Memberships Work

Year Three of running my membership program was bonkers, prodigious, a blast, inspiring, and of course, exhausting. Mega exhausting. But exhausting in a well-used, full-life exhausting kinda way. A fabulous exhaustion. It was a year that left my head sometimes spinning, and my feet sometimes aching.

Because: 2021 was one of the most productive and rigorous years of my life. I published some 150,000+ words to my newsletters, shot and premiered two short documentary films, walked and extensively documented some 1,000+km of trails and towns across Japan, produced a new edition of my book Kissa by Kissa, ran a few board meetings, a bunch of livestream work sessions, and produced a few podcast episodes with writers I admire … and that was all made possible by my membership program, SPECIAL PROJECTS.

It’s not easy, the running of a membership program. But it has inspired and catalyzed, for me, a sustained and vast interval of intense writing, photographing, bookmaking, and general “creative output.” It’s by far and away, consistently, unrelentingly, the most work I’ve ever put into anything. But I keep doing it. And want to continue doing it. The work carries with it a deep sense of fulfillment. (More on this below.) It even — gauche may it be to mention this — pays pretty well. In aggregate, I take all of the above to signal that this is good and right and to keep going.

Permission from Members

As I’ve written in past reviews, “permission” seems to be my biggest psychological takeaway from SPECIAL PROJECTS. That is: Feeling bestowed with a permission to do the kind of work I believed I was capable of, but perhaps not strong enough to do entirely on my own.

Ten years ago I received my first writing residency. I was lucky. It was prestigious. I felt like a full-blown imposter. I was in the woods in New Hampshire right at this very moment (early January, 2012), trying to stay sober (and failing), working on a draft of a novel I’d then go on to revise and rewrite and revise and rewrite some more, for, frankly, too many years. It wasn’t all bad, though — I used various drafts of that book to get accepted into other residencies, workshops, and fellowships. It was in those spaces that I met brilliant Actual Writers (as opposed to me, the Fumbling Buffoon), some of whom became dear friends, and through those friendships I was exposed to books and lives I’d have otherwise never imagined. This all flowed from (somewhat foolishly) committing myself to the novel. 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.

I also banged my head against the brick wall of the New York publishing industry in ways that made me realize I had more work to do to become the kind of writer I wanted to be. There’s that Ira Glass quote about taste and talent, and working on this book showed me my talent wasn’t yet matching my taste.

For years, I got my butt kicked.

I needed those kicks. They were helpful, humbling kicks. But, fundamentally, what I really needed was much simpler: to write more, with more urgency, more loosely, with fewer boundaries, and much less preciousness.

SPECIAL PROJECTS knocked me out of “gem polishing schmuck” mode, into “working writer” mode. It sounds silly, but that small exchange of cash back in 2019 — between me and a few hundred people, a formalizing of some unwritten contract with members — was all it took to flip a switch in my mind, to go from relying entirely on self-driven motivation to feeling the (useful!) pull of Hired Writer. Suddenly, a walk was no longer a navel-gazing stroll, it was a job with curious rules and exigency. My members were members because they wanted to “support” my writing, and that was all I needed to get More Butt into More Chair and do more work with more formal rigor than I had ever done before.

The results are present not only in volume, but also quality. Sure, these past three years I’ve written tons, but within that tonnage is some of the best writing of my life.

I failed to publish that novel, but by committing to, and working on it, I experienced how big projects lead to inspiring connections and growth. The dovetailing of that insight — with the formality of membership — seeded the permission I now feel, and fuels the impulse to keep going.

Finding Product Market Fit

Looking at SPECIAL PROJECTS from the angle of “running a startup,” my three years of membershipping can be broken down thusly:

When I started SPECIAL PROJECTS, I didn’t think “books” would be the cornerstone of the work. But they are. As I wrote last year: The purpose of SP is to enable a continuous and rigorous production of book-shaped projects until I’m dead.

The incidental corollary of this is: education. Meaning, the membership program is meant to provide folks with precisely what I needed while, say, working on my novel. Namely: A strong archetype, and demystification about how it looks / feels to be work on big projects. This is why I offer membership up to “students” for free.

When I launched in 2019, there were essentially no “perks” for members. The program existed simply to support my free newsletters. The main pitch was:

It wasn’t until the start of the pandemic in March 2020 that I began to double down on members-only livestreams, began to run “board meetings,” and began to focus on books in earnest. And it wasn’t until August 2020 until I found true “product market fit” — I sold more memberships in tandem with the launch of Kissa by Kissa than I did during any other period.

As I break down in last year’s review, the percentage of people who were not members, who bought my book and also became members (the “conversion to membership rate”) was about 20%. This feels like a great rate and seems to imply a good confluence between pricing, discounts, and membership value.

I had no “roadmap” to get to my current position. I’ve mainly followed my interests. As I wrote about last year, I’ve most deliberately maintained a self-awareness around “trapping myself” in a kind of horrible meta-loop of running a membership program only to talk about membership programs. Instead, I’ve been pretty “selfish.” Meaning: I’ve been uncompromising in not “bending” the program to meet the “needs” or “desires” of members, but rather to enable and further work on my books. And I make sure my messaging around the program is clear about this.

It’s not to say I’m not interested in creating membership value. But that I want the focus of membership-derived value to be activities (livestreams, Q&As) directly related to book, book-adjacent (videos, walks), and education (Office Hours, Board Meetings, et cetera) specific work.

Paradoxically, I think this is why the program provides the value it provides — namely, members get access to behind-the-scenes peeks at someone Doing The Work (as opposed to meditating on the possibility of work).

From a callous business perspective, SPECIAL PROJECTS is not nearly as big as it could be because of this. I could be creating “classes” and running “seminars” and I’m sure the program would be making more money. But it would also take away from the main goal, the bookmaking goal, and by having that goal firmly set, it makes it easy to say no to distractions.

The Year of Video

If 2020 was the year of considering video as a compliment to the membership program and my work at large, then 2021 was the year of committing to it with some formal oomph.

I published some eighty-nine videos in 2021. Sixty-eight were public facing. Composed mainly of my “Nothing Exciting” series taken on my Kii Peninsula and Tiny Barber walks.

The other twenty-one videos were members-only: livestreams, walk updates, packing videos, and board meetings. (All new members get access to those archives.)

This commitment to video has paid off handsomely. Without trying to intentionally build or grow a YouTube channel, we had decent results, cresting some 90,000 views and garnering a few thousand subscribers. It’s become an interesting tertiary channel through which to promote my work.

More than that, the video commitment means I now regularly run members-only sessions, and am able to give talks online with minimal worry about sound, lighting, or video, since my home studio is now dialed in. This significantly removes the “activation energy” required to try something new or run a video session.

I also shot and produced two short documentaries.

In February I shot the first documentary about a kissaten I had walked past during my Nakasendō walk in 2019. The place served up a great helping of pizza toast, cut in a funky way. So I went back, asked if I could film the proprietor at work. He was flabbergasted. I prodded, he ultimately relented. The resulting video, Pizza Toast & Coffee came out pretty well, I think; certainly pretty well for a first go. I learned a ton working on this project, and somewhat unexpectedly, earned a new friendship in my connection with the owner.

Later in the year, I took the reprinting of my book Kissa by Kissa as an opportunity to shoot a behind-the-scenes production video. The result, The Craft of Kissa by Kissa, is largely about elevation: Elevation of the folks who made the book so damned nice. These were the craftspeople and specialists working as print operators and binders and sewers. The folks who ushered the book from files-in-a-folder to fully-realized object, an object that then found its way into the hands of thousands of people spread out over dozens of countries. I felt like they deserved some screen time, and figured readers would enjoy the journey as well.

My dipping into video during the pandemic was unique. I’ve noticed a number of folks suddenly doing great video work. Of note is the photographer Alec Soth. His YouTube channel has become a masterclass in photography and photo book making. Truly, it is an astounding, free resource.

One of the most delightful professional moments of 2021 was when I got an email from a friend saying, “Hey, have you seen this?” linking to a new Alec video on “Photos + (foreign) Words”. You can imagine my shock at seeing this. Anyway, dumb as it may sound, I felt like this “validated” my work in a “formal” way, and makes me only want to work harder on future projects. I am extremely grateful for the nod.

Strategies for Not Losing Your Mind (Memberships & Mental Health)

I have a variety of strategies for keeping myself sane while running SPECIAL PROJECTS. Maybe they’re be helpful for you, too? Here are my rules:

1. Never look at subscription data more than once a quarter. And even then, don’t really look at it. Glance askance and not for long. SP crested a line last year that I define as the “enough” line. Everything above that line is Good. I ambiently “see” the line when I send out members-only emails because my newsletter software tells me how many recipients are out there (I’m tempted to write some custom CSS to hide it …), but I try to never gaze directly into the beating heart of those digits. Books and education are the goals, not eternal, mythic GDP-style growth of membership revenue.

2. Don’t get notified when anyone unsubscribes from anything. I can’t believe some newsletter / membership software DEFAULTS — D E F A U L T S — to emailing you when someone unsubscribes or cancels a membership. ARE. YOU. MAD? Who are these Sadist Engineers of the Fifth Circle of Hell setting these defaults? The quickest route to declining mental health is to open yourself up to this attack vector. Close it down and keep it shut. Members leave for all sorts of reasons, and “you suck and are a dumb dumb and I hate you” is almost certainly not the (main?) one. (Though it is the one your mind will scream at you upon arrival of each unsubscribe email.)

3. Don’t “bend” yourself or your membership program to the assumed “needs” of members. That is, be clear in what you want to achieve, and communicate those goals directly, upfront. Members will self-select in support of those goals and you won’t feel the need to generate a “Second Self” to somehow placate members who joined for the wrong reason.

Jobs to be Done

Clayton Christensen’s most famous business theory is probably his theory of “Jobs to be Done.”

It boils down to: Folks don’t “buy” stuff, they “hire” stuff. So goes the prime example: You don’t “buy” a milkshake from McDonald’s, you “hire” it to do the job of “satiating your hunger, slowly, via straw while you commute in a car” and other similarly unexpected jobs.

The theory enables simple, but profound insights into how to better find so-called product-market fit for the work you’re doing. I thought it would be fun to apply this theory to my membership program. Let’s look at what I’m hiring members to do for me, and what they’re hiring me for.

Me Hiring Members

As someone who runs a membership program, you’re absolutely “hiring” members. Most obviously, you’re hiring them to pay you so you can do your weird work.

But as I wrote above, I’ve been mainly “hiring” members for permission. Not in a “please allow me to do this” kind of way, but more a “formal contract” kind of way. It’s nice to “sign” something and make it official. I wish my intrinsic motivation was more reliable, but I’ve come to realize I thrive through clear accountability. (I suspect most of us do.)

I’m reminded of the story of Karl Ove Knausgård: In writing his mega-metacognitive-auto-fiction opus, he would — each and every day — call his editor and read him the pages he had written that day. My guess is that there was a lot of pull / permission / energy derived from that relationship. Not all of us are lucky enough to have partners / editors willing to collaborate so intimately (and patiently) with us. So finding alternative forcing functions or systems to enable and engender the work to be done is critical.

Aligned with the above, I’m also hiring members to make the creative process less lonely. I hire them as “audience” members. The “Boring Livestreams” I run are mainly to get me to do “boring” work with greater intentionality. It turns out most creative work-work is “boring” work: iterative and circuitous. I also broadcast those livestreams because I believe there’s value in being able to look over the shoulder of someone as they perform the less glamorous acts of creativity.

Finally, I also hire members to be on my “board” so to speak. “Board Meetings” further force me to think about what I’ve worked on and what I want to accomplish going forward. An act I’ve never done on my own, and as anyone who has “vowed” to do a Year-End Reflection — and yet has never done one — knows, they can be difficult to do for yourself, alone.

These are all constructive tokens with tangible impacts, evidenced by how much I’ve written / photographed / filmed these past few years. By “hiring” members for the job of enabling these activities, I make more progress on books, more quickly, and feel the “courage” to design, and embark upon ever-stranger, longer walks.

Members Hiring Me

Members hire me for all sorts of reasons. I figured the easiest way to find out precisely why was to ask. I sent out a survey and got ~400 (!!) wildly thorough responses.

What membership “perks” provided the most value? (multiple selection allowed):

So, the SP crew first and foremost, “hires me” to synthesize / write for a “broader good.” I had hoped that “enabling my public-facing work” was an understood / highly-valued perk. 87% is astounding. This makes me a) happy, and b) confident that my messaging around SPECIAL PROJECTS is unambiguous. Since day one of SP I’ve always listed the “main” perk as: Craig, ya weird bird, I wanna see more of your work in the world.

Unsurprisingly, “hiring” SPECIAL PROJECTS to provide discounts is the second most valued job. I love this, though; the confluence of discounts and “unlocking the commons” — memberships allow me to produce books / prints, write essays, go on big walks, synthesize, and share — mostly — for free. Being able to “pay it back” to members in the form of discounts feels extremely symbiotic. My goal is to “return” the cost of Yearly Memberships in discounts each year.

But if you just survey folks with a bunch of checkboxes, you miss a lot of nuance. What does it mean to “enable my public-facing work?” What is it about that writing diary that’s useful? In broader terms, I believe it means that members hire me to be an “archetype”-at-large.

I had a few write-in questions on the survey: “Anything else I missed?” and “What was the thing/moment that made you flip from casual reader/fan to card-carrying paying SP member?” Allow me to share some responses. (The surveys were anonymous, but I told folks I would share some responses publicly.)

On hiring me as a “guide” or “archetype” or, even, “mentor:”

There is also a contingency of members who hire SPECIAL PROJECTS to be “part of something” — a framing I hadn’t considered! (Mainly because I do so little to “bring” everyone together; but this is now something I’m thinking more about for 2022.)

I’m also being hired as a “cultural translator” — a lot of my writing is about Japan (by dint of me being here), and folks seem to value that:

And regarding hiring me as a “distributor of coupons” (and seeing how it nicely commingles with other jobs):

On the topic of archetypes: The membership program is like a private club where I’m more willing to be “open” about processes in ways that would feel too exposed on my normal mailing lists or public YouTube livestreams. With SP members, the audience for many of the members-only newsletters (like the writing diary I’m currently running) is in the hundreds or, for livestreams, dozens. All paying, supportive, “fans.” (But really, more like co-workers.) My normal newsletters go out to tens of thousands of strangers. You can understand why one space might feel like a safer & less stressful place to be emotionally & creatively exposed.

Part of me is embarrassed to share the above. It seems narcissistic to post these notes publicly. But, another part of me is energized by it all. To be honest, I did not anticipate this volume of response or positivity. It’s all extremely heartening. The resulting impulse is an overwhelming sense to push further down this road. I’m glad I surveyed folks in the end; having concrete responses is far more encouraging than simply imagining how folks are positively affected by your work. (Or affected at all.)

Overall, three years in, the Members ⇄ Craig relationship feels extremely symbiotic. Like we’re all on a big, funky, pizza toast infused walk together. I’m divining a sustainable financial base, a set of permissions and support, and members are “hiring” an archetype, a guide, a mentor, to simply do the work that I feel I should be doing.

Costs & Equipment

My fixed costs continue to increase commensurate with my work.

In 2019, costs were (all USD) ~$4,000.00.

In 2020, ~$5,200.00.

And 2021, ~$7,000.00.

Biggest cost increases: mailing list software (since my subscriber base has grown), and Dropbox / Backblaze B2 space for backing up video, which is gargantuan.

My general tech stack, largely, remains the same.

My investment in video incurred no recurring costs outside of storage because YouTube is essentially “free” as a platform. I wish there was a reasonably-priced YouTube alternative (besides Vimeo), but the fact is, hosting 4K video is expensive, and there aren’t many options that don’t cost a lot of money.

That said, I did spend roughly ~$10,000.00 on video equipment in the last 18 months, but can trace back approximately ~300 book sales, plus new memberships, to just the two documentary projects last year. This represents approximately ~$30,000.00 in revenue. So that equipment investment has paid off well.

As of February 2021, here are my membership-related fixed costs:

ServiceCost/moNotes
Digital Ocean Server$36.00Hosting for craigmod.com, specialprojects.jp, walkkumano.com, et al.
Cloudflare$32.00Domain caching, protection, CDN
Backblaze backup + B2 storage$30.00Backup for computer / video files
Dropbox$30.00Backup / offline storage / file sharing
Memberful$25.00Managing memberships themselves (tiers, signups, billing, refunds, et cetera)
Campaign Monitor$300.00Running Ridgeline / Roden / SPECIAL PROJECTS newsletters
Mailmunch$12.00Newsletter acquisition helper
Quicken$5.00Accounting Software
Libsyn$17.00[On Margins](https://craigmod.com/onmargins/) hosting / publishing
Simplecast$15.00Office Hours & SW945 hosting
Descript$12.00Podcast editing
Shopify$30.00Selling books / digital goods / hosting membership perks
Zoom$20.00Hosting members-only Q&As, lectures
Plausible$12.00Privacy friendly web stats
Google Apps$10.00craigmod.com, specialprojects.jp email
TOTAL~$586.00monthly running costs

About or $7,000.00 per year in recurring tool & platform costs.

I also hired an assistant / studio manager last year which was — outside of rent — my biggest fixed cost by far. Simultaneously, this was one of the best moves I’ve made since starting the program. This studio manager has helped smooth out a lot of background logistics & customer support noise. I am profoundly grateful for their work and candor.

Other miscellany: Memberful charges 4.9% per transaction. Stripe charges an additional 2.9% (+$0.30) credit card processing fee. Together, this represents an additional running cost of 7.8% on all membership fees.

Shopify charges ~2.8% for credit card processing on top of their $30/mo fee. I don’t use any paid Shopify plugins.

I’ve managed to save tens of thousands of dollars in processing fees by using my opensource Craigstarter theme for Shopify, instead of running campaigns on Kickstarter. You should consider using it, too.

“Measuring” Our Lives

I finished 2021 by reading Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life. It’s a great book. And you should consider reading it, especially if you’re thinking about starting a membership program. Christensen has run successful startups, consulted extensively for big business, and finished out his life as a professor at Harvard Business School. He was also Extremely Mormon which is, I think, why the book is so fascinating. I’d never imagine Mormonism and HBS + business theory in conversation with one another, but here we are. The uniqueness of the book comes precisely from that unexpected confluence.

Relevant to membership programs, we have the notion of “job satisfaction.” Christensen quotes a guy named Herzberg. Frederick Herzberg wrote extensively on the “motivation theory” of satisfaction. To understand and apply it, you need to distinguish between two critically different types of factors: hygiene and motivation. “Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices,” he writes. Critically, it turns out that compensation is also a hygiene factor (as opposed to a motivational factor): “You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.”

The crucial point: “If you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. ”

This is part of why, I believe, once SPECIAL PROJECTS crossed a revenue line sometime in late 2020 / early 2021, I haven’t paid much attention to growth. Obviously, I don’t want it to dip too far, but the point of starting this membership program was never to make a million bucks a year from memberships alone. (There are far easier ways to do that.) The point was — I can now see, years into the program — to self-formalize the permission to do the work I felt I should be doing, and to find a sustainable base upon which to do that work.

Which brings us to motivation factors. Ah, motivation factors, the very grist of a full and rich life. Allow me to liberally quote, since Christensen sums it up well:

Looking back at these last three years of SPECIAL PROJECTS, I see many of these qualities present in spades:

In some ways, this is all obvious, but writing it down pulls it from the realm of theory into something tangible, and helps me double down and believe in this program ever more consciously, going forward.

Conclusions

Three years ago upon launch of SPECIAL PROJECTS I thought I was taking my first steps into the fires of Professional Mount Doom, was shouldering a Sadness Backpack full of coal, was doing the thing I wasn’t supposed to do but couldn’t do anything else so was stuck doing it, big sigh BIG SIGH. I wanted to hitchhike on a Bezos rocket and skydive into particulate nothingness, have those atoms reconstitute into dirty pigeons then maimed by tiny airplanes, seep as boney meatsacks into the earth and become, at best, minor nourishment for a hearty tree, only then to be beset by some horrible fungus and wither, hollow out internally, falling, eventually, during a stormy spring day on the home of a kindly shoe cobbler, rendering him a widower, a howler of the night above his village.

2019 worked out OK, and 2020 was a gangbusters bonanza. 2021 was the fine maturation of the machine of both memberships and creativity, and I’m more excited for 2022 than any year thus far.

So, you know — THANK YOU. Geez. I really can’t say that enough. Thank you to everyone who has joined, and thank you to everyone who has bought my books and prints and has sent in messages of gratitude and poked their noggins into livestreams or Board Meetings or other “boring” video experiments. Thank you to the other folks starting membership programs, “going for it,” out there cranking away on your own terms as archetypes and models for future folks. For showing us all the myriad of strange, wonderful, unexpected ways to live out these lives of ours.

Thank you thank you thank you.

Good luck. And if you have any questions, email me: craig@specialprojects.jp.

Oh, and, you know, please consider joining SPECIAL PROJECTS.

— C