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…
Full transcript available for MurmurCast members
Sign Up to AccessMore from ICOR with Tom | AI Productivity
I Made Opus and Fable Grade Each Other. Opus Admitted It Lost.
The creator demonstrates real-world AI applications in their productivity business using Claude Fable and Opus, showing how Fable excels at comprehensive analysis of complex systems while comparing its performance to Opus on specific tasks. The key finding is that Fable's holistic understanding justifies its higher cost for business-critical audits and optimizations.
Our AI invented the numbers. We caught it.
The hosts discuss the importance of double-checking AI outputs and validating information, emphasizing that this is not a new problem but rather a longstanding practice required with any information source. They explore how AI tools can be customized to individual workflows and contexts, arguing that understanding foundational methodology matters more than specific tools.
An AI Just Handed Me a Fake $67B Statistic
The speaker shares how an AI confidently generated a completely fabricated $67.4 billion statistic while researching AI hallucinations, then explains his systematic approach to combating AI misinformation: using dual independent search engines to cross-check answers and identify where hallucinations occur.
AI Is Quietly Taking Your Memory
AI companies are racing to own users' context and memory through integrated tools like Claude in Slack and ChatGPT's auto-memory features, creating a lock-in trap. The speaker argues users should own their context (expensive, irreplaceable) in local plain text files while renting the AI model (cheap, replaceable), and demonstrates his personal knowledge assistant system built on markdown files that work with any AI model.
My AI Team Now Has an Interface. All 12 Agents. Free.
Tom, creator of the iCola methodology, releases My PKA version 3 with a free interface (My PKA Cockpit) that provides 12 pre-built AI agents for productivity, note-taking, health tracking, document management, and task planning—all running locally in a folder structure accessible via Claude and a web interface.