I Almost Built a Membership. Here’s What Stopped Me.
About a year ago, I went into full research mode on memberships.
Not in a casual, “oh that’s interesting” way. In a genuine, can’t-stop-reading, joining-things-to-study-them-from-the-inside kind of way. I read everything. I listened to people who had built thriving communities. I studied the models, the pricing, the structure, the platforms. And because I wanted to feel what actually works as a member, I joined several communities myself.
I was seriously considering building one.
The community connection piece appealed to me a lot. The idea of a close-knit space where my people could gather, support each other, and keep moving forward between our work together felt really aligned with what I care about. And the recurring revenue angle was obviously appealing too.
But the more I sat with it, the more I noticed something I couldn’t talk myself out of.
I’m an introvert. And the thought of being consistently on for a community, holding the energy, facilitating connection, being the person everyone checks in with on an ongoing basis, felt heavy in a way that no amount of strategic reasoning could fix. So I tried a small version of it anyway. I ran a workshop-style community offer.
Two people showed up the first month.
The second month came around and I genuinely could not bring myself to do it again.
That resistance told me everything I needed to know. I replaced that offer with focused 1:1 work, which is where I do my best work, and I haven’t second-guessed it once.
I’m sharing this because memberships are everywhere right now. Everyone seems to be launching one, and if you’ve been watching from the sidelines wondering if you’re missing something, I want to offer a different perspective. One that I sat down to explore in depth with Kelly Vrchota, a membership and online community strategist who has been helping coaches and business owners build communities that actually feel good to run since 2020.
What follows is what I took away from that conversation, filtered through my own experience of being both a student of this model and someone who ultimately chose not to build one. At least for now.
The Era of “Give Them All the Content” Is Over
When memberships first became popular in the coaching space, the model was built around content. Coaches would spend months building out vaults of training, courses, and resources. The pitch was accessible. The more you had, the more valuable your membership seemed.
That model has quietly collapsed.
I saw this firsthand with a leadership coach I worked with. She had built a year-long group program with a full content library, guest experts, mastermind sessions, and hot seat coaching. A year in, she was exhausted. When we looked at what members were actually engaging with, the answer was striking. Nobody was accessing the content. Guest experts were getting thin attendance. What people showed up for, every single time, was the mastermind. The community time. The chance to sit with peers and think out loud.
She had built an elaborate offer when what her people actually needed was a table to gather around.
Kelly sees this constantly. The most successful memberships in 2026 have simplified dramatically, stripping out features that create work without creating value, and centering instead on access and connection. Members want to be able to bring a real question and get a real answer from someone who knows the work. They want peer relationships with people who actually get what they’re going through. They want accountability that’s built into the structure.
Content, they can find anywhere. That table is harder to come by.
The Question That Actually Matters
Before you think about platform, pricing, or promotion, there’s a more important question to sit with.
Does this model fit who you are and how you serve people best?
Not “can I make it work.” Not “is there revenue potential.” Those are secondary questions. The primary one is alignment.
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Kelly walks every potential membership owner through this before anything else. What’s your purpose for building this, beyond the revenue or the trend? Does the topic naturally require ongoing support, or is it a one-time transformation? Are you someone who’s genuinely energized by holding space for a group month after month, or does that thought quietly drain you before you’ve even started?
And then the harder one: what’s your vision for this container, and does that vision fit your actual life?
I’m someone who does my deepest work one-on-one. I like the intimacy of it. The directness. The ability to go exactly where a client needs to go without managing a group’s energy at the same time. A membership would have required me to become a different kind of practitioner, at least in that container. And I wasn’t willing to do that.
Interestingly, Kelly herself doesn’t have a membership. She’s been helping people build them since 2020 and has no plans to launch her own. She loves her 1:1 work. She’s 57 and has made that choice intentionally. The fact that she’s built her entire business around supporting membership owners without running one herself is, I think, the most honest endorsement of the principle she teaches: the model has to fit you first.
Introverts Can Run Memberships. With One Condition.
One of the things I assumed before this conversation was that memberships were better suited to extroverts. People who are energized by group facilitation, who love showing up live, who thrive on the ongoing energy of a community.
Kelly pushed back on that directly.
She’s an introvert. She works with a lot of introverts. And the memberships she helps them build are designed around their actual capacity, not against it. One of her clients was worried about the energy drain of weekly calls. So they didn’t do weekly calls. They structured the membership around a single monthly call the client could show up to with full intention, plus an async Q&A channel for everything in between. The membership didn’t disappear. It just got shaped to fit how that person actually works.
The condition is this: you have to design the container deliberately. A membership that’s built around what you think you’re supposed to offer will drain you. A membership that’s built around what you can genuinely sustain will feel completely different.
Structure is the whole game.
Where Does a Membership Actually Fit?
If you decide a membership makes sense, the next question is where it belongs in your offer ecosystem.
Some coaches use a membership on the front end as a lower-commitment entry point that introduces people to their work and feeds naturally into higher-ticket offers. Some place a membership on the tail end, as a continuity offer for clients who’ve completed a program and want ongoing support and community. Others build a standalone membership entirely separate from their main business, driven by a cause or mission that exists apart from their core work.
None of these is wrong. The right placement depends on who you serve, what they need next, and where a recurring community offer creates the most natural momentum.
What is worth paying attention to is this: a membership you build because everyone else has one, without knowing where it fits or why it belongs, is a membership that will feel aimless from the inside. Members feel that. It shows up in engagement rates before it shows up in churn.
You Can Build Community Without Running a Membership
This is the part of Kelly’s thinking that I appreciated most.
Memberships are one way to build community in a business. They are not the only way.
You can facilitate real connections through a cohort program. Through an intimate mastermind. Through the way you show up for your 1:1 clients over time. Through the communities you join yourself and contribute to genuinely. Kelly doesn’t have a membership, and she’s built a deeply connected professional community through her 1:1 work and her presence in the spaces she belongs to.
The FOMO around memberships is real. I felt it during my research phase. But FOMO is not a business strategy, and a membership built from it rarely becomes the thriving container you imagined.
If it fits, build it. If it doesn’t, that clarity is genuinely valuable. It means your energy goes toward the offers and containers that actually reflect how you do your best work.
And if you’re sitting with the question of where a community-based offer, or any offer, fits in your ecosystem, that’s exactly the kind of focused question worth spending 90 minutes on. My Ecosystem Sprint is built for that: one clear question, one done-for-you asset, one custom GPT you can keep using after we’re done.
Book your Ecosystem Sprint here.
The right offer for your business is the one you can build, sustain, and genuinely love running. That’s worth getting right before you build anything.
