this is kind of in the interest of focusing explicitly on packing value into the community.
• 7:19
  All right, so what's next? Here's what's on deck for the next few months. You've heard a lot in the past few weeks about in-real-life events. This is one thing that I'm getting really excited about.
• 7:30
  It's our in-person networking events. Our first one is actually this week in Salt Lake City. Then we're heading to Denver, New York, London, Lisbon, with more cities to come after that.
• 7:44
  You've been telling us you want more face-to-face connection, and so we're trying to make that happen.
• 7:48
  We'll kind of test out the format as we go here, but the goal is pretty simple, to get Superpath members in the same room in real life, building deeper connections together. Onboarding overhaul.
• 8:00
  If you have started a Superpath Pro free trial on or after February 13th, then you've experienced one of our largest membership redesigns yet.
• 8:09
  When someone starts a Pro trial, we want them to feel the value immediately, and so we launched a free trial onboarding V1, a much cleaner experience that helps new members find their way, find their people, see what's happening, and get plugged in fast.
• 8:22
  Huge shout-out to those folks who have helped us improve already. In particular, wanna shout out Kate and Brandon. Lastly, podcast experiments. You're listening to one right now.
• 8:31
  We're gonna explore some new series and formats here, so stay tuned for that. And just kind of a few reflections as I close out this section before jumping into the AMAs.
• 8:42
  As I think back on the first three months, which have really flown by, it's been rewarding in a lot of the places you'd expect and hard in places maybe you don't expect.
• 8:54
  A lot of the initial work has been very operational, so setting up systems, wrangling data across different platforms, understanding who owns what parts of which process. And again, I'm just gonna shout out Jimmy.
• 9:05
  Really lucked out here. He's been an incredible partner through the transition, generous with his time, open, and just instrumental in helping me understand how Superpath really works day-to-day.
• 9:17
  I've said it already, but huge thank you to Jimmy. One thing I probably underestimated was how much foundational work I'd wanna do first.
• 9:24
  I've had a lot of conversations with you all, and I'm overflowing with [laughs] a million things I wanna do in this community, but I've had to be really disciplined about prioritization, making sure the foundation is solid before we build on top of it.
• 9:37
  It's not always the most exciting work, but it's gonna position us really well moving forward, I think. I also wanna be honest about a couple things [chuckles] that we tried that didn't land.
• 9:47
  I think one in particular, just a small thing that you might have clocked, we experimented with some incentive-driven partnership campaigns, essentially offering gift cards to drive specific actions.
• 9:59
  We ran one in the newsletter back in December that went out to 18,000 people, and we only got 14 responses out of it. I am really appreciative to our partners who allow us to experiment.
• 10:12
  This was, like, totally my idea, and actually, I wanna shout out in particular Tom at Demand Genius, who was open to me testing this idea and just, like, super cool when it didn't end up working out as I thought it might.
• 10:25
  So that concept, at least in that format, didn't work out, and that's okay. You know, we try things, we learn, and we move on to the next thing.
• 10:33
  In the note to you all, when I announced the acquisition, I also talked about benchmarking reports, where we survey the whole community and get rich data across 100-plus viewpoints.
• 10:42
  That's something I'm still really, really excited about, but the timing hasn't been quite right yet. So we'll get there. It's on the roadmap, just probably not this upcoming quarter.
• 10:51
  With that, I'm going to go ahead and transition into the AMA part of this. Got a lot of great questions from folks. Wanna shout out Eric, Mo, Rachel, Farrah, Ronnie, and everybody else who submitted questions.
• 11:06
  Thank you for those. If there are any other business topics you'd like covered in future quarterly updates or if your question isn't answered here, Pro members can DM me anytime.
• 11:16
  And the greater Superpath community, you've got my email. Okay, so now onto some questions. First one up, "What do you like about the subscription-based community model? Why community over software?"
• 11:29
  So I spent the last 10 years in early-stage VC-backed startups, and the hypergrowth model was just not really a great fit for how or what I like to build.
• 11:39
  I wanted to work on a small business where I could be really, really intentional, maybe moving slowly sometimes, but really focusing on building something that genuinely serves people.
• 11:48
  Think there's also part of it for me that I just wanna build something I'm very proud of and works really well.
• 11:54
  And community as a product is a concept that I've really come to love, mainly because I find it really fulfilling, bringing people together, watching peers learn from each other, seeing someone land a job or solve a hard problem because of a connection they made here.That's, like, awesome stuff.
• 12:10
  So I live for that feeling, and it's just a very cool product to work on. Why are you still betting on content marketing as a field?
• 12:19
  This is a great question, and actually one I thought a lot about during the acquisition period, which by the way lasted, like, three months. I think I started talking to Jimmy...
• 12:28
  We might have mentioned this on an earlier podcast episode, but basically in conversations about the acquisition from the beginning of August until it happened at the beginning of November.
• 12:38
  Obviously, content marketing is changing as all areas of marketing and business are, and AI is reshaping a lot of the function.
• 12:45
  But in the end, I'm very bullish on the core skill set that content marketers have: storytelling, editorial judgment, strategic thinking.
• 12:53
  Eric and Chloe covered this really well, actually, on an episode last week, the one talking about storytelling. And those skills are only becoming more valuable.
• 13:03
  I think we'll find with the oversaturation of AI, the human element will become more important and also a little bit harder to define.
• 13:12
  So the role's gonna evolve, and some folks here will go deeper into editorial, some will generalize, some will become, like, these content engineers that we've been talking about or expand into other content forms outside of the written word.
• 13:25
  Maybe there's gonna be more video.
• 13:27
  But the people in this community, I think, share a mindset and a skill set that's needed, and I don't know what the titles are gonna look like, you know, three to four years from now, but I think the space in this community will still be relevant.
• 13:40
  All right, so the next set of questions is kind of around the product and retention. First question: Why is there only one membership tier? I think this is a pretty simple answer.
• 13:51
  Obviously, Jimmy's experimented a lot in the past, but I think it's... When you have one membership tier, it's really clear what's going on, and it's also just very operationally easy.
• 14:03
  So in my mind, you're either a Superpath Pro member with access to everything or you're engaging with the free community through the newsletter and podcast.
• 14:09
  And, you know, I'm not committing that for the long haul, but... And I'll definitely reassess down the road, but I am always someone who defaults to simplicity over complexity. All right, next question.
• 14:21
  How are you thinking about minimizing churn? Our overall community churn is not bad, but our retention for the first few months could be better, and this is actually one of the top priorities for me in 2026.
• 14:34
  We've got really strong growth channels, thanks to everything that Jimmy has built. People find us pretty easily. They sign up for free trials. That part works.
• 14:42
  Most longtime members think of the value of Superpath as really a no-brainer. Anyone who's been in this community for a long time gets it. People have gotten jobs, clients, and built relationships through this community.
• 14:54
  But for new folks, I think we need to do a better job making the value obvious faster. That means communicating all the programs better, making it easy to connect for what a free trial...
• 15:08
  Like, what somebody who is in a free trial is looking for. My goal is for every core program in Superpath Pro to deliver the full value of the Superpath Pro membership on its own.
• 15:22
  What about upselling or adding value beyond community? Upselling isn't really the move right now. I think we're gonna keep the price where it is and pack more and more value into it.
• 15:32
  Again, this kind of ties to the single membership tier. When you sign up for Superpath Pro, you should feel like you're getting 10 times what you're paying for.
• 15:39
  That's the goal, and that's what I'm focused on, and not any other ways to upsell current members. Okay, the next set of questions is about how we run Superpath. Walk us through the audit process.
• 15:51
  How do you observe and improve the community? So I built out a system, it's an Airtable, where every product and program maps to one of three pillars: find your people, stay ahead, and grow together.
• 16:04
  Each program has a maturity rating. Some are still in pilot mode, some are established, some are thriving. Every quarter, I'm assessing, can we take this program and graduate it from pilot to GA?
• 16:15
  Can we take this from "this works" to, "Is this genuinely delightful and, like, a best-in-class program?" I try to think about it like a product manager would.
• 16:25
  We're building a product that happens to be a community, and every program inside it should earn its place. That's kind of my mindset. What are the best sources of leads and growth?
• 16:35
  So I kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I feel very lucky on this front.
• 16:39
  We have a really strong top of funnel that allows us to focus on the product right now, and that's a testament to a few different things. One, Jimmy built a beast of a brand.
• 16:49
  Our SEO fundamentals are really strong, and they've translated directly into AI search.
• 16:55
  I remember we were talking to our February title partners, Gauge, and they actually set Superpath up within their platform a-and did a quick assessment of where we are, and we showed up on just so many search results very quickly at the top of...
• 17:10
  If you're searching for, "What's the best content marketing community?" It's Superpath, and that's all compounding value of years of great work that Jimmy did here.
• 17:19
  Eric's done an awesome job of using the newsletter to highlight what's happening inside Superpath Pro, which creates a natural funnel from free subscribers to paid.
• 17:28
  So often in the intro channel, we see folks that say, "I was a member back in the free Slack and decided it was time to rejoin," and that is all Eric's doing, in my mind. It's also all of you.
• 17:39
  So when you post on LinkedIn about something you learned in Superpath, when you mention the community, that's some of our best top-of-funnel marketing. For next quarter, it's not about increasing growth channels.
• 17:51
  I know I've been, like, a little bit repetitive about this, but only because it's true.
• 17:55
  But it's more about this early retention and just packing value into this community and making it the best value professional community out there. That's my focus this year.
• 18:06
  Next question: Do you use a CRM or track community health?This is one of those team size trade-off things. I don't know.
• 18:13
  I'm curious about other communities, but when, you know, you think of subscriptions as contracts, and when the contract sizes are this low, it, it doesn't really make sense to have a full CRM on individual people here.
• 18:27
  So I'm looking at top line engagement. I'm also not really... No, I'm not tracking community health at the individual level. I am tracking it at the high level.
• 18:38
  So I'm looking at top line engagement, you know, how many paying members do we have? How many people are engaging weekly or monthly? It's a good indicator. I think, for now, that's all I need.
• 18:49
  And so yeah, that's what I'm doing. It's nothing super, super crazy here, but I think it works for our current operation. All right. What are the most impactful operational changes so far? Okay, this is good.
• 19:03
  So I secretly made an internal pro member directory. I've been on every pro member's LinkedIn at least three or four times. You've probably seen me there and wondered what I was up to.
• 19:14
  [laughs] I've pulled together everyone's kind of public information from LinkedIn, metro areas, titles, specialties, backgrounds, personal websites, side projects, and since you're all content marketers, there's often a lot to find there, and it's pretty rich information.
• 19:29
  That directory powers a ton of what we do right now.
• 19:32
  So for example, the curated one-on-one matches, when somebody says, "I'd love to talk to somebody with LinkedIn ghostwriting experience," we can actually find that person because it's in the database based on portfolios and personal websites and LinkedIn About information.
• 19:48
  So it's also how we're targeting in real life event locations, so I have a good sense of what our biggest metro areas are. If you're curious, it's nothing super surprising.
• 19:57
  I think New York, San Francisco, London, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, To- oh, Toronto's top five.
• 20:06
  Vancouver is up there as well, and then we have a bunch of metro areas that probably have three to five members as well.
• 20:14
  So we'll be targeting those folks first with the in real life events where we have kind of a concentration of people, but all that is from this directory.
• 20:24
  Eventually, we're gonna make this member-facing and have some external version of this. That's coming soon. I gotta figure out how to do that in the right way. All right.
• 20:33
  Next set of questions is around community philosophy. This is fun.
• 20:37
  I have thought a lot about this over the past, you know, five years or so as I've bui- been building communities, so always excited to talk about this, maybe nerd out on it a little bit too much. All right.
• 20:48
  What are three factors that are essential to a thriving online professional community? Here are my three. Number one is respect for your time. So you're really busy, and I think a lot of communities get this wrong.
• 21:01
  They try to give you more and more and more until it feels like you're not a real community member unless you're engaging three hours a week, like you can't keep up, and I think that's really exhausting.
• 21:11
  I try to take the opposite approach.
• 21:13
  If you can only spend 20 minutes a week with us, that's great, and I want you to feel like you can be a member of this community if you can only spend 20 minutes a week, and I wanna make those 20 minutes incredibly valuable.
• 21:23
  I actually think back to my previous communities, like my top slide when I presented what I was doing to leadership was maximize impact for minimum time investment. So I want you to get as many...
• 21:33
  If you can only spend 20 minutes with us, get as many takeaways as you can in those 20 minutes. Number two, I wanna meet you where you already are.
• 21:42
  So we're in Slack, which fits into a lot of your daily workflows, especially the freelancers who are often bouncing between Slack workspaces.
• 21:51
  We also just recently launched a weekly pro member email to bring highlights into your inbox. Goal and something...
• 21:58
  Again, something that's actually frustrating about the community tech stack generally is you have a lot of platforms. So I mean, one that you might have heard of is Circle. It's awesome.
• 22:07
  Honestly, it's a lot easier to operate than kind of stringing together several different platforms like we are with Slack and Stripe and some other places.
• 22:17
  Circle makes it super easy operationally, but the problem is you have to go log into the platform usually to see what's going on, and my goal is to kind of bring things into your flow of work and not force you to go outside of your flow of work to be like, "I wonder what's going on in the Superpath community.
• 22:34
  Let me go log in and check in and see what's happening." So I love building inside the flow of work, and then lastly, third is pure connection over thought leadership.
• 22:44
  So I think the power of Superpath isn't one expert sharing, you know, wisdom from above.
• 22:50
  It's more experimenting together, sharing what works, and being honest about what doesn't in honesty in a way that you don't see in external spaces like LinkedIn.
• 23:00
  I think a perfect example of this is the AI show-and-tell, members testing tools and sharing findings with each other.
• 23:07
  It's that horizontal learning that I think makes communities really thrive because there's no one expert and one learner.
• 23:15
  We're all experts in some areas and beginners in others, and I think a really great professional community space allows for that and doesn't define people in those terms of, you know, mentor/mentee or expert and learner, but we're all learners and experts at the same time.
• 23:31
  All right. What has surprised you about the Superpath community? Let's see. A few things that have stood out here.
• 23:38
  I think one thing, this is a very niche thing, but first, the diversity in how people engage with Slack from conversations with you all.
• 23:47
  So some people process it like an inbox, catching up on three weeks of messages at once, and others are popping in throughout the day, which is a good reminder that we need to design programs and content that work for just a variety of styles with how you wanna engage with the Slack space.
• 24:04
  Second... Oh, this is actually a really interesting one. I came in a little bit skeptical, I'll be honest, about having in-house agency and freelance content marketers all in one community.
• 24:15
  All of my past communities were focused on one specific persona.But within the first few weeks, it became clear that the mix of people is actually a really big superpower for this space.
• 24:27
  Having all those different perspectives in one room makes the conversations richer. I think it also improves the value.
• 24:34
  You know, in-house people sometimes want to connect with an other in-house people, and we're gonna provide spaces for that.
• 24:40
  But also, sometimes in-house people want to be building up their set of freelancers who, when they need to hire a freelancer, they have some vetted, trusted folks that are in a community with them.
• 24:52
  So it's actually making the community richer. Yeah, I think that's something that was unexpected for me. All right, so that's about it for our AMA section here.
• 25:04
  We'll go ahead and close out our first Superpath quarterly update.
• 25:08
  Again, you don't need to feel like you missed out on anything because we'll do this once a quarter, so would love to have you start brainstorming those questions now.
• 25:16
  I'll even challenge you to dig a little bit deeper on some of these questions and ask me some things that could maybe even challenge me more. Not looking for the softballs all the time.
• 25:26
  If you are listening and you're not a pro member yet, come see for yourself what this community is all about. There's a thirty-day free trial at superpath.co. If you are a pro member, your feedback is everything.
• 25:38
  These programs we've launched, the changes we've made, the stuff we've dropped, all of this is driven by what you tell us. Perfect example of that, our member-led spaces.
• 25:47
  I wanna shout out, in particular, Ronnie in our pro member community. He reached out with an idea to run the Culture Club channel in Slack. I thought it was a really cool concept and thought on that for a little bit.
• 26:02
  And, you know, I try not to do things one-off. I wanna be very intentional about, you know, if we're gonna say yes to this, like, let's think about what the whole program looks like.
• 26:12
  Let's open it up to the community in general.
• 26:15
  And so that was actually the beginning of, you know, our spaces concept, which I said has been a really exciting program that I think has exceeded expectations out of the gate.
• 26:24
  So that's the kind of feedback and ideas that really fuel this space, so please, please reach out if you have ideas or tweaks that you'd like to see made in this community.
• 26:36
  I'm really excited about where Superpath is headed this year, and I hope that comes across. So I'm grateful to be building it with all of you, and we will talk soon.
• 26:47
  [outro music]