Onboarding completes in six weeks. The cancellations cluster in month four.

When early-life churn spikes at a predictable point, the cause is almost never located there, and the metric that says onboarding went well is usually measuring the wrong party's work.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Onboarding completes in six weeks. The cancellations cluster in month four.

A pattern shows up often enough in subscription and retained-service businesses to be worth treating as structural rather than coincidental: onboarding is reported as complete, satisfaction at handover is high, and then a disproportionate share of cancellations arrives somewhere between month three and month six. The instinct is to look for the cause where the symptom appears: the account manager who took over, a support failure, a competitor’s approach. That search rarely produces anything useful, because the decision being expressed in month four was usually made in week five. Onboarding…

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