13 Retention-Strategien für Recurring Revenue – Learnings von 22 Mio. Skool-Nutzern

Haupterkenntnis: Churn sinkt dramatisch nach Tag 90 und Monat 6 – wer Retention verbessern will, sollte nicht die Gesamtchurn-Rate optimieren, sondern konkret dafür sorgen, dass Kunden diese Schwellen überwinden.

Creator: Alex Hormozi
Branche: Business
Bereich: Funnels

Tags: retention, churn, recurring-revenue, community, mrr, ltv, onboarding, membership

Kurzbeschreibung

Alex Hormozi destilliert 13 datengestützte Retention-Taktiken aus den Learnings der Skool-Plattform (22 Mio. Nutzer). Anwendbar auf jedes Recurring-Revenue-Business.

Langbeschreibung

Basierend auf aggregierten Daten der Skool-Plattform erklärt Hormozi, warum Churn kein lineares Problem ist: Die höchste Absprungrate liegt in Monat 1–3 (über 20 %), fällt nach Tag 90 auf unter 10 % und schrumpft nach Monat 6 auf rund 2 %. Daraus leitet er 13 konkrete Taktiken ab – vom Cohort-Tracking über gezielte Exit-Interviews und das Befragen der loyalsten Mitglieder bis hin zu Preisstufen, Anti-Overwhelm-Maßnahmen (weniger Features = weniger Churn), Annual-Plans, täglicher Präsenz des Owners und dem Aufbau von 10 „Stamm-Mitgliedern” als Community-Anker. Kernthese: Wachstum entsteht nicht durch explosive Neukundengewinnung, sondern durch eine flache Churn-Kurve über einen langen Zeitraum.

Stichpunkte

• Plattform-Benchmark Skool: 80 % Retention = Durchschnitt; Top-Gruppen ≥ 90 %; Warnsignal < 70 %
• Churn nach Kohorte: Monat 1–3 > 20 %, nach Tag 90 ~10 %, nach Monat 6 ~2 %
• Fokus nicht auf “Churn-Rate senken”, sondern auf “Kunde über Tag 90 und Monat 6 bringen”
• Exit-Interviews: Kündigungsgründe taggen (Preis, Overwhelm, kein Nutzen, falsches Erwartungsmanagement) – alle 20 Cancels reviewen
• Best-Member-Interviews: Was hat euch zum Bleiben gebracht? → Das zur Kernleistung machen
• Weniger ist mehr: Zu viele Features erzeugen Overwhelm → eine Community reduzierte von 30 % auf 5 % Churn durch Content-Löschung
• Preistier-Differenzierung nur dann, wenn Ideal-Kunden Preis als Problem nennen – sonst wirkt hoher Preis als Filter
• Zwei Nutzerpfade: “Busy path” (minimaler Zeitaufwand, trotzdem Wert) + “Power-User-Tiefe”
• Front-loading: Sticky Element (bestes Call-Recording, Quick Win) in die ersten 24 h der Onboarding-Sequenz
• Tägliche Präsenz des Owners = signifikant höhere Retention; negative Mitglieder konsequent entfernen
• Weekly Call + Recording: Wöchentliches Rhythmus-Anker-Format
• Annual Plan mit ~16–17 % Rabatt: weniger Kündigungspunkte, höhere Commitment-Qualität
• 10 “Stamm-Mitglieder” identifizieren, spotten, einbeziehen und mit Neuen vernetzen (Matchmaking)

Zitate

“You didn’t just get a 10% boost – you got a double in LTV per customer.” “Think value per second, not seconds of value.” “We gave them more reason to cancel because they never used it.” “Growth really just looks like a flat retention curve – and then it keeps growing.”

Action Items

1. Joins vs. Cancels monatlich tracken → Business als “wachsend / flat / rückläufig” labeln
2. Eigene Churn-Rate mit Benchmarks vergleichen (Ziel: < 10 % / Monat)
3. Cohort-Analyse aufsetzen: Churn nach Monat 1, 3 und 6 separat messen
4. Exit-Survey / DM-Skript für Kündigende erstellen; Gründe in Tabelle taggen; alle 20 Cancels reviewen
5. Top 5–10 loyalste Mitglieder interviewen: “Was hat dich zum Bleiben gebracht?”
6. Kunden-Umfrage: “Was würdest du verteidigen, wenn wir alles löschen?” → Nicht-genannte Features prüfen/entfernen
7. Annual Plan mit ~16 % Rabatt einführen und sofort ankündigen
8. Onboarding: schnellen Win in die ersten 24 h packen (Pin-Post, Best-of-Replay, Quick-Win-Modul)
9. Tägliche Routine definieren: Notifications clearen, Kommentare beantworten, gutes Verhalten öffentlich loben
10. 10 “Stamm-Mitglieder” identifizieren, spotten und als Matchmaker für Neue einsetzen

Full Transcript

22,265,736 total users on school as of today. And to get that big, we had to know how to retain users. And one of the biggest places we learned this from is the communities on the platform itself. And so in this video, I’m gonna break down what we’ve learned so far that you can use to retain your customers longer in any recurring revenue business. And this is a special shout out to school and Sam. I’m taking all the learnings that he put in the school news and I’m trying to make them public because I think they’re awesome. So number one is think of churn like a leaky bugged it. And then diagnose what’s actually happening. So your MRR, meaning your monthly recurrent revenue, grows when new members are greater than churn members. So for example, if you sell five people and you lose four, your MRR will grow. If you sell five new members and five churn, your growth will be flat. You begin declining when you have fewer new people than people who leave. And so tactically, what you wanna do is track those two numbers on a monthly basis joins versus cancels. And then force yourself to label the businesses growing flat or declining based on that. That’s thing one, thing two. You wanna use retention benchmarks. And so this way you can know if you’re good. And so I’ll just give you the school platform averages. Now to be clear, this isn’t churned for like an insurance premium or an alarm system. But if you sell anything that is, I would say a consumer service that’s not like a home service, but just like a weight loss service or anything that you’d help somebody or remote service or anything that’s like an online service, these metrics will probably be much more correlated to what you’re at. And so the platform average across school is 80% monthly retention. So it said differently is 20% churn. So 80% stay 20%. That’s the platform average. Now the best groups have less than 10% churn, AKA 90% retention month over month. The not good groups have less than 70% retention, AKA 30% or higher. And so tactically, if less than seven out of 10 people wanna stand a monthly basis, you probably need to work on your retention more than anything else. It’ll be the highest ROI lever. Now to put this in context, if you take your churn from 20% to 10%, or say differently, you take your retention from 80% to 90%, you didn’t just get a 10% or 12% boost, you got a double in the LTV per customer. Meaning customer stay twice as long when you make that change. And so one of the big things that people can confuse about these small numbers is that the smaller the number, the bigger the change by percentages when you make these small tweaks. And to be clear, this is all monthly in comparison to others, not in comparison to have like a sellable business or anything like that. Real quick, I’m gonna show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to a hundred million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I’ve now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. What the constraint feels like? Like what are the symptoms of it when you’re going through it? And then what steps we actually took to graduate? And we’ve done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it’s my gift to you, it’s aptly free. And so the links in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter info and it’ll spit it right back to you all free. So number three is the biggest rule is that churn drops dramatically with time. All right, so this is like, this is a very cool inference that Sam shared with me that thought was really, really interesting. So it’s very easy to think, okay, my average churn is call it 10% a month. But when you actually look at cohorts of churn, meaning people who are at their sixth month versus people are the second month, versus third month, et cetera, the averages across platform are also very different by month. And so, for example, month one to three are the highest churn. So they’re 20% plus during these months. Now, if you keep someone 90 days, which seems to be the first kind of big churn drop off point, it drops to around 10% or less. And you’re like, huh, that’s kind of interesting. Basically it drops in half if you get people to day 90. Now, by month six, so another 90 days after that, churn gets extremely low. So it goes from like 10% to 2%. All right, so a five x decrease, or five x increase in LTV depending on how you want to see it. And so, the implications of this are huge. Because a lot of people will obsess myself included about like, how do I get my monthly churn down over and over again? An easier way to think about decreasing your churn is not how do I make this number go down. But how do I get someone to stay past day 90? How do I get these people to stay past month six? Because those become much more tactical in terms of like, this is what I can do. Now, to be clear, if you’re a community or a recurring revenue thing is less than 90 days old, then your churn is always going to be inflated because you haven’t even gotten those customers who’ve made it past that point. That would over time decrease your monthly churn. If it’s less than six months old, it’s the same thing, just a little bit less. And so to be clear, don’t overhaul your entire business because your month one churn sucks. That’s normal for it to be higher than the other months unless basically everyone’s leaving, in which case, yes, you should have fixed that. All right, so that’s number three. And I think that one’s like really, really big. And I want to like hit on that. Like, I would say if you had to focus on three tactics, have a very specific strategy for getting people past the first month ‘cause that’s the biggest month of churn. So that’s going to come from activation, onboarding, expectation setting, selling the right promises on the front end, showing up every day, making sure that you’re providing content in that environment. Day 90 is probably enough to deliver some sort of outcome and some sort of changing behavior for them. Month six, it’s usually them connecting with other people within that community. All right, and so this is kind of as these things develop. Now, number four, ask people why they canceled and then look for the patterns. So I would say earlier on my career, I would just like, when someone says, “Oh, I’ll cost you much, I’ll just ignore them.” I’d be like, “Oh, I need to understand the value.” But over time, I’ve learned to appreciate that like, I’ll tell you a cool little thing. Sam has the head of customer support, sits right next to him, in the whole office. And the reason for that is ‘cause he wanted a very tight feedback loop between the problems that customers are experiencing, the reasons they’re canceling, and the things that are getting built. And that’s why school is such a strong platform is so good. And so, tactically, message people who are canceling and say, “Hey, why are you canceling?” And don’t need jerk, you know, on one response to be clear, I’m like, “Oh, there’s one person canceling.” Look for patterns, collect enough feedback to see them. And so, tactically, you can create a simple DM script and then you can tag the reason that people have in an Excel sheet. So it could be like price, overwhelm, not using. It’s missing a feature, it’s not what I expected. And you can look at that. And for every 20 cancels or so, review the top one or two reasons and then fix those. Really tactical advice, please do this. Number five, ask your best members why they stayed. So we’re asking the bad people why they leave or asking the good people why they stay and then do more of that. So identify the longest tenured people, AKA the most engaged members. And they ask them like, “What made you stay?” What’s the number one value that you get here? And so then tactically, whatever shows up repeatedly becomes your kind of retention engine. And so everything else after that is really optional. And I would not emphasize this point. If you can only do one thing that gets people to stay, why would you do five? And this is a lesson that took me too long to learn because oftentimes we believe that in order to fix things we need to fix them through addition. When oftentimes we need to fix them through subtraction and amelioration, AKA making it better rather than adding more stuff. Because if you were to simply fulfill the promise that you originally made, they probably stay. So if you think about how do I improve the quality of a product, you make a promise and then you remove all friction associated with getting that thing. And so the businesses, the products and the services that win or the ones that simply make all the things that suck about achieving the good thing go away. School fundamentally helps people get started online. And so all we’ve done is try to optimize to make it as easy as easily possible and that doesn’t mean adding more features. It means making everything in the background just vanish so it just works. Which leads me to number six, price objections. You don’t want to guess. You want to tear based on evidence. So at school, so us eating our own dog food, we had a bunch of people canceling saying it’s too expensive. And so what we did, we created a lower tier while still keeping the higher tier available with some additional metrics and additional admins. Things that unique URLs, no sidebars of competitor groups kind of advertising the same area. We kept that for the high level people, but the people who were lower level who were just kind of hobbyist or just getting started, we created a 11 times cheaper tier from $99to$9, right? And so this was important for school because a lot of hobby groups are people getting started and maybe they’re not necessarily making a ton of money. They got to figure out a few months and the difference is $100amonthand$9 a month is pretty huge. And so that allowed the people who were still figuring it out to still be able to use the tool and stay and then ultimately be successful longer term. Now tactically, if you are ideal customers, this is a very important point. If you are ideal customers say the price is the issue, then you can add a lower tier or a standard plan. If non-ideal people say it’s too expensive, just ignore it. That means the price is actually acting as a good filter, right? Like if you, if you’re like, I want a community for a million dollar plus business owners and people who are not a million dollars plus say this is expensive, then it’s like, great, bingo, it’s working, all right? Same thing with whoever your avatar is, which leads to number seven, overwhelm. So let’s talk about this. The number one reason people churn outside of price is overwhelm. It is the churn driver. And this is why doing less can often retain more. And so the core idea behind this is like, I don’t have the time, I can’t keep up, I can’t utilize it. And usually it just means there’s too much stuff. So I want to break down a real world example this outside of school that applied the same concept. So planet fitness is a $10amonthgymsubscription,theyhavesomeupsells,whatever.Andtheywereabletoenterthemarketinaplacethatther{e}^{\prime }salreadytonsofgyms,ther{e}^{\prime }sonlytonsofhealthclubs,etcetera.Butwhattheyrealizedwhentheysurveyedcustomerswasthatpeoplejoinedhealthclubsandtheywerepaying$59 a month or whatever. And they had basketball courts and racquet courts and cardio and pool and all this other stuff, right? And when they surveyed people, the vast majority of people just used the cardio equipment and a little bit of weights. And so they were like, wait, so these have these massively built out things, but people are only using 10 or 15% of the facility. And so what they did, they said, what if we just took out that 10 or 15% and put it over here and then charge way less for it? And by doing that, they had a superior value proposition. Now here’s what gets really interesting. When you have five things that you pay for, but you only use one, you feel like you’re only getting 20% of the value. If for the same price, you just offer that one thing, people feel like they’re getting 100% of the value. So someone is more likely to turn in the scenario because you added more stuff because now they feel like they’re using not enough of it, wild. So us as business owners, a lot of times we’re thinking, oh, I’m gonna add all this extra stuff, but the reality is, all we did is we gave them more reason to cancel because they never used it. And so we had a community on school where they found out about this. They deleted content that they had and they took their turn from 30% month over month to five. They did a 6x increase in LTV by simply having fewer things. All right, a simple version of this is, and I’ll give you a tactical, I’ll give you a couple tactics one of those. So you can make a little form and just simply ask your customers, hey, if I were to delete everything, what one thing would you fight for? And on the inverse, if I were to keep everything and just remove only one feature, which one thing would you not mind seeing go? And then if you chart those on a graph, what you’ll find out is what the number one and number two most valuable things aren’t oftentimes it’s really outsized. And most of the time you just need to do those things and basically forget about everything else. ‘Cause one of the big things we have to remember is that people who are using your services are not full time using your stuff. They have lives. And so we want to think about value per second, not seconds of value. And in the digital world, that might mean just one post, one call recording or just one single action that you need to take that’s valuable for them. That’s it. If someone just gets that every week from you, they’re in. Which leads to number eight. Designed for the extremes, have a busy path like the person who’s just kind of like a dabbler dipping their toe in the water and then also have kind of like the power user depth. And so a busy member should be able to get value from a distance. They should be able to keep up and not feel like they’re left behind. On the other hand, a hardcore person should be able to go deep all day. And so tactically, make an explicit start here, slash weekly cadence flow for the busy people while leaving optional kind of like side quests and depth for the kind of like heavy users or heavy, yeah, the heavy users. Nine, move the ladder closer to the front. So front load the thing that people love. So we use snakes and ladders as a concept. So you want to remove the snakes, aka the friction, the confusion, the overwhelm. And if there’s a long ladder, the thing that makes people stick, put it in the onboarding. So tactically, if the calls are the stickiest thing or the specific service or this specific implementation or onboarding or activation, the best call replay, whatever it is, the pin post, put that sticky, sticky thing up front. And you want to pin, this is now a school-specific thing, but it still works with any onboarding, is you want to pin the fast wind up front. So new members hit that value, ideally within the first 24 hours. And this works for any of these recurring business, whether you’re teaching someone how to sell, teaching them work leads, teaching them how to pickle jars, whatever. Like as long as you have a way to get people to win fast, they will like you more. Ten, show up daily and care. So this is something that we saw across all communities is that the owners who showed up in the community on a daily basis had significantly higher retention than the people who didn’t. Big surprise. Now, we’ve basically never seen this fail. And so if a member feels like the owner is an active or doesn’t care, they leave. And so attack to a minimum would just be like, put it in a alarm, make it part of your daily routine. And so on a small level, you can clear notifications, DMs, report whatever content or deal with content that people might have reported. Now, this is talking about school, but you can apply this to your own business, which is like, what am I doing every day to show up for my customers? And can I make that a repeated action that I do that’s high value and high leverage? This also means like read the complaints every morning of customers were dealing with issues. Because if you want to hide your head in the sand, you will be, well, I guess your head will be in the sand and that will suck. Because then you go, can your ears and your nose and it’s like, you know, how you’re gonna live, right? So it’s a tough life. And so, so you know, encourage the good behavior that you have, the people who follow what you want. People leave nice reviews, people leave nice testimonials. You want to tell people and say, good job. On the other hand, delete bad stuff and delete bad people. I cannot tell you how powerful deleting cancer is is. Like if they do it in your body, you should do it in your community or your membership. Which leads me to number 11, which is a weekly call and a recording. And so live voice/face deepens relationships. And so recordings kind of just like, let busy people keep up. There’s very often that there’s like weekly podcasts that have tremendous retention. It’s just like, it’s just enough like, and think about TV shows. Like obviously Netflix created the binge culture but the vast majority of shows are like once a week. It’s enough that people can keep up with it. And too many of these kind of like extra add-ons, people kind of revert to that one thing and you want to make sure that the one thing they’re consuming is the best one. So if you’re unsure what kind of communication cadence to stick with, just default to like one big thing per week. And then like a best-of-post, very simple. So it could be a weekly call and a weekly post, that’s all you have to do. Very, very simple within a community structure. Let’s go number 12. So you want to add an annual plan with a discount. So the reason this works is that annual always has lower turn than monthly. And it’s because you only need to decide one time rather than 12. And so annual buyers churn less. And even beyond the, they can’t cancel effect, right? So like, because they can’t cancel because they already paid is one element of that. But the other element is just that like, typically those people are also more committed. They also got a lower rate. So there’s a lot of, they’re also more qualified ‘cause they’ve paid more in front. So there’s a lot of and and and. So having that is valuable. Now a common practice here is 16 or 17% which usually by 10 get to. All right, so if you’re not doing this within whatever service you sell, have an annual component that you should implement like today. Like right now, first thing you do after this, announce it and expect a meaningful chunk of people to take it. But that does is it stabilizes retention. 13, you want to build belonging via one-on-one relationships and 10 true regulars. Now this is in a digital community, but from a business that has any kind of community that’s involved, real and person, et cetera, fostering one-on-one relationship, which is thinking like what are the unique aspects of these people who are coming in and can I pair them with other people who are like them? Because if people find, I think there’s Laila shared this out with me. This is on the employee side, but it totally transfers, which is if an employee has a friend that they are friends with outside of work, they stay five times longer at their job. Think about a while that it’s just one friend outside of work or one person that they’re like really good friends with. And so like hack of hacks, like get them to make one real friend, now that’s easier said than done. But the nice thing that you should have, hopefully everyone should have one thing in common, which is that they’re all patrons of your business. So these have that interest some way in common. And so the fast way to do this is also introduce some of the regulars to the new members. And I used to do this at my gyms. Like otherwise everyone just feels brand new, they feel like in group out group. Like you don’t want to have people feel like they’re walking on someone else’s conversation. So if somebody’s new to a party, right? And you’re holding a party and someone walks in, what do you do? This is John, John, Metina, meet Jesse, meet Trish. You know, John’s really good at X, Y, and Z. Trish is great. John, blah, blah, blah. And so it’s just like just help them build rapport, which building rapport just comes down to like what things do they have overlap over it. That’s all it is. All right. But within the digital community, so going back down to school, you can anchor engagement in a community with 10 regulars. That’s it. You just need 10 regulars. The tactical piece of this is that identify the top 10 people. These are your model citizens. The best customers, your best avatars, DM them, figure out their goals, spotlight them, meaning give them public kudos, invite them to contribute, not just like watch them do it. And if you can, again, publicly recognize in any way possible, it further reinforces the behavior. And you want to introduce the new people to them, aka matchmaking. Sometimes tactics can be very overwhelming, but sometimes they’re exactly what you need. If you have a recurring revenue business, don’t expect to implement all the stuff at once. Just take one thing off the list, do it, add it inconsistently. And then once you get consistent with that one, add another one off the list. And so conquering turn or trying to have an alliteration for retention, like mastering retention, but I need an R. Something retention, remastering retention, just comes down to doing 100 small things consistently over a very long period of time. And so most people think that growth looks like this, when in fact growth really just looks like a flat retention curve and then what happens is it just keeps growing. And so I hope this helps keep crushing it.

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