ChurnAudit: Automated First-Month Churn Diagnosis for Indie SaaS

14 months in, about $2.1k MRR, and growth has been dead flat for three months. Reality check please.

14 months in, about $2.1k MRR, and growth has been dead flat for three months. Reality check please.

$2,100 across 70 accounts is about $30 a month each. i think that number is doing more damage than either of the two things youre choosing between, and it quietly explains most of your post. at $30 a month, cold outreach can basically never pay for itself. let's say someone stays a year, thats $360 total, and you spent a couple of hours researching, writing and chasing to get them. thats before you count support. so the reason you hate doing it and keep going inconsistent probably isnt a discipline thing, its that some part of your brain has already worked out the maths doesnt close. thats worth knowing because youve been beating yourself up about a habit when the actual problem is the price tag on the other end of it. same number explains the content. one post a week bringing traffic that doesnt convert is normal at $30, because at $30 nobody researches, nobody reads your blog and then signs up, they either need the thing right now or they dont. content works as an acquisition channel at higher price points where people spend weeks deciding. its not that your writing is bad, its that youve got a channel built for considered purchases pointed at an impulse price. on the actual question, dig into churn first, and the person above is right about that, but id split churn into two completely different problems before you go looking, because theyve got opposite fixes and most people fix the wrong one. group one is people who signed up, poked around, never actually did the main thing your tool does even once, and vanished. thats not really churn, those were never customers, thats an onboarding and expectation problem and its usually solvable. Group two is people who used it properly for months and then left. thats a value or a price problem, and its a much heavier fix. go look at how many of your churned accounts ever completed the core action even one time. that ratio tells you which conversation youre in and it takes an afternoon to work out. the other cut id make, and almost nobody does this, is churn by where they came from. sort your churned accounts into came from content, came from cold outreach, came from word of mouth. cold outreach signups churn faster than everything else, near enough always, because you interrupted them rather than them coming looking. if it turns out most of your leak is outreach signups, then you dont have a retention problem at all, you have an acquisition quality problem, and stopping the outreach fixes both at once. that would be a very nice thing to find out given you hate it anyway. and then the price. you have 70 people already paying you and nothing about testing a higher number puts them at risk, you just grandfather them and leave them alone. put new signups at $79 or $99 and see what happens over six weeks. worst case almost nobody buys and youve learned the value isnt there yet, which is genuinely useful and cheaper to learn now than in another year. best case your signup rate drops by half and your revenue goes up anyway, and suddenly outreach is worth doing and so is content, and you can afford to actually onboard people properly, which fixes group one churn too. the whole thing unlocks off that one number. one more, when you go and talk to people, talk to the ones who stayed as well as the ones who left. everyone emails their cancellations, almost nobody emails the ten people whove been paying happily for eight months to ask what they use it for and what theyd do if it disappeared. Those conversations are usually more useful, because they tell you who your product is actually for, and that is the thing your content and your outreach have both been guessing at.