membership
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PetPlus asks $139.95. What does your pet get back?
PetPlus turns repeat purchases into a membership proposition: pay once, spend less through PetCareRx. The interesting part is where the arithmetic meets the small print.
Lola wants to book your weekend, not just your hotel
The KAYAK founders are back with an AI assistant for the hours between trips. Inside Booking Holdings, Lola pairs conversational planning with member rates and a human who knows whom to call.
Vivrelle sells the freedom to change your bag
A wedding wardrobe problem became a luxury accessories club. Its real business is keeping a shared closet desirable enough to come back to.
Italic wants you to pay for the towel, not the name
The factory-direct retailer set out to remove luxury’s label premium. Its harder lesson was learning which products, prices, and promises deserved to stay.
OXBC’s £99 proposition: keep the right people in the room
Born from an Oxford blockchain course, OXBC turned a shared education into a membership network. Its story shows what introductions can accomplish - and where collective enthusiasm needs a harder question.
Vision Club Has a Door Policy for Dubai’s Business Circle
The Russian-speaking entrepreneurs’ club turns introductions into a managed service. Its real proposition is a room where established business owners can stop performing and start comparing notes.
HK01 Wants the Rest of Your Day
The Hong Kong publisher has built shopping, ticketing and rewards around the daily news habit. Its most revealing growth experiment began with runners looking for photographs of themselves.
The Diet That Invented Group Therapy Now Writes Prescriptions
It taught a generation to count points and lean on each other. Then a weekly shot changed the math - so WeightWatchers went to the doctor.
Everyone Is Quietly Building A Members-Only Internet
The creators and brands who spent a decade renting attention on other people's feeds are now buying software to build private homes instead. Skool, Patreon, Podia and a stack of quieter forum companies are all fighting to be the front door.
Why every course app suddenly wants to be a community
Disciple, Podia, Thinkific, LearnWorlds, Kajabi and Open Social are all chasing the same tired-of-renting creator. Here is how the fight over who owns your audience actually breaks down.
You Don't Own the Community You Built
Skool, Circle, Discourse, Gainsight, Salesforce and Gravyty are all selling the same thing - a place for your people to gather. The difference is who keeps the keys.
Nobody Wants to Build on Rented Land Anymore
Creators, associations and alumni offices are all fleeing the social feed to own their audiences. A cluster of platforms - from Circle to Discourse - is racing to sell them the escape hatch.
Everyone Is Suddenly In The Business Of Belonging
From a Fortune 500 CRM to a solo podcaster's chat room, four very different companies are chasing the same prize - the crowd that keeps coming back. Here is how the fight for online community actually breaks down.
Skool
How a deliberately plain community platform - five tabs, one price, and a points-for-likes game - became the default home for the paid-community economy.
Thinkific
How a lawyer's $29 LSAT course became a public 'learning commerce' company powering 35,000 course businesses.
Bettermode vs Disciple, and Who Really Owns Your Community
Two white-label platforms promise creators and brands a home away from Facebook. One bets on branded mobile apps, the other on customizable web hubs - here is how Bettermode and Disciple actually differ.
Circle Wants Creators to Stop Renting Their Own Audience
The all-in-one community platform crossed into profitability at roughly $27M in ARR by betting that creators would rather own their home than build it on rented land. Now it is rebuilding that home to be AI-native.
Patreon
The company that turned the 'starving artist' into a subscription business - and quietly paid creators more than $10 billion while the rest of the internet fought over ad money.
Invision Community
For more than twenty years, a small team has quietly built one of the web's most enduring community platforms - the software behind forums you have almost certainly posted in without knowing its name.
Higher Logic
Engagement is changing. Make every connection count.
GroupApp
Everything you need to run group learning programs, retain your members, and grow your revenue - in one platform.
Disciple
The London company behind branded community apps for the Rolling Stones and hundreds of quieter passion groups wants creators to stop renting their audiences from Facebook.
Circle
Build a home for your community, events, and courses - all under your own brand.
Ghost
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform that lets writers, journalists and creators run a website, send email newsletters and sell paid memberships from one place. Built on Node.js and released under the MIT license, it is stewarded by the nonprofit Ghost Foundation and funded entirely by its users through Ghost(Pro) managed hosting - taking 0% of creators' subscription revenue.
Public Goods
Public Goods is a New York-based, membership-driven direct-to-consumer brand that sells its own line of healthy, sustainable everyday essentials - personal care, household, cleaning, grocery, and supplements - at near-wholesale prices. Pitched by co-founder Morgan Hirsh as 'Amazon with a soul,' the company launched on Kickstarter in 2017, built a single house brand with minimalist design and clean ingredients, and ties purchases to reforestation and food-bank donations.
The Business of Fashion
The Business of Fashion (BoF) is a London-based global media and intelligence company covering the fashion, beauty and luxury industries. Founded by Imran Amed in 2007 as a blog written from his flat in Notting Hill, BoF has grown into an authoritative platform that combines agenda-setting journalism, paid professional memberships, data and advisory work through BoF Insights, online masterclasses, the BoF Careers job marketplace, and marquee events like BoF VOICES and the BoF 500. The Financial Times led its Series B round in 2019, and the company reaches readers and members in more than 200 countries.
Park Padel
Park Padel is a San Francisco-based padel club operator building Northern California's home for the fast-growing racket sport. Founded in 2023 by Jessica Talbert, Neil Chainani, and Katie Lampert after they discovered padel while traveling in Europe, the company runs three clubs - outdoor courts with Bay views at Embarcadero Plaza, a flagship indoor facility at Oyster Point in South San Francisco, and a location in West Sacramento. Park Padel blends court reservations, coaching, leagues, and social events with an app-first booking experience and a community-first approach, aiming to open 100 courts across the US over the next few years.
SCTE® a subsidiary of CableLabs®
SCTE is the non-profit professional society that trains, certifies, and sets the technical standards for the people who build and run cable broadband networks. Founded in 1969 and a subsidiary of CableLabs since 2021, it runs the only ANSI-accredited standards program for the broadband industry, issues role-based professional certifications, delivers online and hands-on technical education, and hosts SCTE TechExpo (formerly Cable-Tec Expo), the largest cable telecommunications event in the Americas. In short: if a technician splices a fiber, proctors a DOCSIS install, or writes a Remote PHY spec, SCTE is usually the reason there's a shared playbook.
Tizra
Tizra is a Providence, Rhode Island software company that builds a cloud content delivery platform for associations, publishers, and professional organizations. Its modular system lets clients upload, protect, search, sell, and showcase digital content - ebooks, PDFs, periodicals, audio, and video - through a secure digital library, an eStore for direct sales, and an API-driven 'Connected Hub' that ties content into AMS, CRM, LMS, and AI tools. Founded in 2006 by document-engineering scientist David Durand and former Popular Mechanics editor Abe Dane, Tizra helps content-driven organizations turn their archives into discoverable, revenue-generating, member-serving experiences.
WTHN
WTHN is a modern wellness brand rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine, built to make acupuncture, cupping, herbal remedies and acupressure tools accessible to everyday people. Founded in New York in 2019 by Michelle Larivee and Dr. Shari Auth, it pairs design-forward studios across NYC with an at-home product line sold through 200+ retailers and e-commerce, aiming to take centuries-old healing out of the back room and into modern life.