Jun 7, 2023 · 4 min read
For many product teams, the directive to "reduce churn" is a constant source of pressure and frustration. It triggers a predictable, and often flawed, response. We hastily build steep off-boarding discounts, add "pause your subscription" options, and generally do whatever it takes to stop a user from clicking the final "cancel" button.
This approach is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. We treat churn as the disease, when in reality, it's just the final, lagging symptom of a much deeper issue. Chasing churned users is a reactive, low-leverage game.
The most effective product organizations don't focus on reducing a negative metric like churn. They focus on increasing a positive one: retaining their ideal customers. This shift in perspective changes everything.
The initial impulse when tackling churn is to treat every lost customer as an equal failure. This leads to a frantic effort to be everything to everyone, which is a recipe for a mediocre product.
The truth is, not all churn is created equal. A critical first step is to distinguish between regrettable churn and unregrettable churn.
Unregrettable churn comes from "bad-fit" customers. These are users who are outside your ICO (ideal customer profile). They signed up for your product hoping it would solve a problem you were never designed to address. Trying to retain these users is a waste of resources. It pulls your roadmap in the wrong direction and pollutes your feedback with irrelevant requests. You should let them go gracefully.
Regrettable churn is the one that matters. This is when a "good-fit" customer someone squarely within your ICP leaves because your product failed to deliver on its promise. This is the churn that signals a true problem with your product, onboarding, or overall experience.
Your focus should be exclusively on understanding and preventing regrettable churn. Lumping all churn together ensures you'll spend your time solving the wrong problems for the wrong people.
The next common trap is the focus on resurrection. We spend enormous effort trying to win back customers who have already left, often with short-term incentives that do little to address the root cause of their departure.
This is the "resurrection fallacy." It's an expensive and often futile exercise for a simple reason: a resurrected user is not the same as a new user. They have already given your product a chance and found it lacking. Their standards are higher, their patience is thinner, and their likelihood of churning again is significantly greater.
A far more effective strategy is to re-frame the problem from resurrection to retention. Instead of trying to catch sand falling through your fingers, focus on building a better beach. This means investing your resources where they have the most impact: preventing your ideal customers from becoming dissatisfied in the first place.
Many teams view churn as a binary state a customer is either active or they are not. This leads them to focus all their energy on that final moment of cancellation.
But churn is never a single event. It is the final outcome of a journey of unmet needs, growing frustration, or declining engagement. By the time a customer reaches your cancellation flow, you have already lost the battle. Your leverage is at its lowest point.
The real work is in monitoring the leading indicators that predict it. These are found throughout the entire customer lifecycle:
By focusing on these upstream metrics, you shift from a reactive to a proactive stance. You solve problems before they become reasons to leave.
The conversation about churn needs a fundamental reframing. It's not about clawing back users at the exit door. It's about building a product and an experience that your ideal customers never want to leave.
This requires bravery. It requires a willingness to say "no" to bad-fit customers and to focus your resources with discipline. But making these tough calls is the only way to move from a reactive cycle of churn-and-burn to a sustainable model of growth driven by genuine product-market fit.