Most founders are fixing the wrong half of their churn

Something I keep running into while building in this space, and I think it's costing people real money.

Your churn number is two completely different problems averaged into one metric:

Voluntary churn — someone evaluated your product and decided to leave.
Involuntary churn — someone's card expired.

These have nothing to do with each other. One is a product/positioning problem that takes months. The other is plumbing you can fix this week. Public Stripe dunning benchmarks put involuntary at roughly 1 in 4 cancellations.

But most dashboards blend them. So a founder looks at 6% monthly churn, feels bad about their product, and goes off to rewrite onboarding, while a quarter of the leak is people who never decided to leave at all.

Three things that actually move the number:

1. Split the metric before you do anything else. You can't fix what you can't see separately. This is a one-hour reporting change and it usually reframes everything after it.

2. Pre-dunning beats retries. Everyone builds the retry sequence. Almost nobody emails before the card expires, and Stripe already hands you the expiry date. Reaching someone while their card still works converts far better than chasing them after a decline, when your product is now associated with a failed payment.

3. For voluntary churn, watch login breadth, not frequency. How many distinct people at an account logged in this month, not how often. One power user staying active masks an entire team that's gone quiet. Frequency lies. Breadth doesn't.

Full disclosure, because this community deserves it: I'm building a tool that does this automatically (exeechain.com). Zero customers so far, I'm at the stage where I'd rather learn than sell.

So: I'll do this analysis by hand, free, for anyone who wants it. Send me your numbers or connect Stripe read-only and I'll send back your actual voluntary/involuntary split and which accounts are drifting. No call, no deck, and it's yours whether or not you ever pay me anything.

Comment or DM and I'll get to you today.