How to See Churn Coming Before It Kills Your MRR

17:51

How to See Churn Coming Before It Kills Your MRR

Baremetrics 17.04.2026 21 просмотров 1 лайков

Machine-readable: Markdown · JSON API · Site index

Смотреть на YouTube

Поделиться Telegram VK Бот

Транскрипт Скачать .md

Анализ с AI

Описание видео

Luke Marshall, CEO of Baremetrics, and Andrea Del Angel, Content Marketing Manager at Baremetrics, are back for round two on churn: this time digging into a Micro SaaS Reddit post from a solo founder who says it simply - churn is slowly getting to me. Tracking churn indicators, recovering at-risk customers, and building systems to get ahead of cancellations before they happen — that's what this episode is all about. Whether you're a solo SaaS founder watching your MRR drain faster than you can fill it, a RevOps lead trying to build automated churn signals, or a founder who's ever lost a customer and had no idea it was coming, this episode breaks down the frameworks and real-world tactics that actually work. ⏱️ Timestamps: 00:00 – The r/MicroSaaS Reddit post 01:30 – Early churn indicators: delinquencies, failed payments, seat removals, login drop-off 03:00 – Do you see churn coming or is it always a surprise? 03:49 – When someone cancels: should you reach out or move on? 05:06 – How to actually save a customer who's about to leave 06:21 – Call to cancel vs. ease of cancellation: Luke's take 07:52 – Why discounts don't always save churning customers 08:56 – How to track product usage (Clarity, Hotjar, logins, report opens) 10:03 – Low volume churn feels personal and that's okay 11:11 – Reddit comment roundup: community advice on churn recovery 12:00 – Why you need to look at user churn AND revenue churn separately 14:03 – The customer waterfall: Luke's 90-day renewal review system 16:00 – The unpopular take: churn is often a support problem, not a product problem What you'll learn in this Reddit Answers episode: → The churn pre-indicators to monitor before a customer ever hits cancel (failed payments, seat removal, login frequency, support ticket spikes) → How to structure outreach after a cancellation based on your ASP and volume (high-touch vs. automated) → The real purpose of a call-to-cancel flow → Why customers who accept steep discounts often churn within 3–6 months anyway → Luke's minimum product usage tracking stack: logins, active sessions, report generation → How to define "signs of life" in your product and automate alerts when they go dark → Why early churn feels personal (and how to stop taking it that way) → The difference between user churn and revenue churn, and why your #1 churn reason for each is probably different → How Baremetrics uses a customer waterfall to review accounts 90 days ahead of renewal → The "sign of life" checklist Luke's team runs before proactive renewal outreach → Why churn is often a support problem in disguise If you found this helpful, hit that Like button, Subscribe, and tap the bell 🔔 so you don't miss our weekly Reddit deep dives! __________ #saas #churn #b2b 🔔 Subscribe to Baremetrics for weekly Reddit answers, SaaS metrics insights, and founder growth strategies. ► Start your free Baremetrics trial: https://app.baremetrics.com/users/sig... ► Follow Baremetrics on LinkedIn: / baremetrics Where to find us: Luke Marshall, CEO at Baremetrics: / lukebaremetrics Andrea Del Angel, Content Marketing Manager at Baremetrics: / andreadelang

Оглавление (13 сегментов)

The r/MicroSaaS Reddit post

All right, so welcome back to another Reddit chats. We had such a great chat on churn the other day, Luke, that I wanna talk about the topic again, but get a little bit deeper into the subject. So we found a Reddit post that we'll go through and you can go ahead and tell us more about churn, but specifically through this user's eyes. Yeah, this is a great post in MicroSaas. And as you mentioned, we have done a previous very strong recording on what is churn, essentially, right? And the different types that it can take, the different components of churn, and how you can combat them. This one here is one of those questions that comes from the individual that's trying to make it work. They're trying to figure out, what do I do about new MRR, new churn, all this sort of stuff. And they say that they're a solo SaaS founder. Churn is slowly getting to me, which is often the case. Churn is one of those things that we don't necessarily address straight away because all we're focusing on is building a client base, getting you product out the door and building MRR. And we call it the leaky bucket or the hole in the bucket that starts to drain quicker, the bigger you get. And one of our great power users, Adam Robinson, when he was building RB2B and Retention. com on LinkedIn, would obviously share our graphs regularly. And for a good strategic period of time there, he was hammering on about churn. Why is my churn so high? What am I doing about churn? And he went through a really clear sort of six month journey on combating churn directly. And I think a few of these posts, points in this post today will actually raise some of the strategies that Adam outlined in his LinkedIn posts when he was going through that period as well. The questions this founder asks to others is, you see churn coming? was always a surprise.

Early churn indicators: delinquencies, failed payments, seat removals, login drop-off

When someone you reach out and move on? Every, either save a customer who's about to leave and if so, how? And how are you tracking actual product usage? So there's an inference there that product usage is directly tied to churn, which in many cases is true. So we can go through one by one, but do you see churn coming or is it always a surprise? This is, this is one of those things where it shouldn't be a surprise in many ways. If you have the system set up and it's kind of relates to that, how are you tracking product usage? How are you tracking your billing? How are you seeing? in the platform by others, not just the admin, et cetera. That's sort of those churn indicators that we would call them, early signs of churn. Some of the things to look out for are delinquencies, late payments, failed payments, decrease in usage, contraction of the subscription tier, removing seats, if you're a seat-based company as well is another thing. And then overall, just yeah, lack of usage. Logins have dried up. No reports being sent, no requests being submitted to Intercom and you just get that sent. So there are platforms out there and we have some internal tools as well that allow us to sort of raise those flags consequentially and see that because they did this and then they did this, we think they're now at churn risk. One of those actions in isolation may well not be a churn indicator, but when you start to see them line up, that's when you realize that, yeah, one probably leads to the other. It's not always a surprise and it shouldn't be if you have the right systems in place. I think the question to ask for this founder isn't so much, you see churn coming or is it always a surprise is how do I best see churn coming?

Do you see churn coming or is it always a surprise?

What can I set up to do that? And I just mentioned a few of those things. Cancellation insights, which I'll talk about later as well. Obviously one of our core functions in Baremetrics. It is tied in with other things, a way to start to gather the reasons why people are leaving and then put monitors and gatherers in place before that decision happens to see it. Right. So if it is something like you didn't have the feature I wanted, then you might want to be having an intercom review where how many times has this individual requested a new feature or requested something different that you offer inside the platform via intercom. And, know, once they've submitted three tickets in a month. then you're starting to think, okay, maybe we don't have the features they need and that's churn risk. Do I address it head on, build the features or do we just go through and am I gonna break up or we say, hey, unfortunately we didn't have what you need. You know, don't have core ICP, let's move on. That's it too. So number two, when someone cancels, do you reach out or move on?

When someone cancels: should you reach out or move on?

Always reach out, always take an opportunity to talk to a client, current, previous, upcoming about your platform. what value did they get from it, if any at all, what is the solution they've now moved to if they have churned off you. And in particular, you can address those reasons that they churned, like I said, more often than not, those cancellation reasons are going to revolve around price, product, the company themselves, we've outgrown it, we're shutting down, we're moving on, or some sort of new platform requirement that they have as well. So absolutely always reach out where you can. Now. Again, whenever we have these conversations, these Q and A's on Reddit and we talk to founders, it's always contextual, right? You say, well, you reach out to everyone. I'm a, you know, $2. 99 SaaS for B2C. I get 400 churns a day, right? It's like how do I reach out to everyone? So there's nothing wrong with automated outreach after the fact as well. Why did you leave us? And again, this is where churning sites, cancellation insights is really good because automated widget pop up, automated email, follow-ups. that you don't have to manually touch. All you get to see is the data back to say why. If you are a high ticket enterprise, then I would suggest that you're having those conversations well before churn anyway, and you should be reaching out after to understand what you're missing. So the lower volume, the higher the touch point. But yes, you absolutely should reach out in one way or another and then try and continually gather intelligence and know how to build your product, but to satisfy the reasons people are churning as well. Whoever saved a customer who's about to leave.

How to actually save a customer who's about to leave

Yeah, all the time, all the time. And how is again, just talking to them and understanding why, understand the why, because sometimes it actually highlights problems, not in the, so we talked about identifying the pre-indicators of churn. Just say it's a lack of product usage, right? Or lack of feature usage. They're not using your feature because you don't have something, right? It's because they didn't realize they had it. And so we get this all the time with Forecast+. So, and this isn't a churn reason necessarily, but this is one of those aha moments we've had when we start to talk to people about their usage and what's going on inside their platform. We go, and they ask us a question like, I'd really love it if you guys could do this. We're like, we can, like it's over here. My God, you just unlocked a whole lot more value than we, like having this now doesn't point to product usage, it points to onboarding, right? They didn't even know they had that feature available. And they would sign up to a different SaaS company to get that function. So. How do I save that? Have I ever saved customers that's about to leave? Yes. And more often than not, it's because we saw maybe three tickets coming to Intercom within a week, right? We saw some real frustration being expressed in how we do things. So instead of just continuing to do back and forth in chat, hey, let's get on a call, right? call. Let's open the bandwidth up. There is a lot of contention in the SaaS space about call to cancel versus ease of cancellation.

Call to cancel vs. ease of cancellation: Luke's take

And I agree with both sides of the fence, right? I'm gonna sit right in middle of the fence here because there is value in call to cancel when the primary outcome of the call is not to prevent the churn but to understand it, right? If I'm not going in there and being very bullish with like, well, no, you can't cancel because you're within your 60 day order renewal limit and... we'd like to offer you a discount for this and the other. If you're doing it just to prevent the churn, then you're doing it the wrong way. But getting in there and saying, hey, Andrea, I really sorry to see you leave. We wanna make this transition as smooth as possible for you. Let's go through your data requirements, make sure you've got the reports you need. Let's make sure all your users have disabled their access. And you start to just use that as a method of just breaking that relationship. But at the same time, you're like, hey, so while we're doing this, Andrea, where are you guys going to? What platform are you moving to? you it's not a term prevention, right? As much as it's another intelligent gathering tool, but having a call in one way or another just opens the bandwidth of that conversation. Right? So call to cancel is other thing. The ease of cancellation, again, for high volume, low ASP platforms is more often than not mandated by legislation in certain states. It has to be as easy to cancel the service as it was to sign up. And more often than not, that means a one-click cancel. That is not to say you can't follow up after the fact. again and go through that. But that's how, that's how you say the customer's about to leave. Cause you have that conversation. You'll have that response. That's definitely been a save a couple of times where a call has unpacked not a lack of features, a lack of understanding of the features they may well have on their tier as well. When it comes to price conversations, look, there's some

Why discounts don't always save churning customers

data out there. think you find it quite easily on LinkedIn. Price sensitive customers, those that are offered a discount above a certain rate, generally churn in the next three to six months anyway. More often than not, it's not about price when it comes to that. Sometimes if you are truly pricing yourself out of the market, then a discount will work. But discounts also in that conversation are a method of preventing churn before they leave. And again, we've used that before as well. When they come to us and it's almost the opposite, say, look, I've seen everything you guys have got. I really like your platform. It's great, but I only use it for this one thing. I only want segmented MRR. I don't even look at LTV. this or the other. I'm not paying your full suites. This is where it comes in to of custom pricing models or pricing models for different ICPs. And they're the really tough conversations to have because all you're wanting to do is give them as much value as possible and show them how much they've got available to them. But if they're not using it, then it doesn't matter to them, right? So it's not, there's nothing for them. So you do need to get flexible sometimes with that. That's another way we save to customers, understanding that we're asking them to pay for everything because that's the platform they've got. When in actual fact, the only value they're deriving is from a very slim part of your profile. But finally, how you're tracking actual product usage.

How to track product usage (Clarity, Hotjar, logins, report opens)

Look, this is the million dollar question because you could have embedded widgets like Clarity, That monitor just general usage, Hotjar, platforms that are there to see user interactions and range clicks and everything else. You then talk about, further down the line where you're actually using products to track logins, active sessions, clicks. opens what reports have opened like a full robust set of product usage. For me, if you're doing nothing else, you need to look at the number of people that have access. You need to look at the frequency of logins. And then the other thing would be any other internal indicator of usage. That's a report generated, whether that is a button click, chart generated, things like that. They're the things you need to have as a minimum. You need to decide what the signs of life are in your product. And then use a platform to do that, again, whether that's automated through something like a Clarity widget, which is an embedded way of watching user behavior, or whether that is programmatically through something that's embedded to monitor product usage itself, right? And there's a myriad of tools out there that would help you with that as well. So yeah, that's probably it. If we look through the comments, I think a lot of them are

Low volume churn feels personal and that's okay

very similar. The one here that I think hits home, that at low volume, when they talk about low volume customers, you're starting that journey. And this is where the solo founder in question, he says, churn is slowly getting to me. Early churn feels very personal, right? Even not from a company perspective, but from an individual perspective, when I first moved into SaaS and I had big ticket cancellations, I was like, man, what did I do wrong? Right? And it took me a long time to realize that churn happens, right? I churn off things all the time. I stopped using certain subscriptions. I don't do this. I don't do that. So yeah, think every churn can feel personal at the low volume, but once you get a system in place to understand you're going to hit that sort of, Adam Robinson was great talking about his, I think he peaked down in about 24% rev churn per month. And he's like, this is unacceptable. He's like, this can't be my bench. I'm not going to grow if I continue to do this. He managed to combat it and get it down to 12. And he realized it was just how he shaped his product years and other things like that. So yeah, I think it's not necessarily about your product being bad. It's just that churn happens, right? And you might be starting to stray into ICPs that aren't aligned with your core value proposition. You might be just expanding the total number of people using your product. So therefore, it's just going to reach that benchmark of what churn is. Other suggestions about reaching out?

Reddit comment roundup: community advice on churn recovery

Yep. Short message, no guilt trip. Throw in a discount offer if possible. Tracking usage is the best predictor. We've mentioned that as well. Absolutely reach out for cancellations. Here's a funny line. Churn feels like getting dumped by someone who just needs to focus on themselves right now. We get that a lot. with our churn reasons where it's like, it's not you, it's me. I saw one coming last week where it was like, Hey, love the platform, you guys have been great. We just need to work on getting our data a little bit cleaner for now. We're doing some work inside Stripe and we know that's gonna mess up our Baremetrics dashboards. We're gonna come back in six months when everything's cleaned up, right? And so like that might veil other things, but at the same time, it's like, okay, great. It's not us, it's you. Like we'll stay in touch, we'll be friendly, we'll go for coffee, but we'll wait for that six month mark to try and re-initiate a full steak dinner, right? So yeah, I think that's often the case as well. One thing about here and people mentioned sort of followups and interviews and going through that. It's also important to do that regularly on aggregate as

Why you need to look at user churn AND revenue churn separately

well, because you can get focused on individual churn reasons, but unless you're using a tool like cancellation insights, that's going to later aggregate those responses over time and also split the difference between user revenue, user churn and revenue churn. The reason I say that is as you start to mature from a business perspective, you'll have different tiers in your subscription platform. different tiers, different prices, different feature sets. And one really interesting revelation that I always had before I go into a board meeting is the fact that my number one churn reason based on revenue is more often than not, not the same as my number one churn reason for user churn. And the example I use is that lower tier clients may churn at a higher rate. So I have a higher user churn at a lower value because they're not happy to pay for the additional features like I mentioned before, right? So if I've got a heap of $49 plans that are churning out, I'll see a high user churn, but I'll see a low revenue impact. And I'm okay with that for some reason, because they're not my core ICP. But then if I look at it in aggregate and say, well, where do they lose the most money from a revenue churn perspective, the user churn might be low, but the revenue percentage is we're building something internally, right? You didn't have the feature I wanted. So if I was to only address... the one reason I would probably do myself a disservice, right? But if I'm able to then look at that in segments and say, the lower part, lower tier of my ICP, believe we're too expensive. Maybe we can change the pricing model there a bit and increase the value. The higher end of my ICP that is more valuable to me at a lower volume are leaving us because we don't have a particular tool set that allows us to integrate with larger data systems. That's more value. I'm going to focus on that one for them as well, right? So you don't have to pick or choose. One churn reason, and then work on that in particular, understand how that user churn versus revenue churn weighs up and where the most value lies for you. So that's another one as well. Are there any tips, that you've noticed as you've worked in different SaaS companies with getting ahead of churn specifically? Yeah, always doing that review, right? And so for us, we have our customer waterfall that identifies all of our monthly and all of our annual accounts as they occur. And Jacci, our Head of Growth and I, we sit down and we're generally looking at 90 days ahead. We say, okay, let's review these accounts.

The customer waterfall: Luke's 90-day renewal review system

And we're going through one by one and saying, particularly for the bigger accounts that are like multi-years or annuals, what was our last correspondence with them? How did we end the last conversation we had? Are they opening our marketing emails? Are they engaging with support? We do like a... mini checklist of what's the sign of life we have with this customer. And then we start the deliberate outbound for renewal. That's really the renewal conversation, more so the cancellation. But in that process, you can identify the churn indicators as well. Where we generally have the flag, and this is where our team's really great at raising this, you'll see, wouldn't say hostility in a comp, but frustration and saying, hey guys, have we got this report yet? We went two weeks, really dragging, and we're like, yep. Sorry, we're getting to it. We've got this out the other. You can start to sense the frustration. And the worst thing is if they're engaged in that process of saying, hey, guys, I trying to out this report, and they go silent. Because you kind of know they've given up, right? And that's on us for not being able to address that issue quick enough. So the pre-indicators, not only from a practical perspective of product usage, but general sentiment around support, general sentiment around the product and how they've interacted with you is a good sign that you should be monitoring in the lead up to any show. And again, these are easier indicators to see. If you're about individual account focus, then you can see them over time as you deliberately review. If we're talking about in general, then you want automated flags, right? You want to see a weekly report of any account that hasn't logged in. You want in and has previously submitted support tickets, right? Start to elevate different accounts, if they're on a monthly, for example, to try and get in front of them, yeah. You beat me to my final question, which was how often should you be doing this, but I guess monthly. So we do it monthly for like upcoming renewals for at-risk accounts where we have like a big cashflow implication if we don't renew that three year account. But for general, you're probably gonna do it quarterly based on your board reporting. We run an internal board just for the sake of hygiene and cancellation insights and reasons to be part of that. Why are people churning and what can we do about it? And then we obviously have a plan from that to do something about it.

The unpopular take: churn is often a support problem, not a product problem

Yeah. The last comment I think we should say here is the final one here, unpopular take, and I know this is unpopular, churn often isn't a product problem, it's a support problem, that can be the case as well, if they weren't getting the answers they needed to, and this day and age of AI chat as well, I'm seeing this bit more and more, people getting frustrated with getting thrown into a loop without the option to say, where's a human, can I talk to a human? Customers leave when they feel ignored or can't get help fast enough. And we obviously pride ourselves on our response times in Intercom and getting people what they need. And I love it when I see Intercom saying, wow, so fast, or that was amazing, thank you. And we get that big smiley face on our support. That's really good as well. And the final comment here, this person even says, Baremetrics are great for tracking usage patterns. Though if you want the analytic side, downside with outsource support is cost, but honestly, using customers is more expensive. So they're saying, It's one thing to outsource support to other automated tools or maybe organizations outside your immediate geography. But if you bring it inside, yes, it's going to cost you more. The feedback you get and the support you get, I should say the sentiment you get from your customers is definitely elevated. So thank you, that user, for the shout out for us. It's definitely not us. Like I said, that for sure, it's not us. We didn't see that article in there. So it's good for them that they've identified. We can help better combat churn. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Luke. This was such a great chat. So stay tuned. Probably won't do a churn one again, but we'll see what we get up to next week. we've covered Churn well. We'd be interested to see what other topics are sort of trending at the moment in the classic SaaS space. There's a lot of talk about AI and utilizing AI, stacking AI agents, all that good stuff. I think where I'm still seeing people come up against it is in those classic SaaS problems. How do I get churn? new customers? Marketing, those sort of things. So yeah, I think we still have a lot to talk about, a lot to chew on when it comes to the fundamentals of running SaaS. Yeah, find some cool stuff out there and we'll have a chat. Yeah. Thanks, Luke. I'll see you next week. Bye!

Другие видео автора — Baremetrics

Ctrl+V

Экстракт Знаний в Telegram

Экстракты и дистилляты из лучших YouTube-каналов — сразу после публикации.

Подписаться

Лучшие методички за неделю — каждый понедельник