How to keep paid subscribers on my site?

Hi,

Looking at your site, a few things come to mind.

The problem seems to be that there is no real reason for the mentor and the mentee to stay in the channel once they have been connected. The channel itself is not offering any additional value.

First, I would de-couple the "finding" of a mentor from the "experience" of being mentored and make a decision about which pain point your solution is going to address. I believe there is value in both models, but each model requires a slightly different strategy in order for it to be effective and profitable.

If "finding" the mentor is the pain point, then perhaps change your pricing strategy to a one-time upfront fee which enables the mentee to find and try out any number of mentors. The obvious analogy here is the dating site. Dating sites charge customers for the access or the connection, not for the actual date. Your customer's actual mentoring experience can take place on your site or offline, but how the mentoring takes place is no longer as critical of a question because you have already recouped costs when the initial connection was made. (Note - if you are going to replicate the dating site model, then you also might want to consider putting the full bios behind the paywall.)

If the "experience" of the mentoring is the pain point you are addressing, then you will need a different strategy. You'll need to find a way to make leaving the site painful. Perhaps think about making a restricted shared-access collaboration type space available and funneling all communication through that channel. This model is less like a dating site and more like one of those talk therapy sites. The finding is less important than the experience. Even if the mentor & mentee agreed to meet through Skype, neither would have access to the collaboration space where the "magic" happens unless the mentee has paid for the subscription. In this case, the reality is that the customer ends up paying for a special purpose collaboration space with a subscription model, although you wouldn't market it that way. (Also note, choosing this method does not mean that finding a mentor would not be part of this experience. It only means that the value is in the experience, not in the finding.)

Anyway, I think it boils down to deciding which pain point you are addressing, and then aligning your business model & pricing strategy to that pain point.

Hope this is helpful to you in some way.

Cheers!

-Pmox2018