LetsDefend
The Subscription Plumbing That Helped LetsDefend Cut Churn 50.2% — On The Way To An Acquisition
Three high-leverage levers. Ten months of focused work. A subscription engine strong enough to be acquired.
Client Snapshot
- Company
- letsdefend.io
- Product
- Hands-on blue team and SOC training platform
- Model
- Freemium subscription (VIP + VIP+ tiers)
- Scale
- 400K+ learners across 150+ countries
The Situation
By early 2024, LetsDefend was the kind of product engineers tell their friends about. Real cyber attacks. A simulated SOC environment. Hundreds of thousands of learners across 150+ countries. The curriculum team had nailed it.
The subscription engine underneath the product was a different story. Churn was quietly eating revenue. Trial conversion was lukewarm. New users defaulted to monthly plans and bounced before they ever saw an annual offer.
None of it was a content problem. It was plumbing. Co-founder Omer Gunal wanted that plumbing rebuilt with the same craftsmanship his team had brought to the curriculum — methodical, measured, and never at the expense of the learner experience.
The Plan
Three levers, in this order:
- 1.Stop the leak — build a cancellation flow that actually saves people
- 2.Lift trial conversion through real A/B testing on the upsell moment
- 3.Re-architect pricing so more users land on annual, and stay longer
Every change had to fit the team's roadmap, fit the team's budget, and pay for itself in a metric we could watch weekly.
The Results
Ten months in: churn cut by 50.2%, trial conversion meaningfully higher, customer LTV up by a third, and annual plans driving a much larger share of new revenue. No new content. No new product. Just better subscription mechanics.
Churn Rate
-50.2%
Voluntary monthly subscriber churn cut by 50.2% across the engagement
Trial Conversion Lift
+45.8%
Best winning variant from the VIP Popups experiment
Customer LTV
+32%
Lifetime value per customer climbed steadily as the annual cohort matured
Annual Plan Mix
+87%
Share of new subscriptions landing on annual plans
Execution: What We Did
Four workstreams, run in sequence. We started with the audit, then pulled the three levers it pointed us at. Each was measured independently, each stacked on top of the last.
Audited The Entire Subscription Funnel
Before we changed a single thing, we mapped the full funnel end-to-end. Every page, every nudge, every cancellation path.
- -Reviewed every screen across pricing, paywall, onboarding, and cancellation flows
- -Rated each surface — strong, solid, or needs work — with screenshots and analysis questions attached
- -Stack-ranked the highest-leverage levers by potential lift versus cost to ship
- -Walked the LetsDefend team through the audit before we committed to a single line of work
Built A Cancellation Flow That Actually Saves
Most cancellation flows beg. We built one that listens first, then matches the offer to the reason.
- -Added a cancellation survey in front of the offer — so we knew why people were leaving before we tried to keep them
- -Routed users to pause, discount, or no offer at all based on the reason they gave
- -Tracked save rate, pause rate, and discount acceptance every single week in Mixpanel
- -Iterated on copy, eligibility, and offer mix — the cleanest, fastest churn win in the entire engagement
Made The Trial Decision Easier
We stopped guessing and started measuring. Real A/B tests, real winners.
- -Migrated experimentation onto GrowthBook so every change had a statistical verdict
- -Ran the VIP Popups test across thousands of users over a focused window
- -The winning variant lifted trial conversion 45.8%
- -Every percentage point compounded directly into MRR — and never had to be reversed
Engineered Pricing Like A Product
Pricing isn't a number — it's an architecture. We rebuilt the on-ramp.
- -Introduced monthly plans alongside annual to widen the top of the funnel
- -Tested plan presentation and price points to nudge the right users toward annual
- -Annual plan share grew sharply in the months after the rollout
- -The stickier cohort matured — customer LTV grew 32% as the new mix took hold
“Dan is great for subscription businesses. He understands the logic and the flow of subscription flows. He helped us reduce our churn rate almost in half. With this success, of course we increased our MRR and ARR. One of the good parts of working with him is he customizes the roadmap to your team and your budget — you don't end up with something you can't make happen in the short or mid term.”
Co-Founder, LetsDefend
Why It Worked
Built To Your Roadmap
Every recommendation was scoped to the LetsDefend team's capacity and budget. Nothing on the plan required a rebuild. Everything could ship in a short or mid-term window.
Decisions Backed By Numbers
Mixpanel watched behavior. GrowthBook ran experiments. ProfitWell watched retention. Every change was tied to a metric — and every metric was watched weekly.
Wins That Stack
A churn save here. A trial lift there. A pricing tweak. None of them moved the needle on their own. Stacked over ten months, they reshaped the subscription business.