1087 – The math DOES work here: Tom talks When Does 20=24K

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In this episode of Screw the Commute, Tom Antion explains how charging $20 per month for a membership site can turn into $24,000 per year — even with just 100 members.
The Core Math
• $20/month × 100 members = $2,000/month
• $2,000/month × 12 months = $24,000/year
• 200 members = $48,000/year
• 10,000 members = $200,000/month
The main message: membership sites create predictable, recurring income, even at low price points.
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Key Benefits of Membership Sites
1. Recurring Revenue
Members are billed automatically each month, creating steady cash flow. Many members stay subscribed even if they don’t actively use the content.
2. Low Overhead
You only need:
• A locked members-only area on your website
• A payment processor that supports recurring billing (e.g., Stripe, PayPal, merchant account)
• Membership software (e.g., Wishlist Member or platforms like Kartra)
Costs don’t increase much as membership grows.
3. Scalability
Going from 100 to 500 members doesn’t drastically increase expenses. As the community grows:
• Members may help answer questions
• You can appoint volunteer moderators
• Community interaction can reduce your workload
4. Higher-Quality Audience
Paying members are more engaged than free email subscribers. They:
• Have already pulled out their wallets
• Are more likely to buy additional products or services
• Can become affiliates promoting your site
5. Additional Revenue Streams
• Affiliate marketing to members
• Members promoting your site for commissions
• Paid 1-on-1 consulting
• Advertising within the community
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The Critical Factor: Churn
“Churn” is when members cancel.
To reduce churn:
• Add new content regularly (weekly or monthly)
• Host live Q&A sessions
• Bring in guest experts
• Keep delivering value
If members leave too quickly, you need to increase value or engagement.
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Topic Ideas
Membership sites can work in:
• Hobbies (tennis, golf, embroidery)
• Professional skills (jewelry making, marketing)
• Agriculture (yes—even pig farming)
The key lesson:
If others already have successful membership sites in a topic, that proves demand exists. Competition is validation.
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Core Takeaway
You don’t need thousands of members to build meaningful income.
Even modest performance (100 members) creates $24,000/year in recurring revenue.
Tom encourages listeners to:
1. Pick a topic with proven demand.
2. Set up recurring billing.
3. Deliver ongoing value.
4. Focus on reducing churn.
5. Build community.
Bottom line: Small monthly fees × loyal members = long-term financial leverage.

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Episode1087WhenDoes20=24KFinal.mp3
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom. Here with episode 1087 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about when does 20 equal 24,000? Hmm. When does 20 equal 24,000? And I'm talking about money. When does 20 bucks equal 24,000 bucks? Well, I'm going to tell you that in this specific episode. And let's see. Hope you didn't miss episode 1086. That was forgotten tax deductions for us small business people, things you probably need to think about and say, oh, does this apply to me and pass it on to your your accountant or whoever does your taxes for you? And then also this week is 1085. That was five AI hacks. Most people are using AI just like Google, but there's so much more you can do with it. So I gave you five of them there, and I'm doing a big summit here. Let's see, um, a couple weeks where I'm going to give you a whole masterclass on AI hacks. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to the episode number. All right, let's see. Pick up a copy of my automation book. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Make sure you get version 3.0. We actually estimated this a couple years ago, so it's probably close to 10 million keystrokes. This has the thing. Just one of the tips in this book was saved me saved me carpal tunnel syndrome. So make sure you get your copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia.
[00:02:16] All right. Let's talk about when does 20 equal 24,000. Well, I'm talking about membership sites. I'm going to give you the pros and how to do it. Not too many cons in this particular field. A lot of good stuff by having a membership site. So let's look at the math here where I said 20 equals 24,000. Let's say you only charged $20 a month for your membership site now. And the next thing I want you to consider is let's say you only got 100 members, and that's about as pitiful as you can possibly do with the billions of people on this. On this planet. All right. But if you've got 100 members, $20 a month times a hundred members is $2,000 a month cash flow. You just created from creating a membership site. Multiply that by 12 for 12 months in a year, and you just created a $24,000 cash flow from some of the most pitiful performance on the face of the Earth. If you could only get 100 members. What if you got 200 members? That's $48,000 a year. You just exceeded the average income of a US citizen. Okay. And you're still only doing the same amount of work.
[00:03:43] Maybe a little bit more. So I'm going to give you a lot of the pros of this. And and I'll tell you how high this can go. There was a embroidery site the last time I reviewed this several years ago doing membership sites. There was an embroidery site that was $20 a month and they had 10,000 members. All right. 20 times 10,000 is $200,000 a month just from. And all they did was give them one pattern and talk about embroidery all along. All right. Pretty soon what happened was and we talk about this in community building, the individual members started gathering together at McDonald's or, you know, local places to have little meetings. Pretty soon, the owners of the site didn't even have to participate because of all the community that was built in interacting with each other. So that's what could happen. Say, okay, so what are some of the benefits? Well, you have a regular recurring income if you have 50 members, 75 members, and you do a good job, that money is coming in every month. And I'll tell you what, I was a member of three different tennis membership sites, $20 a month each when I was really into tennis. And and so I'm just cranking out that money is coming automatically on my credit card, and I'm not even hardly noticing it. And then when I got really busy, I wasn't even visiting the sites every month, but the money was still being paid to those membership owners.
[00:05:28] And then I had a catastrophic hunting accident and was totally out of whack. Couldn't lift 5 pounds for six months and didn't visit the sites at all. But the money kept coming out of my checking account. Okay, I was too busy trying to recover than paying. You know, to me that was not a big deal to to nitpick. Every little credit thing was coming out of my credit card. So that was $60 a month going to those people, and I wasn't using the service at all. So that can happen too. There's nothing wrong with that. I picked it back up after I was able to to play again, and then I kind of lost interest when I got super, super busy and in my own business. And I did cancel. But all of that money that they got for me, they didn't do any extra work for say, okay. So anyway, regular recurring income and most of the people, unless it's like stock trading where they're giving you stock tips at $400 a month or something like that. Most of these are like low cost of entry. And like I said, I didn't even notice it on my credit card bill when I wasn't really using the service. Some people just stay on even if they're not visiting the site because they like you.
[00:06:47] All right. So it's really a great way to get recurring revenue coming in. And it's also very low overhead. All you have to do to make this happen is to have a locked off portion of your website, and a way to collect the money automatically. We have a couple methods. We use wishlist member as it locks off the pages that if they don't pay, they don't. You know it locks the pages. If they pay, it unlocks them. Simple as that. I'm not saying it's super simple, but once it's set up, it is simple. Another way that's all internal is we put memberships on Kartra, which is our latest shopping cart system. All right. So but doesn't cost a lot of money. And let's see scalability. This is another big thing. If you have 100 members or 150 members or 500 members, you really don't have many increased costs from the, the the technology part of it. Now you may have to be more. Spend more time answering questions from people and answering questions from new members that want to join or this or that. But, you know, one of the other big benefits is, is building community. And many membership sites have volunteers. Once they get big enough, they have the gung ho, really good people. You can tell after time who the really solid people are in your memberships. You offer them either perks or free membership to be an admin, and then they can take a lot of this load off your back.
[00:08:32] See? So beautiful. So you can build up a lot of a lot of members and it just keeps increasing your income. Now another interesting thing is instead of advertising your membership site, you could get your members, your current members, make them affiliates where they get a portion of the regular membership fee. If they get people to sign up, and who's a better ambassador than people that are already members and love you and love the value of the site, and they see the value of the site. So that's another thing. Plus the people that are in there usually better quality, better quality audience because they're paying. See, you know, I'd rather have 100 paid members than a thousand email subscribers or even maybe 5000 email subscribers, say, because they've got their wallet out and they give it money to you every month. So that's a higher quality audience. Plus, it's a captive audience. See, you can advertise to those people. Other things that you're doing, or when you run across affiliate stuff that you believe in, you show it to your members. You make affiliate income off of that. Also, the gung ho members that even, you know, some of them would be admins, but some of them will want to buy one on one consultation with you, depending on your topic.
[00:10:00] I'll go over some topics that you might not have thought of, but there's just membership sites on everything, including. I always used to tease about that, so I went and found there's more, actually more than one. A membership site on pig farming. I'll tell you exactly if you think I'm kidding. I'll tell you the name of it and you can go look at it. If you're an aspiring pig farmer. I don't know if we have a lot of those on screw the commute, Larry. Larry will be listening to this later. Okay, so again, that making them affiliates and having a captive audience reduces your advertising costs to keep members coming. Okay, now there is one thing I got to tell you about. That's one of the most important things. And like I said, the technology is relatively easy to put together and you can get other people to do that for you if you don't want to do it yourself. But the topic is called churn. See URL. And that's the amount of people that join your membership site. But then they leave. So your biggest thing is to make sure they don't want to leave by providing good stuff regularly. So if you just put a bunch of good stuff in the beginning and then never do anything else, well, people will fall off after they consume that stuff. So some people will do a weekly webinar, live question and answer session, uh, put up new learning modules, uh, once a week or once a month.
[00:11:41] You know, you can you get to pick whatever you want to do and what you're willing to do. And then you got to watch to see, oh, well, what I'm doing is not keeping my members, so I better step up my game. And that's another another really cool thing. When you get enough members, you'll have people like me offering to do a training class for you in your membership site, just for your members. So for me, it's exposure and people like me, and also I can give you an affiliate link so that you make money. If anybody buys my stuff, say so. Just awesome ways. Once you build a community and talking about community, one of my former students, Warren Carlisle, and and his partner, Roberto Candelaria, uh, Warren, built an octopus site. Octonation, built it up to hundreds of thousands of members. Right. And and I'm not sure if it's a paid one or not, but but the thing is, he can make money by underwater photographers advertising on his site and camera people. And I don't know what else, but people pay him to advertise on the site, so. So that's another potential revenue stream of doing this if you build up a good audience. So basically you just have to put the infrastructure together, either something like Kartra or Wishlist member.
[00:13:10] If you have a website you already want to use, and then you've got to be able to collect the money, of course, on a recurring basis. See some of the the money places won't allow recurring. You know they only do one shot deal. So you got to make sure whoever you pick like stripe or PayPal or, uh, you know, authorize.net, you know, through a regular merchant account, whatever it is, you got to be able to collect the money on a regular basis, and you got to decide what you're willing to do and try it. And then if members fall off too fast, Then you up your game or you pull in more people that, like I said, like me that are willing to go in front of your members. And so if you go check it out and pick up any topic you can think of and type it into Google and say, put the term membership afterwards. There's golf, there's tennis, there's acupuncture. Now there's a jewelry site. One of my students from way back was a master jeweler, and he was had a membership site for other jewelers teaching them how to set stones. And, you know, all the stuff that jewelers have to do. And that was a higher fee per month because, you know, they're making big money if they, you know, set a diamond in a in a platinum ring or something, I don't know all the stuff they do, but but I know you've been waiting to hear about the pig farms, right? It's called the Empire Kuna Kuna pig association.
[00:14:50] I don't know if KuneKune is a type of pig or something. It's Empire and then Kunekune Pig Association, abbreviated EKPA.org. So for all of my listeners who are aspiring pig farmers, or if there's a pig in your life, I don't know, you must see how to handle them better and check out Empire KuneKune Pig Association. But anyway, uh, on a, uh, not so serious note now, everybody says, oh, now, seriously, I'm hardly ever serious. Uh, check out and think about what kind of topic could you do a membership site on it? Like I said, it doesn't have to be hardcore business. Could be hobbies, all kinds of things, and see what's out there. And just because there's one doesn't mean you say, oh, well, somebody's already done it. I was in three tennis sites. People that are interested in the topic will join. They might quit another site to join your site, because maybe the other membership site wasn't meeting their needs anymore, so they want to try something else on the same topic. So I always say when when there's a demand for something, uh, don't don't quit. That proves I mean, when when there's other products in the marketplace that proves there's a demand.
[00:16:16] If you have nothing on that topic, you think, oh, well, I hit the lottery, I'll be the only one. Uh, that's possible. But it also could be possible that nobody would pay for that topic. See? So. So you gotta. That's flipping a coin. But if you got something that everybody's proven that they are willing to spend money on, you just I call it my pizza shop theory. It's it's that if you make a good pizza, you'll get your fair share of the business. All right. So that's the same thing with membership sites. If you do a good job in your membership site on a certain topic, it doesn't matter if there's 20 others. In fact, if there was 20 others, that's even a bigger indicator that there's a demand out there. See? So so there you go. Check out membership sites and, uh, watch for the digest coming out for this week on, uh, forgotten tax deductions and AI hacks and all that will be coming out probably today or tomorrow. All right. Uh, and also check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. All right. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.