Churn measures how many customers (or how much revenue) a business loses over a given period, usually expressed as a monthly or annual percentage. “Customer churn” counts the number of customers who leave; “revenue churn” (or dollar churn) weights that by how much they were paying, which matters because losing one large customer can hurt more than losing ten small ones even though customer churn looks the same either way.

Churn is deceptively powerful over time because it compounds: a business losing 5% of its customers every month looks fine in any single month, but that adds up to losing more than half its customer base within a year if nothing offsets it — which is why even small differences in monthly churn rate have an outsized effect on long-term growth and LTV.

Reducing churn is often cheaper and more effective than acquiring new customers to replace those who left, which is why mature companies invest heavily in customer success, onboarding, and product improvements specifically aimed at retention, not just growth.

🇵🇭 Philippine Example

Kumu's own early history is a real, documented example of extreme churn in action: of the first few thousand people who downloaded the app in its earliest version, only around twenty or thirty stuck around — a churn rate of well over 99% — before the team identified what those remaining users actually valued and rebuilt around it.

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