Nick Franklin

Who is Nick Franklin?

Nick Franklin is the founder and CEO of ChartMogul, the subscription analytics platform that helps SaaS companies measure, understand, and grow their recurring revenue. He built the product around a single conviction that runs through all of his talks: most founders track their top-line growth obsessively while quietly misunderstanding the metric that decides whether that growth lasts — churn.

Franklin has spent his career close to the numbers that define subscription businesses, and ChartMogul is the expression of that focus — a tool designed to give founders an honest, real-time picture of how their revenue is actually behaving beneath the surface of headline growth.

He is a returning voice at SaaStock, where he delivered a widely watched 2016 keynote on the dos and don'ts of building a SaaS startup and returned in 2019 to share his read on the SaaS trends shaping 2020. This page collects his recorded SaaStock keynotes and talks, with transcripts.

About ChartMogul

ChartMogul is a subscription analytics and revenue-reporting platform built for SaaS and subscription businesses. It connects to a company's billing data and turns it into the metrics that matter — MRR, churn, retention, and the movements between them — so founders and operators can see exactly how their recurring revenue is growing or leaking.

As Franklin describes it, the product is built around helping founders understand their churn: not just whether customers are leaving, but the difference between logo churn and revenue churn, and what each one signals about the health of the business.

That focus reflects ChartMogul's wider thesis — that durable SaaS growth comes from understanding and acting on the economics of retention, not only from adding new revenue at the top of the funnel.

Key lessons from Nick Franklin's talks

Understand your churn — it's the metric that decides whether growth lasts. Franklin's central message is that churn quietly undermines SaaS businesses even when growth looks strong. A company can post impressive new-revenue numbers and still be stuck on a treadmill if too many customers are leaving out the back door faster than they can be replaced.

Separate logo churn from revenue churn. One of his most practical points is that founders need to know both their logo churn and their revenue churn, and understand the difference between the two. The number of customers leaving and the dollars leaving can tell very different stories, and conflating them hides the real problem.

Don't chase new customers at the expense of existing ones. Franklin cautions against pouring everything into acquisition while neglecting the customers already paying — because the economics of SaaS reward retention and expansion, the value of a subscription business compounds in the base you already have.

Treat metrics as the foundation, not an afterthought. Across his dos and don'ts, the throughline is that clear, honest measurement of recurring revenue is what lets founders make good decisions — which is the conviction ChartMogul itself is built on.