Membership Masters Podcast Preview – Robbie Baxter Author of The Membership Economy on Membership Site Pricing and Trials

Summary: Robbie Baxter is the OG evangelist of the membership model. Her book, The Membership Economy, predicted the rise of subscription services like Netflix. And, was literally our membership bible for growing our first membership site into a million dollar membership. In today’s episode we dive deep into when and where you should use free trials, pricing your membership, and we discuss her new book, The Forever Transaction. We are going to talk about all things memberships with the person who literally wrote the book on the membership model. What You’ll Learn: What the Membership Economy is all about The difference in headline benefits and engagement benefits “The Acquisition Schute” Why the free trial can help or hurt you Why friction is key to attracting quality members The Forever Transaction How to evolve your offerings The Membership Economy How to engage and retain your members Show Notes Back in 2012, my wife Jocelyn and I started our journey to entrepreneurship. We had some really bad stuff happen to us at work and we decided to start our own online business. We started out with digital courses, PDFs, all kinds of stuff to download with a one time purchase. A couple years later we noticed some issues with stability. We putting a ton of work in, had to start back at zero every single month. We didn’t really know what we were doing. We went to a conference in the Philippines, hosted by Chris Ducker, called Tropical Think Tank. We went just to get around other entrepreneurs and see what they were doing. We were sitting at a table one day with James Schramko, and starting telling him about what were selling, how it was going good, but was so high energy. He flat out told us it was a membership, all we needed to do was sell it once and have people pay you forever. He told us to read The Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter on our way home. So, of course, I read the whole thing on our way back to the Philippines. And, read it all in one sitting. I knew when we closed the book that we had to do what this book said, as soon as possible. And, then in June of 2015, as soon as we got home, we implemented the membership model into each and every one of our four businesses. Within 30 days of opening our membership, we had over 1,000 members, paying an average of $49 to $99 a month, and it’s been that way ever since. Now, we’ve helped over 3,000 people do the same thing in the last 5 years. All of that literally came from us reading The Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter. The Membership Economy Robbie’s book, The Membership Economy came out in 2015, which meant most of the writing was done in 2014. However, she began making notes for the book a decade before, back in 2004. Robbie had been working with Netflix back in 2002 and 2003, where she fell in love with their business model. She was taking notes like: “Should every business have a free trial?” “Should every business 100% membership or 100% not? She would meditate on those questions. At the same time, Silicon Valley was falling in love with Netflix’s business model too. She began getting calls from companies wanting Robbie’s help in setting up a similar business model, so she began helping them too. She realized there were things that were different about each of the organizations, but several principles are the same. For the next 10 years she worked with these businesses, using these principles. In that time, she was trying to put together a framework. Basically, she would try and explain to people that there was a way to get recurring revenue, subscriptions, memberships, digital community, that works in every business and industry, no matter what the size.

Membership Masters Podcast Preview – Robbie Baxter Author of The Membership Economy on Membership Site Pricing and Trials

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