Customer Support

How to track renewals and expansion as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Customer SupportFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're running a cohort-based course or coaching practice and renewals are a mess. You know a student's annual plan renews in six weeks — somewhere in a Stripe dashboard you check manually. You know three clients from your spring cohort haven't booked their Q3 check-in — somewhere in a Calendly export you downloaded last month. Expansion means noticing that a student who bought your core course has never seen your advanced workshop, then acting on it before the window closes. Right now that noticing happens by accident, during a Friday scroll through Google Sheets you half-maintain. You're leaving renewal revenue on the table not because the students don't want to stay — they do — but because the follow-up never happens.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Customer SupportFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live renewal tracker that pulls Stripe subscription data on a schedule and surfaces every upcoming renewal, lapsed payment, and at-risk student in one view — no spreadsheet refreshing required

An expansion pipeline that tags current students who haven't purchased your other offers, and drafts a personalized outreach email for each one so you can send it in two clicks

Automated renewal reminders and follow-up sequences that trigger off real Stripe events, so a student heading toward churn gets a nudge from you before they even think to cancel

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule — charges, customers, subscriptions, and invoices flow in automatically, so your renewal tracker is always current without manual exports. Starch also connects directly to Gmail so email thread history lives next to each student record in your CRM. Calendly connects from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when you need to see who's booked a check-in and who hasn't. If your course platform is Kajabi, Teachable, or Thinkific and has no direct API connector, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — to pull enrollment status.

Prompts to copy

Build me a renewal tracker using my Stripe data. Show every active subscription with its renewal date, the student's name, their email, which product they're on, and how many days until renewal. Flag anyone whose renewal is within 30 days in orange and anyone past due in red. Add a column for 'expansion offer sent' so I can track whether I've pitched my advanced workshop to each person.

Look at my Stripe subscribers who are on my core course plan but have never purchased my advanced workshop. Draft a personalized email to each one that references how long they've been a student and invites them to the next cohort. Queue them for my review before anything sends.

Set up a weekly automation: every Monday morning, check Stripe for any subscriptions renewing in the next 14 days, pull the student's email thread history from Gmail, and draft a check-in email for each one. Slack me the draft list so I can approve before sending.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch pulls your customer list, active subscriptions, renewal dates, and payment history automatically. You don't touch a CSV again.

2 Connect Gmail so Starch can read email thread history. Every conversation you've had with a student becomes visible inside their record — you'll see at a glance who you last emailed and when.

3 Start from the CRM app in the Starch App Store and describe your schema: student name, email, product purchased, renewal date, cohort, completion status, and an 'expansion offer sent' flag. Starch builds the table to match how your business actually works.

4 Ask Starch to segment your subscriber list by product: who's on your core course plan, who's on a VIP coaching retainer, who bought a one-time workshop. This becomes the base for your expansion pipeline.

5 Build your renewal calendar view. Ask Starch to surface all subscriptions renewing within 30 days, sorted by date, with a red flag for anyone already past due. Pin this as your default Monday morning view.

6 Set up your expansion outreach. Tell Starch to find every student on the core plan who hasn't purchased your advanced workshop, then draft a personalized email for each one referencing their enrollment date and most recent module activity. Review the drafts in the Email Agent before anything sends.

7 Connect Calendly from Starch's integration catalog. Ask Starch to check which renewing students have a check-in booked in the next 30 days and which don't. Students without a booking get a gentle nudge added to their renewal email draft.

8 Build your weekly Monday automation. Describe it to Starch: every Monday at 8 a.m., pull this week's renewal list from Stripe, cross-reference Gmail for last contact date, draft check-in emails for students you haven't reached in 21 or more days, and Slack you a summary. Approve the drafts, hit send.

9 Add a lapsed payment workflow. Ask Starch to watch for failed Stripe charges and automatically draft a follow-up email to the student within 24 hours. You review and send; Starch handles the drafting and queuing.

10 Build your expansion report. Ask Starch to show you, by cohort, how many students have purchased a second offer and what the upsell rate is. Run this before every new cohort launch to see which past students are your best warm leads.

11 As your student list grows, publish the renewal tracker and expansion pipeline as a shared Starch app so your ops helper can work in the same system without a separate tool or a new spreadsheet.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

April 2026 Renewal Push — 47 Active Subscribers

Sample numbers from a real run

Core course annual subscribers renewing in April	14
VIP coaching retainer clients renewing in April	6
Students past due (failed Stripe charge, not yet resolved)	3
Core-only students eligible for advanced workshop pitch	22
Expansion emails drafted and queued for review	22
Check-in calls booked from Calendly before renewal date	11

Going into April, the Starch renewal tracker surfaced 14 annual subscribers and 6 VIP retainer clients renewing that month — a combined $18,400 in recurring revenue. Three students had failed Stripe charges from the prior week. Without the tracker, those three would have quietly lapsed; Starch flagged them and drafted a payment-link email for each one within 24 hours. Two resolved the same day. The expansion pass showed 22 students on the core plan who'd never seen the advanced workshop. Starch drafted 22 personalized emails — each one referenced how long the student had been enrolled and included the next cohort date. Eleven went out after a quick review; four converted to workshop purchases at $497 each, adding $1,988 in expansion revenue that would have required an hour of manual list-pulling to even find. The weekly Monday Slack summary took what used to be a Friday-afternoon spreadsheet ritual and turned it into a five-minute approval queue.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) retention rate — what percentage of subscribers renew on time without intervention

Expansion revenue per cohort — how much additional revenue each cohort generates beyond the initial purchase

Days to follow-up on failed payments — how quickly a lapsed charge gets a response

Check-in booking rate before renewal — percentage of renewing students who have a call on the calendar before their billing date

Upsell conversion rate — percentage of core-plan students who buy a second offer within 90 days

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Sheets + Stripe CSV exports

Free and familiar, but you're manually downloading exports every time you want a current view, which means the sheet is stale by Tuesday and expansion follow-ups happen whenever you remember, not on a trigger.

HubSpot Starter or Sales Hub

Has renewal pipeline features, but at $50–$100/month it's priced for sales teams and requires meaningful setup time to configure for a course business — you'd still need a separate Stripe integration and a way to get Calendly data in.

Kajabi or Teachable built-in CRM

Shows you who's enrolled and when they joined, but gives you no native renewal alert system, no expansion segmentation, and no outreach drafting — you still end up in a spreadsheet for anything cross-platform.

Notion database with Zapier automations

Flexible schema that many course creators already use, but Zapier automations are one-trigger-one-action and building a real renewal workflow — with Stripe events, Gmail drafts, and Calendly checks — requires 4–6 separate Zaps that break independently and have no shared intelligence.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My course platform is Kajabi. Can Starch actually see who's enrolled and who's completed modules?

Kajabi doesn't have a direct scheduled-sync connection in Starch today. What Starch can do is automate Kajabi through your browser — no API needed — to pull enrollment and completion data. For payment and subscription data, Starch syncs directly from Stripe on a schedule, which is where the renewal logic lives regardless of your course platform.

Will Starch automatically send renewal reminder emails, or do I have to approve each one?

You control this. You can configure your automation so Starch drafts the emails and queues them for your review — you approve and send. Or, if you'd rather set a rule (for example, always send a 14-day reminder to annual subscribers with no check-in booked), you can tell Starch to send those automatically. Most solo operators start with the review queue and automate the rule-based ones once they've seen a few cycles.

I use ConvertKit for email marketing. Can Starch see which students are on which email sequences?

Yes — ConvertKit is reachable from Starch's integration catalog, and the agent queries it live when your app runs. So you can ask Starch to check whether a renewing student is already in your 'renewal' sequence before drafting a second email.

Is there a pre-built template for this, or do I have to build from scratch?

The CRM app in the Starch App Store is the closest starting point — it handles contacts, deal stages, and email thread history out of the box. The renewal-specific logic (Stripe renewal dates, expansion flags, lapsed payment alerts) you describe in plain language and Starch adds it on top. Most operators have something working within a session, not a week.

My student list is only 80 people right now. Is this overkill?

At 80 students you can probably track renewals in a spreadsheet — though you're already feeling the Friday-scroll pain or you wouldn't be here. The honest answer is that Starch earns more of its keep as your list crosses 150–200, where the manual check-ins and expansion emails become genuinely impossible to do consistently. But the time you spend building the tracker now is the same time you'd spend regardless; you just won't have to rebuild it when you grow.

Does Starch store my students' payment data?

Starch syncs Stripe data — customer records, subscription status, renewal dates, invoice amounts — into its database on a schedule. It does not store raw card numbers or PII beyond what Stripe already exposes through their API. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, so if your student data has compliance requirements (FERPA, healthcare-adjacent), that's worth factoring in.