SaaStr

DECEMBER 22, 2024

Inherent Churn vs. Fixable Churn: You Have to Attack Both #2. But Not Always a Great Win for Their Late Stage Investors Inherent Churn vs. Fixable Churn: You Have to Attack Both Top Videos and Podcasts: #1. We Just Left a Vendor Weve Used for 5+ Years. They Dont Even Know It Yet. #3. Is SaaS Back? (TL;DR:

Churn 278

Churn AI B2B Engineering 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2024

SaaStr ) And once you have at least a little revenue ($1m-$2m ARR or so), net revenue retention / churn. NRR and churn aren’t necessarily statistical significant before Year 2-3 and before $1m-$2m in ARR). Churn is important, but in the early days, just drive it down. Probably, measured as NPS (more here: I Was Wrong.

Metrics 289

Metrics Venture Capital SaaS Churn 289

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2024

The burn and the churn. The burn was at a stunning $2m a month, and the churn had spiked. It’s sort of a death spiral: High churn, but no burn = struggle, but the engine self-perpetuates to an extent. What’s really hard to solve is The 3H’s: High Growth for a while — but High Churn. And High Burn.

Churn 307

Churn Startup SaaS Payments Venture Capital 307

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do With Churned Customers? The post Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do With Churned Customers? You put them into a Get Them Back bucket and re-market to them with a dedicated program. And you have sales especially follow-up twice. Once in about 90 days, to see if they might want to come back — importantly.

Churn 278

Churn Marketing Data Sales 278

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

So lately I’ve listened to a few calls from churned customers from portfolio companies. Get on the phone with all your churned customers, if you can. Image from here ) The post When a Struggling Customer Churns, You Learn How Important You Are appeared first on SaaStr. How much of a vitamin vs. a painkiller are you?

Churn 281

Churn Market Segmentation AI Cloud 281

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2024

Should I just mark them as churned? 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. Many of them never used the product at all in Year 1. appeared first on SaaStr.

Churn 298

Churn Enterprise Branding Business 298

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Third, contracts mitigate churn rates because the customer is only making a renewal decision once per year, instead of 12x per year. Similarly, Salesforce began with a usage-based approach before shifting to annual seat contracts when churn rates became significant and revenue predictability faltered.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

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.

Payment Features 264

Payment Features SaaS Churn Pricing 264

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2023

As a VP of sales at early stage SaaS companies, what’s your best advice for reducing churn rate? A few things that always work to drive down churn in the early days — and later: Make sure you have a strong Head of Customer Success … whose #1 goal is reducing churn. Far fewer customers churn if you visit them in person.

Churn 242

Churn Sales Hiring Customer Success Onboarding 242

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2025

Companies are seeing massive growth numbers, but with a catch – high churn rates and unpredictable usage patterns. The Real Signs of “Experimental” vs “Real” ARR Want to spot the difference?

AI 278

AI Scale Artificial Intelligence Startup 278

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 278

SMB Churn Enterprise Engineering 278

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

NOVEMBER 28, 2024

Churn is all over the place with SMBs. Toast and Shopify and Bill are really more payments companies today than SaaS companies. You probably have to go multi-product much earlier. Many Vertical SaaS leaders do payroll, finance, accounting, and much more — not just the core software. So be honest.

Payment Solutions 264

Payment Solutions Inbound Sales Team Marketing Scale 264

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2024

Worst case, they still use it and are happy, and churn less. Force yourself to at least grow +20% more than your NRR. #5. Launch a truly great second product. Best case, your happy customers buy more from you. All the best are now multi-product. And most of us regret not having gone there a bit earlier. A related post here. #6.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring SaaS Venture Capital Healthcare 286

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

Though it seems counterintuitive to maximize revenue, Miro intentionally set the threshold high enough that when someone bought Miro, they were getting the collaborative value because the users needed to use the product as a team vs an individual (which early data showed the highest churn in).

Payments 290

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 290

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

FEBRUARY 23, 2025

That way you will actually get it done.

Churn 175

Churn Startup Metrics Revenue 175

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2025

Gong in the early days of this wave was often hurt by consolidation, but today it seems to be benefitting as it itself has become a much broader platform and multi-product. It begs the question: is the sales and revenue acceleration space back?

Engagement 219

Engagement Sales AI B2B 219

The Moz Blog

MARCH 10, 2025

Dr. Pete's analysis shows that from the end of 2019 to the end of 2024, content churn has more than doubled. We know that Google changes constantly, but what about the internet itself? What does this mean in the context of content marketing?

Churn 109

Churn Content Marketing Marketing 109

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Lower Churn : When software is deeply embedded in industry workflows, switching costs become naturally high. The Revenue Impact This deep customer focus has significant financial implications: Higher ACVs : Deep industry-specific functionality commands premium pricing compared to horizontal solutions.

Construction 254

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 254

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. So our gross SMB churn spiked to a crazy high of 5.5% You can also see highly elevated gross churn in 2009 here — the Mar-June on the left side of the X-axis.

SMB 361

SMB SaaS Churn Enterprise 361

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2024

Not Jumping on High Churn Some types of churn certainly can be addressed over time. But if your churn and retention numbers aren’t at least mid-pack for your category, don’t let it lurk. Churn is a problem that lurks, especially in annual deals.

Trends 317

Trends Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 317

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

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? While terrible churn in B2B SaaS is 5%, it’s much worse for mobile apps. average realized LTV. 25% isn’t unusual.

Payment Features 306

Payment Features Subscription B2B Mobile 306

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2025

Measure What Matters The metrics that matter for AI success: User engagement with AI features Task completion rates Impact on core product metrics (careful: sometimes AI properly reducing usage is good) Customer churn and expansion rates 6. Data Architecture Makes or Breaks AI Success The unsexy truth?

AI 204

AI Scale Education User Experience 204

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2024

SMB Churn coming down, but still at SMB-Like Levels Zoom for years defied what we knew about SMB churn. But in the end, today, at scale, their small customers churn is at the same high rates as other “grab and go” SMB products. Still, they’ve brought churn down from 3.6% What a crazy story.

SMB 304

SMB Scale Banking Enterprise 304

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Second, few SaaS companies past $20m in ARR with negative churn seem to fail. Some do fail, but they are generally ones with low NPS / high churn and other customer issues. And an application with high churn by nature is one that is relatively easy … to move on from. They just want to bound it. The revenue recurs, after all.

Innovation 342

Innovation Churn Cloud Branding 342

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2021

In practice, high churn is the only thing. Put NPS and CSAT and churn in every weekly and monthly email. Because churn will be higher than average. Worst case, you’ll never really truly benefit from net negative churn. In theory, many things can kill a SaaS startup after $4m-$5m ARR. It’s not that hard.

SaaS 363

SaaS Venture Capital Churn Branding 363

SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2025

Churn is naturally higher, so you have to trim off a few days of the sales cycle to allow AEs to more easily hit quota. It also goes back to making everyone an expert in the product by further specializing based on sub-verticals, each sub-team has a better understanding and mastery of how those particular customers operate.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales 278

SaaStr

MAY 7, 2024

Before then, think instead about marking up the prices of non-annual contracts to account for churn. You’ll likely want non-annual contracts to be priced 20%-30% higher to account for the effect of churn, but the exact % can vary. 40% off Year 3 for paying all 3 years up front) in the end will “harm” your ARR unless your churn is high.

Pricing 289

Pricing Churn Enterprise Branding 289

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 5, 2024

Each and every month, until the customer churns. The second is to pay annualized commissions, with an allowance for churn. If you are worried you are paying for churned deals, just clawback a pro-rated amount of the $4,800. This does manage cash flow better in the early days. So if you do this — don’t do it forever.

Scale 299

Scale Sales Payments Compensation 299