Notes on revenue, churn, and telling signal from noise

Gross revenue retention is capped at 100% and cannot be rescued by expansion, which is exactly what makes it the more honest of the two numbers.

Everyone reads a cohort analysis table across the rows. The diagonal is where a company-wide event shows up, and almost nobody looks at it.

The customer lifetime value formula is a geometric series with three assumptions inside it. Every one of them breaks on real subscription data.

Annual recurring revenue and annualised run rate are both abbreviated ARR. They describe different businesses and are not interchangeable.

A 3% churn rate is either excellent or catastrophic depending on whether it is monthly or annual. Most benchmark articles never say which.

Monthly recurring revenue is not revenue and not cash. Here is the normalisation, the four movements, and where the calculation breaks.

Net revenue retention benchmarks range from 65% to 109% in the same dataset. What separates them is not quality. It is price point.

Acquisition, product, billing and support each hold part of the same customer. The answer to a revenue question is never inside just one of them.

Most analytics tools show you every change. Almost none of them are worth acting on. Here is the line we draw, and why it matters more than the dashboard.