I think I’m guilty when I very first seen the chainsaw massacre series ( I was young )
But more recently I have rewatched some gems that i definitely didn’t appreciate the first time around
I see a lot of people trying to shop these overly complicated projects for small niches that them personally not even use.
A good sanity check for myself is would this provide value for my circle.
I’m a developer, not a marketer, so my first instinct was to build tools for myself and then try to grow a community around them.
That did work, but it took me about 6 months and close to $10k in Instagram ads to grow my Discord, get subscribers, and make profit.
What I realised is the hard part usually is not the tool. It’s the attention.
I was spending money trying to build trust and momentum from scratch, while other Discords and Telegram groups already had that part solved. They already had active members and niche trust. A lot of them just weren’t monetising it properly.
That changed how I looked at it.
An investing Discord can add crypto signals or EV/arb betting bots and suddenly have something worth charging for.
A Twitch follow-for-follow or creator Discord can add a reels generator or trend tracking and give members a real reason to upgrade.
An OF or creator group can add guides, monitoring, or automation and turn engagement into an actual product.
That was the shift for me. It’s often easier to add value to an existing audience than build one from zero.
If you already have an active community, the question probably isn’t how to get more people. It’s what you can add that makes the people already there worth monetising.
I’m a developer, not a community manager or marketer. I work with code, not people.
I originally built tools just for myself. They solved problems I had and made me money, but I never built them thinking I’d sell them or run subscriptions.
At some point I tried turning it into a Discord and selling access. It did work, but it was slow. Getting people in, keeping them engaged, trying to grow it… that part took way more effort than actually building anything.
After a while I started paying more attention to other servers.
There were communities with way more activity than anything I had, people showing up every day, strong trust, and they still weren’t making anything.
That’s when I changed how I approached it.
Instead of trying to build something from scratch, I started working with people who already had that attention and just adding what I’d built into their setup.
It worked faster and made a lot more sense.
Big difference I noticed is building something useful is one thing, but getting people to see it is a completely different problem.
If you already have people paying attention, you’re in a better position than you probably think.
A lot of communities are sitting on something that could be making money, they just haven’t set it up that way.
I’m a developer, not a marketer.
I’ve always been better at building things than trying to sell them, which honestly made making money from my own Discord way harder than it should’ve been.
I built tools for myself crypto signals, EV/arb betting, automation and they worked, but getting people in and actually converting them took a long time.
A lot longer than I expected.
Then I realised something:
What took me ages to build… a lot of people already have.
They just don’t see it.
I started looking at other Discords in the same space and assumed they had it figured out because they had way bigger communities.
But when I actually went inside them, it was the opposite.
More members, more activity, more trust… and still making nothing.
No structure, no real premium layer, everything just kind of dumped into one place.
That’s when I stopped trying to compete with them and started working with them instead.
I shifted from running my own servers to installing the systems I’d already built into theirs.
And man that’s when it really hit me.
I’ve seen gaming servers, investing groups, engagement communities all with solid audiences doing nothing financially, then start making consistent money just by fixing how things are set up.
Nothing crazy changed.
Just giving people a clear reason to pay, making content consistent instead of relying on the owner being online all day, and actually separating free and paid properly.
The biggest thing I’ve learnt is this:
If your server can’t monetise 100 people, it won’t monetise 1,000.
Most people think they need growth, but really they just haven’t built anything that converts.
From my side, being the one building the tools, it’s actually way harder to get attention than it is to monetise an audience that already exists.
Which is why it’s kind of crazy how many people are sitting on something valuable without realising it.
If you’ve got a Discord that’s active but not making anything, it’s probably not a traffic problem.
It’s just how it’s set up.
Take this from someone bad at marketing.
First things first I am a developer first ( I build tools that made me money) after then having some success selling subscriptions to my discord ( crypto signals bot and EV/Arb betting) I realised that some of the large discords I was emulating to get subscribers just had no funnel at all.
After getting out of the constant upkeep of marketing and focusing on renting my services to discord and telegram owners I have really noticed a lot of people are missing out on huge money.
It’s crazy how many large gaming servers / all girl Engadget groups and investing discords have massive membership, huge trust and they all seem frustrated they are still broke. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
They were beating me on every level except monetisation.
For example
I now rent a reel generator bot to a GTA server that charges for paid roles.
A crypto signals and arbitrage betting bot to an investment discord.
If you have a community find a tool of value and offer it in house don’t force your members but man take advantage of the audience you have because when your just the guy making the tools it’s hard to push and takes a lot of time to get half the audience people take advantage of.