Been running a bootstrapped ed-tech B2C SaaS startup since January 2023, started charging in April. We’ve been growing in revenue around 9-15% MoM but our churn is ridiculous, it’s around 21% and has been flat there for around 2 months (was previously 30-25%). Our growth in other metrics is great, we’ll hit $10k MRR this month but that churn number frightens me and I don’t know what I can do about it.
We are a freemium site and around 2% of our users are returning users (this lines up pretty much exactly with our conversion rate from free to paid accounts). Currently have around 125k users total, of which around 4k have paid for something and 1.7k have active subscriptions.
Congrats on growing to $10k MRR! Despite the churn, that’s still awesome.
Churn could just be a fact of life for your product. Until you identify another use case, it sounds as though your core customer is a student (cash constrained) who has a need for a particular class (time constrained).
You could consider a different pricing model. Pay a one time fee for access for X months. That may help you earn more revenue per customer. Or offer them a “pause” feature - for something like 10-20% of the normal monthly price, they can keep their account active and have some feature access between the freemium and the paid subscription.
Otherwise marketing will have to be a priority. The good news is that new students show up every single month.
Still I think what you’ve achieved is no small feat. You can try to optimize, but also just try to recognize that churn may be one of the battles that your business model will have to fight.