Provoked $12k MRR in churn in the first 60 days of our largest acquisition to-date

PS -- I copied this from my LinkedIn post, but I wanted to share this here as well because I wrote about it prior and got a lot of encouragement from this community. So thank you!

Here's a recap of what we tried:

June 23-July 23: Everything was left as-is
July 23-August 23: Removed credit card requirement from the free trial sign-up, removed some user IP address restrictions, and extended the trial period to 14 days from 5 days
August 23-September 23: Added the CC back, changed the default subscription to monthly plans, and reduced the trial period to 7 days

Here's what happened between July 23-August 23 🙈

The Good 😁 : 4x'ed free trial sign-ups
The Bad 👎 : 51% of the free trial sign-ups had NO usage activity throughout the 14 days (the most recent month we saw only 25% of sign-ups with no usage)
The Ugly 🤢 : 50% decrease in new paying customers
The Super Ugly 💩 : -$12,000 in MRR (churn); -127 active subscribers (according to Stripe)

What I learned:

• In product-led, how and when you ask for the sale is so vital. The thing ain't going to sell itself because you give it away for free for a little while.
• The credit card requirement feels like a lazy/temporary cover for an underlying issue with time-to-value for new users of GrowthBar.
• The quality of a sign-up and the improvements in free-to-paid conversion start with the quality of the traffic coming to our website.

What I'm doing about it for GrowthBar:

• Adding a new onboarding step to get more information on who is signing up.
• Building some new features for our best customers so we can prescribe a clearer activation experience for new users
• Taking a breath because we recovered a bit in September 💆‍♂️

this stuff is freaking hard haha.