Paid Communities Beat Courses – Because They Can Be Sold

01 /The Concept

CNDO claims to have built a genuinely social social network.

The platform lets influencers create communities for their followers – what the startup calls "social clubs."

The core mechanic is "challenges" – time-bound activities that require members to actually do something. Each challenge has a defined start and end date; the life of a club is a continuous sequence of them.

One type of challenge is committing to an action over the duration – for example, running 10 kilometers a week throughout the challenge, or cutting out sugar every day for a month to lose weight.

Beyond single-burst challenges, they can also be designed to build habits. A club owner might challenge all members to start a morning workout routine and share a set of exercises that can be done at home.

Conventional wisdom holds that 21 days is enough to form a habit – so a month-long challenge could genuinely build a lasting routine. More recent research, however, suggests habit formation timelines vary widely by personality: studies found ranges anywhere from 18 to 254 days.

Though it probably also depends heavily on whether the habit is enjoyable or painful. The bad ones tend to stick suspiciously fast.

The strength of this model is collective accountability: all members are working toward the same goal at the same time – sharing strategies, reporting progress, supporting and motivating each other.

To make those connections feel personal, each member fills out a profile that gives others a sense of who they are – and opens the door to direct messaging.

Membership is paid: members pay a subscription whose price is set by the club owner. CNDO takes a 20% cut.

CNDO was founded by a German musician with 8.8 million TikTok followers. The startup launched in 2023, though its app only published a few days ago. At the same time, the founder revealed he raised $1M in investment back in May 2023. Currently, 10 other creators – in addition to the founder – are running clubs on the platform.

02 /Why It Matters

Building a community isn't hard. Keeping members active is.

The traditional approach – posting regular content and nudging members to discuss it – works for a while. But the same recurring topics eventually wear thin, and engagement drops off.

Regularly creating new momentum is a better strategy. Challenges are a strong mechanism for doing exactly that.

Back in 2021, a [related review](/review/soobshhestvo-na-avtopilote) covered Vibely, a startup that built its community platform specifically around challenges. They raised $2M for it at the time.

In 2022, Vibely was acquired by Kajabi – a large community platform that had raised $550M – and the challenge mechanic was folded into Kajabi's product.

Framework, [covered previously](/review/obshhatsja-i-dostigat) also in 2021, applied a similar challenge mechanic to online learning. Their argument: the passive "watch a lesson, complete an assignment" model of online courses doesn't work. They replaced it with time-bound, action-oriented challenges that vary in length depending on the subject. They raised $3M.

Even fitness benefits from external pressure. GoJoe, [written about](/review/kompanii-stali-pokupat-chelovecheskie-otnoshenija) last year, built an app where people training for fitness compete with each other. They raised £1.3M. The clever part: participants can pursue different sports – running, swimming, gym training – but results are normalized to a common metric for comparison.

GoJoe also pivoted to B2B, selling the platform to companies that use it to run internal fitness competitions – fostering team spirit and cross-functional relationships among employees.

Habit formation is its own distinct territory. Shelpful, [covered in December](/review/privychka-jeto-eshhjo-i-vyruchka), built an app specifically for people who want to build new habits. The app pairs a specialized AI coach with a team of live human experts. It turns out people will pay for structured support in building good habits. They raised $3M.

03 /Opportunities

The challenge mechanic has some resemblance to the "marathon" format used in social media marketing. But there's an important distinction.

Traditional social media marathons are mostly one-off events, used either to attract and warm up audiences before selling them a higher-priced course, or as a retention mechanism within an existing course.

In CNDO's model – and in Vibely's before it – challenges are a permanent, ongoing engine built into the community itself, with retention as the primary goal. That means constantly inventing new challenges for the same members, rather than recycling the same "30-day challenge" to reel in a fresh batch of participants.

Coming up with new challenges consistently gets harder over time. But it serves a longer-term objective: steadily growing membership and revenue. And over a long enough horizon, it compounds – not least because accumulated membership makes the community more valuable to sell, if that ever becomes the goal.

On that note: if you're building a community to eventually sell, it's worth building it on a standalone platform rather than inside a social network. Algorithmic changes and platform policy shifts are serious risks – and the higher the risk, the lower the valuation. That's why standalone community platforms remain a relevant build.

And challenges – as a community mechanic – are proven but underused. At minimum, they're worth deploying more actively within existing communities. Or, more ambitiously: worth building and selling as a platform to those who already have communities, or are building them. For inspiration and reference material, CNDO is a useful starting point – alongside the other startups mentioned here.