NRR Cohort

NRR Cohort breaks net revenue retention — also called net dollar retention, or NDR — out by the cohort in which customers were acquired. Rows are signup cohorts, columns are months of tenure, and each cell is that cohort's NRR at that age. It turns a single blended NRR into a full grid of how every intake of customers is really behaving.

The blended number hides the story a cohort view reveals. Reading across a row shows how one cohort evolves as it matures; reading down a column compares cohorts at the same age, which is the only fair way to tell whether newer customers are retaining better or worse than older ones.

For each acquisition cohort, index its starting MRR to 100% and track retained-plus-expansion MRR at each subsequent month of tenure. A cohort that reaches 108% by month five expanded eight points net of churn and contraction over that period.

Because younger cohorts have fewer months of history, the grid is triangular — recent cohorts fill in only their earliest columns. Watch the diagonal and the same-tenure columns rather than the raw blended average, which mixes cohorts of every age.