A Growth Dashboard That Explains Its Own Numbers
The team had metrics and no read on them, so the numbers that mattered most were the ones being misinterpreted.
- Product
- AI storytelling app for children
- Model
- Consumer subscription, monthly and annual, with a limited free tier
- Timeframe
- 4 months
The approach
- Gave every metric four fields instead of one: the benchmark, the current value, what is driving it, and the opportunity
- Benchmarked against the right access model
- The paywall sat inside signup with a dismissible exit into a thin free tier, which is neither freemium nor a true hard paywall
- Benchmarking it as a hard paywall would have inflated expected conversion by roughly 8x
- Named the two metrics that mislead without context
- Blended cost per install, because broken attribution hides paid installs inside the organic number
- Retention, which reads as a product failure but is a funnel failure, since the users who reach the core retain 4.5x better
- Found a paywall offering change that had quietly halved trial conversion on the same SKU
- Reduced it to five plain-language insights an exec could act on without a translation layer
Most growth dashboards answer what happened and stop, which leaves the reading to whoever opens it first. That is where "paid is dead, organic is booming" comes from, when the truth was that paid installs were hiding inside the organic number because attribution in this category is broken. Every metric here carries our read of the cause, so the dashboard argues rather than just reports. The most valuable thing it surfaced was not a new opportunity, it was a change that had already happened and gone unnoticed.
We help consumer apps and products reach their next phase of growth.
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