3,000 Applications a Month, 150 Get In: Inside Founders Club

What happens after you achieve the entrepreneurial success you thought would make you happy? In this episode of In Person, Lucy Nelles sits down with Aaron Spivak, co-founder of Founders Club & Hush (sold for $48M), Forbes 30 Under 30, and an entrepreneur who has built three companies—including one to eight figures in just 24 months. After selling Hush at 25, Aaron found himself with something he hadn’t expected: success, money, and no one around him who truly understood the experience. That loneliness eventually led to a series of founder dinners—and ultimately to building Founders Club. Aaron breaks down how those early dinners evolved into an eight-figure community, why he believes community should create an unreasonable amount of value, and the systems Founders Club uses to protect the quality of its members as it scales. Lucy and Aaron dive into membership vs. ticketed events, pricing premium communities, member retention, using data and AI to identify disengagement, designing admissions incentives, attracting more female founders, building a team, and the one metric Aaron believes every community business should track. They also unpack the human side of building businesses and what makes people actually connect in a room. For Aaron, the best communities don’t just gather great people—they intentionally help them make friends, feel seen, and build relationships they’ll remember long after the event is over. Connect with Lucy: IG:   / lucelianelles   IG:   / inpersonpodcast   Apply to work with Lucy and grow your IRL community events business: https://communitybuildingcollective.com/ Connect with Aaron Spivak: IG:   / spivak   Web: https://www.foundersclubofficial.com Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:03 — The Loneliness After a $48M Exit 03:54 — How Community Can Engineer Luck 05:34 — Building a Business Around What Feels Good 08:07 — Entrepreneurship as Self-Development 09:47 — The First Founders Dinner 11:36 — The Moment They Realized the Value of Community 13:09 — Turning Free Dinners Into a Paid Membership 14:54 — The Retreat That Changed Everything 15:59 — Going All In on Founders Club 18:33 — Scaling Member-Led Events Without Losing Quality 23:01 — Membership vs. Ticketed Events 25:59 — Why Founders Club Doesn’t Profit From Events 28:44 — How to Charge $10K for a Community 32:15 — Reverse Engineering Value From Your Price 33:58 — Using Data & AI to Improve Member Retention 36:10 — The 45-Day Disengagement Rule 38:56 — Why You Shouldn’t Listen to Your Loudest Members 42:56 — Intentionally Attracting More Female Founders 48:09 — Why Founders Club Kicks Members Out 51:00 — Give More Than You Take 53:20 — How Founders Club Vets Thousands of Applicants 56:42 — Why Members Must Run $1M+ Businesses 1:01:01 — The 70-Person Team Behind Founders Club 1:03:30 — The First Hire Every New Business Needs 1:05:34 — The Most Important Metric in Community 1:07:25 — How to Create Real Connections at Events 1:08:53 — The One Thing the Best Communities Do 1:11:11 — Teaching People How to Connect IRL 1:13:33 — Is Work-Life Balance Actually Real? 1:15:59 — Aaron’s Non-Negotiables 1:17:04 — Aaron’s Dream Dinner Party 1:19:18 — Closing