Growth Secrets · ██████ · Health tech and LLM products
Fix retention before buying more growth
Growth consultancy for ██████, an early-stage health-tech company building an LLM-powered product. Diagnosing the growth constraint and prioritising product improvements before more acquisition.
Start with the growth diagnosis
I worked with an early-stage health-tech company building an LLM-powered product. The brief was growth, but that still left an important question: which part of the business needed to improve? I looked at the growth levers, weekly performance and opportunities for optimisation to establish where the team should focus.
Retention was the constraint
The main problem was retention. Bringing more people into the product would not address why existing users were not staying. Acquisition could increase the number of new users while leaving the underlying problem intact. My recommendation was to prioritise product improvements that helped people get value and return, before putting more effort into acquiring users.
Make weekly reporting useful
Weekly reports and reviews were part of the work: examining performance, identifying opportunities and recommending optimisations. The purpose was to connect the numbers to decisions. What was holding growth back? Which potential improvements deserved attention? Was the team addressing the retention problem, or simply adding activity elsewhere?
Put the product work first
The recommendation gave the team a clear order of priorities. Improve the experience for existing users, assess whether retention is improving, then reconsider acquisition. This was not an argument against acquiring users. It was a judgement about where the next investment of effort was most likely to make a difference.
What changed
The engagement resulted in ████ additional users, a ████% lift in week-on-week user growth and growth ████x higher than before.
The principle
Choose the growth lever that addresses the constraint. If people are not staying, more acquisition can obscure the problem rather than solve it. A growth diagnosis should help the team prioritise potential solutions and establish what needs to improve before scaling the next part of the business.
Where this applies
This is particularly relevant to early AI products. A new capability may attract interest, but the product still needs to provide a reason to return. Weekly growth reporting is most useful when it helps the team distinguish initial interest from continuing value and directs product work accordingly.
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