Growth Acceleration
The change in the growth rate itself — where a stalling business shows its hand first.
What is it?
Growth Acceleration is the change in your MRR growth rate itself — the second derivative of MRR. Positive means growth is speeding up; negative means it is slowing, even while MRR still rises. It catches inflection points that the growth rate alone smooths over.
It is where a stalling business shows its hand first. Revenue can keep climbing for months after growth has begun to decelerate, and acceleration is the metric that flags the turn while there is still time to react.
How to calculate?
Subtract the previous period's growth rate from the current one. A move from 5% to 4.6% monthly growth is a growth acceleration of −0.4 points. Because it differences already-noisy rates, read it on smoothed growth to avoid chasing phantom turns.
Watch for sustained sign changes rather than single months: a run of negative acceleration is the earliest credible warning that growth is rolling over.