Situation
I joined Market Rebellion (then Investitute) as a startup looking for product-market fit in financial education. The company had audience, personality, and content—what it lacked was a coherent self-serve product system: onboarding, packaging, pricing, and a flagship that members would pay premium prices to keep.
Constraint
This was a high-consideration subscription (thousands of dollars per year) sold into a community that cared about trust. We could not “growth-hack” our way around activation quality. Testing velocity had to coexist with a serious customer experience.
Decision
I owned the end-to-end self-serve funnel: acquisition, onboarding, activation, pricing experiments, conversion, expansion, and retention.
- 0→1 flagship. Partnered with business development to create Unusual Option Activity, using a beta group, market research, and iterative design. It became the company’s flagship product.
- Lifecycle as the product. Redesigned onboarding and purchase flows so first-time customers could activate without a concierge bottleneck.
- Packaging and pricing. Introduced new subscription tiers and ran structured pricing experiments across channels, balancing conversion with long-term revenue quality.
- Instrumentation and discovery. Set KPIs per product, interviewed customers, and used behavior data to find monetization opportunities instead of adding features by instinct.
Outcome
- Premium subscription base grew from 2,000 to more than 7,000 accounts in under two years.
- Subscription revenue doubled year over year.
- Unusual Option Activity became the product the rest of the business could orbit.
- Public traffic growth (Crunchbase, Feb 2023) showed 23.6% monthly website visit growth—a lagging indicator of a clearer offer and funnel.
What I would do again
Treat onboarding as a product surface, not a marketing page. For high-ACV subscriptions, activation quality is the growth loop.
What I would change
I would have staffed experimentation as a shared operating cadence earlier—fewer hero tests, more of a weekly decision rhythm once the flagship existed.