Case Study No. 01

A Broken System Was Silently Costing This App $150K+/yr in Lost Revenue.

A funded AI companion app. 66,000 contacts. A $4.99/mo subscription. Three infrastructure failures were bleeding revenue from every direction — and nobody knew.

Customer.io Deliverability Rescue Onboarding Architecture Re-engagement AI App · US Market

The Diagnosis

Three failures. All silent.
All costing real money.

The system looked functional. Emails were sending. Campaigns were running. But underneath, three critical failures were compounding — each one quietly draining revenue the team couldn't see.

Critical

Deliverability was destroyed

56.3% of Gmail sends were bouncing. Yahoo was at 80.8%. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC were misconfigured. The domain's sending reputation was degrading with every campaign — and every email that bounced was a user who never saw the product.

56.3%

Gmail bounce rate

Critical

Onboarding was a dead end

Only 13.3% of users who signed up completed the onboarding flow. No engagement gates. No behavioral branching. No personalization. Users signed up, received generic messaging, and disappeared before the product could prove its value.

13.3%

Onboarding conversion

⚠

Severe

Re-engagement was broken at the trigger

The re-engagement campaign had 174,000 sends queued for a 66,000-contact list. A broken behavioral trigger was silently looping sends — 3× the list size. Meanwhile, only 1.0% of lapsed users were actually converting back.

174K

Queued sends (3× list size)

The Fix

What we rebuilt — and what changed.

Root cause was behavioral, not technical. The infrastructure wasn't broken because someone made a mistake. It was broken because nobody was watching. Every fix addressed the underlying logic — not just the symptoms.

Deliverability Rescue

Rebuilt SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configuration from scratch. Cleaned and restructured the contact list to remove high-bounce and inactive addresses. Optimized send patterns and volume ramping to rebuild sender reputation across Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.

56.3%→2.1%

Gmail bounce rate

80.8%→0%

Yahoo bounce rate

77.5%→0%

Outlook bounce rate

Before

After

Onboarding Architecture

Mapped the full user journey from signup through activation. Rebuilt the onboarding flow with engagement gates and behavioral branching in Customer.io. Created personalized messaging paths based on user signals, replacing the single-track generic sequence that was losing 87% of new users.

13.3%→60.2%

Onboarding conversion

—→4.5×

More users reaching paywall

Re-engagement Rebuild

Identified and fixed the broken trigger that was silently queuing 174,000 sends — 3× the entire contact list. Rebuilt re-engagement logic with correct behavioral conditions. Designed a phased paywall campaign architecture to convert recovered users.

8.5%→27.1%

Open rate

0.2%→6.1%

Click rate

1.0%→8.4%

Conversion rate

Re-engagement before and after — open, click, and conversion improvements

The Revenue Math

What the broken system was actually costing.

We didn't stay long enough to measure the full revenue impact. But the math — based on the app's own pricing and the improvements we measured — speaks for itself.

Re-engagement

$108K

Projected annual recovery

48,840 inactive users. Recovery rate moved from 1.0% to 8.4% — that's 3,615 additional users recovered. At $4.99/mo with a conservative 50% paid conversion: $108,254/yr in recoverable revenue.

Onboarding

4.5×

More users reaching paywall

Onboarding went from 13.3% to 60.2%. Every 1,000 new signups now sends 469 additional users to the paywall. At $4.99/mo — that compounds every single month.

Deliverability

2.2×

Multiplier on all email revenue

Gmail delivery went from 43.7% to 97.9%. Yahoo from 19.2% to 100%. This is a multiplier on every onboarding email, every re-engagement campaign, every paywall nudge. None of the other fixes matter if users never see the email.

Conservative projected annual recovery

$150K — $250K+

Based on the app's $4.99/mo subscription, 66,000 contacts, and the measured improvements across deliverability, onboarding, and re-engagement. Annual plan revenue ($79.99/yr) pushes the ceiling significantly higher.

Projections based on measured improvements and published app pricing. Actual revenue impact depends on conversion rates, churn, and user acquisition volume — variables we did not have access to during the engagement.

Testimonials

What clients actually say.

"Isaac identified issues in our lifecycle infrastructure we'd been missing for months. The improvement was immediate and measurable."

Genevieve Bellaire

Founder, Realworld

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

"What impressed me most was the depth of his thinking around retention. Instead of jumping straight into tactics, he analysed our entire customer journey and connected that with lifecycle messaging in a way that made complete sense."

Monica Anyango

Founder, Simplicity & Productivity Co.

"Isaac turned what felt like a messy problem into a clear system. He mapped our onboarding journey, showed us exactly where users were dropping off, and delivered email flows ready to launch immediately."

Abimbola Ajibade

Co-founder, Kitov Consult

Nathan Barry, Founder of Kit, responding to a Perennus lifecycle teardown on LinkedIn

From a single workspace scan: 66,000 contacts analyzed. 32% invalid emails identified. 74% inactive contacts flagged. A broken behavioral trigger silently queuing 174,000 emails — zero delivered. That same diagnostic framework now runs inside Perennus, automatically, every 6 hours.

Before — Deliverability Breakdown

Customer.io deliverability report showing 56.3% Gmail bounce rate, 80.8% Yahoo bounce rate

After — Deliverability Restored

Customer.io deliverability report showing 2.1% Gmail bounce rate, 0% Yahoo bounce rate