#319: How Tamara Grominsky Predictably Grows Her Membership Each Month

My guest is Tamara Grominsky, founder of PMM Camp — a private, application-only membership for senior product marketing leaders with 280+ members. Tamara spent 15 years in product marketing, eventually landing at Kajabi as VP of Product Marketing. She went there with a specific agenda: study how the best creators build their businesses, then reverse engineer it for herself. She started a newsletter, surveyed her audience, learned the thing they needed most was connection, and launched a membership in March 2023. Six months later, she left Kajabi. Her model isn't always-open or quarterly-launch. It's application-gated, opens for exactly five days on the first of every month, and runs on Kit workflows and Circle. She's been on this monthly cadence for nine months and now forecasts her revenue 12 months in advance. She's hit every number this year. Tamara is also in our Lab mastermind, which means I've watched this system get built in real time. This conversation is nine months of mastermind updates compressed into a podcast episode. In this episode, we talk about: How she went from VP of Product Marketing at Kajabi to building her own membership — and why leaving a job she loved was still the right call The monthly open cart model: application-gated, waitlist-driven, four emails, five days, and why it turned a chaotic launch calendar into a predictable business What a personalized onboarding document looks like, and how she gets 90%+ of new members onto a welcome call Her hypothesis about why her conversion rate is stuck at 30% — and what she's testing next By the end of this episode, you will have a complete model for running a membership like a product — with systems, baselines, and experiments that make revenue forecastable. PMM Camp (Home) PMM Camp Community (Membership + Pricing) PMM Leadership Bootcamp (6-Week Cohort) Newsletter Archive (188 editions, every Sunday) Tamara's LinkedIn Tamara's X Full transcript and show notes *** TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Introduction (01:26) What product marketing actually is (04:43) From Kajabi to PMM Camp (06:49) What she learned studying creators (11:28) The decision to leave (13:23) Finding the founding 25 (16:47) Inside PMM Camp today (18:29) The welcome call and onboarding doc (25:25) Why evergreen broke her business (27:52) The monthly open cart model (33:17) The Kit workflow behind the cart (36:09) The conversion rate problem (44:54) The visibility hypothesis *** RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE #313: How Tom Ross Doubled His Community Engagement and Retention With Training Pathways #318: The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox *** ASK CREATOR SCIENCE Submit your question here *** WHEN YOU'RE READY 📬 Creator Science Newsletter 🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system) 🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community) 🧞‍♂️ Get a Personalized Offer *** CONNECT 🐦 Connect on Twitter 📸 Connect on Instagram 💼 Connect on LinkedIn 📹 Subscribe on YouTube *** SPONSORS 💼 View all sponsors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices