The self-described "retention girlie" who bet a career on keeping customers, and built a subscription platform that treats churn prevention as a growth channel.
Gina Perrelli runs Stay AI, a New York company that has quietly become one of the most used subscription and retention tools in the Shopify ecosystem. Its pitch is simple and a little contrarian: the moment a customer thinks about canceling is not a loss to absorb, it is a channel to work.
Walk into most ecommerce strategy meetings and the conversation bends toward acquisition - new ads, new channels, new audiences. Perrelli has spent more than a decade pushing in the other direction. As co-founder and CEO of Stay AI, she has built a business on the argument that the customers a brand already has are the ones worth fighting for, and that the tools to keep them have been badly underbuilt.
Stay AI is a recurring commerce platform for Shopify merchants. It handles subscriptions, memberships and loyalty, but the part Perrelli talks about most is the layer on top: experimentation, predictive analytics and machine learning aimed squarely at reducing churn. The company works with roughly 500 brands, among them Olipop, Vita Coco, Momofuku and Magic Spoon. One frequently cited result is Olipop lifting subscriber revenue 35 percent within 90 days on the platform.
Saving even 10% of customers from canceling can create a massive lift in revenue.
- Gina PerrelliPerrelli does not shy away from the label. "I've always been a 'retention girlie,'" she said in a 2025 interview. "Even back when I was starting Lunar, I remember people telling me acquisition was the future." That conviction predates Stay AI. She co-founded Lunar Solar Group, a digital marketing agency, and led its retention division - running email, SMS, loyalty, referrals and subscription programs for consumer brands including Olipop, Super Coffee and Vita Coco.
The agency work is where the idea for Stay AI took shape. Managing subscription programs for client after client, she kept hitting the same wall. "The spark came when I was at Lunar Solar Group," she has said. "Subscription felt like a weak piece of the tech stack." The existing platforms treated subscriptions as a billing mechanism. She wanted something a marketer could actually test and optimize.
When Shopify opened its subscription API, Perrelli saw the opening. If Shopify handled the transactions, she could build the marketing layer on top - the part she cared about. That framing still defines the product. Stay AI is designed so the person who owns the customer relationship can run an A/B test or adjust a cancel flow without filing a ticket with engineering.
Cancel flows, in particular, are something of an obsession. Most brands treat the cancellation screen as a formality. Perrelli treats it as research. "Cancel flows are one of the most undervalued parts of the subscription journey," she has said, calling them "a goldmine of insights." The data on why people leave, she argues, is more actionable than most of what brands collect while people stay.
Great retention isn't about optimizing one metric in isolation. Focus on maximizing true LTV.
- Gina PerrelliIf there is a single technical insight at the center of Stay AI, it is where customers actually churn. Cancellations spike between the first and second order - the window before a habit forms. Much of the platform's logic is aimed at getting subscribers across that gap. One of Perrelli's go-to tactics is disarmingly simple: tell customers in an upcoming order notification that a gift is on the way, giving them a concrete reason to stay through the risky stretch.
Small interventions, applied at scale across hundreds of brands, are the whole thesis. A few percentage points of retained customers compound into a very different revenue curve, which is why Perrelli returns again and again to lifetime value rather than any single conversion number.
Stay AI carries "AI" in its name at a moment when that can read as marketing. Perrelli is notably measured about it. "AI is advancing rapidly," she has said, "but we've always prioritized scalable, error-proof applications where AI truly moves the needle." The company folded machine learning deeper into its stack through acquisitions - buying the churn-reduction app RetentionEngine and the predictive platform Bellwethr, moves it credits with 20 to 30 percent improvements in churn reduction. The emphasis is on measurable outcomes rather than novelty.
Stay AI is not Perrelli's first company. With her co-founders she launched several commerce tools and the self-funded data platform KnoCommerce, sold to WeCommerce in 2022. Stay AI - founded in 2021 under the name Retextion, alongside Pierson Krass and Taylor Cawiezell - is the one she built to solve the problem she could not stop thinking about. In 2023 the company announced $15.1 million in Series A funding, led by Telescope Partners and Watchfire Ventures, with backers including Sharma Brands founder Nik Sharma and Postscript founder Adam Turner.
Away from the metrics, Perrelli keeps her public voice light. She describes herself as "Stay AI's mom," hosts a retention and subscription podcast, and has, at various points, billed herself online as a "Russian manicure enthusiast." It is a deliberately unserious frame around a very disciplined idea: that the least glamorous corner of ecommerce - the part where customers quietly leave - is where the real growth has been hiding all along.