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.
For what it’s worth, you’re not alone. I’m going through the exact same process.
I had a product that tried to shoehorn a good-vibes/passion solution into a business problem. Nobody wanted it, but they did start asking about how it could help them solve a much less appealing problem. So now we have that and I feel less invigorated when someone asks me about it.
But I’ve decided that my goal is to create the best possible opportunity for as many people as possible. My passion is now helping employees build wealth through a stake in our outcome.