Subscription growing pains

Sarah returned back to the office from her well deserved holiday. She stared at the dashboard. Revenue up 32% year-over-year. Her team was crushing it.

So why did her stomach feel like she’d swallowed lead?

Sarah was reflecting on one of the problems that hit the business just before her break. Sarah’s biggest client moved to a competitor.

Not with fanfare or complaints. Just… gone. And still no reply to her messages. Ghosted.

They’d been around since their second proper year of premium subscriptions.

“But look at these numbers,” her VP of Sales had said, pointing to the acquisition metrics. “We’re replacing enterprise revenue faster than ever. Some churn is inevitable.”

Maybe so. And perhaps she was invested emotionally because she’d been there when they were a new exciting customer win.

But something was jarring her. Why didn’t the replacement revenue feel like winning?

Patterns

Sarah started looking for patterns.

Month 1 to 6 customers: Positive reviews and feedback from the team.

Month 18+ customers: Still saying nice things in surveys. NPS looks good. But renewal conversations look more like lengthy negotiations. And fielding more questions about alternatives.

Month 36+ customers: The quiet exits start. But the sentiment is still positive. And the team report green health scores.

Hypothesis

Her newest customers were buying tomorrow’s vision of the product.

The sales team, energised by market feedback, make bigger bolder promises.

Product scramble to deliver, building features to dazzle prospects.

But when Sarah looked at it from her established customers perspective… The ones who’d built their operations around the core strengths of the solution?

About half were watching their reliable solution become something else.

The rest had built their capabilities and outgrown the solution.

Clarity

Sarah realised she wasn’t growing revenue. She was trading her foundation for her growth.

What if every new feature was a small betrayal of the customers who made the business possible?

Not because innovation is wrong.

Not because winning new business is wrong.

But because she hadn’t balanced the needs of her existing customers.

She lost sight of what made her solution essential versus what made it exciting.

Flawed success

Her team wasn’t failing. They were succeeding at the wrong things.

• Sales was winning with bigger promises
• Product was delivering impressive new capabilities
• Marketing was attracting new versions of ideal customers
• Customer Success was achieving great NPS scores

But what if the critical question is:

“Are we building sustainable value or trading it?”

Shifting mindset

Sarah stopped optimising for new customer excitement and started mapping established customer results.

Then threading new customer needs into the foundations of the solution.

Her new business conversations became market research but not the sole input into innovation.

She shifted her thinking. And her teams.

Her longest-tenure accounts should be dependent on the solution, not scoring high on Net Promoter Scores alone.

And dependent on the DNA of the core solution, not the promise of the evolving solution in isolation.

The insight:

New customers buy for possibilities.

Her established customers were building capabilities to solve a problem.

But they couldn’t see a clear direction with these new features popping up.

And those who reached the peak didn’t see their next milestone, they started looking elsewhere.

She was looking at a conveyor belt of churn. Not over 1 year, but spread out over 3 years.

Framework

Instead of choosing between innovation and reliability, Sarah built a framework:

• Core capabilities for established customers (the journey)
• Expansion drivers as clear additions (not features)
• Customer results drove product decisions (not NPS)
• Team resources allocated to compound value (over years)

28 weeks later

Revenue growth continues, but now it is different.

Established customers stay and expand.

New customers see promises materialise.

Sarah balances growth to build on the foundations.

The most dangerous business metric is revenue growth that masks a retention crisis. When your new customers love the promise but your established customers are evaluating alternatives, you’re not scaling…

Use Substribe services to spot risk and opportunity early, connect with customers and inform value based insights for your premium subscriptions.