In this People Magic episode, Gina Bianchini answers a listener’s question about whether to monetize a free community with cohort coaching, a challenge, or a traditional course, and how to price a membership. She argues against freemium community models, explaining that they demand more work for less engagement and revenue. Instead, she recommends offering a time‑limited free experience (course, challenge, summit) that serves as a container and funnel into a paid core offer, typically a membership around $48 per month—the average price on Mighty Networks. Pricing should follow her “3 Rs” framework: Results (the outcome and its value), Replacement (what the membership replaces in the member’s current spend), and Respect (the psychological impact of charging). She emphasizes that all three formats—cohort coaching, challenges, and courses—are merely different flavors of the same underlying framework: bringing people together on a shared transition, providing a structured weekly calendar, and fostering peer learning. The true driver of engagement, retention, and transformation is community connection, not more content. Gina challenges the belief that the host’s personal time and one‑on‑one coaching are the primary value, urging creators to shift focus to building robust frameworks and facilitating member‑to‑member interaction, ideally through small‑group coaching rather than endless one‑on‑one sessions. This shift, she says, creates a scalable, energy‑generating business that delivers higher impact.
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If you want engagement, if you want retention, it is all about connecting your members to each other, not producing more content. Hi Gina, I'm deciding between cohort coaching, a challenge, and a normal course for the paid portion of my free community. What would you recommend? If you have a choice, don't do a freemium community. You will end up doing significantly more work for significantly less return, including just engagement. The reality is that people pay attention to what they pay for. Our data is so clear. You will end up doing more work, have less engagement, and make less money by having a freemium community, meaning that you make your community free and then you have paid courses or challenges or a paid mastermind that you're offering on top of that. A much better structure is where you have a free course or challenge or or event or summit, something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, emphasis on the end. You want a container to what you offer for free, and then you want to be consistently upselling people into whatever your intro offer is or your core offer, which could be, I have a membership at $48 a month. Now, anybody who's like, oh my gosh, that feels like a lot of money, $48 a month is the average price that hosts of Mighty Networks are charging on Mighty successfully, meaning people are paying them $48 a month on average. The way that you price is— I talk about it as the 3 Rs. What are the results that someone is going to get? What are they worth? So how do you quantify that? The second R is replacement. So what is your membership or your course or your coaching replacing that they're already spending money on? And then finally, respect. So people pay attention to what they pay for. You will also pay attention if you are charging money, and you will be much more likely to create something of value that ultimately will be really successful if you are charging for it. Now, in that context, let's talk about coaching, a cohort, a challenge, and a course. They are all flavors of the same idea. Which is to bring people together who are going through a transition. You offer them a framework for them to take and apply in their life. And as they are going through your framework together, they're learning from each other. So it's not about kind of the old way of doing courses, which was, oh, I as the instructor or I as the host, as we call everybody at Mighty Networks. It is not about your content and somebody sitting back and consuming your content. Little secret. That was never what anybody did. That's why you had in the legacy online course world completion rates and graduation rates of like 1%. Because very rarely, if ever, do people get results and transformation in their lives simply by consuming videos and reading PDFs. Where the true power of change comes from in people's lives is through the application of ideas in community with other people, full stop. So what that means is that you can create a cohort of people going through that framework together with a set of things that you are structuring for them every week. That is a cohort. That is a challenge. That is a course. So it's really what language are you going to have the most fun with? And then I want to tackle coaching a little bit differently. When people start communities again and monetizing them through cohorts, challenges, courses, memberships, events, there is typically a lot of not just fear, but a belief that for my offer to be valuable to the people I'm bringing together, it's about me as the host. It's about my content. It's about my point of view. It's about time one-on-one with me. That's the most valuable thing. And the reality is that it is not. Now, this is a bit of a provocative point of view, that the true value of bringing people together on the same journey, going through transitions, the value is not the creator, which is why we actually talk about it as being a host of a community. It is your ability to create the framework that people are going to go through together, that they are going to apply in their lives and then learn from each other. That's where the value comes from. So if you are fearful of somebody is not going to pay for my membership or my course unless I am putting more and more of myself into it, I'm creating new content every week. I'm offering unlimited one-on-one coaching. What happens is that people don't like their community very much because all they've done is they've taken their audience and they're like, for a relatively small amount of money, I've now sold my time and my energy to other people and I feel like I'm beholden to them. And then people get burned out and it's not fun anymore. A much more effective way of building a durable energy-generating business is to think about how you're creating that framework for people to go and do together. So when you set up your community with the highest tier being one-on-one coaching, that is a very standard model. We support it on Mighty Networks, but I challenge you to shift your mindset from, I am the most important person, I am the expert, I am the one that is offering people the insights and the value in a community, to I am the person that through my framework and through my monthly themes, a weekly calendar, daily actions that I am encouraging people to do with each other, I am getting them more value than they're ever going to get in a one-on-one conversation with me. So coaching is great. Try to do it where you are doing small group coaching as your high-ticket offer as opposed to one-on-one coaching. And then think about your cohort, your challenge, your course as how are you creating a framework for people to come together and then getting those members connected to each other. If you want engagement, if you want retention, if you want people to buy the next thing, it is all about connecting your members to each other, not producing more content. Once you make this shift, hopefully you never go back because you will be able to scale something absolutely amazing and have an impact on the world that you can't Have otherwise. And I think that that's pretty awesome. So with that, I'm Gina Bianchini, this is People Magic, and I will see you the next time around.
