I built a paid membership built on top of a successful podcast, designed to turn an engaged audience into a sustainable business through community, learning, and accountability.
It lasted 18 months with ~150 members from 15+ countries. I did it without team members; it was only me for the first year of running this community.
I want to share this story on how I built this.
Context: when the podcast started working
At the time, the podcast Tiene que haber algo más was performing very well.
It had a strong organic growth, high trust, deep emotional resonance, and a recurring theme of questioning work, career paths, and life choices.
I didn’t want the podcast to remain a standalone media project. My explicit goal was to build a company behind it.
So the real question became: What is a viable business model for this audience, without breaking trust?
Based on what I was seeing in the market at that time, the membership model seemed promising.
First move: user research before building anything
Before building any product, I wanted to understand what role the podcast already played in people’s lives, and whether that role could translate into a sustainable business model. This research focused on listeners, not buyers. The intent was not validation, but sense-making.
Research method
I conducted qualitative interviews with podcast listeners across countries, ages, and professional backgrounds.
This research was conducted manually and synthesized without AI tooling
- ~40 qualitative interviews with podcast listeners
- Ranging in age from early 20s to late 30s.
- Participants were based primarily in Argentina and Spain, with representation from Chile, Italy, the UK, and the US
- They came from diverse professional backgrounds including tech, education, media, health, and entrepreneurship.
Questions I asked
1. Identity and context: To understand the life stage, constraints, and whether the audience was homogeneous or inherently diverse.
2. Entry point and retention with questions like: “How did you discover the podcast?”
“Why did you listen the first time?” “Why did you come back?”
3. Emotional resonance with questions like: “How does the podcast make you feel?” “Do you feel more identified with famous or unknown guests?” “When do you usually listen to it?” To understand whether the value was informational, emotional, aspirational, or relational.
4. Pain, friction, and blockers: To surface latent pains, not explicit feature requests.
Questions like: “What is holding back your transformation?” “Does your environment support you?”
5. Learning and action: To understand whether the podcast triggered reflection, action, or both. Questions like: “What is the most valuable idea you’ve taken from an episode?” “Have you made any decisions after listening?” “If I were your coach, what would you ask me to help you with?
Patterns found across listeners
Pattern 1: existential loneliness, not lack of ambition
Listeners consistently described feeling alone in their questions, not lazy or unmotivated.
Common signals: “People around me don’t think like this” “I feel weird questioning something everyone else accepts” “I don’t see references close to me”
The podcast functioned as social proof that they weren’t broken.
Pattern 2: transformation without a clear destination
Most listeners were not trying to reach a single defined outcome. They were questioning their current path, exploring alternatives, looking for language to name discomfort, and trying to reconcile purpose, money, and lifestyle
Pattern 3: environments that discourage change
A recurring frustration was the lack of environmental support. Signals included:
Families that valued stability over exploration, Friends who minimized ambition
Workplaces that rewarded conformity and Cultural narratives that penalized deviation.
Pattern 4: desire for examples without idealization
Listeners valued Process over success, Failures over highlight reels, and Ordinary people over celebrities
Pattern 5: high curiosity, fragmented goals
Across interviews, people wanted: To change jobs, to freelance, to start companies, to travel, to find purpose, to meet people like them, but rarely the same thing at the same time.
My working hypothesis was: If people who feel intellectually and professionally alone are given a shared space, with structure and recurring interaction, they will stay engaged and find long-term value.
The membership design
The mental model was: A living room for ambitious people.
Value proposition:
1. High-quality live conversations: The strongest moments consistently came from live, synchronous interactions. Weekly debates with podcast guests, Masterminds, and case discussions, Live classes facilitated by me and members themselves stepped into teaching roles.
2. Strong cultural rituals: Several recurring formats created identity and continuity. For example: Book club discussions, monthly challenges, Celebrating wins publicly, and small-group connections.
3. Accountability goal setting: some of the types of goals members publicly worked on were work and career clarity, business and project execution, skill building, content and visibility, and life design and sustainability.
4. Exclusive content as a retention lever: Members valued: 50+ exclusive podcast episodes, and private conversations with high-profile guests. This was content that felt more candid and less performative than public channels.
5. 1% of revenue was donated to NGOs each month
6. Mentorship and role modeling: Discord channels to ask for 1:1 help between members
7. Centralized knowledge and internal platform: Valuable content was getting stored inside Discord, and to solve this, I designed and launched an internal site with the explicit goal of making everything we generated ordered, accessible, and reusable over time.
What the internal site included:
- Participant directory to make discovery and connection easier
- Recordings of all live sessions
- Classes led by me
- Sessions led by community members
- Conversations with podcast guests
- Book club discussions and notes
- Exclusive podcast episodes
- Member-only benefits and resources
What worked well
For a long time, many things worked.
Some signals of success were high-quality conversations, strong emotional bonds between members, members taking concrete actions inspired by the group, and cross-country connections that would not have happened otherwise
The community became a container for ideas, doubts, and experimentation.
Testimonials
What members valued the most
Across responses, three things consistently showed up:
- Feeling accompanied: Members highlighted emotional support, validation, and being understood in ways they didn’t experience in their immediate environment.
- Synchronous moments: Live sessions, podcast guests, and real-time conversations carried significantly more perceived value than async resources.
- Peer energy and goodwill: People emphasized generosity, fast responses, and the sense that “everyone wants others to do well.”
Biggest hits of the membership
The membership supported real-world progress, including:
- Members launching or growing businesses
- Newsletters and personal projects shipped
- Professional partnerships formed
- Members applying to and being accepted into global programs (Georgetown, Harvard, Singularity, Voces Vitales)
The problem that emerged over time
About a year into running the membership, I paused execution and documented the main issues I was seeing while the product was still live.
1. Acquisition and positioning friction: It was hard to attract new members because the value proposition was difficult to explain clearly.
Despite experimenting with multiple framings (“from idea to action,” “lab for doers,” “accountability group”), none articulated a single, sharp promise. This signaled a positioning problem, not a marketing one.
2. Community vs product confusion: People joined for the sense of belonging, but once inside, many struggled to understand why they were there, what success looked like, and how to use the membership intentionally.
The product relied too much on intrinsic motivation and not enough on structural guidance.
3. Fragmented jobs to be done: While many members shared the feeling of being “stuck,” their actual goals varied widely, changing jobs, freelancing, entrepreneurship, networking, reflection, and personal growth.
Execution meant different things to different people, and this created misaligned success criteria inside the same product.
4. Engagement and retention limits: Engagement depended heavily on live sessions. Async participation felt optional and accountability mechanisms were weak.
This made retention fragile and biased toward people who could attend at specific times.
5. High operational cost, low leverage: Sustaining value required constant founder presence: onboarding, follow-ups, guest coordination, and re-contextualizing the product. The model did not scale without significantly narrowing the scope.
6. Inflation in Argentina: Most customers were from Argentina, where inflation in 2023 was extremely high, ending the year with an annual rate of 211.4%. This made it difficult to adjust prices in Argentine pesos.
It was hard to fix, and I experimented in real time with:
- Different session formats
- Different positioning angles
- Different engagement mechanics
But the core issue remained systemic.
The decision to shut it down
After 18 months, I made a deliberate decision to close the membership.
Because:
- The Job To Be Done mismatch could not be resolved without splitting the product
- The operational cost was too high for the clarity of value delivered
- Keeping it alive would have meant ignoring a structural signal
Sunsetting was the most responsible move and product decision
Key performance indicators
KPI 1: Active members
- KPI value: ~150 members
- KPI description: Paid members across 18 months, from more than 15 countries
KPI 2: Retention period
- KPI value: Up to 18 months
- KPI description: Duration the membership operated with recurring live activity
KPI 3: Content consistency
- KPI value: 100% weekly delivery
- KPI description: Weekly live sessions, events, or activities without missing a single week
KPI 4: Geographic reach
- KPI value: 15+ countries
- KPI description: International audience participating synchronously and asynchronously
Impact
Quantitative impact
- Built and sustained a paid membership for 18 months
- Served ~150 members across 15+ countries
- Delivered weekly live content with 100% consistency
Qualitative impact
- Created a strong sense of belonging for globally distributed professionals
- Helped members:
- clarify priorities
- set and track personal and professional goals
- feel less isolated in their ambitions
- Generated deep trust that later enabled:
- education programs
- paid newsletters
- B2B services
Strategic impact
- Revealed the importance of a single, outcome-driven job to be done
- Directly informed the design of more focused products:
- the remote work program
- the paid job-discovery newsletter
- Reinforced the idea that sunsetting is also a product decision
Product learnings
This case taught me things I now apply everywhere.
Key learnings:
- A community without a clear shared outcome becomes fragile at scale
- Emotional resonance is not enough for a strong value proposition
- “Ambitious people” is not a job to be done
- Retention problems often hide positioning problems
- Closing a product is also part of good product management
Conclusion
I’m deeply proud of building this membership from scratch by myself.
Over 18 months, I showed up every single week. I didn’t miss a week of content, sessions, or experiments. I kept iterating, testing, listening, and improving in real time.
The membership impacted people across countries. It helped members take concrete steps, build projects, apply to global programs, form partnerships, and redesign their careers and lives with more intention.
It also taught me something equally important: building with care means knowing when to stop.
Sunsetting the membership was the result of paying attention, taking user research seriously, and recognizing structural limits instead of forcing scale.
This project shaped how I build products today:
I design for clear jobs to be done
I prioritize structure without losing humanity
I build systems that respect people’s time and energy
I iterate relentlessly, but I also know when to close a chapter
This membership was a laboratory for learning how to build meaningful, responsible products in the real world, and I would build it again.