Club

Buying a fresh audience every week is the cost that never comes down. And the alternative is not a points scheme.

A points scheme records presence: you came, have a stamp. What it never records is absence, which is precisely the signal that matters. When someone starts to drift away, a stamp card says nothing.

Three numbers per person, and one of them raises its hand

The model is called RFM, and it has been the standard in direct selling for decades for one reason: three numbers per person is enough.

Recency, how long since their last visit. Frequency, how often they come. Value, how much they leave when they do.

The third tells you who you cannot afford to lose. The second, who is a regular. And the first is the only one of the three that moves on its own: it climbs every day that person does not show up. That is the warning, and it arrives while someone is leaving, not once they have gone.

It comes out of your sales, not out of a form

The reason this almost never works in this sector is not the model, it is where the numbers come from. A standalone loyalty club asks people to fill something in, download something or carry something — and then you only measure the people who agree to be measured.

Here the three numbers are worked out from your own sales data, the data in Web. There is nothing to fill in and nobody falls outside the count: if they bought, they are in.

And what comes out of here goes back to the start of the cycle. The system does not only know who to keep; it knows with what — what that person drinks, what time they arrive, what brought them back last time — and that is the difference between sending a promotion to the whole list and opening the door early for the people who carry your takings.

Out of the three numbers come the two that actually get used to decide: twelve-month value by segment, which is how you know what you can afford to pay to acquire, and the season-on-season retention rate, which tells you whether the business is growing or just churning.

“Treat them differently” has to mean something

Priority access to what that person already buys. An advantage for coming back, not for signing up. And tiers with written conditions, which is the only thing that stops “being a member” ending up as decoration with no consequence.

And an honest word about the three numbers

They come out of your sales data, so they measure purchase. And buying is not turning up: some people pay and never appear, and some come every week on someone else’s ticket.

The good signal is actual attendance, and that comes from the door. Once it is there, the same three numbers get worked out on who really came — and that is where badges and challenges for nights attended start to make sense, earned by turning up rather than by paying. It is proposed, not decided, and until then this page says what is true: purchase is a good approximation, it is not the same thing.

And the channel nobody measures

Ask anyone who runs a venue where their crowd comes from and they will tell you word of mouth. Ask how much, and there is no answer — because it is the one important channel with no way to measure it. Everyone knows it exists, everyone knows it is the cheapest, and everyone operates blind on it.

A referral programme turns it into a channel: whoever brings someone is recorded, what that person spends can be attributed back, and recommending stops being an invisible favour and starts having something in return. It is the real alternative to buying a new customer every week, and it is the one no platform in this sector gives you.

It is decided and not yet built. When it is, this page will say so in the present tense.

Under your brand, not ours

It is instanced with your identity. Your customers do not join a Sound Republic club: they join yours.

Where it is today

In production, and with more miles on it than almost anything else: the rules — tiers, benefits, conditions — have been validated with a real client at residentes.net, for Papagayo Tenerife, since before the OS existed.

What is left is bringing them inside. Today Club runs alongside, and it is the only piece where the business logic gets reused rather than the code: it is being rewritten natively. Until that happens, this page says so.