Jun TeoCommunity Manager · retainer consultingSingaporeGrowing Team·5d ago65
Runs a paid member community for a professional association. Around 400 people in it, maybe 25 pay for anything else we sell. The rest treat it like a free help desk — they ask, they get answers, they disappear.
I've stopped posting as much myself, because every time I do I feel like I'm the one doing free consulting. My team has started resenting it too, which I don't love hearing at standups.
Do I put the community behind the paid wall and lose most of it, or is there something in between? I genuinely don't know if I'm running a community or a lead magnet someone forgot to close.
CONTEXT AT PUBLICATION
What a useful answer should help achieve
A decision they can act on this quarter about whether to gate the community or keep it open, and what that does to revenue.
Already tried
Pulled back their own posting and asked the team to do the same.
Constraints and unknowns
Small team, no marketing budget, association board that sees the open community as a membership benefit.
Community Manager · retainer consulting · Growing Team · This snapshot stays with the question when the author updates their profile.
I'd try a middle tier before I touched the free one — paid members get a monthly call or direct answers from you, free keeps the feed. Ran that for a quarter and about 4% of free upgraded. Not huge, but it tells you who was already willing. If that number is near zero, then yes, gate it.
Why the asker chose this: This is the one I am acting on — thank you.
Before you gate it — track who actually shows up paid vs free in your calls for two months. I did that and the free tier was producing about a third of my paid signups. Gating would have killed the top of my funnel. Your numbers may differ but it's cheap to find out.
Gate it. Anyone who wants free answers will always find them free, and you'll stop resenting your own members. That resentment is worse for the community than the churn.
Two things worth separating here. First, who is doing the answering — if your team is, that's a cost you can measure, and it belongs in the paid offer or you cap it. Second, an association community usually has members whose employer already pays, so a wall can be a one-line change rather than a business model change. I'd look at what your board actually needs from the open group: is it retention or is it new-member awareness? Those point in different directions and you can probably only do one. We tested capping help to two questions a month per member and the complaining was loud for three weeks, then it stopped.
