Building Retention In A Transient Place

When Sarukhanyan started Run & Fun in January 2026, she was not trying to solve a retention problem. She was trying to solve a loneliness problem.

Hoi An, a small city on Vietnam’s central coast, is full of people in motion. Travellers pass through for a few days. Digital nomads stay for a month. Expats build longer lives around changing visa rhythms, new friendships, and the slow churn of people arriving and leaving. It is beautiful, social, and temporary all at once. For someone looking for routine, that transience creates a strange kind of abundance. There are always people around, but not always a structure that helps those people become part of each other’s lives.

“The main thing Hoi An was missing, in my opinion, was a place, online or offline, where people who share an interest in an active, sporty lifestyle could come together,” Sarukhanyan says.

There was a run club in Da Nang, about 45 minutes away, and some Hoi An residents were already making the journey. One member later described commuting there twice a week before Run & Fun existed. The demand was visible. What was missing was local infrastructure: a recurring, low-pressure ritual that made it easy for people to show up, move together, and keep coming back.

But Run & Fun did not grow simply because people wanted to run. It grew because it understood something many communities miss: in a transient environment, belonging has to form quickly, gently, and repeatedly. “Sometimes you just want to show up, see your friends, sweat together, talk about life, and most importantly keep coming back to do it again and again,” Sarukhanyan's desire became the operating system for the group

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The problem with retention in a transient place

Most retention models assume a relatively stable audience. A customer joins, stays, returns, upgrades, renews, or leaves. Churn is usually treated as a problem to reduce.

But a town like Hoi An complicates that logic. People leave because their visas end, their trip continues, their work changes, or their life moves elsewhere. Exit is not always a sign that the community failed. Often, it is simply the condition the community exists inside.

That means a group like Run & Fun cannot rely on keeping the same people forever. Its continuity has to come from something else: recurring rituals, visible activity, shared norms, and a small core of committed members who make the group feel alive even as its edges keep changing.

By May 1st, around four months after launch, the Run & Fun WhatsApp group had 360 members. At any single run in April, average attendance was around eight people. On the surface, that could look like a weak conversion rate: hundreds in the group, only a handful showing up each time.

But the monthly picture tells a different story. Based on April poll data, 49 unique members indicated that they attended at least once during the month. Across roughly 20 to 24 runs, that created an estimated 160 to 190 total attendances. In other words, the community was not failing to activate. It was operating in layers. There was a small core of frequent participants. There was a wider ring of semi-regular runners. There were one-time attendees testing the experience. And there was a much larger group of passive WhatsApp members watching, assessing, and staying loosely connected. For retention in a transient place, that peripheral layer matters.

Lurking is not necessarily disengagement. It can be part of the onboarding process.

The WhatsApp group is not just a channel

Run & Fun’s digital space works less like a broadcast list and more like a threshold.

People can join the WhatsApp group before they are ready to attend. They can watch the tone of the chat, see photos, respond to polls, notice familiar names, and get a feel for the community without taking the social risk of arriving in person. That matters in a group where new members may be asking themselves quiet questions: Am I fit enough? Will I be too slow? Will it be awkward? Is this really for people like me?

The answer is communicated through repetition. Runs are posted. Polls are shared. Photos appear. People respond. The group stays visibly active. Nothing about that is especially complex, but the consistency lowers the emotional barrier to entry.

Belonging is not created the moment someone joins a WhatsApp group. It is created through the transition from observer to participant. Run & Fun allows that transition to be porous. Someone can join, watch, attend once, disappear for a week, come back, stay peripheral, or become part of the core.

That flexibility is part of the retention system.

In a more rigid community, inconsistent attendance might be read as low commitment. At Run & Fun, it is built into the shape of participation. The group does not require people to become fully integrated before they are allowed to belong.

The ritual does the heavy lifting

The runs themselves create the emotional centre of the community. Digital activity keeps the group visible, but the physical ritual makes it real.

A run is simple enough to repeat and structured enough to trust. People know where to go, what will happen, and what level of participation is expected. That predictability is important because social uncertainty is often a bigger barrier than the activity itself.

One regular attendee described the key ingredient as inclusivity: “You can be fast, you can be slow. [Sarukhanyan] does a great job making it clear that everybody can attend and will not be left behind.”

That norm matters. A run club can easily become intimidating, especially for beginners or people who do not identify as “real runners.” Run & Fun’s identity framing softens that. You do not need to be fast. You do not need to prove yourself. You can arrive as you are and still be counted as part of the group.

This is where the retention mechanism becomes visible. The community is not retaining people through pressure. It is retaining them through repeated emotional safety.

People return because the structure is predictable, the invitation is low-risk, and the group’s norms make participation feel possible.

Growth came from consistency, not scale

Run & Fun grew from an initial base of four members to around 300 by month three, then 360 by month four. Early growth came through friend-of-friend networks, then posters, word of mouth, and local visibility. But the more important story is not the total membership number. It is the fact that the runs kept happening.

In early communities, consistency often matters more than immediate turnout. A run with five people still creates proof. A photo in the WhatsApp group still signals activity. A poll still reminds people the group exists. A post-run coffee still deepens the relationship between those who came. Over time, those small repeated moments become social infrastructure. That infrastructure makes the group feel safer to join later. People do not have to take a leap into the unknown; they can step into something already moving.

The founder matters, but the community cannot depend only on her

Sarukhanyan’s role is central. She set the tone, shaped the norms, and created the original invitation. But one of the signs that Run & Fun is becoming more resilient is that those norms are now protected by other people too. The admins and regulars help maintain the expectation that no one is left behind. They reinforce the group’s low-pressure tone. They help make the community feel less leader-dependent, without making it leaderless.

That distinction is important. Communities often become fragile when they depend too heavily on one person’s emotional energy. But they can also drift when no one is stewarding the culture. Run & Fun sits between those two risks. Sarukhanyan’s influence is still visible, but the culture is becoming transferable.

A local collaborator, Michael from Yesh, described the growth as something that depended on warmth and connection: “I don’t think I could have done it the way I run this now, with someone not as friendly, warm or inviting. If I feel a connection with someone in terms of similar ideas or ways, it’s easier for me to open more doors. So it grew naturally.”

That natural growth is not accidental. It comes from norms that other people can understand, repeat, and protect.

Retention doesn't always mean preventing people from leaving

Run & Fun’s model challenges a simple assumption: that retention means keeping the same individuals for as long as possible. In a transient town, that goal is only partly useful. People will leave. They will become inactive. They will move on. If the community treats every departure as failure, it misunderstands the environment.

A better question is whether the group can keep regenerating the conditions that make participation meaningful. Can new people understand what the group is for? Can they enter without social pressure? Can they observe before committing? Can irregular members return without awkwardness? Can a small core maintain continuity without becoming closed off? Can the digital space support physical participation rather than replace it?

Run & Fun suggests that retention in transient communities is less about permanence and more about renewal. Stability does not come from keeping everyone. It comes from sustaining a system that allows belonging to form again and again.

That does not mean churn is irrelevant. The model still has risks. A small group of highly active members carries much of the emotional and operational weight. As the WhatsApp group grows, message volume could overwhelm quieter members. Strong bonds among regulars could unintentionally make newcomers feel like outsiders. Growth could dilute the tone that made the group work in the first place. The community is resilient, but not automatic. It still requires maintenance.

The wider lesson

For brands, community builders, and service businesses, Run & Fun offers a useful reframing of what it means to "retain" your audience/customers.

Retention is often treated as an outcome: a person stayed, renewed, returned, or bought again. But in communities, especially fluid ones, retention can also be understood as a condition. It is the result of repeated signals that say: you are welcome here, you can participate at your own pace, and there will be another chance to return. That is what Run & Fun has built. Not a perfect retention machine. Not a community immune to churn. But a simple, repeatable system where people can move between observation, participation, absence, and return without fully disconnecting.

In a town defined by movement, that may be the real achievement. Run & Fun did not solve transience by trying to make everyone stay. It built a ritual strong enough to keep making room for whoever arrives next.

This article was written by Georgia Freshwater-Blizzard as part of an extended project interviewing community members, to learn about the intersection of community, retention, and belonging. If you would like to read the extended, academic case study for Run & Fun, please reach out.