SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn? You can’t eliminate churn. It’s a fact of business life in selling a product with recurring revenue and thus recurring sales. You can hide churn (e.g., My top suggestion is: Measure churn carefully, and consistently. And set a big annual goal to drive churn down say 20%.

Churn 273

Churn Revenue Sales Business 273

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2024

Annual contracts combined with prepaid cash are a huge benefit, when done right: You get all the cash up-front (this is how I went cash-flow positive in fact) — IF you can collect it a timely fashion; and Your churn almost by definition goes down, at least nominal churn. Think about yourself as a consumer.

SaaS 261

SaaS Payment Features Churn Pricing 261

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Increasingly, you’ll hear the term “business outcomes” popping up in software marketing. While I initially loathed the phrase for its vagueness, over time I’ve come to believe that, much like the frequently abused word “ solutions ,” there is a right and a wrong way to use “business outcomes.” It’s not great.

Marketing 140

Marketing Business Finance Sales Hiring 140

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2021

Everyone talks about hitting 120%+ NRR these days But the truth is, single-seat users & very small businesses churn at a high rate. That sort of churn hurts. Even modestly decreasing churn in Very Small Business and single seat accounts can have a big impact. Don’t treat them all as churned.

Churn 306

Churn Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 306

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

For many founding teams, pricing is one of the most difficult and complex decisions for the business. Third, contracts mitigate churn rates because the customer is only making a renewal decision once per year, instead of 12x per year. The value of your business is the discounted sum of all its future profits.

SaaS Payments 277

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 277

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2024

Should I just mark them as churned? Second, they still wanted to make the business process change and had picked their vendor of choice. Should I Count Them as Churned? Dear SaaStr: A big customer payed for a year but doesn’t use the product. Instead, what you should try to do is renew them, especially in the enterprise.

Churn 293

Churn Enterprise Branding Business 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2025

What Most SaaS Companies Get Wrong The standard playbook is: Hire sales Hit growth targets Eventually add CS when churn becomes painful But that’s backward. Don’t wait until you’re forced to fix churn. The best customers are ones your CS team fights to work with. Way earlier. Build it into your DNA from the start.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2022

And I’m going to suggest two that will worry you a lot as you scale — Churn and Sales Cycle — you should track, but not obsess over, until you are well, well past initial traction, that first $1m-$2m ARR. >> Let’s Start with Churn. Absolutely, getting your churn trending downward is important.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Churn Metrics 274

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

Pricing is more than just a number on a contract — when used thoughtfully, it can become a strategic tool for your SaaS product that can drive product adoption, customer satisfaction, and business growth. Miro’s pricing strategy evolved with their business goals: Early stage: Minimum five-user paid plans to ensure collaborative value.

Payments 284

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 284

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2024

Even a fairly small business can pay $10,000-$20,000 a year for one app, usually. Churn is all over the place with SMBs. and Is the app so core, or at least is on a path to become so core, that they can charge $20,000+ a year for it? Or at least $10,000 at a minimum? Oftentimes, only one. So be honest.

Payment Solutions 261

Payment Solutions Inbound Sales Team Marketing Scale 261

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

While Zoom Enterprise is growing at a healthy clip, churn is over 3% a month for its SMB customers As a result, it’s now predicting 1% growth next year 1% pic.twitter.com/i2k2W9QbVX — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) February 27, 2023 So Zoom has just been the craziest story of all time in SaaS. It probably couldn’t last.

SMB 273

SMB Churn Enterprise Engineering 273

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

A strong GRR (80-90%) ensures your base is solid, and youre not just masking churn with upsells. They need to own metrics like DAU/MAU ratios , feature adoption rates , and churn reduction tied to product improvements. VPP Quotas : Product adoption, feature stickiness, churn reduction, and roadmap execution.

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 162

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Customer Success Churn Retention 162

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

In this article, we explore the concept of customer satisfaction – how to measure it, why it is important for your business, and how you can improve customer satisfaction levels. However, what satisfies customers differs from one business to another. What does customer satisfaction look like for SaaS businesses?

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 5, 2022

Recent unicorns like Stripe and Canva have stolen the headlines, but a wide range of successful PLG businesses all over the globe have arisen. PLG companies are constantly fearful of high churn rates, and for good reason. But by building stickiness within the product, churn should steadily decrease.”. Secret #1: Born, not made.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Business Pricing Churn 284

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2022

But a true solution to an enterprise-grade problem, almost by definition, usually requires business process change. In fact, my uber-learning is one of the Top 10 reasons customer success is so important is to make sure this business process change is implemented. 10 minutes max. And that’s a good thing, at least, 8.5

Business 284

Business B2C SMB Customer Success 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2025

Mangomint has quietly built an impressive vertical SaaS business in the spa and salon space, growing 100% year-over-year to approach $20M ARR with 110% NRR. Marchelle takes a strong stance with onboarding: “If it’s mission-critical to do business with you, just make it free. Make these things easier.” ” 8.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales 274

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Mistakes Did You Make When Starting Your Business That, In Retrospect, You’re Glad You Made? I hate founder conflict, and hate churn on the team. The post Dear SaaStr: What Mistakes Did You Make When Starting Your Business That, In Retrospect, You’re Glad You Made? My list: Launching too early.

Business 274

Business Churn Communication SaaS 274

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

Some fun facts: 10+ years of SaaStr conference attendance Partner at Point Nine Capital, a leading early-stage VC firm Geographic reach: Actively investing across Europe, US, and Australia Notable portfolio: Zendesk, Algolia, Contentful, Loom (and many more) Known for his “five ways to build a $100M business” framework The 5 Key Things (..)

Data 147

Data Acquisition AI Finance 147

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

Two things though did get hit harder — SMB Churn and Upsell s. Customers kept buying more SaaS than ever, which masked all-time high churn in SMB accounts. SMBs just plain went out of business in ’08-’09. So our gross SMB churn spiked to a crazy high of 5.5% That never even slowed down.

SMB 361

SMB SaaS Churn Enterprise 361

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2020

It can really tough to think through the short-term pressures of churn. SMBs are hurting the most, and the churn will be highest there. Enterprises are churning less, but slowing new purchases way down. No one wants to lose their core ERP, what they run their business on. A pause is a lot better than churn.

Churn 354

Churn Customer Support Enterprise Management 354

ChurnZero

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

To win the battle against churn, CS teams need to leverage the right strategies and specialized tools. By combining a customer success platform (CSP) with a powerful CRM tool, teams can minimize churn, turning satisfied customers into loyal advocates and building a more engaged, long-term customer base. Define what success looks like.

Churn 59

Churn Data Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 59

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Recently I was catching up with a good friend who used to be CEO of an enterprise-y SaaS social networking company — and the usage and engagement numbers of his business were just awful. If not, the customer would churn – but not until month 24. Churn is a lagging indicator.

AWS 337

AWS Churn Enterprise Engagement 337

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

B2B is finding more consumers and prosumers paying, and B2C is finding Enterprise and business use cases. Churn is much higher on consumer subscriptions, but you have higher expansion revenue. If you’re in consumer, how can you go upmarket and get a small cohort of users paying more, churning less, and expanding revenue?

Payment Features 301

Payment Features Subscription B2B Mobile 301

The Daily Egg

MARCH 31, 2020

Optimizing your conversion funnel is one of the fastest ways to grow a SaaS business. You don’t need lower churn or a better product. For most SaaS businesses, there’s a few […]. You don’t need more traffic. You don’t need better upsells. The post Are You Optimizing Your SaaS Conversion Funnel?

SaaS 356

SaaS Churn Business 356

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

At least 100% net negative churn (i.e., upsell/account growth + renewals – churn) for very small businesses. 130%+ in the enterprise, and for top B2D products. Let’s look at some of the top public SaaS companies: Shopify — very SMB: 100%. Hubspot — mostly SMB: 100%. Zendesk — 116%, mix of SMB and enterprise.

Retention 349

Retention SMB SaaS Enterprise 349

Stax

MAY 20, 2024

Although your business has received payment, this cannot be credited to your bottom line until delivery of the product is completed. What accounting rules do subscription businesses need to abide by in order to stay compliant with global standards? This is important for subscription businesses due to recurring advance payments.

Payment Features 167

Payment Features Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 167

Blulogix

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

By Inga Broerman How High-Performing Subscription Businesses Maximize NRR For subscription-based businesses, Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the ultimate measure of growth and sustainability. If a business is retaining and expanding existing customer revenue , it can grow without constantly chasing new sales.

Payment Features 59

Payment Features Subscription Payments Payment Services 59

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2023

Keep reading to learn Robertson’s five customer marketing strategies guaranteed to grow your business. Know Your Customers You should always start with customer research, no matter what type of business you’re running. Treat Every Customer As a VIP You aren’t marketing to a business when marketing and building out programs.

Scale 246

Scale Strategy Marketing Education 246

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2021

Or churn is too high. Then once you’ve measured them, set goals of improving each at least 20% (or whatever amount) annually, with interim quarterly goals to get you there : Obsess about decreasing churn. Obsess about increasing “net negative churn”, i.e., increasing the total revenue from all your accounts.

Metrics 318

Metrics SaaS Churn Engineering 318

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2024

And the enterprise business, while starting to taking off, couldn’t overcome the gravity from so many small customers that didn’t need quite as much Zoom as they did during lockdown. SMB Churn coming down, but still at SMB-Like Levels Zoom for years defied what we knew about SMB churn. Yes, one year.

SMB 299

SMB Scale Banking Enterprise 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Her company had been acquired, and the acquirer cancelled the contract, due to a feature gap in the new company’s business process stack. Yes, this customer churned after 11 years. But it was a reluctant churn. Get on a jet, go introduce yourself, and ask for their business. Drive churn down every quarter.

Scale 313

Scale Churn Retention Acquisition 313