Work / 2018–present

First-90-Days Subscription PM. Six engagements, one pattern.

Six engagements · Performance Health · Subscription DTC · Consumer · 2018–present

Every engagement below is a subscription business where the first 90 days were quietly setting the LTV ceiling. The leak almost always traces to one of four mechanisms:

  1. 01A free tier that selects for non-payers.
  2. 02An activation event measured in sessions, not value delivered.
  3. 03A paywall that fires before the product earns the ask.
  4. 04A first invoice that surprises the user the day after a usage spike.

2025

Social-impact crowdfunding platform

Two-sided marketplace across donor and campaign sides.

Outcome

+20% tip rate

Senior PMLevers: Activation / Monetization / Experimentation · Social Impact

Two-sided donations marketplace on a tip-plus-donation model. The revenue surface is donor attention, not donor intent.

  • Behavioral recommendations. Surfaced campaigns from each donor's history and giving pattern.
  • Unified discovery. Consolidated two parallel search and discovery backends. Unlocked full-funnel analytics and ended the split-experiment problem.
  • Experimentation practice. Piloted PostHog, standardized experiment templates, brought three PMs up the curve.

2024

TaxAct

Outcome

+18% add-on conversion

Senior PMLevers: Activation / Monetization / Pricing · Consumer

An annual subscription where the first 90 minutes are the first 90 days, and the renewal decision is made before the return is filed.

  • Add-on pricing and presentation. Rebuilt SKU presentation, discount clarity, and pricing psychology on the add-on path.
  • New-filer onboarding. Personalized the start path for first-time filers and lifted start rate.
  • Form completion. Progressive disclosure and conditional fields on the three highest-volume forms.

2023

Found

Outcome

2–3x LTV/CAC

Senior PMLevers: Activation / Monetization / 0→1 · Performance Health

A national obesity-care launch where the insured purchase flow broke the moment a real benefits check hit it.

  • Insured purchase flow. Rebuilt the purchase path for users covered by six health insurers, where the in-flow benefits check was the lever, not acquisition spend.
  • 0→1 B2B channel. Built the first employer purchase flow, opening enterprise as a second revenue line.

2022

Thirty Madison

Outcome

+11% DTC conversion

Senior PMLevers: 0→1 / Activation · Performance Health

Chronic-care subscription on the Performance Health pattern with a clinical-content overlay.

  • 0→1 iOS app. Shipped provider chat, CBT modules, daily tracking, and chronic-care content in a single coherent release.
  • DTC funnel. Routed each visitor through a condition-based questionnaire to the product that actually fit.
  • Post-merger triage. Rebuilt company-wide bug triage so the rest of the roadmap was shippable.

2021

Match

Outcome

$1.7M incremental

Senior PMLevers: Monetization / Pricing · Consumer

Monetized the moment the user was already paying attention, not the moment the calendar said to ask.

  • Relationship-aware upsell. Triggered subscription upgrades off in-product success signals, not renewal-window calendar reminders.
  • Scarcity surface. Shipped visibility-boost and peak-hour exposure as a paid product. Created legitimate scarcity inside the surface users were already in.

2018 + 2020

HelloFresh

Outcome

$15M+ protected

Senior PMLevers: Pricing / Activation / Monetization · Subscription DTC

Two workstreams on the same first-90-days surface: the price ramp that decides whether a household stays past month two, and the payment integrity that decides whether they can stay at all.

  • Pricing ramp and early-tenure retention. Replaced the single-week promo cliff with a multi-week front-loaded structure. Smoothed the jump to full price across the first four boxes and cut the early-tenure churn spike the cliff was creating.
  • Payment integrity at scale. Launched Sift Science across six countries with the International Payments team and stood up a fraud-alert workflow for compromised accounts. Protected over $15M in subscription revenue from fraud-driven chargebacks and forced cancellations.
  • Global CRM dashboard automation. Automated the global CRM dashboard so campaign performance read live across markets. Cut time to flag and resolve critical campaign issues by 25%.

The pattern

The first 90 days set the LTV ceiling.

If your retention chart turns red around month 3 to 6, the leak almost always traces back to one of the four mechanisms above. The intake form is six questions and tells us which one.