The Weekly Growth Brief — Issue #24
Subject line options we'd recommend:
- Your customers are leaving — here's why (recommended — curiosity + specificity)
- The one metric SaaS founders ignore until it's too late
- Churn is winning. Here's how to fight back.
Hey there,
Last week I had two conversations with SaaS founders — both had grown revenue 40%+ year over year. Both were also losing more customers than they were adding.
Net new revenue was positive. Net new logos was negative. And neither of them realized how close they were to the growth wall.
That's the quiet crisis of 2026 SaaS. Everyone's obsessed with acquisition metrics. The companies that will win this year are the ones paying attention to retention.
This Week's Deep Dive
The churn blind spot
Most SaaS teams look at one number: gross revenue churn. It's the easiest to calculate and the worst metric to run your business on.
Here's what you should be watching instead:
- Net revenue retention (NRR) — includes expansion. Best-in-class SaaS companies hit 120%+. Under 100% means your existing customers are shrinking.
- Customer cohort retention — track each month's signups as a cohort over time. This shows if onboarding improvements are actually working.
- Expansion rate by segment — which customer segments grow their spend? Double down there. The segments that don't expand are usually the ones churning fastest.
The pattern I see most often: a SaaS company has great top-of-funnel metrics, average NRR, and terrible cohort retention. They've built a leaky bucket and are papering it over with aggressive acquisition.
That works until it doesn't. Usually it stops working when the cost of acquiring each new customer doubles — which is happening across most SaaS categories right now.
Resource of the Week
ChartMogul's 2026 SaaS Benchmarks Report — free, data-rich, full of specific benchmarks by ARR and category. If you haven't read it yet, it's the best hour you'll spend this month. Get the report →
Quick Hits
- OpenAI's enterprise SaaS launch hit $5B ARR in 6 months — the fastest ramp in SaaS history.
- New Salesforce data shows B2B buyers now use an average of 11 touchpoints before purchase — up from 6 in 2021.
- HubSpot just open-sourced their churn prediction model. Worth a look if you're building retention infrastructure.
One Question to Sit With
If you stopped all marketing and sales spend for the next 90 days, what would happen to your revenue?
If the answer is "it would crater," your business runs on acquisition. If the answer is "it would stay roughly flat," you've built something with real retention. Most SaaS companies are closer to the first answer than they realize.
That's it for this week.
If you're thinking through retention strategy, hit reply and tell me where you're stuck. I read every email.
— Sarah
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