Net Positive: Having More Positive than Negative Impact

Net negative revenue churn is when a company’s expansion revenue is greater than the MRR lost from cancellations and downgrades. Net Negative Churn occurs when a SaaS or subscription-based company’s expansion revenue (e.g. from upselling, cross-selling) exceeds the lost revenue from churned customers and downgrades. You should also keep this in mind when it comes to how you view others. There might be times or domains where it’s not reasonable for you to pursue or achieve net positive. For example, it might be that you’re struggling financially due to your circumstance, so you require more financial help than you can give.

Similarly, when it comes to achieving certain outcomes, being net netural is likely to lead to stagnation and lack of progress, whereas being net positive will lead to improvement. To get net revenue churn, we’re going to subtract all MRRgainedfrom expansion (upsells and cross-sells) from that number. That will tell us whether we wound up in the red or the black by the end of the month.

By the end of the month, the company lost $200 in MRR from customer cancellations and downgrades. The concept of net positive is primarily discussed in the context of the environmental policies of large organizations, such as companies, cities, or countries. An example of net positive in this context is a company that tries to generate more electricity than it consumes. Because net positive has substantial potential benefits, so it’s worthwhile to understand this concept.

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P.S. We believe so firmly that solving retention is one of the keys to SaaS success that we built a product that does exactly that. We’ve found that 20-40% of most SaaS companies have unnecessary churn due to delinquent credit cards. We cannot afford to remain oblivious to the overall value and risk versus reward of each decision.

In order words, even if the company were to acquire zero new customers, its revenue would continue growing. Net positive is sometimes also referred to as net gain or net positive impact. It is sometimes contrasted with net negative (also referred to net loss or net negative impact), and with net neutral (also referred to as no net loss, net zero, or impact neutral). Finally, note that many of these benefits can become more apparent when you contrast net positive with the alternative types of impact that one can have, and namely net negative and net neutral. For example, when it comes to the impression that you make on others, being net negative is generally more likely to lead people to form a bad impression of you than being net positive.

If you can’t achieve net positive

Wistia has been helping businesses do video for over a decade, so it makes sense that they would have the rhythm of the typical business’s adoption of video baked into their pricing like this. With net negative churn, you can weather a slowdown in customer acquisition and even an otherwise-deadly rate of customer attrition. You gradually increase your average revenue per customer because they’re paying you more each year, which gives you the dry powder to go after even higher-value customers. Most importantly, net negative churn is a positive sign that you’ve successfully aligned your business model with your value metric, creating a self-sustaining flywheel of growth.

Even if we get it wrong, we will have plenty of opportunities to get it right. Of course not, baseball players know this, deal with failure 70% of the time and work extremely hard to avoid a slump. Now, back to the 48% of those in this country who are struggling. Unfortunately, when people are depressed they suffer in the ability to make value-based decisions. Essentially, they give up Cognitive Control; a fundamental skill to guide behavior and suppress inappropriate responses. Occupational Wellbeing – Bad mouthing a colleague is net negative.

How to calculate net negative churn rate and MRR churn

It can be useful to account for the net impact of things, even when it doesn’t have to do with pursuing net positive yourself. For example, if you realize that a certain person has a net negative impact on your life, you can do things such as talk to them about the issue, limit your interactions with them, or cut them out of your life entirely. It can sometimes be beneficial to pursue net positive with regard to your personal development. Essentially, this means that you should constantly try to improve yourself, and finish each day/week/month/year in a slightly better way than you were before, in ways that matter to you. The business with -2% net MRR churn continues to thrive because it doesn’t rely on new acquisition to grow. However, if the company obtained $600 MRR from existing customers upgrading their accounts, the MRR at the end of the month is $1,400.

Such conceptualization can take various forms, such as the idea of giving more than you take, helping more than you harm, or doing your part to make the situation better. Each one of these APIs feeds into the hunger for data that rules marketing and sales but performs a different function, sometimes for a different kind of team, at a different point in the pipeline.

The next step is to examine the efficacy of the 350 meaningful decisions we make each day. Our hypothetical company’s MRR grew from $1.05 million in Period 1 to $1.24 million in Period 4, which is attributable to how its expansion MRR offset and surpassed its churned MRR. For the churned and expansion MRR, we’ll use the following step function to increase (or decrease) the amounts for each period. For instance, let’s say a company generated $1,000 in MRR at the beginning of the month. One important distinction of this metric is the absence of revenue from new customer acquisitions.

How SaaS companies can achieve net negative churn

One of the most powerful growth engines and SaaS metrics to track is net negative MRR churn. Engineering net negative churn into your SaaS business from the start means you practically have an unfair advantage. Net negative churn (NNC) is achieved when the total additional revenue generated from existing customers is greater than the revenue lost from cancellations and downgrades. When your recurring revenue grows without the addition of new customers, you’re achieving positive net revenue retention. With a video marketing platform like Wistia, none of that matters, which is why they charge based on the number of videos uploaded instead.

• Our hypothetical company’s MRR grew from $1.05 million in Period 1 to $1.24 million in Period 4, which is attributable to how its expansion MRR offset and surpassed its churned MRR.
• That will tell us whether we wound up in the red or the black by the end of the month.
• Each one of these APIs feeds into the hunger for data that rules marketing and sales but performs a different function, sometimes for a different kind of team, at a different point in the pipeline.
• Net positive can apply to various entities, such as individuals and organizations, and to various domains, such as the environment and social relationships.

The reduction of revenue churn is critical for the long-term viability of a SaaS company, but a net negative churn implies the company is capable of weathering a sharp drop-off in new customer acquisitions, such as during a global economic slowdown. The gross churn rate is the percentage of a company’s beginning of period (BoP) revenue lost across a specified period. For some of these benefits—but not all of them—the reason why you’re pursuing net positive can also matter. For example, if it’s clear that you’re pursuing net positive out of altruism, which is selfless concern for others, this could improve people’s impression of you more than if you were pursuing net positive for selfish reasons. However, this might not make a direct difference to your motivation to take action, or to your ability to achieve positive outcomes.

Net Negative Churn Example Calculation

If you are part of this graduating Class of 2014, you are about to start an exciting new chapter of your life. It’s now time to up your game and “Empowerize” yourself to make the right choices. Each day, try to make those 350 decisions reflect the highest you.

In certain scenarios, the net churn rate can become negative, in what is referred to as “net negative churn”. How you should go about this depends on factors such as who you’re trying to influence and what you’re trying to get them to do. For example, if you’re trying to get some person to act a certain way, it might be best to simply lead through personal example.

When you cross-sell, you give your customers additional value with different features and side products. Twilio drives a ton of expansion revenue through the sale of services that are related to their main API, which companies use to do voice and video messaging. Achieving net negative churn is an incredibly powerful way to lay the foundation for a great business. Tom Tunguz compares the customers of companies with net negative churn rates to “high-yield savings accounts” and it’s an apt comparison. Companies can have a negative net income, a scenario more often referred to simply as a net loss. A net loss occurs when a company’s costs of goods sold, fixed costs and irregular costs exceed the revenue the business generated during a given period.