Building a community on lifetime membership

I've been thinking about lifetime memberships for communities recently. In my indie world it's a topic that I keep seeing coming up.

Initial reactions to lifetime membership are often full of scepticism. That it's not financially sustainable. That you can't sustain member activity longer term, to the extent that you will resent it and even be forced to shut it down. With a bit of future planning, I think these things are nothing to worry about.

To be clear, I don't think lifetime membership will necessarily work for everyone, but it's worth considering as an option for some communities, or for community-driven products.

Here are some of the key thoughts flying around in my head.

Subscriptions are a 10x harder sell

We're subscription fatigued.

When I first wrote this in 2021 I felt the subscription fatigue creeping in, now in 2023 it's even more apparent. The economy continued to has continued tightened. Subscriptions adds to the mental load and makes it harder to make decisions.

We can shrug this off as not important, but I feel it's a real challenge. Subscriptions take up people's mental and organisational capacity. Monthly payments are a pain in the butt to expense back to companies or your own business. And often we just lose track of what we've subscribed to.

Our lives are complex as it is, we should always be thinking how we can simplify our lives for ourselves and our members.

This leads on to...

Subscriptions are great for community owners, not always for their customers

Recurring subscriptions are the dream for businesses, it makes it easy to predict revenue. Of course, businesses want this. It's the dream. It doesn't mean it is what is best for your customers.

What happens if an expired subscription member wants to pop in to give something really valuable, yet they are unable to. How would the vibe of the community change if people knew they could drop in anytime they wanted to give or seek help?

What if members wanted to participate, but never got the chance? Their subscription ends with them having a slight sour taste that perhaps they never got their money's worth.

Or what if a lifetime member ends up observing a lot and then passing on recommendations of the community to new potential members? Free marketing? Yes please.

We should really be thinking from the customer's perspective:

• How will customers feel about lifetime versus subscription?
• How can lifetime members continue to add value?
• What value do we lose when subscriptions expire?

Lifetime memberships are a much easier sell

Psychology wise one-off payments are much easier to deal with.

As a member, you pay once and you're done. You can now relax and focus on being a good member of the community. You can contribute in a way that works for you and without being under pressure that your community membership will expire.

There are other practicalities, specifically when it comes to businesses purchasing memberships. Many organisations are just not set up to buy recurring payments. They are all about one-off transactions and having an approval process.

Employees tend to have a limit on their purchasing powers, or approval is required over a certain amount. It's super important to understand who holds the purse strings. A recurring payment can complicate the process.

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Lifetime brings value for everyone

To expect people to continue subscribing or being committed members forever is unreasonable. We all churn at some point, or our community needs can fluctuate for a whole variety of reasons. This doesn't mean we don't want to dip in or support occassionally.

In the context of community, I've referred to this as Lifetime Commitment (LTC), loosely speaking how long a member will stay active (or committed). Some will stay for years, but on average this is highly unlikely. Mostly what I see is that people come, build up knowledge and confidence and then move on.

When I think about Lifetime Commitment, I ask myself:

• How long can we realistically expect members to commit to our community?
• Are there different levels of commitment we can design for?
• What's the minimum, maximum or average commitment that we can expect?
• Can we create segments for different types of commitments?
• What can each type or level of member contribute?
• How can we seek to understand and co-design the goals or journeys people wish to go on?
• What 'community activities' can we expect of them?
• What is valuable to our community?
• Are committed community members always customers too? Can the relationship change? Can they become collaborators?

Perhaps try having an educated guess at how long you think an average member would benefit from hanging around in your community, then price your community accordingly.

For example, for an annual membership at $100 for members that on average last 2 years, perhaps try pricing it at $200-$300 and see how you get on.

Remember, prices are not permanent. You can increase or decrease them at any point.

How will you and your members feel when they lose access?

In addition to how your members will feel when they lose access to a community, there is also the aspect of how will you feel as a community founder when they are cut off from relationships and resources that they've helped you co-create?

This is one of the biggest parts for me. My stomach churns when I think about this. I just hate the idea that it's ok to just cut people off from everything that they may have also contributed to the community. It feels cruel and not very community focused.

The idea of a door always being open just feels so right for me, especially as a community-focused business.

There's also the practical and operations side of things. Lifetime Membership actually simplifies operations and will consequently save you money. It's actually a huge pain to sync up paid members on different platforms. The continuous need to always be syncing multiple tools together is a royal pain and it can get complicated when members have different emails for varying accounts.

But members will drain us x years down the line

There's the argument that members will zap us of our resources further down the line. Or ask for refunds if things are shut down.

Honestly, I think these are non-issues or ones that can be planned for with clear communication of the culture of the community.

Everything shuts down eventually. Nothing we create will really last forever. The world changes so fast, it certainly looks very different from what it was even just 5 years ago. People know this.

Lifetime does not need to mean lifetime of people's existence. It means lifetime of the existence of the community. Having clarity upon registration, or in the terms is all that is needed.

And for the people who are "too active" or may drain our "resources", quite frankly, that's a good problem to have. It's a situation that needs to be re-framed. There is so much to learn from these people. Embrace them as much as you can. Talk to them. Learn from them. Figure them out. See the value that they bring.

The reality is your long-term and highly experienced members have a huge amount of value, it's a major win to keep them around, support them, create opportunities and continue investing in building your relationship.

These types of members are great for sharing insights that have depth. You could invite them to speak on a podcast or an event, for example. And this invite can happen smoothly if they are still a member of your community.

Appreciate the people who have subscribed. There's huge value in maintaining connections and relationships with your members. Building community is a two way street. It's not just them that gets value from what has been created. As a community builder you get huge value too.

We must not forget this. It's easy to treat things with transactional behaviour. The reality is that we need people as much if not more than they need us.

Most communities need to diversify their incomes anyways

To rely on one source of income is a risky business. The world changes quickly. Business models become defunct in the blink of an eye. We only need to look at COVID and the resulting impact it had on events. More recently, I've witnessed businesses with membership only revenue struggling.

Ministry of Testing had 70% revenue coming from events pre-COVID. Luckily, in addition to money tucked away in the bank, we had invested a couple of years into building a membership platform and had existing sponsorship deals. The business has managed to survive when many events based businesses haven't — through a mixture of focusing on membership, paid online events, and increasing the advertising/sponsorship revenue. Now that in real life events are coming back, they are able to tap back into that revenue as membership revenues start to dip.

Just because we have lifetime access for a community, it doesn't mean we can't explore other ways of making money:

• do paid events
• sell products on their own
• offer services on the side
• explore advertising and sponsorship angle

Exploring other ways of making money and pulling people in without membership is also a great community growth tactic — I've referred to this previously as Community Entry Points.

As community builders we need to be creative and look for opportunities to adapt constantly. Those that don't adapt cease to exist.

Building systems and tech for recurring subscriptions is a pain

I feel like people still don't talk about this enough.

Recurring subscription payments that are hooked into a membership offering, potentially even two, three or more tools, are a royal pain in the ass.

Yes you can no-code, integrate, or custom build it. Either way, there are so many little things to cater for, to build processes around. It gets messy, quickly. We can achieve so much with tech, but it gets complicated and costly pretty quickly. I'm at the point where I feel that juggling so many tools strips us from the joy of building community.

It's slowly killing my spirit.

Lifetime membership removes so many operations requirements. It simplifies everything, and IMHO, makes it much easier to focus on what's important — building a better community.

Who is doing Lifetime membership well?

Nomadlist has been around for a few years now and it's such a great example of a low cost lifetime membership. The pricing also changes in an attempt to achieve better diversity. I've seen the price vary between $70-150, I love the constant experimentation.

Smallbets is a more recent community, it's a community for founders, initially starting as a repeating monthly cohort and now it invites other people in to share their experiences. It's mostly based on Discord with event recordings made available. I'm sure it will continue to experiment, add and change things over time.

The price varies, sometimes it has discounts, but mostly it's on a slow upward trend. I think it will reach one million in revenue shortly if it hasn't already.

🌈 Rosieland started as a newsletter, so the logistics of changing to a lifetime membership is tricky and nuanced. If Ghost offered an easy way to offer lifetime payments, I would offer that in an instant!

One of my main goals is to reduce the number of tools I use, community minimalism, so to speak. Whilst I know I could set up some integrations or automations to make it work, I don't really want to spend the time or effort into that at this point in time. I don't have the headspace, it doesn't spark joy, and I just have different priorities.

What I've settled on for now and after migrating to a new community platform is having events and the community as lifetime access. Continued payment means getting access to all the content, courses and community knowledgebase. What makes me feel good about this is that I can continue building relationships without the stress of people churning.

The offering will iterate over time, especially as I hope to get the knowledgebase into the community platform. As I mentioned previously, communities should experiment and iterate.

Remember, you can always change things up

Lifetime membership does not mean 'forever'. You can change things up as things grow and change. If you grow your community, you should seek to explore and change constantly.

You can always change to subscriptions later. Or increase the price. Change the business model or add revenue streams. Really, you can. Just try not to confuse or annoy people along the way.

There is no right answer to any of this stuff. All of our paths are unique. Being aware of the pros and cons is most certainly useful.