Why I decided to abruptly close my membership

I’m doing the thing that I get annoyed with when I see others do it: making a big announcement about closing a program.

Long story short: I decided to abruptly close my membership, effective 11/13.

Long story long: keep reading.

Launching the membership

My goal for the membership was to address the mindset side of business, while tying it to the practical marketing side. I did a survey to my email list before launching to validate some of the deliverables. Then I made what people said they wanted.

The membership initially included the replay of my free monthly workshops, a workbook, meditations and a behind the scenes peek at my business. A few months in, I decided to stop offering the workshops for free at all, so that the value proposition of the membership felt a little more clear.

I launched the Abundant Entrepreneur Experience in February 2023 with a $1 trial. I was so excited!!! I kicked off the launch with a workshop, and had about 25 people jump in. At the end of the trial, I had one member immediately request the annual pay in full, and almost everyone stayed on for the $33 monthly subscription after the $1 trial.

To me, this was really good data and a huge success.

High retention. It felt super fun. I loved, and still love, delivering the monthly workshops with hot seat coaching.

Delivering the content

This took a few months for me to refine the balance of being both thorough but simple.

I have about four deliverables monthly, and send an email every Monday at 10-am CST with the new deliverable. A member requested we add a private podcast feed for the videos so they can be easily digested on-the-go, so we added that via Hello Audio. As of September Hello Audio stopped importing the long form workshops, so sometimes only send the workshop replays via YouTube.

We also send a monthly summary and recently launched a course platform as well.

Relaunching the membership

I debated about keeping the membership always open, or closing it and relaunching it.

I decided to keep it open, but relaunch it with a crazy cheap trial every now and then since that’s what got people into the membership initially.

But here’s where my lack of clarity started: when I did my second big push for the membership about 4 months in, including buying a sponsored promo from a related creator with an email list of 40,000, I got about 8 new trials. Ok, not thrilling, but I’ll take it.

However, all but one of those new members in the second launch cancelled before the first month was over.

This was a reality check, and when I started really questioning if I wanted to go all in on this like I thought I would.

Community

One thing I absolutely love about this membership is the community. Specifically the workshops, hot seat coaching, and group meditations.

But unfortunately, this also became another reason I needed to think about discontinuing the membership.

Part of the idea behind the membership was giving people an affordable way to work with me, but also create natural demand for my small group coaching, which is roughly $1,000 a month. But because I’m not working to grow the membership, the membership is small. Because the membership is small, it means a lot of people get 1:1 support in the low cost membership. And I LOVE DOING THIS. I LOVE coaching with people, I don’t care if they’re paying $33 or $2,000, I want to help.

The problem comes in when something doesn’t feel in alignment with my product and pricing suite.

Here’s what I mean:

One of my beliefs around pricing services online is choosing an offer that’s an “anchor”. It’s your main thing that you can base other pricing on.

Pricing things online can be somewhat subjective, so as a business owner, you have to know how you’re pricing things and why. An “anchor” gives you a baseline for pricing everything else.

My $1,000 monthly group coaching is my anchor.

And the membership became unaligned with my anchor, which started to feel not-fully-in-integrity to myself.

Payment plans

As a client, I hate it when subscriptions are hard to cancel. From the start I had a “no questions asked” cancellation policy. Send an email, we cancel in 7 days or usually far less. We ask for 7 days notice so we can process cancellations one day a week.

This worked well, at first.

But throughout this membership I experienced something more than I ever had before:

1. Failed payments. Makes sense, it’s low cost and people might be doing this because they couldn’t afford to work with me another way. The system retries, and this works fine. The problem is that if the payment fails too many times, the system eventually stops retrying
2. People cancelling their payments without notifying us. I had more people than I care to go back and count, that were able to cancel their recurring payments through Paypal or Stripe without notifying us. Because they didn’t notify us, they would stay as active members. One person had been unpaid for 5 months, and was still active in the membership. When I was looking at member data in October to make a decision about this, I came across three of these that I wasn’t aware or, in addition to 5 or more others that have happened since launching the first time.

Why were subscriptions such a big issue in this membership?

Here are my guesses as to why I had problems with payments in the membership, and not with group coaching payment plans.

With group coaching…

• There is a much stronger relationship and connection, face to face over many months. There’s no need to figure out how to contact me, because there’s always a direct connection
• Most of the clients are on a set term (6 or 12 months for example). So there’s a minimum required commitment and timeline
• The price is higher, and it’s not a payment you “set and forget”. So clients are proactively looking at it, and I’m actively counting on it. (We are less likely to miss a problem). The $33 monthly price can be forgettable. I had one person who paid for 6 months, only to email me and ask what it was. We paused her payment plan and gifted her free time in the membership because she’d never logged into anything, and I wanted her to at least try it

Income

Since I launched the membership, I’ve hovered around $400 in monthly recurring. Because I love the workshops, and because I knew it would eventually grow, I was ok that it was in the hundreds, and not massive just yet. I’ve also had seven annual pay in full members ($198) which were nice bumps.

After the launch where almost every trial canceled, I haven’t re-launched again. Between people who canceled, payment plans that failed where the system stopped retrying, and people who stopped payment without cancelling, I’m currently at about $200 monthly recurring.

I’d be okay with that number if I knew what I was doing.

But between:

• lack of clarity I feel around “what to do next”
• increased need for administration
• amount of deliverables
• feeling friction around deadlines
• difficulty of taking action enough to sell it to overcome natural attrition
• feeling out of alignment with my product suite, because I wasn’t growing it enough
• payment issues that needed a longer term solution (more below)

I realized that I needed to discontinue the membership.

Initially I thought I would continue until the last pay-in-full year was complete (August 2024). But when I talked to my coach, who is also an energetic and spiritual advisor, we realized it felt cleaner to complete it now.

Next Steps

Here is the email I sent to members:

Hey everyone, important announcement.

  [In the email to members, I included a YouTube video here as well, so people could hear me and see me and I could connect, because I know this might be a hard change]

I’m moonlighting this membership, effective 11/13, which aligns with the date that makes everyone’s monthly payments complete AND also happens to be a Monday.

I know this may seem unexpected. I felt a lack of clarity for a while now, so I focused on other things until clarity came. What I wanted clarity on was what to do, or how to grow, but instead what feels really clear is that this membership is complete.

I want to support you in a more complete way, and am inviting you all to join my $1,000 coaching group for [private pricing] monthly. We meet weekly and mostly talk about business, but mindset and somatic work also come up a lot.

If you are on annual prepay:

• You can apply the prorated refund multiplied by 1.5 to the mastermind
• You can apply the prorated refund multiplied by 1.5 to anything on my everything page, including multiple offers until you hit your refund amount. AlisonReeves.co/everything
• You can simply have the prorated refund

I’ll be reaching out to all active paying or prepaid members today and Monday.

If you have any questions at all, let me know!

Some Thoughts and lessons

Memberships in general

I don’t want you to read this post and think that memberships are hard, or don’t work.

My bread and butter since 2017 has been coaching and consulting. I also love launching courses at many price points. But adding in a high maintenance, volume based income stream that required monthly maintenance forever isn’t aligned with my manifesting-generator, change-my-mind all the time personality.

In short, maybe I have commitment issues.

I have clients who have super profitable memberships. I know creators making multiple six figures and even millions with SUPER low cost memberships. (As low as $7 monthly.)

Memberships are awesome because they can stabilize your income, and stack well. But you have to be in it for the long haul, and have a little patience with scaling it (or have a lot of money to force the scaling with ads, which don’t always “work” right away).

And I still basically STILL have a membership, the group coaching in Worthy of Wealth. But it’s high touch coaching and community, where I provide amazing support while meeting my income goals with 20 clients instead of 500 (for example).

Where I Can Take Radical Responsibility

1. Launch differently, or not at all. I could have kept the membership in an evergreen funnel, talked about it more, etc. Lizzy Goddard has a course on how to sell “always open memberships”. I bought it, it’s good. But I tend to change my focus often, and found it challenging to come back to talking about the membership, especially when my motivation started waning after the second launch and I started losing clarity. My point is, there was a lot of room for me to make more effort.
2. Change the deliverables. I proactively added in a monthly call because I wanted to see people get more results, but this added to my own lack of clarity (or lack of alignment) by making it feel more comparable to group coaching. You can TOTALLY have low cost group coaching. It’s a thing. But it doesn’t work for MY product suite, UNLESS the membership became substantially bigger than the higher cost group coaching

Payment plans

I also don’t want you to be afraid of payment plans.

I love offering payment plans, and I love receiving payments from payment plans. I love recurring income in general.

Where I Can Take Radical Responsibility

1. Create a different cancellation process, so that clients can cancel themselves without notification, while automating the offboarding so they don’t keep free access. This wasn’t easy with my current setup, and I wanted to prove the concept before re-swizzling my tech
2. Delegate more of the administration, so a team member is proactively staying on top of failed payments
3. Manifest different results, by intentionally creating and visualizing my positive expectation, which I never did, and/or bringing the membership into alignment sooner, so that I didn’t attract payment problems

If I wanted to scale a volume based membership again, I would dedicate someone to stay on top of the payment plans and the administrative side of it. I have some email notifications off in Thrivecart because I enter a lot of bundles, and the emails can get a little insane. I could have / should have caught all types of failed payments sooner and more consistently.

It’s also possible that I manifested the failed payments. In fact, I’m sure I did. Because it was starting to become time for me to be complete with this membership, and I was dragging on, I probably attracted additional frustration. I can take radical responsibility for that (and still acknowledge that a couple of people were out of integrity).

Closing

That is probably more than enough, don’t you think?

But if you have questions, feel free to reach out! I’m still learning lessons from this, so we might as well learn together.