Building a self-sufficient, data-driven marketing function

Twelve weeks of mentoring, and their in-house marketer now runs the whole data-driven system.

2.7x

paying subscribers

over a 12-week engagement

57%

of paying subscribers from email

the dominant channel, measured for the first time

01

What they were up against

Merova's health app, Zia, had a small in-house marketing team and a founder with no time to mentor or manage it. Marketing ran on activities rather than evidence: campaigns launched without success criteria, there was no reliable read on where paying subscribers actually came from, and the data sat in tools that could not answer basic questions. They did not need an agency to run campaigns for them. They needed their own person able to run the whole thing, enabled by AI, with methods to keep improving it.

02

What we did

We ran a twelve-week mentoring engagement built around a weekly working session: their marketer brought whatever was live that week, and we pressure-tested it together before it shipped. Rather than handing over a report, we taught the system. We set up a Claude connection to the app's admin data so user-level analysis was possible for the first time, then worked through a full data-science pass together: activation, reach and retention diagnostics across the user base, plus a four-cluster segmentation. We rebuilt the messaging from feature-led to symptom-led and benefit-led, co-designed the funnels and the content calendar with them rather than pre-building, and helped the marketer to stand up her own dashboards and a user-level subscriber-source tracking sheet, so every paying subscriber could finally be traced to its origin.

03

What came of it

Their marketer moved from executing tasks to owning a system. By the close she was running multi-funnel campaigns, maintaining her own data infrastructure, doing user-level attribution, and pushing back on the plan when the funnel logic did not hold.
Paying subscribers grew about 2.7 times over the engagement, and email was confirmed as the dominant acquisition channel, at 57% of all payers.
The shift from features to symptoms/benefits showed up in the numbers: the best-converting campaign of the engagement was the benefit-led one.
For the first time, Zia had a trustworthy subscriber number and knew where each one came from, replacing figures that had never reconciled.
Most of it now runs without us, which was the point. The capability stayed in the building.