About
Delia Marchbank, and why this site exists
Eight years running a membership site of my own, thirteen more advising people who run theirs. This page is the whole of it, including the parts I got wrong.
How I got here
In 2003 I paid to join a small subscription site for watercolour painters. It was badly organised and I loved it, which turned out to be the most useful thing I ever learned about this business.
In 2005 I built my own. Lessons, monthly critiques of members' work, and a forum that I did not plan and could not have run without. It grew slowly for three years, then quickly, and by 2011 it had a little over two thousand paying members. I ran it until 2013, when I sold it to two members who had been there almost from the start. It is still going, under people who are better at it than I was.
I started writing here in 2008, in the middle of that, because the advice I could find was all about launches. Nobody was writing about year four: the archive nobody can navigate, the price you set when you had no idea what you were doing, the member everyone tolerates. Those are the years that decide whether a membership site becomes a living or a hobby that costs money.
What I got wrong
Plenty, and most of the guides here are a version of it. I priced too low for six years and then raised prices in a panic. I added material when I should have organised what I had. I let a forum run without written rules until it cost me members I never knew I had lost. I built a tier structure that took me two years to unwind.
None of that is false modesty. It is the reason the guides are shaped the way they are, and it is why I am sceptical when someone tells me their retention problem needs more content.
How I work now
Six to eight clients a year, one at a time. I read the whole site before the first call, and I say no when I am not the right person, which is more often than you might expect. Sites in a subject I know nothing about are usually fine. Sites where the owner wants me to confirm a decision already made are not.
I take no commission from any platform or tool, so nothing here is a recommendation I am paid for. If I mention a way of doing something, it is because I have watched it work.
What I believe about this work
That a membership site is a promise renewed on a schedule, and that most problems in one are a promise that has gone vague. That the unglamorous parts, the cancellation screen, the failed card, the first fortnight, carry more weight than anything on the sales page. And that the honest version of this business is a good living for one person or a small team, not a machine.
If you want the whole of that argument rather than a summary, it is spread across the nine guides, and reducing member churn without gimmicks is the closest thing to a starting point.