Talks that change how your audience thinks about the people who pay them.
I love being in the room — big teams or small ones, on stage or on a screen. I give keynotes, operator-led deep-dives, and executive working sessions on customer lifetime value, retention, and recurring revenue — operator to operator.
Signature talks
You Have Customers. Do You Have Members?
The difference between people who pay you and people who belong to you — and why the second group is the only durable growth engine left. Built on two decades inside Prime, SiriusXM, and Walmart+, and adapted to the room: retailers, media, SaaS, associations. (For credit union audiences, the talk becomes "You Have Members. Do You Have a Membership?") The audience leaves with the four-layer Growth Gap framework and one question they can't unhear about their own business.
The Renewal Memo: Working Backwards from the Member You Want to Keep
Amazon writes the press release before it builds the product. The best membership businesses write the renewal before they win the member: the note a customer would write a year from now explaining why staying was obvious. This talk turns that idea into an operating discipline — onboarding, gateway behaviors, and the metrics that predict retention long before the renewal date.
Mind the Growth Gap: Why Membership Businesses Stall — and How to Restart Them
The core framework talk. Clarity, Momentum, Durability, Accountability: where growth actually breaks, how to diagnose which layer is yours, and what the weekly operating rhythm of a healthy membership business looks like. Includes the promise-drift diagnostic and real patterns from consumer and institutional membership businesses.
Where I go deep
Membership isn't a marketing tactic — it's your operating system
Reframing how leadership teams treat recurring revenue: not a program, an operating model.
Stop over-funding acquisition: retention is the cheapest growth lever
The math, the mindset shift, and the moves that make finance stop treating retention as a cost center.
Onboarding is destiny: time-to-value determines renewal
The first 30 days of a member decide the next 30 months — designed, not accidental.
Graceful exits and winbacks: how to lose customers and still win
Cancellation flows and winback design that protect brand trust and unlock revenue most companies leave on the table.
Org design for recurring revenue: owners, accountability, cadence
Who owns the member number, what the weekly rhythm looks like, and how the board sees it.
Formats: keynotes (30–60 min) · executive and board workshops · association sessions · virtual keynotes and webinars. Also available for podcasts and contributed articles.
Bio
Matt Epstein has spent two decades inside the world's biggest membership machines. At Amazon, he helped launch Prime Day and scale Amazon Prime, Music, and Grocery. At SiriusXM, he built the streaming subscription business from the ground up. At Walmart, he led loyalty, retention, and member experience strategy for Walmart+. He is the author of Mastering Membership: The Guide to Loyalty, Retention, and Transformational Subscription Growth, a Partner at LF Partners, and the creator of the Growth Gap framework. He speaks about why companies with loyal customers still stall — and the operating systems that turn customers into members who stay.
Speaking sample coming soon