“If you’re going to charge a premium and tell people you’re a high-touch experience, your member experience needs to reflect that.”
Emily Claire Hughes · The 10K Email Club
Emily Claire Hughes was getting paid to sing, act and dance by the time she was 16. She did national tours, performed on military bases around the world with the USO show troupe, and sang on cruise ships, sometimes in German. Somewhere between ports she started a travel blog and realized she could write. She took whatever Upwork jobs would add a logo to her portfolio, then landed a copywriting job in Europe after her future boss told her she was the most unqualified person she’d interviewed. Emily worked her way up to marketing manager at a fashion rental company in Germany, where she watched email bring in more for what it cost than the company’s other channels. She went freelance, then built the 10K Email Club, a high-touch membership that helps female founders turn their newsletters into a six-figure marketing channel. The club is now on track for about $160K a year.
The challenge
The first version was called the Copy Club, at $1,000 a month. Emily launched it to her email list and nobody signed up. Most of her subscribers were just starting out, and the offer was built for people further along.
A few months later she relaunched as the 10K Email Club at $199 a month. One person joined. Emily messaged everyone she knew and handed out discounts until a second member came in, and an old friend in New York, a web designer, started sending clients her way.
“One person is not a club. I need another person.”
Members write their own emails. Each one maps out a week-by-week plan with Emily, drafts every newsletter herself, and Emily’s team of copywriters edits it in Google Docs. At $199 a month, with a one-on-one planning call and a newsletter to edit every week for every member, Emily wasn’t making money. More members just meant more hours. She went to $279, then to $449 after a group of women at a business retreat told her to raise her prices. When she hired her first editor, the margins were so thin that Emily caught herself trying to squeeze more work out of every paid hour, and saw that her pricing was the problem.
The club itself ran out of a Slack channel, a Notion page and a pile of Google Docs. At around ten members it had gotten messy, and Emily wanted to charge more. She didn’t think anyone would pay a premium for something that looked cobbled together.
Why she chose Heartbeat
Emily doesn’t go looking for new software. If someone shows her how a tool works, she’ll use it. Everyone she knew ran their community on Circle, so she looked there first and didn’t like how it looked. Her brand is feminine and fun, and to her, nothing about Circle was. Then a friend with her own community on Heartbeat suggested she try it, and Emily searched YouTube for someone comparing the two.
One video made up her mind. On Heartbeat, events can be opened to people who aren’t members. Emily gets a lot of her leads from workshops, so that settled the main question.
What the 10K Email Club runs on Heartbeat:
- Public workshops: open to non-members, so new leads show up in the same place the club lives
- The club calendar: every workshop and Q&A, added to members’ Google Calendars when they RSVP
- Chats and channels: the team works with members several days a week, so chat gets heavy use
- A workshop library: recordings sorted into folders, each with its own branded cover photo
- Pink: the whole space matches her brand
“Then I saw you could make it pink, and I was like, done.”
From $199 to about $1,500 a month
Moving to Heartbeat was the first step toward charging more. Emily also joined a business accelerator that had her price the club from what it actually costs to run: contractors, software, and the time each member takes. The answer was roughly triple what she’d been charging, about $1,500 a month.
She moved away from a $99 low-ticket version, too. It made a couple thousand dollars a month, but she had to hire someone to run it and the margins were bad, so she put everything into the premium club. The programming got smaller. Early on she built a new slide deck for a workshop every week, and it turned out members got more out of Q&As and the occasional strategic workshop.
Club revenue up more than 500% year over year
For about 18 months Emily kept doing big client work on the side, around 20 hours a week, including newsletters for The Female Quotient that go out to millions of subscribers. The contracts paid well. The club got whatever time was left over. So she shut down $10,000 a month of client work and told herself new members had to make up the difference.
When she checked Stripe at the end of the year, club revenue was up more than 500% on the year before. Her business as a whole only grew a little, since the client money was gone, but now all of it comes from the club. She has about 18 members, wants 25, and is on track for about $160K a year.
“This is a way higher salary than I ever had as a full-time employee.”
Weekly wins, and a channel that runs itself
Every Friday Emily posts in the Weekly Wins channel and asks each founder for one win from the week. Some Fridays she isn’t sure anyone will answer. She posts anyway, and often enough someone turns up with a milestone. One member had a launch that did five times better than any launch she’d run before. Another, who sells a physical product, finally had customers in all 50 states.
The other channel she loves is Asks, Gives and More, where members hunt for video editors and accountants and pass along people they’ve worked with. It keeps requests out of the main feed, and Emily doesn’t have to do anything to keep it going.
What she tells founders on the fence
Setting it all up was what made Emily nervous. She wanted the space to look professional and wasn’t sure she knew how to get it there. Heartbeat support heard from her a lot in the early days, and she got a real person every time. When she asked her assistant to clean up the workshop recordings, the result was good enough that Emily said she’d join the club herself. She didn’t need to have all the answers.
She also likes that Heartbeat doesn’t try to do everything. Her team still edits members’ emails in Google Docs, which is what Google Docs is for, and Heartbeat has the chats, channels, calendar and workshops.
On the days impostor syndrome shows up, she has proof to look at: a dashboard for every member with their email revenue, list growth, open rate and click rate, and a folder of screenshots on her phone she calls love notes. Her advice to anyone thinking about launching on Heartbeat is to go for it.
“With every person that joins the email club, that’s a female-founded business that suddenly has a rock-solid marketing plan.”
