Churn diagnosis and recovery system
Sparkle Stories had a rising churn problem. Before touching the data, I researched subscription pricing principles from Recurly, ProfitWell, Chargebee, and Simon-Kucher, so the recommendation would rest on what actually works rather than instinct.
I rebuilt the model from fifteen months of raw Stripe payment data, then split the real churn into two separate problems: about 29 percent was failed or expired cards, a billing issue with no discount required to fix it, and about 71 percent was members genuinely choosing to leave.
I built the financial model and a decision deck that weighed each option leadership was considering, with numbers behind every verdict, then implemented the fix directly in Stripe: smart retries, a card updater, and expiring-card emails to recover the involuntary churn automatically.
On top of that, I built a personalized automation layer in n8n that watches for members showing signs of trouble and routes them differently depending on value: a direct, personal outreach nudge for high-value members, and an automated win-back sequence in SendGrid for anyone who fully cancels.
Churn fell for four straight weeks after the fix, from 6.2 percent down to a new low of 4.9 percent. The model sized the total opportunity at close to $35,000 a year, with member lifetime value projected to nearly double.