How to start an online membership platform? (answer from Katie)

Katie unpacks how to design a membership that creates recurring revenue without overwhelming you or your audience. We share pricing strategies, planning rhythms, and why a warm email list beats social vanity metrics every time.

• the case for recurring revenue as stability
• using one flagship deliverable each month
• flexible scheduling over rigid calendars
• quality over quantity in content
• example of a high-ticket, single-class model
• planning month by month with clear comms
• building a warm list before launching
• starting with freebies and low-cost offers
• using funnels to grow email and trust

We cover all of that in the yoga business accelerator, how to build that we call it a funnel that brings people into your world and builds your email list and builds your audience, which definitely can then eventually lead to a really successful membership

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Whether you're at the very beginning of your business (you might not even have a website yet!) or you've been going for a while this intensive program will support you to vision into growth and clarity.

Here's what's included:

✅ Personalised attention. We want to give you our focused attention to accelerate your business. Let’s go from overwhelm and procrastination to profit and passion together.⁠

✅ A live online container, we will hold your hand through marketing, business strategy, content creation and pricing and more. ⁠

✅ Practical and energetic support. We need a clear plan of action based on strategy. And we need a steady mindset so we can stay aligned with the vision. We've got you covered for both.

✅ Nine months of support, our first three months together will be intensive and focused and you'll have still have monthly zoom sessions after that to keep you accountable and supported.

https://www.bhaktibusiness.com.au/yogabusinessaccelerator

Edwina & Katie x

Chapters

• 0:02 The Case For Recurring Revenue
• 0:24 Examples From Yoga And Ayurveda
• 1:44 Flexible Formats Beat Rigid Schedules
• 2:24 Less Content, More Value
• 3:17 A High-Ticket, One-Class Model
• 4:15 Planning Month By Month
• 4:45 Memberships Need A Warm Audience
• 5:12 Start With Freebies And Low-Cost Offers
• 6:06 Build The Funnel Before You Launch

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Okay, so the next question comes from Tracy, and she is asking about how to start a membership platform, what to charge, and how to create something that leads to membership. So the first thing I would say about membership is it's a great business model because with membership, what you do is you generate recurring revenue. So I have two memberships in my business. I have Bhakti Rose or Bhakti Club, which is in my Bhakti Rose business, and that is a yoga and Ayurveda uh membership. I've been running that for a few years now. Um, I've got over a hundred women in Bhakti Club, and that is a reliable source of recurring revenue for me each month. So what that means is if I have a month where I don't launch anything or I don't have any other plans to generate income, or if I get sick or I need to take time off, or one of my children is unwell, I know I'm still going to have a baseline of income generated. So I'm going to have the stability of that baseline income, which is really valuable. So memberships are a brilliant business model from a business perspective. Um, I also personally really enjoy creating the content for the membership. One of the things for me as a teacher is that I'm multi-passionate. I have lots of different um areas that I'm interested in and things that I love to study and share. And what I was finding before I had the membership is I was creating all of these different little mini programs and offerings because I had all these different things I wanted to share. I was like, oh, I want to do something on the theme of silence, or oh, I want to do something, I want to interview this person, or whatever it might be. And a membership is a beautiful umbrella container under which you can host all kinds of different things. You can follow your passions. And one of the things I would say with a membership, this is a piece of advice I have around membership, is don't create a container that's too rigid. So in the beginning, you might be tempted to say, okay, every Tuesday we'll do this, and every Friday we'll do that, and I'll deliver, you know, these types of calls on these types of days throughout the month. Actually, what people are paying for with memberships isn't bulky content. They don't want loads and loads of content. Most people are busy, they are overwhelmed, they're already juggling a lot of balls. They don't want to be overwhelmed by feeling like they have to keep up. Um, one of the most effective memberships I know of is a woman called Chelsea Diane. Um, you can look her up on Instagram. She has a membership called Um Poems and Power. She's a brilliant woman. And her membership is about writing poetry and women's studies. She runs one class a month, one class a month. It usually goes for like two and a half to three hours, so it's pretty in-depth. Um, and she charges 80 US dollars for her monthly membership. So essentially, each woman in that membership pays 80 US dollars and they get one three-hour class, and she has hundreds and hundreds of members. Like she's a multimillionaire from this business alone. She's I love her, she's brilliant, and her classes are brilliant. What she does is she doesn't try to do too much, she doesn't have all the fancy bells and whistles and loads and loads of content. She does, like I've said, a single class, but that class is brilliant, it's gold. Women absolutely love it. She brings so much energy, so much creativity, research, um, life and vibrancy to that class. It's worth the$80 investment. Um, so see, more is less is more, less is more, that's what I'm trying to say. Um, it's about quality over quantity and variety and not getting too stuck in a rut. So the way I run my membership is I don't have, I schedule it each month, month by month. Um, I don't pre-schedule what I'm gonna do. I mean, I do to a certain extent. I usually have a plan a few months in advance, but I don't tell the members what we're doing until the beginning of each month, and then I create a little magazine that tells them what's coming up. And that gives me so much flexibility, and I love that for them and for me. Um another thing I'd say about members, memberships is you can't really launch a successful membership until you have an already established audience. So um, the other membership I have is my Buckete Business membership, which is only open to people who've done my group program or business accelerator. I don't open that up to the public, you won't see it advertised anywhere. And I have, I think, about 60 members in that membership now. Um, we meet twice a month for hot seat coaching and masterminds, and um, I love that membership because everyone who's in it has done my program. So I'm preaching to the choir. It's women who understand exactly what my perspectives are on business and how we work, and so it feels very refined and very um like I'm not having to repeat myself a lot because the foundations are already in place. So that's a good example of a membership that's running with a pre-existing audience. Um, if you're fairly new to growing your business, I wouldn't recommend starting with a membership because you won't have the numbers to make it a viable option. I would start by creating a really solid free offering and then a really solid low-cost offering. Once you've built up enough of a following through your email list, then you can start to market and launch a membership. But you need to have at least a few hundred people. I would say three to five hundred people on your email list before you launch a membership. Otherwise, you just won't have the numbers to make a membership worthwhile and it will be a lot of work for you with not much return because you won't have enough people in it. So, yeah, a really warm audience of 300 to 500 people, an email list, not Instagram followers, because that's not, you know, you don't really have access to them in the same way that you do with email, um, would be the perfect sweet spot to think about launching a membership. And prior to that, you want to do the steps that come before, which is um generating interest and following through having freebies and having low cost offers. And we cover all of that in the yoga business accelerator, how to build that uh we call it a funnel that brings people into your world and builds your email list and builds your audience, which definitely can then eventually lead to uh a really successful membership.