September Recap: Never take the 9am slot

Three events in a week, a Hyrox sign-up, and five minutes of talking to nobody.

Oct 01, 2026

Hi there,

If you ever see your name next to a 9 am workshop slot, beg for a different one.

That was my first lesson from Appsforum this month.

Getting people to a workshop at 9am is hard on day 2 of an event is hard. I forget that not everyone is an annoyingly over-energetic morning person like me.

But the people who did come were brilliant. Properly engaged, asking so many questions that we got through only one of the six exercises I’d planned.

And at the end, someone asked me where they could learn more from me, which made me all warm and fuzzy 😬.

That happened three times this month: at App Growth Summit, at Appsforum, and after my positioning workshop at the WiE Summit.

It’s my favourite signal, and it beats a full room every time. A full room tells you the title worked. “Where can I learn more?” tells you the session did.

(Yes, I’ve just described acquisition versus activation. I can’t switch it off.)

Here’s the rest of September.

What’s been happening with clients

I rounded off the growth audit this month.

Every audit is a big undertaking, and there’s always a stretch in the middle that’s pure information overload, where I’m piecing a hundred different things together into one story.

I sometimes feel guilty that I don’t do growth audits more quickly. With AI, that should be possible, right? But then Iqbal Ali reminded me of something at our Women in Experimentation Summit:

That the efficiency of AI comes at the cost of understanding.

The manual process of going through the data and piecing it all together is what helps me create a good audit. Automating that process would strip out the very thing that creates the value I’m delivering.

And the two founders made it a joy. Engaged, curious, and full of great questions. They also told me what had surprised them — in a good way:

Daphne uncovered what was the biggest bottleneck in our product. Something we hadn't even looked into or considered. Her work has bought us many months and completely changed our priorities and roadmap over the next few months for the better. Beyond providing a lot of business value, Daphne is very nice to work with on a human level and very professional. She is great!

Leo Litrico, co-founder of Detox

I’m excited to see what they do next, and I’ve made them promise to keep me posted. I’m now rounding off another audit focused on improving trial-to-paid conversion rate.

Another audit!

I didn’t have long to miss working on the last audit before diving into a new one. The previous one was focused on identifying where they should focus to grow faster and profitably. This one was more specific: how to improve trial-to-paid conversion rate.

For specific challenges like this, I still like to look more broadly at the quantitative data, but I spend more time on qualitative research (user testing and reviewing user recordings) as well as a more in-depth heuristic analysis.

I’m excited to run through it with the founder today in a workshop, where we will discuss the key findings and prioritize the ideas further together.

Where I’ve been

App Growth Summit London. My first time attending. I met a wide range of people and caught up with Owen Farmer, whom I interviewed for a feature on how he scaled WordPal to nearly $1 million in ARR, starting at 13 and fully bootstrapped. Keep an eye out for that one.

Appsforum London. A panel on monetization and a workshop on activation (yes, the 9am one). I’m now revamping that workshop for App Growth Annual in New York next month, with everything the early risers taught me.

Online, hosting the Women in Experimentation (WiE) Summit. More than 800 people signed up, but more importantly (because signups are, of course, a vanity metric), the engagement in the sessions was amazing.

I introduced several of the speakers and ran my workshop on working out your positioning.

What I’ve been writing

The quiet article-publishing streak is over. We’re back in full force!

Lorelei, my lovely editor at RevenueCat, is back from parental leave, and now that the WiE Summit is done, I’m writing again for Convert.

Are you ready? It’s a lot.

Curse of the first renewal (RevenueCat). Whether someone renews is mostly decided during the first activation window: roughly five days for weekly plans, two weeks for monthly plans and the first month for annual plans. Miss that window and you’re relying on hope.

Why Your Pricing Tests Keep Failing (Convert). Pricing decisions stack like a pyramid, and most teams test the top layers while the foundations are quietly broken.

Why would someone pay for your app when AI does it for free? (RevenueCat,). Chegg lost half its stock value to ChatGPT while Duolingo kept growing. The difference is what a blank text box can’t do: structure, memory, habit, precision, connection, and blending physical with digital. There’s a two-minute Blank Box Test in there to help you work out which ones are yours.

“Not enough usage” is the churn reason nobody is fixing (RevenueCat). It’s one of the biggest reasons people cancel, and most teams answer it with a discount. But usage churn is a habit that broke somewhere: the trigger never fired, the action never stuck, the reward went flat, or the value never landed. A discount fixes none of those.

Money-back guarantee vs free trial (RevenueCat). A guarantee won’t replace your free trial, but on paid web funnels, it can beat one. Meta learns to find people who actually pay, and far fewer people claim the refund than you’d fear. How long to offer it, how to run it, and when to skip it entirely.

This month’s flip-flops

The W Stories podcast. I joined Viktoria Kharlamova and Tetiana Isaienko to talk about being the first employee at a growth agency, back before anyone really knew what growth hacking was, impostor syndrome, and why I recover on a mountain rather than a sofa.

The Price Power Playbook: Monetization Edition (Botsi with Ramdam). 42 monetization insights from the Price Power Podcast, each built around a real test. Mine is about a client who told me they weren’t a yearly product.

Their yearly subscriptions went from 16% to 39%. I’m in very good company, alongside Alice Muir, Dan Layfield and Marcus Burke, among others.

This month’s flip-flops

Every month I share not just my wins but my challenges, so here are my monthly flip-flops. This month, technology and I did not get along.

1. I recorded my workshop. Granola recorded nothing.

I definitely pressed record for the Appsforum activation workshop. Granola captured precisely none of it, leaving me with an empty recording.

Frustrating, because that recording was how I planned to spot what I wanted to change for New York. Thankfully, I scribbled notes straight afterward, so the revamp ideas survived.

2. I gave a five-minute intro to nobody.

The WiE Summit was online, and I spent five minutes warmly introducing the event before realizing I was still backstage… the switch to live hadn’t happened 🙈.

So I got to go ahead and repeat myself.

Maybe the lesson this month is simply to get better at clicking buttons…

3. I didn’t get a role I went for

This is a hard one to share, but I think it happens to so many of us that we should share it openly. I applied for a product growth role at a wellness app scaleup I was very excited about.

The role was actually more junior, but I was hoping there was a chance to reshape it to a more senior role. They were super kind about it, but ended up going for someone who better matched the level of the role.

What I’ve been enjoying

Starting the month in the Netherlands. Friends in Rotterdam, seeing my mum and grandma; it's always nice to go back.

A little break in France and Spain. I took a small week off and finally got to meet my new nephew. Given they live near the Spanish border, we combined it with a trip to see friends there.

Signing up for Hyrox. How can it be that, after talking about wanting to do one for nearly a year, it still felt like an impulse decision when we realized there were tickets left for London?

I was in an in-person meeting and came out to a Hyrox charge on the bank account. My husband had managed to get us a spot in the mixed doubles in London in December.

So we rushed to start training, beginning with a Monday 6:50am killer. My heart rate (I kid you not) has never been that high. My husband, meanwhile, has already asked me approximately ten times: “Why did we sign up for this?”

It’s reminded me how important it is to have a fitness goal. I can already notice that I’m taking more care with what I eat (I have a major sweet tooth) and becoming more conscious of my training.

Obsessed with paint-by-numbers. My creative outlet for the last few years has mainly been crocheting gifts for friends who are having babies, which, in your early 30s, is a lot. Lately, though, I’ve been trying my hand at paint-by-numbers, and I’m definitely obsessed.

It’s such a great ADHD-friendly thing to do while on a call with someone or listening to a podcast.