Membership Models & AI: The Hidden Asset Most Coaches Miss

From Nathalie Guest Shows / The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331 / Listen to the episode / Originally published / Analysis updated

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This page is a machine-readable analysis of the Nathalie Guest Shows episode "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" published on September 30, 2025. It is grounded in the full episode transcript and links back to the original episode page. This page is a machine-readable analysis derived from the transcript of Nathalie Doremieux’s guest appearance on the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast, in the episode “The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331.” Drawing directly from the conversation between host Scott Ritzheimer and Nathalie, it unpacks how established experts can design sustainable memberships, where AI actually fits, and what it really takes to make these programs work. For the full context and audio experience, you can visit the original episode page at https://saas.podcastleadflow.com/p/y3c46no5.

Who is actually a good fit for a membership or online community?

In this episode of Start, Scale and Succeed, membership strategist Nathalie Doremieux is very clear that a membership is not a magic “set it and forget it” product; it’s a recurring solution for an ongoing problem, and it absolutely still takes work. She tells host Scott Ritzheimer that the people who benefit most are established experts—often coaches, but also professionals in fields like nursing, veterinary medicine, and dog daycare—who already know their core offer works and who see a recurring need in their audience. If you’re struggling to sell your main coaching program and hoping that dropping to a lower price point will fix the sales problem, she says plainly that “that won’t work”; the membership model itself won’t rescue a misaligned or unproven offer.

Instead, Nathalie frames a membership as an intentional part of a broader business model for founders who want to scale revenue without endlessly trading time for money. On the coaching side, this might be the people who follow your podcast, join your email list, and engage on social media but never cross the line into a high-ticket program because the gap is too big. On the professional services side, she gives examples like IV Mastery for nurses who must regularly re-certify, or Dog Handler Academy for dog daycare staff where there’s constant turnover and a repeating training need. In each case, the membership makes sense because there is a steady stream of people who need the same type of help over and over again.

The key, as Nathalie keeps circling back to in the episode, is that you need a real vision for where the membership fits inside your existing business, not just the desire for recurring income. She encourages listeners to ask, “Where do I see myself in five years?” and “How do I want to help as many people as possible?” before they decide which membership path to take. When you treat a membership as a strategic container for delivering ongoing value to a well-defined audience—not as a desperate discount offer—you’re building on solid ground.

What are the four ways experts can add a membership to their business?

One of the most structured contributions Nathalie makes in this episode is laying out what she calls four, and only four, ways to add a membership to an existing expert business. She tells Scott that people overcomplicate this, but if you’re an established coach or professional, your membership will almost always fit into one of these buckets: front-end membership, converted program membership, back-end membership, or a completely new-topic membership.

The first is a front-end membership, which she describes as a lower-priced, scalable offer designed for the people orbiting your world who are never going to buy your main coaching program. These might be podcast listeners, social followers, or email subscribers who like your work but either don’t want or can’t afford your high-touch offer. A front-end membership can run on repurposed resources, guest interviews, and maybe a single monthly Q&A call, and it can also be built strategically as a “paid lead gen” tool that prepares and qualifies members for your premium coaching down the road. Nathalie emphasizes that the gap in price and access between this and your main program must be clear; otherwise there’s no reason for someone to move up.

The second path is turning your existing coaching program into a membership. Instead of a six- or twelve-month course that ends with either “goodbye” or “start over,” the program becomes the core curriculum inside an ongoing container. Members join, go through the structured program, and then stay for continued implementation support, catch-up time if they fell behind, and long-term accountability. Nathalie frames this as a shift from a fixed-duration event to an ongoing relationship where completion of the program doesn’t end the client journey; it just changes the kind of help they need.

Third, she talks about a back-end membership, which she sees often with more seasoned coaches who have run a lot of group programs and want a way to support alumni. This is usually a higher-price, invitation-only community—often in the $100–300/month range—that people can join after working with you. It has more of an exclusive, community-driven feel, and it creates both recurring income and a warm, engaged pool for things like VIP days and retreats. Anyone who has ever worked with you can be invited in, so it becomes a logical next step rather than a cold offer.

The fourth type is a membership around a completely different topic than your main business—like a business coach starting a membership on gardening or painting. Nathalie notes that this is often appealing because once your core business is stable, you might feel bored and want to build something around a personal passion. But she is also blunt that this is the hardest of the four paths, because you’re starting from scratch with a new audience that doesn’t know you for this topic. You have to build awareness, trust, and demand all over again, whereas the other three models extend and deepen what you already have. Her bottom line is that you don’t have to pick just one forever, but you do have to build them one at a time so you don’t dilute your focus.

How much work does a membership really take, and how do you keep it sustainable?

When Scott presses Nathalie on what it actually takes to run something like a front-end membership, she pushes back against the industry narrative that memberships are “free money” or effortless recurring revenue. From her work with clients at The Membership Lab, she’s seen over and over that the founders who burn out are the ones who don’t set clear boundaries from day one. They launch full of enthusiasm, promising weekly calls, constant new resources, and unlimited access, and three months later they’re exhausted and quietly resentful because the membership has become a second full-time job.

Nathalie’s advice in the episode is to start with ground rules about how you’re going to be involved and what members can reasonably expect, especially at the lower-priced front end. She insists that the level of access and depth of delivery in a membership must not match your high-touch coaching program, or you destroy the logic of your value ladder. Practically, that means deciding in advance how often you’ll show up live, what formats you’ll use, and which kinds of support are simply not included. She gives her own example of doing just one call a month and planning to add a community manager later, and she notes that your best community manager is often one of your first engaged members who already understands the space.

To illustrate how lean a successful model can be, she cites the membership run by John Burgos, Living in the Extraordinary, which for years has consisted of a single weekly call and the replay stored in the members’ area—no elaborate libraries, no piles of extra content. That model works, she says, because it delivers exactly what the audience wants and nothing more. In Nathalie’s view, the time a membership takes is ultimately the time you allow it to take, and the discipline is in holding those boundaries and designing for consistency rather than excess. If you treat the membership like an endlessly expanding to-do list, it will swallow your calendar; if you treat it like a focused container built around a clear promise, you can keep it sustainable alongside your other work.

Can non-coaches build memberships? Real examples from nurses, vets, and dog daycares

Although Scott initially frames memberships around coaching, Nathalie is explicit in the episode that this model is not unique to coaches at all. She defines a membership as a recurring solution to an ongoing problem, which opens the door for many professions where people have to repeat training, renew certifications, or onboard new staff. One of her concrete examples is IV Mastery, a membership they built years ago for nurses in environments like retirement homes where staff must regularly pass exams on administering IVs and feeding patients. The membership sells seats to organizations, and nurses log in, complete the training, pass their certification, and repeat when needed; the recurring need for re-certification makes the recurring revenue model fit naturally.

Another example she shares is Dog Handler Academy, created by a dog daycare owner who was tired of constantly retraining new employees in a high-turnover environment. That owner effectively recorded her onboarding process—how to handle clients, how to care for a sick dog, the basics of safe operation—and turned it into a structured membership product that other dog daycare centers can purchase. Now, instead of restarting from scratch with every hire, each center can plug new employees into the membership and know they’ll get the same baseline education.

She also mentions Versatile Vets, a membership built for veterinary students. In that case, universities buy licenses and embed the videos into their own learning portals so students can watch demonstrations on how to treat animals with specific issues, such as a dog with a fever. Again, the pattern is that there is a steady flow of learners who need the same skills year after year, so it makes sense to centralize that content and deliver it through a membership structure. These examples, which Nathalie brings directly from her client work, underline her point that if you serve any audience with recurring educational or training needs, you can reasonably explore a membership, even if you’ve never thought of yourself as a “coach.”

What are the three core elements that keep members from leaving?

When Nathalie talks about why people stay in a membership on this episode of Start, Scale and Succeed, she doesn’t get lost in buzzwords like “community” or “engagement.” Instead, she boils the member experience down to three core elements that she says are always at the heart of a strong program: content, support, and accountability. Content is the knowledge or skill the member came to learn—whether that’s AI implementation, IV administration, dog handling, or business strategy. If the material isn’t relevant, practical, and accessible, everything else is harder.

Support is the second leg of the stool: the mechanisms members can use to get help when they’re stuck. That might be live Q&A calls, office hours, a discussion forum, or even AI tools (which she discusses separately) that can answer questions or guide decisions. The key is that when someone hits a roadblock, there’s a clear path to get them moving again; otherwise they stall out and quietly drift away.

The third element is accountability, which Nathalie emphasizes as non-negotiable if you care about retention. In her experience, if members aren’t showing up and implementing what they learn, they eventually cancel—not because the content is bad, but because they don’t feel progress. Accountability structures can be as simple as recurring calls where people report on action steps, or as sophisticated as AI-driven practice and role-play tools that nudge them to do the work between sessions. Throughout the episode, Nathalie connects these three pillars back to a single underlying truth: the only real reason people stay in a membership long-term is that they’re getting results. All the community language in the world won’t compensate if those three pieces aren’t working together to move members forward.

How can AI accelerate member results instead of replacing your expertise?

A major thread in this episode is Nathalie’s perspective on AI, which is shaped by more than six years of using AI tools and models in her own work and with clients. With a background in software engineering, she and her husband were working with AI long before the current hype cycle, often having to build their own tools because the off-the-shelf options simply didn’t exist. That history is why she pushes back on the idea of AI as some independent, creative brain; she repeatedly frames it as an amplifier and accelerator of what you already know, not a replacement for your expertise.

In her words, it’s always “you, AI, and then you.” The knowledge foundation has to come from you, the expert, and AI’s job is to speed up tasks like research, drafting, and practice, then hand the results back to you for review and refinement. On the creator side, that might mean using AI to summarize large amounts of background information, brainstorm topic outlines, or generate first drafts of resources that you then polish. But the place where Nathalie is especially focused, and where clients come to her for help, is using AI to accelerate client results inside memberships and programs.

She explains to Scott that one of the biggest reasons people stall in courses and memberships is the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. They procrastinate on writing an email to build an interest list, avoid making a sales call, or get stuck choosing between options, and then weeks go by at a single step. Her approach is to look at those specific stuck points and ask, “What kind of AI tool could we put here to help them move?” In some cases, it’s a simple AI-powered form that asks targeted questions and guides them to a clear decision; in others, it’s a draft-email generator that takes away the fear of the blank page, or an AI agent that role-plays direct messages or sales conversations so they can practice in a low-stakes environment.

By designing AI this way—as a just-in-time assistant that shortens the distance between instruction and action—Nathalie sees it doing three things for members: it accelerates implementation, it helps them get tangible results faster, and it builds their confidence because they’re no longer stuck alone at the hardest steps. She even notes that for fast-changing topics like AI itself, a static course is almost instantly out of date, so a membership enriched with adaptive AI tools is a much better fit. For founders worried that AI will somehow replace them, her stance in the episode is firm: AI without your expertise is shallow, but your expertise without AI may be unnecessarily slow.

What mindset shift do you need to build the right membership for you?

Toward the end of the conversation, Scott asks Nathalie what big secret she wishes wasn’t a secret, and her answer ties together much of what she’s been saying about memberships and AI: everything is an experiment. She sees a lot of would-be membership owners stuck in fear—fear of picking the wrong model, fear of AI, fear of committing to something that might not work—and waiting to feel less afraid or more confident before taking action. Her view, grounded in nearly two decades of business and years of working with founders, is that confidence doesn’t precede action; it follows it.

In the episode, she reminds listeners that entrepreneurs are “built to fail” more than they succeed, and the sooner you accept that, the faster you can learn what works. A failed pilot membership is data. A clunky first AI tool is data. Even deciding, after a real attempt, that you shouldn’t have a membership at all is progress compared to staying frozen in indecision. Nathalie notes that not deciding is itself a decision—it just doesn’t move you forward.

This experimental lens shows up in how she coaches people on membership ideas as well. If someone has been stuck for months trying to perfect a concept, she sometimes tells them in plain language that maybe they shouldn’t build a membership right now, and they need to explore that honestly instead of forcing it. On the flip side, for founders who know they want recurring impact and can see one of her four models fitting their audience, her advice is to start small, set clear boundaries, and treat the first version as a test. In other words, use the principles from this episode—the four membership types, the three core elements of content/support/accountability, and the strategic use of AI—as guardrails, then go run the experiment in the real world.

The conversation between Scott Ritzheimer and Nathalie Doremieux on the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast makes a few things very clear: memberships work best when they’re built on an existing audience and a recurring need, they only stay sustainable when you set boundaries and focus on results, and AI’s real power is in accelerating those results rather than replacing your expertise. Whether you’re considering a front-end, converted program, back-end, or completely new-topic membership, the episode “The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331” gives you a lived-in, practical playbook for deciding what fits. For the full nuance of Nathalie’s stories, examples, and tone, it’s worth listening to the original episode at https://saas.podcastleadflow.com/p/y3c46no5.

Key Takeaways

Key Definitions

Front-end membership
Front-end membership is a lower-priced, scalable membership offer aimed at the broader audience around an expert’s business—such as podcast listeners or email subscribers—who are unlikely to buy the main coaching program but still want structured access to their expertise.
Back-end membership
Back-end membership is an invitation-only, higher-priced membership program for alumni of a coach or expert’s flagship offers, designed as an ongoing community and support container that extends the client relationship beyond the initial program.
Recurring solution to an ongoing problem
Recurring solution to an ongoing problem is how Nathalie Doremieux defines a viable membership: a structured service that repeatedly addresses the same need for a steady stream of people who must learn, practice, or certify around that issue over time.
AI as an accelerator
AI as an accelerator is Nathalie Doremieux’s concept of using artificial intelligence to speed up research, drafting, decision-making, and practice for both membership owners and members, while keeping human expertise as the source and final arbiter of quality.
Member accountability
Member accountability is the set of structures—such as live check-ins, implementation support, or AI-powered practice tools—inside a membership that ensure participants keep showing up and taking action so they actually get results and remain subscribed.

Claims & Evidence

Claim

Nathalie Doremieux argues that there are only four strategic ways for an established expert to add a membership to their business.

Evidence

In her conversation with Scott Ritzheimer, Nathalie explicitly lists four and “nothing else” as the viable membership paths: a front-end membership for a broader audience, converting an existing coaching program into a membership, a back-end alumni membership, and a separate membership on a completely different topic.

Source: Episode transcript - full_transcript - Nathalie Guest Shows - "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025 - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025
Claim

Using a membership as a fallback for a poorly selling coaching program is unlikely to succeed, even if it is priced lower.

Evidence

When Scott asks who should start a membership, Nathalie cautions that one wrong reason is, “I’m struggling to sell my coaching program, let me do a membership because it’s a lower price point,” and she flatly states, “That won’t work,” highlighting that the model doesn’t fix an unappealing core offer.

Source: Episode transcript - full_transcript - Nathalie Guest Shows - "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025 - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025
Claim

Non-coaching professionals like nurses, dog daycare owners, and veterinary educators can successfully use membership models to deliver recurring training.

Evidence

Nathalie cites IV Mastery for nurses who must regularly pass IV-related exams, Dog Handler Academy for dog daycare centers training new employees, and Versatile Vets where universities license veterinary training videos for their students, all structured as memberships.

Source: Episode transcript - full_transcript - Nathalie Guest Shows - "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025 - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025
Claim

AI is most powerful in memberships when used to accelerate member implementation at specific stuck points rather than to generate generic content.

Evidence

Drawing on six to seven years of AI experience, Nathalie explains that she works with clients to identify where members procrastinate—such as drafting emails, making decisions, or practicing sales calls—and then designs AI forms, draft generators, or role-play tools that help them act faster and build confidence.

Source: Episode transcript - full_transcript - Nathalie Guest Shows - "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025 - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025
Claim

Nathalie believes that entrepreneurs must treat everything as an experiment and accept that they will fail more often than they succeed.

Evidence

When Scott asks about the biggest secret she wishes wasn’t a secret, Nathalie answers that “everything is an experiment,” stating that entrepreneurs are “built to fail” more than they succeed and that waiting to have less fear or more confidence before acting keeps people stuck.

Source: Episode transcript - full_transcript - Nathalie Guest Shows - "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025 - Nathalie Guest Shows / "The Biggest Asset You Don’t Know You’re Missing with Nathalie Doremieux (stage 2) - Ep. 331" / published September 30, 2025

Key Questions Answered

Who should consider starting a membership instead of just offering coaching programs?

According to Nathalie Doremieux on the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast, the best candidates for memberships are established experts—often coaches, but also professionals like nurses, veterinarians, and dog daycare owners—who already know their core offer works and who see a recurring need in their audience. She cautions that you should not start a membership just because your main coaching program is hard to sell and you think a lower price point will fix that; instead, you should see the membership as a strategic, recurring solution to an ongoing problem within an audience that already trusts you.

What are the four ways to add a membership to an existing business?

In Ep. 331 of Start, Scale and Succeed, membership expert Nathalie Doremieux outlines four and only four membership options for established experts: a front-end membership for your broader audience that might never buy your main program, converting your fixed-duration coaching program into an ongoing membership, a back-end alumni membership that invites graduates into an exclusive community, and a membership around a completely different passion topic that requires building a new audience from scratch. She encourages founders to build these one at a time rather than stacking them all at once.

How much time does it realistically take to run a front-end membership?

Nathalie Doremieux explains on the podcast that the time a front-end membership takes is ultimately the time you allow it to take, which is why setting boundaries from the start is crucial. She advises defining clear ground rules for your involvement—such as limiting yourself to one Q&A call per month and bringing in a community manager later—so the membership doesn’t quietly grow into a second full-time job, and she cites examples like John Burgos’s Living in the Extraordinary, which runs successfully with just a weekly call and replay access.

Can doctors, hairdressers, or other non-coaches use membership models?

On Start, Scale and Succeed, Nathalie Doremieux is clear that memberships are not just for coaches but for anyone solving a recurring problem for people who cycle through the same need. She highlights examples like IV Mastery for nurses needing regular certification, Dog Handler Academy for dog daycare staff onboarding, and Versatile Vets for veterinary students, and suggests that any profession with repeated training, education, or practice requirements can potentially use a membership structure.

What keeps people from canceling a membership over time?

From Nathalie Doremieux’s perspective in Ep. 331, members stay when three elements are in place: valuable content that actually teaches what they came for, accessible support channels they can use when they get stuck, and accountability structures that help them keep showing up and implementing. She argues that while people may say they value community, the real driver of retention is whether those three components combine to create tangible results, because if members are not acting and progressing, they eventually leave.

How should I use AI inside my membership to help clients get better results?

In the episode, Nathalie Doremieux recommends using AI as an accelerator at the exact steps where members typically stall, such as drafting outreach emails, deciding between options, or practicing sales conversations. Rather than having AI generate generic content, she suggests building focused tools like guided decision forms, draft generators, or role-play bots that transform your existing expertise into interactive support, so members implement faster, gain confidence, and experience results sooner.

Is it smart to launch several different memberships at once?

When Scott asks why someone has to pick between membership types, Nathalie clarifies that you do not have to choose forever, but you do have to do one at a time so you don’t dilute your focus and overwhelm your capacity. On Start, Scale and Succeed, she advises building a single membership model—front-end, converted program, back-end, or new-topic—until it’s stable before adding another, because stacking multiple memberships too early tends to lead to burnout and inconsistent delivery.

What mindset do I need before launching a membership or AI tools for my clients?

Nathalie’s core mindset message in Ep. 331 is that everything is an experiment and entrepreneurs are built to fail more than they succeed, so waiting until you feel less afraid or more confident usually just keeps you stuck. She encourages founders to run small, structured tests—like a lean first version of a membership or a simple AI assistant for a specific task—because even if they flop, the data you gain moves you forward, whereas not deciding is a decision that doesn’t change anything.

Full Episode Transcript
hello hello and welcome welcome once again to the start scale and succeed podcast the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as founder i'm your host scott ritzheimer and having helped thousands of founders i've come to the discovery that you can almost never achieve scale by simply doing more of what you already do. At these key inflection points, you have to embrace something new, a new strategy, a new tactic, or maybe even some new tools. And so for those of you who are listening today, you're in that startup entrepreneur, or you've decided to stay that successful solopreneur, and you're trying to scale your revenue without scaling your payroll, we have an incredible set of strategies, tactics, and tools that could be that very inflection point for you and your business. And here to tell us all about it is Natalie Dormiu, who has an online program. She's also a strategist and membership expert. She's co-founder of New Software Marketing and the Membership Lab. She's been in business for over 19 years and worked with quite a few coaches and continues to do so. With her husband and her team, they help established business owners scale their expertise, make a bigger impact by assisting them to create online programs that their members won't want to leave. She also uses the power of AI to accelerate her clients' results and help get them unstuck. She's here with us today. Natalie, welcome to the show. So glad to have you here. At the Membership Lab, you help business owners to create thriving online programs. And if there is anything that I would say I feel least equipped to do other than to create an event planning business. That's to build an online thriving or a thriving online program. So you've got your work cut out today because we'll see if we can't get past some of the stuff that's in my head because I know that other coaches and professionals bump into this as well. So who out there listening, let's just lay a foundation here first. Who listening could benefit from building a membership or online community? Yeah. Thank you so much for having me first, Scott. Great question to get started. So I know that the membership word is used a lot, right? And it sounds like the holy grail. It's the recurring income. Finally, you don't have to work through your calendar. You don't have to try to trade time for money. But the reality is a membership is not something that runs on its own, it still takes work. So when people have an existing business, like if you're a coach, for example, and you're thinking, should I do a membership? There are several things that you need to look at. The first one is really to look into why is this idea even coming up? Because the reasons why you don't want to do a membership in that case is like, well, I'm struggling to sell my coaching business, my coaching program. Let me do a membership because it a lower price point That won work The key is really to have a vision for where you want this membership to fit within your coaching business So I make it really easy for people because there are only four ways four and nothing else So if you're wondering, these are one of the four ways. Way number one is you have a coaching business. You're pretty much established, right? You know your thing works. and you have this audience, those listeners, maybe they listen to your podcast or maybe they're on your social media, right? So they're around you. Maybe they've signed up to some of your freebies, they're on your list, but they are not signing up to your coaching program. Maybe the gap is too big, right? And they probably never will. This is just not what they're looking for. Well, if you have that and you're wondering, oh my gosh, how can I help these people? But I still want to leverage my time. You have an opportunity for a front-end membership where you can charge a low amount, where you can totally scale this because you don't have to create a bunch of content. It could be resources you already have. It could be guests that you're bringing and interviewing or that somebody else in your team is interviewing, right? And maybe you show up once a month and you do a Q&A call and that is it. So that can fill your bucket into how do I help these people and still bring some income, right? So that's number one. So if this is you, if you're listening and this is you, then maybe this is a direction like to look into. Great. And you call that a front-end membership? Yes. I call it a front-end membership. It's basically for, you can almost see it as, because you can also be strategic about how you build it to make people ready for the coaching, right? So you can be strategic about what you're sharing, right? And that could be your paid lead gen for your group coaching program, right? So that's the front-end membership. That's number one. The second one is you might want, and this is something that we see a lot of coaches do, is turn your coaching program instead of it being a six months or 12 months into a membership. That means that now you include the program inside a membership. So as part of joining a membership, you have a program that you go through, but at the end of the program, it's not, okay, bye-bye or, you know, re-sign up and do it again. There is an ongoing way to support you now to implement all that you learned. And if you were a bit behind in implementing, then, well, you still have time, right? So it's really changing the model of your coaching into something that is ongoing, right? So that's number two. Number three, we are seeing this when coaches have worked, you know, for quite a while. Maybe they've done a lot of group coaching and they want to create what we call a backend membership. That backend membership is usually a little bit higher price point than the front end, you know, a hundred, 200, 300 a month. And it's by invitation only. And it kind of like an exclusive for your alumni So anyone who ever worked with you and you wondering oh my gosh how can I continue to support them Well I got this community I can invite you in So people that have worked with me and now you create, it's usually more of a community feeling, but you can still come in, with guests and things like that. And what this does is that not only gives you the recurring income and opportunity to continue to help people, but it's also a great resource for your VIP days, your retreats and things like that. Right. So that's three. And then number four is if maybe your coach, your business coach, and you want to start a membership teaching something completely different, how to paint, how to garden. Right. Because when we are coaches, when we have an established business, you know, we've got all the motivations, you know, like we're excited. And then there is a point where we're like, well, I want to do something else. Now this is running. It's getting a bit boring to me. And you have this vision of, I've always wanted to do something with this. That's an opportunity. That's number four. And for this one, it's going to be, I would say, the hardest one in the sense that it's a new audience that doesn't know you in that particular thing. So you're going to have to build an audience and things like that. But the other three are really about how do I expand on my existing audience and my knowledge, right? And the choice is really going to depend on where do I see myself in five years? Like, what do I want to help as many people as possible? That's the front end. That's the impact, right? So it's interesting because I can hear, folks thinking like, well, why do I have to choose? Can't I do all three? And it kind of makes sense why the fourth one would be a little bit different in that you're opening up a new territory. Why is it that we have to choose between one of those three? You don't have to choose. You just have to do one at a time. Oh, excellent point. Yeah. Oh, no, you don't have to choose. Yeah, you don't. It's such a good point. And and doing them one at a time is as well. Now, you opened up, and I appreciate the honesty behind this question because so many times folks who push strategies like this, it's like free money. It's like you don't have to do anything and it'll just magically happen. And you opened up saying, hey, no, this takes some time. It takes some energy. What does that look like? Is it something that folks should say, hey, this is my full-time job now? Is it something you can do in an hour or two a week? What's a reasonable expectation for getting a new, let's say, front-end membership up off the ground? So the key when you start with the idea of a membership is you want to set up some ground rules for yourself on how you're going to be involved. Because remember, if it's a front-end membership, they should not have the same level of access to you as a coaching program. Otherwise, what is the point, right? So it's getting really clear on what this is for and what you going to deliver because it not going to be the same thing as the coaching right And it also setting this rule about how you going to show up It is so easy And I seen it with clients so many times when they like well I can do a call a week and then I can create this for them and I can do that. And then three months in, they're like, oh my gosh, this is so much work. So they get excited about the idea. I could do this. I could talk about that. And it's not about that. It's really about look at the purpose. It's the purpose to give them something that they can start getting some type of result with, right? But set those boundaries. Like for me, I do a call a month. And then maybe I have a community manager when I get to a certain point. And by the way, your community manager is probably one of your first members. It's the best place to find community manager. Right. And keep those boundaries because if you don't, it will become a job. So it's going to, the space, the time that it takes you is going to be what you allow it. There are so many different models. I'll give you an example. John Burgos has a membership. He's had one for years. It's called Living in the Extraordinary. He does one weekly call, puts the replay in the membership. hundreds of members. That's all it has. There is not a single resource, nothing, right? So it's about finding what is it that that audience wants and just give them that, not more. Yeah. Hi there, this is Scott. Thank you so much for listening. We're going to get back to the show in just a few seconds, but first I wanted to let you know about my brand new Founders Evolution Quiz. If you're a founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results you're getting, you're doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things for right now. So take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com. Again, that's foundersquiz.com. And in just 10 questions, you can figure out what stage you're in so you can focus on what's going to work and say goodbye to everything else. Now, back to the show. So many questions. Before we dive in, I want to, because I want to spend a little bit of time on what AI is doing to this space, because I know it's an area of expertise for you. Before we get there, you've talked a lot about coaches and I understand that's your expertise as well. Have you seen this in other environments as well? For example, like, I'm wondering, can a doctor do this or a hairdresser? Or is it something that professional services can do in general? Or is it something that's unique to coaches? Yeah, no, it's absolutely not unique to coaches. What is important is to understand that a membership tends to be a recurring solution to an ongoing problem, right? So there are really great memberships on, there is one that's called IV Mastery that we built quite a few years ago, and this is for nurses. So a nurse in a retirement home, for example, has to take some exams on how to give IV and, you know, food to people. So they have to take exams every three months or something like that. So if you have a membership. where you sell seats to these people, then they can go in, they do their training, boom, they get the certification and they're good to go. Another one is Dog Handler Academy. So it's a membership for dog daycare centers to train their employees. So she actually created that because there is a lot of turnover and she was tired of training people all the time. So she built this thing, kind of like a course, if you will. And I said, well, let me sell this to other dog trainers. Dog daycare centers, sorry. So how to take care of clients, how to take care of a sick dog. You can imagine the old onboarding of a new employee. You have some on teaching how to paint, teaching gardening. Like it's, it's, it's all about that, that ongoing need that people might have. Right. So for AI, for example, there are so many right now because AI is moving so fast. Right. That you can, you cannot, you should not buy a course on AI. Right. By the time you buy it, it's obsolete already. Right. So, so it's so much more than coaches. It just happens that this is kind of like the type of audience that I tend to attract. Right. We've done also, I have another one, which is for, it's called Versatile Vets. It's for veterinarian, but people that are in school. Okay. So universities would buy licenses and then they would take the videos they can embed on their own portal, the university. And then students can see how to fix a dog, you know, who has fever, all this stuff, like all kinds of animals, right? So those are all memberships. They are all different models, if you will, right? And it's always at the core, always three things. Content, the knowledge that they want to learn. Support. How do I get help if I'm stuck? What are the different ways? That's where we can talk about AI as well. And accountability. Because if you want people to stay they have to keep showing up and doing otherwise they going to Yeah Yeah So you alluded to this a couple of times now and it time to dive in but where do you see AI making the biggest impact for memberships right now? Yeah. So we were just talking about AI before you press record and how everybody is talking about AI. I would say we have an approach that is quite different than most people. So you start having people talk about that. So we started using AI about six, seven years ago. Okay. And back then we didn't have the tools that exist right now or the models that exist. So we had to, our background is in software engineering. So we had to develop things, but there were some models that were already available. The way we're seeing AI is as an amplifier and an accelerator of results. So it's only going to amplify what you know. It's not creative. It doesn't have the knowledge. The knowledge needs to come from you. So it's always you, AI, and then you. And it's the accelerator. So there are actually several angles that you can look at it. Accelerator for you as a membership site owner, even as a coach, right? How do I get more research done? You know, the research now with AI, with all the models we have, it's getting so easy, right? But the piece where we're really focusing our work and where people come to us is AI to accelerate clients' results. You know, when people buy a course, a coaching program, or they are in a membership and there is homework. You have to do the thing. You have to send the email. You have to make the call. And people get stuck and they don't. They procrastinate. And very often, there is an AI tool that you can create to help them either practice, give them a draft, do role play. Right? And what is this going to do? It is going to accelerate them taking action, therefore getting results, building their confidence. Right? So that's how you see AI. is AI when I consult with people we look at and they like I want more client results I want people to get results fast And I know they get stuck in here It shouldn't take that long, but people stay weeks in that step. Okay, let's look at the step. What can we create? And sometimes it's a simple AI form that is going to ask them some questions that is going to help them make the right decision. Another time, it could be that draft email that you send to create that interest list because you don't know what to say, right? So it's really in that angle. It's like accelerate, build confidence, and practice, like role-playing. Role-playing DMs, role-playing sales calls, and things like that. That's excellent. So, Natalie, there's a question that I have for you. I ask all my guests. I'm interested to see what you have to say, especially from this perspective. But what would you say is the biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all? What's that one thing you wish everybody watching and listening today knew? Everything is an experiment. Right? People are not taking action. I mean, especially right now with everything that's going on in the world, right? And waiting to have less fear, more confidence. but it all comes with action, right? We're built, entrepreneurs, we are built to fail. We're going to fail more than we succeed. And the minute we start to understand that, then the quicker we fail, the quicker we figure out what it is that works, right? So, so many people are stuck. You should not be stuck. Like, get help and do something. It is going to at least tell you, I just have like a newsletter coming out to my list and I'm like, maybe if you're still stuck with your membership idea, maybe you shouldn't do one. Let's figure that out because getting stuck and not making a decision is a decision, right? But it's not helping you move forward. Yeah. Yeah. So true. So true. So Natalie, there's some folks listening that would love to either get their membership program that exists working properly or to actually set one up in the first place How can they find more out about you and the work that you do at Membership Lab Sure So they can go to themembershiplab and they can actually go to themembershiplab slash gift. And I have a couple of free resources for them there, including AI with the four ways to add AI to a membership, if they want to look at that. I'm also on LinkedIn with my name, if you can type it, pronounce it. We'll include the link for you all. Excellent, excellent Well, Natalie, it was a privilege and honor Having you on the show today Thank you so much for being here and sharing with us And for those of you who are watching and listening You know your time and attention mean the world to us I hope you got as much out of this conversation As I know I did And I cannot wait to see you next time Take care Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for your stage right now. If you want to discover what stage you're in, take our 10 question Founders Evolution quiz for free at foundersquiz.com. That's foundersquiz.com. It'll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today's episode, would you do us a favor and share it on social media? Just grab a quick screenshot on your phone, text it to a friend, or post it on your favorite platform. Tag us and use hashtag start scale succeed. I'd love to see your posts. You can also head over to scalearchitects.com forward slash podcast to check out more episodes tagged by your stage so you can focus on what matters most right now. Don't forget, subscribe, rate, review. It helps us to reach more founders like you, and it means a ton to me and my team. So let's keep starting, scaling, and succeeding together. I'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you next time.

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