Get a customer success mentor who has fixed churn before
Vetted GrowthMentor mentors who help founders and operators keep the customers they already won. Every mentor below wrote their own take on the work.
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Zev Asch
5.0 · +59 more
Blaine
Founder · Permit Hound
"I don't want to walk through an uncleared minefield without someone who has walked it before."
Hamel Shah
Co-Founder · CarrotsAndCake
"GrowthMentor enables us to swiftly get a world-class expert to give us guidance on any marketing issue or…"
Lena Sesardic
Product Manager
"Knowing I can always book a call to help me clarify what I'm doing is the best feeling in the world."
Minh
Solo Founder · SEOmatic
"I like to set my own strategies and then get help from experts to improve on them and check if I'm on the…"
Nicola Rubino
Growth Marketing Consultant · nicorubino
"It gave me fast access to expert-level insights that I couldn't get from academic research or user surveys…"
Annie Chen
Head of Marketing · DOWN Dating App
"Sometimes I'm stuck at one step and all I need is someone who can share experiences of what they did when…"
Carlos Terol
Co-Founder · Bagmaya
"I enjoy having pretty much instant access to a pool of worldwide, expert mentors who are keen to share their…"
Luka Karsten Breitig
Co-Founder · The Happy Beavers
"Imagine a world where everything you read was written by a subject-matter expert."
Flora Bui
Co-Founder · Acie
"My favorite thing about GrowthMentor is how it allows me to expand my network globally in a very short time…"
Maria Ledentsova
Digital Marketing Manager · magier
"Whatever problem I have, there's a friendly and incredibly helpful mentor ready to help."
Kate Bojkov
Head of Growth · EmbedSocial
"How quick and easy I can find somebody who had my problem and is willing to talk with me and openly share…"
Supriya Agarwal
Co-founder · BiosectRx
"Being able to connect with any expert across the globe at the click of a button. No network or previous…"
Anastasia Rubleva
Head of Growth · Rapid Dev
"I love the ability to receive valuable feedback from mentors who have been in the industry for decades."
Andrew McBurney
CEO & Co-founder · Review Robin
"You should cut out 99% of the things that you're thinking about."
The mentors, in their own words.
60 mentors available
Zev Asch
Empathetic Listener. Strategic & Intuitive Creative Problem-Solver. Business Coach|Mentor
If you'd ask me what has been the secret to my success growing multiple companies in my career, it was creating an exceptional customer service and support teams. Ensuring that at any touchpoint, from leads to complaint handling, every customer felt appreciated and that we were attentive to their needs. This also requires a culture that embraces complaints as a way to excel and raise-the-bar on how customers 'feel' (not just perceive) about doing business with us
This is my bread and butter. I've started customer success teams from scratch and scaled them. I've also helped half a dozen companies build and scale their customer success orgs from scratch as a consultant.
Kuba Rdzak 🤓
🚀 Growth / Marketing / Product ✨ Certified Team Manager 📚 Top 1% CXL 📈 Ex-Ladder.io scaling 1→50+ people
Customer success happens when your customers achieve the desired result by interacting with your business. Working in a marketing agency, I have regular contact with many clients who want to improve their results. Good onboarding is the key - that is: processes, tools, communication, documentation, reporting results. Answer before being asked, exceed expectations, surprise your customers - but only positively!
Jason Barbato
Growth, Inbound, Product Marketer. Consultant, Advisor, Mentor. Former Best-In-Class Enterprise Growth Hacker at IBM.
Delivering positive outcomes and tangible improvements for over a decade for organizations such as IBM, Sodexo, EarthLink, QuestionPro, Chartbeat, and more. Highly custom and consultative marketing solutions in all areas (content, SEO, social, analysis, paid media, email, program strategy, OCMO) based on a data-driven, inbound marketing approach.
Peter Murphy Lewis
🕸️Fractional Chief Marketing Officer | 📺 TV Host | 🎧 Podcaster |🐒 CSO Zoo | Founder 🚲 | 👠Ultra-Marathoner
Customer success means helping clients grow into the version of themselves they didn’t think was possible. I helped one client shift from \$25 event tickets to a \$450 VIP plan bundled with an annual subscription—doubling their revenue over the last few years. That happened by building trust, clarifying value, and designing an offer their audience actually wanted. It’s not about keeping customers happy. It’s about making them proud they chose you.
🚀 Richmond Wong, JD 💰📈
No bull$hit advice for new SaaS founders perfect your 1st profitable Go-to-Market📈 Ex-Reuters: Launched in 10+ markets 🌏
How do you keep buyers happy over the medium and long-term? I oversaw Customer Success for Asia (10+ markets) at Reuters so I know a thing or two about keeping your existing customers happy (and therefore buying again from you). It's much easier to sell an existing buyer so upsells, cross-sells and renewals are critical low-cost ways to drive and sustain revenue.
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30 min
Talk to someone who's done it. Thirty minutes, recorded.
After the call
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Recording
You came in with
"Account went silent before renewal."
You left with
"The buyer went dark. The champion still logs in daily."
12:40 / 30:00
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Keep the recording, summary, and takeaways. Yours.
What a CS mentor does
A customer success mentor has already run the retention playbook you are about to run. You get a 1:1 call with someone who has owned churn, onboarding, and the path from signup to paying customer, and knows which one is leaking for a business at your stage.
Most calls do some version of five things:
- Name the leak. "Churn is killing us" becomes a named cause: a broken first run, a trial that never converts, a price that does not match the value. You leave knowing which one it is.
- Find the one fix first. The fastest win is usually spotting the single part of the post-sale funnel holding everything back, then fixing that before touching anything else.
- Get users to value sooner. Most churn starts in week one. A mentor helps you find the moment your product proves its worth and get people there faster.
- Make the trial convert. Instead of guessing at pricing, you figure out why free and trial users stall, and what moves them to paid.
- Read your own metrics. If you cannot tell which customers are at risk, every decision is a guess. A mentor helps you track the signals that predict churn.
You also leave with a record. After each call, the takeaways are written down for you, ready to keep or skip:
Barbara StewartChurn diagnosisSplit churn into voluntary and involuntary before touching anything, involuntary is the 20 to 40 percent you win back with dunning in an afternoon.
Pick one activation event and drive new signups to it inside the first session, most churn is set in week one.
KeepSkipTime the upgrade prompt to the day a user first feels the value, not the last day of the trial.
KeepSkipWatch retention by cohort, not one blended number, the leak shows up in the trend weeks before the cancel does.
KeepSkipWhy customers churn
The biggest mistake founders make is treating churn as one problem. It is two, and they are fixed in completely different ways.
- Voluntary churn. The customer decides the product is not worth the price and cancels. This is a value and retention problem, solved upstream in onboarding, activation, and the everyday experience.
- Involuntary churn. A card expires or a payment fails and the customer leaves without meaning to. This is roughly 20 to 40 percent of all churn, and it is an infrastructure problem fixed with dunning emails and smart retry logic.
Most founders pour all their energy into the value side and never set up basic payment recovery, so a chunk of their churn is fixable in an afternoon.
Fixing onboarding
When churn is high, the leak is almost always onboarding. Most products lose the majority of new users in the first week, and over half of all churn traces back to a weak first-run experience.
The pattern repeats across most businesses: users are let in with no guidance, never reach the moment the product clicks, and drift off before they see the point. A mentor walks the path from signup to value and finds where people fall out, usually one of these:
- No aha moment. users never hit the action where the product proves its worth, so nothing pulls them back the next day.
- Too much friction. the setup is long, the empty state is intimidating, and people quit before they get anything done.
- No guidance. you let users in and hope they figure it out, instead of walking them to the first win on purpose.
- Slow time to value. the payoff is real but it takes days to reach, so most people leave before they get there.
Shorten the time to value
The highest-leverage retention fix is getting users to their first win inside the first session or first day. Find the aha moment, then redesign onboarding to drive people straight to it.
Converting free & trial users
If you run a free trial or a freemium plan, the question that keeps you up is why people sign up and never pay. The price is rarely the blocker.
People sign up, never reach the moment the product proves its worth, and the upgrade prompt lands on someone who has not felt the value yet. The benchmarks tell the story:
- Opt-in trials. convert at roughly 8 to 25 percent, because nothing forces a decision at the end.
- Card-required trials. convert at 50 to 75 percent, because continuing is the default instead of an extra step.
- Freemium. captures far more signups but converts at just 2 to 5 percent, so the free tier has to be designed to create a reason to upgrade.
Free-to-paid conversion usually comes down to activation. If users never reach the moment the product proves its worth, the price was never the blocker. Fix that moment, time the upgrade prompt to the day they feel it, and the paywall starts working.
Knowing what's working
Many founders arrive unsure whether retention is improving or getting worse. They watch the cancel button instead of the signals that predict a cancellation weeks earlier, so churn always feels like a surprise.
A mentor helps you set up the few measurements that guide decisions:
- An activation metric. define the one action that means a new user got value, then track how many reach it.
- Cohort retention. group users by when they joined and watch how each group sticks, instead of one blended number that hides the trend.
- A customer health score. combine logins, feature adoption, and support signals into one read on who is at risk before they cancel.
- Net and gross revenue retention. the numbers investors ask about, and the ones that tell you whether the base is growing or shrinking underneath you.
You do not need perfect tracking. You need enough to know which customers to save and which fix to make next.
Mentors start diagnosing before the call. A typical first exchange after you book:
Ekaterina GamsrieglerWhere retention gets stuck
Most people book a customer success call stuck on something specific:
- High churn before scale. new users come in and leave just as fast, and you cannot pour more acquisition into a leaky bucket.
- Onboarding that loses people. signups are fine, but most users never come back after the first session.
- A trial that will not convert. you have thousands of registered users and almost none of them pay.
- The post-PMF plateau. you have paying customers and early traction, but retention or unit economics are not working yet.
- Metrics you cannot read. the dashboard exists, but you cannot tell what is happening or what to fix first.
Most readers here already have paying customers
The person on this page is usually a founder or operator who has won the customer once and cannot keep them. You do not need a customer success title to get value from a call. You need a specific leak to plug.
Pricing & paywall placement
Pricing and paywall placement kill conversions more often than founders realize, and the damage is hard to see. A tier that is hard to choose between, a paywall that drops before the user has felt any value, a free plan so generous nobody ever needs to pay: each one leaks revenue you already earned.
A mentor who has priced and repriced products helps you with the decisions that move the number:
- Tier design. Build plans a buyer self-selects into, so the right customer lands on the right price without a sales call.
- Paywall timing. Place the upgrade moment after the user has felt the value, not before, so the ask makes sense when it lands.
- Free-tier limits. Design the free plan to create a reason to upgrade instead of giving away the whole product.
- Value-based pricing. Tie the price to what the customer gets, so the number feels fair and grows as they grow.
The goal is a price the right customer says yes to, placed at the moment they are ready to say it.
The timing of the ask moves conversion more than the number does. A mentor who has placed paywalls before helps you find the moment the value lands.
CS vs support & first hire
Customer success and customer support get confused constantly, and the difference matters once you start hiring.
- Customer support. Reactive and ticket-driven. The customer hits a problem, reaches out, and support resolves it. Measured by response time and resolution.
- Customer success. Proactive and outcome-driven. You reach out before there is a problem to make sure the customer is getting value, renewing, and expanding. Measured by retention and growth.
Early-stage founders usually do both themselves long before they hire for either. A mentor helps you decide when the first customer success person pays for themselves, and what they should own when they arrive: activation, time to value, net revenue retention, and the health score.
You do not need a CS team to do customer success. In the early days, the founder talking to customers on purpose is the highest-leverage retention work there is.
When to book a call
You do not need a giant question. Bring the thing you would ask someone who has fixed retention five times before. The most useful moments to book:
- Churn just spiked. something changed, the cancels are climbing, and you cannot tell whether it is onboarding, pricing, or the product itself.
- Your trial is not converting. you have signups but almost no upgrades, and you are about to start guessing at the price.
- You are about to scale acquisition. you want to pour budget into the top of the funnel and you suspect the leak is downstream.
- Investors are asking about retention. you are under pressure to show net revenue retention and you do not have a clean story yet.
- You are setting up CS for the first time. you are deciding what to measure, what to automate, and whether it is time to hire.
A focused 30 minutes with the right mentor beats another month of watching the cancel button.
You can also run it in reverse: post what you are stuck on as a help request, and mentors raise their hands to take it.
What people book customer success calls about
Rarely what they end up solving. The ask on the booking form is usually a symptom, and a mentor who has fixed retention before recognizes the pattern underneath it. Three that come up again and again:
walked in as, walked out as
Walked in as
An onboarding problem
New signups drop off in week one.
Walked out as
A handoff problem
No one owns the first week after signup.
Walked in as
A support problem
The ticket queue never gets shorter.
Walked out as
A success problem
You only show up once it breaks.
Walked in as
A renewal problem
Accounts lapse right at the deadline.
Walked out as
A value problem
They never reached the outcome they bought.
Three calls, one mechanic. The problem that leaves the room is never the one that walked in.
Why GrowthMentor
Every mentor on GrowthMentor is vetted before they are accepted. Fewer than 5% of applicants get in. They are operators and advisors who do this work daily, not influencers selling a course.
The reader who books a customer success call rarely needs a narrow CS specialist. They need an operator who can see the whole post-sale picture, retention, onboarding, conversion, and pricing, and tell them which part is leaking. Most of the time the problem is mis-diagnosed: they think it is churn, it is onboarding; they think it is the trial, it is the audience they let in.
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People who were exactly where you are.
GrowthMentor enables us to swiftly get a world-class expert to give us guidance on any marketing issue or question in a matter of days.
Hamel Shah · Co-Founder
Read Hamel's storyKnowing I can always book a call to help me clarify what I'm doing is the best feeling in the world.
Lena Sesardic · Product Manager
Read Lena's storyI like to set my own strategies and then get help from experts to improve on them and check if I'm on the right track.
Minh · Solo Founder
Read Minh's storyIt gave me fast access to expert-level insights that I couldn't get from academic research or user surveys alone.
Nicola Rubino · Growth Marketing Consultant
Read Nicola's storySometimes I'm stuck at one step and all I need is someone who can share experiences of what they did when they were in my situation.
Annie Chen · Head of Marketing
Read Annie's storyI enjoy having pretty much instant access to a pool of worldwide, expert mentors who are keen to share their expertise and help others.
Carlos Terol · Co-Founder
Read Carlos's storyAsk ChatGPT
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Before you join
What people ask before their first call.
It depends on who you sell to. For SMB-focused products, roughly 3 to 5 percent monthly is healthy. Enterprise should run under 1 percent monthly, and annual churn under 10 percent is excellent. A mentor can tell you whether your number is a problem at your stage or just the cost of your market.
The fastest way to find out is to talk to the customers you have been ignoring, especially the ones who left. Run a short exit survey on every cancellation, segment retention by cohort to see which source or plan sticks, and watch leading signals like login drops and stalled feature adoption. A mentor can help you read the answers and pick the one fix worth making first.
This is the most common cause of churn. Users are usually let in with no guidance and never reach the moment the product proves its worth. Find that aha moment, then redesign onboarding to drive people straight to it inside the first session. A mentor can walk your signup flow with you and find exactly where people drop out.
In most cases they never reach value before the trial ends, so the price was never the blocker. The upgrade prompt lands on someone who has not felt the product work yet. Fix the activation moment first, then time the upgrade ask to the day users feel the value. A mentor who has run trials can tell you whether to change onboarding, the trial length, or the offer.
It depends on your product and your funnel. Opt-out trials that require a card convert several times better than opt-in trials. Freemium captures far more signups but converts at just 2 to 5 percent, so the free tier has to be designed to create a reason to upgrade. A mentor can help you pick the model that fits your motion instead of copying a competitor.
The aha moment is the first action a new user takes that makes the product's value obvious, the thing that makes them want to come back. You find it by looking at what your retained users did early that churned users did not. A mentor can help you spot it in your data and rebuild onboarding to get people there faster.
Stop watching one blended number. Track an activation metric, look at retention by cohort so you can see the trend, and build a simple customer health score from logins, feature use, and support signals. A mentor can help you set up enough measurement to know which customers to save and whether your fixes are landing.
Support is reactive: the customer hits a problem, reaches out, and you resolve it. Customer success is proactive: you reach out before there is a problem to make sure the customer is getting value, renewing, and expanding. Support is measured by resolution, success is measured by retention and growth. A mentor can help you decide which one your business needs to invest in first.
Usually once you have enough paying customers that retention and expansion are real levers, and the founder can no longer talk to all of them. A mentor can help you decide whether you are there yet, and define what the first hire should own: activation, time to value, net revenue retention, and the health score.
Yes, and this is exactly who most people on this page are. You do not need a customer success title to get value from a call. Most people who book are founders and operators who already have paying customers and a leaky bucket. Bring the specific leak and you will leave with a plan.
One specific problem and any context that helps: your churn numbers, your onboarding flow, your trial conversion, the decision you are weighing. The more concrete the question, the more useful the 30 minutes. You do not need a polished deck, just the thing that is stuck.
A tool runs the dunning and the in-app messages, and an agency runs the work for a retainer. A mentor gives you a practitioner's straight opinion on your specific situation, in real time, with no upsell. It is the fastest way to diagnose which leak to fix first before you spend money on a tool or a team.
Still have questions? See all FAQs →
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Every face here has already solved what you're working on in customer success. You're one call away.