Balance Conversion and Retention Growth

Company Context

StreamFit is a subscription-based fitness app with 12M monthly active users across iOS, Android, and web. The company has strong top-of-funnel acquisition through paid marketing and creator partnerships, but growth has slowed because many new users convert quickly and then churn within the first 60 days.

Problem

The growth team wants to increase short-term paid conversion by pushing a more aggressive paywall: fewer free workouts, earlier upgrade prompts, and limited trial access. Early tests suggest this could raise 14-day free-to-paid conversion from 6.8% to 8.1%. However, historical data shows users who complete at least 5 free workouts before seeing a hard paywall have 25% higher 90-day retention and 18% higher lifetime value.

Today, StreamFit's leadership is debating whether to optimize for immediate revenue efficiency or for a healthier long-term subscriber base. The CEO has asked product to recommend a strategy that balances both outcomes rather than maximizing only one metric.

Deliverables

1. Define how you would frame the trade-off between short-term conversion and long-term retention for StreamFit.
2. Identify the most important user segments and their core jobs-to-be-done.
3. Recommend a product approach, including what you would change in onboarding, paywall timing, or free experience.
4. Define success metrics and guardrails to evaluate whether the strategy is working.
5. Explain the key trade-offs and how you would make a launch decision if conversion improves but retention worsens.

Constraints

• MVP must launch within 10 weeks.
• Only 1 growth PM, 4 engineers, 1 designer, and shared data science support are available.
• Marketing CAC has increased 20% quarter-over-quarter, so leadership wants payback within 9 months.
• The team can run experiments, but cannot rebuild the full subscription system or pricing architecture this quarter.