🔴 From an 8-person study group to 500-member community

There’s no shortcut to building a thriving community. Kaelyn Grace Apple took the long route. It paid off.

Our guest this week is the founder of Accepted Society, a 500-member study-group community that generates around $14,000 monthly. The member-led community spans four countries, with members running sessions around the clock — requiring minimal time from Kaelyn herself.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Five years ago, at the beginning of her PhD — alone, mid-pandemic, and missing the library study halls she'd relied on — Kaelyn Grace Apple invited her YouTube viewers to join a Zoom study session. Eight people showed up.

Today, 500 people pay up to $28 monthly to participate in the thriving community born from those sessions.

Those eight kept coming. Then 10, then 15, then 20. By summer 2021, with attendance hitting 20 regularly, Kaelyn began formalizing it. She hired her first team member, a former client, to help run sessions. They gave the group a name: Accepted Society.

By 2022, Accepted Society had begun to behave like a proper community. Members formed subgroups — parents in academia, disability and neurodivergent support — and began meeting up offline.

By 2023, the communal structure had matured, with daily sessions and monthly resets — a cadence that members could rely on. But Kaelyn herself was burning out. She'd just closed Accepted Consulting — her admissions coaching arm that she’d scaled to a team of 15 and 550 clients over three years — and was questioning whether she could sustain anything at all.

That same year, she took a job as Head of Product at Ali Abdaal's company, where she learned professional community management at scale — automation, systems, workflows. She brought those skills back to Accepted Society, but with an eye towards sustainability over scale.

So she brought on Cait Murphy-Hurrel, a former consulting client who'd worked at Google and was pivoting toward her own PhD, as a 50-50 business partner to help manage Accepted Society. “Accepted is exactly what I needed when I was making the decision to prioritize my education,” Cait had told Kaelyn. Together, they rebranded around a member-led model, which doubled growth past what had been a 200-member plateau.

Today, their 500+ member community is global and diverse, spanning the U.S., Brazil, Singapore, and Australia, and comprising remote students, returning students in their 30s and 40s, and individuals with families or jobs that make in-person study sessions more challenging. In total, it generates around $14,000 monthly.

Accepted Society’s pricing mirrors what Kaelyn would pay for a professional membership ($28 monthly or $297 annually), but when 95% of departing members cited financial hardship in exit surveys, she established a scholarship program using quarterly revenue calculations.

It’s an outlook that extends to her YouTube channel approach, where she's shifted from SEO-optimized tutorials to content she simply wants to exist — calling on scholars to counter misinformation, and being honest when deadlines mean fewer uploads. Her 2022 note-taking guide video, which has 1.7 million views, was strategic. Today, her videos are more values-driven. Her core audience still shows up.

Connect with Kaelyn on LinkedIn.
Learn more about Accepted Society.

Kaelyn’s playbook for Accepted Society spans five years. Here’s what you can glean from her timeline, and how her approach compares to other creators who’ve built communities that last.

The $5 barrier Kaelyn set for those first co-study sessions was about filtering, not revenue. A barrier to entry incentivizes commitment.

Former Spotlight guest Michael Kauffman started The Newsletter Club with the same principle — pricing has since changed, but in the beginning, members had to pay a one-time fee of $100 to join. Friction at the point of entry incentivizes people to stick around and contribute.

This is a consistent takeaway for every creator community we’ve covered.

For nearly two years, Kaelyn ran Accepted as "a co-studying space" or "accountability workshops,” before her community grew large enough to begin segmenting independently.

When Kaelyn analyzed churn, 95% of membership cancellations cited financial hardship. So she built a scholarship program with quarterly funding and member-gifted spots as a retention strategy (people who leave due to affordability are often the most engaged members once a solution has been granted). She didn't launch with scholarships — she built them as a solution to an emergent problem.

Key takeaway: Identify patterns in your community data and develop infrastructure that meets their needs.