A quick extra email from me this week, because I'm excited to be hosting a webinar this Wednesday together with Andrew Capland.

Recently, I pulled apart 20 live Head of Growth job specs and compared them to the same analysis I ran in 2022.

It made me realize just how much the Head of Growth role has changed and that we need to be talking about it more. Andrew had similar insights from coaching 100+ growth leaders.

Together, we realized it is now 4 roles. So 4 people with the same job title:

1. 1 that is the founding growth hire: broad scope, no playbook, nobody above them who’s done the job.

2. 1 leads a small team of six and still jumps into the hands-on work.

3. 1 advises three companies and focuses on strategy.

4. 1 is the entire team.

I’ve been at least two of these over the last few years (maybe 3).

The title survived the last years, but almost nothing underneath it did:

• The execution work (PPC, SEO, offline) has mostly left the spec.

• Strategy, experimentation, and unit economics stayed.

• AI-native is, of course, on the rise.

• And the salary range for this one title now runs from £70K to £250K, because it isn’t one job anymore. It’s four.

Knowing which version of the job you’re in or need to hire — changes everything about what you should learn next.

So this Wednesday, Andrew Capland and I are breaking it all down live:

• The 4 roles the Head of Growth job is splitting into, each told through a real person’s week

• What the spec data says you can stop worrying about, and the few skills that now carry the whole job

• The career ladder bending into a loop, and the senior IC roles that didn’t exist a few years ago

• What to do next based on which version matches you

• Plus live Q&A

Wednesday 19 August · 5pm UK / 12pm ET · Zoom · 60 min · Free

Save your seat

Can’t make it live? Register anyway; everyone who signs up gets the recording and a one-page cheatsheet/summary.

And if you’re a founder rather than a growth leader, come anyway.

You’re probably about to write one of these job specs, and hiring the wrong one of the four is an expensive mistake.

We promise no “AI WILL TAKE YOUR JOB” fear-mongering, just valuable and actionable insights.

Hope to see you there,

Daphne

Inviting you to my free webinar with Andrew Capland on August 19th at 5pm (GMT+1), all about the rise of growth engineers. More on that to come, but don't forget to sign up!

Sign up for my free webinar

Hi there,

I asked Kameron Tanseli to walk me through an ordinary Tuesday. He runs growth engineering at Flora, and built it at Fyxer.ai while it went from $1m to $32m ARR.

Here’s what he sent back, more or less as written:

• Wake up. Double espresso from the Sage Bambino, over ice (snap, same coffee machine!). Gym, breakfast.

• Open PostHog. Check the metrics, check the running experiments. (His note next to this line: “peeking lol.”)

• Come up with two or three ideas for the backlog and add them to Linear. He’ll often point an LLM at PostHog and BigQuery to do the data science part for him.

• Hand the build to Devin, or write it in OpenCode with AI assistance, depending on complexity.

• Devin QAs every pull request end to end, with video and screenshots.

• Lunch, and a walk in nature.

• Merge to production. Launch the experiment. Post it in the #experiments Slack channel.

• Meetings from 3pm to coordinate bigger launches with other squads.

• 6pm: brain dead, go cook dinner.

Read it again and notice what isn’t there:

There’s almost no building in it.

He specs, an agent builds, an agent tests, he merges. The part I always assumed was the job, the part founders think they’re paying an engineer for, has been squeezed into an afternoon and mostly handed to something that doesn’t sleep.

So what actually fills the day

Ben Fanning, a growth engineer at Fyxer, doesn’t describe a schedule at all. He describes a cycle:

• Data first

• Then ideation

• Then design

• Then the build

• Then analysis

• Then improving the tooling that does all of the above.

“There’s a lot of days where you do all of these things in one day, which is part of the joy of growth engineering.”

Six stages, one person, one day. Which only works because five of the six are decisions and one is typing.

Three things eat the hours.

1. Deciding what’s worth testing. Kameron adds two or three ideas to the backlog a day. Almost none become experiments. He runs one, maybe two a fortnight. The gap between those two numbers is the actual job: analysing, understanding and prioritising.

2. Checking it’s real before it’s built. Kameron and I approach this similarly: running a few quick calculations before choosing experiments goes a long way toward ensuring you have enough traffic to test and that the opportunity is worth it (MDE = Minimum Detectable Effect).

   

3. Checking it’s real after it’s built. At Flora, Devin signs up as a customer for every pull request and sends screenshots of each variant. Kameron’s example: it tried the Stripe checkout, found a coupon leaking in from a different experiment, fixed it, and sent him the new screenshots. His reaction was “I don’t need QA engineers anymore.”

Nobody has ever enjoyed that job. It’s the first one I’d hand over too.

Why one person can hold all of it

Ben describes the role as the centre of a Venn diagram: part software engineering, part experimentation and data, part product and user psychology. Drop a circle and you land in a different job.

Nobody arrives holding all three. There are three routes in, he says: engineering, data, or business. And the most common one now is business, “especially now with AI making the coming from the technical side potentially less important.”

The gate is moving, not closing.

Three things to steal, without hiring anyone

Most of you reading this are five to fifteen people; you might hire one growth engineer, but you won’t have a full team.

So here is what you can learn:

1. Give one person one metric and don’t let them change it. At Flora, one person’s entire job, week after week, is the percentage of new signups who generate an image. Weekly dashboard, weekly experiments, keep going until the number moves. Not a theme. Not an area. One number.

2. Draw a box around it. Kameron’s rule for avoiding collisions is brutally simple: “I will say to an engineer, you are from sign up to paywall. That is your area. You can draw a box around it. No one else is going to really touch it.”

3. Size the test before you build it. You don’t need Fyxer’s platform. You need an honest answer to how long a result would take at your traffic. If it’s four months, you’re testing in the wrong place. Go further down the funnel, where the numbers are smaller, and the money is bigger.

None of those needs a new hire. All three need someone to decide.

What I’d recommend this week

Join us on 19 August. I’m doing a free webinar with Andrew Capland on how these growth roles are pulling apart into different jobs with the same title.

Join the webinar

The building has quietly become the cheap part. What’s left is knowing which two of your twenty ideas are worth twelve days, and being honest with yourself when the answer comes back.

Speak soon,
Daphne

A while ago I was standing in the kitchen, checking several weather apps on my phone, trying to work out whether I should walk the dog now.

I turned around to find my father-in-law looking at me like I’d lost it: “Why are you doing that? Just look out the window.”

He wasn’t wrong. We have a book's worth of these types of down-to-earth quotes by him (“What type of music do you like to listen to while driving?” “Silence.”)

But it stuck with me. Because for me, the obvious move is always:

• Open the app (or three)

• Check a website

• Ask someone.

For him, the obvious move is: look outside. Go outside.

Same job (”what’s the weather doing?”). Completely different idea of the obvious solution.

That four-word takedown is the whole game in early growth, and it’s the thing I watch founders miss again and again.

You think you’re competing with the other apps in your category. You’re not. You’re competing with whatever your user already does to get the job done. And usually, that thing is free, instant, and good enough.

Your competitor isn’t another app

Time and time again, I hear apps compare themselves to other apps. But I challenge you to look a little further. Once you see it, it’s everywhere:

A meditation app isn’t really up against other meditation apps. It’s up against going for a walk, a yoga class, or flopping on the sofa with the TV to switch off.

A recipe app is competing with old school cookbooks. Duolingo is competing against in-person lessons. And a weather app is competing against, well, the sky.

An app I worked on for the over-65s, helping them stay active, had one giant competitor: YouTube. Their users’ kids kept sending them free workout videos.

How we actually beat YouTube

Let’s talk about that active app and our huge challenge of going up against a mogul like YouTube. We couldn’t win on “short, easy videos.” YouTube already had those, for free, forever.

So we stopped competing with the category and started competing with the real alternative. We focused on the thing YouTube couldn’t offer: a coach who knew their specific struggles:

• Could they keep their balance?

• Carry the shopping home?

• Get down on the floor to play with the grandkids, and back up again?

Our best-performing ad wasn’t about workouts at all. It was “keep up with your grandkids.” (Honestly, that still gets me.)

Because that’s the job. YouTube doesn’t promise that. A pile of free videos doesn’t promise that.

Why this isn’t just a nice reframe

I’m not trying to be pedantic, and it’s not just about mindset. This is about setting yourself up for success.

If you benchmark yourself against other apps, you build a slightly better version of the category, only to wonder why nobody switches.

The window is free and already in their hand. “Slightly better than the other app” loses to “free and instant” every single time.

To win, you don’t have to beat the category. You have to be, obviously, specifically better than the one thing they actually do instead.

What to do this week

1. List what they do instead. Write down everything a user does to get this job done without you. Include “nothing,” “the manual way,” and “ask a person.” For weather: the window, stepping outside, Google, a friend, the pre-installed weather app.

2. Find their default. Of that list, which one do they reach for first? That, not the App Store top charts, is your real competitor.

3. Beat that one thing, out loud. Make your value obviously better than that specific alternative, and say so. Not “a better weather app.” More like “stop guessing whether you’ll get rained on halfway through your run.”

And steal this question for your next five user interviews: “Before you had anything like this, what did you actually do?” Their answer is your competitor. (It’s almost never another app.)

What I'd recommend this week

If this clicked, the classic version is the McDonald's milkshake study (the story that kicked off Jobs To Be Done).

The team realised their milkshake wasn't competing with other milkshakes at all. It was competing with bananas, bagels, and a boring morning commute.

Clayton Christensen's Competing Against Luck is the deeper read if you want the full thinking behind it.

I fall for this too. I assumed everyone uses a weather app.

It took my father-in-law and a window to remind me that most people just... don’t.

Sometimes the thing your product is really up against is a behavior so obvious your users don’t even call it a solution.

So before you study a competitor’s paywall and onboarding for the hundredth time, go simpler. Find the free, boring, good-enough thing your users already do.

At the moment, this is often AI; AI is your competitor. So you need to understand how they use it instead and what you can do to offer real value on top of that.

See you next week,
Daphne

June was for tidying. July, it turns out, was for building.

Not building more — we’ve already established my feelings on more.

Building better foundations:

A business that actually supports me and my ADHD instead of one I have to constantly wrestle with. And, for the first time in a while, a real plan for what I want the next few years to look like.

The nudge came from this newsletter by Andrew Capland, reflecting on five years of working for himself. It made me realise I’d been so busy running my business that I’d stopped asking where I actually wanted it to go. We’ve been having some great chats about it and are even hosting a free webinar together next month.

So that's been July's quieter project, ticking along in the background between experiments, the cohort, and a fox with some very strong opinions about my garden (more on that later).

Here’s everything that happened.

What’s been happening with clients

July has been a month of experiments.

We've been running some really interesting tests around onboarding and paid trials, with a mix of expected results and a few surprises. Some experiments gave us the lift we were hoping for, while others raised even better questions.

That's one of my favourite things about experimentation: even when the outcome isn't a clear win, you still learn something valuable. Sometimes the most useful result is finding out what doesn't move the needle.

What I've been presenting

Sub Club Live with Alice Muir and David Barnard on reactivation! We went live on July 2nd and covered everything from whether you should even prioritise reactivation in the first place to the tactics we've seen actually work.

Presenting in 30°C+ heat was... an experience (I have never looked shinier on camera), but I did my best to bring the energy.

If you missed it, you can watch the session back here.

What I’ve been writing

Nothing new went live this month; a planned pause on the editorial side meant a few pieces were pushed back.

That doesn't mean the writing stopped, though.

Two new pieces are on their way — one on money-back guarantees and one on growth stalls — plus I’ve been preparing some extra Growth Waves content with some fun breakdowns and advice I can’t wait to share.

What I’ve been up to with Women in Experimentation

The personal branding cohort kicked off on July 10th!

You might remember I nearly talked us out of running it. I’m so glad I didn’t, because this group is such a motivated bunch. Every session leaves me more energised than I started (which, for someone who carefully guards her energy, says a lot).

One of our free spot participants, Miracle, shared such a sweet post.

This is exactly why we wanted to offer free spots to people who are rebuilding.

The job market is a tricky place at the moment, so it feels good to be able to help women out there who are struggling and we have plans to do more free webinars and sessions with WiE to support them further.

This month’s flip-flops

As always, the messy reality:

I triple-checked course access. Google Drive had other plans. After retiring my self-serve courses (as promised in last month’s issue), I moved everything over to Google Drive and checked the permissions no fewer than three times.

Some wonderfully mysterious permission settings still managed to lock people out. The irony of breaking access while trying to simplify everything was not lost on me.

It turns out I didn’t have the original course videos. So retiring the courses meant redownloading 180 (!) videos from Podia to organise. Joys.

The silver lining: it pushed me to build a second brain in Claude that now automatically organises all my relevant files. Future me should have a much easier time.

My survey estimates let me down. I’m usually quite good at estimating survey response rates. This month, for one client, they’re coming in super low.

So I’m revamping and reviewing to see what we can do.

The gardening saga continues. I successfully grew mint and rocket this year (redemption after this year’s graveyard of seedlings!)... and then the foxes dug up and ate all my rocket. Why, foxes, why? The mint lives on. For now.

My true saving grace is my fig tree; I’ve proudly picked already 26 figs (yes… I’m keeping count).

What I’ve been enjoying

Silverstone! I headed to Silverstone with a former colleague from Heights (now a great friend), our partners, and a lot of excitement.

I got to see all my favourite drivers, which almost made sleeping in a tent worth it. Almost. Camping and I are still not on speaking terms.

Our annual road trip to France with friends. The tradition continues: the same core group of friends (plus a few new additions), a tiny village, a champagne festival, and a weekend full of good food, a few morning runs around Reims, and catching up.

London remembered it's summer. It was hot. Complaining about the weather is basically a British rite of passage, so I'm assimilating nicely. The long evenings, though? I'll happily keep those.

Attended a breathwork and sound session with Rosie Hoggmascall. This was actually my birthday gift to Rosie, but I think I needed it more than she did. I'm fairly certain I drifted off towards the end 😅... which I'm choosing to believe means it worked.

A day-long gardening course. Yes, before you point it out: I did a gardening course and still lost my rocket to foxes. The course was after that and is my comeback story 🦊.

The focus was on designing a low-maintenance, food-growing garden, and we even sketched out our own plans. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic.

Completed the Ben AI accelerator course. This is where the second brain came from. Investing in actually learning this stuff properly, instead of duct-taping tools together, has already been paying off.

I became an auntie! After a difficult pregnancy, my sister welcomed a beautiful baby boy, Lucas, on 21 July. He’s still a little one, but slowly growing :).

If you missed my newsletters this month

Looking ahead to August

• A new growth audit — always exciting to dig into a fresh app with fresh eyes.

• A major feature launch for a client, very excited for them.

• A webinar! About the three directions growth roles are going towards; you can sign up for free here.

• More building and improving, of course.

AND… my birthday. Turning 33 on the 13th August and decided to stay young by going climbing in trees 🌲🌳.

If June taught me that endings make space, July taught me what the space is for.

Not filling it back up, but building something that fits.

Till next time,
Daphne

I’ve been dancing around this for months.

If you’ve been reading Growth Waves for a while, you may have noticed a shift:

• The teardowns? All apps.

• The client examples? All apps.

• The problems I get excited about — paywalls, onboarding, day-7 retention, activation loops? All apps.

I just never officially said it.

So: here it is. I’m apps only now.

How I got here

My career path has never been a straight line. (Whose is?)

It went:

1. Studying business and then Finance

2. Realizing I definitely didn’t want to go into the world of banking

3. Joining a growth agency to work across every type of brand imaginable (from B2B to apps to e-commerce)

4. Head of Growth at an e-commerce subscription startup

5. Then back out as a consultant and advisor, working across both worlds of apps and e-commerce

For a while, that felt like a strength. I could speak both languages. And because I was only working with B2C brands, the audience challenges often felt similar, whether it was an app or an e-commerce business.

But over the last year, I started noticing something… When a lead came in, was it an app? I’d get excited. I’d download it. Test it. Pull it apart. Think about the onboarding, the paywall, the activation moment, and the retention loops. I’d want to understand every part of it.

I didn’t feel the same way about e-commerce anymore.

I tried to ignore that for a while. E-commerce has been good to me. I’ve spent almost 10 years building experience in that world.

Letting that go felt a bit like… a breakup.

Not because anything was wrong. Not because I didn’t appreciate it. Just because sometimes you grow in a different direction, and you have to be honest about what you’re excited to build next.

What e-commerce gave me that I’m not leaving behind

Here’s what I’ve realized, though: I’m not actually leaving e-commerce behind. I’m taking the best parts of it with me.

Years of DTC work taught me things that are genuinely invaluable for apps:

1. Thinking in full customer journeys, not isolated screens.

   In e-commerce, the pre-purchase experience matters just as much as what happens after someone buys.

   You’re constantly thinking about the entire journey — from first touchpoint to conversion to repeat purchase.

   That framing completely changed how I approach app onboarding.

2. Web funnels and landing page psychology.

   A lot of app teams discover web funnels later. I’ve already spent years obsessing over them.

   Understanding messaging, friction, intent, and what makes someone take the next step is just as relevant for an app as it is for a checkout flow.

3. Retention when you can’t measure everything perfectly.

   E-commerce attribution is notoriously messy. You don’t always know exactly why someone bought, what influenced them, or which touchpoint mattered most.

   You learn to make smart decisions with imperfect data. That skill transfers.

4. Marketing can’t solve product problems.

   I learned this one the hard way. (And it became, roughly, my entire philosophy on growth, as you may have noticed.)

   The biggest growth opportunities usually aren’t hiding in another campaign. They’re in the product experience itself.

5. Both are in the wellness space.

   I focused on wellness and eco-friendly e-commerce brands; my plan and love is still for wellness apps.

That crossover background is genuinely what makes me different in the app world. I think about real customers, not just funnels.

I’ve seen what works across both models. And I think that combination is pretty powerful.

Why apps won me over

There were a few things that kept pulling me toward apps, and I’d be underselling it if I didn’t name them.

1. I can actually impact the product!!!

   In e-commerce, growth consultants often get pushed into the marketing lane — ads, email, acquisition — because working on the actual product is a completely different skill set.

   With apps, I’m often in the room (or the Notion doc) when product decisions are being made. That’s where I do my best work.

2. The data is better.

   Not perfect, but better. Behavioural data, cohort analysis, event tracking — you can actually see what users are doing inside the product and use that to make decisions. I get so much joy of running in-depth analyses using tools like PostHog and Amplitude.

   In e-commerce, so much of the customer journey happens in the dark.

3. Growth compounds.

   In e-commerce, you’re often chasing spikes. A great campaign. A seasonal moment. A viral hit. Growth loops exist, but they’re harder to build.

   With apps, if you fix retention at the right stage, the impact compounds.

   Improving the product experience can change the entire model. That compounding dynamic energises me in a way I didn’t expect.

4. No stock issues.

   Our best growth month when I was Head of Growth was followed by a stock outage and having to turn everything off.

   I cannot tell you how much mental energy I spent on this across previous clients dealing with running out of stock... Never again.

What this means in practice

The e-commerce brand I still work with is one where I can focus on exactly the parts I’m best at: subscription growth, churn prevention, user research and the full customer journey.

Those are the pieces of e-commerce that map directly to my app work. I’m only continuing with brands I’ve already worked with — relationships where I know the business, understand the customer, and can have the biggest impact.

Going forward, when I am ready to take on a new client (I’m currently only available for one-off strategy sessions or growth audits), I’ll be focusing that space on consumer apps, specifically wellness apps.

Because if you’re a consumer app founder, this is exactly where I want to be spending my time.

Activation. Retention. Monetisation. Growth experiments. Growth hiring. This is the work that gets me out of bed.

And if you’ve been around here for a while…

Thank you. Genuinely.

Growth Waves started as a newsletter for both worlds; I called it D2C and tried to speak to e-commerce and app brands. But I definitely started off skewing to e-commerce.

I’m not deleting the e-commerce archives. There’s still a lot of value there. But going forward, Growth Waves is an app-focused newsletter.

If that’s not what you originally signed up for, that’s completely fair.

And if it is? I think we’re going to have a lot of fun.

Till next time,

Daphne

I was just 1km into a 40km hike when the storm hit.

My boots were already soaked, squelching with every step. I was halfway up the first peak, with another 39km and the better part of 10 hours still ahead of me. (Yes, I’d checked the weather. Saturday “looked fine.” Saturday lied.)

So I had three options:

• Pivot: Turn back and try again on Sunday.

• Adjust: Slow down, find shelter, change the plan.

• Or Stay the Course and keep climbing.

I kept climbing and finished the hike.

Recently, I was thinking about that moment on the trail because I’d just sat down with a founder facing a different version of the same decision.

Most of us reach points where we have to choose a direction. Instead, we convince ourselves we can climb three mountains at once.

During our strategy call, he explained he was building in one of the most crowded categories imaginable. (I’ll keep him anonymous, but think weather apps. Almost everyone has one on their phone.)

Which was exactly why he felt stuck.

He had at least five different audiences he could build for. And when almost everyone uses your type of product, the possibilities feel endless.

So he was trying to serve all of them at once.

That’s the trap.

Five audiences means five slightly different products, each pulling in a different direction. Your roadmap slowly fills with competing priorities. You build a little for everyone and something indispensable for no one.

So I gave him the same thing I reach for whenever I’m overwhelmed by too many options: a way to make the decision smaller.

Here’s the thing, almost no one says out loud: the fear of focus is really the fear of permanence.

We don’t avoid choosing an audience because we can’t decide. We avoid it because choosing feels final. “If I commit to runners, I’m abandoning everyone else forever.” So we stay broad and water the product down for all of them.

But committing to an audience isn’t a tattoo. It’s a direction of travel. And there are only ever three things you can do with a direction.

The 3-way check: stay, refine, or pivot

You pick an audience, then run this every few weeks. Look at the evidence, then choose one:

1. Stay the course. The signals are good. Your target users are activating, the feedback’s right, there’s payment intent. Don’t second-guess it. Put your energy into execution.

2. Refine. The direction’s right, the details are off. Maybe it’s not athletes training for an event, just people who want to move more. Maybe it’s one use case, not five. Same mountain, better route.

3. Pivot. The evidence killed your core bet. Your target users tried it and didn’t see the value. Change the problem, the user, or the solution. On purpose, not in a panic.

That’s it. Three options. The goal isn’t to be right on day one. It’s about committing hard enough to actually learn, then steering.

It’s how the apps you admire got there:

• Calm could have been “wellness for everyone.” They committed, saw Sleep Stories take off, and doubled down.

• PhotoRoom could have been “Photoshop, but easier.” They picked one job (background removal) for one audience (non-designers selling online who need speed, not perfection), then expanded.

• Ladder (I use it most days) had real product-market fit with fans of specific influencer coaches. They hit roughly $1M ARR and a ceiling. To grow, they pivoted to a broader audience who didn’t want to pay extra for 1-on-1 access.

None of them got it right up front. They committed, then adjusted.

What to actually do this week

If you’ve got multiple audiences you’re juggling and you’re scared to pick, do this:

1. Score them.

For each audience, rate three things out of 5:

1. How painful the problem is

2. How badly it’s being solved today (aka are other apps not meeting their needs)

3. How willing they are to pay.

Use that to prioritise the highest potential audience.

2. Write it as a hypothesis.

“We’re building for [audience] who struggle with [problem]. We’ll know we’re right if [specific signal].”

A hypothesis is easy to change and can be proven/disproven.

3. Decide your evidence in advance.

Before you ship anything, write down what would make you stay, refine, or pivot. Otherwise you’ll just read the data to confirm what you hoped. We all do it, let’s not pretend otherwise.

I’m a pivot’er

Quick confession, so you don’t think I’m preaching from some serene strategic mountaintop: I’ve repositioned my own consultancy more times than I’d like to admit.

I’ve dropped services, added new ones, niched down, then niched differently.

You know what happened? Nothing.

No one cared. (Sorry, but it’s oddly freeing.)

The hard part isn’t choosing the perfect direction. It’s choosing one, knowing you can always change it later.

What I’d recommend this week

If this hit a nerve, I get properly practical on this in my free course with RevenueCat: Early product decisions: How to build an app people will pay for.

It walks through how to choose your first audience, define what “working” actually looks like, and run the stay/refine/pivot check without spiralling into endless second-guessing.

It’s the exact framework I kept reaching for during that strategy session.

Check out the course

I’d also highly recommend watching the Pivot scene from Friends again. Pivoting is far less scary when you have the phrase “Pivot, Pivot, Pivaat!” in your head.

One last thing I told that founder, because it’s the real risk when you’re trying to do too much: don’t fall for the solution before you’ve nailed the problem.

He’d sketched out a genuinely clever feature, the kind that makes you go “Oh, that’s actually different,” and I loved it. But a clever feature for an audience you haven’t committed to is just a nicer way of going off-topic.

Problem first. Then solution.

So: pick the audience with the strongest pull. Commit until the evidence tells you otherwise. Then decide whether to stay, refine, or pivot.

You’re not signing your life away. You’re simply choosing which path to take.

And when the storm rolls in, you can always change direction. (Ideally in drier boots than mine.)

See you next week,

Daphne

I’m a growth advisor. And I’ve decided to stop growing.

Not the advice you’d expect from someone whose entire job is helping companies grow. But here we are.

Today, instead of telling you how to expand your brand, I’m going to tell you why I’m deliberately putting a ceiling on my own. Bear with me.

When “more” started to hurt

I fell into freelancing accidentally and stayed for years. Every single year, I grew. I never wanted to become an agency, so that capped things nicely, but I still kept doing more. More courses, more talks, more projects.

Until more started hurting me.

• My newer courses cannibalised the sales of my old ones.

• My website grew bigger but felt constantly out of date.

• I had a list of projects and ideas I never had time to touch.

• I made mistakes in the rush to ship — wrong links, a feedback form none of you could actually access (oops).

Better beats more

Then I read Company of One. It describes how a business can become a beast: you grow and grow until you lose control of it. The answer isn’t more. It’s better.

More is tempting, especially with AI. But more doesn’t always mean better.

I want to be better. My revenue has grown, and I don’t need it to grow beyond this. I don’t want to hire a team I have to manage, or do everything at half quality.

I know not everyone gets to make this choice right now. Plenty of people are having “less” forced on them, not choosing it — and I don’t take for granted that I get to choose.

The point of a Company of One isn’t growth at all costs (ironic, coming from a growth advisor). It’s growing to the level that feels right for you, and shaping your life around it, instead of the other way round.

Why now?

Because I love what I do. Truly. But I also love long walks with my dog, working out, visiting new places, and time with my family and friends.

The last two years made that non-negotiable. I lost my stepfather. My husband had cancer (he’s been all clear now for 1.5 years). My older sister has been in hospital for 10 weeks with pregnancy complications.

If I’d grown faster, I couldn’t have been there for them. Even now at times I’m feeling the strain of it all.

What I’m stripping back

So I’m doing something that sounds strange for a growth person. I’m stripping things back.

Over the coming months, I’m going to be:

1. Removing my self-serve courses.

Don’t panic. Hear me out.

So much has changed since AI, and since then I’ve launched my CXL and RevenueCat courses to high demand. So it just doesn’t justify keeping my self-serve courses.

I’ll keep my CXL and RevenueCat courses, and I’m working on shifting the rest to Google Drive Access. If you bought one: don’t worry, you’ll keep your access, and I’ll share some additional gifts as a thank you.

2. Simplifying my website and how I work with brands.

Less noise, more up-to-date content on my actual approach and who I am. Removing the courses will help with this, and then it’s time for a full refresh.

3. Testing simpler LinkedIn content.

My carousels have been precious to me; they’re my mini stories and guides, and the way I love to consume content as someone with ADHD. But LinkedIn’s new formatting has made them almost impossible to read. So I’m testing simpler text-and-image posts: still scannable, but a better fit for what actually works there now. As well as carousels with larger fonts.

4. Removing inactive subscribers.

My newsletter grows over time, but the open rate has slipped over time. It’s hard to let go of list size, but a smaller, engaged list beats a big, quiet one. I’ve just tidied up inactive subscribers. This will also make it easier for me to see which content you like and which you dislike.

5. Reducing my client load.

I love my current clients, and I’m not going anywhere. I keep my client list small on purpose, so I can do right by the ones I have. At some point one of them will outgrow me — they’ll need a full-time hire or a different kind of expert for their next phase. When that day came last month, I chose not to take on a new client.

The missing piece

There’s one puzzle piece I haven’t solved. I want to help smaller startups too — the earlier-stage founders who don’t fit ongoing client work, and who I rarely have room for anyway.

To be clear: this isn’t me adding more on top. It’s redirecting. I’ve tested one-off strategy sessions, courses, workshops and growth audits. Strategy sessions and audits worked best, but they don’t scale.

So I don’t have the answer yet, and that’s fine. It will come later.

If you’re feeling the pressure to do more right now — more output, more channels, more everything, because AI makes “more” so easy — take this as permission to do less, better, too.

First, I want to focus on you. This newsletter. Showing up better here, adding more value, more consistency. I’ve already built a Claude dashboard to keep a better eye on performance.

Worth a read (this week’s recommendations)

The book that kicked all of this off is Company of One by Paul Jarvis. If any of this hit a nerve, start there — it’s the clearest case I’ve found for staying small on purpose.

Two more, if you want to sit with the idea:

• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — on making peace with the fact that you can’t do it all. The one that helped me most this year.

• Essentialism by Greg McKeown — the disciplined pursuit of less, but better.

So here’s my question for you: if you let yourself, what would you strip back?

Hit reply and tell me; I read every answer.

Thank you for being part of my Company of One.

Company of One doesn’t mean doing it alone with no help — I have a lot of help.

It means a company that resists traditional growth: not chasing more, not hiring to add capacity, but getting better.

My younger sister has a tattoo on her arm: This is me trying.

Well, this is me trying to be better,

Daphne

Endings scare me. More than I’d like to admit. I slow down my reading to avoid finishing a beloved book; I avoid watching a TV show’s finale, and I hate goodbyes with long-distance friends.

So when one of my longest-standing clients rounded off our work this month, earlier than I’d initially planned for, my first reaction wasn’t pride.

It was panic. (Not my finest growth-consultant moment, I know.)

It took me a few days to see it clearly. The work hadn’t gone wrong; it was time for them to hire someone full-time to take over. I’d just thought I’d have a few more weeks to round off.

It was tempting to immediately look for a replacement, but, as if by serendipity, I was fortunate enough to be asked about a few potential projects.

But I stopped myself from taking them on.

I’d just been carrying too much, and I needed time to tidy up. To reorganize. To work out what I actually want more of, and what I’m finally ready to put down.

So that became the real theme of June: tidying up.

I know it’s nearly July and technically far too late (and hot) for spring cleaning. But clearing the clutter in my business, my life, and my head has felt so good.

So much has changed lately, in the world and in my own life, and I’m only human. I needed the room to process. This month, I finally took it.

Here’s everything that happened in June.

What I’ve been writing

Two articles went live this month:

The First 7 Days Are The Most Underrated CRO Opportunity (Convert)
Takeaway: The first week is where retention is quietly won or lost. Get those seven days right and everything downstream gets easier.

Monthly Plans Might Be Your Best Option (RevenueCat)
Takeaway: Annual isn’t always the smart default. Sometimes, monthly is the better call, and I make the case for when.

What’s been happening with clients

The client I mentioned at the top? Here’s the part that makes the ending easier to swallow.

Over the year or so we worked together, their sales grew 167%. Subscription revenue? Up 210%.

They’ve now grown to the point where they’re ready to hand the reins to someone else for a while.

And when I finally stop panicking long enough to actually look at it, that’s exactly what you want to happen. A client outgrowing you in the best way is a strange, proud, slightly sad thing all at once. The baby brand is flying out of the nest.

The lesson I keep relearning: an ending isn’t a failure. Sometimes it’s just space.

And this particular ending makes space that I feel like I’ve needed.

Such as time to build more automations to take the manual, repetitive tasks off my plate. Less admin, more thinking.

Clearing the clutter so there’s room for the work that actually needs me.

What I’ve been up to with Women in Experimentation

I’ve been deep in prep for a personal branding cohort, and I genuinely can’t wait for it. Every sign-up that comes through makes me giddy with excitement.

One reason it matters so much to me is that we’re giving spots to people who’ve lost their jobs or are going through a tough time.

Personal branding shouldn’t be a luxury for when everything’s already going well. It matters most when you’re rebuilding. That one sits very close to my heart.

If that’s you, or you know someone who could benefit, here’s the form for the free spots.

And if you’d like to join the cohort in general, you can apply here.

I’ve also been working with the judges to select the speakers for the WiE Summit. Reading through the submissions and getting to shape who gets the stage has been a huge challenge (120+ applicants) but also a quiet highlights of my month.

A little recognition

I won Best Educational Content for Community Content with Guest Test at the Best in Test Awards.

I’ve poured so much time into writing and content over the years, often wondering if any of it actually lands, so seeing that recognised meant more than I expected. I also got a badge, which is pretty cool.

This month’s flip flops

The panic when the client ended. I’ve already told you this one. My first instinct when something rounds off is to spiral rather than celebrate. I’m working on catching it faster. Progress, not perfection.

I tell founders to do less, then build myself a to-do list a mile long. I spent part of this month mapping out all the AI tools and automations I want to build, and ended up with a backlog so big I’d never actually start any of it.

I built some cool new things with AI this month.

Curious? Let me know, and I’ll include a “What I built” section in the next recap.

The irony of the “you need fewer, better things” person doing exactly the opposite was not lost on me. So I went back and made every idea smaller. The smaller the task, the more likely I’ll actually do it. (Funny how the advice I give is always easier to give than to take.) More on this next week.

I nearly stopped us from doing the Personal Branding Cohort. I let my own doubts fill my head: what if we don’t have PMF? What if no one signs up? What if my challenges on LinkedIn recently make me the wrong person for this?

I’m so glad Lucia and Marcella encouraged us to go ahead, because seeing the stories of the people who signed up for both paid and free spots has been such a motivator.

Just because I can do it doesn’t mean I should. I got asked a lot this month for meetings outside my usual time, process changes, and extra tasks. In the last few months,

I’ve been a bit too quick to say yes, but it’s come at a cost. This still happened a few times in June, but at least this month I was aware of it and managed to say no much more often than before.

What I’ve been enjoying

A month of less travel, which has been so nice. The one trip was at the very start of June, to see my sister who’s been in hospital in Bordeaux. Everything since has been lovely and local, and I’ve been soaking up the London weather while it lasts.

The highlight: I got to see Lily Allen with my younger sister. She’s a journalist and somehow managed to get us tickets, which was just incredible.

I’ve been a bit obsessed with her latest album, mostly because of how raw and emotional it is. The whole show was one beautiful theatre performance from start to finish.

If you missed my newsletters this month

Looking ahead to July

First up, a live SubClub episode tonight together with Alice Muir on Reactivation Strategies.

Then there are a few more articles on their way, focusing on fixing your first renewal and reducing churn due to ‘low usage’. First renewals and low usage are two of the most under-watched moments in the subscription lifecycle, and I’ve got a lot to say about both.

And of course, the live personal branding cohort is in July too.

Otherwise?

More tidying.
More AI automations (I’ve been nerding out building a second brain).

If June taught me anything, it’s that endings aren’t the enemy. Sometimes they’re just space, to tidy up, to reorganise, to choose what you want more of.

I’m only human (a fact I’m relearning constantly), and I needed the room to process. I’m taking it.

Till next time,
Daphne

Yes, 80% of trials start on Day 0. Yes, the onboarding paywall matters. And yes, you should absolutely optimise it.

But here’s something I’ve noticed working with apps: teams pour all their energy into the onboarding paywall, while barely thinking about what happens after.

For freemium apps especially, that’s a missed opportunity.

The onboarding paywall captures users at their moment of highest curiosity.

But feature-based and contextual paywalls catch users at their moment of highest need, and that’s often a far more powerful point to convert.

Vahe Baghdasaryan talks about these three paywall types in his Paywall Optimization Masterclass, and it struck me how under-discussed the latter two are.

So here’s to the underappreciated paywalls, and how to approach them properly.

Why the moment of need beats the moment of download

When someone downloads your app, they’re curious and maybe motivated, but they haven’t experienced it yet. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Now compare that to the moment when a user actually tries to do something and discovers it’s premium.

At that point, they’ve already decided they want it. The intent is real, not hypothetical. Interestingly, these later subscribers often have a higher LTV than those converting on Day 0.

There are two types of non-onboarding paywalls worth understanding.

Feature vs Contextual paywalls

Vahe splits non-onboarding paywalls into two types:

1. Feature-based paywalls

These trigger when a user tries to access a specific premium feature. The key is that they hit the paywall because they want that feature, not because the app decided to interrupt them with a sales pitch.

Here’s how X does it when you try to access offline videos:

It makes it clear this is premium and pushes you to upgrade, taking advantage of the exact moment you wanted that feature.

CapCut, the video editing software, does this cleanly as well. Basic editing is free, but fancier subtitles or specific effects are clearly marked as premium. You hit the paywall because you tried to use something, not because the app decided it was time to sell.

The principle: make the paywall about what the user wants, not about what you’re trying to sell.

2. Contextual paywalls

These paywalls appear based on behaviour, timing, or milestones, not just feature access.

Fitbod, a workout app, shows a paywall after three free workouts. By then, you’ve started building a habit and seen the value. The paywall hits at a moment of demonstrated commitment, not speculative interest.

Duolingo’s hearts system creates natural paywall moments when users run out and want to keep practising. The timing isn’t arbitrary; it’s when motivation is highest.

The principle: surface the upgrade when intent peaks, not when it’s convenient for you.

Contextual paywalls are about being aware of the moment, the user’s behaviour, and where they are in the journey, and presenting the offer when it’s most meaningful.

Combine the two for impact

For me, the two types of paywalls blur a bit, and it’s the combination that’s really powerful.

I remember signing up for AllTrails, the hiking app, when I lost connection to my offline map. I got a brief moment of signal in the middle of nowhere in Crete (minutes before I ended up being chased by wild dogs, but that’s a story for another time).

I tried to download the map, saw it was premium, and thought, “F** it.” I upgraded immediately — no way I was getting lost alone in Crete.

Here’s how their paywall works when you try to download a map:

Versus when you try to see the community heatmap (where others have walked):

Different visuals and plans were pushed; it’s adjusted to the feature and the moment.

Combining context and a feature is a powerful converter.

How to think about paywall placement

A few questions worth asking when thinking about paywalls:

• Where do users hit a wall? Look at where free users try to do something and can’t. Those are natural paywall moments. If you’re not surfacing an upgrade offer there, you’re missing high-intent conversions.

• How many times does someone see your paywall? Some users need multiple exposures before converting. One interaction isn’t always enough. Check the percentage of free users who see a paywall per session.

• Does your paywall match the moment? A generic “Upgrade to Premium” doesn’t work as well as “Unlock this route” or “Get unlimited hearts.” The more specific it is to what users are trying to do, the better the conversion.

• Is it clear what is premium? This sounds obvious, but it comes up all the time: upgrade options buried in settings or hidden behind tiny icons. If users don’t know premium exists, they can’t buy it. Don’t wait for them to click through; make it obvious.

This isn’t about more paywalls, it’s about better

For smaller apps, yes, visibility often needs improvement. But for most, the bigger opportunity is matching paywalls to the right moments. Tools like RevenueCat Paywalls and Superwall.

When you align paywalls with features and context, users don’t feel sold to; they feel like you’re meeting their specific need.

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I share a resource related to the week’s topic.

Jacob Rushfinn wrote a fantastic deep dive on dynamic and contextual paywalls, with concrete examples from Strava, Calm, and Duolingo. He also highlights how AllTrails handles this well and even includes a whimsical board of contextual paywalls.

If you’re looking for inspiration on making paywalls feel more relevant to user behaviour, it’s definitely worth a read.

Read more

I would also definitely recommend Vahe’s course.

The onboarding paywall gets attention because it's measurable, and it's where most trials start.

But for freemium apps, the paywalls that appear at moments of real need often convert the users who weren't ready on Day 0 — but are ready now.

Daphne

A friend of mine was looking for a new senior role in data and Business Intelligence. He’s the kind of brilliant, experienced operator you’d trust to run your entire analytics function without blinking.

So, naturally, I did what any good friend does: went full detective mode.

Scrolling job boards, stalking company careers pages, asking around to see what’s actually out there.

And that’s when I kept coming across a role that made me think: what the…

Growth Engineer

I stared at it for a while. Closed the tab. Opened it again. Read the job spec twice.

A few days later, Ioana from AI Goodies posted something about design engineers, and it clicked. This is not a one-off; this is a shift.

So I went down the rabbit hole to figure out what’s actually going on here, and more importantly, whether this is:

a) a real evolution in how companies build and grow
or
b) another shiny “fix everything” title, like growth hacker (speaking as a former one… I was young, okay?)

So what even is a Growth Engineer?

In theory, a growth engineer is exactly what it sounds like: an engineer focused on growth. Sure, that tracks.

But theory and job specs are very different things, as anyone who’s ever hired a Head of Growth will know. I looked at five real Growth Engineer job specs across companies in the UK, France, and the US, and mapped out the responsibilities the same way I did for Head of Growth roles back in 2022. Here’s what I found:

The core appears consistently across almost every role:

• A/B testing and experimentation

• Full-stack feature development

• Analytics instrumentation

• Cross-functional work with product and design

That’s the job. That’s the base.

But then things start to diverge.

Companies 1 and 4 are building product-led growth machines: engineers who ship customer-facing features, run experiments, and own the conversion funnel end-to-end.

Company 2 sits closer to a data-heavy growth analyst with strong engineering chops; they want someone owning CAC, activation rates, and retention cohorts alongside the build.

And then there’s Company 3. Their Growth Engineer, GTM AI role is almost a different job entirely. It’s about building AI agents and automated workflows that power the sales and marketing motion, closer to RevOps engineering than product growth.

No A/B testing in sight. The only thing it shares with the others is the word “growth.”

Which brings me to what worries me.

My concern: the Head of Growth problem, but for engineers

Cast your mind back. Remember when every startup needed a Head of Growth? Or a Growth Hacker? And they were expected to be a data analyst, performance marketer, CRO specialist, product manager, and brand strategist all at once?

I wrote about why that goes wrong in 2022 — still relevant.

The mistake wasn’t hiring for growth. It was conflating “growth is important” with “one person can own all of it.”

I’m starting to see the same pattern here. Some of these Growth Engineer job specs are asking for someone who can:

• Build and ship full-stack product features

• Design and run rigorous A/B tests

• Write SQL and own analytics dashboards

• Build AI automation workflows

• Partner with marketing on GTM strategy

• Mentor junior engineers

Companies 2 and 5, especially.

That is four different jobs. And much like the Head of Growth situation, when you ask one person to do all of it, you usually end up with a jack of all trades and a master of none.

When the role genuinely makes sense

That said, I don’t think this is a bad trend. I think it’s real, and I think it’s the result of two things converging at once.

Ioana made a point in her article about design engineers that applies directly here:

The role isn’t a product of AI, but AI has dramatically accelerated both its visibility and its accessibility — by collapsing the distance between what different disciplines can each do.

A growth person who used to depend entirely on engineering resources to ship an experiment can now build more themselves.

An engineer who used to think purely about code quality can now engage more meaningfully with growth questions.

The gap is narrowing on both sides.

Being a generalist used to be a bad thing; it’s now becoming a strength. AI helps with deep knowledge/perfecting.

Now, understanding how it fits together and challenging the bigger picture is the strength, not specialist knowledge, and asking the right questions to make sure you approach it right

I’ve heard of brands already running fully autonomous growth experiments, an AI agent that handles research, analysis, and test setup with no dev support needed at all. That’s not science fiction anymore.

Someone needs to build and oversee those systems. That someone is increasingly being referred to as a Growth Engineer.

So yes, the role makes sense. But only if it’s scoped correctly.

The three flavours, and why you need to pick one

If you’re hiring a Growth Engineer, or thinking about it, the most important question to answer first is: which type do you actually need?

Even the best generalist will be slightly stronger in one area or another.

Flavour 1: The product growth engineer (Company 1 & 4)

Primarily a frontend or full-stack engineer who lives and breathes experimentation. Strong on shipping, strong on the product funnel.

Their currency is experiment velocity and conversion lift. Hire this person if your growth is primarily product-led and you need someone to build and test features fast.

Flavour 2: The data-led growth engineer (Company 2)

Analytically heavier, owns the metrics, comfortable in SQL and dashboards as much as in code.

Hire this person if you’re at a stage where you need someone to connect the dots on data to build smarter experiments, not just run them.

Flavour 3: The GTM/AI engineer (Company 3)

Much closer to a technical RevOps or GTM systems role (Should they even be called a growth engineer?).

They’re building the infrastructure that powers sales and marketing, not the product experience. Hire this person if your growth bottleneck is in go-to-market execution, not the product funnel.

Conflating these three will get you into trouble. Just like a Head of Growth who’s brilliant at paid acquisition is not the same as one who’s brilliant at product-led loops — the title sounds the same, but the skills are completely different.

The other thing to nail down before you hire: where does the role sit? Growth Engineers who report into engineering tend to be held to engineering standards.

Those who report into growth or marketing tend to skew more strategically but can struggle to get prioritisation.

Neither is wrong, but it’s worth being intentional about it.

My take

Growth Engineer is a real role.

But like a lot of new roles that emerge in the startup ecosystem, it’s currently a container that different companies are filling with very different things.

The underlying insight is correct: as AI speeds up building, the best growth people will increasingly be those who can build, not just strategise. I’m building prototypes and landing pages these days without dev and automating more and more.

And the best engineers focused on growth will increasingly need to think like growth people, not just ship features.

But if you hire a Growth Engineer hoping they’ll be your full-stack developer, your data analyst, your experimentation lead, your AI automation builder, and your GTM strategist?

You’re going to end up with the same frustrated, stretched-too-thin hire that the growth hacker era gave us.

First, define the flavour. Then hire.

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I share a resource related to the week’s topic.

Two recommendations this week, since they sit nicely together:

Ioana’s deep dive on design engineers — a different role, but the same underlying shift. If you found this interesting, her piece adds useful context on where engineering and creative disciplines are converging more broadly.

PostHog’s take on what a growth engineer is — interestingly, their take also includes quite a bit of technical SEO. They have some great points about the characteristics a good growth engineer should have.

If you’re considering a Growth Engineer hire, write down the five things you’d most want this person spending their time on.

Then look at the chart above and see which flavour that maps to. If it maps to all three, you’ve found your scoping problem before it becomes a hiring mistake.

Till next week,
Daphne

This isn’t a normal email from me. It’s an extra one this week.

No frameworks, no teardowns today. Just a personal moment I wanted to share, and something I’ve been building quietly that’s finally ready.

First: I won an award last week

The Guess the Test Community Educational Content Award 🎉.

I awkwardly stuttered my way through a short acceptance speech (there were so many incredible names there, and I genuinely didn’t think I’d win). And it took a moment to really take it in.

Maybe once the physical award arrives it’ll feel more real 😅.

Here’s why it matters to me:

I have spent years creating content about growth and experimentation. Most of it free.

Not because I had to, but because I genuinely love teaching.

Even at university, I’d take on extra classes as a side job just because helping people learn something gave me a feeling I couldn’t replicate anywhere else.

Winning that felt like recognition of something I care about deeply. And it gave me the push to finally announce this properly.

Second: I’m running a personal branding cohort. And I want you to know about it.

Alongside Lucia van den Brink and Marcella Sullivan through Women in Experimentation, I’ve been building something for women in growth, product, marketing, data, and experimentation.

One thing I’ve always taught — informally, through WiE, through the UPSPEAK challenge with Convert — is how to build a personal brand and post on LinkedIn.

Because it’s brought me enormous value, and I know how hard it is to dare to speak up, especially in fields where women are already fighting to be heard.

So we’re scaling it up. Properly.

The Personal Branding Cohort: July 10–24

What you get:

• A positioning statement that makes you instantly recognisable

• A content strategy built on your actual expertise

• A fully optimised LinkedIn profile

• Your first post written, workshopped, and published before it ends

• 2 1.5 hour live sessions + a full video course + a workbook to keep

Price: £258

Enroll here

One more thing, and this is the part I’m most proud of…

Not everyone can invest right now. But that doesn’t mean they need this less.

For every ticket sold, we’re giving a free seat to someone who’s out of work or going through a tough time financially.

If that’s you, please apply. No questions asked.

Apply for a free seat

And if you know someone who’d benefit, paid or free, please share this with them.

It’s really appreciated. See you again on Thursday, where we’ll dive into a completely different topic: what is a growth engineer, and do you need one?

Daphne

One of the most impactful experiments we ran at Heights had nothing to do with optimizing the conversion rate.

It was a single line of copy on the product page stating that the supplement should be taken for at least 3 months for optimal results. No big deal, right?

Well, it’s still on their product page five years later.

That experiment changed how I think about CRO. We spend so much time optimizing the front door (the landing page, the checkout flow, the paywall) and almost no time thinking about what happens once people walk through it.

But here’s the thing: a 10% improvement in your conversion rate gives you 10% more customers.

A 10% improvement in 7-day retention means those customers stay longer, spend more, and refer others. The impact compounds over months.

I’ve written the full breakdown for Convert.

What you’ll learn about in this article

Your landing page already impacts activation, even before the purchase. What you communicate pre-purchase (expectations, timelines, outcomes) shapes how customers behave in those first crucial days.

Beyond the landing page, your post-purchase emails are probably focused on the wrong thing.

Most companies send a confirmation and jump straight to upselling. Those first emails should be about activation, not revenue.

I also share a practical approach to improving your first 7 days:

• How to figure out what “activated” actually means for your product (it’s usually not what you think)

• Why you should audit your post-purchase experience as if you were a brand-new customer

• Where the biggest drops happen and what to experiment on first

• The metrics that actually tell you if your first 7 days are working

Plus, there are some great examples from Mission Teas and La Doux showing how even physical products can reinforce activation through packaging.

Read the full article

Recommendation

Convert sponsors this week’s newsletter.

If you’re running experiments on your website, they’re a great testing platform with support that actually responds (their median first response time is seven minutes, which is four times faster than the industry standard; talk about optimizing for the first 7 days).

If activation is on your mind, my previous Convert article on using Jobs to Be Done to drive growth through your e-commerce funnel pairs well with this one. Understanding your customer’s JTBD helps you figure out what to say before they buy and what to reinforce after.

Most CRO teams are optimizing the front door. The real opportunity is the first 7 days after someone walks through it.

Till next time,
Daphne

I have freelancer guilt. And I’ve been hiding it from everyone — including you.

I didn’t mention the Ecuador trip in my last newsletter. Working for myself, I’ve found it hard to fully own taking time off — especially two trips so close together — even though I know they ended up nearer in timing because of life circumstances, not poor planning.

If I took five weeks of leave across March and May in an in-house role, it probably wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows (assuming that’s all my holiday for the year). But working for myself, I felt like I had to keep quiet about it.

I always promise to be real in these recaps, and hiding my holiday isn’t that. So here’s a photo from an unforgettable trip.

YES. I SWAM WITH PENGUINS AND SEA LIONS. It was incredible. Also snorkelled with sharks and did some beautiful hikes. I’m in love with the Galapagos.

I spent two weeks resetting, enjoying nature (I repeat, there were penguins!?), and on a more serious note, reflecting on my company and where I want to go with it.

And around that trip: articles were written, AI tools were built and more. So maybe I don’t need to feel all too guilty after all.

What I’ve been writing

As you can imagine, I’ve been writing very little content except for Instagram captions. Meanwhile, four articles went live this month:

In-house vs Freelance vs Agency for CRO (Convert). Takeaway: There’s no one-size-fits-all. It’s about finding the right resources for your stage and challenge.

Post-purchase screens for subscription apps (RevenueCat). Takeaway: Some apps completely underutilise these screens. Here are 13 examples that show the range of approaches and how to level up yours.

Pre-mortems: a 30-minute exercise to plan for success (RevenueCat). Takeaway: Imagining a launch failing and asking why it would is a powerful way to surface risks before they become problems.

20% of your churned users will come back – but are you ready? (RevenueCat). Takeaway: Don’t assume you should focus on Reactivation; the impact varies hugely from app to app.

I also built a free Reactivation Calculator for that last article (had to get on the vibe coding train, of course), luckily, Ethan Garr helped guide me through it.

What I’ve been presenting

Experimentation Elite — I attended with Women in Experimentation and, in one of the workshops, built my first AI agent with Iqbal Ali. Very cool to go from “I should learn this” to actually doing it.

Women in Experimentation dinner — We hosted a lovely evening with Convert on being (or becoming) a female leader. The challenges, the lessons, and how we support each other. The thing that stuck with me most: how many women in the room had quietly talked themselves out of opportunities before anyone else got the chance to. We’re working on that.

What’s been happening with clients

1. My client did a SubClub interview about their growth!

Here it is: How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal

Definitely check it out. Here are some of the interesting learnings:

• Socials should be focused on building trust and adding value, and at most, a soft sell when relevant

• Trust is such an important factor, even if hard to measure

• The importance of a deeper one coherent app vs multiple niche apps

Really proud of her and the work we are doing.

2. Built my first email flow through an AI agent in customer.io.

Pros: much faster to set up, generated good ideas and different approaches I might not have thought of.

Cons: the copy got repetitive and shallow, so I rewrote quite a bit and improved my prompt for next time. Still, the speed was great.

3. Also used Replo AI for the first time to build landing pages.

They describe it as “Lovable for Shopify” — funny, because Replo existed long before Lovable did. But it’s a fair shorthand. Much faster than their old block editor, and the output was solid enough that I wasn’t fighting it the whole time.

The theme of this month, other than freelancer guilt? AI is helping me deliver more value, faster — and freeing me up to focus on where I add the most: strategy.

This month’s flip-flops

Freelancer guilt. I’ve already shared this one. It’s a mindset thing I’m working on. Progress, not perfection.

The WiE Summit speaker call exploded. I posted on LinkedIn looking for speakers for the Women in Experimentation Summit (coming in September!) on a busy day... and my DMs went from manageable to 400+. Thankfully, Marcella Sullivan (WiE co-founder) stepped in and handled a lot of the responses. I dread to think what it would have looked like without her.

Excited to go through all the applications soon, though! We got around 100 applicants, which was amazing.

Pretty sure the era of LinkedIn Carousels is over. I love carousels, as you probably know, but a recent update makes them all hard to read (you see in the preview 2 and a bit of slides vs 1).

So my carousel days may be over… since the update, reach seems to have decreased dramatically. Why LinkedIn? Why?

My little plants died / never grew. I tried to plant things this year, again. I spent hours on it. And I even roped my husband into watering them on a strict schedule while I was away.

Maybe it was the heatwave (or me, given my track record), but nearly nothing grew, and what did died. So much for my year of homegrown fruit and veg.

I pitched an experiment that didn’t land. Something felt off as I was working it out, but I couldn’t articulate it until I talked it through with someone. The plan's complexity didn’t match the audience.

It reminded me of a question I wasn’t asking often enough — and one that’s easy to skip when you’re in execution mode:

Is our priority learning or short-term impact?

Different answers lead to very different experiments. Ironic, given I literally wrote a whole article on learning roadmaps. Oh well, I’m a work in progress too.

What I’ve been enjoying

Ecuador! Swimming with penguins and sea lions in the Galápagos was a true bucket list trip. The hikes through the Amazon and around Laguna Quilotoa, a volcanic crater lake, were stunning too.

Finished reading Company of One by Paul Jarvis. A good reminder that growth for growth’s sake isn’t the goal, and that staying intentionally small can be a strategic choice, not a failure. Timely, given how I’ve been thinking about my own business.

Building out my AI workflows. Between the agent-building mini unplanned hackathon at Experimentation Elite and experimenting with tools for client work, I’ve been investing in my “second brain.” The goal: reduce cognitive load and protect my energy for the work that actually needs me.

Recording a podcast about my journey. I did an interview this month about my path into growth, dealing with ADHD, and more. Talked about things I don’t usually say out loud. Will share when it’s live.

If you missed my newsletters this month

Looking ahead to June

Continuing to build my AI skills — both for client delivery and for my own workflows. It’s genuinely changing how I work. I’ve invested in an accelerator course, so I'm excited to dig into that.

Sub Club Live with Alice Muir — now happening July 2nd, so technically not June, but I’ll start preparing. Between the two of us, we’ll cover everything from “Should you even focus on reactivation?” to the tactics that actually work.

No more holidays planned for a while, so you’re stuck with me for the coming weeks. Let’s get to business.

Till next time,
Daphne

Most performance marketers running web and app have a measurement setup, usually some combination of an MMP and analytics tool.

The problem is, almost nobody fully trusts it.

Not because they’re using the wrong tools, but because the tools were never built for the journeys real users actually take.

Today, I’m breaking down why web measurement has been structurally broken, what that costs you in practice, and what’s excitingly changing.

The journey problem nobody solved

Journeys in real life look something like this: your user:

• Saw your ad on mobile.

• Researched on desktop.

• Purchased on web.

• Re-engaged in app.

Now answer the riddle: which channel gets the credit?”

That’s one person, one journey. But most measurement stacks treat each of those touchpoints as separate or assume everyone takes the same journey.

When in reality, there are many paths:

The first two (app only and landing page → mobile) have been easier to measure, but the rest? That is where things have been traditionally messy.

The 5 reasons it’s structurally broken

If it were one simple cause, there would be a simple fix, but this measurement issue is the result of a few causes:

1. Attribution logic doesn’t fit the business

Someone visits your website, and that first visit is hardcoded as the acquisition event. The window to attribute them to web is fixed.

But what if they convert much later?

When measurement is forced to fit a default logic rather than the reality of customers, you end up measuring the wrong moment.

2. You need too many tools just to see the full picture

One tool for mobile. Another for web. Another for ad spend. Another for each network.

They don’t share the same logic or definitions, so you’re always comparing numbers, trying to work it all out, and at the end of the day, you don’t have a single source of truth.

And don’t just rely on the ad platform's data; they tend to skew it toward what looks good to them.

3. Your ad platforms are missing the data they need to improve

When someone converts on your site, that signal needs to get back to Google, Meta, and TikTok so they can find more people like them.

But most setups either lose data along the way or require you to rebuild the integration whenever something changes.

The result: your platforms don’t know who to optimize for.

4. Testing a new channel takes months

On mobile, adding a new ad network is quick. On web, it typically means a custom dev project from scratch.

So teams stick with what they have rather than experiment.

5. Web and app don’t talk to each other

This is the big one. If someone uses your app for months and then converts on web, most tools count that as two different people. Not ideal.

There’s no single view of who that user is or what they’re actually worth.

What does this cost you?

I know the data and terminology can get overwhelming, but the end cost of this issue is huge:

You can’t trust your attribution numbers, so you can’t confidently scale what’s working.

Your lifetime value calculations are off, as are your payback periods.

So how are you meant to confidently scale your budgets?

If you have an omnichannel setup, you need to be aware of this risk and implement the right measurement setup.

There is (finally) a solution

As of last week, actually.

At MAU Vegas, AppsFlyer launched Web Performance Measurement.

The same MMP-grade attribution that transformed mobile measurement is now applied to web.

What that means in practice:

• Flexible attribution windows that match your actual business logic, not a default setup.

• One unified platform for web and mobile with a shared data model.

• Optimization signals are sent to every network automatically, without custom engineering work per integration.

• Cross-platform LTV — one user, one journey, accurate credit across every surface.

So those five challenges will finally be addressed. Set it up properly once, and you can trust your data long term.

What to do with this

If you’re running paid campaigns across web and mobile, here are my three questions for you:

1. Do you trust your web attribution numbers? Not just in theory but in practice, when you’re making budget decisions. If the honest answer is “not fully,” that’s worth addressing.

2. Do you know your true cross-platform LTV? If a user converts on web after months on mobile or vice versa, does your measurement capture that? If not, your LTV is probably incomplete.

3. How long does it take you to test a new channel on web? If it’s measured in months rather than weeks, the infrastructure cost is worth examining. Yes, post-testing optimization can take months, but you should be getting valuable insights in the first weeks.

Recommendation

This newsletter is sponsored by AppsFlyer, the attribution tool I recommend and use with clients.

If you want to go deeper into:

• What was broken on web measurement

• What good web measurement looks like

• How unified measurement changes everything

Check out their full guide here.

Read more

Web measurement shouldn’t be a workaround or accepted as “it’s just not accurate”.

We need to hold it to a higher standard, especially now that there is finally a fix.

Till next week,

Daphne

Last week, I shared how Mob, a meal prep app, went from £1.2m in debt to Number 1 in the app store — and the first two lessons that got them there: cutting distractions and actually speaking to their users.

This week, lessons 3 and 4. And honestly, lesson 4 is my favourite.

Lesson 3: Experimentation mindset for everyone

Not just in-app, but in their ads. Initially, they had one ad that kept working. As Ben puts it, “The damn duck kept winning.” It was a simple ad of a duck dancing around, happy about the free trial and the packed lunch we all wish we had time to prep (and maybe with Mob, you actually could).

But there was a problem: it only converted warm audiences. Often, simple videos or static ads appear to perform well but skew to warmer audiences.

For Mob this meant that no matter how well Ducky performed, it didn’t allow for spending to scale.

So they started experimenting with every part of their video ads.

Bye-bye, Ducky, hello, Evergreen Adam. A video ad that walks through "Adam’s experience with using Mob.

I wrote out the script covered in the ad, because if you look back at the JTBD, you’ll see how powerful it is:

• “If you’re the main cook of the house, this app is for you” — helps the audience resonate

• “It’s called Mob, a weekly cooking app that takes the stress out of eating in the week” — super clear and simple what it is and the main pain point it solves

• “It suggests delicious, easy recipes, developed by brilliant chefs personalised to your taste” — clear USPs

• “If you want to make something ahead, plan your week in meals or just cook something great that evening, it makes it all so simple” — when to use

• “The recipes have no ads, no long back stories and each ingredient amount is shown in the method. So you don’t need to scroll mid-cook” — differentiator from other solutions (aka free recipes online)

• “For my planning, I pick the dishes I want to make, and it makes a smart shopping list. I do the shop, and that’s everything sorted.” — reinforces ease

• “This app has solved weeknight cooking for me” — reinforces the pain it solves

• “They are running a free trial. Try it out.” — clear CTA and offer

(Okay, I’m hungry after seeing all the food in that video, be right back.)

Experimenting over 6 months unlocked this super winner and showed the power of continued testing. But still, there was something — or well, someone—accidentally holding them back.

Related resources:

Lesson 4: Get out of the way

At a Mob offsite, a powerful question was asked:

“If you could ask one person in this room something to make your job easier, what would it be?”

The response was a tough one for Ben — a founder who had given so much to his business — to hear: “Let me do my job.” Ouch.

But with respect to him, he did. He stopped being involved in every design decision, every piece of content, and even left Slack channels where he wasn’t needed.

Things sped up—from prototyping to shipping code. While there were other factors at play, Ben Lebus explains: “It needs to be the right moment, you must constantly assess: is my input helping here, or am I in the way?”

Related resources:

Where is Mob today?

• 280,000 Premium subscribers

• $12.5M ARR

• Runway that secures the company’s future

Not bad for a business that started as a branded content Instagram account. And I’m sure they will continue to grow.

Recommendation

I’ve shared related newsletters alongside each lesson, so I thought I’d do something different here instead.

First, if you want more on Mob’s growth journey, Ben very candidly shares their wins and challenges on LinkedIn. Worth a follow.

Second, if you struggle with weekly cooking, definitely try the Mob app. As someone who almost never cooks the same thing twice, I’m still enjoying their recipes five months in.

Tonight I’ll be making their Tikka Halloumi & Curried Lentils recipe. Wish me luck!

Till next week,
Daphne

Recently, I attended Business of Apps, and my favourite talk was the opening one by Ben Lebus, founder of Mob.

Mob is a food and meal-planning app designed to make cooking simple, high-protein, and organised, with features like pre-built meal plans, a smart shopping list, and curated recipes.

I’ve been using Mob for about six months, so I’ve been following their growth journey and experiencing their optimisations and tests firsthand (while cooking many a very good recipe).

What I love about Mob’s story is that it isn’t about a secret hack or trick, but about fixing many of the common mistakes startups make. I also appreciate Ben’s openness in sharing his challenges and mistakes along the way.

He’s kindly let me share the story with you that he presented so you can see how Mob did it.

Lesson 1: Distraction is death

Mob started in 2016 as a platform sharing delicious recipes that feed four for under £10, a clear and simple proposition.

As they grew, so did the opportunities, and with it every founder’s hardest challenge: resisting shiny object syndrome.

There were so many opportunities—from their books, to a food truck, to spice mixes, to an influencer-led app, Peckish—but none of them scaled.

So they stopped almost all of it. And in March 2023, Mob launched Mob Premium, which at the start was just 50 recipes behind a paywall.

In Ben Lebus’s words: “Cutting everything else allowed us to go all in.”

Startups rarely lack ideas or opportunities, but the ones that win get ruthless about focusing on just a few areas.

Related resources:

Lesson 2: Actually speak with your users

Yes, the same lesson I drone on about all the time.

Mob realised they were a vitamin product: nice to have, but not solving a clear pain point. In trying to cater to everyone, they ended up with no real edge.

So they started speaking to users weekly and found a clear JTBD:

“How do I feed myself, my partner, my family when I’m tired and stressed, but I want something tasty and healthy on the table without much effort?”

They focused on solving that. Growth picked up. They started scaling internationally for the first time.

And focused in on solving that. It initially showed a shift, but it was still too broad.

Come 2025, they were growing, but the rate was steady rather than exponential. They needed to find a deeper product-market fit, so this time they zoomed in on what was truly their JTBD:

When weekday meals keep coming
I want a reliable, low-effort way to choose what to cook, and cook what I’ve chosen
So I can eat well, without stress

What this meant in practice: inspiration was key. Mob’s superpower was inspiring through content and community. So when a user opened the app, they needed to see recipes that would excite them, and trust that those recipes would actually be good, based on other people’s reactions.

This helped them improve not only their messaging but also their product roadmap. Growth picked up. They started scaling internationally for the first time.

For the final two lessons, you’ll have to wait for Part 2 next week. Stay tuned!

Related resources:

Recommendation

I’ve shared related newsletters alongside these first two lessons, so I thought I’d do something different here instead.

If you want to follow Mob’s journey in real time, Ben Lebus shares their wins and challenges very candidly on LinkedIn. Worth a follow ahead of next week’s lessons.

Till next week for Part 2,
Daphne

I’m just going to say it upfront: hiring an agency as your first CRO move can be a huge mistake.

And I say that as someone who’s been on all sides: agency, in-house, and freelance. I’ve got the full bingo card. No prize for it, but it does mean I’ve seen the good, the bad, and everything in between.

The issue isn’t that agencies are bad, there are plenty of great ones out there. The issue is that too many companies default to “hire an agency” without considering whether it actually fits their stage, their budget, or the problem they’re trying to solve.

Agencies aren’t going to tell you you’re not ready for them, and why would they?

I’ve put together a full breakdown of when each model works (and when it doesn’t) for Convert.

Read the full article

The question most companies get wrong

Most companies frame the CRO setup decision as: “Who will run the A/B tests?”

The better question is: “Who will own our experimentation strategy, and the learning that comes from it?”

That’s the difference between just doing CRO and actually building an experimentation capability. You can’t permanently outsource experimentation; it has to become part of your company’s DNA.

In the article, I break down the honest trade-offs of each model:

• Agency: Great for kickstarting a program or when you need multiple skills at once. But the goal should be to teach your team, not create dependency.

• Freelance/consultant: Often deeper involvement and better value. Limited to their expertise, though, so know whether you need a strategist or an executor.

• In-house: The strongest long-term choice. Knowledge stays, context compounds, and speed increases. But this only makes sense once you’ve validated that experimentation drives results.

• A mix: Most mature programs land here. The key is clarity on who owns the learning.

I also cover the hidden costs that rarely appear in proposals: what happens to your experiment history when an agency leaves, tool fragmentation, and the “context tax” every time someone new comes on board.

Read the full article

Recommendation

Convert, an incredible testing platform for Shopify, sponsors this week’s newsletter. If you’ve got the traffic to run A/B tests, they’re a great platform to use.

If this topic resonates, Convert’s Agency Growth Pathways Report is worth checking out. They studied 237 experimentation agencies and found that 90% claim to offer “strategy,” but the definition varies wildly from one agency to the next.

They also found that 60% of agency practitioners run two or fewer tests per month. Both of these stats should make you ask sharper questions before signing anything.

Download the report

Whatever setup you choose, remember: you’re not buying CRO. You’re building a system that learns. The best outcome from any external relationship is that your internal team gets smarter.

Till next time,

Daphne

April was one of those months where everything happened at once — in a good way, mostly.

Between a new audit (82 slides, 2.5 weeks from data to delivery, fastest I’ve ever completed one), a 47-minute podcast that was me sharing my love for activation, and smashing my Yorkshire Three Peaks PB, my brain and legs both ended the month a bit fuzzy. But it was the kind of tired that comes from doing work you’re proud of, which is truly the best kind.

Here’s what I created, what I learned, and what I’ve been enjoying.

What I’ve been presenting

1. Price Power Podcast: 47 minutes on activation

I was meant to talk about activation for... less time than this. But once you get me started, apparently, I don’t stop. We covered onboarding, retention triggers, and why most apps are measuring the wrong activation metrics.

Listen on the podcast page or watch on YouTube.

It was also featured in Growth Gems, a newsletter I love by Sylvain Gauchet. So if you are more of a reader or short on time, check that out instead

2. Business of Apps London: Activation roundtable

I hosted a roundtable on activation and onboarding at Business of Apps London on the 23rd April. So fun to hear everyone’s challenges — and reassuring to know we’re all wrestling with similar things.

What’s been happening with clients

A busy month across the board:

• Completed a new growth audit for a new client, with some interesting findings around pricing opportunities. 82 slides, full strategic review, delivered 2.5 weeks from first receiving the data. It’s not about the slide count — it’s about the depth. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little proud of the turnaround.

• Continuing on an activation and lifecycle project with an app I audited earlier this year (working alongside Alice Muir). We’re now also working on some web-to-app funnel updates, which is exciting.

• For another client, we’ve been working on scaling up their team. We’ve grown 66% in terms of monthly revenue since they increased my hours from 8 to 12 hours, but with new products and markets, it is time to scale up further.

What I’ve been writing

A lot went live this month:

Inside Noom’s 113-screen web-to-app onboarding funnel (RevenueCat), the beast I teased in February is finally out. Every screen, every friction point, every clever move — broken down.
Takeaway: Long onboarding can work if every screen earns its place.

Pre-product-market fit metrics (RevenueCat) What to measure when you’re too early for “real” metrics.
Takeaway: Leading indicators matter more than lagging ones when you’re still finding your footing.

How to design a freemium tier that actually works (RevenueCat)
Takeaway: Your free tier should create desire, not just demonstrate features.

The ecommerce product carousel guide (Convert) A deep dive into carousel design and optimisation.
Takeaway: Carousels aren’t inherently bad — bad carousels are bad.

Stop building features (RevenueCat) Why early-stage apps need a learning roadmap first
Takeaway: Early stage startups should focus on learning goals over features.

Best of LinkedIn this month

A few posts that stood out this month, including two from my new content partnership with Appsflyer:

• Top 5 health & fitness apps control 73% of the market

• Stop studying Duolingo, start studying IKEA

• I keep telling founders to fix the product

In the busiest of moments, this means the most:

The product growth strategy course I launched with RevenueCat in March has been getting some lovely responses. This one made my day:

“Just completed your course at startapp.school, and I just wanted to reach out and say THANK YOU. This was so timely for me, as I’m working on an upcoming launch, and I just really appreciate it!”

If you’re early-stage or know someone who is, it’s free: startapp.school

I also received this the other day:

First time ever I’ve been called a GOAT 🐐🥹.

This month’s flip flops

As always, the messy reality:

• Tried to connect Claude and Figma to automate some of my LinkedIn carousel creation and remove the manual copy-pasting (I write out the content first and then add it to the templates). Turns out custom fonts do not make that easy. I blew through nearly all of my AI credits and still don’t have it working. Time to rope in the big guns: my developer husband. Hopefully, the new Claude design should help with this.

• House renovation saga continues. Attached coving to the ceiling. It came down. Attached it again. It came down again. Got someone professional to do it. It cracked a day later. Our ceiling is simply refusing to cooperate.

• My schedule has been chaotic. New US-based clients meant evening meetings, conference days, travel — I think I’ve said “sorry, can we do a different day/time?” about 20 times this month. Not ideal, but hopefully May will be calmer.

What I’ve been enjoying

Yorkshire Three Peaks! The goal was 10h30m. Did it in 9h52m. 40km, 1,860m elevation. Legs were sore for days, and I loved every minute. Well, maybe not every minute, the first hour it was pouring rain and freezing. But most of them.

One of our best friends visited, and we went to see Cursed Child together — just as good the second time. Slightly worried about how little I remembered from the previous time.

Saw Alex Warren live. My husband and I did our first dance to “Ordinary” nearly a year ago, so it was special to see it together. Very cute, yes, I know.

Treated myself to two new books at a secondhand book store: Company of One and How Women Rise. Looking forward to digging into them.

If you missed my newsletters this month

No worries, here’s what I covered:

Looking ahead to May

• Attending Experimentation Elite with Women in Experimentation — join us if you’re going

• Organising a Women in Experimentation dinner on 5th May with Convert to chat about being (or becoming) a female leader — the challenges, the lessons, all of it (if you are in London and want to join, sign up here)

• Speaking of which: We’re organising a new Women in Experimentation Summit! Apply to speak here, we offer speaking coaching and compensations. Experienced and new speakers welcome!

• New articles going live next month: How to stop losing subscribers before they start, choosing between freelancer vs agency vs in-house, and a piece on pre-mortems — what they are and how to run one.

• Building a reactivation calculator for apps. So that apps can calculate is it worth focusing on reactivation. Really excited for this and grateful to Ethan Garr for helping me build this.

Till next time,

Daphne

P.S. I got nominated for Experimentation Thought Leader of the Year, crazy! If you have one minute to vote for me, it would be much appreciated 🙏

I was helping a client work through their annual targets recently, and realised I had a lot of opinions about this.

Not about the numbers themselves — but about how we think about targets in the first place. Because I’ve seen firsthand what happens when target-setting goes wrong.

Too ambitious, communicated to investors as commitments, and suddenly the team is demoralised after two quarters of “failure” — even when the underlying business is healthy.

Too cautious, always exceeding, and everyone starts wondering if you’re actually pushing yourselves.

The difference between a motivating target and a soul-crushing one often comes down to a few decisions made in a spreadsheet months earlier.

The problem with “if everything goes right” targets

Most growth targets are built on assumptions. If the new product launches on time. If the marketing campaign performs. If the supply chain holds. If competitors don’t do anything unexpected.

But nothing goes 100% to plan:

• Development delays

• Competitors launch

• App stores reject your latest version

When your target is “what we could hit if everything works,” you’re not setting a target. You’re setting an ideal ceiling you’ll probably miss.

The correction I always recommend

Start with your baseline:

The growth you’d expect based on your current new and returning customer/subscriber rates, assuming no major changes, e.g., depending on the month, this could be 4% growth one month, 6% the next month.

This is what happens if you just keep doing what you’re doing.

Then calculate your adjusted target:

Baseline plus all the upside from new initiatives, launches, and optimisations. These are set per month and adjusted for delays to ensure targets don’t remain the same when projects/hires are delayed.

The target you actually commit to? Somewhere in between.

I usually opt for the following formula:

Baseline + 70% of the predicted lift (% can be adjusted based on how optimistic/pessimistic your team is).

This isn’t pessimism.

It’s acknowledging that not every initiative lands exactly when and how you expect.

The 30% haircut accounts for timing slips, things that don’t work, and factors outside your control, while staying ambitious.

Why targets are so hard to get right

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the more variables in play and the shorter your history, the less accurate any target will be:

• Early-stage businesses are forecasting with limited data.

• Seasonality is still a guess.

• You don’t know how that new channel will perform or whether the product/feature launch will slip by three weeks.

Every variable you add — new markets, new partnerships — compounds the uncertainty. Your H2 targets, set in January, might be little more than educated guesses as a startup.

This doesn’t mean don’t set targets. It means hold them loosely, build in recalibration points, and don’t treat a miss as failure when the forecast was always uncertain.

Who sees which number matters

This is where I see founders get into trouble.

Google’s OKR philosophy says aim high, expect to hit 70%, and that’s success.

But that’s for internal stretch goals within a culture that understands the game. It doesn’t translate to board meetings where hitting 70% of your forecast looks like failure.

My rule of thumb is as follows:

The most valuable part isn’t hitting the target

Here’s what I’ve learned: the target itself matters less than the reflection afterwards.

Did you hit it? → Great — what drove that?

Did you miss? → What assumptions were wrong? Which initiatives underperformed and why? What would you do differently?

That reflection is how you learn what actually works in your business.

It’s how your forecasts get more accurate over time. It’s how you stop repeating the same mistakes.

A target you hit without understanding why teaches you nothing. A target you miss but learn from is genuinely valuable.

A few questions before you finalise

Having discussions internally about how targets are understood is so important. I really wish I’d done this more at the start of my career:

Target-setting feels like a spreadsheet exercise, but it’s really a communication exercise.

Get that communication right, and targets become useful. Get it wrong, and they become a source of friction and burnout.

It’s worth getting right.

Till next time,
Daphne

I spent 16+ hours going through Noom’s onboarding flow. Typical Daphne style: I obsessed about it, testing every combination of answers I could. I even created a mega board of the whole flow that I shared a video on:

113 screens. Up to 15 minutes for a typical user. And somehow, I never wanted to quit.

That’s not normal.

Their secret? They don’t just collect data. They give value back at every step. ‘

Here’s how.

1. The payoff isn’t at the end — it’s everywhere

Most onboarding flows follow a simple formula: ask questions first, deliver value later. Users fill in fields and tick boxes, then wait for the reward at the end.

Noom flips this.

After you enter your weight (a vulnerable moment), the app immediately responds: “Thank you for sharing. That’s an important (and hard) first step.”

When you share a health condition, you see: “We’re really glad you shared. Noom’s mission is helping people get healthier, whatever that is for them.”

When you answer questions about your eating habits, the app teaches you something — explaining calorie density, showing you why grapes keep you fuller than raisins, and introducing their green/yellow/red food system.

Almost every screen either:

1. Acknowledges what you just shared

2. Teaches you something new

3. Shows you your progress

The result? Users aren’t just answering questions. They’re learning the method, feeling understood, and watching their personalised plan take shape in real time.

2. Small wins that keep you moving

One detail I loved: every few screens, Noom shows an updated projection of when you’ll hit your goal weight. So the initial prediction:

And then 21 screens later:

The date keeps moving closer.

Not because you’re giving “better” answers, but because the app is showing you that your input matters — that you’re building something together.

It’s a small psychological trick, but it works. You feel momentum, like the app is working for you, not just extracting data.

They do the same thing with their “building your plan” loading screens. These aren’t just spinners; they show progress bars for each section you’ve completed: demographic profile, weight loss goals, and eating habits. It’s a simple way of making it clear that all those questions are actually going somewhere.

Even if some of this is theatrical, it makes the personalisation feel earned.

You can see the full visual breakdown here.

View the full breakdown

Why this matters for your onboarding

Most startups have an onboarding process that is long overdue for renewal. They are short and sweet, conscious that every additional step is a potential drop-off point.

But the lesson from Noom isn’t “make your onboarding longer.” It’s this:

Every question you ask should deliver something back.

That could be:

• A reassurance message after a sensitive input

• A visible update to their personalised result

• A small piece of education that makes them smarter

• A moment of “you’re not alone” social proof

If a question only extracts value without giving any, cut it or move it later. But can you turn a question into a micro-moment of connection or insight? That’s not friction. That’s investment.

This might not increase your onboarding completion rates, but if you do this well, it will increase your activation rates, paid sign-ups and potentially retention.

What to take from this

If you’re building an onboarding flow (or auditing an existing one), ask yourself:

1. What does the user get back after each input? If the answer is “nothing until the end,” you have a problem.

2. Where are the vulnerable moments? Weight, income, health, relationship status, these deserve acknowledgement, not silence.

3. Can you show progress visually? A percentage bar, an updating result, a changing date — anything that shows their answers are actively shaping their experience.

4. Are you teaching or just asking? Noom’s food questions double as education. By the time you finish, you already understand their method.

Length isn’t the enemy; emptiness is. Greediness is asking and asking without giving and guiding.

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a resource to check out related to the week's topic.

I wrote a full teardown of Noom’s web-to-app funnel for RevenueCat — all 113 screens of it.

It goes much deeper into:

• How they handle sensitive questions (gender, pregnancy, eating disorders)

• The “pay what you want” trial pricing psychology

• Where the flow falls short (spoiler: I still don’t know what the app actually looks like)

• Specific patterns you can apply to your own onboarding

Read the full breakdown

Take a moment to go through your onboarding and ask yourself: how does it feel to complete this? Does it feel like a chore, or does it build excitement and curiosity?

I’m not saying you need 113 screens like Noom (long onboardings aren’t always better). Rather, consider the mechanisms they use and how you can apply them to improve your own onboarding.

Till next time,

Daphne