We're Shutting Down Our Membership (Here's What's Next)
The payless movement is shutting down its membership on external platforms and launching a custom-built all-in-one productivity application called My ICore. The new platform integrates community features, courses, tool databases, and learning resources into a unified experience with powerful cross-linking capabilities between discussions, articles, videos, and tools.
Summary
After six years of operating memberships across various platforms (Body Boss, Discourse, Circle, and most recently Mighty Networks), the payless movement founders have made the strategic decision to build their own proprietary application. While members were satisfied with the content and course progression on previous platforms, the founders envisioned a more integrated solution that couldn't be achieved on existing platforms.
The new My ICore application features a hybrid community platform that combines social media elements with membership community functionality. The core innovation is a smart mention system that allows users to reference tools, concepts, and workflows from the ICore methodology. When users mention items in posts, the system automatically extracts and displays relevant icons and creates interconnected discussion threads across multiple contexts.
The platform demonstrates sophisticated interconnectedness: posts shared in the community feed automatically distribute to relevant tool pages and concept discussions. Comments made on articles or videos also surface on the main feed. Users can highlight content in articles and videos with synchronized transcripts, creating discussion threads tied to specific timestamps. The system integrates with Readwise for highlighting synchronization and features Golden Nuggets—curated insights from founders and community members.
Personalization is achieved through tool stack filtering, allowing users to see only posts relevant to their specific tools. Member profiles display tool stacks, discussion history, and allow for direct engagement. The platform includes a searchable database of 500+ productivity tools contributed by the community, filterable by job titles and use cases. During the silent alpha launch, 400 members migrated with 511 tools shared. The app offers free access to the ICore starter kit and framework, with paid tiers unlocking full community and course access, except for Inner Circle coaching with the founders.
Key Insights
- The founders decided to abandon established membership platforms like Mighty Networks—despite member satisfaction and solid platform capabilities—because their larger vision for integrated productivity features couldn't be achieved without building custom infrastructure.
- The new platform's core competitive advantage is a hybrid social-membership model where mentioning tools or concepts in posts automatically distributes that content across multiple contextual locations (tool pages, concept pages, community feed) simultaneously, creating what the speaker calls the power of serendipity.
- The system enables deep content interconnection across articles, videos, and discussions through synchronized transcripts and highlighted content—allowing users to jump between a video timestamp, discussion thread, and Readwise highlights all pointing to the same reference.
- During the silent alpha launch, 400 community members have already migrated and contributed 511 unique tools to the platform's database, demonstrating adoption of the custom platform before the public announcement.
- The speaker frames this consolidation as solving a critical UX problem: replacing the back-and-forth of multiple platforms with a single, fully-integrated solution where all productivity tools, courses, discussions, and community features exist in one application.
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] This is a pivotal moment not only for us but especially for all our members and followers out there who want to become more productive. We are shutting down our membership. But when one door closes, another one opens. And this one will lead to the ultimate productivity suite out there. This is a bold statement. It will be the all-in-one solution. It is already the all-in-one solution. In fact, as I will show to you now. But before we dive into it, just a bit more context about what I'm talking here about. All right. 6 years ago in [0:31] 2019, we launched the first membership of the payless movement. And ever since we had thousands of members…
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