Client stories
Evidence from application teams who asked us to read retention cohorts before changing onboarding, messaging, or board narratives.
“The signup-week tables finally showed us that our spring onboarding change looked strong in week one and then faded by day twenty-one. Helen walked us through the caveats before we changed the roadmap. I still wish we had booked the follow-up session earlier in the quarter.”
“We had been treating day-three silence as churn. The activation study reframed it as a natural pause for our weekly content cadence, which saved us from a clumsy push notification rewrite.”
“Priya’s brief named the exact interval where tradespeople stopped opening the schedule after quiet job months. Specific enough that our support team could change the check-in script the same week.”
“Having an outside reader on our cohort definitions stopped us presenting inflated return rates to the board. Tom’s notes are short, slightly blunt, and useful.”
“We expected a dramatic story about lost users. What we received was a quieter finding: two under-performing signup weeks tied to a broken invite flow. That restraint made the brief credible with engineering.”
Extended note: marketplace invite flow
A Midlands marketplace booked a Retention Cohort Review after leadership asked why spring signup weeks looked strong and then faded. The cohort tables showed healthy day-seven return and a sharp drop by day twenty-one for two consecutive signup weeks that shared a broken invite confirmation.
Rather than rewriting the whole onboarding journey, the team repaired the invite path and re-ran the same cohort definition four weeks later. Return at day twenty-one recovered for the repaired weeks. The brief’s mild reservation — that autumn seasonality still needed a separate annotation — kept the board from treating the fix as a universal retention story.