The Growth Strategy I Wish I’d Focused on Sooner

There was a time when I measured progress by the number of new customers signing up each month.

New leads meant growth, right? More logos on the dashboard. More MRR on the spreadsheet. More energy from the team.

But over time, I started noticing a strange pattern.

While acquisition numbers looked healthy, our retention didn’t match. New users would sign up, poke around, maybe use a feature or two… and then silently churn weeks later.

They came in excited and left unnoticed.

That’s when I started asking a better question:

“What if we stopped optimizing for acquisition and started optimizing for staying power?”

And honestly, that question changed everything.

Why Retention Became the Game-Changer

Customer acquisition gets most of the attention in SaaS. It’s sexy. It's easy to attribute. You can pump money into ads, watch the dashboards light up, and feel like you're winning.

But retention? Retention is quiet. It hides in cohort charts and usage logs. You don’t notice it until it’s already hurting you.

And here’s what I’ve come to realize:

• Acquisition creates momentum. Retention creates sustainability.

• Acquisition tells you people are interested. Retention tells you they found value.

• You can’t grow if you can’t keep what you’ve earned.

I’ve lived through months where our acquisition outpaced churn, and yet growth still felt stagnant. When I zoomed out, I saw the truth: we weren’t building a business—we were bailing water from a leaking boat.

Retention Is Not a Department. It’s a Culture.

We often think of retention as the job of customer success or product. But if you dig deeper, it touches everything:

• Marketing: Are we attracting the right customers who will stick?
  

• Sales: Are expectations being set accurately?
  

• Product: Are we helping users achieve their goals efficiently?
  

• Support: Are we solving issues fast enough to earn trust?

In other words, retention is not something you fix with one playbook—it’s something you build into your DNA.

How I Started Improving Stickiness

These are some of the most impactful lessons I’ve learned—not from theory, but from messy, in-the-trenches adjustments.

1. We redesigned our onboarding to focus on the first win, not the full feature set.

I used to think more features meant more value. But most users don’t want to be experts—they just want to know, “How does this solve my problem today?”

So instead of giving them a full tour, we guided them toward the action that gets them the fastest ROI. That one key feature. That one report. That one workflow. And when users experience success early, they stick.

2. We made it easier for users to form habits.

Retention is often a result of repetition. If someone uses your product once a month, churn is just a matter of time. So we built reminders, triggers, and systems around usage cadence—daily, weekly, monthly. We even asked our customers during onboarding: “How often do you expect to use this?” and we tailored the experience around that.

3. We proactively reached out before they disengaged.

Waiting for churn is like waiting for a fire alarm to ring—too late to prevent damage. So we built simple signals—login frequency, usage drops, skipped tasks—and used them to trigger check-ins. Sometimes just asking, “Everything going okay?” saved an account.

4. We stopped treating churn as a loss and started treating it as research.

Every churned user became a case study. Not in a blame-filled way, but in a curiosity-driven way. We started scheduling 10-minute exit interviews. The insights we pulled from those conversations led directly to product improvements, pricing tweaks, and onboarding updates.

5. We created ‘stickiness’ scorecards.

Beyond NPS and CSAT, we developed our own internal stickiness score. It factored in login velocity, feature depth, team invites, and task completion. It wasn’t perfect—but it gave us a heartbeat. When stickiness was high, churn dropped. When it dipped, we asked why.

Retention Also Gives You Leverage

Here’s the part that isn’t talked about enough:

Retention changes how you operate as a business.

• You don’t need to spend as much on ads.

• You don’t need to hire sales reps to hit the same targets.

• You have more time to focus on the product.

• You create predictable revenue, which unlocks better planning, better hiring, and better sleep.

I’ve spoken with other operators who built 7-figure ARR businesses with less than 100 customers—because those customers stayed, upgraded, and referred others.

That’s the dream. That’s the compound interest of SaaS.

What I’d Do If I Were Starting Over

If I could rewind to the beginning, I’d do three things differently:

1. Start building retention into onboarding on Day 1.
   Not just “sign up and explore,” but “here’s how we help you win.”

2. Create human touchpoints early.
   Automation is powerful, but personal connection is sticky.

Obsess over the first 90 days.
That’s when the decision is made—Do I need this or not? Everything after that is maintenance.

Retention isn’t a feature. It’s a feeling.

When people feel seen, understood, and successful—they don’t look for alternatives. They stay. They tell their friends. And they become the foundation of a real, sustainable business.

If your growth has felt off lately, if you’re burning more on ads than you’re recouping in LTV, maybe don’t look outside for answers.

Start with the people who’ve already said yes.

And ask:
How can I get them to stay one more month?

Then do it again.

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If this resonated with you, feel free to reply and tell me how you're approaching retention this year. Always happy to trade notes.

Talk soon,
Angelo