Membership Platforms: The Holy Grail Of Online Business? – Info Entrepreneurship

Patience.

In the beginning, you might only have a handful of members. You might be creating stuff every single day for your community, but there are only a few people who are actually there.

In short, you might spend 40 hours per week for a $100 paycheck.

Plus, these few existing members might also leave quickly (once they realize that there is no active community there yet).

One way of working around that is simply not to launch it right away. But rather, to ask people to go on a waiting list and sign up for the day that the platform is going to be released.

Then, only once you have enough members, you actually launch the platform itself. That way, there will be people actively engaging in the community from day one.

The downside of this approach:

You are going to risk a huge failure. If you already have many people signed up on launch date and the product just isn’t good enough, then you will disappoint a whole lot of people.

So, choose wisely.

But either way, you must realize that a membership platform doesn’t happen quickly. It is something that you slowly build up over time. As more and more people sign up for it, the value of the platform also increases.

It is much more of a long-term business model than, say, launching a single online course on Udemy.