Membership is saying "I want to be part of your orbit”

Ben L Collins speaking at an event

Ben L Collins, the Google Sheets expert behind the education site benlcollins.com, is incredibly thankful for his membership business and the digital creator economy in general. “When you create something – whether you're an artist or you're creating a technical course or a building membership – and some random stranger opens their wallet and gives you money, you realize how incredibly fortunate you are to exist at this moment in time where you can do that kind of work and reach so many people.

“If someone's taking the time to – first of all – just look at my stuff, and they like it enough that they're willing to pay for it, I want to do absolutely everything I can to make this as good as possible for them,” he continues.

Ben loves the concept of membership because it’s more than just a one-off payment: “We’re not talking about a consulting agreement where someone hires you to do a piece of work that's structured and written out and everyone knows what they're getting. It's more like a relationship where that person is saying, ‘I want to be part of your orbit for the next year or month or quarter. I like what you're doing; I want to support you and be part of that.”

He believes that membership gives you a really strong incentive to do the best you can do, and strive to make wonderful content. “People are of course expecting me to make high-quality stuff, but I also really want to – for them and for me. “

Ben explains that it helps to build a wonderful relationship you have with the community: “I feel like I'm doing something for them rather than just this anonymous person buying a course and you never know whether they even look at it. It feels more immediate with the membership or closer. It's about building a deeper relationship that goes beyond being transactional.”

From ‘always-on’ to microdeliverables

When the covid-19 pandemic struck, Ben had been delivering e-courses on data manipulation including Google Sheets for 10 years. “I had delivered around 15 different courses on Teachable, perhaps with 25 launches, because some of the courses had been relaunched. Doing the courses, you have to honestly put as much effort – if not more effort – into marketing than the actual course. It's interesting, but I don't love it and it's not my strength.”

Ben had been delivering e-courses for 10 years when covid struck

Ben knew he preferred to work on the technical spreadsheet content and helping people. “People would come to me and say, ‘How do I do that?’ and it would be really interesting to solve.

“Membership is something I thought about probably two, maybe even three, years ago,” says Ben. “I really liked that model because it's recurring revenue. With membership, you're not having to constantly launch something to make money where you have a big spike and then it's virtually nothing after that.” He explains that it provides a more stable platform that allows the creator to focus on the creating and the relationship with the audience, more than having to do the marketing.

“For a few years, I'd flirted with the idea of membership, but never got past the research. I was worried that it would feel like I was ‘always on’ if I did this model where I had to be constantly doing things. I always pulled back and kept on going with the courses.” But he had finished what he set out to do.

“I’d pretty much covered all the different things to cover with full courses. It was hard to find another course that wasn't just getting increasingly specialized and therefore the market gets smaller as you get to more advanced stuff,” he continues. “There wasn't a good economic case to do some of the courses I might be interested in.”

Ben also notes that he felt burnt out. “I was thinking, ‘I have to record 100 Teachable videos that all have to be one big coherent thing.’ I didn't have the energy to sit down and create that in one big block. You don't even know if people are going to buy it. “

Ben explains that e-courses require the creator to publish their work before they try to sell it, and you don't necessarily know if it's going to be a success. “It might take you, say, three to six months to create a really good course. If it doesn't land, you can’t just resell it tomorrow, ” he adds. “I realized that I needed a more ongoing relationship with my audience where I would have microdeadlines and microdeliverables.”

A course on the Query function in Google Sheets

Membership suddenly made sense. “I'll commit to a weekly newsletter and we can have templates and tutorials, but they don't all have to be part of one gigantic topic and all tied into each other. It could be bitesize and more manageable for me – and more manageable for people to consume.”

Speaking also from a user perspective, not many people finish their online courses: “It's daunting when you buy a course that has 10 hours of video. It's hard for people to fit in 10 hours of content so you give up and you never get around to doing it. Whereas, hopefully if you get one email a week, you can set aside 30 minutes over a lunch break and get a lot of value that week then you can forget about it until the following week,” Ben explains.

In the spring of 2024, Ben started to think hard about membership. Over the summer, he sat down and mapped out exactly what it would look like – and he launched in September.

Email is still king

Talking about his career, Ben is keen to thank his partner. “I'm really fortunate that my wife has done all of this before. She has had her own business; she’s launched various products and she knew how to build an email list.” Ben received a lot of advice early on in his membership career “that helped enormously” – and one of the lessons was to build an email list.

Ben’s wife was working in content marketing when he was starting to build his community. “She had an agency that did marketing for clients, writing blog posts and SEO and social media. It was super-helpful, obviously for what I was trying to do at the time,” Ben adds.

Simulating a game of chess with Google Sheets

“Emails are the most important channel to interact or connect with your audience,” he continues. He admits that this is perhaps less relevant for younger generations, but clarifies: “The problem with social media, and especially the newer platforms like TikTok, is that there's this detachment between you and your audience.

You create a piece of content but the platform just shows whatever is viral and what is trending – it doesn't matter if you've got 10,000 or 100,000 followers, if your piece of content isn't viral per the algorithm, not many of those followers are ever going to see it. It’s a precarious relationship. You exist at the whims of that platform. If they change their algorithm or they fall out of favor – we've seen lots of social media networks disappear – so building an email list is crucial.

Advice for aspiring membership operators

“If somebody was starting a membership now, I would say, ‘Just get started!’” Ben smiles. “With hindsight, I wish I'd done this two years ago. These things just take time. The sooner you get started, the more time you have.”

Ben hosting a Zoom session for his members

He admits that it’s always easy to do a little more research: "You can convince yourself that there's something you're missing or there’s another way of doing it. I've been guilty of that before. But when you actually press ‘Go’ and put something into the world and start interacting with real people, it takes on a new life. You start to actually solve the things you need to solve and not these hypothetical questions.”

He urges people to not overthink it: “If you're addressing someone's pain point – if someone needs to solve a problem, and your membership can do that, just get out there! You can improve it over time.”

More information

For more information and to sign up to Ben's weekly Google Sheets tips, go to benlcollins.com.