Do the normal rules of churn apply?

I’ve been building out my own online education presence and just recently changed my opinion about course subscriptions. I used to want to chase the MRR, so my thought was to have a subscription where you could access all the courses I created. Like you discovered, there’s a bit of a misalignment of incentive there. I want recurring revenue, you may just want to learn one topic.

I’m in the process of switching my model to have two components:

1. Standalone course sales. One time fee, no subscription. Buy the thing, keep the thing.
2. Membership for weekly live classes. Pay a subscription, get access to join the live sessions. Get the previous sessions and discounts on courses.

My assumption is the subscription model better aligns with the continued value delivery of ongoing live classes. We’ll see if it works!

I think it makes sense that your churn would be higher than that of most SaaS products. As you said, people might subscribe for a month, learn what they need, and then unsubscribe. That doesn't mean they're unhappy or your content didn't meet their expectations.

Check out this IH interview with Joel Hooks from egghead.io: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-we-turned-coding-screencasts-into-a-million-dollar-business-f20ef382a1

There's a chart of their new vs. lost MRR, and you can see that there have been times when their churn was beating their growth. I think that's a terrible sign for a SaaS business but not as bad for online courses. Joel also mentions that switching to annual subscriptions helped their growth.

A couple of thoughts here:

1. Would be interesting to compare notes with other folks in the same course-creator space since churn benchmarks vary from one vertical to another and comparing to SaaS benchmarks feels like apples vs. oranges to me.
2. I think as long as you have info on when/why someone leaves your product, and you can relative address issues of 'regrettable' churn (churn where you can internally take action to improve your service or product to retain future customers that might encounter the same barrier) — measuring relative change might month over month might be more valuable to track 😄

Just thoughts though — was intrigued when I bumped into this post!

ah, what a great topic! i've got a course that has got some churn and it's normal... part of me think that optimizing against churn based on saas models can be over-kill... sometimes, you just have to figure out what works for you.

i'm not an expert though. if your subscriber gets what they came for... then, it's all good, right? unless they missed something else...