The Treadmill of Transactional Energy
That sinking feeling usually hits around the 13th of the month. It’s when the churn reports finally stabilize, and you see the truth laid bare: for every 23 new subscriptions you managed to claw in, 13 of the old guard have quietly slipped away. It’s a deficit model disguised as growth. You run and run, sweating on a treadmill that keeps accelerating, convinced you’re gaining ground, but you look down and realize the ground beneath you is actively being dissolved.
We’re addicted to the notification high. I am, too. Don’t look at me like that; I know you check the email subject line that promises “A New Subscriber!” even though you know, statistically, 83% of those people are just passing through, testing the water, carrying the transactional energy of a drive-thru window. And yet, we build entire marketing strategies around maximizing that dopamine hit. We prioritize the acquisition engine, the cheap, fast lead magnet, the mass broadcast-the noise-because volume feels safer than depth.
Audience vs. Community Intent
High Friction to Keep
Low Friction to Keep
Different Species of Relationship
This is where the core mistake lies. We confuse an audience with a community. They are not adjacent points on a spectrum; they are two fundamentally different species of relationship. We believe that if we just get enough people in the door, a community will organically form. It doesn’t. You can throw 10,003 people into a digital space, but without intention, all you have is a crowded room full of strangers who only care about what you-the host-can provide.
An Audience is Passive: They consume. They pay for entertainment. Their relationship is purely transactional: “What have you done for me lately?” If the next piece of content doesn’t hit the mark, they leave. They are easy to attract but impossible to retain long-term without constantly increasing the quality and quantity of the entertainment offered, which is an unsustainable treadmill that burns out the creator every 3 months.
A Community is Active: They contribute. They invest in the relationship. Their relationship is relational: “How can we solve this together?” They value the container, the connection to others, and the identity granted by belonging, often more than they value the content itself. They are difficult to attract but incredibly loyal. They stay 13 times longer, easily.
When you use blunt, low-friction tools for acquisition, you invite low-intent individuals. You cast a net wide enough to catch 1,003 people, but you end up spending all your time managing the 973 who were never really interested in staying. They were attracted by the flash, not the substance. The focus shifts from serving the loyal core to constantly entertaining the revolving door.
💡 Insight: Retention starts at the moment of attraction.
This is the single most counterintuitive thing I have learned in 23 years of trying to build things online. If you want a community, you must implement filters that weed out the merely curious. This sounds elitist, doesn’t it? But it’s protective. You are protecting the time and energy of the 33 people who *are* ready to invest.
Focusing on high-quality intent is non-negotiable for generational building.
This is why focusing on quality subscribers matters, as highlighted by platforms like FanvueModels who prioritize ready-to-engage users.
Stewardship Over Fixing
I spent an afternoon last week sitting in Sophie F.’s workshop. She restores grandfather clocks. Not the quartz movement knock-offs, but the big, complicated regulators from the 1700s. I was supposed to be picking up a box, but I ended up watching her hands for nearly 43 minutes. She wasn’t fast. She was attentive. She spent a solid 3 minutes just looking at a tiny, rusted spring, not touching it, just observing its tension and history.
“You can’t fix a clock,” she said, leaning over the movement. “You can only steward it. Fixing implies a one-time job, a transaction. But a community-or these clocks-they are living systems. They need constant, varied, respectful attention. The moment you treat maintenance as a one-off payment, you’ve guaranteed its failure 13 months down the line.“
The audience model is the transactional fix. Pay me $3, I give you content, we’re even. The community model is the stewardship. It requires understanding that the mechanism is fragile and requires continuous investment in the relationship-not just the output.
The Psychological Contract: V vs I
Value (V)
Price and content sensitive. If V+1 exists elsewhere, they leave.
Identity (I)
Pays for belonging. Leaving means abandoning a part of self.
If you are only delivering V, you are replaceable. If you deliver I-if you make people feel like they belong to something bigger than their individual subscription-they don’t leave. The mistake I made early on, maybe 13 years ago, was trying to scale belonging. You cannot scale belonging. You can scale *reach*-that’s the audience game. But when you try to apply mass-market tactics to community formation, you only dilute the essential emotional connection until it’s tasteless water.
