Retention, Denis Shatalin says, is where real growth begins. “Acquisition is easy to get wrong and expensive to scale. Retention is where your business either becomes sustainable or starts bleeding quietly.”
It’s not a quote you’d expect from someone known for helping early-stage SaaS founders book their first demos. But Denis — founder of the mentorship programme SaaS Camp, Growth & Product Marketing Lead at PowerPlay (2021–2023), and now founder of SportsProSolution — has always taken a long view. He teaches founders to do the same.
Over the past five years, Denis has advised more than 150 B2B SaaS companies, helping them build scalable outreach, close initial sales, and — crucially — keep customers long enough to turn one-time wins into real revenue engines. His approach to retention isn’t based on motivational ideas or high-concept theories. It’s structural. He treats the user journey like an engineered system.
Building Retention from Day One
During his time at PowerPlay, an email deliverability SaaS tool, Denis rebuilt the onboarding and lifecycle flow from scratch. The product itself was solid — it helped B2B clients keep their cold outreach campaigns out of spam folders. But the journey from sign-up to success was unclear.
“There was no single path,” Denis recalls. “Users would connect their domain, run a few tests, and then drop off. So we mapped out a linear journey: onboarding to warming to execution to results. That’s how you turn feature usage into a narrative.”
With clearer stages and milestones, user retention more than doubled, from five months to thirteen. “Retention is about consistency of value,” Denis adds. “But first, users need to understand what ‘success’ looks like.”
He introduced email and in-app guidance that triggered based on behaviour, not time. Instead of sending generic newsletters, users were nudged when they stalled, congratulated when they completed steps, and offered prompts when they were about to fall off. “It’s less about talking more,” he explains. “It’s about speaking at the right moment.”
PowerPlay’s client base grew steadily under that system — 56 new clients signed in the first year — and retention became a core metric the team could forecast and control.
From Sports to Software: Retention in a New Vertical
This year, Denis launched SportsProSolution, a B2B white-label SaaS platform for the sports industry. While the sector was entirely different from email tech, the same retention-first mindset shaped how the product was designed and delivered.
“The question in both cases is: how do I help this user win again and again?” Denis says.
From the beginning, he focused on product scalability, not through one-off sales or support-heavy onboarding, but through a repeatable, long-term engagement model. He conducted in-depth interviews with prospective clients to understand their day-to-day operations, digital pain points, and decision-making cycles. “Retention starts long before someone logs in,” Denis explains. “It starts when you decide who you’re building for and how often they’ll actually need you.”
With its first enterprise client already secured and long-term revenue contracts underway, SportsProSolution is proving that retention-focused architecture translates across industries, from B2B SaaS to high-performance sports environments.
Mentorship with Long-Term Impact
Through SaaS Camp, Denis has continued to mentor founders across multiple sectors. Many come in with an MVP and a few sales, but no system for keeping users engaged after onboarding. His advice is blunt: “You’re losing people not because they don’t care, but because you stopped showing them why they should.”
He pushes founders to build lifecycle campaigns from the very first cohort, not as an afterthought, but as part of the product experience. “You don’t need full automation. You need relevance. Even five manual emails, if they’re well-timed and based on behaviour, can outperform the fanciest drip campaign.”
He also teaches them to anchor retention in value moments, not time intervals. “Don’t ask ‘Has it been 30 days?’ Ask ‘Have they achieved the thing they came for?’”
Retention Is a Growth Strategy
For Denis, retention is more than customer support or UX optimisation — it’s the only sustainable growth strategy.
“You can’t outgrow a leaky bucket,” he says. “And when you finally find a message that works, you want that customer to stay. Otherwise, your CAC just keeps compounding.”
Today, Denis continues to build his own platform while mentoring founders through SaaS Camp and informal pro bono work. What he teaches is simple, but often ignored: real growth happens after the first conversion. Not when you win someone’s attention, but when you keep earning their trust.
