Stories / SaaS
SaaS Founder: $1.0M to $5.2M ARR, churn down 42%
Stuck at $1M ARR for seven quarters, with logo churn running near 3% a month.
- Client
- SaaS Founder
- Industry
- SaaS
- Size
- 14 people
- Timeframe
- 12 months
Anonymised at the client's request · figures verified · published with written permission
The situation
The product had 340 paying accounts and a founder who could recite every feature on the roadmap and none of the renewal reasons.
Pricing had been set in 2019 by copying a competitor's page. Three years later the highest-value workflow — an audit export the finance team of every customer relied on — sat inside the cheapest tier.
Sales was closing new logos at a respectable rate. It just didn't matter, because the leak at the bottom of the bucket matched it almost exactly.
What we did
- STEP 01
Listened to renewals before touching the price page
We sat in on twenty renewal and cancellation calls over three weeks. Fourteen of them mentioned the audit export unprompted. Not one mentioned the integrations the roadmap was built around.
- STEP 02
Repackaged around the thing people renewed for
The audit export moved up two tiers and became the spine of the mid plan. Existing customers were grandfathered for twelve months with a written promise, which cost about $90k of theoretical revenue and bought every ounce of goodwill we needed.
- STEP 03
Made the numbers unavoidable on a Monday
One page, four numbers: net revenue retention, accounts at risk, activations completed, cash. Reviewed every Monday at 9am with the four people who could actually move them. No slides.
- STEP 04
Gave onboarding an owner and a definition of done
An account was not 'live' until the first audit export ran successfully. That single definition moved 90-day churn more than any pricing change did.
The numbers
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| ARR | $1.0M | $5.2M |
| Monthly logo churn | 2.9% | 1.7% |
| Net revenue retention | 88% | 121% |
| Average contract value | $3,100 | $8,400 |
Measured over 12 months
What didn't go to plan
Months four and five went backwards. Two enterprise accounts left over the repackaging and the team's confidence went with them. The Monday page is what stopped it becoming a retreat.
In their words
“Robert didn't tell us to raise prices. He made us watch twenty renewal calls until we admitted we were charging for the wrong thing.”
Founder and CEO · SaaS
The lesson
Pricing is positioning, not maths.