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.

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

One of my favourite parts of a Product Detail Page is the product carousel.

Not because it’s fancy, but because it’s a small space where you can pack in a huge amount of decision-making support.

And unlike most carousels on websites (which, let’s be honest, often get ignored), PDP image carousels actually get used.

I’ve looked at a lot of heatmaps and session recordings over the years, and the pattern is almost always the same: people click through the images.

Not always all of them, but almost always the first two.

Which is why it pains me how many brands still underuse this space.

Five near-identical packshots. Benefit images with text so small you can’t read it on mobile. Lifestyle shots that look pretty but don’t actually answer any questions.

So in this week’s Convert article, I zoom in on product carousels and cover:

• What actually makes a strong PDP product carousel

• How to test carousel images properly in Shopify (without wrecking inventory or analytics)

• How heatmaps and recordings can guide image order and removals

• How AI can help when you don’t have the images you wish you had

Read the full article

The impact of improving your product carousel

I’ve seen carousel changes alone drive double-digit lifts. One client moved from five near-identical images to a mix of benefits, social proof, and clearer packaging, and saw a 17% uplift. No offer change. No pricing tweak. Just better decision support.

Here’s one of my favourite examples, The Ordinary. They use a similar structure for most of their skincare products that fits nicely together, but is powerful:

1. Product Image

2. Key usages

3. Results of using it

4. Before/after photo

5. Key ingredients and impact of the ingredients

6. If relevant: Comparison to similar products they offer to help you choose

7. For some products: Video explaining the product

Here you can see it for their Glycolic Acid 7% Exfoliating Toner:

I cover another six great examples in the full article.

Read the full article

Practical tips

Bookmarking the article for later? Here are a few quick lessons you can apply to your carousel this week:

1. The first image matters more than you think. Test it before touching anything else.

2. Design mobile-first. If text isn’t readable on a phone, it’s not doing its job.

3. Use heatmaps and recordings to identify which images people engage with, then reorder or remove the weaker ones.

4. If you’re testing image 2+, analyse the segment of users who actually interacted with the carousel. Otherwise, you dilute the signal.

5. Video works best when it’s short (5–15 seconds), silent, and loop-friendly. Think demos or rotating reviews, not long brand films.

Carousels are one of those areas where small changes can have an outsized impact, especially on PDPs.

Read the full article

Recommendation

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Convert, an incredible testing platform for Shopify. If you have the traffic to run A/B tests, it’s a genuinely great tool.

And if you’re thinking beyond images — optimising things like layout, trust signals, or UX flows — Convert also has a strong article on 6 expert-backed ways to optimise your product page that’s well worth a read.

Learn more

Product carousels aren’t glamorous, but they quietly drive decisions. Haven’t looked at yours lately? This is your sign.

Till next time,
Daphne

If you ask most app or e-commerce teams what’s holding growth back, you’ll hear a familiar answer:

We’re struggling with acquisition

Why, because their LTV is often too low. So eventually they realise, maybe it is a churn issue.

So they start working on retention: improving winback flows, encouraging longer subscriptions.

But most retention issues are also actually not retention issues.

The number-one challenge that came up in the growth audits I conducted last year?

Activation issues.

For apps, the dropoff is often steep in the first seven days or even the first session.

For e-commerce, it is often the first- to second-order rate.

This is more important than ever, especially in competitive categories.

I shared some data on LinkedIn recently: the top 5 health & fitness apps control 73% of ad spend. If you're not one of them, you're not going to out-acquire them — you have to out-retain them, starting with activating effectively.

So how do you know if you have a retention issue, and what can you do about it?

How to tell if you actually have an activation problem

Activation issues rarely announce themselves clearly. They show up as secondary symptoms.

Here are the most reliable signals I see across both apps and e-commerce:

1. Users drop off fast, not slowly
If most churn happens right after signup, download, or first purchase, that’s not a loyalty issue. It’s a value-delivery issue.

2. Monetisation feels “forced”
If paywalls or products only convert with heavy discounts or long trials, users likely don’t yet understand why the product is worth paying for.

3. You’re debating pricing more than usage/value perception
When teams argue endlessly about price points but can’t clearly describe early user behaviour, activation is the missing link.

4. Support and reviews sound confused
Comments like “I didn’t know I could do this” or “I expected something else” alongside support questions about basic features or information you believe they should know… they’re activation warnings.

5. Power users look nothing like average users
If a small group uses the product frequently and sticks around, while most users never adopt those behaviours, the gap isn’t retention, it’s early guidance.

When you see multiple of these at once, fixing churn or pricing won’t solve the root cause.

How to fix an activation problem (without overcomplicating it)

The teams that make progress on activation don’t do more. They do less, better.

They don’t get caught up in onboarding completion or email open rates; instead, they focus on the following:

1. Define one activation behaviour that matters most
Not a vanity metric. A behaviour that clearly separates retained users from churned ones.

2. Design onboarding around action, not explanation
If users need to understand everything before doing anything, activation will stay low. Keep it simple and focus on the most important things, rather than telling them everything

3. Remove optionality early
Templates, defaults, and guided paths outperform choice during the first experience. Choice is only valuable when you give them guidance on how to know what is right for them

4. Delay monetisation pressure until after value is felt
Paywalls work better when users already know what they’re upgrading for. I’ve seen this with e-commerce too for high-end products: show the price too quickly, and they may not give you a chance to show value, build a relationship first.

The good news is that none of this requires a full rebuild. Small changes to early flows often outperform months of downstream optimisation.

Recommendation

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

This week, it’s the book Product-Led Onboarding by Ramli John.

It’s written with SaaS products in mind, but one insight from the book maps perfectly to what we’ve been talking about here:

Onboarding shouldn’t teach users what your product can do.
It should guide them to do the thing that makes the product valuable.

That distinction sounds subtle, but it’s precisely where many teams go wrong.

Most onboarding flows focus on:

• Explaining features

• Highlighting flexibility

• Showing everything the product is capable of

But the best onboarding does the opposite:

• Narrows the path

• Removes choices

• Pushes users toward one meaningful action as fast as possible

That’s activation.

Whether you’re building a SaaS product, a subscription app, or an e-commerce brand, the principle holds:

Value isn’t understood, it’s experienced.

If users don’t get there quickly, no amount of retention work will save you.

If growth feels harder than it should, don’t start with churn, pricing, or paywalls (and definitely don’t over-obsess about acquisition)

Start by asking:
How many users truly experience value early on?

Because if activation is broken, no amount of tape will fill your leaky bucket of users.

Till next week,
Daphne

I’m back!

After three weeks in Australia for our honeymoon, I returned last week feeling genuinely recharged — something I wasn’t sure would happen given how nervous I was about switching off (as I confessed in February’s recap).

Turns out, swimming with whale sharks has a way of putting everything in perspective.

It’s been an incredible trip: time together, wildlife that made me speechless (think I said wow about 50x times) and the kind of reset I didn’t know I needed.

March was quieter on the work front by design, but there’s still plenty to share.

Also so grateful to come back and see how much has happened.

Here’s what went live, what I’ve been enjoying, and what’s next.

What I’ve been writing

Nothing tends to go live while I’m away, but I did get featured in two valuable app resources this month:

• 48 Laws of Subscription Success (Botsi) Jacob put together an incredible resource pulling wisdom from across the subscription app world. Honoured to be included.

• State of Subscription Apps 2026 (RevenueCat) The annual report is out, and it’s packed with data. Definitely worth a read if you work in apps.

And coming next week: The 7-day trial, and other free trial myths. One of the articles I teased in February is finally going live.

I’ll share it on LinkedIn and in a separate newsletter in the coming weeks.

The course is live!

I can finally tell you about the course that kept me busy in December and January.

It’s for RevenueCat’s StartApp School and helps new apps learn how to make better product decisions and build a strong product growth strategy.

If you’re early-stage or know someone who is, check it out — it’s free.

I love creating courses, and this one feels extra special because it helps early-stage startups that aren’t always big enough to get an advisor/consultant on board.

Check out my new course

What’s been happening with clients

A quieter month given the honeymoon, but I wrapped up March with a lifecycle kickoff workshop for a new client we audited in February. It's always exciting to move from "here's what we found" to "let's actually do this."

This month’s flip-flops

Given I was off for most of the month, there weren’t really any work flip flops. But the honeymoon had its own challenges...

The biggest one: getting home.

Our Qatar flight was cancelled due to airspace closures, and suddenly, we were scrambling to find alternatives from Perth.

I slightly regret not bringing a laptop — it made staying longer and working remotely impossible, which meant some very painfully expensive new flights back.

The other realisation: I was so focused on preparing work before I left that I forgot to sort out some personal things. It played on my mind more than I expected while away.

Lesson learned: empty your head of everything before a big trip, not just work tasks.

What I’ve been enjoying

• Seeing family. A lot of my close family lives in Australia. I hadn’t seen them since our wedding last year and having a week with them was very special.

• Margaret River wines. We spent a few days in wine country before heading north, and it was lovely — good food, great wine, no emails.

• Swimming with whale sharks. I’ve wanted to do this for years, and it did not disappoint. We were at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia, and I also got to swim with manta rays, turtles, and reef sharks. Genuinely life-highlight stuff.

  

• Actually switching off. I had big plans to read non-fiction and AI books on holiday. Reader, I did not. I fully surrendered to easy fiction, including Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn — a psychological thriller with an interestingly unrelatable narrator. Sometimes your brain just needs a break. I also got back into crocheting which was perfect for the long flights / trips.

A nice surprise

I was included in a list of fastest-growing women in CRO, experimentation, and growth on LinkedIn. I got a fun message from Charlotte about it:

Also, I hit 25K LinkedIn followers whilst I’m away 🎉.

If you missed my newsletters this month

No worries, here’s what I covered:

A little gift

If you are a B2C app and would like to attend Business of Apps London (Thu 23 Apr 2026 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM BST), I have a few free guest passes (usual price).

I’ll be hosting a roundtable on onboarding and activation.

Given I’m out of office soon, please let me know asap if you want a ticket and email me your:

• First name

• Last name

• Company name

• Job title

• Email

And I’ll put that through for you :).

Looking ahead to April

• Continuing an activation project with an app I audited in February, now working alongside Alice Muir to implement the recommendations. Excited to move from strategy to action.

• New potential projects/audits in the pipeline. I’ve had quite a few chats with exciting brands this week and look forward to seeing what comes of it.

• Hosting a roundtable at Business of Apps London. Let me know if I’ll see you there!

• New content partnership with Appsflyer kicking off. Keep an eye out for that.

• Yorkshire Three Peaks — it’s happening! I didn’t do super long hikes in Australia (too hot), but we did do lots of walks, some canyon hikes and upped our running. My legs are sore, but I’m ready…ish.

And lots of new articles are finally going live after the pre-honeymoon writing sprint.

Till next time,

Daphne

Most paywalls are forgettable. You’ve seen them a hundred times: a few bullet points, maybe a “Most Popular” badge, and a trial button. Some version of this:

They exist to get you to pay, and it shows.

But the best paywalls don’t feel like that:

• They feel like the app gets you.

• They answer questions you didn’t know you had.

• They make you want to keep going.

The difference? The best paywalls aren’t designed to sell. They’re designed to convert doubt into confidence.

Today, I’m breaking down the four elements that separate high-converting paywalls from forgettable ones, with examples you can learn from (and a few you might want to steal).

1. They sell the job, not the features

This is the mistake I see most often: paywalls that list features instead of outcomes.

“Unlimited access to all lessons” tells me what I get access to… It doesn’t tell me why I should care.

Smart Tales, an educational app for kids, discovered this through user interviews.

Their initial paywall focused on math, science, and reading content.

But parents didn’t care about that. What they cared about was avoiding the screen switch-off meltdown. The app helped kids have non-addictive screen time, so putting the iPad away didn’t trigger a tantrum.

Together with Léa Samrani advising them, they rewrote their paywall around that job-to-be-done, and they saw a 72% increase in free-to-paid conversion.

The question to ask: What problem is your user actually trying to solve? (Hint: it’s rarely “access to features.”)

2. They build trust before asking for money

You’re asking someone to hand over their card details (or at least double-tap to use Apple Pay). They need to trust you first.

The best paywalls address this head-on with:

• Social proof (ratings, review count, “loved by X users”)

• Clarity on how trials work, if offered (when they’ll be charged, how to cancel)

• Reassurance (money-back guarantees, “we’ll remind you before your trial ends”)

Blinkist pioneered the “Honest Paywall” approach: a clear timeline showing exactly what happens during the trial, plus a guarantee they’d remind users before charging.

The result? 23% higher conversion and 55% fewer complaints.'

This isn’t about good ethics (every paywall should be considered ‘honest’ in my opinion), rather it’s about ensuring users feel informed and trust you through clarity.

The question to ask: Does our paywall reassure the user and build trust?

3. They make the decision easy

Most users have no idea which plan is right for them. Your paywall should make it obvious. The best paywalls:

• Lead with one clear recommendation (usually annual)

• Frame the price comparison helpfully (”Save 50%” or price per week)

• Reduce options (too many choices = no choice)

Duolingo does this well. They show the trial length directly in the CTA button, they do the classic highlight “Most Popular,” and break down annual pricing to a weekly figure. No mental math required.

When you give options, it needs to be easy to understand what option is right for you, for example Peloton even gives the option to compare plans on their paywall of App+ vs App One:

This opens up a clean comparison table overlay over the paywall to help you better understand the differences:

The question to ask: Do I help them identify which option is best for them?

4. They match the moment

A paywall immediately after download needs to do different work than one someone sees after using your app for a week.

Early in the journey: Focus on education and trust. Users don’t yet know what you offer.

After the aha moment: Focus on reinforcing progress and urgency. They’ve felt the value; now help them commit to it.

AllTrails nails this. After you’ve completed a hike, their paywall says: “AllTrails+ members are 3x more likely to hit the trail.” It connects the premium offering to the progress you’ve already made.

For apps where the aha moment takes time, consider delaying the paywall and adding more guidance upfront.

The question to ask: What needs to change about our paywall once users understand the main value of the app?

What to take from this

If you’re auditing your paywall, ask yourself:

1. Are you selling the job or listing features? Rewrite your headline around what users actually want to achieve.

2. Where’s the trust? Add social proof, clarify trial terms, or include a guarantee.

3. Is the decision easy? Reduce options, lead with a recommendation, and frame pricing clearly.

4. Does your timing match the journey? Test paywall placement based on where users hit their aha moment.

Recommendation

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

If you want to go deeper on paywalls, I wrote a piece last year on how the top apps approach them differently, sharing insights from Rosie Hoggmascall, Head of Product at Fyxer, who’s worked with 20+ subscription apps:

And if you want more visual inspiration, I personally use Mobbin (not a sponsor) to see how 100s of apps approach their paywalls.

Your paywall isn’t just a gate to revenue.

It’s your last chance to answer the question every user is silently asking: “Is this worth it?”

Make sure your answer is yes.

Till next week,

Daphne

Early in my career, I used to ask founders the same question all the time:

What matters more: profit or growth?

I wanted to understand what really drove them. Did they care more about how fast the company was growing — or how profitable it was along the way?

At the time, it felt like a sharp, strategic question. I was even a little smug about asking something that seemed so tough and insightful.

Now, I think it was a stupid question.

Not because profit and growth don’t matter. They do.

But because the question forces a false choice between two things that are both essential.

Worse, it obscures the real issue. Teams aren’t actually fighting about profit versus growth. They’re disagreeing about what they’re optimising for right now.

Profit and growth are outcomes. Growth requires profit to be sustainable long term. Profit without growth is just slow stagnation.

The real question isn’t which one matters more.

It’s: what does this company need at this stage, and what are we willing to trade off, temporarily, to get there?

That’s why I’ve found a lot more clarity in a framework from Gibson Biddle: the GEM model.

How the GEM model changes the conversation

The GEM model asks teams to force-rank three factors:

1. Growth is about reach and momentum: how many new people enter your product experience.

2. Engagement is about value: how consistently users experience the core benefit that keeps them coming back and delighting customers.

3. Monetisation is about sustainability: how and when that value turns into revenue.

It also forces leaders to get clear on the order of priorities: is it Engagement → Growth → Monetisation, or Monetisation → Engagement → Growth?

That ranking becomes a lens for every product decision:

• What do we optimise?

• What do we accept as imperfect?

• What do we explicitly deprioritise?

And that’s where strategy actually becomes real.

My update to the original GEM framing

Gibson originally argued that for early-stage startups, monetisation should almost always come third:

That made sense in 2021, when capital was cheaper and runways were longer.

Today, I’d tweak that slightly:

Monetisation must be designed earlier, even if it’s not prioritised.

That doesn’t mean squeezing revenue too soon or obsessing over pricing. It means making sure growth and engagement aren’t built on assumptions that will later break the business.

Engagement still matters most in the early days, but ignoring monetisation entirely is no longer realistic for most teams.

How does this tie back to product strategy?

This is where the framework really earns its place.

A strong product strategy isn’t just a vision or a roadmap. It’s a clear signal of which tensions you’re willing to live with right now.

When teams can’t force-rank GEM:

• Roadmaps grow endlessly

• Experiments lack direction

• Everyone optimises their own metric

• And “strategy” becomes something people debate instead of use

When teams can force-rank GEM you see the opposite:

• Optimisation becomes easier, not broader

• Decisions get faster

• Growth and product stop pulling in different directions

That’s also why I keep coming back to this idea:

Product strategy defines the promise you make.
Growth strategy is the system that keeps that promise.

If you can’t agree on what you’re optimising for, that system will never work.

Recommendation

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

If this topic resonated, I highly recommend checking out Gibson Biddle’s writing on product strategy and trade‑offs. I love how clearly he explains strategy and the practical frameworks he gives for driving real decisions.

Start with a summary of his different frameworks:

And then dive deeper into the GEM framework if you found it helpful:

Read more on the GEM Framework

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this:

Strategy isn’t choosing between profit and growth.
It’s choosing which tensions you’re willing to live with… right now.

Until next time,
Daphne

I was chatting with my friend Rosie Hoggmascall recently, and she said something that stuck with me.

Rosie joined Fyxer as Growth Lead. She’s incredible at user research, genuinely one of the best I know, so naturally she became the research person.

People kept coming to her for it. At a fast-growing AI startup, it can easily become a full-time job.

But here’s the thing: as much as Rosie loved research, it wasn’t the main thing she wanted to do. It wasn’t where her special skills lie.

Research was her Zone of Excellence, not her Zone of Genius.

The trap of being “good enough”

This is the challenge with growth and product roles. They’re so broad that you can easily get pulled into your zone of excellence, or worse, spend most of your time in your zone of competence.

I had this at Heights.

There was no Head of Marketing, so I ended up managing influencer marketing and overseeing the social media team. Definitely not my Zone of Genius. Barely my Zone of Competence, if I’m honest.

I felt awful. Influencer marketing wasn’t performing how it should, and I didn’t know what I was doing.

I spent time learning and trying to get better, but I didn’t enjoy any of it. Every week left me drained and burned out.

The worst part? I was still doing the work I loved — growth strategy, optimising the customer journey — but I had less energy for it. I was juggling so much that even my Zone of Genius started to suffer.

And when you let this happen, whether you’re a Head of Growth or a founder, no one wins:

• You aren’t doing the things you thrive at

• You aren’t delivering at the level you need to

• You feel frustrated because you’re working so hard, but not excelling

Sound familiar?

The four zones

This concept comes from Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap, and it’s one of the most useful frameworks I come back to with founders and growth leaders.

Hendricks frames it around two axes:

• Passion: How motivated does this work make you? How fast does time go? How energised do you feel?

• Skill: What are you uniquely good at? What can you pick up quickly and execute better than others? Where’s your leverage?

When both are high, you’re in your Zone of Genius. When skill is high, but passion is low, you’re in the danger zone: excellence without energy.

Here are the four zones:

1. Zone of Genius: The sweet spot. The things that come naturally to you, that energise you, that you’re uniquely brilliant at. This is where you create the most value and where you should spend as much time as possible.

2. Zone of Excellence: Things you’re really good at. Often, what you’re known for. But here’s the trap: just because you’re excellent at something doesn’t mean it’s where you should spend your time.

3. Zone of Competence: Things you can do adequately, but so can many others. No real advantage here.

4. Zone of Incompetence: Things you’re bad at. Others can do them far better. You probably already delegate these (or should).

The problem? Most high performers get stuck in their Zone of Excellence.

It feels productive. People praise you for it. But it’s not where you do your best work, and over time, it drains you.

What a Zone of Genius looks like

Rosie and I talked about this. I’ve known her for years, so together we narrowed it down quite quickly.

Her Zone of Genius isn’t research.

It’s building strong strategy and visualising journeys in a way that’s easy to understand. Research was a tool she used well, but strategy and clarity were where she truly shone.

Once she recognised that, she shaped her role around it.

She recently got promoted to Head of Product and UX at Fyxer (big congrats!), a role she helped define. Not Head of Product Research.

The difference matters.

My Zone of Genius?

Product growth strategy and turning massive amounts of data and insights into practical strategy that drives focus and impact. Not managing influencers. Not overseeing social media. Analysing, synthesising, and creating clarity that moves things forward.

Finally voicing this at Heights changed everything. We reshaped the team structure and started looking for a Head of Brand Marketing. The impact wasn’t just on my happiness; it impacted growth. I could finally focus on my strengths.

I wish I’d been more critical upfront. My “I’ll help with everything” attitude actually hindered me. Now I’m brutally honest in every sales call about where my strengths do and don’t lie.

How to find your Zone of Genius

If you’re trying to figure out your own Zone of Genius, ask yourself:

1. What energises me? Not just what I’m good at, but what I could do for hours without feeling drained.

2. What do people specifically come to me for? Look for patterns in what others recognise in you.

3. What feels effortless to me but hard for others? Your genius often hides in plain sight because it comes so naturally.

4. If I could only do one type of work, what would I choose? Strip away the “shoulds” and listen to what pulls you.

You’ll never be 100% of your time in your Zone of Genius, but already shifting it from 10%-20% to 50% makes a huge impact.

This applies to your team, too

Here’s where it gets interesting for founders and growth leaders.

It’s not just about finding your Zone of Genius. It’s about helping your team find theirs.

The thing is, it's hard to see this in yourself. Rosie and I figured out her zones through conversation - she needed someone outside her own head to help connect the dots. Your team likely needs the same.

Taking time to have these conversations isn't soft management fluff. It's how you unlock performance.

When everyone on a team is operating in their Zone of Genius:

• Work gets done faster (and better)

• People are more engaged and less likely to burn out

• You stop duplicating effort in areas where no one excels

When people are stuck in their Zones of Competence or Excellence:

• Everything feels harder than it should

• You’re overpaying for mediocre output

• Frustration builds on all sides

The unlock for growth isn’t just hiring more people. It’s making sure the people you have are doing the work they’re uniquely brilliant at.

The hard question

Sometimes, shaping your role around your Zone of Genius isn’t possible. The company needs something different.

The role was mis-scoped from the start. The founder wants you to be someone you’re not.

If that’s the case, it might be worth asking a harder question: is this the right fit?

I’ve seen too many talented growth people burn out in roles that were never going to let them do their best work.

Rosie could have stayed as “the research person” at Fyxer. She would have been good at it. But she wouldn’t have thrived as much as she could have.

Instead, she had the conversation; she shaped the role. And now she’s doing incredible work in a position that actually fits.

She’s shared her incredible journey of finding her Zone of Genius and reflecting on it in a recent newsletter. She seems to love the framework as much as I do. There is also a great template in there for mapping out your Zone of Genius.

Rosie's Growth Dives

New month, new role, new realizations

February already. What a crazy start to 2026…

Read more

5 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Rosie Hoggmascall

Recommendation

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

If this resonated, I’d genuinely recommend reading The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It goes much deeper into how we self-sabotage and why we often resist moving into our Zone of Genius (spoiler: it’s uncomfortable to admit what we’re not meant to be doing).

One thing to try this week:

Write down where you’re spending your time. Be honest. Then categorise each activity: incompetence, competence, excellence, or genius.

If genius isn’t taking up the majority? That’s your signal.

And if you manage a team, have this conversation with them. Ask where they feel energised and where they feel drained. You might be surprised by what you learn.

Till next week,

Daphne

P.S. My Zone of Incompetence is definitely creating diagrams; I delegated the one above to AI. What do you think? This was the original one in my old branding from two years ago:

February is always a short month, but it feels even shorter in the UK with the sun setting before 5 pm, and apparently, it’s been raining pretty much every day.

But it’s been good, I got to visit friends in the Netherlands and Belfast over two weekends (both were also rainy) and got quite a bit of home renovation done (I’ve given up on the staining of the doors and moved on to tearing down wallpaper).

On the work side, I’ve had a lovely new client that is an impact-focused, female-founded wellness app startup. Because I’m away for three weeks from the end of next week (honeymoon!) I’ve partnered up with the lovely Alice Muir to work on the project.

Ok, before I give everything away that happened this month, let’s go through it a bit more structured.

Here’s what I created, what I learned, and what I’ve been enjoying. As always, lots of free resources.

What I’ve been writing

Publishing wise less came out:

• Meta Andromeda: The algorithm you can’t ignore (Convert). A deep dive into the latest update and how this impacts not only your ad strategy, but also your a/b testing. Takeaway: Test as a funnel from ad to landingpage vs just landingpages.

But I’ve been writing a lot! Nothing will go live whilst I’m away the first three weeks of March, but after that, you can expect articles covering:

• Pre product-market fit metrics

• Building a strong freemium strategy

• The learning roadmap: A framework for early-stage apps

• Determining the right trial length

• Inside Noom’s web-to-app funnel: a full breakdown of the 113 screens

All are written and ready to be read!

What I’ve been presenting

LinkedIn and Personal Branding Course

Last week, I spent three hours recording Lucia van den Brink and my Personal Branding and LinkedIn course. This is a passion project of ours through the community we run, Women in Experimentation, and focuses on helping more women build their personal brand and become more visible. The waitlist is here, it’ll come out in Q2 and be a live cohort.

You can choose which screenshot is the most awkward:

I think 2nd from the bottom right 😅. Lucia and I also had a day recording some pieces in Amsterdam at the start of the month:

I also gave an online workshop for a one-off project, which was really fun and great to hear the kind feedback after I handed in the full report and walkthrough:

Daphne, This is exceptional.

I was NOT expecting this level of granularity and thoughtfulness.

I already know - just from the walkthrough - where we are falling short, and the next steps.

I even screenshotted it and sent it to hubby, these kind of messages make my day.

What’s been happening with clients

So I’ve already given away a lot, a new exciting project where we are auditing their current app growth and strategy, and a one-off project with a workshop. For the rest of my ongoing clients, we:

• Got some really good insights from running user tests and have been redesigning our landingpages based on them.

• Have been working further on the new product launch, which goes live at the end of March

• Have been working on forecasting and scenario analyses to develop more robust growth targets for 2026 for a client and to prioritise the roadmap accordingly.

This month’s flip-flops

As always, the messy reality:

• Clumsy me fell into a stream and got stung by nettles. I have been better about protecting my Fridays this month and went for a long two-hour walk earlier this month. Turned out all of Epping Forest was flooded, and in my attempt to jump a stream to get home, I slipped into it. Luckily, Loki didn’t mind the wet.

  

• I have one client (not the one we did the user testing for) where, despite making many improvements based on research (they are too small to A/B test) and testing different style pages, we are struggling to get the conversion rate up. It’s a very sensitive topic (fertility issues), making it even harder to balance educating/supporting with selling. We’ll be doing some user testing soon to speak with the target audience more and better understand where the challenges lie.

• Completely underestimated the time it takes to strip wallpaper. Me: This will take a few hours. Reality: Spent 16+ hours stripping and still need to do the part above the stairs. Thankfully, our kind neighbour lent us a long ladder, but it definitely isn’t ready before we leave.

• Mentally being off for 3 weeks is weighing heavily. I haven’t been off that long in 2-3 years, and for some reason, it feels harder this time. I think because there is so much I’m excited about and trying to ‘prepare’ for that, it’s making it hard to switch off and enjoy the idea of it. I’m sure once we are in Australia on our honeymoon, all will be well!

What I’ve been enjoying

• Being back in Rotterdam for one of my best friends’ birthdays, Agnes. I’m so grateful I have the ability to work remotely and join her for her birthday party at the weekend but also to work from her place for the day itself. She’s such an incredible individual leading in Politics in the Netherlands and so kind and thoughtful too. It showed! Over 100 people were there at her 35th.

• Getting to work with Ruben, Lucia and Desiree. Ruben de Boer kindly lent his apartment for us as a recording studio for our course, and we had a nice day coworking, also with Desiree. It was Ruben’s first day freelancing, so we went out for some great Thai food to celebrate.

• Sauna and ice baths with Rosie. Had a nice little trip to the community sauna, which is always fun! We also had a fun day coworking and painting pottery afterwards.

• Wicked the musical. I took a friend there for her birthday, Charlotte (check out her excellent new newsletter on Customer Care, Scrappy CX). The musical was great.

• Belfast. I went to visit a friend who is there for three months filming a series (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Game of Thrones spinoff) and didn’t know much about the city, but it was so fun. Really cool street art, buildings and nature surrounding.

Ok, I’m going to get unusually soppy… one minute only, I promise. But this month, I feel really lucky to be surrounded by so many inspiring women.

Some are in the same field as me, but many are killing it in their own areas: politics, finances, film, customer care, being a new (or soon-to-be) mother, and more.

When recording the LinkedIn and Personal Branding course, I talked about how when I started in growth, I missed female role models, but now it feels like I’m surrounded by them. I got to spend a lot of time with friends this month, also knowing I’d be away soon for three weeks, and it’s been amazing and energising.

If you missed my newsletters this month

No worries, here’s what I covered:

A little gift

If you are a B2C app and would like to attend Business of Apps London (Thu 23 Apr 2026 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM BST), I have a few free guest passes (usual price).

I’ll be hosting a roundtable on onboarding and activation.

Given I’m out of office soon, please let me know asap if you want a ticket and email me your:

• First name

• Last name

• Company name

• Job title

• Email

And I’ll put that through for you :).

Looking ahead to March / April

• Till 21st March in Australia — Honeymoon time! Sydney (seeing a friend), Port Macquarie (see family) and then off for the honeymoon: Perth, Margaret River and Ningaloo to swim with whale sharks. Tips are welcome!

• New partner brand. They’ve got some great app research I’m diving into, and I’m excited to share their content from April to June.

• New product growth course. It’s free and focused on app startups; it should come out in March. More on that soon.

My newsletters are all scheduled for the coming weeks, so whilst I can’t reply to questions, you will still get your usual Thursday dose.

Till next time,

Daphne