A speaker (from HubSpot) argues that many SaaS companies wrongly equate low cancellation rates with customer happiness. Cancellations alone don't prove satisfaction—customers may be passive, unaware they're paying, or have other reasons for not canceling. The speaker promises to explain what HubSpot did instead.
I'm going to tell you the mistake we made and I think most SaaS companies make as they're going through this generation of SaaS companies is way better than we were. Right. You guys are much more thoughtful around the metrics that you track and knowing the churn and retention is important. But here's the mistake. The mistake is you assume by looking at your kind of cancellations it's like okay, well people are not canceling. That means they must be happy with the product. Well, it does not mean that they are happy with the product. It just means for any number of reasons, one of which could be they're happy with the product but it could be they're too lazy to cancel. They didn't even know they were paying you essentially, which happens by the way, shockingly so any number of things. So what you have to do, what we did at HubSpot, I'll give you the very short version of it.
