#65 Avoid One-Size Communities
I had a great time at the Content Entrepreneur Expo conference (CEX) last week catching up with friends and making new ones. CEX is primarily an audience of content creators.
I promised to share the most interesting things I learned about community building and memberships.
But I'll be honest... sitting in a few sessions I felt myself cringing at a couple pieces of advice. And this is why...
You shouldn't build a community or membership based on one person's experience building ONE community or membership. Just because it worked for their community, doesn't mean it will work for yours.
Many of my clients are people that come to me because their membership isn't working. They have high churn and/or low participation.
I can tell immediately that they modeled it after bossbabe or another well known membership. They didn't craft the right experience for their community.
Software companies will release reports and education on how to build community, but their data is (usually) only based on their user base and therefore skewed.
Here's an example –
At CEX there was a speaker (and sponsor) from Memberful. The presentation was great and informative, but it was about a very specific type of creator-audience relationship.
Memberful is a platform for fan club memberships, which makes sense because they are owned by Patreon.
Keeping this in mind, here were some interesting metrics that she shared based on Memberful users:
90% of memberships start with 3 benefits or less
A great membership will have a 5% conversion of your most engaged audience members
Your revenue could increase 30% YoY by adding a membership to your brand
Pricing is typically $5-7 mo
This was great data as long as you recognize if it is applicable to your community. If you have an entertainment-content business or an educational business that has less of a tangible ROI (like you can't charge $50/mo+ for a membership) then you might run the numbers!
What would $5/mo look like for 5% of your most engaged audience members?
My best friend Kait is a huge fan of the cook Molly Baz so I was excited to see her membership case study featured. She has a cookbook that has QR codes in it that directs you to how-to videos. Super cool!
RelayFM uses a membership to amplify their podcast network. I'm really excited to see how private podcast feeds evolve over the coming years with membership models.
When you review software data like this, make sure you consider the audience. I have clients that charge $100 - $3000 a month for membership.
There are a lot of different ways you can build recurring revenue ... the most important thing is to build the right thing for your community, and your business.
What do you think about this type of membership?
One of my more popular essays is titled "Don't Build A Fan Club" – maybe it should be titled "don't build a fan club unless it makes sense for your business model and audience" 🤣
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