Understanding the differences between Behavioral vs Attitudinal reasons for churn

Paul Harwood

|

Co-founder

of

Useristics
EP
175
Paul Harwood
Paul Harwood

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Paul Harwood, a Co-founder of Useristics

In this episode, Paul shares why dealing with churn in different markets can vary wildly whilst the blended metric may look the same across them.

We then discussed how to define user segments for your research and we wrapped up by talking through the differences between behaviour vs attitudinal reasons for churn.

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

Dealing with churn in international markets. 00:00:00
User churn vs account churn. 00:00:00
Defining user segments. 00:00:00
Understanding the differences between Behavioral vs Attitudinal reasons for churn. 00:00:00
Defining the churn metric/benchmark. 00:00:00

Transcription

 
[00:01:19] Andrew Michael: Hey, Paul. Welcome to the show. Nice to meet you, Andrew. It's great to have you for the listeners. Paul is the co-founder of user, a company that equips teams with actionable knowledge and hard skills to better understand users. So they can build products that mid user needs and create experiences.

Users can't live without. Paul is an international researcher that has worked across various markets and previously held roles as a user sentiment researcher at Facebook and a market research leader, Twitter. So my first question for you, Paul. What was the biggest surprise you got while conducting user sentiment research at Facebook?

[00:01:55] Paul Harwood: So it was very early on and I think the [00:02:00] biggest not surprise, but the biggest sort of challenge was just understanding that the way people were applying the product was very different by market. How someone was making use of it in market X was very different than how they were applying it in market.

[00:02:17] Andrew Michael: Interesting. And so what you're saying by that then is like at Facebook, as we know the product today, you can share pictures, photos, updates you can connect with friends and loved ones. The usage patterns were different across different markets and the way that we're using it, the use cases changed.

[00:02:32] Paul Harwood: Yeah so usage is obviously different by market. And I think that's one of the biggest things when we think about retention and. Generally is that we need to avoid this sort of naive universalism that if it is this way in our own market, then it will be in the will be the same way in every market around the world.

And some of that is obviously just behaviorally driven. There are similar apps or competitors that. [00:03:00] Exist in other markets around the world that don't exist in the United States. So if we think of Kaka, think of neighbor they have high usage in say South's Korea. They have very limited usage in the United States.

And some of the behaviors that are associated with social media products here in the United States may be used by users in South Korea. Within say neighbor or cookout. So the use of behavior is obviously central to understanding retention and 

[00:03:32] Andrew Michael: And when you go into, so this is something that you looked at Facebook.

I don't know if have you looked at it other companies then as well. So you mentioned as well, different markets is different user behaviors. So people use your product in different ways. You mentioned though that churn may look the same but it's not in reality. What do you mean by that?

Exactly. 

[00:03:51] Paul Harwood: So I think when we look at churn, In terms of user behavior is a very [00:04:00] artificial construct. Mau 30 days. It doesn't necessarily capture the true user behavior. So you can go to any market and have people that may have been identified as trend. But they are still satisfied users, but they are using it on say a 45 day cadence failing to understand that user behavior creates a problem because you are now trying to resurrect.

An individual that doesn't need resurrecting. So the way teams will create email marketing, haven't seen you in a while can be problematic because the person receiving it's like. I'm using your product. What do you mean? So churn can be different by market, but the challenge is that the actual rate of churn, if we look at it at an aggregate level may be the same.

It may be 3%. It may be 5%, but the explanation as to why it's 3% in market [00:05:00] a and why it's 3% in market B may be very different. Also if we only look at churn in isolation, we fail to place it within the context of everything else that's going on. So you may have churn, but the churn may be associated with accounts, but the person themselves may still be using your product.

So there's a need obviously to separate. The individual and the actual account that you are measuring, cuz that's normally what we're measuring. We're measuring an account rather than the actual users. So it's critical that you get out there and speak to users. 

[00:05:42] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And definitely, I think B2B P we focus like account based churn retention.

B2C would typically be on the user level itself. You raise an interesting point as well. I think when it comes to like frequency of usage and the way we go about measuring churn retention currently today and I think. [00:06:00] Churn and retention when it comes to like billing cycles and payments. I think there's, it's pretty black and white.

There's if someone doesn't pay you or they pay you they've churned. But when we think a little bit about user retention within those accounts and how you go about measuring engagement for users is that if we don't understand what the natural like usage frequency is of our users, We then end up going up and putting together like things like onboarding campaigns or is direction emails targeting the wrong sort of time frames and understanding.

And as you say, like this can vary as well. Like the natural usage frequency can vary maybe by markets or by different use case. What is some of the like, things that people should look out for and trying to understand this? Like, how would you go and determine what the natural usage frequency is of your users?

[00:06:46] Paul Harwood: Most companies obviously recognize churn by looking at aggregate quantitative data. And that's totally fine. It illustrates that you have a problem, however, to understand [00:07:00] the root of the problem, you need to speak to very few people. But in detail. So you need to get rich sort of internal validity, the got the generalizability, the external validity from your numbers that tell you it's 3%, you now need to speak to users and importantly, listen to the users.

Once you identify that you may have a churn issue. It's critical to conduct qualitative research. So talking to a particular user that you've identified as being churned and understanding their use case because. They've churned in terms of your data, but that doesn't mean that they've stopped using your product, the challenge for SaaS.

And when we enter monetization is obviously we no longer just have users. Obviously applications social media, they have challenges when it comes to [00:08:00] churn, but their challenges are for the most part based on users. The challenges for SaaS are obviously got users intermingled with customers, the people who are actually paying for it and identifying who is the customer and the user who is just a user is critical because they're going to have different user behavior.

So if we think of a. A SaaS product. You may have a CEO who glances at a dashboard. Okay. And they do it once a month. You may have the accountant who maybe looks at the dashboard. Every three months when they have to do a quarterly report, they have very different. Use cases if you're just measuring them against some standard 30 day, then you're going to have churn, but you're going to waste a lot of resources by not talking to them in trying to resurrect them.

So speaking to just a few people and under, and look and using your behavioral [00:09:00] data. To identify individuals who maybe have different tasks so that you can understand whether this individual is a true churn is a challenge. And then I think the other challenge, when we look at it in terms of markets is there's just a lot of external variables that can impact your churn.

So if we think of. Several Asian markets where telephone numbers are just throw away things and the way that you've onboarding people, if you've onboarded them using a mobile phone number or even an email in some markets it can be incredibly challenging because as the phone number is disposed of they.

Download your application or your product again. Another thing to look at when we're trying to deal with churn, internationally, 

[00:09:52] Andrew Michael: need to understand these nuances. Yeah. I think you mentioned like a really good point as well when it comes to the measurement side of things [00:10:00] and specifically focused as well.

I think when it comes to B2B sauce, it's. We all focus really on the final like churn and retention. And we focus on the dollar value associated with it. And we talk about account churn for the majority of time. But when we focus, like typically account churn ends up happening when you have user churn happening within an account and people aren't using it and they're not getting value from it.

You mentioned as well, like the concept of having different use cases within an account. So the CEO who's regularly checking the dashboard versus the CFO. Maybe who's checking it once a quarter. And if we're looking at sort of month or month retention or monthly active users we would see like a very different profile between these two different types of users.

And then perhaps maybe the way we go about measuring it is different as well. I think it goes back to the first point though, around like the frequency of usage and understanding that. So you mentioned a company let's take a hypothetical scenario, identify there's an issue. You need to go in and do a little bit of research now to diagnose this.

And you've identified maybe [00:11:00] the CEO and the CFO. What do you do next? Like how do you what are some of the questions you'd wanna be speaking to and asking these users and how are you gonna go about synthesizing that inform. 

[00:11:10] Paul Harwood: First off you want to look at the company's internal data.

You want to use it so that you can identify, this is the CEO, this is the CFO, or in sort of research terms like archetypes, or because you haven't done segmentation, but you at least know that. This is a characteristic of this type of user. And this is a characteristic of another type. So you would use the internal data and then you want to craft scripted questions because you want the questions at their heart to be similar.

Irrespective of whether you're speaking to the CFO or the CEO, you want to understand the importance. That the product has within their daily task, how common it is, how useful it is, what's the motivation for them to use it. What's the benefit. [00:12:00] And through these very general questions you are getting at the cadence because obviously the challenge for a founder early on when they're doing their own research and also for researchers is you are asked to Find out about retention and you're asked to find out about churn, but you're not allowed to mention the word retention or churn.

These are words that you can't actually speak about. But by talking to these individuals and listen to them, You're able to get a lot of valuable information from them to understand their particular use case utility that they get out of it. And hopefully if you're speaking to what should be the stakeholders and the people who pay the money.

For your SaaS product the utility that they see that they're getting out for other members of their team, you're also wanting to ask questions about how they situate your product and understand their decision [00:13:00] making as to why they selected your product, because that in of itself can give you some indicators as to possible reasons why they have, or they have not churned.

If you're the market leader, then obviously that's great. You need to keep checking to make sure that you remain as the market leader, but in short, it's having structured or semistructured conversations with individuals write down the questions and and then report them out.

I think that's the other thing that's critical is yes, you may have a growth team. Yes. You may have a team that's just dedicated to churn if you are a larger entity, but these are valuable things that everyone at that company should know. They should know use cases that people are applying their product.

For, so don't have a knowledge silo, push the information out as far as you can. 

[00:13:59] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I [00:14:00] think doing the research understanding sort of what are the use cases for the product? What are the different segments and how they're using it, and then understanding the natural frequency as well of that is super, super valuable to everyone on the team.

Like from a customer success standpoint, how to deal and approach different segments from. Life cycle marketing, how to reach out to the, what stages like it really just helps everybody understand a little bit better, the use cases and to serve the customers better at the end of the day. So at this stage, you've done a little bit of research then you've conducted a few interviews.

You've got structured data. You've put together some reports you've shared with the team and what would typically be the next step then as well. So like it's often while you have the research you've, but you've got it now. You've shared it with the team. Where do you go from there? 

[00:14:48] Paul Harwood: Yeah, I think so where you go from there?

I think the only other thing to add is when you are reaching out to these individuals you have to recognize that they [00:15:00] could have churn and they may not like your product. So you may need to do a blind recruitment, but in terms of where you go from there, you obviously want to. If you're not working with that with the growth team, you want to share it with the growth team and you want to provide Not just the raw analysis, but how it may impact either the growth team of a particular market or the growth team of a particular product.

What I mean by that is if you have learned in the research that people use your product during their commute is one of the things that just fascinates me. It's like how people go to now that we are again, but If you've learned that people are applying your product to check it or send messages or whatever it is that they're doing during their commute, then it's a meeting with the growth team, a meeting with the designers to see is there elements of the [00:16:00] product that are not well suited to a commute and I've done research To better enable people to use products during say a London underground commute.

So if you're thinking of the hustle and Jostle of the commuter underground train How can you send X or send a message while it's juggling around. You may have a very good product and the use case that they're applying. So you understand the behavior. But the, what you're learning from the research is the time in which they have to do your particular activity is just not conducive to the current way the product is built or designed.

Want to obviously figure that out. You also want to be able to share the broader context because sometimes you identify that churn is seasonal. Okay, so you've put all your I don't wanna say your eggs in one basket, but you put concentration on a particular type [00:17:00] of content. And that's what you're going to focus on, but when that type of content, whether it's sport's no longer in season then what do these people do?

So you have some seasonal trend. And then the other thing I think is. Identifying what is going to be just natural churn, because if you have say a product that is an ed tech tool the life cycle of your product is going to be finite. If you're helping someone learn a. There's going to come a point where they have proficiency in that language and they are naturally going to try and help.

Yeah. Now you you can figure out what you can use to retain them or learn something else. But these are the things that you'd want to be passing on to the team and keeping it as broad as possible. In the way you deliver the. 

[00:17:48] Andrew Michael: You mentioned quite a few different things now also I wanna backtrack and run through a few of them. The first thing that I wanted to chat a little bit about was graduation churn, because this was actually something that I was sorry, not graduation churn [00:18:00] was seasonal churn.

Graduation churn, you mentioned now seasonal churn is something as well. Like we actually previously saw at Hotjar where. People would use the tool or service for a project and that project would end and then they would churn. And what ended up happening was we ended up having a really large amount of reactivation in terms of the business.

So companies would use us while their project was ongoing and then they would reactivate. So I think that's one area where that happens. Like you mentioned as well, like the example of maybe focusing on specific types of content and being out of season from that perspective. What is like some of the things that you've seen companies do towards, so you do the research in the first case, like you understood that the natural frequency of the product doesn't fit the current product thing.

So as a product team, you can then work towards understanding how can you fit the product better to that cycle and of usage and those patterns when it comes to seasonal churn itself. This for me in my mind is when [00:19:00] it comes to subscription, businesses raises quite a big challenge because if you don't have that ongoing usage on a regular basis, you don't really have a subscription business.

You just have of like these once of purchases and then trying to win back customers at the next season. One of the ways I've seen different companies do it as well is like introduce different product offerings that enable you to have that all round usage. What are some of the other things you've seen companies do to try and tackle the seasonal chain.

[00:19:27] Paul Harwood: So I think there's what they can do in terms of content and also what they can do in terms. How they measure retention. So in terms of content, obviously you identify what content can retain them across the season. So if you have a a uh, A social media application whether it's Kaka, whether it's Twitter or whatever that is focused on providing people access to let's know, secret.

Twitter in India provides a lot of [00:20:00] access to cricket so if there's no cricket being played in Then how do you provide content that could be of interest to those individuals while there is no cricket being played? If we think of how on more of the SaaS side, how the retention is measured It can be measured obviously by actual user growth, but it could also be linked with user saturation.

If you think of probably some of the main tools that people have access to at work There will be some individuals, for example, that may use confluence daily. There may be others who use it. Very infrequently. If we look at it at the. Single user data level, then yes, we would have lots of churn, but if we understand the usage and the subscription or the pricing is built not necessarily at pursuit, then that's one way [00:21:00] that you're not addressing churn, but what you are addressing is user behavior.

And then measuring your success to better mirror the actual user behavior that you have. Okay. Because what you obviously don't want to do is have huge levels of revolving churn. The metric itself is artificial, the use of behavior. What's important. So if you can truly understand what is actual churn people who have stopped using your product, that's going to be a far more cost effective way to be able to grow.

Because you're not going to be resurrecting individuals yeah, 

[00:21:46] Andrew Michael: for sure. I think confluence is like a very good example that you highlighted well in terms of understanding engagements within an account and users and usage, because it can very wildly, depending on the type of. For user, and it's also not role [00:22:00] specific.

So I, I think let's say if you somehow knew which roles within an organization were using the products, so maybe a product manager versus a product designer versus the CEO using confluence. It's not always going to be the same patterns because a product manager within the first three months might use it increasingly a lot.

And then over time maybe taper out or the inverse. But depending on the type of company in . So I think. In those cases, it becomes very difficult to pinpoint to specific type of user. But do you typically then try to understand, okay. Like in an activity account size, what should be the engagement looking like across the blended engagement across an account?

Or do you still try to find patterns within organizations that you'd be able to reflect and understand and segment by? So in this case of confluence, like how would you wanna go about segmenting engagement and understanding retention across different users in an account. 

[00:22:54] Paul Harwood: In terms of segmenting the users I would never suggest that you begin [00:23:00] segmentation with a churn project.

What you want to do is obviously segment the total user base and then see what percentage of those segments actually are churning because if you find that one of your segments is churning the the greatest, then that's awesome because you obviously have a. Clear target on how to address churn.

If you have no idea, particularly early on, you just have churn then you would want to look as I say, at your user data and see whether you can see either patterns or use the user data. To build hypotheses as to what could explain different reasons for an individual to stop using your product.

So you may look at tenure. So if you don't take tenure into consideration, you could [00:24:00] obviously recruit a lot of individuals who. Turned out within the first 30 days or so, particularly if you've got a freemium model, but, and you could miss the ones who've been using your product for two years now, as I say, the challenge is obviously being able to talk to those individuals because when we get to because of the focus of lots of new SaaS products, Having tech users be their early users.

And the fact that people in tech jobs do seem to move around a lot. You still have to, first of all, identify whether this is just a person who's left their job and that's the death of that particular account. So there's lots of things that factor in, but at the end of the day if you. Just speak to a few people and I, six is more than sufficient to begin to get [00:25:00] a good idea as to what could be the driver behind the churn of 

[00:25:06] Andrew Michael: Of the product.

The thing is, although you mentioned like segmentation itself and agree, shouldn't be done with churn in mind itself. It's really trying to understand thing, but how do you go about thinking about segmenting to begin with? Because there's many different ways that you can go about segmenting your user base as well.

So you mentioned The time period. So how long have they been with you, perhaps what their role is, perhaps what their use case is for the product, perhaps their frequency of usage. When you go about this in the beginning, wanting to do the research, like how do you first start off and say, okay, what are the segments are we gonna be looking at?

And then the following to that would you wanna be like, speaking, to say five to six people in each segment? Or do you think five to six people across the board would be enough? 

[00:25:46] Paul Harwood: So in terms of. Dealing with segmentation. I think one of the challenges that companies face and I've had to address it is what is it that you want [00:26:00] to segment?

So do you want to segment your potential users or do you want to just segment your current users? So if you segment. Current users that may not provide you the opportunity to use that segmentation and most effectively to win those who are your non-users. So that's the first decision, like what are we segmenting?

What we just going to segment the current users or do we want to segment in a way that will be useful for us to understand? Non-users when. Doing segmentation. It's always good though, to still begin with qualitative research, because the first thing you need to understand when you're doing the segmentation are what are all of the possible behaviors and attitudes that these individuals have, and you are wanting to find out [00:27:00] not the behavior.

That your users do within your product the users behaviors and attitudes that are separate from your product, how do they commute? How do they have breakfast? These things E every day aspects of their life, you will ask questions about how they apply the product, but it shouldn't be the.

The only thing, because your product is going to change, but the way someone commutes and the way someone lives their life is going to change more slowly than the way your product will change. So segmentation built around user. And user behaviors.

And again, what works in market a may not work in market B user protection is incredibly important variable to place within any sort of segmentation, the way people think about and can even [00:28:00] adopt your product may be very different in Countries that have low political rights to those in countries with high levels of political rights.

So there's lots and lots of factors that you need to. Building 

[00:28:15] Andrew Michael: two them, for sure. And you mentioned as something interesting. I think it's something when we think about our ideal customer profile as well, and there's many different ways we can go about being researched to understand that a lot of the times, like when people just focus on their own internal.

Data. And speaking to customers currently is that typically like the customers that you have today are a direct reflection of the marketing that you've done to date and the product you've built, but they don't necessarily represent the biggest opportunity for the company. And I think that's where you mentioned as well, like speaking to potentially like a panel or potential customers of your product can really help you understand.

Okay. Are we actually going after the best segment, have we been able to acquire the best opportu. For the business. So I think that's really important to think about when doing any of this research [00:29:00] as well is do we have any bias in the current user base that we have that is not gonna give us the best results?

[00:29:06] Paul Harwood: Yeah. I've conducted research for companies where you Recruit people to interview and you ask where they're located and it comes back. The 80% are in San Francisco because the company has targeted tech workers as been their sort of first market. Is that going to help you longer term?

Probably not. So you probably want to ensure that you're speaking to people outside of that particular bubble But the challenges are greater, obviously when you're dealing with churn. Sometimes you need to recruit people blind as opposed to using internal data.

[00:29:44] Andrew Michael: For sure. We chat a little bit about this before the show, but it'll be good to get respective. Is that the reasons for churn and understanding if they're behavioral versus Al maybe you can just share a brief of what you mentioned by what you meant by that and how you go [00:30:00] on measuring it. 

[00:30:01] Paul Harwood: So obviously there are many factors that go into why someone.

Will churn churn itself is obviously only as accurate as the benchmark that is being held against 30 days is a measure. But it doesn't mean that everyone who's using it 35 days, cadence is not satisfied with your product, the reason. Why churn is obviously linked with user behavior and attitudes and it can differ.

Particularly when we build in different markets is the context in which these attitudes and behaviors. If we think of the attitudes that. I have as someone who was, you can probably tell, I didn't grow up in Alabama. So the attitudes that I have as someone who grew up in the UK are different than the attitudes of say [00:31:00] someone else that lives here in California, who grew up in, in California.

If we're trying to understand what a user does, whether they keep using your product or whether they stop using your product, we need to understand the attitudes that they have and also the behaviors that they have and the context in which they occur. So to give an example, that's not on a churn, it's a barrier to adoption.

If. Looking at the German market. The, and you're trying to onboard users in Germany, the length of the password is important. Okay. And the way you communicate the length of the password, if you just say it's a eight character password, that can be a blocker for adoption, because you are just seen as this crazy non-German company that has this really.

Password saying that it's a longer password will allow people in [00:32:00] Germany to have trust that you're going to look after their data and they will adopt your product. So again, it's just illustrating the importance of attitudes as to the attitude then is linked to the behavior I signing out for the.

[00:32:20] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And then that also can like attitudes, I think can then changes all based on perceptions and based on timing and markets and what's going on in the world as well. Hence like now, currently today we are going through what most will say is a recession almost certainty. The Tual. Behavior or the, your attitude towards certain products or services well is gonna start changing based on the current climate and market necessarily based on your typical behaviors.

[00:32:45] Paul Harwood: Is that, yeah, so you can, obviously you can still have a very positive. Perception your attitude towards the product can still be high, but your attitudes that are [00:33:00] associated with the broader context may be changing and that will impact your behavior as to whether you are willing to continue to pay for it.

So when we're looking at SaaS products and we're thinking of churn, one of the, Pieces of research that should be done fairly regularly is stakeholder research understanding. This is our evangelist, this is the one that we started with at this company. They've now spread the word to these others.

They've got other people in their team using it, but. What are the potential blockers as the economic climate changes do we have still the buy-in of the person in finance? Do we still have the buy-in on the people who actually write the checks and also understanding your product is competing against.

Other products that those come into play as obviously people look to really understand which ones are giving them the greatest utility. 

[00:33:59] Andrew Michael: [00:34:00] Yeah. It definitely can be a tough challenge to figure this all out now. And I think it's definitely something that needs to be top of mind. A lot of us is like understanding that sentiment and understanding how different users within the accounts are busy viewing the product because.

It not necessarily, maybe even mean that they're unhappy with your products or service anymore, just that circumstances have changed around and reevaluations are going on and people need to be taking a look at what this products or service they're using. I see we're running up the time, so I wanna make sure I've.

Time for two questions, ask every guest, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario, and this probably might be incredibly difficult for you. Because the scenarios you join a new company, churn attention is not doing good at this company. The CEO comes to and says, Hey, Paul, we need to turn things around.

You have 90 days to do it. You're in charge. What do you do? The catch and here, the catch that I thought is that you can't say I'm gonna go and speak to customers, or you can't look at data and then make decisions from there. What you're going to do is just apply a tactic that you've seen work at a [00:35:00] previous company where you've been at and run with that blindly, hoping that it works.

Why would you choose and why? 

[00:35:06] Paul Harwood: I think I would quit, but if we go along with the the scenario it would depend on whether the company was charging or not charging. If the company was a company that just had users, then I would place my emphasis on content delivery rather than trying to change the product behavior.

Because if you've only got 90. Then content is more realistic than just taking the shot in the dark of making it a change. If it was one where there was pricing involved, then I would be looking at trying to increase. Saturation as opposed to necessarily user growth and looking at pricing [00:36:00] models that facilitated that.

But I would definitely quitting now 

[00:36:04] Andrew Michael: quit. Yeah. I was gonna say that quitting would be the first option. Nice. What's one thing that, you know today about gender retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your. 

[00:36:17] Paul Harwood: So I think the one thing that I wish I knew is just how made up the definition is.

Okay. So if we think of the metric itself when we begin to really analyze it, it's stake in the ground. Mau 30 days. Okay. And I think that the importance that we need to place on user states in general so early on, so that we have a really crisp understanding of this is tram.

This is dormant. This is resurrect. This is active and we try to streamline it to ensure that it is crisp as possible. So [00:37:00] that today I see some that three different variables are dependent upon the active state. I think making it as simple as possible, but to speak directly to your question, it would've been nice to.

Realized before just how artificial the term churn truly is when we think of it within the context of user behavior, because I had many conversations, sitting like this love the product I'm using it. And then, you are there to find out why they're not using it.

And then The discovery is they are using it. They're just not using it on the same cadence or with the same metric that we are finding acquiring ourselves to account by. Yeah. 

[00:37:47] Andrew Michael: Interesting. Paul, it's been a pleasure chatting to today. Is there any final thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with?

Is there anything they should be aware of or how can they keep up to speed with your. 

[00:37:56] Paul Harwood: I think to speak to your users early and often, and that [00:38:00] you don't need to speak to many numbers are awesome. I began as a quant researcher, but you can have great value by speaking to just a few users and getting really good in depth insights.

And as to my work yeah, I'm. Focused on user understanding and really understanding the characteristics that just make users and customers. Yeah. 

[00:38:24] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the things that I actually learned a lot at my time during hot show was a very big, I'd say like data nerd to begin with, and you always heard, like you should speak to your customers, speak to your customers.

And one of the things I was surprised by was like how little data was being used at hot show in the early days and how much qualitative feedback and speaking to customers was. And the value that you get out of both, I think there's a lot of value in data and you can extract it. At least now for me, I feel really the gold lies in speaking to customers and really understanding the pain points because ultimately it gives you better understanding of what you're seeing in the data as well.

[00:38:59] Paul Harwood: [00:39:00] Yeah. It's marriage of the two, marrying them together is critical. 

[00:39:03] Andrew Michael: Exactly the what's and the why. Yeah. Nice. Paul, it's been a pleasure chatting today. Thank you so much for joining and I wish you best of luck going forward. 

[00:39:12] Paul Harwood: Thanks very much, Andrew. And likewise to you, cheer. 

[00:39:16] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew, Michael, I really hope you enjoyed it. And you're able to pull out something valuable for your business to keep up to date with churn.fm and be notified about new episodes. Blog posts and more subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you and you can provide your blend direct feedback by sending it to andrew@churn.fm, [00:40:00] lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review. As it really helps get the word out and grow the community.

Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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Paul Harwood
Paul Harwood
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The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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