I've built and sold 2 saas for $8m. now I run a saas portfolio doing $1m mrr
churn has cost us more growth than anything else
so I made my team a list of 12 reasons users churn. sharing them here too:
1. you sold to bad-fit customers. that churn was booked the day they signed. write down the 3 traits your best accounts share and disqualify leads who miss them, even when you need the cash
2. onboarding never hits the aha moment fast enough. find the one action that predicts retention and rebuild onboarding so every new user does it in session one
3. failed payments cause 10-20% of churn and nobody's watching. add dunning emails, card-expiry reminders, and smart retries. it's the easiest churn you'll ever win back
4. silent churn. they went quiet months before cancelling. build a health score from logins and core-feature usage and get pinged the moment it drops
5. usage isn't value, results are. define the outcome each customer came for and measure whether they hit it, not whether they logged in
6. "budget" is never the real reason. it's the polite version of "I stopped seeing value." when someone leaves on price, dig one layer down and close the value gap
7. you watch net retention and ignore gross. expansion hides a leaking base for a year. if the retention curve never flattens, fix the product before you spend another dollar on ads
8. no expansion revenue, so normal churn drags you backward. add one upsell or usage-based lever that lets good accounts grow, not just renew
9. the product stopped evolving. their needs moved, yours didn't. talk to churned power users and ship against what they outgrew
10. cancelling is all or nothing, so they pick nothing. offer a pause, a downgrade, or a heavy discount, plus a prompt asking why. save who you can, learn from who you can't. read every cancellation reason weekly and then act on it
11. no win-back motion. nearly half of returning customers come back within 30 days. fire a sequence the week after they leave and lead with something they never saw, a new feature or workflow
12. shallow usage means zero switching cost. drive adoption of a 2nd and 3rd feature until you're wired into their weekly workflow. depth is the moat
hope it helps 🙏
If you aren't yet bold enough to install the Codex app, you can stay in the presence of your orange crab and point it at GPT 5.6 Sol. Takes 5 minutes. Kudos to Theo for explaining one of the ways to get this done.
Step 1: Install CLIProxyAPI
Step 2: Connect
Step 3: Define following alias and enjoy claudex
```
alias claudex='CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL=gpt-5.6-sol \
CLAUDE_CODE_ALWAYS_ENABLE_EFFORT=1 \
CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_TOOL_USE_CONCURRENCY=3 \
ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH=false \
claude --model gpt-5.6-sol'
```
If this gets blocked, I owe you a reset.
Don't harm opossums! They’re harmless and actually really useful. They keep pests in check (eating ticks, roaches, rats, and scorpions), clean up dead animals, and help spread seeds. Basically, they’re nature’s cleanup crew