The short answer
You are losing customers when more people cancel, stop using the product, or stop paying than you replace. The number is churn rate: customers lost this month divided by customers you had on the first. For a small product business the number matters less than the names. Ten customers is ten stories, and you probably know which three are about to go.
How to spot it before the cancellation
- A paying customer who has not logged in for three weeks.
- A failed payment that retried and failed again.
- A support message you have not answered in three days.
- A cancellation with no reason given.
Each of these is visible in a tool you already have (Stripe, your analytics, your inbox). None of them is visible in the same place, and none of them announces itself. Today June's weekly readout and drafts run on the Stripe and PostHog integrations you add; same-day alerts are not live yet.
What is actually stuck
Customers rarely leave because of the thing they type in the cancellation box. Behind most churn in a small business is one of three stalls, and each needs a different move:
- Someone is blocked. They hit a bug, a permission, an invoice question, and the thread died on your side. The move is to chase yourself: answer the thread, fix the access, escalate the bug.
- Someone does not know. They never got to the part of the product that would have made them stay. The move is a bad first draft: a two-line message that guesses what they were trying to do and offers to do it with them.
- Someone does not want to. You. The win-back email has been "this week" for a month because it feels like begging. The move is to have the draft in front of you with the date you first postponed it.
What to do
- Write down the three customers you think are closest to leaving. Today.
- For each, decide which stall it is and send the matching message.
- Read every cancellation reason for the last quarter in one sitting. Patterns appear at five.
- Make "customer went quiet" a thing that shows up in your day, not a thing you discover at renewal.
What it looks like
Two things stalled this week. Marta (Pro, since March) failed payment twice and hasn't logged in since the 4th. Cause looks like blocked, her card expired. Draft below, one line. And the Kessler thread has been waiting on you for four days. That one is you.
Behind this is usually someone who is blocked, does not know or does not want to. This is how June looks at everything. Here is why.