Building The Creator Kitchen's Membership With Jay Acunzo

Back in the Fall of ‘22, just around the time that the edges of the maple tree leaves in Boston turn a burnt orange, I stumbled across a Twitter post from Jay Acunzo mentioning that he was starting to look for membership software.

Being the composed, unflappable entrepreneur that I am I immediately started begging.

As a career marketer myself, Jay is on the short list of marketers whose work I admire most. His mantra of “resonance over reach” has forever been one of my core beliefs as a marketer. He represented, in short, a dream customer—this was not the time to play it cool!

Over the course of the next two years I had a front row seat to watch Jay launch and run his membership site, The Creator Kitchen. The site scaled to over six-figures in revenue very quickly, and Jay and his Co-founder Melanie’s execution in the Kitchen was simply a step above what I’d seen from most other memberships.

To start 2025, Jay and Melanie made the tough choice to close their small but beloved membership. The two friends and professional speakers had launched the project to claw back from the pandemic decimating their income, while also looking for ways to earn from home, as both are parents to young kids. Today, Jay's work consulting entrepreneurs on their messaging and speaking and Melanie's work building branded frameworks for her clients have overtaken the Kitchen, and Jay explains their decision to close the membership here.

So while the Kitchen may no longer be serving hot meals, I had to jump on the opportunity to have Jay share his lessons learned with you. If you’re building a membership, read on!

Meet the Creator Kitchen

The Creator Kitchen launched in January 2023 and ran for two years. The site was very much a “premium” membership offering—while Jay and Mel experimented with a variety of price points, they settled on a standard membership of $999/year or a VIP membership operated as part of an 8-member group for $10,000 annually. At its peak, there were about 70 members in the Kitchen.

The promise to members was simple; Melanie and Jay would help members evolve from experts sharing advice-focused content into leading public voices and storytellers in their respective fields.

“Turn your experience into IP” was a mantra—and “commodity work” was a named common enemy.

The Kitchen was born. 

What follows are the questions I posed to Jay and his responses—based on his experience building and running the Creator Kitchen over the course of the last two years.

Creator Kitchen was not purely a content-focused membership site, nor purely a community. How did you think about the format in which you’d deliver value to your members?

Our goal remained the same throughout—find a way to teach “personal, transferable creative skills.” Most groups don’t focus on the essence of the work in this field of thought leadership or business storytelling. They focus on hacks for one channel, or narrowly on one medium (e.g. podcasting). We emphasized the skills that made you superpowered everywhere, like developing differentiated messaging, public speaking, personal storytelling, and turning your ideas into frameworks. 

That’s already a pretty heady concept, so to help focus people, we decided to first create what we called “menus” (micro-sites inside our member portal containing masterclasses, templates, and tutorials grouped by skill) and asked members to focus on that skill for a time in their work. 

We then saw how some members got stressed about falling behind or keeping up, while others had other things they wanted to focus on given their business goals, so menus took a back seat (we still rolled them out, but repositioned them less as a shared focus area and more as an ever-growing library of resources). Instead, we shifted to be more coaching-forward, with rotating weekly calls (roundtables and office hours), and with an understanding that we’d point members to various things found in menus given what we discussed so they could get to work on the things that mattered most to them and their businesses.

Creator Kitchen was more of a premium membership offering and you experimented with pricing ranging from $499/quarter to $10,000 annually. What did you learn about pricing through this experience?

I’ve always known pricing is part of your marketing. It sends a signal to others and attracts the right types of people or the wrong ones. Melanie and I wanted to attract people with some traction and lots of experience shipping content, but who also had a creeping feeling that the old approaches weren’t working anymore. 

As with lots of things I’ve sold, we underpriced things to start because of stress and uncertainty and lack of data. 

We then found we had two distinct groups of people: some who needed direction and blueprints to get started and some who were way beyond that and needed to see how elite peers of theirs were doing things. So we adjusted our tiering and offering and had two divergent price points:

• A “Standard” membership of $999/year that gave members access all menus and one weekly call. 
• A “VIP Group” membership of $10,000/year where we brought together 8 elite, established people in a truer mastermind format. 

One major lesson? Changing pricing is way harder when it’s a subscription product than I’m used to with other offerings like 1:1 coaching or bootcamps, where you can merely change the next time out. The subscription component and the idea that you access the right level of value behind the paywall in a membership creates a domino effect of how you can or can’t implement new pricing in a membership. 

How did you think about whether your membership was “delivering” for your members?

For our Standard membership it really turned into changing their perspectives and delivering more confidence. Members thought they were getting a community of peers and a collection of lessons and techniques, and to some degree, they did. They also thought they were getting access to Melanie and to me, and again, they did. But most of my and Melanie’s work as authors and speakers showed us what we saw unfolding again with Standard members: mostly, people just need to trust themselves more, especially when it comes to sharing your ideas publicly. 

For our VIP members—especially the second iteration (the $10,000/year tier)—we were able to bring together a rare density of established, kind, and creative entrepreneurs. It was more about putting the right people in a room together and offering a forum, not a program. This tier will persist in a new iteration with the same eight members. It’s working well for all involved, and it’s much more in-line with where Melanie and my businesses are going. 

You said something to me in one of our first calls that I’ll always remember, akin to “Honestly the decision to use Outseta (or any other software tool) was the absolute last thing I thought about as I was considering the launch of CK—I knew the correct tooling was out there, it was everything else that I had to get right.” Can you speak to this further?

People have trouble focusing on the actual value-drivers or the “essence” of things in the business world. It’s similar to my work coaching entrepreneurs on their messaging and public speaking. They leap to tactical execution, like creating content, when they lack an actual premise to differentiate and strengthen the impact of all they do. So partly, first principles get lost underneath conventional wisdom and the stress of the daily grind. 

That just gets worse thanks to social media. You get “shoulded” to death, or you watch trends unfolding and decide you have to follow suit. I’d seen this movie so many times as a marketer working in-house for brands as big as Google, as obsessed with content as HubSpot, and as tiny as a 12-person startup; mostly, the trendy stuff and the tools you use get in the way more than they help you, unless you are totally clear on what you are building and how (and even then). 

So I wanted to make sure that the decision to use Outseta or a similar platform was the last thing I chose, basing it not on what was being offered by the company or what others were trying to do, but on the transformation I wanted for members, the way I wanted to price and deliver the product, and the way I do or don’t want tools I use to feel. 

Almost every technology I’ve ever used just gets in my way. I wanted a tool that felt like a supersuit to mold around me so I could keep flying but make it more effortless, and not this big clunky ship I’d need to learn to operate and fly. In short, I wanted to get good at running my membership, not get good at using a tool. Those are simply not the same things.

I am fascinated by the importance of rituals within communities and memberships. Was there anything that you did routinely within CK that became a hallmark or membership or proved particularly valuable?

The name Creator Kitchen meant we had tons of bad puns and metaphors involving culinary terms. People took to those (it helps that Mel and I are kinda cheesy and love it). We called our members Chefs. We called our resources library The Pantry. Our microsites of assets based on skillset were called Menus. We had guest speakers but we called them Guest Chefs. Tip of the iceberg there, my friend. (Or should I say: tip of the knife?)

As you set out to build CK, how did you think about “stacking the cards in your favor” in terms of running your membership in a way that you would most enjoy? What did you do to align the work with your preferences? 

This was our biggest miss on programming but biggest win on member values. In terms of the programming, I knew I didn’t want a community forum because I’m more of a teacher and coach and speaker than I am a community manager, but you feel pressured to respond to member requests or what you suspect they need. 

We also didn’t do a good enough job of identifying energy-draining interactions with members. For example, I found myself repeating myself a lot to answer common questions, but never really focused on pinpointing what specifically I was repeating, so we didn’t create a means to point people towards other resources versus the highest-value, most expensive part of the Kitchen: Mel and my time.

But in terms of member values, we attracted people who fully buy into Mel and my belief system and the way we show up. We attracted zero a-holes, but more than that, people felt safe enough to be vulnerable, cared deeply enough about craft and quality to reject the grimy internet growth tactics Mel and I so dislike, and much more. We joked: “the vibes are immaculate.” 

In retrospect, what were the aspects of running a membership that you didn’t enjoy… or found to be unexpectedly time-consuming, tedious, etc. Is there anything that you think you could have done to better solve for this?

A membership is a product you develop, deliver, and promote all at the same time. I realize now how hard that is, and for me at least, how draining. Launching urgency campaigns like discounts or other levers to attract members, or closing/opening enrollment, making feature adjustments, scheduling programming, connecting members to each other and ensuring a good experience, educating them directly 1:few or 1:all, setting up automations and ensuring nothing breaks… it’s a lot! 

To say nothing of the fact that this membership was always only a small number of weekly hours for Mel and I, and a small percent of our annual incomes. Running a membership reminds me of being a parent to my two small kids: there’s no ONE thing that feels alarmingly hard, it’s just that your base-level of stress and cognitive load goes up. That becomes the new norm. No breaks, no out. 

At the end of the day you have what many creators are hoping for—a six-plus figure membership, working with a Co-founder you love, people you enjoy—yet you decided to shut CK down. Explain that decision, and maybe what other creators that are considering launching their own membership can learn from it.

I shared a really long essay of sorts about this to members, as well as took questions, and also shot a couple videos, so I’ve done the right thing to make it totally transparent to the right folks. 

Publicly, I’ll say this: Mel and I adored working together, but the membership was born out of a dire need for both of us to figure out our businesses in a post-pandemic world. Before the pandemic, we were both road warriors to earn a living as paid speakers. We both do some of that, but given the changes and growth of our families, plus the traction we’ve each seen selling other things that feel more sustainable and lucrative, we had to look reality in the eye and decide we could keep a membership going at an OK level we weren’t thrilled about yet, or we could do the right thing for our businesses and our members and shut it down. 

Nobody wants to go to that restaurant that used to be special but the owners took their eye off it for other things. Those places are just sad. We wanted to end on a high note.

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The Creator Kitchen site was built with Squarespace, Outseta, and Wistia.

Jay's focusing on his work as a Speaking and Messaging Coach—you can subscribe to his personal newsletter on his website or find him on BlueSky or Linkedin.