This isn’t about running.
Acquisition Gets the Budget. Retention Builds the Community.
Nearly every day of the week, sometimes even before sunrise, thousands of people show up in clusters all over the world to run the same route they ran last week, and the week before that, going back years for some of them. There's no ad campaign behind it. No onboarding flow, no push notification, no algorithm nudging anyone to show up. Just a time, a place, and enough people who kept coming back that it eventually became a club.
If you’ve ever spent five minutes trapped in a conversation with me, you know that the last three years I have served on the board for the LA Leggers, Los Angeles’ original running and walking club. I’m actually also currently the Vice President of the club, and a mentor, too! I don’t get paid for any of this, in fact I’ve invested significant amounts of time and sometimes my own money into keeping the club going just so I get one thing in return: a community of people just like me who want to get in some mileage on Saturdays with friends.
Running this club has taught me something that I don't think most community and marketing teams actually believe, even when they say they do: acquisition is the sauce. Retention is the entree.
Our industry is built to reward the wrong metric
In nearly any campaign regardless of industry, launch day gets the budget – the trailer, the press push, the countdown. It's the most measurable, most dramatic, and most fundable moment in a community's life, and it's also the moment that matters least for whether a community survives. A new sign-up, follower, customer – or whatever – is a hypothesis, not a result. Being able to acquire any of these personas (let’s call them “fans” to keep things clean) shows that you were able to convert the thesis of your campaign into an action, but unless the product you are selling is something someone will only need once in their lives and never interact with your brand again, you may have forgotten the only goal that actually matters: keep them coming back.
Most organizations and brands are structured to optimize for the hypothesis. Acquisition has a clear owner, a clean funnel, and metrics that update regularly. Retention is messier; it lives in behavior over time, often it operates more like a lifecycle (or a loop for any of my dedicated readers) with fans regularly entering and exiting, and the people responsible for it are usually the ones with the least amount of power or feedback in the building. So the incentive structure quietly tells everyone: get people in the door, and something else will figure out whether they stay.
Nothing else figures it out. The door isn't the hard part.
What actually keeps people showing up
Operating a local nonprofit run club has been instrumental in shaping how I view community-building. We do not have any fancy mechanism or customer funnel for acquiring new members; no CRM, no re-engagement email, no loyalty tier – you pay your membership fee to get a shirt and a training plan. And yet people show up, unprompted, for years. If you actually watch why, four things are doing all the work, and none of them are content.
Ritual, not content. The route may change, but the meeting place is always the same. The time doesn't change. Heck, if anything you only get punished with longer miles the longer you stick around. There is no reward or novelty for being consistent, there is only the people around you. People don't return because something novel is waiting for them; they return because the thing they already like doing has a fixed place to happen. Most community strategy is obsessed with fresh content as the reason to come back. Often the more honest answer is a reliable container.
A low bar to re-entry. Miss three weeks, show up again, everybody greets you with a smile and says they’re happy you’re back. The club doesn't punish absence or require you to re-earn your place. Compare that to how many digital communities quietly punish lapsed members: old posts buried, no acknowledgment of a return, an entire algorithm that's moved on without you. The lowest-friction communities make it just as easy to come back as it was to start.
Social accountability to each other, not to the organization. Nobody keeps showing up for the club – they show up for the person they run next to or the pace group they'd feel a little bad bailing on. The organization's real job isn't to be the reason people stay, it's to engineer the conditions where people become each other's reason. That's a completely different design problem than "how do we get people to engage with our brand more."
Visible, incremental identity. Somewhere in the first few months, a person who "goes running sometimes" becomes "a runner” – or even more sacred in my club because we welcome all paces and venerate one personality: the marathoner in training. Nobody hands them that identity, it accumulates over time, and the club just gives it a place to be witnessed. Retention begins the moment after acquisition has done its job, and it never stops.
None of those four things cost money in the way acquisition can and does. None of them show up cleanly in a quarterly report. All four are why the club still exists with no marketing spend at all.
The customer journey isn't a funnel with a finish line
The standard framing — awareness, consideration, conversion, retention — treats retention as the last stage, the thing you get to once acquisition has done its job. I would argue this model treats retention too much like an end point, or worse, a spout that flows on its own. Retention isn't the last stage of the journey; in most cases, it is the actual product. Acquisition is just the mechanism that gets someone close enough to experience it.
That reframing changes how we build out our marketing model, and by extension, the entire team. If retention is the product, the earliest design questions aren't "how do we get people in the door," they're "what's the ritual," "how easy is it to come back after they have been away," "who is this person accountable to beside the brand," and "what does this person get out of this if they stick around." Answer those first and acquisition gets easier almost as a side effect because the thing you're inviting people into is actually worth staying for. Skip them, and acquisition just gets you a bigger number of people discovering that out the back door.
“This is about running, and this isn’t about running.”
I often quote my favorite running mentor, Coach Bennet of the Nike Run Club, when I inevitably use running as a metaphor. This isn't a running story, and it isn't really a gaming story either, though it holds just as true there. A new community built around any hobby, product, or platform is making the same bet a run club makes every morning: that showing up once will turn into showing up again for reasons that have very little to do with the thing that got them there in the first place. A trading card game, a fitness app, a professional network, a brand's Discord – all of them are asking the same design question a run club answers every single week.
The brands that treat community as a funnel will keep optimizing the door. The ones that treat it as a practice – something with a ritual, a low cost of return, a web of accountability between members, and room for someone to become something – are the ones people are still showing up for a decade later, unprompted, before sunrise, for reasons that were never really about the brand at all.