Hey all, it's 2026! That means as ElevateCX shifts to a paid membership community we will be enforcing more strict boundaries on who posts what here. This channel is meant for our community members and sponsors to promote things. If you're a CX vendor, please get in touch about sponsorship to post your events and content here. Tl;dr I'm really over CX Vendors using our community to get free content, advice, quotes, and business strategy without giving back to our community members. It's 2026.
1000000000%. I wouild love to build a sort of co-op of CX consultants, the hurdle has always been how do we get paid. What I am noodling on is a low entry fee per consultant (so there's skin in the game) and we source out leads/intros for them? It's a process. But in process.
visa gift cards? 🙂
sh agreed though. the payment part can be tricky. Unless everyone uses their own venmo or something. I think that some people (sometimes me) are honestly just fine with sharing their experience/advice for free, and some small business owners are just a single person who doesn't know what they are doing (yet or ever). But free advice is often worth what you paid for it.
It costs $40k plus a year to run this community.
I had no idea of the costs, but agree 100% that the expertise is valuable.
and that it's bonkers for a for-profit entity to expect to leverage an expert community for free
it's one of the reasons we are picky with vendors/sponsors... the expectation of unfettered access to us as a community of experts can be blown out of proportion when we partner up with bad-fits. This is a place for growth and support, not to just give our best ideas away to corporations all willy nilly.
There is a quality to the community you've sort of curated into existence here which is obviously really exciting but it is inherently fragile. There are other similar spaces which are very...polluted? I don't envy you who are trying to find that balance.
In other spaces I have had people quiz me on something I've mentioned or built or whatever and then they ran my answers through some gpt thing and published my ideas as their content. I would have written actually good content if they had asked. I've had people DM me follow-up questions on things (including "here's my code can you fix it") and then get real stroppy when I've given them my pricing for this kind of work even though they are from businesses you've heard of and could easily afford a few hours of me solving their issue. The worst honestly was one person again from a big brand who I think is absolutely lovely but they were not experienced at running a Zendesk and they were sending me so many questions about fundamental things it felt like they thought I worked for them. The message is don't dilute the value for the people who do contribute to your business/etc by giving in to those who want you to give it all away!
AMEN
