Been in your exact spot with a meditation app we launched two years ago. Had around 600 users and wasted weeks testing Mixpanel’s prediction features.
What actually worked was setting up basic alerts in our analytics. We flagged users who didn’t open the app for 3 days, then sent a simple push notification.
Recovered about 20% of those users just from that basic trigger. Way better results than any prediction algorithm gave us.
The real insight came from reaching out to churned users directly. Turns out most left because our onboarding was confusing, not because we failed to predict they’d leave.
Fix your retention problems first, then worry about predicting them later.
With 800 users you can actually track churn better than most tools will predict it.
I just watch user behavior in my analytics and look for patterns like people who stop using key features or skip onboarding steps.
Simple cohort analysis in Google Sheets shows me more useful stuff than any prediction software ever did. You can see exactly when people drop off and what they were doing before that happened.
Most of these tools are built for companies with way more data points than you have right now.