3 min read  ·  Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Why They’re Leaving: A Deep Dive into Retention and Churn

"Stop Chasing Vanity Metrics and Start Fixing Your Leaky Bucket"

I’ve seen it happen dozens of times. A product launches, the marketing engine kicks into high gear, and the "Total Registered Users" chart looks like a rocket ship taking off. The team is high-fiving, the stakeholders are smiling, and everything feels like a win.

But as The Churn Fixer, I’m the one looking at the basement while everyone else is staring at the penthouse. Because if your "Total Users" is growing but your "Daily Active Users" is flatlining, you don't have a growth engine—you have a leaky bucket.

Acquisition is expensive. Retention is where the profit is. To scale, we have to stop obsessing over who is coming in the front door and start obsessing over why so many people are sneaking out the back.

Not All Churn is Created Equal

The first thing I do when I look at a product’s health is separate the "Natural" from the "Preventable."

• Natural Churn: Sometimes, your product just does its job. If you build an app to help people find a wedding florist, you want them to stop using it after the wedding. That’s success. Or, perhaps the user's business simply closed down. You can't fix that, and you shouldn't try.
• Preventable Churn: This is the silent killer. This is when a user has a problem you can solve, but they leave because they hit a friction point, felt a lack of value, or found a competitor who made it look easier.

As a pragmatic leader, I don't waste time on the natural stuff. I hunt for the preventable gaps in the experience that we can actually close.

Spotting the "Red Flags" Before the Goodbye

Users rarely just wake up one day and decide to delete an app. It’s usually a slow fade. By the time someone officially cancels their subscription, they’ve probably been "gone" for weeks.

In my experience, you can spot the red flags in user behavior long before the churn event:

1. The "Login Gap": They used to log in daily; now it’s once a week. Then once every two weeks.
2. The Feature Retreat: They stop using the "sticky" core features and only use the basic, low-value ones.
3. The Support Silence: Contrary to popular belief, a user who complains is often more loyal than a user who is silent. Silent users have already checked out mentally.

If we can identify these patterns early, we can trigger automated interventions—a well-timed email, a personalized tutorial, or a simple "How can we help?"—to win them back before they're out the door.

Cohorts: Checking the "Stickiness" of Your Product