Fertility & Pregnancy Institute.
Diagnostic and recovery framework for a US subscription business losing recurring revenue without a clear cause.
Recurring revenue was declining and no one knew exactly why.
The Fertility & Pregnancy Institute runs a US subscription business in the health and wellness space, on WooCommerce with Woo Subscriptions handling recurring billing and HelpScout handling support. Over the months preceding the engagement, recurring revenue had been declining, but the team didn't have a clear picture of which lever was responsible: were subscribers actively cancelling, was there a payment infrastructure issue, was churn concentrated in a specific cohort or plan, was retention failing at a specific point in the customer lifecycle?
They needed a diagnostic that gave them a real answer, plus a framework they could act on with their internal team, without ongoing dependency on external help.
Untangling cancellations, failed renewals, and silent lapses.
Subscription decline is rarely one problem. It's usually two or three overlapping problems that look identical in the aggregate revenue number but have very different causes and very different solutions. Voluntary cancellations respond to product experience and communication. Failed renewals respond to payment infrastructure. Silent lapses respond to lifecycle timing and reactivation triggers. A recovery plan built on the wrong diagnosis wastes time and reinforces the wrong assumptions.
The client had all the raw data (subscription records, support tickets, cancellation logs, payment history) but no consolidated view of what the data actually said about where revenue was leaking.
Data first, tickets second, framework last.
Data analysis. Analyzed subscription decline trends across the three failure modes: active cancellations, failed renewals, and silent lapses. Segmented by plan, cohort, and lifecycle stage to isolate where losses concentrated. First honest picture of what was happening under the aggregate number.
Support ticket review. Reviewed HelpScout tickets from the affected period to identify churn pressure points that data alone doesn't show: what subscribers complained about before cancelling, what confused them about the subscription mechanics, what triggered failed renewals from the customer side rather than the payment side. Surfaced retention gaps invisible in the WooCommerce data.
Recovery framework. Delivered a structured revival framework the internal team could implement: prioritized revival targets, outreach tracking workflow, subscription timeline model showing when in the lifecycle subscribers were most at risk, and cancellation pattern diagnosis explaining the three overlapping problems and which levers addressed which one.
A clear diagnosis, a framework the internal team owns, no ongoing dependency.
At the end of the two-month engagement, the client had a documented diagnostic of exactly where subscription revenue was leaking, prioritized recovery targets, and a repeatable framework the internal team implemented after handoff. The framework included the analytical model, the outreach workflow, and the decision rules for identifying at-risk subscribers going forward, so the team could keep running it without me.
Tools & Platforms
- WooCommerce
- Woo Subscriptions
- HelpScout
- Google Sheets
- Subscription Analytics