Today on the show, we have Susan Keplinger, CEO of Force of Nature, a boutique performance marketing shop behind the growth of brands like Ring, Oofos, and other category leaders. With experience building data-driven growth engines across e-commerce and DTC, Suzanne has helped companies shift from chaotic marketing to orchestrated, scalable systems.

In this episode, we uncover why the future of performance marketing isn’t about hacking audiences or chasing the “one winning creative”—but building portfolio-driven creative systems, trusting your data, and showing up clearly for both humans and algorithms.

We explore why Google and Meta still dominate the ecosystem, why clean data is the new competitive edge, and how brands should think about programmatic everything—from ads to email to retargeting.

We also discuss how Suzanne built the original performance infrastructure at Ring, how brands like Oofos leverage their “growth signal system,” and why the best-performing companies today treat robots as part of their audience.

Finally, we dig deep into retention: why 10 customers leaving is the same as your 11th leaving, why the “leaky bucket” kills great brands, and how to know when it's time to stop relying on founder intuition — and start trusting the data.

As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me directly at andrew@churn.fm, and don’t forget to follow us on X.

Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.

Today on the show, we have Kevin White, Head of Marketing at Scrunch AI, a platform helping brands stay discoverable in the era of AI-powered search. Kevin brings experience from leading go-to-market and marketing teams at Segment, Retool, and Common Room, as well as advising fast-growing startups like Ashby, Deepnote, and Gretel.ai.

In this episode, we explore how the rise of answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity is reshaping how people find information online—and what it means for marketers. We discuss how Scrunch helps brands optimize their sites for large language models (LLMs), why bots are becoming the new audience, and how AI-driven search is redefining visibility and discovery.

We also delve into lessons from Segment and Retool on balancing self-serve and enterprise growth, how activation-first onboarding drives retention, and why doing “white-glove at scale” can triple user success.

We wrap up by unpacking Kevin’s biggest learnings on churn and growth—from Reforge’s “don’t fill a leaky bucket” principle to why something as simple as naming conventions can make or break a company’s ability to scale.

Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.

Today on the show we have Vova Feldman, the Founder and CEO of Freemius.

In this episode, Vova shares his experience in launching Freemius from a side project into a platform powering thousands of indie software businesses.

We then discussed how Freemius is repositioning itself from its WordPress roots to become the go-to solution for small SaaS and desktop software businesses.

We wrapped up by discussing their new transparent pricing model — designed to align with growth and reduce graduation churn.

Mentioned Resources

• Freemius
• LinkedIn | Vova Feldman
• RatingWidget.com
• Senexx | Gartner
• Techstars
• WordPress
• Paddle
• Stripe
• PayPal

Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.