Lessons Learned from Shutting Down My Membership

Andréa Jones [00:00:00]:
It's official, friends. It's the end of an era. If you were on my email list, you saw that the Mindful Marketing Lab just went through its final enrollment. We are wrapping up the program. This is our final year of the program. It'll be closing October 31, 2026. And so in this episode, I want to do something a little bit different and talk about the lessons learned, the stories, and why I'm pivoting. This is kind of like a behind the scenes conversational episode, but it's the first of a four part series.

Andréa Jones [00:00:33]:
I'm doing all about the shifts that are happening in marketing. I'm really excited to bring this to you as four episodes this year instead of one. Let's get into it. But first, a word from our sponsor. Riverside is the all in one podcast recording and editing tool that I use for this right here show. I use it to edit not only the audio and the video, it is like Chef's Kiss, magical, making the entire process so, so easy. Plus, I love their Magic AI clips. Their little AI robot in the background pulls out the most impactful moments of the episodes without me having to comb through and do it myself.

Andréa Jones [00:01:13]:
Resizes them for social media. So those vertical videos you see on TikTok and Reels, those all come from Magic AI inside of Riverside. It's literally one click. It spits out 10 clips. I pick the best one and away I go. Saves me so much time. If you want to get on the Riverside train, check it out today, the links in the show notes and make sure to use my code DREA D R E A at checkout to get 15% off your membership. All right, let's set the stage.

Andréa Jones [00:01:41]:
Set the scene, if you will, of the history of the Mindful Marketing Lab. I launched the Mindful Marketing Lab, formerly the Savvy Social School, in 2018. And it was kind of a wild time because I was running my agency at the time and I had decided to start a podcast first. And I already had the Savvy Social School with one product. It was my canva course that was in that school. And I launched the podcast and joined the podcast movement 28 Day Challenge. I watched Pat Flynn's YouTube videos on how to start a podcast. And then I started following the membership guys, the membership geeks, and quickly realized I wanted to do a membership model.

Andréa Jones [00:02:26]:
And I decided to launch all of this within a period of months. And if y' all know me, you know, when I decide to do something, I'm like, well, whatever, let's Just go all in. Why not? My dulu is the salulu as the. The gals and gals. And they say on Tick tock. Do they still say that? I'm still saying it. So I created it because I had all of these resources that I was already creating internally for my team on how to post to Instagram. What's the best way to write a LinkedIn caption? How do we build our following on Facebook? And how do we.

Andréa Jones [00:03:01]:
What do we say in Facebook groups? Like, I had all of these trainings for my team, and that became the foundation of the school, which is now the lab. And I created it because I kept getting all of these questions, and I wanted to have kind of like a resource and a place place to house all of these. And back then, my goal was just to supplement my income. Back then I was like, this is a great kind of thing to have in addition to my agency. And I wanted to be known for social media. And it kind of grew into this huge thing, especially in the pandemic. I was one of the first people to pivot towards pandemic support. Two weeks to crush the curb.

Andréa Jones [00:03:43]:
I had started running Facebook ads on how to update your social media language to reflect kind of the time that we're all in, like, the collective time. And y', all, I've never seen cost per click that low. I've never seen cost per conversion that low. Like that. That was some list growth. Like, if I could go back in time, I would, like, take out a line of credit and run more ads. Because if I knew then what I do now was that I jumped into something really, really great in. In a.

Andréa Jones [00:04:13]:
In a pocket of time where people really needed that resource. Then I rebranded the Savvy Social School to the Mindful Marketing Lab. But what you all know about this rebrand is I bought those domain names in 2020. I should have rebranded back. That then was the time. But I waited too late. I rebranded the Mindful Marketing Podcast. When I had my second kid in 2024, I rebranded the podcast.

Andréa Jones [00:04:35]:
I. And then by the later that year, fall of 2024, I rebranded the lab. So it's only been a year since I rebranded the lab. And, like, looking back reflectively, it was the right thing to do for my business. But y', all, ooh, things are shifting. Things are shifting faster than I can keep up with them. And that name shift happened too late. So my first lesson learned is, when you are inspired by something, go for it.

Andréa Jones [00:05:04]:
And I think I should have back then. And so it Kind of reminded me of that, kind of reflecting on this entire process. So if there's something that you're sitting on, I want to encourage you to just go for it, because then you'll regret if you don't do it at the right time. But the other thing that shifted for me, actually, there's a number of things that shifted in this entire process, and I want to just kind of come on the mic authentically and talk about it, because I don't see a lot of people talking about this online. So there's a lot of conversations from business coaches, life coaches, whatever, about feeling inspired to make a change. Right? And that was the Mindful Marketing Lab. Feeling inspired to make a change. And I sat on it.

Andréa Jones [00:05:46]:
But what people don't talk about enough is making a change because you have to. And I think it's just not romantic. That's why people don't talk about it. It's not fun to talk about having to make a change. And that's where I feel like I am now in my business. If I could have my way, I probably would keep running the Mindful Marketing Lab for another couple of years because I have two toddlers. They are very demanding of my time, my energy, my health. Okay.

Andréa Jones [00:06:13]:
I feel like I'm always on the precipice of another cold. I feel like that right now. And I'm like, I just. I feel like I just had three days with no cold. Anyways, combine that with the state of the world, and I'm going to talk about more of this in my predictions episode. But, y', all, a lot is changing. AI has entered the chat, has entered the room. And what I realized about the structure of my program is that it.

Andréa Jones [00:06:37]:
It's too large to fit the fast pace that marketing is changing at. And I'm trying to make it work, but even explaining what's included in it feels like too much. I feel like I'm going against my own marketing ethos when I talk about how I approach marketing. My new tagline, simpler, smarter marketing for busy people. I've been using this tagline for almost a year now. It feels really good for me. But when I look at my program, I think, this doesn't fit. Do I want to change it? No.

Andréa Jones [00:07:10]:
Because I love running it, honestly. But it doesn't fit. And so I think we have these moments sometimes as business owners, as marketers, where we're testing things, we're trying things, but we feel too invested to make a change. And that's not going to be me. I'm not going to let it be me, to be honest with y'. All. I need to make a change as well, financially. And so I'm looking at this program.

Andréa Jones [00:07:30]:
I built this huge thing that is actually hard to sell. The name change made it hard to sell. People don't want Mindful right now. They wanted mindful in 2020. They don't want Mindful right now. They want the fast way, the shortcut. So I'll get to that in this series as well. But also a lot of personal change for me.

Andréa Jones [00:07:48]:
When I started the program, I had an agency. When I rebranded, I had an agency. And now I do not. Actually. I just joined another agency, which I'll talk about in another podcast. But I don't have my own team running this program. I was double dipping with my agency. My agency team would also run in the lab and vice versa.

Andréa Jones [00:08:08]:
And so it was basically, I had a lot of systems able to run it. And then when it became just me and it was the peak of my postpartum depression, anxiety, pre medication, pre therapy, it was a lot to keep running, and that showed. I'm not proud of it. I still think my B plus work is better than a lot of Yalls. No offense. I could have a little ego about that, right? A lot of my competitors out there can't meet my B plus work. But I want A plus, okay? I'm a star student, and I wasn't proud of some of the work that I was producing during that time. Okay.

Andréa Jones [00:08:41]:
My energy shifted, my priority shifted, my family shifted. So I started thinking, what if? And this is what I want you to think about when you feel like you have to change. I want you to go back to ground zero and go, what if? And the what if? Questions I were asking myself are, what if this could be easier? What if it could be more fun? What if it could be what people need, what they actually need. Not what they say they need, but what they actually need. And what if it could be what they say they need? Right. I felt like I was selling this huge offer, this huge program that was very valuable, mind you. People who are in it loved it. Y' all who are in it and loved it.

Andréa Jones [00:09:22]:
And when I said I was doing my final year, so many people emailed me and my. My members email me sad that this program was ending and asking, like, desperately, what else are you doing, Andre? And I'm like, I'm not abandoning you, I promise. We're just shifting, right? And I feel like this is what I teach in the lab. I. I Taught a class almost a year ago now about my new marketing framework, my marketing ecosystem. And part of this framework is building a marketing playground that feels good for you. And that playground has to match your season of life and your season of business. I am in the season of business where I just had my winter season and now I'm headed into spring.

Andréa Jones [00:10:02]:
And I don't want to grow the same plants again because these plants aren't producing enough fruit for me to survive. That was a good analogy. So basically what I'm trying to say is I love the Mindful Marketing lab, but the tools that I used to run it, the energy that I used to run it, and the requirements that I promised in the program, all of those things were no longer aligned. I'll use tools. For example, I was on Circle to run my membership and y' all for the size of the membership. When I switched to Circle, it made a lot of sense. Okay? We had almost 200 members. We had all these live classes, I was teaching classes, my agency staff were teaching classes.

Andréa Jones [00:10:42]:
We have so many products in there that it just made sense. I love their search functionality. Live streaming is built in. Translations and captions are built in. Everything's built in. It's like an all in one tool. It is amazing. However, it is expensive, y'.

Andréa Jones [00:10:59]:
All. And it made sense when I had other things like my agency running and you know, my top line revenue was closed to a million a year. It's nowhere near that right now. So when I look at the tool that I was using run the program, I go, okay, how can I simplify this? I started doing research, I started trying to simplify everything. I was using ConvertKit before I tried to move my contacts over to Circle. It actually increased my monthly expenses and I spent a lot of wasted time trying to make that switch. And so my lesson learned here is simple sometimes means starting over. And I didn't want to hear that at the time.

Andréa Jones [00:11:35]:
And I tried to like duck redo my duct tape and it wasn't working. And so the lesson I learned there is simple sometimes starting over. And so now I've simplified things. I'm on a different tool now. I'm on teachery now for my program and I'm using flodesk for my emails. That's it. And I'm using very simple technology to deliver my new program that is coming up, which I'll be talking about in this series. But simple is the way to go here.

Andréa Jones [00:12:05]:
Now I mentioned AI. AI is entered the chat. The other lesson that I've learned in this process is to lean into the natural waves and natural curiosity of my clients and customers. Y' all are curious about AI. You maybe tried it and you thought, this ain't it. Or maybe you tried it and you were like, this is amazing. What else it can do? Whatever the case may be, a lot of you are like, AI is integrated into everything, and I need to either learn it or be staunchly against it. And most of you listening to this podcast are AI curious.

Andréa Jones [00:12:39]:
You're like, okay, I want to know how to use it, but ethically, I want to know how to use it, but mindfully, right? And so I started building AI tools, AI shortcuts to be able to help you with that. And I realized those were getting used more than my full length courses. And so then this is another what if. What if I could take my course and make it more actionable? And a lot of the times when I teach a workshop, I talk about how it's not a workshop. It's a workshop. It's not a watch shop, it's a workshop. If y' all have been watching one of my things, I want you to do the work that is always, always, always my goal. And if I can give you something that gets you there quicker, like some of my custom GPTs, why the hell not? And so I started building these in.

Andréa Jones [00:13:23]:
I think we have almost 10 of them now in our program. And I started realizing that that was actually the biggest sell, not the course, with all the videos in the worksheets and blah, blah, blah. Like a worksheet you'll only use if you use it. And even then, do you actually need the worksheet? Really what you need is the solution. Okay? And then you save it and store it wherever you want to save it and store it. And so I'm learning through this whole process to be flexible and to be nimble with what my people actually need here now and today. One of the things that I absolutely love about the lab is the templates. And that is what people, honestly, when they leave testimonials and things, they talk about how things are actionable, but they also talk about the templates, especially things like swipe files and like, the do this, then this templates love them.

Andréa Jones [00:14:12]:
And so I started thinking about, what if? This is my other what if question. What if I can give you something that's more along the lines of like, this is what you need today versus here's everything you need to know about Instagram ever. Okay? And y', all, I got so frustrated too, with Instagram I love Instagram. It's probably the platform I spend the most time on, Perhaps Instagram threads. TikTok. I spent a lot of time on social media. Instagram's probably one of the main ones. But y', all, the amount of updates they go through.

Andréa Jones [00:14:42]:
I tried to record the Instagram course twice this year alone. And I kept getting frustrated because I'd get halfway through recording and then the interface would change again. And so I kept having these frustrating moments of like, I can't do this myself. In the past, I had a team helping me even just edit the videos. I am that person now. I am the video planner, recorder editor. And it's taking me a lot of time when I don't have a lot of time. And so I thought about, what if I can make this easier? What if you don't even need a full Instagram course? And I don't think you do.

Andréa Jones [00:15:13]:
YouTube University is free, free 99. And there's a lot of support on YouTube. And if you want to learn something specific, you can literally just go search for it on YouTube. And now with the power of AI, you could just ask ChatGPT. Hey, ChatGPT, I'm trying to do a green screen video on Instagram. What do I need to know? And ChatGPT will link you to the YouTube videos that you need to watch. It is wild the amount of information that's available for freezies on the Internet. And so that's another piece of this that I realized that people were craving was not the Googleable solution, but how does this work for me? So I shifted a lot of my marketing for the Mindful Marketing Lab to talk about the unlimited support, which y' all love.

Andréa Jones [00:15:56]:
Okay, so the unlimited support still in the lab. For those of you in the lab, it's still there. But I realized that's something that people just wanted on its own. So why try to sell the whole thing if I could just sell the unlimited support on its own? The other thing that surprised me this year about the lab was the community space. When I first started the savvy social school, having the community space was key to all of this. And I kept getting more and more questions, more desire for it. And I wish I had a tool like Circle when I started. Something like that didn't exist at the time.

Andréa Jones [00:16:26]:
And even as things were starting to develop, you know, we have apps like Mighty Networks, we have apps like School now. And so school didn't exist back when I started this, otherwise I probably would have used that tool. Right? And so When I think about the evolution of all of this and where things are going, I realized I needed to make a change, and the community element actually became less important over time. And I want to test y' all on this too, because the definition of community is changing. And this is one of my predictions. I'll talk about in the predictions episode, but I'll touch on it here as well. Because community to me is not a space, it is a feeling. Community is not a physical space.

Andréa Jones [00:17:11]:
It is a feeling. And what I've noticed about my community is y' all want it easy, okay? Simple, easy. Don't force me to go one place to get a solution. I want to already go where I'm at, okay? And so one of the things I was noticing is my community members would DM me on Instagram. They would reply to emails, they would send me voice notes on LinkedIn, like, wherever y' all are, that's where you'll contact me. And I was trying to force everyone to use Circle. Please only contact me through Circle because that's the tool that I'm paying for. And I'm like, well, what if.

Andréa Jones [00:17:43]:
What if my community was a feeling, not a space? And what if I allowed my community members to contact me in whatever method is easiest for them? And then I had another lesson and light bulb moment where I was like, my community, we can meet anywhere and we feel like we're in community with each other. It's not the space that makes the community, yes. Can add to the atmosphere and the vibe of all of it. But when I look at the. The content that's in the community space, it is not being utilized to its full potential. And when I try to bring engagement up, I post all these things, I tag people, I try to bring you in, I'm adding more work to your plate that's already full. And you're like, andrea, please, I don't want to be in the community because I don't have time for this. Right? And so I thought, what if I made this entire experience easier? If you have a question, message me wherever you are and I'll answer that question.

Andréa Jones [00:18:32]:
If I can't answer it there, then you're either in my membership and we can talk about it there, or you can pay for a one on one with me and we could talk about it there. Like, wherever you are, I'll meet you there. Right? And that was a turning point for me as well. So what I'm doing, this next phase of my work is all about creating simpler, smarter marketing for busy people. I've teased a little bit about what this is and I'll talk about this more in this four part series, but my vision is really to make it easier for you. I've been talking a lot with my business coach, the amazing Becky Mallenkamp, and one of the things that has come up in my coaching process is that price really matters to me and it's something that I want to stand behind ethically and also energetically. There are certain things like courses and DIY products that I want to price as a course or a DIY product and I'm not the type of person to try to overcharge for that. I still struggle with this to this day.

Andréa Jones [00:19:38]:
I'm not perfect by any means, but I'd rather charge the larger businesses to sponsor something to give it to y' all for free. So that's kind of my goal going forward is how can I get a larger company, like say, Canva, for instance, to sponsor a workshop that I teach to you for free, so you get the information for free and then I charge Canva and it's a win win because they now get more users into their platform using it more efficiently. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about as far as content creation goes. My membership. I'm launching a new product. It's not a membership. I'm launching a new product. On Black Friday called your marketing shortcut.

Andréa Jones [00:20:20]:
You're hearing it here first. You'll get the link to the waitlist with this, this video and this podcast episode. But my focus is to bring you the marketing that you need here now and today. You don't need the whole course. You need to know what you need to focus on right now. And this comes from talking with a lot of you. Going through the course feels like work. And you're like, andrea, can you just send me what I need to do today? And I'm like, yeah, I can definitely do that.

Andréa Jones [00:20:45]:
And so that's what your marketing shortcut is. And the difference between what the mindful Marketing lab is and what this next chapter is is that I'm no longer trying to force you to go through and learn every single thing you need to know about the platform before starting to use it. Instead, I want to give you something that you can use in your business here, now and today. I still consider myself platform agnostic, but I have noticed trends over time about what platforms you're interested in. And so I may lean more heavily on one or the other, depending on where y' all are at. But my focus is no longer, you know, here's the entire Instagram course. It's like, oh, Instagram made an update. Here's what you need to know about it today, and here's how you can change it.

Andréa Jones [00:21:29]:
And here, here's a tool that will actually help you do that. Here's the template. Here's the swipe file. Here's a resource that you can actually use. Okay, so I'm inviting you to join me in this next series, this next episode. In the next episode, I'm going to be breaking down how I'm adopting this into my own strategy for 2026. To me, it's not about doing more, it's about doing less, a better. And so I'm really excited to share what that looks like for me in my business.

Andréa Jones [00:21:58]:
But I want to ask you this. What if? That's what I'm going to leave you with in this episode. Ask yourself, what if? What would it look like for things to end? What would it look like for things to change? What would it look like if you actually gave your customer and clients what they need? What is on the other side of this change? I'll see you in the next episode where I'll talk more about what that looks like for me in 2026. And yes, I'll be talking more about my new job at an agency as well. Stay tuned for that. I'll see you then. Bye for now.