Last month I celebrated @Buffer hitting 70k paying customers. I need to retract that statement.

Why? Because we consciously decided to start recognizing churn immediately, the instant a customer decides to cancel their paid Buffer plan.

This is blasphemy in SaaS land! Nobody wants to lower their top-line metrics, and there’s always a chance that a user may change their mind and reinstate their plan.

But we’ve committed ourselves to being honest about how many customers we really have. We believe this will help us respond better to customer pain and deliver a better experience over time.

This all started because we decided last month to proactively cancel the subscriptions of ~1300 customers who hadn’t used the product in (literally) years. We were bracing for a $14k MRR drop… which never happened.

By changing how we report on churn and MRR, we’re now able to more clearly see that dip and all the other dips.

Slightly counterintuitive, but we see this as a good thing! Our feedback loop when customers decide to cancel is near-instant now, rather than carefully spread over a period of months when subscriptions actually do expire.

I’m really curious to see how this changes our behavior as a team. Genuinely! It’s both exciting and a bit humbling! I’ll report back in a few months with how it’s feeling