Power Users Churn First
All of us are tracking the same churn signals. Usage drops. Support tickets pile up. NPS scores tank. We launch “at-risk” campaigns, schedule check-in calls, and offer discounts to accounts showing signs of disengagement.
Meanwhile, your power users - the ones with 90%+ engagement, using every feature, logging in daily are quietly canceling their subscriptions. No warning. No escalation. Just gone.
How is this possible? While you’re building features to activate the inactive, your best customers hit your product’s ceiling six months ago, and you didn’t notice.
Here’s the paradox most retention teams miss: High engagement predicts loyalty... until it predicts churn.
The Engagement Trap You Can’t See in Your Dashboard
Your power users aren’t leaving because they’re disengaged. They’re leaving because they’re too engaged. They’ve pushed your product to its limits and found where it ends.
At one of my previous companies, we celebrated our “superusers” who used 15+ features, created hundreds of workflows, and essentially lived in our product. Our health scores were perfect green. Usage metrics were off the charts. Then we lost 12% of them in a single quarter.
Why? Because they’d automated everything they could. Built every workflow we supported. Integrated with every tool in our ecosystem. And then realized they needed capabilities we couldn’t provide: custom API endpoints, white-label options, and enterprise permissions we hadn’t built yet.
They didn’t churn to a competitor. They churned into a more powerful tool that could grow with them.
Research from Retently shows power users “need to feel challenged and recognized through behavior-based emails to reduce the chance they will quit.” But most companies do the opposite; they ignore engaged users because the dashboard says they’re “healthy” and focus all their energy on rescuing low-engagement accounts that were never going to stick anyway.
What Power Users Actually Need (And Why You’re Not Giving It to Them)
Power users don’t need help getting started. They don’t need another tutorial or a “tips and tricks” email. What they need is proof that your product can still challenge them even after they’ve mastered the basics.
When someone maxes out your product’s capabilities, they’re not thinking, “Wow, I’ve mastered this.” They’re thinking, “Is this all there is?” The moment they have that thought, you’re on borrowed time. This is why “challenge” matters more than “support” at the power-user level.
But challenge alone isn’t enough. Power users need to feel seen. Not in a “thanks for being a customer” way, but in a “we see what you’re building, and it’s impressive” way.
When Slack started sharing case studies of teams that had sent millions of messages or built complex workflows, they weren’t just marketing. They were telling power users, “We see you, and you’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”
And this is where most products fail: they’re built for a single persona, solving a single problem. Your product roadmap is still optimizing for the original use case, while your best customers need you to grow with them.
The Math You’re Ignoring
Let’s talk about what this actually costs.
If a typical customer is worth $2,000 in LTV and a power user is worth $8,000 in LTV (using 4x more features and staying 2x longer), losing 12% of your power user base isn’t just 12% churn. It’s equivalent to losing 48% of your base-tier customers.
Power users aren’t just revenue. They’re your best case studies, your most compelling testimonials, and your highest-qualified referrals. When a power user leaves, you lose the proof that your product works at scale. You also lose the internal champion who was evangelizing your product to their network.
You built a product with a ceiling, and your best customers hit it.
The Decision Most Teams Won’t Make
Let’s face the reality.
You can’t save everyone. Your retention strategy can’t be “prevent all churn.” You have to choose.
Most teams pour all their retention resources into activating users who barely logged in, trying to convince them that your product is valuable even though they’re not actually using it. It’s easier to measure. “We reduced early-stage churn by 3!” looks good in a QBR.
But meanwhile, you’re bleeding power users, and nobody’s tracking it because they were “engaged” right up until they left.
The teams that figure this out do three things:
Segment power users and monitor their churn separately by pulling usage data for the last 90 days. Filter for accounts using 5+ features weekly or top 10-20% by session frequency, or define your ‘power user.’ Track their churn rate separately. If overall churn is 5% monthly but 8% among power users, it’s a ceiling issue, not engagement.
They build for power users first, offering an advanced tier, beta feature access, direct product team contact, and API docs for extensions, signaling “we built this for those who mastered the basics.” The goal is to do this before they seek alternatives, not after they’ve decided to leave.
They staff it with someone whose role isn’t to rescue at-risk accounts but to keep healthy accounts thriving. This person contacts power users quarterly - not to upsell, but to ask, “What are you trying to accomplish that our product can’t do yet?” These insights shape your roadmap. Unlike traditional customer success, you’re not fixing problems but preventing them by anticipating your best customers’ future needs.
Here’s the question that exposes whether you’re set up for this:
When was the last time someone from your team reached out to your highest-engagement customer?
Not to fix something. Not to upsell them. Just to ask: “What are you trying to do with our product that you can’t do yet?”
If the answer is “never” or “I don’t know,” you’re about to lose customers you think are safe.