#163 How Doing Less Added $2,600 In MRR
Most people running memberships just have too much going on. They have too many tiers, an overwhelming amount of content, and they're serving lots of different levels at once. And because it's such a complicated ecosystem, it causes all kinds of issues.
Maybe engagement is low, the membership has plateaued and it's become really hard to grow. You think you need to add more value, more content, or more events in order to drive engagement and make it work better... but a lot of times, simplifying is actually the answer.
Recently we did a strategy for my client Matt. His membership had four tiers, a ton of content, and he was serving a lot of different levels at once. He had unintentionally created an overwhelm & confusion problem.
We reduced his offer from four tiers to two, centralized his content, killed a bunch of separate spaces, and built one hub for connection and support. And we updated his library so it became a searchable workshops library instead of an overwhelming pile of content for members to sift through.
Less than a month after implementing, he had 21 new members and $2,600 in new monthly recurring revenue.
Isn't that crazy? Sometimes we just need to do less. Best news ever!
Okay of course there's a catch...
There has to be intention in how it's designed.
The second piece of Matt's strategy was personalization. Before our strategy he trying to do the personalization and the member journey before people were inside the membership. They had to choose the right member journey based on membership tier (which had 4 choices). Before they even buy, we're handing them lots of decisions, and that just causes overwhelm which keeps people from buying.
Instead, speak to the right person, bring them in, and then personalize. They join already bought into the transformation, then as part of onboarding, they get a personalized plan.
Matt does this with an onboarding quiz, and he uses AI plus the Circle MCP to create personalized 3 month roadmaps for each new member. It's super fast, and a HUGE value add for members.
What I love about this strategy is that it grows the membership from two directions at once. On the front end, we're reducing decision friction in the buying process and making it really clear what people get. On the backend, we're improving the member journey, which improves retention and engagement, which leads to more member results, which increases word of mouth growth.
If your membership feels too complicated, start here:
Count your decision points. How many choices does someone have to make before they can buy? Tiers, packages, paths. Every one of them adds friction. Could you cut it in half?
Audit your spaces. If your community has separate spaces for every topic and level, look at which ones are actually active. Could most of the connection happen in one central hub?
Make your content searchable, not scrollable. An overwhelming library is a retention problem. Would a member joining today know exactly what's for them?
Move personalization inside the membership. Sell one clear transformation, then use onboarding to build each member's personalized path once they're in.