churn

Definition

The startup world's euphemism for customers abandoning ship, measured as the rate at which subscribers cancel or stop using your service. It's the metric that keeps SaaS founders up at night, because acquiring new customers is expensive but losing existing ones is devastating. High churn is basically your business slowly bleeding out, but with spreadsheets.

Example Usage

The company's monthly churn rate of 8% meant they were losing customers faster than they could acquire them.

Source: SaaS and business metrics terminology

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