The Membership Retention Stack
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Ravi researched how $100m membership businesses hold members by hiring Mindvalley's former CMO and interviewing marketers from MasterClass, then assembled a small set of retention mechanics. The stack rests on three ideas: do not overwhelm new members with all the content at once, because overwhelm causes cancellation; always have something anticipated in the near future, because people pay for what is coming rather than what they have already consumed; and manufacture a sense of progress through other members' wins delivered to email, where people actually look. Credits create accumulated switching cost, a monthly roadmap creates anticipation, and a wins blast creates vicarious progress for the majority who never log in.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Cap what a new member receives
Do not dump the full library on day one. Ravi gives new members ten classes out of forty-six, on the reasoning that throwing everything at people feels like value but produces overwhelm and churn.
Pro tip Choose the ten that produce a first win, not the ten that look most impressive.
Watch out Members who feel behind on day one cancel before they ever start.
- 2
Run a credit system
Borrow Audible's mechanic: issue one credit per month of continued membership, redeemable against the remaining library. Accumulated credits and unlocked classes are forfeited on cancellation.
Pro tip Make the balance visible so members see what leaving would cost them.
- 3
Publish a monthly coming-soon roadmap
Ravi runs a monthly briefing he calls the scaling scoop listing what is landing that month — a guest short-form agency teaching a class, a new tier, and so on. MasterClass's marketer told him the greatest retention weapon is coming soon.
Pro tip Schedule the most anticipated item just after the typical churn point.
Watch out Announcing things you then fail to ship converts anticipation into distrust.
- 4
Email the wins
Send member wins and updates on a constant basis by email, because members will not always log into the community but they will read email. Seeing others win produces the feeling of progress even without participation.
Pro tip Ravi's analogy is the gym membership: most Planet Fitness members never attend, yet membership itself feels productive.
- 5
Ask members what they want, then put it in coming soon
Survey the community for the content or feature they most want, build it, and announce it on the roadmap. This closes the loop between demand and anticipation and keeps the pipeline honest.
- 6
Show up personally in the community
Ravi treats posting value, creating classes and generating hype as his full-time job while delegating coaching calls, support and billing. Founder presence is a retention input, not a nice-to-have.
Pro tip Turn a well-performing YouTube video into a class, or pull a class into a video — one piece of work serves both.
Watch out Do not let founder presence expand into answering support tickets.
In the wild
Ravi launched Scaling School as a $97 membership on Skool, using a credit system he says no other community on the platform runs: ten classes included at signup, one credit per month of renewal, everything forfeited on cancellation. He layered on a monthly scaling scoop announcing upcoming classes and tiers, and paid advertising for acquisition. The membership did $30k MRR in its first thirty days and was on track for $60k in the second thirty. He was explicit that churn was not yet proven, but that the low fulfilment cost makes even mediocre churn tolerable.
→ $30k MRR in month one, on track for $60k in month two.
Ravi described wanting to cancel Netflix because he did not particularly value it, but a film he and his girlfriend wanted to watch was due to be released. He decided to wait for the release before cancelling. The pending release, not the existing library, kept the subscription alive — which is precisely the mechanism the MasterClass marketer described when he said the greatest retention weapon is coming soon.
→ A churning subscriber retained purely by anticipated future content.
Common mistakes
Dumping the entire library at signup
Founders equate volume with value, but Ravi's view is that unrestricted access overwhelms new members, they take advantage of none of it, and they cancel. Access should be metered so each month delivers a new unlock.
Marketing only to non-members
If all communication points outward, existing members hear nothing about what is coming and cancel once they feel they have extracted the value. Internal announcement cadence is a retention channel.
Judging the model on churn alone
Ravi argues that if fulfilment requires almost no one-to-one work, three or four month churn is survivable, especially alongside a higher-ticket product. Comparing membership churn to a high-touch programme misreads the economics.
From the transcript
“Your greatest retention weapon is coming soon.”
“So when people come in, they get 10 classes included. But then we have 46 classes inside of there. And they get one credit every…”
“people feel like they are getting the wins themselves, even though they aren't actually getting the wins themselves”
From the episode
$25m CEO Coaches me on How to Grow our Business - Ravi Abuvala: Scaling with Systems
Ravi Abuvala: Scaling with Systems