254: The STICK Test - Why Your Students Aren't Getting Results
Marketing Your Business - Marketing Strategies for Business Owners
Stu McLaren
4.9 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you teach for a living and your students keep telling you your content is amazing, but six months later nothing's changed in their business... this episode might rattle you a little bit. And that's a good thing.
A conversation with Scott Paley inside our Impact Mastermind cracked something open for me. Scott consumed all of our Summit content, but didn't show up live, didn't watch a single video. Instead, he ran the transcripts through Claude. And it made me ask a bigger question: what's actually happening to retention when people learn this way? The research is staggering. Students who used ChatGPT to study scored 57.5% on retention tests 45 days later. Traditional learners scored 68.5%. That's an 11-point gap, and it's not because AI is bad. It's because of cognitive offloading.
In this episode, I'll share three things that stood out from the research, and then walk you through a simple five-letter test you can run your content through. I'm calling it the STICK test, and once you hear it, you'll see exactly where your courses, programs, and memberships are leaking transformation, and what to do about it.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why AI summaries cause students to retain 11 points less than traditional learners (and the cognitive offloading effect behind it)
- The "passive learner trap": passive learners feel 62.5% prepared but only retain 79%, while active learners retain 94%
- The full STICK test — Space, Trigger, Illustrate, Community, Keep — and how to apply it to anything you teach
- Why the membership model naturally outperforms one-off courses for long-term student transformation
- The one shift that changes everything: you're not paid to teach, you're paid to make it stick
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you're a coach, an expert, an author, a course creator, or anyone who teaches for a living, |
| 0:05.7 | this episode might rattle you a little bit. |
| 0:08.3 | And I think it's a good thing because you pour everything into your content, your modules, your videos, your live calls, |
| 0:15.0 | and then you watch students who consume it and somehow they don't change. |
| 0:19.3 | They tell you that it was amazing. |
| 0:21.8 | But six months later, |
| 0:26.2 | nothing's different in their life or their business. And you wonder what's going on. |
| 0:30.7 | Well, today I'm going to share what I learned from a conversation that genuinely shifted how I'm thinking about this. And there's research behind it that's pretty staggering. |
| 0:34.7 | And by the end, you're going to have a simple five-letter test |
| 0:37.9 | that you can run your content through. I'm calling it the stick test because if your students |
| 0:42.9 | don't get results, your business doesn't grow. It's that simple. Welcome to marketing your business. |
| 0:48.8 | I'm Stu McLaren, co-founder of membership.io, and author of predictable profits.. Now here's the truth. You are one great |
| 0:56.2 | marketing idea away from transforming your business. One strategy can be the difference between |
| 1:01.7 | struggling and thriving between a business that drains you and one that fuels your life. Every episode, |
| 1:08.1 | you're going to get specific tactics you need to build your audience, |
| 1:11.2 | attract more customers, and scale your business, all without the burnout. |
| 1:15.4 | These are real strategies, real numbers, real behind the scenes. |
| 1:19.5 | Buckle your seatbelts, my friend. |
| 1:20.9 | Let's go! |
| 1:23.7 | All right, so here's the deal. |
| 1:25.4 | I mentioned in episode 252 where I gave you a debrief of some of the summit stats. |
| 1:32.7 | One of the things that stood out to me that I was sharing with our Impact Mastermind, |
... |
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