What is the best way to decrease churn/turn rate in my community?
Using a GHL account via an affiliate funnel can generate revenue but won’t lower churn. The most effective way to reduce churn is to be present daily in the community—spend 20‑30 minutes, respond to 50‑70% of threads, add value, and showcase expertise. This habit alleviates a large portion of churn, though beginner communities still see ~20% churn because many lack the funds to continue. To further reduce churn, you can raise prices to exclude early‑stage customers who are less likely to stay, accepting a trade‑off: a higher price narrows the top of the funnel but can improve revenue per affiliate. For example, at $50/month you might get 500 sign‑ups (10% affiliate uptake → 50 affiliates) earning $50×500 + 50×$100 = $30k MRR; raising to $100/month drops sign‑ups to 300, yielding 30 affiliates and $33k MRR—only a 10% revenue increase despite doubling price, illustrating an optimization problem. Additional tactics include offering exclusive content (e.g., a weekly members‑only video) and unlocking templates after extra months to incentivize retention.
The focus regimen is just like your five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. Distractors involve small daily accountability and building momentum. I've done five product/five videos and only made it through about a week of comments; I'll continue farming them out, recording the first one today and then every 3-5 days, expecting a substantial decrease in churn. I'm jazzed about this. I wanted to run through as many questions as possible and do some live work to show my thinking. Since community is my primary revenue source, I should spend the bulk of my time on it—I already spend 1-2 hours each morning across communities, and should spend even more. An additional 45 minutes to an hour developing exclusive content to reduce churn by 5% over the next month would be crazy; if it works, I'd make about $100k, equivalent to $10k per hour. I'll leave it there; join Maker School to see these changes in real time, and check out make moneywithmake.com to go from working to working even better.
The non‑negotiable daily tasks are essentially the same as when scaling from $1K to $10K – they’re all about consistent marketing. I always start at the top of the funnel: marketing, then sales, then the transformation event, onboarding, fulfillment, and finally admin and re‑engagement. Previously I focused on cold‑email outreach, time‑boxing one to two hours each day and making at least one improvement to my emails – whether a tiny copy tweak or a full rewrite. I’d also respond to all outstanding leads on platforms like Upwork, Freelancer.com, and Fiverr, then handle sales and client management. Nowadays the focus is more on content (videos, community engagement) because community members become my marketers. I aim to spend roughly 20‑30% of my energy on marketing each day (sometimes up to 50‑60%). Consistent daily effort on these core activities is the only thing that reliably drives growth.
You’re running a low‑ticket, low‑touch SaaS that’s mostly automated, so you need a lot of volume to make it worthwhile. Cold outreach—especially cold email—usually isn’t profitable for low‑ticket products because the average revenue per user is too low to justify the sales effort required for each lead. A half‑hour sales call for a $49 annual plan simply doesn’t break even. You have a few options: target enterprise customers with larger seat counts, or focus on paid acquisition like PPC. If CPA is high, either lower it with better marketing tactics or raise your price point. Remember, the goal isn’t necessarily a low CPA; it’s to be profitable after a few months. You’ll likely lose money for the first 3‑4 months of a user’s lifecycle, so you need churn under about 20 % monthly to break even. Once churn extends to 6‑12 months, the model becomes sustainable. In short, for a low‑ticket SaaS, prioritize paid ads and consider raising prices or moving upmarket rather than relying on cold outreach. The only real value of a tool today is its distribution channel, so focus on getting it in front of as many eyes as possible.
To be clear, I don't rely on affiliates as my primary marketing channel, so I keep affiliate commissions low and only use them minimally—usually around 20% for my school product. I prefer to market the product myself. That said, I do run affiliate programs for other people's products. For example, when I make a video about cold email, I include a link and get a kickback. The rates can change, and recently I've seen them drop; I used to make about $10k a month from those referrals.
If you wanted to make affiliates a core part of your strategy, you’d need to be selective. I’d ask potential affiliates to send you a sample of the promotional material they’d create, and only work with those who meet a quality standard. I’d also actively hunt for affiliates by reaching out at scale—cold‑email, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn—to people with large audiences. I’d offer a small upfront payment (e.g., $250 for the first post) plus a 20% ongoing commission. The upfront payment acts as a carrot to get responses; once they reply you can evaluate their content and decide whether to move forward. If they’re a good fit, you can pay the $250 and expect the affiliate revenue to exceed that amount.