Watch how CineJourneys founder Aaron West built a home for a niche audience and turned it into his dream job.
CineJourneys runs today as a subscription film school of sorts: online classes taught by working critics and scholars, live discussions on specific films or directors, and a growing library of film history content, all sitting behind one MemberPress-powered membership.
It's also Aaron West's full-time job, and a successful, sustainable business built entirely around something he loves. It didn't start that way.
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Aaron had already lived a few professional lives before any of this: film criticism in the early 2000s, a tech company he built and sold in the 90s, years in enterprise IT.
Film was the one constant running underneath all of it. He'd been podcasting as a hobby for over a decade, launching Criterion Close-Up e depois Criterion Now in 2017 with Jill Blake joining as co-host.
“We already had the podcast and we had podcasts about the Criterion Collection,” Aaron says. “That was our passion, that was our hobby – just talking about movies, talking about discs and physical media.”
The podcast led to a Patreon. The Patreon led to a Substack. The Substack led to a Facebook group that grew to around 3,000 people.
Then there were the Zoom calls Aaron and Jill called “journeys”: Film club sessions for friends and followers who wanted to go deeper on movies than everyone else did.
None of it was engineered to become a company. Slowly, it became clear there was something real there: an audience willing to show up, engage, and eventually pay.
CineJourneys' own About page puts the motivation plainly:
“We decided to create CineJourneys after seeing changes in the online film community, especially on social media. While we've had great interactions on those platforms, the overall experience was unpleasant. There was too much noise, too much negativity, and not enough of what makes the film community special. We wanted more engagement in the form of thoughtful discussion and camaraderie, but realized that what we wanted did not exist.”
At MemberPress, we’ve known about this trend for a while: people are leaving big platforms in search of real connection.
Aaron and Jill spotted the market for building curated, positive online spaces, and set to work building a business model from it.
Turning a hobby into a business: “we put together kind of a manifesto”.
“We decided that we had something […] so we put together kind of a manifesto on a way to turn it into a business,” Aaron says. “Now we didn't think we were going to be billionaires in two years, but we did want to hopefully employ ourselves.”
The motivation wasn't only their own paycheck.
“A lot of our friends had been facing challenges with employment and keeping their jobs,” he says. “We really just wanted to build something that helped our friends make money and create their own gigs.”
That's more or less CineJourneys' business model today: working critics and scholars, several of whom had lost income in journalism and academia, teaching classes on their specialties, and earning a cut of what those classes bring in.
From a simple page to a real platform
CineJourneys existed on paper before it existed online. For months after incorporating, the website was, in Aaron's words, “just a blue placeholder page”, this was around August 2023.
A web designer built the backbone. Aaron finished the rest himself, with a couple of developers handling the heavier code.
They added MemberPress in early 2024, once the site was far enough along to need real membership infrastructure.
MemberPress became the one system running everything
By early 2024, CineJourneys had three separate audiences spread across three separate tools: a Patreon, a Substack still actively collecting subscribers, and a Facebook group with no billing attached to it at all.
Consolidating them meant picking one system to handle who gets access, what they pay, and how classes actually get delivered.
“MemberPress is basically all the rules, all the memberships, all the payment processing – that's all MemberPress,” Aaron says.
Rather than ask his Substack subscribers to sign up again somewhere new, Aaron brought them in directly.
“It's not the smoothest to port people over, so what we did is we just imported them as members from the Substack,” he says. “So if they had signed up there, they still have access here.”
He still keeps the Substack running as a billing record, but the membership itself (the plans, the access rules, the classes) all live in one place now.
That one place also holds the classes.
Working critics and scholars like Ty Burr (a Pulitzer finalist formerly of the Boston Globe and HBO), Imogen Sara Smith, Adrian Martine Chris Yogerst teach live and pre-recorded courses through the same membership, gated by rules Aaron sets himself.
A free plan and a paid monthly plan run side by side, “basically like a Patreon,” he says, but under a single login instead of scattered across platforms.
It's also why CineJourneys skips tools like Zapier. “It's just easier to control everything within our own system,” Aaron says. “Since it's behind a paywall, that's actually an extra layer of simplicity – we don't have to pass credentials through a third party.”
Turning a book into another reason to join
Once the membership side was running on its own, Aaron had time to write. The result was The A24 New Wave, a 500-page book tracing the classical film influences behind modern movies like Dune and Moonlight, built from about 2,000 sources over two years.
The book didn't stay separate from the membership either.
Of the roughly 2,000 sources Aaron pulled from, only 300 made it into the printed index. The rest became bonus digital content on the site, unlocked through the same account system that runs the classes.
“All those sources I can't fit in the book will be built out as digital access on the site,” Aaron says.
Buying the book gets readers more than the book itself: they also get early access to chapters of the sequel Aaron's writing now, delivered to their account as each one is finished.
CineJourneys is now planning a fall book with contributions from about ten of its guide instructors, and folding a second site, CineJourneysPress.com, into the same platform so books live in the LMS the same way classes do.
The result: one person, one system, a business that grew past what he expected
Aaron still runs the website himself, day to day. What's changed is what “himself” can support.
What was once a hobby now funds
- classes taught by working film professionals,
- a self-published 500-page book,
- a second book in progress, and plans for a third
all through one recurring membership instead of a patchwork of Patreon, Substack, and manual invoicing.
He's candid about what's still rough around the edges. CineJourneys runs on WordPress with no real source control or version history. It's a gap Aaron, with his enterprise IT background, knows exactly how to name.
“A Fortune 250 company can capitalize their DevOps,” he says. “We were basically using personal finance and membership subscriptions.”
He's just as honest about add-on sprawl: “Make sure you're up on your add-ons, because an add-on update can destroy your website.” CineJourneys keeps its plugin list short on purpose. MemberPress does most of the heavy lifting.
What he hasn't had to worry about: losing subscribers or rebuilding billing every time the business adds something new.
Account numbers and mailing list growth, he says, came in “far higher than expected.” He won't share the figures. He doesn't have to, the surprise is in his voice
His advice: “go for your dreams, man”
Aaron's advice for anyone sitting on a hobby, a side project, or an audience they've built almost by accident is blunt.
“What I'd say to people that use MemberPress or are entrepreneurs – go for your dreams, man,” he says. “It was the best decision I could have made.”
If you're already doing the thing (writing, recording, teaching, building an audience around something you actually care about) CineJourneys is proof that the hard part usually isn't finding the audience. It's giving that audience one place to become a business.
MemberPress's rules and membership plans handle the access and billing side once you're ready to make that move.
Obtenha o MemberPress hoje mesmo!
Comece a ser pago pelo conteúdo que você cria.
Where to find CineJourneys
If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, CineJourneys has a free membership tier to get you started. Paid plans unlock classes, community access, and a growing library of content from some of the most knowledgeable film minds working today.
Website: cinejourneys.com
The A24 Book: cinejourneys.com/a24book
Instagram: @cinejourneys
Aaron on socials: @awest505
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