Episodes

Chris Badgett, co-founder and CEO of LifterLMS, expects a lot of people to go to AI to learn, maybe instead of a course or a membership. He sees something like it at his own company: support tickets are down about 75% while usage isn't, and he thinks it's because people now ask AI how to do something instead of waiting on a reply. So the question for a course is how it beats the generic answer ChatGPT or Claude would give. That can mean curation for a specific customer, personalized support or c...

Latika Manaktala had spent years teaching her members webinars, one-to-one closing, and social media, and still had people who would not move. So she started booking one-to-one calls to find out why. Her conclusion: skills are about five percent of what decides whether someone gets a result. The rest she now tracks as mindset, energy, and unconscious programming, and she changed the check-in question from how are you growing to why are you not. That diagnostic runs on top of a business worth stu...

Lingerie Fighting Championships (LFC) spent years building the audience before building the revenue: 5.3M social followers and Tubi's most-watched show within a week of landing on the platform. Then the platforms pushed back, and the UK tour that grew the following from 1.5M to 5.3M was run as an intentional loss. The audience worked. The business model is the part still being built. Shaun Donnelly, CEO of Lingerie Fighting Championships walks through the full picture: revenue against followers,...

The most valuable traffic any business gets is somebody vouching for it. A partnership is how you arrange that on purpose: someone endorses you to their audience, and you pay commission only when a sale lands. Sai Blackbyrn built Coach Foundation on partnerships, starting with little to spend on ads and nobody in the space who knew him. He takes the method apart in this episode. What we also discussed: - The introduction swap: ask for three introductions, offer three back, and why that almost gu...

Giving your best course away free sounds like a fast way to go broke. That was Mark Virkler's reaction when the founder of ClickFunnels told him to do exactly that, after years of hiring marketers who, by Mark's account, never made him a penny. He tried it anyway. Every month since, one of his top twenty courses goes online free: ten pre-taped sessions, each watchable for 24 hours before it comes down, then a 48-hour window at the end to catch what you missed. Nothing downloads. The copy you kee...

Micah Mitchell is co-founder and CEO of Memberium, which connects WordPress membership sites to Keap and ActiveCampaign. His view on AI is that it is the new mobile. When phones arrived, everyone said websites were finished. What happened instead is that people added an app and kept selling the same thing. The big change he has seen inside memberships is that live calls and mastermind groups came back, and access to the expert moved from a perk to the core of the offer. On the software side, sup...

A $39/month membership can sell a $1,000 upsell offer. The people most likely to buy it already pay you every month. Jordan Rafaelov runs Dopamine Digital, a cold outbound agency that charges per qualified booked meeting instead of a retainer. Much of this conversation is about the opposite problem: what to do with an audience you already have. He walks through the launch format behind what he says is a $137,000 average over five days, how a friend's launch went from $2,500 to over $60,000 in a ...

How do you scale expertise past 1:1? As director of mathematics, Lucy West took the district from 16th to #1 in math - out of 32 districts in the largest school system in the US. Her method: refuse to coach the struggling teachers, find the teacher-leaders everyone already went to, and grow them until their peers came to watch. She then productized that method into Metamorphosis, a consultancy that won clients entirely through inbound - and nearly lost everything when its biggest client canceled...

Nathalie Doremieux, co-founder of The Membership Lab, has helped build over 300 membership sites. Her position after nearly two decades: when members stall, drift, and cancel, it's rarely the member. It's the design. In this episode: - Why "they didn't do the work" is usually a cover story, and what the cancel notification actually means - How to find the exact spot in your program where members get stuck (tracking, asking, and the questions that repeat on your calls) - Why the platform is rarel...

Free two-week Rupt trial for MemberFix listeners: https://rupt.dev/memberfix/ If five people are using one login on your membership site, four of them are not paying you. According to Rupt's data, 15-20% of accounts on a typical membership or eLearning site are shared - and without the right tooling, it goes unmeasured. Ahmed Saleh, founder and CEO of Rupt, built his company on a counterintuitive idea: account sharers are warm leads, not thieves. They already use and love the product - they just...

After a broken leg left him stuck in bed for two months, Jack Arturo - creator of WP Fusion, the glue between WordPress and CRMs - started turning AI agents into coworkers. His message for membership business owners: you don't need to be a developer to do the same. In this conversation: - The free, low-risk way to start: give an AI read-only access to your inbox and ask it how it can help - Build it or buy it? Jack's two-question test settles it - Why AI accelerates people with real expertise in...

Want a no BS audit of your site and SEO? Normally $97, free for MemberFix listeners. The content your members pay for sits behind a paywall, which means Google and AI can't see it. And what they can't see, they can't recommend. Phil Hudson of Rook Digital breaks down how membership sites actually get found in an AI-search world: free funnel content that answers real buyer questions, schema markup that hands AI your best information in a way it can't misread, and the one signal AI can't fake - ge...

Shaun Nanan is the co-founder and academic director of Nanan Academy, a STEM education provider for youth and adults built on WordPress and LearnDash. In this episode, Shaun breaks down why sustainable education requires sustainable revenue, how Nanan Academy structures long-term student journeys (grade 3 through post-secondary), and the operational decisions behind their platform stack and business model. What we cover: - What Shaun noticed about incoming students at Saskatchewan Polytechnic - ...

Shane Walton - co-founder of the Commercial Loan Broker Institute - joins MemberFix Radio to break down what commercial loan brokering actually is, why most new brokers fail before they start, and how CLBI built a five-phase training system that gets people launched instead of just educated. Behind the scenes, that system runs on a WordPress-powered membership platform plugged into a CRM, Zapier automations, gated Vimeo content, and daily marketing operations - and Shane gets honest about what a...

Alexander Ford spent a decade running a marketing agency before he shut it down to coach. The reason wasn't a market shift or a better business model. It was a thesis he keeps coming back to: most engagements fail not because of bad tactics or weak discipline, but because the client - or the founder - doesn't actually want to do the work the engagement requires. He joins Vic to walk through the pivot, the high-touch coaching practice he's building in its place, and the worldview connecting both....

After 10+ years running Membership Academy, Mike Morrison has a bird's-eye view of what quietly kills membership businesses while owners are staring at the wrong metrics. In this conversation with Vic Dorfman, Mike breaks down why most owners are misdiagnosing their biggest problem, what the churn data actually tells you vs. what it hides, and why the subscription economy has fundamentally shifted against them. What you'll learn:

Věra Lantelme-Faisan, president of HETI (The Federation of Horses in Education and Therapy International), shares what it takes to lead a not-for-profit organization across 45+ countries since 1974. In this episode, you'll learn:

AC Hampton built Supreme Ecom - a 43-person, fully in-house e-commerce education company - without spending a dollar on paid ads. In this episode, he walks through the shift that changed how his business operates: moving from pure revenue KPIs to retention rate, churn rate, ROI, and customer satisfaction. The money, he says, followed when the metrics did. In this conversation: How Supreme Ecom engineers recurring revenue across a three-tier offer structure - and why the customer's next problem i...

Jen Santos is the founder of Smart Event Academy, a training platform she built after the pandemic wiped out decades of institutional knowledge from the events industry. Her premise: when events fail, the technology is almost never the real problem. It's the people around it - the teams who don't know what they don't know, in an industry that has almost no formal training for newcomers. In this episode, you'll learn: → Why event tech failures are a people and alignment problem - not a software p...

Evan Mestman, founder and Chief Gratitude Officer of ProAttitudes, has spent 30+ years at the intersection of clinical nutrition, neuroscience, and leadership coaching. His argument: self-awareness is the first step - but without intention, it just keeps you comfortable in your discomfort. In this episode, he explains why burned-out leaders keep repeating the same patterns, how he built a coaching practice with clients who stay for years, and what the research actually says about what motivates ...

Kim Pomares, CEO of Mendability, explains how sensory enrichment therapy helps autistic children and individuals with neurological challenges by boosting brain plasticity without pharmaceuticals. In this episode, you'll learn:

Most membership businesses don't have a technology problem. They have a "too much technology without strategy" problem. Melodie Moore, founder of Business Tech Ninjas, has spent 10 years helping seven-figure membership and eLearning companies cut through the noise. In this episode, Melodie introduces the "technologist" role — someone who asks "what problem does this solve?" before implementing any tool. She shares why hiring for mindset beats chasing "A players," how her ClarityOps system develo...

Don Crosby has spent 35 years in behavioral science, but his real mission started when he watched his parents' marriage fall apart after 28 years. Now, he's building a suite of online courses with one audacious goal: reduce the divorce rate in America by 10%. In this episode, Don shares: → Why most relationship courses market poorly (and what he's doing differently) → How he's targeting teens to prevent divorce before it starts → The dual-market strategy: affordable consumer courses + premium co...

Dawn Holts, Director of Operations at Amnio Technology, reveals how she built a biotech business where quality and ethics replace aggressive sales tactics. With a PhD in Performance Psychology and Navy background, Dawn explains how regenerative medicine works, why she uses WordPress and LearnDash for regulatory compliance training, and how her company achieves accreditation standards that exceed FDA requirements. In this episode, you'll learn: → What regenerative medicine does that traditional s...