The problem: the launch wasn't paying back, and the team moved blind
We joined the project, a B2C subscription app in the lifestyle space, at exactly the moment the founders were about to shut it down after a failed launch. Marketing costs turned out much higher than expected, and because of low retention the ads didn't pay back at all.
With no clear analytics, the dev team moved at random. Features were shipped reactively, based on the latest negative reviews. The non-technical founders felt stuck: it wasn't clear what exactly was broken or whether it could even be fixed before the marketing budget ran out for good.
At the same time they didn't want to build a cheap 'subscription trap' that survives only because users forget to cancel. They needed a product that delivers real value, and a lean way to acquire users to test hypotheses rather than burn the rest of the budget on guessing.
The turning point: from 'we made a huge mistake' to 'we believe in this product'
The turnaround started not with product fantasies but with market analysis. We singled out competitors with a similar level of investment and monetization model and, on their data, completely rebuilt the marketing funnel, including major changes to pricing and closing mechanics.
We don't invent the funnel from scratch. We take competitors with a comparable level of investment and monetization, break down what already works for them, and reassemble the funnel on proven solutions, then bring in our own hypotheses. The market has already paid for those validations, and starting from a blank page, burning budget on the long-known, only loses time and money.
In parallel we set up end-to-end analytics. The data immediately highlighted obvious snags that could be fixed fast and at almost no cost. These quick wins delivered two results at once: users reacted positively to the improvements, and the founders believed in their original idea again.
Next, now together with a new marketer, we used the analytics to run the ad campaigns. That cut the cost of acquiring a customer 5×. Even when overall marketing budgets shrank, the return on every dollar invested grew several times over.
What changed
Retention moved the most: both product metrics and subscription renewals grew. But this isn't a separate 'product' story: retention rose together with the monetization work: conversion growth from targeted funnel experiments and a price increase of 25%. Before, raising the price was impossible: users didn't see the value, and conversion dropped. Once the funnel and pricing fell into place, the price could be raised without losing conversion at the paywall.
To make it stick, we introduced a system of alternating sprints: one for marketing and the funnel, the next for targeted product and UX fixes that the analytics highlighted. This structure gave the team the freedom to:
test marketing hypotheses fast and often, even on a small budget;
replace the chaotic stream of new-feature requests with targeted, data-driven improvements;
segment and target users by demographics and behavior;
prove to the founders that the app they'd lost faith in could be both useful for people and profitable for the business.
Results
Raised prices 25% without a drop in conversion at the paywall.
Increased 2nd-period renewals by 68%, and 3rd-period renewals by 115%.
Grew LTV 4×.
Secured further development. Despite past funding troubles, the founders decided to keep building the product: it proved it works even on small budgets, and further growth in marketing investment only sharpens the algorithms of the ad sources.
The main shift wasn't in a single metric, it was that the founders again saw the whole money machine: where revenue leaks, what to fix first, and which experiment to run next. The product stopped resting on luck and the latest negative review.
// We flag product and UX snags along the way and help close them, but we don't take on building the product: that's not our zone. We answer for the money in the funnel: traffic, onboarding, paywall, price, upsell and renewals. Retention and LTV here grew as a consequence of the monetization work, not a separate product build.