5% churn at $3k MRR is $150. At $20k it's $1,000. Nothing about the product changed.
A plateau looks like a traffic problem. Signups slowed down, so obviously you need more signups. That was my first read too.
And for a while that's the right read. When the base is small, acquisition basically is the business. You can outrun a leaky bucket when the leak is eighty quid a month.
What changes isn't the product. It's the arithmetic. Churn is a percentage of a base that keeps getting bigger, and new MRR — for most solo products, anyway — stays roughly flat month to month.
5% of $3k is $150. 5% of $20k is $1,000. Same percentage, same product, wildly different month.
So the effort that used to show up as a climb now shows up as nothing much. You add twelve hundred, you lose a thousand, you're technically growing. Doesn't feel like growing.
Anyway. That part's just maths. The bit I can't work out is what it's actually telling me.
Obvious move is to pull six months of gross new MRR against net new and look at the gap. I did that. It tells me the leak is big. It doesn't tell me the leak is what's holding things down — loads of products carry ugly churn and grow anyway, and I can't find the line between leaky-and-growing and leaky-and-stuck anywhere in my own numbers.
Pricing makes it murkier rather than clearer. Price low enough and maybe you bought a cohort that was always going to leave, which in the dashboard looks exactly like a retention problem and isn't one. I've got no clean way to tell those apart from inside my own account.
And sometimes acquisition really does just die on you. Google update, directory dries up, launch spike that was never a channel in the first place. Same flat chart either way, and the flat chart is all you get to look at.
Which is where I keep getting stuck, and why I'm asking rather than concluding.
If you've hit a wall somewhere between $1k and $30k MRR — solo, subscription product — I want the honest version of which one it actually was. Did acquisition genuinely stall? Or was it churn or pricing you'd half-known about for months and hadn't dealt with?
And if you thought it was one and it turned out to be the other, that's the answer I'm most interested in.
I think the hardest part is separating the symptoms from the cause. I’ve seen cases where acquisition looked like the problem because signups slowed down, but once you look at cohorts, churn had quietly been eating most of the new MRR.
One thing that helped me was comparing churn by customer age and acquisition source instead of looking at the overall churn percentage. If one cohort or channel has much higher churn, it becomes easier to tell whether the issue is actually retention, pricing, or simply a weak acquisition channel.
The flat MRR chart by itself really doesn’t tell you enough.
Great reminder that a stable churn percentage can hide a rapidly growing revenue leak. Retention systems need to scale alongside MRR, not after the losses become painful.
One thing I've found is that plateaus are difficult because multiple explanations can produce almost identical charts.
The hardest part often isn't fixing the problem—it's becoming confident you've identified the right problem in the first place. Everything after that depends on getting that distinction right.
the number that separates your three cases isn't churn percent, it's the shape of retention by signup cohort.
plot each month's cohort as a curve of how many are still there n months later. leaky but growing looks like a curve that decays and then flattens at some floor, so every cohort leaves behind a permanent base and the thing compounds. leaky and stuck decays toward zero with no plateau, and then acquisition is just refilling a bucket.
the pricing case has its own shape too. a cohort that was never going to stay dies in month one or two and the survivors look normal after that. a real retention problem keeps bleeding in the later months.
Right, that's the thing I was missing. I was looking at aggregate churn and asking it a question it can't answer.
The floor-vs-decay-to-zero distinction is the bit that reframes it for me. If every cohort leaves behind a permanent base, acquisition compounds on top of something. If they all trend to zero, acquisition is just refilling. Same monthly churn number, completely different business. I'd been treating those as the same situation with different severity.
And the early die-off vs. late bleed split for the pricing case is cleaner than anything I'd come up with. I had "these look identical from the inside" and you've just shown me they don't, they're only identical in aggregate.
Question, if you don't mind: how do you judge whether a floor is high enough to matter? A cohort settling at 40% is obviously compounding. 8% presumably isn't, or isn't fast enough to notice. Is there a rough number you look for, or is it always relative to how fast you're adding cohorts?