Vijay Menon helped catch accidental subscription churn at Xbox, Dropbox and Scribd. “I realized every subscription company must face this problem,” he said.A decade ago, Microsoft, Dropbox and Scribd were all leaking money. They were losing millions a year to subscriptions that were being “accidentally” canceled, says Vijay Menon, whose work shoring up the financial backend at each company helped his previous employers to retain revenue they otherwise might have lost.
“I could’ve done this at a fourth company and know with a 100% chance that it’ll work,” he says. “Every subscription company must face this problem.” Subscriptions can churn for a plethora of reasons, which often differ across companies depending on their customer base. For example, the majority of people in Indonesia do not have bank accounts, and Menon says Butter has found cases in which a company was failing to process Indonesian transactions because it did not have the proper payments infrastructure set up.