I fell out of love with e-commerce
Seven months late, but this is my official announcement.
Hi there,
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:
Studying business and then Finance
Realizing I definitely didn’t want to go into the world of banking
Joining a growth agency to work across every type of brand imaginable (from B2B to apps to e-commerce)
Head of Growth at an e-commerce subscription startup
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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