How I’d Build a $7M Membership From Scratch in 2025 (No Audience)

In this comprehensive guide, I’m walking you through the exact step-by-step checklist I would follow if I were starting a membership from scratch in 2025 with no audience and zero assets. As someone who has generated over 33,000 paid subscribers and over $7 million in sales with low-ticket online memberships and communities, I’m sharing the precise framework that actually works.

This isn’t hypothetical theory—I actually went through every single step myself to show you how I do it rather than just tell you about it. In my video, I break down the entire process from making your first directional decision all the way through to scaling with paid advertising.

Making Your Northstar Decision

The first critical step is what I call making a directional decision. So many people get stuck because they think they have to get everything perfect from the beginning. What I’ve learned over time is that with memberships and online communities, you just need to make a Northstar decision and start walking in that direction. Only when you start moving will you see the obstacles in your path and gather the data you need to course-correct.

When you become a membership owner the way I teach it, you’re essentially monetizing your personal growth journey. This means picking a desirable transformation that’s valued in the market—one that a lot of people want to achieve. But here’s the crucial part: you need to pick a transformation that you personally love and resonate with deeply. You’ll be spending so much time becoming this person and helping others become it too, so if your heart isn’t in it, you won’t be able to sustain it in the low-ticket world.

In my video, I reveal something quite intimate: if I had to start over today, I’m not sure I would choose business coaching again. While I love what I do and have thousands of members, I feel there’s more I want to add to my life. For this demonstration, I chose to focus on a mixture of spirituality and health—specifically what I’m calling “the middle,” which encompasses physical core strength, gut health, mental clarity, and consciousness work for women over 35.

Collecting Your Vision Elements

Once you have your directional decision, you need to start collecting pieces that feel important. I created a visual canvas where I gathered all the content, concepts, and ideas that resonated with my Northstar. This included things like Michael Singer’s work on consciousness, the concept of relaxing into discomfort, mental and physical minimalism, and the connection between gut health and the mind.

This process is like creating a vision board for your transformation. You’re bringing together all your unique experiences and thoughts based on what feels meaningful to you. Don’t worry about it making complete sense initially—just get everything out of your head and onto a canvas where you can revisit and refine it. This should grow over time as you discover new connections and insights.

Recording Your Transformational Hypothesis

After creating your visual mind map, the next step is to record yourself explaining it. I recommend keeping these recordings to 10-minute chunks maximum because we’ll be processing them with AI later. In my recording, I walked through each element on my canvas, explaining why I included it and what connections I was seeing.

Something magical happens during this process: you start to see the common thread. For me, I had an epiphany that everything connected back to “the middle”—it became the frame for consciousness, mind, and body. This pattern recognition is what you’re looking for, and you’ll only find it by gathering enough data and processing it deeply. I do this so often for clients that I can spot patterns quickly, but when you’re starting out, you just need to give yourself time to let the pattern emerge.

Crafting Your Before and After Transformation

Once the pattern emerges, you take your big vision recording to your favorite AI tool (I switch between ChatGPT and Claude depending on which is performing better). I used a specific prompt: “This is the big vision for my new coaching brand. I want to start with a program called [name]. Please define my before and after and suggest three different ways to bridge the before and after with modules.”

The AI gave me a comprehensive before and after that captured the stuck middle (physical tension, mental rigidity, emotional overwhelm) versus the aligned middle (physical balance, mental agility, emotional liberation). It then suggested a curriculum structured as a three-phase journey: Reset the Middle, Strengthen and Reclaim, and Deliberate and Integrate. This isn’t the final curriculum—it’s just a first hypothesis I can start refining based on my actual transformation and the results I get helping others.

Creating Your Personal Transformation Tracker

Here’s where it gets practical. I asked the AI to generate a full daily tracker I could follow for 30 days to make this shift happen for myself. The tracker included daily actions like morning vacuum breathwork, mindful meal selection, hydration checks, core strengthening, and journaling prompts. I then adapted this to fit my existing routines while incorporating the new elements I wanted to test.

This is crucial: you have to walk the talk first. Set an ambitious goal and go for it. Your work over these 30 days is to stay on task, document everything, research why these practices work, and continuously refine your hypothesis. I also requested a study and knowledge work plan outlining key areas I need to research further to develop a comprehensive proprietary body of knowledge.

Drafting Your Offer Page

Before building an audience, you need to draft your offer using what I call my sales page first method. I have an ultimate sales page creation prompt that includes specific sections: a clear audience call-out, bold promise, summary of what they get, five pain points, five benefits, my solution discovery story, a bulleted summary, and FAQs.

The sales page I created for “Middle Mastery” isn’t perfect—it’s a first hypothesis. My task over the next 30 days as I walk through my transformation is to keep coming back to this page and refining it. Who am I really talking to? What’s the bold promise? What are the aha moments I’m having? This is how you write a truly effective sales page—it’s weeks and then years worth of refinement work as you gain transformation intelligence.

Building Your List with a Strategic Freebie

Now that you have your first hypothesis, you need a list builder—a strategic freebie that will filter the right people and funnel them to where you can reach them. I asked the AI: “What mini journal can I use to kick off my personal journey? Give me 10 prompts.” It created “The Middle Awareness Journal” with prompts like “Where do I feel most tension in my body?” and “What’s my default response to stress?”

I would then prototype this journal myself, refine the prompts based on what actually works, and create a video walkthrough explaining why each question is included and what came up for me. This becomes your first free resource to grow an aligned audience. You can access my full checklist to see exactly how I structure this.

Running Facebook Lead Generation Campaigns

For me, the best approach is email marketing combined with Facebook lead generation campaigns to build your list. This is what I did in 2020 and what I’ve helped so many people with. The campaign objective sends you people who are already leads—meaning they’re in market for what you offer—and your strategic freebie filters for your specific transformation.

In your ads manager, you create a leads campaign, target your desired countries (I recommend tier one countries), select women 35+ if that’s your audience, and set up instant forms. You’ll need to set up a MailerLite account first to handle your email delivery automation. When someone subscribes, they automatically receive an email with your journal and a link to your video walkthrough on YouTube.

Nurturing Your List with Daily Content

Once you’re building your list, you need to communicate with that audience. I use my daily Loom recordings debriefing my day and capturing what I’ve learned to create nurture emails. My prompt is: “I want to write a highly valuable insightful nurture email for my newsletter subscribers. Please use my tone of voice and turn this brain dump into an email including key takeaways, action steps, and a moral positioned at the end.”

In the beginning, I would send these emails daily to create connection. I also use these emails as a basis for YouTube content—not perfectly edited initially, just getting the information out there. The same content goes on Facebook and Instagram. I would literally screenshot sections from my email and post them as carousel images. Don’t overcomplicate it in the early stages—just make sure people keep seeing your face and your message everywhere.

Getting Your First Clients Through Free Themed Calls

As interest starts building, I would make invitations to work with me using free themed calls. This is exactly how I built up my initial coaching client base. I would offer free sessions like “Need help analyzing your current approach? Jump on a call with me.” I’d post these invitations in my emails, on Facebook, and in Instagram stories.

These sessions serve multiple purposes: you help people, you tune into the exact language they use to describe their problems, you collect testimonials, and often people ask how they can continue working with you. This is how you get your first paid clients, but more importantly, this is how you rapidly understand your audience and refine your messaging. Nothing accelerates your transformation intelligence like helping someone one-to-one on an actual call.

Launching Your Beta Program

Once you see things start to simmer—audience building up, people reaching out, you’re doing daily work with people—that’s when you make a beta program. At this point, your offer page is refined enough to send to your email list. I would price it at what I eventually want my monthly membership to be (like $22/month), but offer it as a one-time payment for founding members.

I would set this up on Skool using the 14-day free trial to validate the concept. I’d build out the classroom with my refined modules and deliver with a three-part structure: training sessions where I present content, co-working or coaching sessions on Zoom, and Q&A sessions. This way I’m creating my content live with people, getting real-time feedback, and building out my community organically.

Scaling with Paid Ads

While running the beta program, I’d continue my personal transformation tracker and keep reporting on the work I’m doing and the results participants are getting. Once I’ve delivered all the core content lessons, I’d switch to an ongoing community model with monthly pricing. I’d do one big promotional launch to my list featuring all the proof and testimonials I’ve collected, offering a discounted founding members rate.

Throughout this time, with my conversion API integration set up, I’m collecting purchase data. After the founding members launch, I’d test running trial campaigns directly to the community, then experiment with direct-to-paid ads. Long-term, the most profitable approach is switching to a waitlist model with an almost-evergreen workshop, which I detail in other videos on my channel. This gets you the same number of members for a fourth of the ad spend while building a much larger email list for future scaling.

If you want to build your own community, you can start on Skool or join my existing community at Grow with Evelyn to see exactly how I structure everything. This is the precise plan I would follow to create, grow, and scale a paid membership and community in 2025.