Free to Paid Community

I'd disagree with some of the other responders here - there are real risks to starting free with the intention of going paid and benefits to starting with a paid offering.

(for context, I launched a community a few months, paid from day 1)

Benefits of starting paid:

1. Make revenue from the start that you can reinvest in better content, programming, growth, etc.
2. Increases member quality + engagement by screening out folks who don't want to add value.
3. Psychologically, creates the impression that the community is valuable in itself and establishes a value-exchange relationship between you and your members.

Ways to avoid the cold start problem:

1. Identify a group of "founding members" and give them a discount, status in the community, and influence over the roadmap.
2. Create value in the community from the beginning - exclusive content, events, structure, etc.

Happy to chat more, if you'd like.

Thanks for responding. That’s my struggle. I personally wouldn’t pay to be part of community that didn’t exist yet. I think starting with a free community makes the most sense. I’m just wondering if its possible to create a paid option at some point down the ride and how to do that.

Hey Josh, I'm in a similar boat. I run a community on Circle called Local SEO Community: www.localseocommunity.com

I have decided that the first 1000 members will receive free for life memberships. After that, I plan on putting up a paywall (maybe something like $50/year to join).

It was pretty hard for me to justify charging someone for a non-existent community.

By the time we reach 1000 members (we're at 520 now), I think I will be able to charge for membership.

The hope is to have a lot of good UGC so that the majority of traffic comes from Google searches in the future.

It is totally possible. To start with a free membership when you're building it is the most ideal option. With communities, the value increases with the quality of members and the resources that are offered, initially it is of you with an introduction/welcome post. You'd have to pay me to join at that point. But once you have members and your community is resourceful you can chose to move to a paid plan. Offering a paid plan to new members but keeping the membership free for old members or your early members is what I would advice. If you want to move your entire community (i.e older members that joined for free and the new members that'll join), you should consider the conversion rates, your free members may not convert and leave, lowering the value you created, which lowers the chance someone would pay for.

Benefits: Free then paid (for new members only) works, not sure about the free then fully paid model.

Challenges: When you move to paid, new visitors to your landing page cannot fully see the value of your community, so have to work on bringing that out. Or offer a free trial so they can decide themselves. Another challenge would be building a highly resourceful community with meaningful conversations and respectful members that someone would want to be a part of.

Circle.so is great and exactly serves the needs for a community imo. I'm considering circle mostly and researching on other platforms as well for building my community.

I've been mulling over this same thing Josh. It seems like most communities start with some type of free offering and have an upgraded paid version with more features that provide more benefit.

I'm going to launch mine paid... But I'm going to be doing about 50 podcast interviews pre launch and a perk of the founders I'm interviewing for doing the interview is the option of joining for free once I launch...

So one benefit is there is a rock solid memberbase to begin with which makes people want to join. My hope is also the podcast interviews will be retweeted which gets their audiences attention, and then get the ball rolling that way.

I'd strongly recommend you to have freemium offer if you're deciding to start your community with a paywall.