It’s membership season, and the doors will soon open to Stu Mclaren’s signature program, the Membership Experience (formerly Tribe). So what better time to share our personal experiences of The Membership Experience 2022 programme?

Disclaimer

First, a full disclaimer: This blog includes affiliate links which won't affect your purchase should you make one, but might result in a small commission for us. We only recommend things we truly believe in.

The Membership Experience only opens for enrolment once a year and is typically launched with a 3 part free workshop series and free masterclass. These free sessions are well worth attending, especially as they are free!

Why should you enrol in The Membership Experience?

If you want to add a recurring revenue stream to your business and create more financial stability by creating a membership or subscription site Stu Mclaren would be the obvious choice as he is known globally as the membership expert.

In this article, we'll share our experiences of The Membership Experience, and how following Stu’s training, we were able to close our Founding Member Launch with 380 members and grow to over 500 members in under 6 months!

However, the program only opens once a year, and at a significant cost, it might be worth considering other options, including Stu's other programme Plan It, Build It – promoted as ‘The ultimate get-it-done program designed to help you create an AMAZING course, membership or coaching program… and finally get your paid content out into the world!'

What is The Membership Experience course?

The Membership Experience is Stu McLaren’s six-module signature training program that gives you the clarity and confidence to launch, grow and scale a high 6, 7 and even 8-figure membership site… even if you’re starting from scratch.

This course is based on the 6 core strategies for long-term membership success: marketing, retention and growth.

Stu has helped tens of thousands of people to create their membership.

The Membership Experience programme opens once a year, usually in April and starts out with a series of FREE workshops which are open to anyone.

These workshops are crazy good and you’ll learn all about the Success Path and Stu’s strategy for a founding member launch.

In fact, during The Membership Experience Workshops last year, so many people launched their brand new memberships during the free workshops it was mind-blowing!

But as we mentioned already, the full program only opens once a year so what could you do in the meantime? Stu's Searchie course, Plan It, Build It is a great alternative as it helps you plan and build your program or membership and is designed to help you with the technical side as well as the fundamentals of selling your knowledge and expertise.

How does The Membership Experience course work?

The Membership Experience is an online programme and each week you get access to a new module. You start off with the foundations and figure out where you are on the Success Path™️ right now so you can focus solely on the right steps for you.

Every weekday Stu goes live for his 10in10 Q&A’s in The Membership Experience Community. These 10in10 sessions are meant to be 10 questions in 10 minutes, but remember when we said Stu leaves no stone unturned? Yeah.. that means these are rarely 10-minute sessions!

The best bit about the Q&A is that you can submit a question in advance. Even if you can’t watch live to see the answer, you can use Searchie to find the exact spot in the video where he answered your question, AND you can search hundreds of other Q&As to find answers to other questions you might have too!

You’ll also get to attend Brainstorm Breakout sessions with your fellow students, where you can get feedback on your ideas and build great connections to drive your membership forwards.

The Membership Experience is the only membership site course that is based on years of best practices from over 60,000+ membership sites and online communities. This isn’t based on a one-time success.

The Membership Experience is not some cheap, fly-by-night program. It’s a world-class, well-designed and highly effective system that gets you results.

And don’t forget, Stu has been doing this himself, having experience running both high 6-figure and 7-figure membership sites. And he is personally coaching and consulting other high-level entrepreneurs, best-selling authors and well-known influencers on how to launch their high-profit, low-stress membership site. He’s in the trenches. He knows firsthand what works and what doesn’t. And there’s no one better suited to learn from when building your membership.

And, while The Membership Experience is a course, not a membership, you’ll see some of the ways Stu makes the course engaging and fun and makes you want to join his membership from day one. So you can take these ideas and put your own spin on them for your community

What did The Membership Experience do for us?

When we joined The Membership Experience, we had already planned to launch our membership, The Inner Hub.

But our only knowledge of what a membership should include came from our experience of memberships we’d been in. So we didn’t have all the answers and we wanted to make sure our membership was the best it could possibly be for the people investing in joining us.

The Membership Experience gave us clarity on the foundations of a great membership. What it should include, how we could successfully launch our membership without any content and without putting in too many hours to build something we didn’t know if people would even want.

We used what we’d learnt in The Membership Experience to launch our membership with 380 founding members joining us.

What’s so good about The Membership Experience?

For us, there were a few things we liked about the course.

#1 The lessons were short and sweet but gave you everything you needed.

We typically watch courses at 1.5x speed to get through the lessons, as there is often a lot of fluff.

Stu shares actionable strategies and tactics in every lesson. Each video is around 5-10 minutes and they’re done so well you can’t help but want to watch the whole thing.

#2 The community is amazing.

Usually, large groups with thousands of members can be intimidating but in this programme everyone has one key goal, to build a thriving membership and they support each other like you’ve never seen! We'd go as far as to say that we learnt more from the community than we did from Stu himself – so maybe we could have learnt just as much in other communities had we put the time in.

#3 Stu McLaren is known as the memberships expert.

Not only does this guy know EVERYTHING about memberships, but his enthusiasm is so infectious he makes you want to just keep going no matter what roadblocks you encounter.

What’s not so good about The Membership Experience?

There are a few things you might want to consider, and other options out there:

#1 The 10in10s are long! 

Don’t expect ten questions in 10 minutes. But as we already explained, you don’t need to watch all of these live sessions and can search for keywords in the recordings to find answers in the future. But we will say that every time we did stick around and watch the whole Q&A, we always learnt something, sometimes more than one thing. Because it’s often other people’s questions that bring you the answers you didn’t know you needed.

#2 The lessons drip weekly.

If you are impatient like us, then the weekly drip of lessons might frustrate you. But it also stops you from being overwhelmed by trying to learn everything at once. And having gone through the course ones ourselves, we can now see exactly why this content was dripped because no matter where you are in your memberships journey, you need to take each stage as its own training and implement it before you can move on.

#3 It’s not a miracle cure

It’s no good just watching the lessons, showing up in the community and taking part in the 10in10’s. You have to do the work, a membership doesn’t create itself. But if you follow the training and put in the work you can build a thriving membership following The Membership Experience method.

#4 It's only open once a year and is pretty expensive

If you're just getting started and don't want to wait then it can be frustrating not being able to get started right away. And the investment is rather eye-watering when you're at the start of your business journey. If that sounds familiar, we'd highly recommend checking out the Plan it, Build it program that Stu and his Searchie team have put together to help you get started turning your knowledge and expertise into a profitable business.

Our status as affiliates does not affect our recommendation in any way because, as you know, we only ever recommend things we have tried and tested personally… Actually, being an affiliate probably means we are more critical when it comes to reviews because we are putting our names behind them, and we want you to know exactly what you’re getting. Plus, we are using our time to tell you about this when we could be promoting our own products.