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To grow a membership site, publish on a fixed schedule for years to build organic traffic, funnel that traffic into webinars, and treat the membership as a product that changes every month rather than a course you build once. Thanh Pham used that approach to grow Asian Efficiency into a seven-figure business with 12 employees.
Thanh runs asianefficiency.com, where he teaches productivity, and he has been featured in Fast Company, Inc., Forbes, Huffington Post, and the Globe and Mail. He joined me on the podcast to break down the business behind the site and then share his actual productivity tactics.
Below are his membership pricing tests, his churn numbers, the surprising role his podcast plays in retention, and the productivity system he teaches clients.
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Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- Asian Efficiency has published a blog post every Tuesday for eight straight years without missing one, and organic search is still its primary traffic source.
- The membership is $49 a month or $350 a year. Thanh tested $29, $39, $69, $99, and $150, and $49 was the ceiling before signups dropped noticeably.
- Average member lifetime is about seven months, which is why the annual price sits at $350.
- The blog generates leads and the podcast retains members. Churn dropped after launching the podcast, because members subconsciously associate the show with membership.
- The email sequence that funnels people into the membership runs for eight months, with a webinar as the primary conversion event.
- Live webinars convert around 10%, evergreen webinars convert 3% to 5%, and Thanh runs both.
- Thanh spends roughly five hours a week talking directly to prospects and customers, which is where his product and content ideas come from.
- His top productivity tip is to tackle your hardest task first thing in the morning.
How Thanh Pham started Asian Efficiency
Thanh started Asian Efficiency in 2011 as a passion project while he was drowning at his first job. He was weeks behind, losing clients, overwhelmed, and had gained about 25 pounds from stress.
His response was to read books and attend seminars, then document everything he learned. Over one year he read 35 books, listened to 21 audiobooks, and lost the 25 pounds he had gained.
People kept asking how he did it, so he started publishing what he had learned. The site began as a joke about Asian efficiency and became a full-time business.
He now works about 30 to 35 hours a week, down from 60 to 70 a few years ago. His framing is that optimizing for happiness beats optimizing for more money once the money is sufficient.
Where Asian Efficiency gets its traffic
Organic search is Asian Efficiency’s main traffic source, built by publishing every single Tuesday since 2011 without ever missing a week. Eight years of weekly publishing compounded into enough search traffic to carry the business.
Facebook ads were added two to three years ago as a supplement. Thanh sets a fixed monthly budget and runs lookalike audiences built from his customer list, purely to get new people onto the site.
The ad strategy is deliberately simple. Publish a piece of content he is proud of, put ad money behind it to reach new people, then retarget the resulting traffic toward a webinar or a lead magnet.
How Thanh measures whether a Facebook ad is working
Thanh judges an ad by organic shares, not by cost per click. When people share an ad without being asked, he knows the content is resonating.
His rough threshold is 10 or more shares, which signals an ad worth putting more budget behind. If nobody shares it, the ad is probably not that good.
The upside of a shared ad is that it stops being limited by your budget. Facebook distribution takes over and the piece takes on a life of its own.
How Asian Efficiency chooses what to publish
Thanh’s content planning starts with customer problems and finds keywords afterward. He runs a quarterly publishing calendar so he knows in advance which podcast and blog post go out each week.
He targets only five or six keywords deliberately, with specific landing pages built to rank for them. Everything else is written to solve problems he has heard about directly.
His input comes from spending about five hours a week in his private community and reviewing customer service tickets. Once a topic emerges from those conversations, he looks for keywords to match it.
Why Asian Efficiency uses a private forum instead of a Facebook group
Asian Efficiency runs its community on a private forum rather than Facebook because its audience actively dislikes Facebook. Members joined a productivity site specifically to spend less time in feeds.
They started on Facebook and members asked to move off it. The audience also skews organized, so they value search and the ability to revive old threads.
The forum runs on Invision boards and has been in place for four years.
Asian Efficiency membership pricing and what Thanh tested
Asian Efficiency charges $49 a month or $350 a year for its members area, and Thanh landed on that price after testing $29, $39, $69, $99, and $150. He found no meaningful difference in signups between $39 and $49, and above $49 conversion got noticeably harder.
| Price tested | Result |
|---|---|
| $29/month | Original launch price four years ago |
| $39/month | No measurable difference from $49 |
| $49/month | Current price, the sweet spot |
| $69, $99, $150/month | Significantly harder to convert |
The annual price of $350 is set against an average member lifetime of about seven months. At $49 a month, seven months is roughly $343, so the annual plan captures the same value up front.
Thanh’s warning about price testing is that the feedback loop is brutally slow. A cheaper price might convert better and churn worse, and you will not know until eight, nine, or twelve months later.
His advice is to start testing sooner than you think you need to, because of that waiting game.
The rest of the Asian Efficiency product line
Beyond the membership, Asian Efficiency sells about seven courses ranging from $50 to $1,000. The $1,000 tier is high touch and includes coaching sessions where a coach walks you through the program and holds you accountable.
The lower-priced courses are self-paced and do-it-yourself. The company employs 12 people total: two coaches, one marketer, and four writers among them.
The membership is the product Thanh actually wants people to buy, because members get access to all the high-ticket courses. He calls it close to a no-brainer.
How Asian Efficiency’s webinar funnel converts members
Webinars are the primary conversion event for the membership, supported by an eight-month email sequence. People enter the funnel from the blog or from Facebook traffic, then get invited to a webinar.
Asian Efficiency runs two evergreen webinars and two live webinars per month. The evergreen ones cover permanently relevant topics, one on habits and one on focus, since those are what most people struggle with.
The live webinars pick a new topic each month, cover current industry news, and give members a reason to show up. Both types funnel toward the members area.
Live webinars vs evergreen webinars: which converts better
Live webinars convert roughly 10%, while evergreen webinars land somewhere between 3% and 5%. Thanh runs both because they solve different problems.
Live is more interactive and converts better, and it can only serve one time slot. Evergreen lets someone start a webinar 15 minutes after signing up, at whatever time works for them.
It took a lot of live webinars to eventually produce a good evergreen one. Thanh also notes that some people watch the same webinar two or three times before buying, which is fine with him.
His view is that even non-buyers who sit through a webinar got real value, and time spent watching moves them closer to eventually purchasing.
Why the email sequence runs for eight months
Asian Efficiency’s membership email campaign runs about eight months because that is how much useful content they have to give. Some people join immediately and others need months of nurturing.
Not every email pushes the webinar or the membership. Many simply deliver useful content while moving the reader incrementally closer to joining.
Thanh does not claim eight months is the correct length. It is the length of content they had.
Why a podcast is a retention tool for a membership site
Asian Efficiency’s podcast is a weak lead generator and a strong retention tool. Thanh describes a love-hate relationship with it, because conversion from a podcast offer is very low relative to download numbers.
The blog is by far the more effective way to generate leads. The podcast is what keeps existing members subscribed.
Asian Efficiency launched the members area before the podcast, and churn dropped after the show launched. Talking to members revealed why: most members are podcast listeners, and they subconsciously associate the show with being part of the community.
Thanh’s recommendation for anyone running a membership is to get as many members onto the podcast as possible. It is another channel for staying top of mind and keeping people engaged.
This tracks with my own experience. Students who sign up for my course consistently say they started trusting me once they began listening to the podcast, and there is no clean way to attribute that beyond asking.
Why Thanh spends five hours a week talking to customers
Thanh spends about five hours a week in direct conversation with prospects and customers because that is where every insight comes from. He is in the private forum, reviews support tickets, and monitors a private Slack.
Those conversations are the only reason he discovered the podcast-retention connection. Nothing in his analytics would have surfaced it.
He picked this up from Scaling Up workshops, which push CEOs to continuously talk to customers. Internet business owners tend to avoid exactly this.
Treating a membership site as an evolving product
A membership site is an evolving product, not an evergreen one. Thanh’s mistake early on was applying course thinking to it: build it once, then drive traffic.
Asian Efficiency runs two-week sprints on a scrum methodology. Each sprint includes the regular publishing work plus one or two improvements to the members area.
Those improvements come from forum feedback, member conversations, and bug reports collected by the customer success team. There is also a monthly live coaching session inside the membership covering a topic and industry news.
Thanh Pham’s top productivity tip: do the hardest task first
Thanh’s single most important productivity habit is to start each day with the task you are most likely to procrastinate on. Once the ugliest item is done, everything else on the list looks easy and you carry momentum through the day.
He borrows an analogy from John the Cavalier: climb a mountain every morning, then hang glide down for the rest of the day. Even if nothing else gets finished, the day was productive.
For a task too big to finish in one day, break it down until the daily piece is trivially startable. A book becomes a chapter a month, then a draft chapter a week, then 1,000 words or 50 minutes of writing a day.
Using a timer to beat procrastination
Setting a short timer is the most reliable way to start a task you are avoiding. Commit to 15, 25, or 30 minutes and give yourself explicit permission to stop when it goes off.
The permission to stop is what makes it work. Most people find that once the timer runs out they are in the groove and keep going anyway.
Thanh coaches the exact language: “I will just write for 15 minutes and that’s it.” You are negotiating with your own brain, and 15 minutes is an easy yes.
Removing friction to make good habits inevitable
Removing friction beats learning new productivity strategies. Thanh cleans his desk the night before a writing day so his future self can start immediately instead of clearing dishes and papers first.
He calls this the inevitability mindset: structure your environment so the thing you want to do is the path of least resistance. A gym in your building beats a gym 50 minutes away in traffic.
His own version is a pull-up bar between his bedroom and living room, where he does five pull-ups every time he passes. The quality of the pull-up does not matter, only that he keeps the commitment he made to himself.
I do the same thing with a pull-up bar outside the bathroom and by moving all my workout equipment into the garage. The point is removing the excuse.
How to manage your email inbox without losing the day
Check email in two or three fixed sessions of 30 minutes or less rather than leaving the client open all day. Two sessions puts you at one hour a day on email.
Most people have no system at all and simply assume everyone knows how to handle an inbox. Leaving email open next to you while recording a podcast or building course content guarantees distraction.
When the timer goes off, you stop and move on. Some weeks you will not clear everything, and Thanh treats that as normal rather than as failure.
His guideline is under an hour a day for most people, adjusted upward for customer service or sales roles. The thing to avoid is spending the entire day in the inbox.
What Thanh would do differently building Asian Efficiency again
Thanh would keep the weekly publishing consistency and start webinars far earlier. Showing up every single week, whether by podcast, blog, or webinar, is what he credits for the organic traffic that built the business.
Asian Efficiency did not start running webinars until around 2017, which he considers late. His four reasons for running them: people love them, they are the most effective selling format he has found, they generate email subscribers, and an evergreen version works as a salesperson running 24/7.
You can find Thanh at asianefficiency.com and on his podcast, The Productivity Show.
Frequently asked questions
How much should you charge for a membership site?
Thanh Pham tested $29, $39, $49, $69, $99, and $150 per month for Asian Efficiency and settled on $49, since signups dropped noticeably above that and $39 performed no better. The right number depends on your audience, and the only way to find it is testing.
What is a normal churn rate for a membership site?
Asian Efficiency’s average member stays about seven months. Thanh prices the annual plan at $350 specifically because it roughly matches that lifetime value at $49 a month.
How long should a membership site email funnel be?
Asian Efficiency’s runs eight months. Some subscribers join immediately, others take months, and Thanh’s view is that the length is determined by how much genuinely useful content you can send.
Do live webinars convert better than evergreen webinars?
Yes. Thanh sees around 10% conversion on live webinars versus 3% to 5% on evergreen ones, and he runs both because evergreen lets people attend at any time.
Should a membership site use a Facebook group or a private forum?
It depends on your audience. Asian Efficiency moved off Facebook to a private forum because its productivity-focused members actively wanted to avoid Facebook and valued forum search and thread history.
Does a podcast help a membership site?
For Asian Efficiency the podcast is a poor lead generator and an excellent retention tool. Churn dropped after the show launched, because members associate listening with being part of the community.
What is the best productivity tip for entrepreneurs?
Thanh Pham’s answer is to do the task you are most likely to procrastinate on first thing in the morning. Everything else on your list feels easy afterward, and the day counts as productive even if nothing else gets done.
How often should you check email?
Thanh recommends two or three sessions of 30 minutes or less per day, with your email client closed the rest of the time. Aim for under an hour a day total unless your role is customer service or sales.
