Dasha Antonova / Marketing & Growth · Founder What usually breaks
Efficiency collapses with spend because the system was never built to carry it. Onboarding leaks. Monetisation was assumed, not proven. The signal going into the ad platforms is weak, so scale just buys worse users faster.
And the AI layer on top of a broken system doesn't fix it — it just breaks it faster and with better slides.
The project’s paid acquisition remained unprofitable overall. Investment continued while the economics were expected to improve.
Analysed unit economics by audience and focused spend on profitable segments. Then restructured campaigns so each channel received enough signals to optimise acquisition for those audiences.
A year of underperformance on a six-figure monthly budget. Plenty of activity, plenty of dashboards, no path to positive ROAS.
Stopped scaling and rebuilt the UA team’s expertise, campaign decision process and accountability for results.
Store presence treated as art direction rather than a conversion surface — the cheapest traffic in the funnel, left untested.
Treated App Store search results like a social media feed, testing our listing as an ad within it.
High-intent demand existed and nobody was buying it. Growth operations were improvised week to week.
Understood the marketplace’s unusual search mechanics and used long-tail keywords to capture demand competitors missed.