Super early--but I can share a little bit about what I'd consider the product side. In the case of Memberships, the a big part of the product is what content yo

Super early--but I can share a little bit about what I'd consider the product side. In the case of Memberships, the a big part of the product is what content you're going to have access too. (And important to note, this is going to be content that wouldn't exist without memberships.) I got tapped to be Medium's first external editor. I'm going to run a section on personal development: productivity, health, life hacking, maybe some gadgets, plus a few more crazy topics. Medium's execution idea is to take a subject-matter expert (I run Coach.me) and give that expert a modest editorial budget and a lot of freedom. Literally, Ev's directions were: "I'm interested in any topic you're interested in that you think matters to smart people." I think that model of smart, subject matter experts filling editorial roles can actually work really well to produce high-quality media. The heyday of O'Reilly books (when all programmers had O'Reilly books on their desks) mostly ran this way. The main editors were also great coders. The O'Reilly conferences still run this way. In my case, having a budget has been an amazing switch from the editorial I had been doing. It took me about three days to start sending out hyperbolic statements like: "There hasn’t been a personal development publication that mattered since Gina Trapani left Life Hacker in 2009. This could be the next one." Experiencing the switch really highlighted for me what's wrong with the status quo. In personal development, blogging has been completely corrupted by content marketing. Literally a content marketing company, Buffer, came in and owned productivity blogging for awhile. Look at the top productivity stories on Medium and you'll find most of the authors are marketers rather than academics or coaches. So what you see in personal development content is articles that have been fully optimized for virality. The headline is everything. I run a Medium publication that is a group blog for our coaches (Better Humans) and we saw a 5X change in traffic after we asked writers to run their headline through an online headline scoring tool. But... having content dominated by content marketers feels like empty calories pretty quickly. Not to be too prickly--but a content marketer doesn't have any experience with how the reader is going to implement the advice. That makes for functionally weak articles. Either the reader attempts nothing or attempts something and gives up in frustration. A personal development article that works is actually really hard to write. Tim Ferriss does this exceptionally well. And if you deconstruct one of his posts you'll find a lot of parts to it. You can't write a short article if you actually care about changing people's lives. I've been on the receiving end of a Tim Ferriss article and those users come in hyped up to the point where they spike retention. Maybe the current crop of content marketers don't care about impact. Or they just see themselves as the front of the funnel. Well, here's the switch with content in a membership model. Our content is the end of the funnel. Medium already has the reader's money. So we're going to write completely different articles than anyone else because our article is the product. It's supposed to change your life on its own. These high quality articles take time to write. The people who know how to write them are busy. In other words, I think really great content for this particular niche really can't exist in any other format. Not sure I completely made the case for that, but it's definitely what I'm feeling after a few days. I haven't thought too hard about what other niches get transformed in a good way if you put them behind membership. I know people are mentioning news. That experience seems lame to me too. But I do pay for ESPN's Insider. That's just because I'm a basketball junkie. I used to have a subscription for Rails tutorials. I would pay for insider-y stuff--if I love your book and you have a paywall for your daily blog then I'll pay. Mostly, I think this just comes down to any other pay product: if the content is the type of content I love and is trustworthy and is higher quality than I can get anywhere... of course I'd pay for that.