BASED ON A TRUE STORY… of how one small SaaS company reduced churn to levels that even FaceBook couldn’t beat. I am one of the developers at , a tool that speeds up and simplifies reporting for PR professionals. CoverageBook.com We roughly have an equal split between the marketing and development team. Most of the time the marketing team do their thing (developing marketing strategies, etc) and us in the development team do our thing (coding, arm wrestling competitions, etc). Chalk n cheese. But when it comes down to it, we collectively want the same thing: build a beautiful service that people genuinely need; that’s so good, they’ll be happy to pay for it. Then we can get paid to continue developing strategies and have arm wrestling competitions. It’s a beautiful, virtuous circle. marketing It’s not easy making this dream happen but we are doing pretty well at it. Over 1,000 active, happy, customers in 100’s of countries around the world. We have 100’s of leads coming in every week, giving our free trial a whirl and if it turns out they like what they see, then they sign up for a paid plan. Classic funnel stuff here, really not worth writing a blog post about. I hear you. But at the other end of the funnel, the dirty, dirty end no one wants to talk about, you have what all SaaS companies dread: CHURN. I still get nightmares about churn. Or at least I used to… (Keep reading for sweet, sweet, nightmare-free sleep). Churn You can qualify your leads to make sure that you have the right customers coming in at the top and so we thought we had another great, qualified customer when one day David from New York signed up for a paid plan. We all cheered in CoverageBook.com HQ (as we always do when another happy trialler realises they can not live without us). He seemed like another fully qualified, perfect match for us and it seemed like the start of another beautiful relationship. …from New York. David uses CoverageBook.com for a few happy months: making dazzling reports in the blink of an eye. But then it turns out his main client cancels their contract with him. It was the client who wanted the reporting that CoverageBook.com provided, so he doesn’t need us anymore. Back in CoverageBook.com HQ, we are blissfully unaware of David from New York’s pending decision… it would go on to break our hearts. David from New York logs in to his account, sees all the beautiful reports he’s made with us over the last few months, and although he can barely bring himself to do it… it’s time… time to end the beautiful thing between with us… he clicks over to “My Account”, a place where so many times before we had shown David all the great stuff we had done together… clicks on “Cancel My Subscription”, then “Cancel” and… his subscription is cancelled. Sad, so sad. David from New York closes the browser window, pulls up the collars of his grey trench coat and steps out in the cold, drizzly New York night. Back in CoverageBook.com HQ, the bad news comes in. “We got a churner!” I look at the marketing team: Stella has her hand over her mouth; Gary looks away, out of the window, his eyes glazed. In the dev team, Dan checks our numbers, that churn means we can’t have our Friday evening beers, tech debate and arm wrestle. Tears well up in his eyes. Churn decimates Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) destroys team morale and breaks young, fragile hearts. I had to do something. Something radical. I had a crazy, crazy idea… I stayed up all that night, drinking coffee after stinking coffee, hacking away to make the one thing that would kill churn once and for all… and not just for our SaaS, but for ALL SaaSs (? What’s the plural of SaaS? I really don’t know). I disregarded all the silos between marketing, product and tech development. I laughed in the face of development protocol and marketing fundamentals… I was enraged. I was frazzled. I was determined to make this work, no matter what. At 4:37am, I had it. The next morning, I crawled into HQ and announced to the team, “I have built something that will kill churn. All churn. Even that annoying bit of churn that sticks to the dirty end of the funnel. I call it… After a demo on my local machine, I persuaded Gary (founder/ product manager / the twitter guy) to let me hot fix it into production and then watched our churn numbers droooooop….. I was a hero. I was lifted upon the team’s shoulders and paraded around the office. I was exhausted and elated. I couldn’t help but cry. “Churninator! Churninator!” they cheered. We were back. CHURN IS AT ZERO. ZERO. A level we could of only of dreamt of weeks ago… MRR is soaring… MRR since Churninator Morale is at an all time high… And young, fragile hearts will not be broken. Not on my watch. OK, two weeks later… Susan from Sydney decided it was time to cancel her subscription with us (she was having a tough time, work had dried up and she was changing careers). She did what David from New York had done, she logged into her account, clicked on “My Account”, “Cancel My Subscription” and went to click on the “Cancel” button but then… out of the blue… something very unexpected happened… Susan from Sydney couldn’t cause a dip in our MRR or break our hearts… How? Watch the video below to see how The Churninator managed to prevent this, and any other churns from happening. Watch a Video of The Churninator in action: If you run a SaaS and want to see your churn drop to zero, we have open-sourced The Churninator and it is available as Rails gem ( / )or a . This one’s on us. Sweet dreams you crazy, young, fragile-hearted dreamers (Full installation instructions are on the GitHub page). GitHub RubyGems Bower package Follow me on . twitter Know any PR professionals struggling/ bored to death with reporting? Check out: for a free trial (but please don’t go breaking our hearts). CoverageBook.com _It does what it's designed to do, quickly cranking out clean, data-rich coverage reports. My agency has shaved off…_coveragebook.com Make Coverage Books. Fast. Fancy PR reports with analytics in minutes
