Once your membership or subscription starts generating steady revenue, a new question inevitably shows up: should you keep pouring resources into finding fresh leads, or should you focus on nurturing the members you already have?
Memberships aren’t strictly a numbers game. This also becomes a conversation about retention â the often-overlooked lever that can completely change your revenue trajectory. While Iâll frame this primarily through the lens of memberships and subscriptions, the principles apply broadly across business models. Whether youâre running a coaching program, a service-based business, or even a subscription box, the core tension remains the same: do you fuel the top of the funnel, or do you double down on keeping people engaged once theyâre inside?
Thereâs no one-size-fits-all answer. But what I see far too often is a misconception â that the only way to grow revenue is to relentlessly chase new leads. Yes, more leads often equal more sales, but thatâs not always the smartest way to grow a business long term.
In this post, Iâm going to unpack this question through the story of one founder, Jordan, who recently crossed $350,000 in annual revenue with her subscription-based wellness platform. Her challenge â balancing the drive to scale quickly with the reality of members disappearing after a few months â is one I hear from business owners at every level. And the truth is, the biggest leverage point when scaling is often hiding in plain sight.
What’s inside this episode:
- The counterintuitive reason chasing top-of-funnel can stall profit â even when it spikes sales
- A simple diagnostic to decide if you have a lead gen issue or a delivery bottleneck disguised as churn
- My email tactics that I swear by to increase engagement and retention (this is a hill I will die on!)Â
- How offboarding works as a growth lever for higher ticket and/or term projects to multiplies referrals, alumni sales, and repeat buyers
- The cost of acquisition vs attention and why this should matter a LOT to you
The Core Question: Leads vs. Retention
This all started with a question from Jordan, who runs a subscription-based wellness platform. Her business just crossed the $350,000 annual revenue mark, largely fueled by growth through social content. On paper, things are working â but behind the scenes, sheâs noticing a painful pattern.
I run a subscription-based wellness platform that just passed $350K in annual revenue, and most of that growth came from social content. The thing is it feels like people sign up and then disappear and are gone after a few months. Right now, Iâm stuck between pushing harder on acquiring new members (since I know how to do that pretty well) versus really digging in to fix retention and customer experience, which feels slower and a lot less exciting. I want to scale fast and I know I can, but Iâm worried Iâll just keep pouring people into a leaky bucket. So my question is: at this stage, should I prioritize fueling leads to keep increasing revenue, or slow down and work on retention even if it means short-term growth plateaus?
Her words capture a dilemma many founders face once their memberships gain traction. On one hand, Jordan knows how to acquire new members â sheâs proven that with consistent marketing results. On the other hand, she sees that many people sign up and then vanish after a few months, leaving her worried sheâs pouring people into a leaky bucket.
The heart of her question is this: should she keep pushing hard on lead generation to fuel fast growth, or slow down to address retention, even if that means risking a short-term plateau?
Recognizing Bottlenecks in Business Growth
The first thing I told Jordan is that what sheâs experiencing is completely normal. Businesses hit bottlenecks at different stages depending on their model, but there are some predictable inflection points â usually around $100,000 a year, again at $300,000, then $1 million, and later around $3 million.
For information-based businesses, that $300,000 mark is a big one. At $350,000 a year, or roughly $30,000 a month, many founders are still running lean operations. That sounds great on the surface, but itâs also the point where things start to feel like theyâre breaking. Youâre suddenly serving a lot more people than before, and the cracks begin to show. Members donât feel quite as seen, supported, or valued as they once did, and retention starts slipping.
Service providers hit this type of delivery bottleneck earlier, usually between $80,000 and $150,000 a year. For them, the strain shows up as client load becomes unmanageable without help. By the $300,000 mark, itâs often time to bring in operations support or restructure the way delivery happens.
So Jordanâs frustration â feeling like people join and then disappear â isnât a sign sheâs doing something wrong. Itâs a natural stage of growth. The challenge is figuring out whether itâs a delivery issue (members no longer getting enough attention) or an engagement issue (members not being guided to form habits that keep them connected). Either way, the bottleneck is a signal: the business has grown, and the systems that worked at $10K or $15K a month wonât carry you through $30K a month and beyond.
Diagnosing Retention Problems
When retention starts slipping, the knee-jerk reaction is to assume itâs just the nature of memberships â people come, people go. But that mindset leaves a lot of money on the table. The truth is, most drop-off patterns have a clear root cause. The key is asking sharper questions and looking honestly at your delivery.
The first and most important question is this: have members always fallen off after a couple of months, or is this a new development?
- If itâs always been the case: then the problem is baked into your offer or onboarding. Members are joining without fully integrating into the community or building habits that keep them engaged, so naturally they donât stick.
- If itâs new: then something has shifted in how you deliver. That might mean youâve outgrown your original systems, or youâve become stretched too thin to give people the attention they once received.
What Delivery Shifts Look Like in Practice
Retention rarely tanks âout of the blue.â More often, itâs the natural byproduct of growth. When your membership grows quickly, what used to feel personal and high-touch can suddenly feel impersonal. At $10K or $15K a month in revenue, you might have been able to remember peopleâs names, comment on their posts, or personally welcome them to calls. At $30K a month, with hundreds of members, that level of intimacy isnât possible without support.
This can show up in several ways:
- Members no longer feel seen or acknowledged in the community.
- Calls feel crowded, and members donât get a chance to interact directly.
- Questions go unanswered for longer than before.
- The sense of belonging that drew people in starts to fade.
When that happens, the fix often isnât a massive overhaul â itâs support. Adding a team member whose role is to manage community touchpoints, or putting systems in place to replicate that early âhigh-touchâ feel, can make all the difference.
The Service Provider Parallel
For service providers, the bottleneck shows up differently but the principle is the same. Around the $80K to $150K range, delivery starts to strain capacity. If youâve noticed that clients who once re-signed for additional packages are no longer doing so, itâs worth asking: what part of the experience changed?
For example, one of the web designers I work with thrives on client conversations â she never wanted to hand those off. But her projects were bottlenecked because she was doing everything. The solution wasnât to cut her out of client interactions; it was to bring on a junior designer to handle production. That freed her to stay in her zone of genius â maintaining high-touch client relationships â without compromising delivery.
External Factors vs. Internal Responsibility
There are external variables, too. If you serve lower-income families, single parents, or any group deeply impacted by economic shifts, you may see higher churn when the economy wobbles. Thatâs real, and itâs outside your control.
But in most cases, retention issues are internal. Theyâre a reflection of whether your systems, your team, and your leadership have scaled alongside your revenue. This doesnât mean self-blame â it means radical responsibility. Taking the time to ask, Where might I have dropped the ball? What did members use to get that they no longer feel? How can I rebuild that sense of being seen, heard, and valued at scale?
That kind of honest diagnosis is what separates memberships that plateau from memberships that keep compounding.
Why Scaling Too Fast Can Backfire
When Jordan said she wanted to âscale fast,â my immediate reaction was caution. At $350,000 a year, sheâs in a strong position â but sheâs not yet ready for what Iâd call true scale.
Growth vs. Scale: Two Different Games
Itâs important to draw a line between growth and scale.
- Growth means adding more members and generating more revenue, but usually with a proportional increase in costs â whether thatâs hiring team members, paying for upgraded tech, or taking more of your time.
- Scale means being able to add more members and more revenue without a proportional increase in costs. Thatâs when your systems are mature enough to absorb new volume without breaking.
At $350K a year, Jordan is still in the growth stage. She can absolutely increase membership count and revenue, but it will come with added expenses â and likely more of her time, too. Thatâs not a bad thing, but it means sheâs not at the leverage point where true scale kicks in.
The reality is that you probably want better clarity before you look for speed. And the real issue IMO is that Jordan doesnât yet know why members are leaving.
Without that clarity, pouring fuel on the fire will only make the leak bigger. If members are leaving because theyâve gotten the full transformation they came for, then the fix might be introducing an alumni tier, advanced curriculum, or higher-level calls to keep them engaged.
But if members are leaving because they donât feel supported, because the community feels like a ghost town, or because delivery has become stretched too thin, then adding more people only compounds the problem. Suddenly youâre spending money on ads, driving new leads into a system thatâs already struggling to keep people engaged â and retention tanks even faster.
The Better Place to Grow From
The âgreen lightâ moment for faster growth is when you can confidently say:
- I know why people join
- I know why they stay
- I know what they want at 3 months, 6 months, 12 months
- I know how to keep them engaged at each stage of the journey
That level of clarity isnât about perfection â no one has every variable nailed down. But it gives you a strong foundation. It means youâre not just playing a volume game. Youâre building a business where each new member is more likely to stick, spend more, and bring others with them.
You also want to be really clear about the downside of speed.
Iâll be blunt: when founders say they want to scale fast, most arenât ready. Growth at all costs can feel exciting in the short term, but it often creates burnout, financial strain, and reputational risk when members start quietly slipping away. Slowing down long enough to shore up retention isnât glamorous â but itâs the work that makes scaling sustainable.
The Case for Retention Over Acquisition
When faced with the choice between fueling the top of the funnel or focusing on retention, I almost always point business owners toward retention. Hereâs why: itâs not only the more sustainable play, itâs also the one that delivers higher profit margins over time.
Every new member comes at a cost. Sometimes itâs a direct ad spend, sometimes itâs the hours you invest in creating content, sometimes itâs both.
Letâs say it costs you $100 in effort or ad spend to acquire one new member. If your membership is $75 a month and the average member stays three months, youâve made $225 from that person. After deducting your $100 acquisition cost, youâve profited $125. Thatâs a decent 2x return.
But hereâs where things get interesting.
Why Retention Wins the Math
Harvard Business Review published research showing that retaining a customer costs 5 to 25 times less than acquiring a new one. Translating that to our example, keeping a member might cost as little as $4â$20. If you spend $12 on average to retain someone for an additional three months, youâve turned that same member into a $450 customer â while only spending a fraction of what it wouldâve cost to acquire a new one.
That extra $225 in revenue, minus just $12 in retention efforts, adds $213 of nearly pure profit. The ROI skyrockets. Instead of doubling your money, youâve effectively quadrupled it â without needing to replace that member in the funnel.
Profit Margins and Long-Term Value = The Real Wins
This is why I tell people: memberships are a retention game. When you shift your focus to keeping members engaged longer, your profit margins expand naturally. Youâre not endlessly hustling for the next lead, youâre compounding the value of the ones you already have.
And hereâs the kicker â retention doesnât just improve your margins. It also makes your business more attractive if you ever want to sell or seek outside investment. Consistent retention numbers signal predictability and stability, which buyers and investors care about far more than flashy top-line growth.
Because of that, retention is probably a smart first lever.
When business owners start thinking about scale, they often obsess over new lead generation strategies. But the very first lever you should pull is retention. Itâs cheaper, itâs more effective, and it gives you a healthier foundation to grow from. Without it, scaling fast is just accelerating the churn.
Practical Retention Strategies
Retention doesnât happen by accident. Itâs the result of intentional systems, touchpoints, and experiences that keep members feeling connected and valued long after the excitement of joining wears off. Here are the biggest levers to pull if you want people to stay.
1. Strengthen Onboarding
The first 30â60 days set the tone for how long someone will remain a member. If they donât feel connected, donât know where to start, or donât form the habit of engaging early, the odds of them sticking around plummet.
Thatâs why onboarding needs to be more than a single welcome email. You need an experience that orients people, builds momentum, and keeps reminding them why they joined.
In my own membership, The Visionaries Collective, we run a three-month onboarding sequence â with the bulk of touchpoints happening in the first two weeks. Members get:
- Day 1: A welcome email with everything they need to get started (links, logins, and community guidelines).
- Day 2: A reminder to download our Mighty Networks app, fill out their onboarding form (where I collect details like birthdays and anniversaries), and introduce themselves.
- Day 3â7: Emails that help them set themselves up for success â identifying what outcome they joined for and how to achieve it, plus specific instructions on engaging in the community.
- Day 10: A personal-feeling âcheck-inâ email that looks like it came straight from my Gmail account. Itâs short, sweet, and simply asks, Do you feel like you have everything you need? This one consistently gets the highest response rates.
- Day 14 onward: A mix of reminders, success stories, and an early feedback form. This isnât just about data â Iâve actually gotten full-length testimonials out of this step.
The result? Members form the habit of logging in, engaging, and showing up. And they tell me, over and over again, that they appreciate the volume of emails because it makes the community feel alive and keeps their goals front and center.
If youâre afraid of âtoo many emails,â hear me clearly: silence is more dangerous. Frequent, thoughtful communication is one of the strongest retention tools you have.
2. Consider Term Commitments
Cancel-anytime memberships sound attractive because they reduce the barrier to entry. But at a certain revenue level â often $300K to $500K a year â churn becomes a constant drag. Thatâs when introducing a term commitment (six or twelve months) can stabilize revenue and improve retention.
The key here is timing and context:
- Do it when your community feels engaged and active. Locking people into a quiet or half-dead community will make them feel tricked.
- Frame it as an upgrade. Run one last launch with the promise of âcancel anytime,â and then announce that moving forward, all new members will commit to six or twelve months.
- Support it with strong testimonials. People are more willing to commit when they see evidence of results.
Itâs not for everyone â and Jordan, for example, felt strongly that her members wouldnât respond well to it. But for many founders at her stage, itâs worth serious consideration.
3. Build Re-Engagement Sequences
Not everyone disengages on day one. Some start strong, participate for a few weeks, and then quietly fade out. Others lose steam around the three-month mark. Thatâs where a re-engagement sequence becomes crucial.
The idea is to identify where people tend to fall off, and then meet them there with reminders, personal stories, or incentives to come back. For example:
- At 45 days, send a âwe miss youâ email with highlights from the community
- At 60 days, share a vulnerable story about a time you almost gave up and why you stayed the course
- At 90 days, remind them of what they said they wanted when they joined and show them the next step to get there
This is probably going to be wise so you can reignite the spark that made them join in the first place.
4. Celebrate and Personalize
People donât leave communities where they feel genuinely seen. Thatâs why personalization is such a powerful retention tool.
In my onboarding form, I collect birthdays, anniversaries, and business anniversaries (aka bizaversaries đ). Every month, we celebrate those milestones inside the community. Itâs simple, but it makes people feel valued and connected in a way that goes beyond the transaction of paying a monthly fee.
You donât have to do birthdays if thatâs not your vibe. But find ways to add personal touches: spotlight members, send handwritten notes, or create rituals that make people feel part of something special.
5. Offboarding for Service Providers
If youâre running a coaching or service-based business, onboarding is important â but offboarding is just as critical.
Most service providers finish a project, send a final invoice, and move on. But an intentional offboarding process can turn one client into multiple streams of revenue. Itâs your chance to:
- Ask for feedback (and testimonials).
- Introduce alumni offers or maintenance packages.
- Invite them into a referral program.
- Celebrate their results so they leave feeling amazing â and eager to tell others.
This is what I call the âBedazzleâ stage of visibility â when past clients come back for more or send new business your way. Itâs one of the simplest ways to increase lifetime value, but so few people do it well.
Radical Responsibility as a Leader
When retention slips, itâs tempting to blame the market, the members, or even the model. And sure, external factors like the economy or shifting priorities in your audience play a role. But more often than not, the real answers start at the top â with you, the leader.
The hard truth is that communities take on the tone of their leader. If youâre fully engaged, showing up consistently, and modeling the kind of participation you want to see, members feel it. If youâre stretched thin, disengaged, or trying to grow too fast without shoring up systems, they feel that too.
Retention issues are rarely just âmember problems.â Theyâre usually signs that the business has outgrown its original way of operating and the leadership hasnât adapted yet. Thatâs not failure â thatâs growth. But it does require radical responsibility.
So ask yourself the hard questions. Instead of asking âWhy are people leaving?â start with:
- Where have I dropped the ball on delivery or engagement?
- Am I engaging as much as I want my members to?
- Have I built systems that make people feel seen, heard, and valued at scale?
- What steps have I already taken to fix retention, and where am I avoiding uncomfortable changes?
These arenât easy questions. But theyâre the ones that shift you out of blame and into action.
Leadership Sets the Ceiling
Thereâs a saying I donât love â âthe fish rots from the headâ â but the sentiment applies. When things go sideways in a membership, the first place to look is leadership. If members arenât engaging, chances are the leader isnât engaging at the level required. If the community feels stale, itâs often because the founder hasnât invested in systems, support, or innovation to keep it vibrant.
The good news? Just as leadership can be the source of disengagement, it can also be the spark for re-energizing a community. A single shift in how you show up, the systems you put in place, or the way you prioritize retention can ripple through the entire membership.
At the end of the day, your business is leadership game. (Louder for the people in the back!)
Your role isnât only to bring people in the door; itâs to create an environment where they want to stay. That means leading by example, taking ownership of the experience, and continuously asking how you can make members feel more connected, more valued, and more supported.
To Wrap Up: Why Retention Is the Ultimate Leverage Point
Memberships and subscriptions live or die on retention. You can pour endless energy into top-of-funnel strategies â running ads, posting content, pushing for visibility â but if members leave after a few months, youâre constantly sprinting just to stay in place.
Retention flips that dynamic. When people stay longer, your profit margins expand, your growth compounds, and your business becomes more predictable. You no longer need to chase new leads at the same frantic pace, because each memberâs lifetime value is higher. And if you ever want to sell your business or attract investors, strong retention makes you exponentially more attractive.
Thatâs why I tell founders like Jordan â and anyone running a membership â to treat retention as the first lever, not the last. Itâs less expensive, more effective, and far more sustainable than acquisition alone.
Does that mean ignoring new leads? Of course not. Youâll always need fresh people coming in. But scaling with a leaky bucket is a recipe for burnout. Scaling with strong retention is a recipe for longevity.
So the next time you feel pulled toward âmore leads, more leads, more leads,â pause and ask: have I really done everything I can to keep the people I already have? Because the biggest leverage point in scaling isnât always at the top of the funnel. More often than not, itâs hiding in plain sight â in how well you care for the members whoâve already said yes.