Retention comes down to a few things that compound over time:

• Clear onboarding users should hit their "aha moment" fast, ideally in the first session
• In-app messaging for feature discovery, not just email
• Actually tracking churn reasons (exit surveys, cancellation flow feedback)
• Regular UX audits a lot of retention loss happens because of friction users never bother to report

That last point gets overlooked a lot. Founders assume churn is a pricing or feature problem when it's often just usability. Getting a proper UX audit for your SaaS product done every few months catches a surprising number of drop-off points before they show up in the churn numbers.