CASE 1/2 Retention 15% → 60%: designing for the first seven days
SMB advertisers churned brutally. An owner who spends $200, gets nothing, and leaves never comes back, and tells other owners on the way out.
Walking through churned accounts, the pattern was first-campaign failure. Advertisers weren't leaving because the platform was weak; they were leaving because their first campaign never worked, and nobody caught it in time.
The moves
- Segment-specific onboarding: an e-commerce store, a local service business, and an app marketer need different first-campaign templates, not one generic flow.
- A hard operational target: first campaign success within 7 days, backed by high-touch support that caught failing campaigns before the advertiser gave up.
CASE 2/2 The rejection bug: walking the journey nobody walked
Ad rejections were read as advertiser error: bad creatives, policy violations. "SMBs don't get it," the rejection rate said. The rejection rate was lying.
I stopped reading dashboards and walked the full advertiser journey myself: signup, business verification, creative upload, policy review, launch. Doing that end to end, I hit a platform-side bug systematically rejecting legitimate ads across the base. Escalated with reproduction steps.
Aggregate metrics hide their own causes. The cheapest research instrument I've ever used is being my own user, end to end, with the patience to hit what real users hit.