How Molly Baz Built an Exclusive Recipe Membership Community

Molly Baz is a two-time New York Times best-selling cookbook author, recipe developer, and food creator with nearly 900K followers on Instagram. She also operates an exclusive members-only community called The Club where she connects with her online community of food-loving fans. Each week, Molly shares a new recipe with her members through her self-hosted solution built using WordPress and Memberful. She also shares giveaways, discounts on her merch line, and more opportunities that are exclusive to the membership community.

Learn more about how she created a custom paid membership community built around her unique brand and tailored to her audience.

Lessons From Molly

• Build audience trust through free content before introducing a paywall
• Choose platforms based on your content’s specific needs (visual design, community features, format)
• Understand that paid membership creates accountability and requires consistent bandwidth
• Continuously evaluate the value proposition for paying members
• Let community interaction shape your offerings, not just one-way content delivery

From Magazine Editor to Cookbook Author

While working at Bon Appetit food magazine—first as a food stylist and then as a food editor—an editor from Clarkson Potter, a group within the publisher Penguin Random House, reached out to Molly and asked for a meeting. “The dream is to get an email from a Penguin Random House email address,” she smiles. “I knew this was cookbook-related. I took the meeting and one thing led to the next and all of a sudden, I had a book deal.”

Molly’s first cookbook opportunity created a pivotal shift where she went from being a food editor who was great at executing ideas to a cookbook author with a very specific point of view.

Shifting From Executor to Independent Creator

Not long after landing the book deal, Molly left Bon Appetit and had a stark realization. Without the magazine’s platform, she needed a way to continue sharing recipes and stay connected to her audience, or risk disappearing entirely.

“I had to figure out how the world was going to access my recipes, otherwise I'm gonna disappear and there’s gonna be no new Molly recipes to share,” she recalls. This was 18 months before her book was due to come out and she was determined to build her own audience in the meantime.

Enter: membership. Molly started researching membership and publishing platforms that would allow her to continue creating content on her terms. “I was looking for an administrative structure that would allow me to be creative and continue to offer something to my fans on a weekly basis,” she explains. Perhaps most importantly, she could start to talk about food in the way she wanted, which she describes as “honest, casual, and in a way that actual people talk if they’re at home cooking.”

Why She Chose a Membership Platform

Molly had previously used Patreon and evaluated newsletter platforms like Substack but ultimately chose Memberful for three specific reasons:

Visual customization: “Food is so visual and so much about photos,” she explains. “The brand I was building had such a specific look and feel.” She needed a platform that could handle photo-heavy content with custom design.

An interactive user experience: Unlike a traditional newsletter where subscribers exist in isolation, membership lets her audience see and interact with each other. “I love my community and I wanted them to feel part of something, not just one of many subscribers."

Long-form recipe format: Molly’s detailed, step-by-step teaching style doesn’t translate to social media’s brevity. “Instagram is not a text-based platform,” she says. “I really want my recipes to be a success, and having a membership, where writing would be a major part of it, made a lot more sense for me.”

When to Add a Paywall to a Creator Membership

Molly’s most emphatic advice centers on patience. She spent four years building trust with her audience through free content before introducing paid subscriptions.

“Give recipes away for free for as long as you can,” she advises. “When you feel your audience is fierce enough to follow you, then start to think about how to parse out the free stuff versus the paid stuff.”

She also warns against premature monetization. “It’s so much easier to ‘flip’ people and bring them into your world once they trust you and love your content,” she says. “People need enough ‘bait’ before there’s a paywall.”

For Molly, this meant having name recognition, proven recipes, and trust with her audience before asking for payment. She encourages other creators to prioritize long-term growth over short-term income.

Molly emphasizes that paid membership creates real obligations. “Every Friday, I have to get a recipe out because I'm accountable,” she notes. “I have a product that people need me to deliver on, or I'm going to lose them.”

Scaling an Audience-First Paid Membership Community

When you’re operating an independent business—whether as a creator, publisher, or community builder—everything from the tools you use to the ideas you choose to pursue become crucial decisions that impact your members.

Her advice to new creators: “Make sure you have the time and bandwidth for it, because this is a job.” What starts as an exciting creative outlet becomes a responsibility to paying customers.

Another ongoing challenge is determining what to give away publicly versus what remains exclusive to members. “I am weary of giving too much away to the public for free,” Molly says. “It’s a constant battle, because I want to provide a really valuable product to the people who are paying to be there.”

Molly recommends thinking not just about what to give to your audience but how the audience shapes you. The ideas for live cooking classes, Q&A sessions, and exclusive merchandise are a direct response to that line of thought, and flexing the creative freedom to directly build a community using members’ input and feedback. She concludes: “That gives you even more opportunity to interact fully with your audience, which was the goal all along.”

Launching Paid Membership With Memberful

Molly’s experience highlights what’s possible when creators build membership businesses on their own terms. By focusing on audience trust, thoughtful monetization, and flexible infrastructure, she created a community that supports both her creative work and her livelihood.

If you’re exploring how to launch or scale a paid membership, Memberful helps creators build custom membership experiences that fit their content, brand, and audience, without giving up ownership. Explore Memberful’s community platform to learn more about how you can easily set up your own membership program.