Why month two
The first month of a subscription is often a trial, a discount or a honeymoon. The second month is when people decide whether the product has earned a place in their week. It is also when many B2B products lose the most people.
We looked at twelve churn studies run by customers on ProductSignal, all interviewing people who had left in their second month. Together they covered a little over 1,200 interviews.
The moments people described
Three moments came up again and again, across very different products. The first was the handover: the person who chose the product set it up, then a colleague who had not chosen it was asked to use it. The second was the first real deadline, when the product was needed for something that mattered and did not fit. The third was the renewal email, which arrived before anyone had seen a result.
What rarely came up
Price came up, but rarely first, and almost always as a conclusion rather than a cause. People said it was too expensive after describing a month in which it had not done much for them. Missing features came up less than teams expected, and usually as a way of describing one of the three moments above.
What teams did about it
The teams that acted on these studies mostly changed small things: a second onboarding for the colleague who inherits the tool, a check-in before the first deadline, a renewal email that shows what the product has done so far. None of them changed their price.