SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn? You can’t eliminate churn. You can hide churn (e.g., My top suggestion is: Measure churn carefully, and consistently. Usually, your smallest customers will churn at the highest rate. And set a big annual goal to drive churn down say 20%. Instead, you drive it down.

Churn 279

Churn Revenue Sales Business 279

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 279

Churn AI B2B Engineering 279

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 290

Metrics Venture Capital SaaS Churn 290

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

The average churn rate for the software industry as a whole is 14%. Thats actually one of the lowest churn rates across all industries. That said, industry experts agree that your SaaS companys goal churn should be below 2%. TL;DR The average software industry churn rate is 14%, but SaaS companies should aim for under 2%.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

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 279

Churn Marketing Data Sales 279

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 282

Churn Market Segmentation Cloud AI 282

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 299

Churn Enterprise Branding Business 299

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 265

Payment Features SaaS Churn Pricing 265

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

MAY 3, 2025

Customer Succes s: If youre seeing churn or struggling with renewals, or have larger customers that are high touch, consider hiring a VP of Customer Success around 2 M 3M ARR. 2 M 3M ARR : Bring on a VP of Customer Success especially if you have larger customers and/or churn is an issue. $5M A head of Product. And often, a VP of Eng.

Sales Hiring 243

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Scale 243

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

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 279

SMB Churn Enterprise Engineering 279

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

MAY 28, 2025

The key is to align their incentives with the outcomes you want: happy customers, low churn, and growing accounts. Clawbacks for Churn : To avoid rewarding AMs for short-term gains that lead to long-term churn, implement clawbacks. For example, if an AMs accounts average an NPS of 70+, they get a quarterly bonus.

Scale 189

Scale Management Churn Finance 189

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2025

It combines renewals, churn, and upsells. Track metrics like churn, NRR, time-to-value, and customer health scores. The goal is to act before customers even realize theyre unhappy 2 3. Focus on Net Retention Net retention is the ultimate metric for customer success. Everything your team does should drive toward improving this number.

Sales Hiring 236

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Retention 236

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2025

Churn and Expansion : For existing customers, analyze churn rates, upsell/cross-sell performance, and NRR (Net Revenue Retention). AI can help predict churn and identify expansion opportunities. If so, why? Metrics like time spent in each stage and reasons for lost deals can provide clarity.

Technical Review 186

Technical Review Sales Forecasting AI 186

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2025

Basic questions like “What’s our churn rate?” They were two developers who had lived through the nightmare of subscription infrastructure while working at Elevate. The Problem Was Real: Apple and Google’s app stores weren’t giving developers the data they needed.

Payments 285

Payments Payment Solutions Underperforming Technical Team Payment Methods 285

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Here’s how Notion crushed it: The Hard Metrics: 49-51% open rates (2x industry average) 1-1.5%

Scale 277

Scale SaaS B2B Scaling 277

SaaStr

MAY 9, 2025

Customer Commitment : Annual and multi-year contracts do lock in customer more, reducing churn risk and keeping competitors at bay. Getting 2-3 years of revenue upfront can give you the runway to invest in growth, hire key team members, or even just sleep better at night knowing youre not scrambling for cash.

Payments 174

Payments Churn B2B Branding 174

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2025

High CAC Is a Symptom, Not the Root Problem If your CAC is too high, its likely because of one (or more) of these issues: Churn is too high : If customers arent sticking around, your CAC payback period will balloon. Fixing churn is often the fastest way to make CAC more reasonable. Itll just starve your pipeline and make things worse.

Marketing 160

Marketing Scale Churn Content Marketing 160

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 265

Payment Solutions Inbound Sales Team Marketing Scale 265

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 291

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 291

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2025

I f onboarding is broken, it creates a ripple effectcustomers dont adopt the product fully, they dont see value quickly, and theyre far more likely to churn. You cant fix churn or improve NRR if customers never get properly onboarded in the first place. Most Churn Happens Early The first 90 days are where most churn happens.

AI 169

AI Onboarding Customer Success Scale 169

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) 160

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Customer Success Churn Retention 160

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2025

If youre selling to SMBs, churn can be a killerfix it now. Operational Focus At 35% growth, you need to optimize every dollar spent. Cut low-ROI initiatives and focus on your best-performing channels. Double down on upsells and cross-sells to improve NRR. Youll also need to hire carefully, dont overstaff until you see faster growth.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring B2B Churn Retention 195

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 255

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 255

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

ServiceTitan discloses that their net retention is “>110%” Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback (Previous Q S&M) / (Net New ARR x Gross Margin) x 12.

Benchmarks 299

Benchmarks Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 299

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

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 217

Engagement Sales AI B2B 217