Most SaaS founders misunderstand the main point of their business, especially early on. I see it every day.
We’ve spent the past three years analyzing data and building BI systems for over a hundred SaaS companies, from $1M ARR to $30M ARR. The same pattern keeps repeating itself: everyone is looking in the wrong direction.
Founders obsess over MRR, ARR, and CAC; they chase growth. But almost no one looks at Logo Retention – the simplest, most brutal metric in SaaS.
What is Logo Retention
Logo Retention is basically the share of customers that stay with you after a year. Not revenue, not CAC, not even LTV/CAC ratios. Just logos that didn’t churn. That’s what makes it so honest.
Because if your Logo Retention is below 70%, no amount of growth will save you. You’re pouring money into a leaky bucket — every dollar in marketing just postpones the inevitable.
The harsh truth about fixing retention
You can keep tweaking CAC, or chasing new MRR until your dashboards glow red. But that’s nothing but an anesthesia. It dulls the pain, buys you time, and changes nothing.
The cruel reality is that poor retention is almost impossible to fix. Across hundreds of SaaS dashboards we’ve reviewed, hardly anyone doubles their Logo Retention.
If it’s below 50%, lifting it to 70% is nearly impossible. Those who start with 65–70%? They tend to survive, and grow steadily.
Retention isn’t a vanity metric. It’s a reflection of product–market fit, onboarding quality, and actual customer value. Everything else — CAC, MRR, even LTV — are just outcomes of it.
A final thought
Let’s say your CAC/LTV ratio looks “fine,” but you’re losing half your customers every year.
Technically, you can survive like that, but let’s be honest – that’s not a SaaS business. That’s a different creature entirely: part subscription, part denial.
True SaaS lives and dies by retention. SaaS is not about how efficiently you acquire customers, but how naturally they stay.
Want to check your logo retention?
We’re building a library of SaaS dashboards together with Cognitively — including templates for Logo Retention, MRR Cohorts, and Churn Analysis.
Fill out the form if you’d like early access, we’ll add you to the demo list.