Buildertrend is a customer-first SaaS juggernaut, now having served over one million customers, tracked over two million projects, and has a presence in over 100 countries. From mobile scanning receipts and documents, customer portals, progress reports, to-do lists, financial management tools, and even an in-person training course on how to use the platform (Buildertrend University), they’ve evolved into an all-in-one solution for running a better construction business.

As the product’s surface area grew, Buildertrend’s data-centric approach started overwhelming their support team. Customers moving through their homegrown cancellation process produced feedback that lacked data uniformity. The team needed actionable data analysis to make better product decisions. Taking a pragmatic approach to churn, Buildertrend knew they couldn’t just go hire a floor of people to wade through the mountains of data; they needed a solution that would work smarter, not harder, for their needs.

In 2020, Amit Gupta and James Yu co-founded Sudowrite, the “non-judgmental, always-there-to-read-one-more-draft, never-runs-out-of-ideas-even-at-3am, AI writing partner you always wanted.” Sudowrite quickly found product-market fit with writers captivated by AI’s potential but wanting a writing tool crafted specifically for fiction. “Sudowrite can help unblock you, give you ideas. It can help you deep in the editing process and help you bring your stories to life,” said Gupta.

Sudowrite has been called “scary good” by author Hugh Howey, a “salvation” by Stephen Marche (The New Yorker), and has been covered by The Atlantic, WIRED, The New York Times, and other major press outlets.

The “scary good” product grew its customer base scary fast thanks to impressive coverage and positive reviews. That made onboarding the influx of customers, learning from their needs, and shipping product improvements a monumental task. On top of that, such impressive growth brought cancellations and failed payments, making retention an initiative that someone needed to own.

When customers cancelled their OneUp accounts, Baer had no easy way to determine why that customer left. So he and his partner created automatic email campaigns that asked churning customers why they cancelled. But this email had very low response rates and the project had a low return on its investment.

OneUp decided to jettison its in-house feedback collection system and chose to implement Churnkey’s cancellation and customer insights survey. Because the survey happens at the moment of cancellation — and responses can be required — every cancellation becomes its own story, not just a vague data point.

Armed with cancellation feedback that OneUp’s user interface design appears outdated — and that trialing customers were cancelling specifically because of it — Baer and his partners realized that they needed to reprioritize a user interface update. Now, they’re about to launch a fresh UI. With it, they hope to increase free trial conversions.

“Without Churnkey,” Baer said, “I am pretty certain that [the UI update] was something we would have continued to put off again and again because we wouldn't have realized that our user interface was causing the cancellations.”

Zubtitle mainly serves video creators that are creating content for social media. Because they commonly batch their video content by recording in bulk and releasing over time, there were often periods where users needed to pause their account in between these “batched” work sessions. The team built a custom cancellation flow where users could enter a reason for cancelling. Unfortunately, this method provided inconsistent data and it was difficult to report on given that it was just stored in the database.

Not only did Zubtitle need a more reliable way to offer subscription pauses to its customers—it was an in-house solution susceptible to API changes—but the company also needed clean, accessible, and accurate data from cancelling customers. Turning to Churnkey, Zubtitle immediately saw churn drop with an array of offboarding offers: subscription pauses, discounts, so-called “hidden” plans, and funnels into customer support teams.

Because Zubtitle was able to offload these features to a reliable partner, they were able to focus on growth and optimizing their offboarding offers, lowering churn from ~10% to 7.2%. Almost a quarter of customers who would have cancelled have remained on as customers.