My SaaS Hit $6K MRR Then Immediately Stalled. The Problem Wasn't My Product.

June 2025: $6,100 MRR. I'm pumped. Growth is happening.​

July: $6,050 MRR. Weird.
August: $5,900 MRR. Concerning.
September: $5,600 MRR. Panic.​

New signups were fine. Churn was killing me. People would use the product for 2-3 weeks then ghost.​

Here's what I learned about the "silent churn" problem:

Users weren't leaving because the product sucked. Exit interviews revealed: "It works great but we forgot to use it." They'd sign up excited, integrate it into one workflow, then default back to their old habits after two weeks.​

I was treating activation like a one-time event. Get them to the "aha moment" once and they're hooked, right? Wrong. Behavioral change requires repetition. One success doesn't build a habit.​

My product existed in isolation. They had to remember to open a separate tool. The moment they got busy, we became invisible.​

What I changed:

Built a 21-day onboarding sequence (not emails in-product prompts). Day 1: Do X. Day 3: Try Y. Day 7: Here's a shortcut. Sounds annoying but retention after Day 21 went from 34% to 61%.​

Added Slack integration. Critical updates now ping them where they already are. Removed the "remember to check" friction. Engagement doubled in 3 weeks.​

Moved from project management spreadsheets to Teamcamp. This one's personal, but relevant: I was drowning tracking who was in what stage of onboarding. Couldn't see patterns.

Switched to Tteamcamp.app because it had this timeline view where I could see all user journeys at once. Spotted that users who didn't complete Action #3 churned 80% of the time. Fixed the UX for that action specifically.​

Started weekly "momentum emails." Not feature announcements. Just "Here's what you accomplished this week with [Product]." Reminded them of value they'd already gotten. Replies went through the roof.​

The painful truth:

Your product isn't competing with competitors. It's competing with inertia. The default behavior. The old way of doing things. Most founders (including me) obsess over features when the real battle is making your product impossible to forget.​

Churn isn't always a product problem. Sometimes it's a habit-formation problem disguised as a product problem.​

For founders fighting churn: What's your retention rate after 30 days? And what's the ONE thing you did that actually moved that number?