How to Build a Business So Sticky Customers Can't Leave

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Today we're talking about stickiness.

[00:00:02]The more stickiness you have in your business, the more times people will buy from you and the longer they'll buy from you. Both of which make you a lot of money. And I would know because I built a multi-sefigure business, mastering [music] just five layers of stickiness.

[00:00:16]Master most or all of these and you'll escape that [music] rat race of having to always find new customers every single month. So to start out here, let's talk about what stickiness means in the first place. Just so we're all clear, what actually creates stickiness in a product or business is what's called value. If people don't get any value, they won't buy from you at all.

[00:00:32]If they don't get very much value, they won't stay for very long or they won't pay you very much money. So, the more value you create in your business or your product, the more money you can make, the more times you can charge, and the longer people will stay. And it essentially acts like rings, kind of like an onion, right? There's layers to this here. The deeper you go into these five layers, the stickier you're going to get, which means the higher revenue ceiling you're going to have, and the more scalable your business is normally going to be. But it's also a double-edged sword here, okay? The deeper you go, it's also harder to build. It's far more technical, more complex, and it may not match your lifestyle or your preferences for the type of business you want to make. So, don't look at these rings so much as like a goal. You have to get to the middle so much as they are more trade-offs, right? Yes, creating a sticky business is extremely valuable, but it does come with some big costs.

[00:01:14]some costs that you may or may not want to take on yourself. Let's start with the first layer. We have durable value.

[00:01:20]Durable value is one-time value. And I personally call this one-time tree ongoing fruit. What I mean by that, think about a tree. When you go and buy a peach tree, for example, that is a one-time expense you take on. But the tree by itself only has so much value.

[00:01:34]What actually creates the value is the fruit the tree produces. And in this info business world, right, selling courses, coaching, communities, memberships, any way where you're packaging your knowledge online and monetizing it, the most obvious form of durable value, that one-time tree is information. It's education, which is pretty obvious, right? I mean, think about it. You get the education. Once it's seen, you can't unsee it. It's always going to be in your brain in some way, shape, or form. And it's for that reason. For every online course or info product we've ever sold, we've always priced it in the following way. a higher onetime fee on the front end with the potential of some ongoing consumable value. Again, it might cost me $1,000 to buy a tree. If I wanted to buy fruit ongoing, that might cost me $5 per fruit. But if you price your durable one-time value wrong, you can really screw up your business model. And I know this because we watched it happen with full-time filmmaker, extremely successful online course business. We've sold $25 million worth of that one online course. For eight years, we always priced it at around $500 to $1,000. Big onetime upfront fee. Just last year, we tried something. Let's charge monthly for this instead of a onetime fee. So, we charged $37 a month for the exact same education, right? The durable one-time value. And what we found was pretty staggering. We had extremely high churn. Here's what it looked like. Our lifetime value went from about $500 per customer all the way down to $150 per customer simply because we were pricing the value incorrectly.

[00:02:51]Course Creator Pro is another online course. We've sold $3.5 million worth of that. We've always sold that for about $1,000. Again, we're giving people the info. It's the education. It's the how-to, the videos. That has a ton of value. It is very important. But that is where most people stop. They don't even consider the other four rings or layers to value that you have to create if you want to build a far stickier business model. Which brings us to the second layer. This is called direct value.

[00:03:16]Direct value are things that get used up or go stale per project or per cycle.

[00:03:20]These are things like templates, presets, swipe files, creative assets, recipes, plans. And this is the second layer because it's the most obvious place people's brains go when they think about, okay, I have to create some sort of consumable value, not just the durable one-time value of education. And so they build things like we've built for full-time filmmaker, for example. We would give filmmakers our Premiere Pro project files. We'd give them our assets, our sound effects libraries, our most used stock footage, some title animations. We gave them all sorts of direct value. In course creator pro did the same thing. We gave people funnel templates, email templates, things that we've used in the past. We gave them calculators to figure out how much they should price their courses at. Direct value or direct consumables are the easiest to build, but they also are the easiest to cancel, right? Nothing actually breaks when people leave or stop using those things. There's no switching cost, right? It's the easiest to compete with. If you look at my business personally, I find that my best use case for direct consumables are actually as lead magnets. I can sell them and I do sell them as lower ticket products. I could sell these for $27 here, $47 there. That is a very viable and valid business model and strategy.

[00:04:21]you can do that, but it's still just layer number two. It's nothing that crazy or special, but it does create a lot more stickiness past just the information. And I've also found that the more quantity of direct consumables you create, the longer that stickiness can stretch out. And this has been one of the key components that has made both Full-Time Filmmaker and Course Creator Pro, our two online education businesses, so successful, is with all of the education we give them, there's some sort of accompanying done for you tool or direct consumable that they get along with the information to help them implement it. So, it's also creating value in the sense that people just get better results, right? They're getting more value from just the information.

[00:04:55]They're actually implementing it. And when they implement it, they get results, which creates more value, which creates more stickiness. Okay? But then we've got the third layer of value. And this is human delivered value. This is exactly what you probably think it is.

[00:05:06]It's coaching, it's consulting, the masterminds, giving audits, accountability sessions, done for you services. These are genuinely consumable because every session or every human interaction and touch point you have can address a new unique customized situation. And the cool part about human delivered value, similar to direct value, is it's also very easy to give.

[00:05:25]The issue is that you're giving your time, right? You're trading time for money. And that's my least favorite part about this third type of value. It is extremely valuable, but a lot of it starts to rely on you. Now, some of you might love that, others might hate it.

[00:05:37]Another big benefit of this third layer is that it's the most accessible to everyone to just launch, right? You don't have to actually spend much time building it. It's just you. You are the person. You are the product. It's your time you're giving away. So, there's not as much like sitting down and technically building something like you'll find with the fourth and the fifth types of value I'll talk about in a minute. There's not a bunch of technical requirements. It's just opening up your calendar and slotting out time to either give the coaching, give the information, or deliver the service if you're giving a service. So human delivered value is a lot more sticky than direct value, but it is capped by your available time. And if you don't have much time, then you have to then scale it out and hire other coaches or other people to come along with you. In every business I've made so far, we have some sort of human delivered value. In my subscription services, I almost always offer some sort of a coaching call, right? Weekly coaching, could be monthly Q&As's, just the community itself and getting touch points with me as the expert. That's all human delivered value. I've also gone the route of having the entire product be the human delivered value, which is a coaching program that's more high ticket. I charge 10 $15,000 for that.

[00:06:34]You coach people for 3 to four months or longer and they're literally just getting daily or weekly phone calls with you on a one-on-one basis or in a group setting. Again, a lot of pros and cons to that. It just comes down to almost entirely just your preferences and your personality. But next, we've got layers four and five, which is where we start to dip into the much harder types of value to create, which also means they're a lot stickier and a lot more scalable long term. Layer number four is what I call strategic value. This tends to be time sensitive information. This can be things like market data, trend analysis, updated playbooks, benchmarking, anything that has a shelf life that needs to be replenished every single month or week, whatever to be valuable. And so what makes this scalable is that you are researching things once and you're delivering it to thousands of people. One of the easiest and most obvious forms this tends to pop up is newsletters. There are free newsletters, there are paid newsletters, but it is an element of stickiness, right? If I cancel, I'm going to lose that intel, the insight that I want that's going to help me to make some breakthroughs and apply some things better and to get better results. I have seen strategic value take all sorts of forms. To give you some more examples here, people that give state of the industry reports, monthly trend reports, curated news, seasonal strategies, case studies, tool recommendations, regulatory updates, industry forecasts.

[00:07:43]That is all strategic value in nature.

[00:07:45]Similar to the human delivered content, right? It still requires you somewhat as a bottleneck. You're still being the curator and the disseminator of the info, of the strategy, of the insights.

[00:07:54]And if you stop producing it, so does the consumption of it stop. The fifth and final layer, this whole equation of the types of value that you can create to create stickiness in your business is operational value. Now, I call this operational value because people need this type of value to operate at some level. It is no longer a nice to have.

[00:08:12]It's no longer some cool types of value that kind of get sprinkled in throughout your offer. This now enters a different dimension of business where people need this to actually operate. And therefore, why it is the ultimate form of stickiness, it is the hardest to create.

[00:08:24]It requires the most technical knowhow.

[00:08:26]It can be quite complex, but it is by far the easiest to scale. It has the highest revenue ceiling once done right.

[00:08:32]Operational value is ongoing tools.

[00:08:34]These are systems, software is the biggest form here. Platforms, dashboards, AI tools, something that is embedded into people's workflows on how they operate. One of the best litmus tests to figure out if you've got operational value or not is the following question. If I stop paying for this, will my ability to do the work be impaired? Not inconvenience, not a slight setback, but genuinely impaired.

[00:08:55]my workflow breaks, my access disappears, my routine falls apart. That is real stickiness. It is by far the most scalable, and once you create it, it can serve thousands of people without more of your time involved. This is why it's also my favorite type of value to create. Yes, it's the hardest, but unlike human delivered value or strategic value, it doesn't require my consistent ongoing investment of time, resource, and energy. Durable value and direct value are at least a one-time investment, right? I make the information once, and most of it's going to stay pretty timeless. Direct value is the same way. I make some tools, some templates, some things. Hopefully, you build it and structure it in a way that doesn't require some ongoing updates to make it better to keep the quality high.

[00:09:32]Those are the best types of durable and direct value. But operational value is where you get the best of both worlds.

[00:09:36]It's not only the most valuable type, but it's also the stickiest. Some quick examples here, right? Course pro, we taught people how we have sold $25 million worth of online courses. How do you create, market, and sell them? The information, the course itself, we priced at $9.97. That was the durable value. We then sprinkled in dozens of direct value by giving them templates, swipe files, cheat sheets, calculators, and more. We do weekly coaching calls, strategy calls, technical calls. I do Q&A sessions. I have a community in there. That's all human delivered value.

[00:10:02]I then mix in that strategic value both in my content, but also in my newsletters and my emails, giving people the most up-to-date trends and what's working right now in 2026. But despite all four of those types of value being delivered, I found that Course Creator Pro had a very big problem. We were giving people all the information, the systems, the how-tos, and then I was sending them off to other people to go get the operational value. Need to build a course, go to Kajjabi. Want to send emails, go to Mailchimp. Want to automate stuff? Go to Zapier. Webinars, every webinar, website, Wix. We were creating this massive revenue generating machine for other people. And in 2022, I finally stopped and said, you know what?

[00:10:36]This is great. We're providing a lot of value, but could we give people some operational value so that we can get the stickiness? I can further embed that value into a subscription that creates consumable value that then recurs every single month. And I don't have to be in this rat race hamster wheel trying to get new customers through my four rings of value every single month. The first four types of value were not enough to create an extremely scalable business.

[00:10:59]That's now gotten me to $300,000 a month. But again, let me just pause here for a minute. You don't have to create operational value. Full-time filmmaker got to $25 million in lifetime revenue without any operational value. Very little strategic value. and almost no human delivered value. So, we were able to sell eight figures of that online course strictly from just durable value and direct value. And it worked extremely well. So, again, the point here that I'm trying to make is that it's nuanced. You have to really diagnose what are my preferences? What are my personal goals? What's my personality type? What's the type of business I want to make? Am I shooting for a $100 million valuation? Am I trying to make my first $5,000 a month?

[00:11:33]But as you start finding success in those early stages, you'll start to find that, you know what, do I want to scale this? And if I do want to scale it, then I have to start considering the other types of stickiness, the other types of value that I can create. My specific customer needs a software and a platform to create funnels and emails and websites and host the course and the community and then a CRM to manage that all and automate it all. That's what my customer needs. Yours are going to need very different things. And at this point, you might be thinking, "This is great. A lot of theory. I get the five types of value and how that creates more stickiness. But how does that apply to me? How do I actually create these five types of value from my business, from my niche to create stickiness? And for you, I have programmed a single AI prompt that you can plug into your AI tool of choice. You can use Chat TBT, you can use Claude, Gemini, I don't care what you use. It is a single copy and paste prompt that's going to walk you through your current business structure. It's then going to give you ideas for all five types of value that you can create.

[00:12:23]Map out the whole business plan for how your offer interacts with each other, how to price each and every part of it, so that you can create a sticky business. I've done the hard work for you by programming that AI prompts on everything I've taught in this video.

[00:12:35]Just click the link in the description.

[00:12:36]Let me know which email to send it to you. Copy and paste and use away. But past that, if you want the entire blueprint for how we create, market and sell online courses to build your funnels, your landing pages, to send your emails, to automate, to communicate with your customers, to host the community, you want the 247 technical support, you want the handholding you'll get on our coaching calls, if you want the how-to on exactly how we create content for social media on Instagram, YouTube, and more. All of that is included in one subscription. I call it Course Creator 360. You can join a 30-day free trial to test it all out.

[00:13:03]See it for yourself. Again, link is also in the description. But with that, you now know exactly how to create a sticky offer. If it ain't sticky, people will cancel. They will churn. And you are limiting the level at which you [music] can build your business too. So, use the prompt. Apply these five rings of stickiness into your business. And like, subscribe, come along ride with me.

[00:13:19]We'll see you in the next one.