"We Just Need More Traffic"
The CEO wants to double the marketing budget. The funnel says the money dies three steps later. Diagnose it — out loud, in the meeting.
You just joined Platewise, a meal-planning app for people with dietary restrictions, as its first product hire. In your first leadership meeting, the CEO slides a proposal across the table: double the paid marketing budget from $40k to $80k per month.
"Growth has flatlined. We're at 60,000 visitors a month but the user count won't move. It's a top-of-funnel problem — we just need more traffic."
The head of marketing nods. You pull up the funnel from the last 90 days:
| Funnel step | Value | | --- | --- | | Monthly site visitors | 60,000 | | Visitor → signup | 8% (4,800/mo) | | Signup → completes first meal plan | 61% | | Day 7 retention | 31% | | Day 30 retention | 9% | | Day 90 retention | 4% | | Blended CAC | ~$8.30 | | Free → paid conversion ($6.99/mo) | 5.1% |
Both the 8% visitor-to-signup rate and the 61% first-plan completion are healthy for the category. The problem is what happens next: by day 30, 91 of every 100 new users are gone. Support tickets and app-store reviews repeat the same theme — "setup was great, but after two weeks the meal suggestions get repetitive." Monthly active users have been flat at ~21,000 for five months: new signups are pouring in at almost exactly the rate old users quietly leave.
The CEO turns to you: "You're the product person. Back me up on the budget?"
Data snapshot
Answer the CEO in the meeting. Do you back the budget increase? Use the funnel numbers to show where growth is actually dying, explain why doubling traffic won't move MAU (do the arithmetic), and propose what you'd do instead — including the one metric you'd put on the wall for the next quarter.
Rubric
- Correct bottleneck. Locates the problem in retention (day 7→30 collapse), not acquisition — and notes that the top-of-funnel numbers (8% signup, 61% activation) are actually healthy.
- Shows the arithmetic. Demonstrates quantitatively why more traffic won't move MAU: flat MAU means churn ≈ inflow, so doubling spend roughly doubles the monthly loss rate too, buying users who are 91% gone in 30 days.
- Uses the qualitative signal. Connects the reviews/tickets ('suggestions get repetitive after two weeks') to the day-7-to-30 retention cliff as the specific product hypothesis to attack.
- Concrete counter-proposal. Proposes a retention-first plan (e.g. variety/recommendation improvements, week-2 engagement loop, cohort experiments) with a clear guardrail metric like day-30 retention, before scaling spend.
- Meeting-room judgment. Disagrees with the CEO directly but professionally, offers a testable path rather than just a 'no', and says under what condition the budget increase becomes the right move.