First-month churn among new trial users from 93% to 40%, and ARR from €5M to €7M.

Taplio is a LinkedIn growth product. lempire had acquired it, and I joined as Product Manager in September 2024 to help rebuild it. Revenue was already falling. In December I was promoted to Interim CEO and took responsibility for the turnaround with a team of five.

The seven-day trial converted users to paid before the product had delivered enough recurring value. 93% of new trial users churned within their first month.

That number is a specific one and worth stating precisely: it is first-month churn among users arriving from the trial, not churn across the whole base.

Product direction for the turnaround, then general management of it. I did not write the product code; the engineers on the team did.

I started from the accounts that had already stayed for months or years rather than from the ones leaving. What were they doing that the leavers were not?

Two sources: the behaviour of long-term customers in the product, and interviews with retained users.

Rebuild activation around the workflows most closely associated with retention, and deprioritise the rest. The alternative, which is easier to sell internally, would have been to add features or to discount. Neither addresses a trial that charges before the value lands.

Studied the behaviour of long-term customers. Interviewed retained users. Identified the workflows tied to retention. Cut or deprioritised what carried little value, and rebuilt activation around what did.

First-month churn among new trial users fell from 93% to 40%. ARR went from €5M to €7M between December 2024 and March 2025.

No price increase, and no meaningful increase in acquisition. The revenue moved because customers stayed.

The people who stayed were a better brief than the people who left. Churn interviews tell you what annoyed someone; retention behaviour tells you what was worth paying for.

Cutting is the part that needs the general-manager hat, not the product-manager hat. Removing surface is unpopular until the number moves.

I can state what changed and over what period. I would want a clean cohort comparison before claiming the activation rebuild caused all of it, and a longer window to see whether the 40% holds past month one.