Look at the attendance list from your last live call. Now look at your member list. Find the people who have never appeared on a single one, and check how long some of them have been paying you.
There will be more of them than you expect, and they will include some of your longest tenured members. Which is the interesting part. These are not people who joined and lost interest. These are people who are quietly happy, quietly paying, and structurally excluded from every single event you run.
Some of them work nights. Some have small children with immovable bedtimes. Some are twelve hours away from wherever you happen to live. Some cannot speak comfortably on camera, or process spoken conversation quickly, or hear well. Some have jobs where a mid afternoon hour of privacy is impossible.
You cannot fix this with a second call at a different time. You will exhaust yourself and still miss people. What you can do is build events that never require anyone to be present at a particular moment, and the good news is that these are often better than live events, because they produce something durable instead of something that evaporates.
Why a recording is not an async event
Let us clear this up first, because most founders think they have solved the problem and have not.
Posting the recording is a courtesy, not a program. Watching an hour of other people having a conversation, days later, with no ability to contribute, is a fundamentally passive experience. It gives your absent members information and gives them zero belonging, and belonging is the thing that keeps subscriptions alive.
The test for a genuine async event is simple: can a member who was asleep during the whole thing contribute something that other members will respond to? If not, it is content, not an event.
Five formats that actually work
The rolling thread with a hard close
Open a thread on Monday with one substantial prompt. Close it Friday. Anyone can enter at any hour, and you commit to replying to every single contribution before it closes.
The magic is entirely in the close. An open ended thread is a channel and gets ignored. A thread with an end date is an event, and people feel the deadline. Announce the closing time in a couple of time zones, and post once mid week to say what has come up so far, which pulls in the people who were waiting to see whether it was any good.
This is the cheapest format on the list and often the best. If you only add one thing, add this.
The forty eight hour clinic
Instead of a live question and answer session, open a window. For two days, members post problems, and you answer in writing, properly, with real depth. Then you close it.
Written answers beat spoken ones in almost every measurable way. They are searchable, quotable, and can be edited for accuracy. They can include links and examples. And you can think for four minutes before answering rather than improvising under the pressure of eleven faces watching you.
Do this monthly and your resource library builds itself out of exactly the questions your members actually have.
The video relay
Pick a question. Members record ninety seconds on their phone, at any hour, and post it. Over a week you get a wall of short human videos, and then you stitch or curate the best of them into a single piece for everyone.
This one produces something surprisingly emotional. Hearing eleven voices from eleven countries answer the same question does something a text thread cannot, and it works entirely without synchronization. Keep the time limit brutal, because ninety seconds forces people to say the interesting thing immediately.
The paired swap
Two members trade something on their own schedule inside a defined week. A critique, a look at each other's plan, twenty minutes of expertise each way. They arrange it themselves or do it entirely in writing.
From your side this is almost no work: match people, send one message with the brief and the deadline, ask two questions at the end. From the members' side it is the most valuable thing in the community, because it is one to one attention with no calendar collision.
The slow challenge
A shared task with a start date, a finish date, and no required meetings. Ten days, one small thing a day, one thread to post progress in. The shared experience comes from the calendar rather than the clock.
Slow challenges are the single best async format for creating the feeling that everyone is in something together, which is the thing live events are usually for.
The design rules that make async work
A few things separate the formats that come alive from the ones that sit there quietly.
Always put a deadline on it. Async without a deadline is just a channel. The end date is what converts a thread into an occasion, and it is the difference between forty replies and four.
Publish times in at least three time zones, always, including a date. "Closes Friday 6pm New York, 11pm London, 8am Saturday Sydney" takes ten seconds to write and tells every member in the world that you thought about them.
Seed it with three contributions before you announce it. An empty async thread reads as a failed event, and unlike a live call, there is nobody in the room to break the silence. Ask two friendly members in advance to post early. This single trick roughly doubles participation.
Reply to everything, at least briefly, during the window. In a live call your presence is obvious. In an async event your presence has to be demonstrated by replies, and if you go quiet the thing dies immediately.
Summarize at the close, publicly. "Here is what came out of this week." The summary is what makes the event feel like it had a shape, and it is the artifact that keeps working for the next six months.
And name it like an event, not like a channel. Not "weekly discussion." Instead: October Pricing Clinic. The Ten Day Reset. Voices Week. Names create anticipation.
Do not accidentally build a second class experience
Here is the failure mode I see most, and it is worth guarding against deliberately.
Founders keep the live call as the real event and add async as an accommodation. Members can feel that instantly. The async version gets less energy, less promotion, and a slightly apologetic tone, and it becomes the thing you get instead of the thing you wanted.
Two fixes. Give at least one async format equal billing on your calendar and in your sales page, so it is a headline offering rather than a consolation. And make sure something happens in async that does not happen live, so there is a genuine reason for the people who could attend live to join it too. Mixed participation is what removes the second class feeling entirely.
Also, do the small courtesies that cost nothing. Caption your recordings. Post a written summary alongside every audio or video thing. Let people contribute in text where the default is voice. Every one of those makes your community usable by more people, and none of them require a single extra hour of your week once they are habits.
The privacy layer
Async formats often involve members recording themselves or writing at length about their work, so be clear about where it goes.
Say up front whether a video relay will stay inside the community or be used publicly, and default to inside. If you ever want to use a clip externally, ask that person specifically and accept no as a complete answer.
Do not surface members' locations or schedules as fun facts. "We have people posting from nine countries" is lovely. Naming who is where is not yours to share.
And in any clinic format, remember that people ask their most exposing questions when they cannot see who is watching. Treat what gets asked with the same care you would treat a private message, and never lift a member's problem into your marketing without asking.
Do this this week
Find the members who have never attended anything. Count them. That number is your case for doing this.
Then run one rolling thread with a hard close. One substantial prompt, opened Monday, closed Friday, times published in three zones, three seeded contributions before you announce it, and a reply from you to every single person.
On Friday, post the summary. Then look at who participated and compare it to your live call attendance list. I would put money on the overlap being smaller than you expect, which means you have just reached a group of paying members who had never been in a room with anybody, and that is worth far more than another calendar invitation nobody can accept.
The quiet argument for going async first
Here is a heretical thought to finish on. If you were designing a community today, from scratch, for people scattered across the world with jobs and children and different working hours, you probably would not start with a live call. You would start with written and recorded formats that anyone can join at any hour, and you would add live sessions later, as a bonus for the people who happen to be free.
Most of us do it the other way round because live feels like the premium thing and asynchronous feels like the compromise. It is worth questioning that instinct. Written clinics, video relays, and slow challenges produce artifacts that keep working for years, include everyone by default, and cost you less energy than performing for an hour on camera. Live is wonderful, and it is not automatically the centre.