While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:

🎧 Want the whole vibe? Find & bookmark the running playlist right here.

From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…

One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.

A few years back, I was advising a company that felt like it was growing.

The pipe was pretty healthy, deals were closing, the marketing team was busy.

And yet… ARR was stuck, every single quarter.

What finally broke things through for the founder wasn’t a celebrity VP of Sales or a TikTok wizard, but a painfully boring spready that showed something brutal:

They were losing customers as fast as they were acquiring them.

Aka, the leaky bucket.

And it’s how a ton of companies - especially in the $3M-$10M range - quietly begin to stall out.

Lemme tell you this from experience:

If you’re losing customers nearly as fast as you’re adding them, it’s like running on a treadmill.

You run hard. You sweat your ass off. But you don’t move.

The math makes this impossible to ignore.

Say you have 5,000 customers and 20% annual churn.

That doesn’t feel catastrophic. It’s not 50%. It’s not “everything is on fire.”

But 20% churn means you lose 1,000 customers every year.

Which means just to stay flat, you need to add 1,000 new customers annually.

That’s 20% of your entire base. Every single year. Just to tread water.

That’s not really growth at that point, that’s a replacement strategy.

Early on, this is easy to miss. Most founders are wired to hunt — new logos, new revenue, new wins.

Retention feels like something you’ll “tighten up later.” I completely get that.

But later is when it bites you.

Andrew Chen says it bluntly:

A product stalls when churn catches up to acquisition.

You can pour more money into marketing, you can hire more sales reps, you can add notifications galore. But once churn and acquisition converge, the top line flatlines. Period.

And consider this for SaaS companies — median NRR has gone from 120% five years ago, to 110% two years ago, to 106% in 2025. It’s getting harder and harder to expand revenue, let alone keep customers happy.

If your NRR is under 100%, you’re in a hole.

You’re losing more than you’re adding.

For SaaS, that’s the line.

For many B2C or community businesses, if retention is under ~80%, same problem.

So how do you actually fix the leak?

Net customer churn. Net Revenue Retention. Cohorts. Customer lifetime value.

Not once a year. All the time.

When I was CEO of Hampton, I was obsessed with this — daily.

If you can’t clearly answer, “Are customers sticking around longer and spending more?” you’re flying blind. Slowdowns in growth don’t typically just show up overnight — they show up months after retention quietly degrades.

Retention doesn’t improve because you care more or add more bells & whistles. It improves because customers actually get what they were promised.

That usually means:

Bad fit? Fix positioning or your ICP.

Missing feature? Prioritize it or kill the segment.

Low engagement? That’s on you, not them.

And remember this — it’s always cheaper to keep a customer than acquire a new one.

And every cohort that grows instead of shrinks compounds momentum.

That’s how you get NRR over 100%.

That’s how growth restarts without lighting more money on fire.

You have got to make retention something everyone cares about.

It can’t just be that sales gets paid on the close, product ship, and customer success cleans up the mess.

That structure will help contribute churn.

In the early days, tie sales incentives to 6–12 month customer health, not just day-one bookings.

Create a company-wide bonus that ties performance to net retention.

The cultural shift is from “sell at all costs” to land and expand, or at least, land and retain.

I once heard a founder say a terrible realization for them had been realizing they’d been “replacing the entire customer base every year.”

Don’t wait for that.

Growth doesn’t usually stall because you stopped trying.

It stalls because the bucket was leaking the whole time.

Plug that, and suddenly… a lot starts working again.

Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.

If today’s newsletter piqued your interest, here’s another deep cut. Andrew Chen lays out why growth stalls happen once churn catches up to acquisition. Narrative, rigorous, and worth bookmarking if you’ve ever stared at flat revenue and said, “but sales is working?” Check it out here.

Longevity vampire pioneer Bryan Johnson finally says the quiet part out loud: AG1 is mostly great marketing wrapped around mediocrity. If you’ve been choking it down out of habit or sunk-cost guilt, congrats — you’re free now. Check it out here.

I keep hearing good things about Granola, an AI notepad that turns meetings into usable notes and follow-ups without feeling disorienting or over-engineered. Haven’t used it yet, but it’s firmly on my “try this before buying another SaaS” list. Check it out here.

Growth rarely stalls because effort drops; it stalls because the system quietly drifts out of alignment. Across this series, the pattern is the same — the buyer shifts, the channels decay, or churn catches up — and the old playbook stops working.

When growth feels stuck, the answer usually isn’t “do more,” it’s fix the thing that used to work and no longer does.

Have a great weekend, and until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan

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