Customer Support

How to watch for churn risk accounts as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Customer SupportFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You find out a student is about to quit when they email asking for a refund — not when they stopped logging in three weeks ago. Your Kajabi or Teachable dashboard tells you who completed a lesson, but it doesn't tell you who's quietly disengaging. You're not cross-referencing login timestamps against Stripe subscription renewal dates against the last time someone posted in your Circle community. That would take an hour of manual tab-switching you don't have. By the time a student ghosts the group, misses two live calls, and submits a chargeback, you've already lost them. You needed a flag two weeks earlier when their engagement dropped.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Customer SupportFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A churn-risk dashboard that surfaces students who've gone quiet — combining payment status from Stripe, email engagement signals from ConvertKit or Mailchimp, and community activity from Slack — so you see the warning signs before a refund request lands

An automated weekly digest that lists at-risk students by name, last activity date, and next renewal date, delivered to your inbox every Monday morning before you start the week

A CRM-style student view where you can log outreach, track who you've checked in with, and mark students as re-engaged — so nothing falls through the cracks between cohorts

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, subscriptions, renewal dates) and syncs your Gmail on a schedule (message history and reply timestamps). ConvertKit or Mailchimp connect from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your churn-risk app runs to pull open and click rates. Slack connects from Starch's integration catalog for outbound digest delivery. If your community lives on Circle or a platform without a direct API, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a churn-risk tracker for my online course students. Pull payment data from Stripe to flag anyone whose subscription renews in the next 14 days. Cross-reference that with Gmail to see if I've had any email back-and-forth with them in the last 21 days. Add a field for last community post date that I can update manually. Show results sorted by renewal date ascending, with a risk score column that's red if they have a renewal coming up and no recent email contact.

Every Monday at 8am, send me a Slack message listing any students who: (1) have a Stripe renewal in the next 14 days AND (2) haven't opened or replied to an email in the last 21 days. Include their name, enrollment tier, renewal date, and the last date I emailed them.

In my student CRM, add a pipeline stage called 'At Risk — Outreach Needed' that sits between 'Active' and 'Churned.' When I move a student there, create a follow-up reminder for 3 days later if I haven't logged a note on their record.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch has a live view of every student's subscription status, renewal date, and payment history — updated automatically.

2 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch can read your email thread history with each student. This lets it calculate 'days since last two-way contact' for every contact in your list.

3 Connect ConvertKit or Mailchimp from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can pull open rates and click activity per subscriber when evaluating engagement level.

4 Start from the CRM starter app and describe your student-specific schema to Starch: enrollment tier (self-paced vs. cohort vs. 1:1), cohort start date, last live call attended, and a manual 'last community post' field you update when you check Circle or Slack.

5 Tell Starch to build a churn-risk score — for example: red if renewal is within 14 days and no email contact in 21 days; yellow if renewal is within 30 days and no email contact in 14 days; green otherwise.

6 Set up a Monday morning automation: every week at 8am, Starch queries Stripe renewal dates, Gmail contact recency, and ConvertKit engagement, then sends you a Slack message listing every red- and yellow-flagged student with their name, renewal date, and last contact date.

7 When you get the digest, open the student CRM and move flagged students into the 'At Risk — Outreach Needed' pipeline stage. Starch logs the date you moved them and sets a 3-day follow-up reminder automatically.

8 Use the Email Triage app (Founder Inbox) to draft personalized check-in emails to at-risk students. Give Starch the student's name, enrollment tier, and the specific module they're stuck on — it drafts a message you can send in one click.

9 After you reach out, log the response in the student's CRM record. If they re-engage, move them back to 'Active.' If they don't respond within 7 days, Starch flags them again in the following Monday's digest.

10 At the end of each cohort, ask Starch for a churn post-mortem: which students churned, what their engagement pattern looked like in the 30 days before they left, and what the average time-to-churn was from the last logged email contact.

See this running on Starch

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

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

April 2026 Cohort Churn Check — Week 4 of 8

Sample numbers from a real run

Students in active cohort	47
Renewals due in next 14 days	12
No email contact in 21+ days (red flag)	5
No email contact in 14+ days (yellow flag)	4
Check-in emails sent Monday morning	9
Students re-engaged by Wednesday	6
Refund requests received that week	0

It's Monday morning, week four of your April cohort. Starch sends you a Slack message at 8am: 5 students are red-flagged (renewal in 14 days, no email in 21 days) and 4 are yellow. You open the CRM and see that two of the red-flagged students last logged in during week one — they're probably stuck on the week-two async video. A third one replied to your week-three email but never clicked the worksheet link. You move all 9 into 'At Risk — Outreach Needed,' then open the Email Triage app and tell Starch: 'Draft a check-in email to Maria Chen — she's in the April cohort, she hasn't done the week-three worksheet, and her renewal is April 28th. Tone: warm, not salesy. Offer a 15-minute call.' Starch drafts it. You edit one sentence and send. By Wednesday, 6 of the 9 students have replied. Zero refund requests arrive that week. The 3 who didn't respond get flagged again in next Monday's digest.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days from last student contact to churn (average across churned students per cohort)

Percentage of at-risk students who re-engage after a manual check-in email

Refund requests per cohort as a percentage of enrollments

Student completion rate at the halfway point of each cohort (module 4 of 8, etc.)

Days between renewal date and last two-way email contact for churned students

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Kajabi or Teachable native analytics

Shows you who completed a lesson but doesn't cross-reference payment renewal dates, email contact history, or community activity — you'd still need to stitch that together manually in a spreadsheet.

A manual Google Sheet with VLOOKUP across Stripe CSV exports and email logs

You can build this and many solo operators do, but it takes 2-3 hours per cohort to update, breaks when Stripe changes its export format, and goes stale the moment you forget to run it.

HubSpot or ActiveCampaign behavioral email sequences

Can trigger emails based on login inactivity if your course platform integrates — but the integration setup is non-trivial, it doesn't surface a CRM view of at-risk students you can act on directly, and the monthly cost is hard to justify for a 200-student roster.

ConvertKit automations based on email inactivity

Good at flagging people who've gone cold on your email list, but has no visibility into Stripe renewal timing, so you can't prioritize outreach by who's about to renew.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, founder inbox 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 (or Teachable or Thinkific) — does Starch connect to it?

Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific aren't in the scheduled-sync provider list, but they're web-based platforms you can log into. Starch can automate them through your browser — no API needed — to pull things like last login date or module completion status. For payment and renewal data, Starch syncs directly from Stripe on a schedule, which is where the most actionable churn signals live anyway.

Will this work if my community is on Circle instead of Slack?

Circle doesn't have a direct API connector in Starch's integration catalog today. Starch can automate Circle through your browser — so it can navigate your community dashboard and pull recent post activity — but that's less reliable than a native sync. The more practical approach is to use Slack or email engagement as your primary churn signals, and manually update a 'last community post' field in the student CRM when you do your weekly community check-in.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I have students who've shared payment info.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified as of today. Starch reads from Stripe (it doesn't store raw card data), and email connections use OAuth. If your institution or enterprise clients require SOC 2 certification before you can use a tool, that's worth knowing upfront. For most solo coaches and small cohort programs, this isn't a blocker — but it's an honest limit.

I use ConvertKit for email, not Gmail. Does the churn tracking still work?

Yes. You can connect ConvertKit from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries your subscriber engagement data live — open rates, click rates, last activity — when your churn-risk app runs. If you also have Gmail connected for direct student correspondence, Starch can combine both signals: ConvertKit activity for broadcast emails and Gmail for personal back-and-forth.

What about the Customer Support Agent I saw mentioned — can that handle student refund requests automatically?

Customer Support Agent is currently in development — it's not available yet. You can request beta access to be notified when it launches. For now, the Email Triage app (Founder Inbox) handles the inbox side: it triages incoming messages by priority, drafts replies you can send in one click, and sets follow-up reminders on unanswered threads. That's the right tool for managing refund conversations today.

How is this different from just setting up a ConvertKit automation for inactive subscribers?

ConvertKit automations are triggered by email inactivity — someone stops opening your newsletters, they get a re-engagement sequence. That's useful but it doesn't know when someone's Stripe subscription renews. Starch combines payment timing with email engagement so you can prioritize outreach by financial urgency: the student who goes quiet three days before their $500 renewal gets flagged differently than one who's quiet six weeks before renewal.