Memberships Work: What I learned during the third year of my membership program | Hacker News Reader

Memberships Work: What I learned during the third year of my membership program

craigmod.com

61 pointsphilip120915 comments

I don't even really get the gist of what he does/is selling. I am probably not refined enough to get it but glossing over multiple pages it kept reading the same to me. He writes a lot, goes on walks and has a "SPECIAL PROJECTS" membership program.

These are very common for a lot of "Thought-leader" or influencer types. They are just social clubs/memberships. So a portion of the money goes to him, and the rest goes towards organizing these "special projects" (Socials/events) for the people who are paying to be members. They are a new sort of country club, for example.

Like most social clubs in the past, the price of membership acts to gatekeep against "casuals", and creates a sort of commitment ("I pay this much, so I might as well use it"). For the latter point, like gym memberships, the model probably relies on 100% of the people rarely if ever showing up or taking part. In that way the attendees are treated to an event or occasion that is worth more than the sum of the contribution of the attendants, in principle.

Damn I need to start being a thought leader

Start a sect and be its guru. It's less work and more lucrative. Example: Goop.

[Furiously takes notes]

Sounds like it's a patreon style setup, but on his hand-built stack instead.

Creates books, alongside some documentary style work related to the topic and the creation of those books. At least as far as I can tell.

https://shop.specialprojects.jp/products/kissa-by-kissa-3rd-...

There's a bulleted list of what you get on the membership page. I'm not in the target audience, but he does make pretty clear what I would expect to receive if I were a member.

https://craigmod.com/membership/

Right but none of it is of substance at least for me. Probably not the target demographic for this, I just saw a lot of rambling about things but for myself I could not pinpoint what was being said. Again, I am not the audience most likely, curious though this works.

The target demographic for stuff like this, from my observation, is people who are easily parted with their cash.

Like those get rich quick real estate seminars. Yea the person talking is wealthy, but it's from subscriptions and entry fees to their talks not actual real estate investing.

Yes. I didn’t even understand what he meant by public facing, which at first I assumed to be something own source.

Sort of a merge of some of the concepts of Substack, Patreon, and old fashioned fan clubs from the looks of it.

Very similar to motivation for starting a startup:

"And my main takeaway from this was: Committing to big, messy, creative projects is a reliable way to increase the number and quality of healthy, talented archetypes within your orbit. The highest signal you can send a busy, accomplished person is that you are someone who makes, not just talks."

Awesome writeup. Especially the technical stack part.

I think there's so much emphasis on Courses, crypto, NFT's drop shipping, etc, that many people forget its businesses like this that are stable and last a super long time for small creators.

One point that stood out is that the author kept saying "it's a lot of work". And that's fine. Somehow we have been trained by society to want a lot without working a lot -- perhaps just refined human nature in the west.

There's something to be said for curating information with an opinion into a niche that people actually want. Refreshing and congratulations.

I agree. It's a shame the creator economy shifted so hard into Crypto. You can build a very "creator first" stack without any Web 3.0 technologies. I guess one thing missing that NFT and the like purports to provide is a "stake" in the creator that can grow in value over time. That's clearly not what Craig was looking for by creating this venture.

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