Early Churn

Early churn is a user leaving in the first days after meeting the product, before ever reaching its activation point.

It is not the same species as long-term churn: someone who never experienced the product's value is not making a judgement about value, but about the friction of a first visit and the gap between what was promised and what appeared. On the retention curve it shows as a steep drop in the very first bracket, where the slope differs sharply from the rest of the curve. The expensive mistake is calling it a loyalty problem and building advanced features or notifications, when the cause is usually onboarding, time to first value, or an acquisition channel promising the wrong thing.