Inside Osmo's $100K Membership Site Launch
How two designers built a thriving membership business selling access to design and Webflow components
The Realization: Audience Doesn't Equal Income
Dennis and Ilja had something many creators dream of: active social media followings built over years of sharing their design work. But there was a problem.
”My followers, they're not my clients,“ Ilja explained. "These are not the businesses that I work for. Maybe some, but most of them are my competitors that take inspiration."
Dennis had experienced the same thing. "A lot of people just copy-pasted my design and used it as their own."
The turning point came when they asked themselves a simple question: if people are going to use our work anyway, why not sell it to them?
Ilja proposed designing Webflow templates, but Dennis resisted, citing an urge to build something that felt more creative.
Templates were out, but the problem kept nagging at them. "We were on Google Meets a lot and texting on WhatsApp. So it was like just a couple days of almost a continuous brainstorm," Ilja recalled, before they landed on a bigger idea: a design library. The components, code snippets, and animations from their own client work—packaged as a membership site.
Don't Overthink It—Just Ship
With the product defined, they set out to turn their idea into reality.
"The main concept that we really took to heart was to not overthink everything," Dennis said. "Just do it, push it out and then later improve it rather than trying to perfect everything before shipping it."
Within days, they’d chosen a name, Osmo, and announced it online.
"A week later at Webflow Conf in London people were already coming up to me and saying hey I'm excited for Osmo whatever it's going to be. And it's like oh damn people already remember and it stuck with them."
They had buzz and interest, but didn't know the proper way to gate content, take payments, or manage potential members. Ilja remembered seeing a demo of Outseta at a recent community event.
”It had the CRM. It had email marketing tools built in. It had a help desk… and that just seemed so appealing to us. I feel like we would have otherwise have had to spend so much time on all these different tools with links between each other that could break and now it's just one login and everything's in one screen.“
Building Demand Before Building the Product
Rather than spending months building in isolation, they tested demand first. On a friend's recommendation, they created a landing page. It was intentionally simple: an FAQ with five questions, a compelling headline, and an email signup form connected to Outseta.
After sharing on social media, their subscriber count grew to 500+ people. But they didn’t stop there. Every Monday for 12 weeks, they sent a free component or code snippet to subscribers on their waitlist, while they built the product on the side.
”It was crazy… it grew from 1,400 [subscribers] from the first email in 12 weeks, like right before we launched, to just under 6,000 people.“
They set up a drip campaign using Outseta’s email automation features, so new subscribers wouldn't miss out on past resources. "Whenever you signed up, you'd get an email listing all the previous free resources.”
Dennis and Ilja provided consistently valuable content to their email subscribers, as illustrated by their 75% email open rate tracked in their Outseta email dashboard. The waitlist strategy worked. They’d validated demand, built an audience, and learned from customer feedback. It was time to launch.
Launch Day: When 6,000 Emails Turn Into $100K
The team settled on a pricing structure of €75 per quarter or €500 for a lifetime membership, leading with a special launch offer to build immediate momentum. They initially opened the doors to the first 1,000 subscribers on their list. The response was staggering. The 100 founding member seats sold out almost instantly.
When the offer was extended to the remaining 5,000 subscribers, the pace of signups only increased.
”Our 3-month marker for whether we're going to keep going with Osmo was to have 300 members,“ the founders explained. ”We had 300 members within the first 48 hours.“
Today, the community has grown to 700+ paid members, with a surprising majority opting for the lifetime tier. What began as a launch spike has settled into something better: a steady stream of new sign-ups arriving every single day. The followers who once copied their work for free are now paying customers.
Key takeaways
- Validate demand before building. Dennis and Ilja got 600 signups in 24 hours with just a landing page and email capture form—validating their idea before spending months building it.
- Grow your list by sharing freebies. Their 12-week pre-launch email series grew their list from 1,400 to 6,000 subscribers setting the stage for a successful paid launch.
- Reward founding members and early adopters. The €360 lifetime offer (vs €500 regular price) sold out almost exclusively to the first 1,000 emails sent. Limited-time pricing is often a strong incentive for early customers.
- Use an all-in-one platform to move faster. Building everything in Webflow with Outseta handling payments, CRM, email, and authentication meant managing the entire business from one login instead of wrestling with fragile integrations between multiple tools.
