At the end of 2025, my time at Memberium came to a close after eight years and ten months.
It is difficult to summarize nearly nine years of work. Memberium was where I developed most of the skills that shaped my early career. It supported my family, introduced me to people who became friends, and gave me opportunities I could not have anticipated when I started.
The ending was somewhat abrupt, although it was not entirely unexpected. The market around the platforms Memberium had historically served was changing, and we had spent a long time trying to create growth in a category that was becoming smaller. There were no hard feelings. Sometimes a business has to simplify, return to its foundations, and prepare for its next phase. Sometimes an employee has to recognize that he has done what he can and that his own season there has ended.
From an Upwork project to a career
I joined Memberium in 2017 through Upwork. It began as freelance technical support: answering a support line, working tickets, and helping customers troubleshoot WordPress membership sites.
The work was rarely simple. Membership sites combine WordPress, plugins, hosting, caching, payment systems, CRMs, marketing automation, and dynamic content. A problem in any one of those systems could affect whether a member received access, whether a campaign ran, or whether a business made a sale.
As time went on, I took on more responsibility. Technical support became customer onboarding and consultation calls. I learned to help customers think beyond the immediate problem and understand how their technical decisions affected sales, engagement, retention, and growth. From there I moved further into marketing, sales, product work, and eventually development.
During roughly the last four years, I worked closely with Memberium's founder, Micah. He taught me a great deal about business, marketing, leadership, entrepreneurship, and life. Memberium also invested in sending me to training, industry events, and trade shows where I represented the company and built a network that extended well beyond any one product.
The work I am proud of
My role eventually became difficult to fit into a single title. Over the years, I:
- created hundreds of tutorial and onboarding videos to help customers install, configure, and use Memberium;
- wrote documentation and improved onboarding so customers could reach a working solution faster;
- helped plan and run marketing campaigns, including campaigns that generated more than $60,000 in sales over a weekend;
- helped implement a complete Memberium rebrand, including building the new website from a designer's work and updating its copy;
- planned and executed the Membership Summit, a live event in Scottsdale, Arizona, despite having never produced an event like it before;
- served as an escalation point for complex customer problems and worked across support, development, and marketing to resolve them; and
- used AI-assisted development to build Membershipper AI, a WordPress product that allowed an AI system to learn from a membership site's content and provide more relevant information and insights to individual members.
Membershipper AI became part of the experience we were creating for Membership.Coach, our own training platform for people building online courses and memberships. It drew on lessons learned from serving more than 4,000 Memberium customers over the years, and real users were able to use the AI functionality before I left.
I also had the opportunity to see behind the scenes of sophisticated membership businesses, including well-known brands. At one point, a Tony Robbins product used Memberium. Experiences like that showed me that even very large operations depend on people solving ordinary technical and customer problems well.
What thousands of membership businesses taught me
The customers who succeeded were usually not the ones with the most elaborate site or the longest feature list. They were the ones who launched.
We saw people spend months or years trying to make everything perfect. Some spent tens of thousands of dollars before earning their first dollar. They kept adding features, rebuilding pages, and postponing the moment when a real customer could buy what they had created.
The successful operators tended to move quickly. They launched while things were still imperfect, started trying to make sales, listened to customers, and improved what mattered. Because they had not sunk everything into the first version, they could change direction when the market taught them something new.
As they grew, they also learned to get out of their own way. They hired people to handle work outside their strengths. They became more honest about what they did well, what they could learn, and what someone else should do better.
Not everyone needs to build a membership or online course. A business works better when it fits the person operating it. Someone can improve at teaching, speaking, coaching, selling, or appearing on camera, but there is little value in forcing a business model that does not suit the person's strengths or the market's needs.
I also learned that people will pay well for a solution to a painful and valuable problem. The solution does not have to contain secret information or a complicated methodology. Some of the best businesses we saw took knowledge that appeared basic and organized it into a clear, repeatable path to a result. They made money because they made an impact, not because complexity made the product impressive.
Business is people to people
The most valuable part of these years may be the relationships. I worked with teammates, customers, partners, and other people in the industry who became real friends. We looked forward to seeing one another at events and stayed in touch outside the immediate reason we had met.
Business language often separates companies into categories such as business to business and business to consumer. In practice, every business is people to people. Software does not change that. Marketing does not change that. Behind every ticket, purchase, partnership, and company are people deciding whether they trust one another enough to work together.
Some lessons are expensive
Not every part of the experience was easy. I saw how costly a business decision can become when enthusiasm moves faster than due diligence. I learned not to take important claims at face value, especially when the person making them stands to benefit from the decision. Verify the facts, follow the process, and be willing to walk away when the evidence does not support the opportunity.
I also learned that strong execution cannot indefinitely overcome the direction of a market. Memberium had already become a leading product in its category. As the surrounding CRM market contracted, attracting new customers became an uphill battle. We could produce occasional successful campaigns, but it became harder to create consistent growth when fewer people needed the underlying solution.
Toward the end of my time there, Memberium was building an integration for GoHighLevel, where many customers were already moving. The beta created a kind of energy that had become harder to find in the older market. I hope that work helps bring new life to the product, and I sincerely wish Micah and Memberium the best.
When a season has ended
It is acceptable to leave when a season has ended and you have done what you can. That does not make the years before it a mistake, and it does not have to be personal. In hindsight, perhaps I should have stepped away sooner. In reality, that decision is much harder when a family depends on the income you provide.
I was the sole provider for my family, and the uncertainty was frightening. There were nights when I lay awake wondering what I was going to do. Memberium kept me involved as long as it reasonably could, and I remain grateful for that.
I also discovered that the years had prepared me for the transition. I could solve technical problems, work with customers, sell, market, write, teach, consult, and build. I began taking freelance and IT consulting work immediately. Those skills helped me bridge the gap without missing a paycheck until I moved into a new full-time role with a company I am excited to be part of.
The new role is not simply a continuation of my old one. That is all right. Sometimes a chapter closes and the next one asks you to adapt. I will continue building AI tools, learning, and consulting where I can be useful, but I do not need to recreate the past to prove that it mattered.
You are your own job security
If you are anxious about your job or uncertain about what comes next, the best investment you can make is in yourself. The more useful skills you develop, the more problems you can solve. Those abilities can make you more valuable to an employer, but they can also become consulting, freelance work, a product, or a business of your own.
Keep moving during uncertain seasons. Apply for the job. Update the résumé. Take the training. Call the person. Build the small project. Movement will not remove every risk, but it prevents fear from becoming paralysis.
I leave Memberium grateful. I am grateful for Micah's mentorship, for the people I worked beside, for the customers who trusted us, for the friendships that remain, and for a company that gave me room to grow far beyond the support role I was originally hired to fill.
Nearly nine years is a long chapter. It does not have to continue forever to have been worthwhile.