The first sketch of the membership structure happened on the back of something that was not a proper sheet of paper. I do not remember if it was a napkin or the back of a printed boarding pass or the blank side of an envelope, it was the thing that was available when the conversation reached the point where the description needed a diagram rather than more words.
Sven was talking about access and frequency and the different relationships that different people would want to have with the voyage, and I picked up the pen that was on the table and started drawing the structure because the structure was becoming visible in the conversation and the drawing would make it visible to both of us simultaneously.
Three tiers. Not because three is the magic number for membership structures, though it is the number that works most consistently, because two tiers presents a binary choice and four tiers presents a complexity that the person choosing between them cannot resolve without more information than the choosing moment provides.
Three tiers because the access patterns that the Naora voyage made available were naturally three: the person who wants one specific leg in a specific ocean, the person who wants multiple legs across the circumnavigation, and the person who wants the fullest possible relationship with the voyage and the community.
The sketch drew these three shapes. The shapes had the numbers that our earlier conversations had produced. The sketch looked, from a distance, like the thing it eventually became.
From The Napkin To The Website
The napkin sketch is not the membership structure on the website. The website version has been through the iterations that the months of the planning process produce: the conversations with the people who heard the early version and asked the questions that exposed the gaps, the testing of the pricing against the financial model that I was refining in parallel, the adjustments to the tier names and descriptions that the articulation process gradually improved.
The napkin was the seed. The website is what the seed grew into after the two of us spent several months on it.
But the napkin was the moment the structure existed in a form that was outside the conversation and therefore real in a way that the conversation was not. The conversation is the description of the thing. The sketch is the thing itself, in its first rough form. I kept the napkin (or the boarding pass, or the envelope) for longer than was practical and eventually transferred the sketch into the first proper document and let the original go. The document is in the drive.
The original was the moment. The membership structure that the Naora member navigates when they book their leg began on the back of something that I cannot now remember precisely, on a day in early 2024, with a pen that was already on the table.
