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You might be considering creating a membership for your business. Recurring income, a loyal community, no more scrambling for the next client, it sounds like the answer to everything.
And it can be exactly that. But it can also be the thing that drains your energy, takes months to get off the ground, and quietly dies because nobody told you what it actually takes to keep one running.
I have built memberships for clients in all sorts of niches, and the difference between the ones that work and the ones that don’t is almost never the tech. It is the thinking that happens before anyone touches a platform. So let’s do that thinking together.
What a membership actually is
Before you start building, it helps to understand that not all memberships look the same. The word gets used for very different things, and which type you choose changes everything about how much work it becomes and whether it fits your business. Most memberships use a recurring subscription as the payment model, but what people are actually paying for tends to fall into one of three categories.
The first is a course library.Â
You build a collection of courses, resources, and other training materials, and members pay for access to the whole thing. They work through it at their own pace, and you add to it over time. There is no pressure to deliver something new every single month, but the library needs to be valuable enough that people feel it is worth paying for ongoing access rather than just buying a single course. This model suits you if you have a depth of knowledge you want to organise and share. The trade-off is that you need enough material to make the library worth joining, and you need to keep adding to it so members feel there is a reason to stay.
The second is what I would call a coaching model.Â
Members get something new on a regular schedule: most of the time this is used for coaching calls, but it could also be fresh training modules or workshops each time. The value here is not what already exists but what comes each month. The content might even disappear after a while. People show up because you keep showing up, and that means committing to creating or delivering something consistently, month after month. If you enjoy showing up live and being ‘in the room’ with your people, this could be a natural fit. But be honest about what “every month” actually feels like. There is a difference between loving the occasional workshop and committing to regular live sessions with members who are counting on you to be there.Â
Some people thrive on that rhythm. Others find it suffocating after a few months.
The third is a community membership.Â
Here, the real value is the people, not the content. Members pay for access to a private group where they connect with each other and with you. You might host a monthly call or drop in with prompts and resources, but the magic happens between members, not just from you. This is a very different energy to the coaching model, where you are the main draw.Â
In a community membership, you are the facilitator, not the performer. This can be lighter on content creation, but it asks something different of you: the skill of keeping a group engaged and connected without doing all the talking yourself.
In practice, a lot of memberships blend two or even all three of these. A coaching membership with a community element is one of the most common combinations. But even in a blend, one model tends to carry the weight. Understanding which one that is helps you figure out where your time and energy will actually go, plan realistically, price it properly, and avoid building something that sounds great on paper but feels impossible to maintain.
The thinking work before the building starts
Once you have an idea of which model fits, there is a layer of work that needs to happen before you actually create a membership for your business. This is the part that takes the most time and the part most people try to skip. But it is also what separates memberships that last from memberships that fizzle out after three months.
Start by writing down the topics you could cover. Not a polished curriculum, just a brain dump. What do your clients ask you about most? What do you keep explaining one-on-one that could work just as well in a group? What would your audience benefit from learning or practising over time? Write down ten or fifteen topics and notice which ones excite you. If you cannot get past five, that does not mean you have nothing to offer. It might mean a course is a better fit than a membership, or it might mean you need a different angle.
Then comes the part where most people get stuck: organising it all. You have a list of topics, but a list is not a membership. How do these topics relate to each other? Is there a logical order your members should follow, or can they dip in and out depending on what they need? If you are running a coaching model, what does each month look like? Is it one theme per month, a mix, or something that builds on the previous month? If it is a course library, how do you group things so people can find what they need without feeling lost?
Think about how much you are delivering and how often. A membership that promises weekly content is a very different commitment to one that delivers something substantial once a month. Both can work, but you need to be realistic about what you can keep up. Overcommitting at the start is one of the fastest ways to burn out and let your members down.
Consider the format too. Are you teaching through video, written guides, live calls, templates, or a combination? The answer should come from what works best for your audience and what you can produce consistently, not from what looks impressive. A simple monthly workshop with a well-made workbook can be far more valuable than a library of polished videos that nobody finishes.
And then there is the question of what happens when someone joins. Do they start from the beginning, or do they jump into whatever is current? If there is an archive, can they access all of it? How do you onboard new members so they do not feel like they have arrived halfway through a conversation everyone else has been having for months?
Getting these decisions right before you build anything saves you from rebuilding later. It is not the exciting part, but it is the part that makes everything else easier.
A note on platforms and tools
This is the part people tend to overthink. The truth is, any decent membership platform can handle the basics: recurring payments, content delivery, and member management. The specific tool you choose matters less than understanding what you actually need it to do.
If you already have a WordPress website, plugins like MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro let you add a membership directly to your existing site. You own the relationship and the data, and you can customise how everything looks and works. However, it can become quite slow and some people don’t like having their own website combined with the membership directly.
If you want something that handles everything in one place, platforms like Kajabi, Thinkific, or Thrivecart (Learn) each take a different approach. Some are better for course libraries, some are stronger on community, and some try to do it all.
If you want a platform that is also strong on communities, you could look at Circle or MightyNetworks for instance.
When you create a membership for your business, the right platform depends on which model you chose, what tools you are already using, and how much control you want over the experience. A coaching membership that runs on live calls and a private group needs different features from a course library that people browse at their own pace.
Take the time to work out what you need from the platform and only then start looking at the right tools and the pricing that comes with it.
What I would say is this: do not let the platform decision stall you. It is easy to spend weeks comparing features and pricing tables instead of doing the thinking work we just talked about. The platform is the container. What goes inside it is what matters. And if the tech side of setting it up feels like too much, that is exactly the kind of thing Tech Hours exist for. You focus on the content and the thinking, we can handle the build.
Pricing your membership
Pricing is one of the first things people ask about and one of the hardest to give a straight answer to. There is no formula that works for everyone, because the right price depends on what you are delivering, how often, and to whom.
What I can say is this: price based on the ongoing value you are delivering, not the amount of content you have created. Someone stays in a membership not because they have watched twenty videos, but because they feel they are making progress, getting support they trust, or connecting with people who understand what they are going through. If the value is there, the price should reflect that.
Underpricing because you feel awkward about asking for recurring payments is a common mistake. It attracts members who are not invested, and it makes it harder for you to justify the time and energy the membership demands. But overpricing before you have proof that the membership delivers what you promise is risky too. If you are just starting out, pick a price that feels fair for what you are offering at launch, bring in your first members, and listen to what they tell you. You can adjust as you grow and as the membership evolves.
It is also worth thinking about what the payment platform takes as its cut. Some platforms charge a percentage of every transaction, others charge a flat monthly fee regardless of how many members you have. That difference adds up quickly and affects your bottom line, so factor it in from the start rather than discovering it later (make sure you look at it while picking that tool!).
Circle is a membership platform where you can create a community, host events and run your courses.Â
The reality of running a membership
Here is the part nobody talks about enough. Launching a membership is exciting. Running one, month after month, is a completely different thing.
In the first few months, you are riding the energy of something new. You are creating content, welcoming members, building the community, and it all feels worth it. But somewhere around month four or five, the novelty wears off. You still need to show up. You still need to deliver whatever you promised. And your members are still expecting it, whether you are having a good week or not.
Content fatigue is real. If your model relies on you producing something new every month, you need a plan for the months where inspiration is low and your calendar is already full. This is not a sign that the membership was a bad idea. It is just what ongoing commitment feels like, and it is worth knowing that before you start rather than discovering it when you are already in the middle of it. Don’t pick your topic in the moment, have it planned (even if you switch things around) so you know what you need to do when life gives you lemons.
Then there is the growth side. Getting your first members is really hard. Getting your next fifty is harder. A membership does not fill itself just because it exists. You need to keep talking about it, keep showing up in the places where your audience is, and keep giving people a reason to join. That takes energy too, on top of the energy you are already putting into serving the members you have.
And retention. People will leave. Not because your membership is bad, but because their priorities change, their budget shifts, or they got what they needed and moved on. That is normal.
But if you take every cancellation personally, it will wear you down. The memberships that last are the ones where the person running them has made peace with the fact that members come and go, and that the goal is not to keep everyone forever but to keep delivering something genuinely worth staying for and serving the people that are there for as long as they are.
Is a membership right for you right now?
If a membership is right for you, right now, is the million dollar question.
A membership is not a bad idea. But it can be a bad idea right now, and the difference is worth figuring out before you invest months of work into building one.
Start with what you have to offer. Do you have enough knowledge, experience, or expertise to share something valuable over time, not just once? If you are a coach or service provider, you almost certainly do. But what you share needs to be something that evolves, deepens, or expands month after month.
Then look at your audience. A membership only works if you have a group of people who already know and trust you enough to commit to recurring payments. That trust takes time to build, and the place it gets built is usually your email list. If you do not have an email list yet, or if the one you have is small and cold, a membership is not the priority. Build the list first. Nurture those relationships. The membership can come later, and it will be stronger for it.
And then there is the honest question about your own capacity. A membership requires ongoing energy. Not just at launch, but every month after that. Content to create, members to support, community to tend to if that is part of your model. It is not passive income, no matter what anyone tells you. The more honest you are with yourself about how much time and energy you actually have, the better your chances of building something you can sustain rather than something that burns you out within a year.
If any of those made you pause, that is not a bad thing. It might mean now is not the right time, or it might mean you need a different model than the one you had in mind. If you want to talk it through before making a decision, a Pick My Brain session is a good place to do that.
None of this is meant to put you off. If a membership fits your business and you go in with your eyes open, it can be one of the most rewarding things you build. The recurring income gives you breathing room, the community gives you energy, and the relationships you build with your members over time is something a one-off course or service cannot replicate. But it is not easy, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone.
