Here's a phrase I've heard more times than I can count: “I want to be the Netflix of my niche.”
The Netflix of drumming. The Netflix of yoga. The Netflix of social media. The instinct is always the same – build the biggest, most comprehensive library in the space, and the members will follow.
The reality is the opposite. Your members never joined for the size of your library. And in over a decade of working with membership owners, the single biggest mistake I see is treating content as the be-all and end-all of what a membership offers.
Stop trying to be the Netflix of your niche
I understand where the instinct comes from. Netflix changed the game. In the early days of online memberships, having the biggest selection of courses and tutorials genuinely was a strong selling point.
But it was never the thing that made people stay. Nobody renews year after year because your library is large. They renew because you helped them get somewhere.
If your goal is simply to stockpile every course, workshop and download you can think of, you don't end up with a more valuable membership. You end up with a bloated one – harder to navigate, harder to maintain, and harder to deliver real results from.
Volume is not value
This is the heart of it. More courses, more events, more features, more community channels does not automatically equal more value. Usually it's the reverse.
People do not join a membership to stand still. They join because they have a goal, a problem, or a transformation in mind. They don't want the stuff – they want what the stuff makes possible.
Content is the vehicle, not the destination. Members are buying the transformation, the outcome, the result – not the biggest lesson count or the most hours of video.
You're not selling content. You're selling the solution to a problem, and content is only ever one way of delivering it. The moment you stop trying to impress people with the volume in your library and start focusing on what actually moves them forward, you become a far more valuable membership.
And there's an added pressure now: content has become completely commoditised. AI tools can generate a passable how-to faster than a member can even log into your site.
So if your entire pitch is “look how much content we've got,” that pitch is getting weaker by the day. It's worth remembering that nobody joins a membership to stand still – they join to move forward, and that's what you're really being paid for.
Get off the content treadmill
The second trap is the content treadmill: creating purely to satisfy a schedule rather than to serve a real need.
So many owners define their value like this – join, and you get a weekly call, a monthly training, fresh templates every week. But who cares what they're getting every week if it's padding? Who cares about a new workshop if all it does is inflate an already overwhelming library?
Releasing less, but releasing the right things, beats hitting an arbitrary schedule every time. Ask your members what they actually need and build that, even if it means slowing your publishing down. You'll often find the content you're already sitting on goes a lot further once you stop burying it under new releases nobody asked for.
Let me be straight with you about where the urge to over-create usually comes from, though. It's rarely your members. More often it's a quiet voice telling you that you need more to be valuable, that the most impressive offer is the one with the most items listed on the sales page.
That's insecurity talking, not strategy. And you don't fix it by throwing more content at the problem. You fix it by getting more of your members to a result they care about.
Tell people what they should do, not what they could do
Here's a mistake I made myself in the early days of Membership Academy.
I thought that if I didn't cover all 100 ways to do something, someone would call me out for missing one. So I'd take a problem that needed a five-minute answer and inflate it into an eight-module course. That was insecurity talking, not expertise.
The truth? If you can solve someone's problem in one five-minute video, solve it in one five-minute video.
Your role is to narrow down the choices, not expand them. To provide clarity, not further confusion.
“Start here, do this one thing, then this” will always beat handing someone every option they could possibly consider. Clarity is the value. Overwhelm is not.
Audit your library: addition by subtraction
Once you accept that volume and value are not the same thing, something useful follows. You start to see the value in pruning.
There's such a thing as addition by subtraction. Taking things away, especially from a membership that's been running for years, often adds more value than piling more on. Here's the play:
- Audit at least once a year. Block out the time and properly review what's in your library.
- Check each piece against reality. Is it still relevant? Still current? Does it duplicate something else?
- Decide: keep, update, merge or cut. Anything stale gets replaced or removed. Getting rid of it doesn't mean it was bad. It means it no longer earns its place.
- Then, and only then, consider creating something new.
Nothing in your library should be there forever. Your membership is an evolution, so don't let it go stale just because you're attached to having the most stuff. This is also why I'd argue your perceived value rests far more on clarity and results than on sheer quantity.
What this all comes down to
Value comes from clarity. From saving people time, stress and mental load. From cutting overwhelm and forging the simplest, quickest path between where someone is now and where they want to be.
Sometimes you can get them there with barely any content at all. And that's fine, because people don't join your membership for the Netflix of your space. They join because they trust you to get them where they want to go. Everything in your library is just the vehicle.
Want to put this into practice? The free Membership Content Audit gives you a scored way to review your library and decide what to keep, update, merge or cut. Grab it at membershipgeeks.com/479.
And if you'd like a wider read on where the gaps in your membership actually are, our free Membership Healthcheck is built for exactly that.
