They only met the offer

For years I read the quiet after the month as churn.

The cohort arrives in Ramadan, orders four or five times inside thirty nights, then goes flat within a fortnight. So I built win-back flows. I argued for a reactivation line in the budget. I called them lapsed, because lapsed is the word the dashboard offers.

What corrected me was putting the two versions of the business side by side.

In the month the kitchen is open until two. Delivery is free, because the threshold came down for the season. There is a price per head that takes the decision away. The reply arrives in four minutes, because somebody is rostered to the phone all night. There is a code under every third post. For thirty nights the business is awake, generous and cheap, on purpose.

Eleven days on from Eid, give or take where the sighting fell, all of that has come off. Hours back to eleven. Threshold back to eighty riyals. Full menu, no set price, replies in the morning, no code.

Nobody tells the customer. They find it on their own, at the first order they try to place.

They have not lapsed. They have met the real business for the first time, and declined it. What they signed up for is not sold in the other eleven months, and the win-back offer invites them to buy something worse than what they liked, at a higher price, from a company that is not answering tonight.

Which means that cohort is worth what the ordinary version of the business is worth. Not the month's version. The one the rest of the year gets.

The gap between the two is the real number, and it closes in the quiet months, not in the fortnight after the holiday.