

How Vidyard (YC S11) grew from 4K to 1M views a day and achieved negative churn - brandnewlow
http://blog.perfectaudience.com/2012/11/12/how-vidyard-grew-from-4k-to-1mil-viewsday-in-8-months-has-a-negative-churn-rate/

======
andreasklinger
> Currently, the number of Vidyard customers who upgrade their plans outpaces
> the number of those who cancel their accounts, Litt said, correlating with a
> negative churn rate.

Maybe i have a miss-understanding of churn. But given that definition any
startup with growth would have negative churn. I see no difference between
upgrading to 'B' or registration with 'B'. Both is revenue. Both creates a
customer.

Thanks in advance for any explanation

~~~
devongall
It's a distinction between Revenue Churn and Customer Churn. If customer A
cancels their account, it is a loss of 1 account. You can't really have
negative customer churn.

Revenue churn would be Customer A cancels their account which was worth
$5/month. But if customer B upgrades their existing account by $10/month, you
would have negative revenue churn. The negative churn here is negative Revenue
churn, ie. upgrades outpace cancelations.

~~~
nevaben
The idea of revenue churn is startup biz hype. This is how startups play with
numbers to make their business seem better than its really doing. You can't
make solid business decisions based on a framework of revenue churn since it
hides real business issues. The real issue with churn rate is that you have
users leaving the service. If you want to better your business you want to
reduce this number and get it as close to 0 as possible. Revenue churn would
hide this and make it think you're doing well, when in fact you're not. You
could be facing a dwindling user base with just a small number of high paying
users.

~~~
davidkatz
Totally, reminds of the late 90s when companies were reported to move money
around in circles to increase revenue. Company A pays B, B pays C, C pays A.
Lots of money exchanging hands, zero profit, infinite revenue!

------
brandnewlow
Hey folks,

This is part of a series of posts we're doing on our company blog about HOW
early stage startups boosted key metrics. The tech press mostly just reports
that company X reached some key milestone. We thought it'd be interesting to
ask some of these folks how they did it.

We posted the first one to HN a few weeks ago and got a lot of great feedback.
[http://blog.perfectaudience.com/2012/11/01/manpacks-grow-
cus...](http://blog.perfectaudience.com/2012/11/01/manpacks-grow-customer-
base-customer-service/)

The most common request was for more detail so we tried to make with the goods
this time around. All feedback welcome on the piece.

And go check out Vidyard if you're doing video stuff.

