Churn Buster

Head of Partnerships

Disco

Senior Agency Partnerships Manager

Okendo

Agency Partnerships Manager

Lunar Solar Group

Director of Growth

Antler

Founder in Residence

Hawke Media

SelfMade

Senior Business Development Executive

Business Development Executive

RippleMatch

Recruitment Consultant

Vibelyst, Inc

Marketing Associate & Project Manager

Streamup

Director of Operations and Marketing

Partnerships at Disco 🪩 Post-Purchase Ads for Shopify

As a hands-on leader with a deep understanding of data analytics and omni-channel performance, Gabrielle is highly skilled in and knowledgeable of new and emerging media channels & platforms across the complex digital media ecosystem, and the balance of brand building, demand generation, and long-term equity. Gabrielle has an extensive background in building teams and scaling revenue at reputed digital marketing agencies across the US.

Gabrielle uses her edge to strategize creative solutions to help brands establish and grow their market presence, and in turn, their cultural relevance and revenue. As a Founder in Residence at Antler, her core competencies are focused on marketing and user acquisition with startups. In parallel, she consults with companies on e-commerce marketing strategies for DTC brands.

Today, Gabrielle spearheads the development of the agency partner program at Disco, a post-purchase ad network. Her extensive background in e-commerce, combined with her innovative approach, positions her as a driving force in shaping the future of the industry. With a track record of success at top agencies and her dedication to e-commerce tech, Gab continues to make significant contributions to this ever-evolving landscape.

Gabrielle is a graduate of NYU with a major in Global Liberal Studies and minors in Child & Adolescent Mental Health and Business of Entertainment & Technology at the Stern School of Business. Gabrielle wrote her thesis on how technology has disrupted the flow of modern romantic relationships, is an East Coast native, and one day hopes to complete a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle entirely on her own.

What's the best retention strategy? Make pizza with your prospects 🍕

We just hosted NYC's annual pizza party for subscription nerds. Hands in dough, wine flowing, real talk about churn reduction.

Thanks to everyone who came!! Your pizza game is now as strong as your recovery rates should be.

(And yes, we're doing this again next year 😉 )

Gabrielle San Nicola

Increasing Recovery Rates by 10–20% and Unlocking 10X ROI | Head of Partnerships @ Churn Buster ⚡️

If you’re losing 3–5% of MRR every month to failed payments, you’re average. But average doesn’t mean acceptable.

When we run audits, this is what we see:

- Companies think they have 5% churn
- But passive churn alone adds another 6–10%
- Meaning their actual churn is 2–3× higher than they think

Failed payments aren’t a billing failure.
They’re a retention issue.

And until you fix them, no amount of acquisition spend will feel like enough.

Curious what a 5–10% improvement in recovery would mean for your LTV? We can run the numbers with you, DM me.

Powering amazing brands with top-tier retention for over a decade:

https://churnbuster.io/

A few months ago, I was speaking with a subscription operator who was confident that their failed payment recovery was fine.

They were relying on the native tools in their billing platform. On the dashboard, everything looked normal, a recovery rate right around industry average. Nothing seemed out of place.

But something wasn’t adding up.

Their acquisition was strong, churn looked stable, yet MRR wasn’t moving the way their models predicted.

So we pulled up customer-level data, the part that many platforms don’t surface.

That’s when the picture changed:

- Customers with soft declines were getting only 2 retry attempts
- High-LTV subscribers were treated the same as brand-new trials
- Emails were bouncing without anyone noticing
- Decline reasons were lumped into one general error bucket
- Recoveries stopped after 10 days, even though many would have resolved in 30-45

In other words:
Their good enough dunning tool wasn’t doing anything wrong; it simply wasn’t doing enough.

The gap between what the platform recovered and what was recoverable was the difference between stalled growth and predictable compounding revenue.

Passive churn is a process problem, and when your recovery process is capped,
your growth becomes capped with it.

Curious how to find additional recovery? DM me, and we’ll walk through it together.

Subscription teams still assume expired cards are the primary driver of failed payments.

A decade ago, that was true.

Today, it’s one of the least common causes of passive churn.

Modern card-updater systems quietly handle many expiration-related issues behind the scenes. And across the subscription brands we’ve supported over the past 10+ years, across both eCommerce and B2B SaaS, the real drivers of involuntary churn look very different.

Here’s what typically sits beneath that single “failed payment” number in most dashboards:

• Insufficient funds (especially common in subscription eCommerce)
• General “do not honor” or issuer-level declines
• Cards replaced due to fraud or reissued numbers
• Network or processor-level disruptions
• Transient declines that shift across retry attempts

The challenge is that most billing systems surface these as one generic failure outcome, which makes it nearly impossible to understand what’s actually happening or how to respond.

And without clarity, teams often optimize the wrong part of their recovery process.

What actually does improve recovery?
Real gains come from fundamentals:

• Understanding decline codes
• Distinguishing soft vs hard failures
• Improving deliverability
• Using decline-specific retry logic
• Segmenting recovery paths
• Measuring incremental lift transparently

Retry timing alone has diminishing returns. Visibility and fundamentals drive far more impact.

This week’s newsletter breaks down what we’re seeing across hundreds of subscription businesses, and why understanding the why behind failed payments is becoming a critical part of every retention system.

If you want the full insight, read the article below.

When working to improve your failed payment recovery process, identifying the specific problem you're addressing is crucial. The first indicator of an

Failure Reasons

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Gabrielle San Nicola's Linkedin Analytics

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