From Two Failing Cohorts to One Thriving Circle Community
- Brianna Leever
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
This article contains affiliate links - when you purchase or subscribe, I earn a commission at no cost to you. Thanks for your support!
Client: Lori Pine, Executive Coach — The Connect
Project: Community Restructure + Platform Migration + Cohort Strategy Redesign
Platform: Circle (migrated from Kajabi)
Industry: Executive Coaching / Leadership Development
Outcomes:
Paid community for professional women consolidated from two cohorts into one cohesive experience
Platform migrated from Kajabi to Circle: 17 of 26 original members made the move
6 new members added post-migration; 23 active members and growing
Cohort cadence redesigned from 6-month blocks to trimester model (open every 4 months)
Outcome-based community design framework built to articulate real member transformation
Next cohort launched under the new structure
"I think clarity around outcomes was probably the biggest thing. It's not just this fluffy, squishy, 'oh, you're going to make some friends.' There's real value. And being able to articulate it was an important exercise for me." — Lori Pine, Executive Coach
When a Paid Community for Executive Women Fills Fast but Cracks Underneath
Lori Pine posted her community offer on a Tuesday in December.
By Thursday, 18 women had signed up.
Lori coaches corporate, ambitious professional women: the kind of women who already carry demanding schedules, high standards, and very little patience for anything that wastes their time. Her 1:1 coaching runs $9,000 for six months. Her VIP Days are $5,000.
The Connect was her first accessible offer: $197 a month, six-month minimum. A paid community for executive women who wanted what Lori offered but couldn't access it at her premium price points.
The women who came in were warm. They were ready. They trusted her.
And then January 1st arrived. Lori had structured the launch with a free December month, everyone together, finding their footing. Then based on when each woman had joined, they split. Group 1. Group 2.
On January 1st, someone said it out loud: "Wait, we don't all get to stay together?"
Group 1 found its rhythm. Group 2 didn’t. Lori was doing double the operational work to keep two parallel groups alive, one of which she described plainly as being on life support. She knew the structure wasn't right. She couldn't see the way out on her own.
So she posted in another community she'd joined specifically for support as a new community builder. Said she was figuring this out, asked if anyone had thoughts. Someone replied with four words: "You have to talk to Bri Leever."
And Lori reached out the next day.
Why Kajabi Was the Wrong Platform: Migration to a Circle Community
Before the structure could be fixed, the platform had to change. Lori had built The Connect inside Kajabi, where the rest of her business already lived. It seemed logical. But her members kept texting her to ask where the call links were. Getting into the space wasn't intuitive.
It didn't hold people the way a community needs to hold people.
Lori was already part of a couple of Circle-based communities herself. The contrast was immediate. She knew where to go. She knew what to do. It felt like belonging from the first login.
"With Kajabi, there was constantly an issue, whether it was user error or it just didn't feel welcoming. It didn't hold you in a space where you felt like, oh, I belong here and I'm safe and protected and a part of something. Whereas in Circle, I knew where I belonged. I knew what to do. It was very intuitive."
For a paid community designed for corporate executive women, who have zero tolerance for friction and very small windows of time, the platform cannot be something members have to figure out. It has to disappear. Kajabi didn't disappear. Circle does.
Lori made the decision to migrate. She still runs the rest of her business on Kajabi and pays for both. She described it simply: it's just an investment into having a community.
Restructuring a Paid Community Without Losing Members
When Lori came to Ember, she was managing two projects at once. A platform migration and a community restructure, with an existing member base she'd already made promises to. This meant managing the change for existing members while navigating a launch for new members in the next cohort.
As Bri said on one of their calls: that's not one hard thing. That's two hard things.
Here is how they worked through it.
Consolidating two cohorts into one:
The original split into two cohorts came from a genuine instinct and driving desire: Lori wanted to honor intimacy. She believed small groups were the only way to create the depth of connection her members needed.
What the strategy work revealed was that the split was working against her. It was diluting energy, doubling her workload, and creating a Group 2 that couldn’t build the momentum Group 1 had found.
The shift in thinking was this: intimacy isn't a headcount. It's a design choice.
"What you taught me is that there can still be intimacy, even in a greater number. It was important for me to be able to shift my thinking around that."
One group, designed intentionally for connection, would always outperform two groups where one was running on fumes.
Redesigning the cohort cadence
Lori had been running six-month cohort durations. Through the work with Ember, she moved to a trimester model: open enrollment every four months.
This gave her a more natural rhythm, a cleaner commitment for members, and more frequent opportunities to adjust based on what was working. The first cohort under the new structure launched in spring. Smaller, intentionally.
"Less is more in this go around because it allows me to still continue to figure out some things. That's a blessing."
Using Outcome-Based Community Design to Scale Intimacy in the Community
From the first call with Lori, one thing became clear: her dedication to fostering intimacy and real transformation for her members. This desire for intimacy is what led her to breaking the group into 2 smaller groups, but it backfired. Instead of creating more intimacy, each group felt like they were missing out on the connections in the other group, while Lori was doubling her efforts facilitating both groups.
We weren’t convinced the small groups were a bad design choice for The Connect until we started exploring her onboarding experience using outcome-based design. In this exercise, Bri asked Lori: “After being in this cohort, what should be different for your members?”
Bri challenged Lori to not use the word “connection” anywhere in the answer.
What emerged blew us away. We landed on 2 values/skills. After being in The Connect, members should see a noticeable shift in “expansion” and “contraction” in their lives and work.
Expansion: The skill of embracing growth and momentum. This is dreaming big and doing it boldly.
Contraction: The skill of befriending and doing the quiet shadow work that subconsciously guides your inner world.
We used Ember’s method to ground the entire community experience in these 2 outcomes in a way that is both concrete and quantifiable and leaves space for the nuanced transformation that connection-centric spaces foster.
It wasn’t until we mapped these 2 outcomes that we realized intimacy was never tied to her cohort group size, it would be facilitated by orbiting the community around these 2 outcomes: expansion and contraction.
I have a lot more to say about the outcome-based community design we’ve been using here at Ember and how you can implement this method in your community for profound results. Make sure you’re signed up for the Ember Newsletter so you don’t miss it.
The Speed Was the Challenge
One thing Lori named clearly in her exit interview that belongs in this case study: it went fast. Really fast.
Their timeline was condensed. Five sessions to navigate a platform migration, a cohort restructure, a new launch, and the high-level strategy underneath all of it. There were moments mid-project where Lori caught herself wondering: am I making the right choices? Am I being thoughtful enough about what this means for the next two to three years, not just the next launch?
"There were times because it went so fast, I was questioning myself. Am I making the right choices? Am I being the most thoughtful with my investment into you and your services?"
Because Lori needed to make the changes so quickly, it was even more critical that she have a partner to help watch her blind spots, ask the right questions early, and avoid getting bogged down in unnecessary details.
One of the tools Ember provides that made it possible to move so quickly was the Dear Bri podcast to fill in the gaps between sessions. With five calls and a lot of ground to cover, the episodes served as an extension of the strategy work. Lori told us she went back and listened to certain ones two or three times.
Results: What Changed for Lori's Paid Community for Executive Women
The community is still in motion. The Connect is a living thing and Lori would be the first to say she's still figuring parts of it out. That honesty is part of what makes her the right person to be running a community for women who've spent their careers presenting like they have everything handled.
✅ Two parallel cohorts consolidated into one connection-designed community
✅ Platform migrated from Kajabi to Circle: 17 of 26 original members followed her through
✅ 6 new members added post-migration; 23 active and growing
✅ Cohort cadence redesigned to a trimester model, open enrollment every 4 months
✅ Outcome framework built to clearly articulate the value of a paid community for professional women
✅ New cohort launched with a cleaner structure and a clearer promise to members
Seventeen of Lori's original 26 members made the move from Kajabi to Circle. Six new members joined on the other side.
A 65% retention rate through a simultaneous platform switch and structural redesign is a signal that the women who stayed were the right women. And the six who came in after the migration came into something cleaner, clearer, and better designed for them than what existed before.
Key Learnings for Building a Paid Community
A community that fills fast is not automatically a community that works. Eighteen signups in 48 hours is exciting. It's also a signal to look carefully at the structure underneath. Lori's challenge was never getting people in. It was keeping them in something that served them.
Running two cohorts is not twice the intimacy. It is twice the work. The instinct to keep groups small makes sense. But splitting your community into parallel tracks doubles your operational load and makes it almost impossible to build the momentum that makes a space feel alive. One well-designed group with intentional seeds planted for intimacy will almost always outperform a fractured experience.
For time-starved professional women, platform friction is a deal-breaker. When your member is a corporate executive who carved 45 minutes from a packed calendar to show up in your community, the tech has to work without explanation. If people are texting you to ask where the link is, the platform is the problem.
Intimacy is a design choice, not a headcount. A community of 30 that is thoughtfully designed for connection will create deeper relationships than a community of 10 that isn't. The size of the room matters less than what you do inside it.
You can evolve the community while it is running. Lori navigated a new launch, a platform migration, and a structural redesign at the same time, with existing members and existing commitments. It was a lot. And it worked because she stayed committed to the real goal: a community that actually holds and serves the women inside it.
FAQ: Paid Community for Executives and Coaches
Q: How do you launch a paid community for professionals when you already have an existing audience?
Start with the warmest people, not the biggest list. Lori had 18 women sign up in 48 hours because she had already built trust with her audience through her 1:1 work and her podcast. A paid community for executive women works best when the first members come in already believing in the host. A broad launch to a cold list rarely produces the energy a community needs to feel alive in its first weeks.
Q: What platform works best for a paid community for corporate executives?
Circle is a strong choice for professional audiences, particularly when members are time-starved and have no patience for clunky technology. The interface is clean and intuitive from day one, which matters when your members have carved out limited time to show up. Kajabi offers a community feature but it was not built for communities first, and the friction it creates for members can undermine the experience before it even starts. See our full platform comparison guide →
Q: How should a paid community for professional women be priced?
Price for commitment, not just access. Lori's $197 a month with a four-month minimum was intentional: low enough to be accessible compared to her $9,000 coaching packages, but structured enough that members had real skin in the game. A minimum commitment period matters for a connection-centric community because relationships take time to form. Month-to-month pricing creates churn before the community has a chance to prove its value. Learn more about our philosophy on pricing and how critical it is to your strategy.
Q: What is a trimester cohort model and is it better than a 6-month model for an executive coaching community?
A trimester model means opening enrollment every four months.For a paid community still in its early iterations, a smaller window of commitment is often the better choice: it gives you more frequent opportunities to adjust your structure, pricing, and programming based on what you learn from each cohort without locking you in to a structure that isn’t working for a longer period of time. It also makes the enrollment conversation feel lighter for prospective members who might hesitate at a six-month commitment. The trade-off is slightly more frequent launch cycles, which requires good systems behind the scenes.
Q: When should an executive coach hire a community manager for their paid community?
Scale the hire with the revenue. In the early phase, fewer than 30 members and still iterating on the model, a founder and a part-time assistant can manage the operational load. At the moment, Lori is running The Connect with her executive assistant Brit and plans to bring on a Community Manager soon through Ember. The right time to bring in a dedicated community manager is when the community has consistent enough revenue to support the hire and enough members that the founder's attention is genuinely becoming the bottleneck. Ember's fractional CM hiring system is built for exactly this transition.
Ready to Build Your Own Community?
If you're sitting on a community concept or a growing list of people already asking for more from you — let's talk about what building it right the first time would actually look like.
Comments