Hello.

Hello, I'm Brian Polackoff. I started VAIRKKO, a B2B SaaS company, in 2009. I later sold that business in July of 2022. The business started small, just me and my business partner, and as with most partnerships the workload was split. I was responsible for all client and business activities along with developing various aspects of the SaaS product. VAIRKKO was client funded and churn was always the monster just waiting to feast on the fruits of our efforts. I’m sure you have heard the phrase, two steps forward, one step back. As the years progressed and our client base grew, it became harder and harder to identify the “needle in the haystack” or client who was quietly going to churn. It was painful, demoralizing and beyond frustrating to get an email or call from a client saying they wanted to cancel, and have already signed with a competitor all because of something that was easily resolved with either a small amount of training/education or assistance from my team. But it was too late, they were already gone (hence the 1-step back), now just to get ahead, we needed to onboard two new clients. You can start to see how the math really hurts a SaaS organization's growth. There were so many late nights and weekends lost for me as a founder trying to find a reliable method that could find and predict the accounts who were about to “quietly cancel”. It was a game of cat and mouse. I would focus on client retention efforts, but my business’s growth would stall. Then I would switch gears to focusing on growth (to outrun the churn that was occurring) but then churn would pick back up. We tried everything over the nearly 13 years in business including dedicated and incentivized Customer Success Managers (CSMs), Onsite training of new clients, recorded virtual trainings, advocacy groups, client adoption incentives, etc. But at the end of the day what I found was the best way to mitigate churn was early identification and remediation.

Many of the tools and solutions available on the market today are very expensive and for a SaaS company who is already struggling with loss of revenue due to churn this makes it a very hard pill to swallow. Additionally they are also bloated with features that are not needed to solve the simple problem of early identification of clients who are likely to churn. Frustrated about the existing solutions with a heavy price tag I started to really dig into Churn. Turns out, churn wasn’t unique to me. Although I've always known, churn is the single most important metric that we must continuously monitor and actively combat at every stage to improve. Many articles, from many publishers discuss this, but here is just one: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/saas-metrics. Reflecting on all my past efforts, the idea for Churn Assassin suddenly struck me one day out of the blue, and thus Churn Assassin was born so that I can help other SaaS organizations have the knowledge and information I lacked when I needed it most.

Churn Assassin is unique because it doesn’t compare a client's behavior to a standardized template (this is how most of the current solutions in the marketplace work) but it compares behaviors to the client themselves. Think of it like an olympic runner. To measure their improvement they don’t measure themselves against others. While yes, they might be trying to achieve the results of others, they won’t be able to do that until they can improve their own performance. The runner should measure their improvements by comparing where they are today to where they were yesterday, last week, last month etc. This will easily identify the trend of improvements, hitting a plateau or even worsening over time.

I began to work with other SaaS companies as a consultant and, using their real-world clients, behavior patterns started to emerge. Predictable patterns with predictable and early results. If I had this tool when I was the founder of VAIRKKO, there is now doubt in my mind we would have been able to reach 10+ million in ARR.  But beyond the money, my stress level would have been drastically reduced, my team wouldn’t be “fighting fires at the eleventh hour” which would have improved their work life quality and happiness. My family life would have improved drastically with my “head-space” being more in control and optimistic and not having to worry about the next “client cancellation email”, because I would have already known about it months in advance. My team would have had enough time to change the outcome for the client before cancellation had ever entered the clients' mind.