// When the user needs to identify at-risk accounts, understand why customers are leaving, reduce churn rate, build health scores, design save plays, or create win-back campaigns.
When the user wants to apply to startup accelerators, incubators, or fellowship programs. Also use when the user mentions "YC application", "Techstars", "accelerator", or "apply to programs".
When the user needs to design or evaluate system architecture — service boundaries, data models, API contracts, infrastructure topology, database selection, or dependency analysis. Also activate for "design the system", "how should I architect this", "monolith vs microservices", or architecture decision records.
When the user needs to write a monthly or quarterly investor update, prepare a board deck, or communicate company progress to stakeholders.
When the user needs to set up or improve CI/CD pipelines — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, deployment automation, or says "set up CI", "automate deployment", "add tests to pipeline", "fix my build".
When the user asks for a code review, shares code for feedback, or says "review this", "check my code", "what's wrong with this". Also activate when reviewing a pull request or diff.
When a founder needs to write cold emails or LinkedIn messages to prospects, partners, or investors. Activate when the user mentions cold email, outbound, prospecting, LinkedIn outreach, or needs help getting replies from people who don't know them.
| name | churn-analysis |
| description | When the user needs to identify at-risk accounts, understand why customers are leaving, reduce churn rate, build health scores, design save plays, or create win-back campaigns. |
| related | ["feedback-synthesis","onboarding-flow","email-marketing"] |
| reads | ["startup-context"] |
Activate when a founder needs to identify at-risk accounts before they churn, diagnose churn drivers, build a customer health scoring system, design cancellation or save flows, recover failed payments, or re-engage lost customers. This includes prompts like "our churn is too high," "which customers are about to leave," "why are customers canceling," "build a customer health score," "set up dunning emails," or "create a win-back campaign." Especially relevant for seed/Series A teams managing customers manually without dedicated CS platforms like Gainsight or ChurnZero.
Work with whatever data is available. Early-stage companies often lack formal CS systems — the skill works with support inboxes, Slack history, and spreadsheets.
A churn risk report tailored to the specific request. This may include:
Analyze every account across these four signal types:
Support signals: Ticket volume spikes, unresolved tickets, escalation language ("frustrated," "unacceptable," "cancel"), response time degradation, repeat issues on the same topic.
Communication signals: Silent accounts (no contact in 30+ days), frequency decline, sentiment shifts in Slack/email, champion disengagement (the main contact goes quiet), new stakeholder asking basic questions (signals champion departure).
Usage signals: Login frequency drops, feature abandonment (stopped using features they previously used regularly), shallow usage (logging in but not completing core workflows), no growth in usage over time, export/data download spikes (preparing to migrate).
Commercial signals: Discount requests, downgrade inquiries, payment failures, renewal proximity with no expansion discussion, competitor mentions in any channel.
Build a composite score (0-100) by weighting individual signals:
| Signal Severity | Points | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | 25 | Explicit cancel request, competitor migration started, champion left |
| High | 15 | Usage dropped 50%+, 3+ unresolved escalations, payment failed twice |
| Medium | 8 | Login frequency declining, support sentiment negative, downgrade inquiry |
| Low | 3 | Slight usage dip, delayed renewal conversation, single missed payment |
Multiple signals compound. An account with two high signals (30 points) and three medium signals (24 points) scores 54 — solidly in the Orange tier.
| Tier | Score | Timeline | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red | 70-100 | Action this week | Executive outreach, save offer prepared, root cause identified |
| Orange | 40-69 | Action within 2 weeks | CS outreach, intervention plan, monitor daily |
| Yellow | 20-39 | Monitor within 30 days | Check-in scheduled, watch for signal escalation |
| Green | 0-19 | Routine check-in | Quarterly review, expansion opportunity assessment |
Categorize every churn event into one of these buckets:
A well-designed cancel flow saves 10-20% of users who initiate cancellation.
Involuntary churn accounts for 20-40% of total churn and is the easiest to reduce. Retry failed charges 4-6 times over 10-14 days. Send card update links (pre-authenticated). Warn before cards expire (30 and 7 days prior). A good dunning system recovers 30-50% of failed payments.
Target customers who churned 30-90 days ago. Beyond 90 days, response rates drop sharply. Segment by churn reason — users who left for fixable reasons (price, missing feature now shipped) reactivate at 2-3x the average. Expect 5-15% overall reactivation from a well-executed sequence.
feedback-synthesis — Analyze qualitative feedback from churned customers alongside quantitative churn dataonboarding-flow — When churn analysis reveals early-tenure churn as the primary driver, indicating an activation problememail-marketing — Build full lifecycle email sequences (dunning, win-back, health-triggered re-engagement)User: "I manage 45 accounts manually. Help me figure out which ones are about to churn."
Good output excerpt:
Weekly Risk Scorecard — March 15, 2026
MRR at Risk: $18,400 (12% of total MRR)
Account MRR Risk Score Tier Key Signals Acme Corp $2,400 82 Red Champion left 3 weeks ago, usage down 60%, no response to last 2 emails Beta Inc $1,200 55 Orange 4 support tickets in 2 weeks (up from 1/month), asked about downgrade Gamma LLC $800 28 Yellow Login frequency declining, approaching renewal with no expansion signals Save Play — Acme Corp: Root cause: Champion departure. New contact has not been onboarded. Action: Executive-level outreach to identify new stakeholder. Offer a dedicated re-onboarding session. Prepare a 20% renewal discount if needed. Escalation trigger: No response within 5 business days — CEO-to-CEO email.
User: "Our monthly churn jumped from 4% to 7% over the last quarter. Help me figure out why."
Good output approach: Segment the increase by cohort, plan tier, and acquisition channel. Cross-reference with exit survey data to identify which churn drivers are increasing. Produce a root cause hypothesis linking the spike to specific changes (pricing, acquisition quality, product issues) and recommend targeted interventions for each driver.