churn
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The Customer Success Tools Racing to Zero Your Churn
Renewals now decide who wins in SaaS. Six platforms - from scrappy ZapScale to the HubSpot machine - are fighting to own the moment after the sale, when the real money is quietly made or lost.
The Retention Stack Fighting to Keep You From Cancelling
Inline Manual coaches users inside the app while Vitally tracks whether they stay. Two sides of a quiet industry built on one anxious question - will you renew?
Onboarding Is Where SaaS Quietly Wins or Dies
Baton, GUIDEcx, Rocketlane and Whatfix are four of eight startups chasing the same ugly truth - most customers churn in the first 90 days, long before anyone thinks to look.
Planhat
The Swedish company spent seven years bootstrapping a customer platform before the venture money arrived. Now it wants software agents and the humans who run accounts to work off the same page.
The gold rush to keep your customers from leaving
Candu, Churn360, Churned, Avoma, Velaris, Apty, Cast - and SAP - are all chasing the same moment: when a customer quietly decides whether to stay. This is the software built to fight churn, and the AI agents now doing the fighting.
Customer Success Software Stopped Advising and Started Doing
For a decade, tools like Pendo and Userlane told humans which accounts to save. Now Hook, Velaris and Cast are shipping the agents that do the saving, and the whole category is quietly picking a side.
The Onboarding Software Boom Is Already Thinning Out
Six tools set out to fix customer onboarding and stop churn. A year later, two are already gone. Here is what the survivors say about the fight to keep customers.
Totango vs Hook and the Rewiring of Customer Success
Two companies are betting on opposite futures for customer success software - one consolidating the old dashboard playbook, the other handing the work to AI agents. Here is what the split says about where retention revenue is headed.
Kaizan Wants an AI Watching Every Client You'd Hate to Lose
The London startup assigns a tireless AI helper to every account, reading the emails, calls and silences that hint a client is about to walk. It raised £2.5m in May 2026 to carry the idea into the US.
ZapScale Wants Your Customer Success Team Live Before Lunch
A bootstrapped B2B SaaS startup, run by a founding trio that already built and sold one company, is betting the whole category on a single idea - be the easiest tool to switch to and get you set up in a day. Here is how it stacks up against Gainsight and Chameleon.
Dickey Singh Wants Customer Success to Run on Autopilot
The Cast.app founder spent three decades building products at Silicon Valley companies. Now he is arguing the customer success playbook shouldn't need a bigger team to run - it should run itself.
Vitally Made Keeping Customers the Whole Game
The Brooklyn software company built a business on a plain bet: in B2B SaaS, the money isn't in the first sale, it's in never losing it. Here's how customer success turned into a category worth fighting over.
Kaizan Wants to Hear a Client Leaving Before They Say It
The London startup just raised £2.5m to turn every client email, call and chat thread into an early-warning system for churn. Its rival Dock is betting the opposite - that the shared workspace, not the AI listening post, is where accounts are saved.
Velaris Wants to Fire the Spreadsheet Running Your Renewals
The London-and-Madrid startup landed as the only Visionary in Gartner's 2025 customer success ranking with a simple bet - that software should spot a shaky account before a human ever opens the health dashboard.
The Onboarding Software Turf War Over Your First 90 Days
Appcues, Usetiful, Arrows, GUIDEcx, ClientSuccess and Common Room are all chasing the same fragile stretch after a customer signs - the weeks that decide whether they stay. Here is how six very different tools split the job of keeping people from quietly leaving.
OnRamp Wants to Own the First 90 Days of Every SaaS Deal
A Boston startup founded by two former VTS operators has raised $27 million betting that customer onboarding - not the sales demo - is where software deals are won or lost.
The Startups Rebuilding Customer Onboarding - And Getting Bought
EverAfter, Baton, UpdateAI, Usetiful, GUIDEcx and Skalin all set out to fix the messy handoff between a signed contract and a happy customer. Half of them have already been acquired. Here is what each one does - and why the category is consolidating so fast.
Skalin Spots the Churn Three Weeks Before You Feel It
The Paris-built customer success platform reads product usage, emails and support tickets, then hands small teams an AI health score that flags a fading account before the renewal call goes wrong.
Jamie Davidson
Jamie Davidson is the co-founder and CEO of Vitally, a New York-based customer success platform used by more than 600 B2B software teams including Segment, Productboard, and Calendly. A two-time CTO with a computer science background, he shifted from engineering into customer-facing work at his previous startup Pathgather, concluded that customer success software was overdue for a rebuild, and launched Vitally in 2017. He has raised roughly $39 million across seed, a $9.2M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $30M Series B, positioning Vitally around analytics, automation, and workflow tooling for customer success teams.
Antenna
Antenna is a New York-based market data company for the subscription economy. By analyzing the purchase and subscription signals of millions of U.S. consumers, it measures sign-ups, churn, retention, and market share for streaming and direct-to-consumer subscription brands - turning messy consumer behavior into industry benchmarks that tell companies what 'good' actually looks like.
Jonathan Carson
Jonathan Carson is the co-founder and CEO of Antenna, the company that turned the messy guesswork of streaming subscriptions into a market standard. Two decades earlier he built BuzzMetrics, the company widely credited with inventing social media analytics, then sold it to Nielsen and ran Nielsen Digital. He has been chief revenue officer at both Vevo and The Trade Desk, and now spends his days explaining to studios, networks and Wall Street why people sign up for streaming services - and why they leave.
Lincoln Murphy
Lincoln Murphy is the strategic mind behind Customer Success as a recognized business discipline - a consultant, author, and speaker who coined the most-cited definition in the field: 'Customer Success is when your customer achieves their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.' Founder of Sixteen Ventures since 2006, co-author of the first book on Customer Success (Wiley, 2016), and former Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight, Murphy has worked with 300-400+ SaaS and subscription companies worldwide. His 'Desired Outcome' framework - breaking success into Required Outcome plus Appropriate Experience - reshaped how software companies think about retention, expansion, and lifetime value. In 2024-2026, he pivoted toward AI-powered agentic workflows for CS teams under his new venture Extensible Agents, while serving as VP of Customer Experience at ListKit.
Patrick Campbell
Patrick Campbell bootstrapped ProfitWell (originally Price Intelligently) from a cashed-out 401k into one of the most cited SaaS pricing authorities on the internet, serving 30,000+ companies for free before selling to Paddle for $200 million in 2022. Known as @Patticus, he turned a debate scholarship, a stint at the NSA, and a barista certificate into a decade-long conviction that pricing is the most underleveraged growth lever in SaaS. Now living in Puerto Rico and quietly building a new healthcare company.