leap.club Shuts Down Amid Funding Crunch and Retention Woes

The women-only community business leap.club is shutting down its operations after raising $2.3 million since its founding in 2020 because of expensive customer acquisition costs and retention issues.

The startup used LinkedIn and Instagram to publicise the decision operations. The firm claimed to have done a lot of things correctly in terms of atmosphere, space, member experience, and event planning, but the unpleasant reality is that the acquisition and retention metrics weren't strong.

 Leap.club announced that it will close its offline club in Bandra, Mumbai, which it opened last year, as part of the decision. Additionally, it plans to shut down its app and online community by the end of this month.

The business went on to say that it had to make the difficult choice to put the app and online community on hold by the end of May.

Climbing the Success Ladder

Leap.club entered an expansion phase in 2024 after experiencing rapid growth in 2023. In the same year, it moved its headquarters from Gurugram to Mumbai and opened its first actual community workspace in the nation's financial centre.

Mumbai's offline workspace included meeting spaces, workstations, and carefully chosen experiences. Remarkably, leap.club also sought to establish a real workspace of this kind in Bengaluru.

According to the startup's "2024 wrap" blog, it staged over 50 social and professional events and onboarded 450 paying members for its Mumbai club. But there were issues with the expansion as well.

The firm claimed to have closed a capital round during the year, but it abruptly collapsed and never came to fruition. According to leap.club, the company is surviving some difficult times and is working as a team of ten people.

 It's challenging, but it's also an opportunity for the brand to concentrate on what really counts and work harder to recover.

The Downfall

The startup's journey appears to have ended abruptly due to a lack of finance and an uncertain business plan. When the firm first started out, it used a call-based sales technique, onboarding users by speaking with them on the phone.

The first 10,000 members were onboarded in 2.5 years; however, this methodology limited the startup's options for scalability and caused "team fatigue".

Leap.club shifted all of its membership buys online in 2023. But this led to a short-term revenue shortage. The startup's financials also showed the difficulties with its business plan.

 According to Tofler, their net loss increased from INR 3.38 Cr in the previous fiscal year to INR 5.59 Cr in the fiscal year that ended in March 2024 (FY24), a 65% increase. In addition, its sales fell 54.1% from INR 5.7 Cr in FY23 to INR 3.7 Cr in the reviewed year.