“Should you start a membership?” I hear this question constantly: in my DMs, inside my own community, from people who corner me by the coffee at events with a look on their face like they already know what they want me to say.
Here’s the answer they’re hoping for. Yes. Recurring revenue, the dream, go. A membership has been sold to every one of us as the thing that finally gets you off the launch treadmill.
If I’m honest, a lot of the time my real answer is hold on, not yet, or maybe not this. Starting the wrong membership, or the right one at the wrong time, is one of the most expensive and exhausting mistakes I watch founders make.
So before you sink six months into building one, here’s the honest gut check: five questions that tell you whether a membership is actually right for you, not whether it’s right for whoever’s story convinced you that you wanted one.
Is the Problem You Solve Ongoing, or Is It One and Done?
A membership only works when the need you meet renews every month. If what you help with has a clear finish line, a membership is the wrong container for it.
Memberships live or die on whether people have a reason to keep showing up month after month. That only happens if the thing you help with is ongoing.
If you help people through a specific, finite transformation, something with a clear finish line, a membership is a strange fit. Once they cross the line, why would they keep paying? You’d be quietly hoping they don’t finish, which is a miserable way to run a business.
But if the work is continuous (growing a business, staying healthy, improving a craft, parenting, leading), a membership makes sense, because the need renews every month right alongside the payment.
Here’s a concrete version. Teach someone to set up their first online store and that’s mostly one and done: they build it, it works, they’re gone. Cramming that into a membership means constantly trying to keep people around after their problem is already solved. But help people run and grow that store over time, the marketing, the seasons, the slumps, and the need never ends. Same industry, completely different answer.
So be honest. Is your people’s need a one-time fix, or a forever thing? A fix points you toward a course or a program. A forever thing means you just passed the most important gate.
Do Your People Want Each Other, or Do They Just Want You?
A membership works best when members want the room itself, not just ongoing access to you. If they only want your answers, you might be building a coaching container instead of a community one.
This one surprises people, myself included. If it were only about access to you, you’d be selling group coaching, and that’s a different offer with a different ceiling. A membership works when part of the value is the other people in the room, and not being alone in it.
Ask yourself honestly: do your people actually want to meet each other? Would they get value from talking to someone else on the same path, or would they rather the other members weren’t there at all?
Here’s a quick way to test it. Think about the last time you got a group of your people together on a call or in a thread. Did they light up talking to each other, swap stories, stick around after? Or did they wait quietly for you to talk and leave the second you stopped?
If it’s the second one, that’s real information. It doesn’t mean don’t build something, it might mean you’re selling the outcome instead of just access to you, through a coaching container rather than a community one. Knowing which one you’ve got changes everything about how you set it up.
Do You Actually Want to Show Up for This, Long Term?
A membership is a relationship, not a thing you launch and walk away from. If you don’t actually want to be in that room a year from now, the people in it will feel it.
Here’s the part the recurring revenue dream conveniently leaves out. A course you build once and sell for years. A membership you have to keep alive, with real people counting on it existing next month, and the month after that.
Picture your life six months from now, a year from now. Are you still excited to be in that room? Or does the thought of showing up every week, forever, make you a little tired?
There’s no wrong answer here, but there is a dishonest one, and it costs you. I’ll be honest about my own version of this. There have been seasons inside coCreator Society where showing up felt like one more thing on a very long list. What got me through wasn’t discipline. It was that I actually like these people, and the work underneath the tiredness.
If that core isn’t there, if the honest answer is that you’d be doing it purely for the money, the tired seasons win. Not because you’re weak, but because a membership asks for your real presence over years, and you cannot fake presence for years.
Is Recurring Revenue the Reason, or Is It the Fantasy?
Recurring revenue is real, but it isn’t passive. The same thing that lets people pay you every month also lets them leave every month, and keeping them is the actual job.
The word “passive” has done a lot of damage here. Real, predictable income that doesn’t require selling from scratch every month is genuinely a gift. But it’s the opposite of passive, because churn is the entire game.
Retention is the actual job, and it starts with who joins in the first place. That’s why paid access changes how people show up long before you ever get to the keeping-them-happy part.
The membership dream isn’t get people in once and coast. The real work is keep people so they stay, and that’s an active, ongoing job. If your fantasy is a membership that runs itself while you’re somewhere else entirely, that fantasy has ended more memberships than almost anything.
While we’re being honest about reasons, a few of the wrong ones. Starting a membership because you’re exhausted by launching and want the pressure to stop: it doesn’t remove pressure, it just trades a few big launch spikes for a constant low hum. Starting one because someone in your niche has one and you feel behind: that’s peer pressure with a business plan. Starting one because someone told you it’s the path to predictable income, which can be true eventually, but only after a long stretch of very unpredictable work getting it there.
None of those reasons are shameful. I’ve felt every one of them. But none is enough to build a membership on by itself.
Is a Membership Even the Right Container for What You’re Building?
Sometimes the better fit is a cohort, a course, or a mastermind, not an always-on membership. Picking the shape on purpose beats defaulting to the one everyone talks about.
Sometimes what you actually want is a cohort: time-boxed, a group moving through something together with a start and an end, higher energy, higher price, and you’re not on the hook forever. Sometimes it’s a course, if the transformation really is one and done and people just need the material. Sometimes it’s a mastermind, a small high-touch room rather than a big open membership.
I’ve watched this play out plenty of times. Someone comes to me sure they need a membership, and once we talk it through, what they really want is to run three or four cohorts a year: high energy, a clear beginning and end, a real break in between, and better money per person. They didn’t need the always-on commitment of a membership at all. They needed a container with an off switch, and they only figured that out because they asked the question instead of assuming the answer.
If the answers above do point you toward a membership, build the smallest version of it you can actually launch. Start with what it needs on day one, not the version in your head.
Try This Prompt
Run your own answers to these five questions through this, and get a plain verdict at the end instead of a hunch.
“I’m thinking about building a membership for [type of community] serving [who it’s for]. Here’s what I help people with: [describe the ongoing or one-time problem]. Walk me through five questions: is the need ongoing or one-and-done, do my people want each other or just want me, do I actually want to show up for this long term, am I chasing recurring revenue as a fantasy or do I understand the retention work, and is a membership even the right container versus a cohort, course, or mastermind. After each one, tell me what my answer points toward. Give me a plain-language verdict at the end: build it, hold off, or build something else instead.”
It sorts your answers into a verdict. You still decide what to build.
The Gut Check Is the Cheap Part
If most of your answers landed as clear yeses, you’re not guessing anymore. You have real reasons, and that clarity will make everything you build next stronger.
If some of them landed as no, or not yet, or honestly not sure, that isn’t failure. That’s the gut check doing its job. It’s far cheaper to find this out now than eight months into a membership you’ve come to dread.
A not yet isn’t a no forever. Maybe the need is there but you haven’t built an audience that wants each other yet. Maybe you want to show up but haven’t figured out how to do it without it eating your whole life. Those aren’t reasons to abandon the idea. They’re the actual work that comes before the launch, the work most people skip and pay for later.
Run a real test before you build the whole thing once you know which questions came back honest. A no today can save you a very expensive yes you would have regretted.
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More From Your Community Strategist
Not every episode has a video version, but the channel is where the walkthroughs live: Circle builds, settings, and setups on screen instead of described out loud. New videos every Thursday.
More Like This
Listen: How to Validate a Community Idea Before You Launch. The next honest step once you know a membership is the right call.
Listen: The Smallest Membership You Can Launch. What to build once the gut check says yes.
Listen: Stop Selling Access: What Your Membership Is Actually For. The positioning question sitting right behind “do they want each other.”
Keep Going
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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