The situation
Futurestay sells to "rentalpreneurs": independent hosts running one to five properties, a buyer who is time-poor, skeptical of software, and shopping in a category dominated by heavyweight channel managers. Growth ran on paid social and search feeding a self-serve trial, which means the funnel's economics live or die on two things: whether the ad-to-activation path converts, and whether you can trust your numbers channel by channel.
The constraint
The classic PLG trap: platform dashboards each grading their own homework. Meta claims the trial, Google claims the same trial, and the CRM tells a third story. Without channel-accurate attribution down to the campaign and ad-group level, budget allocation is a faith exercise, and every "scale what works" conversation is really "scale what claims credit best."
What I built
- An attribution system that ties trials and activations back to their true source at the campaign and ad-group level, reconciling platform claims against CRM reality, so budget moves on one version of the truth.
- A landing page program: purpose-built pages per campaign and audience rather than one homepage absorbing all traffic, with the brand's voice and conversion structure held consistent.
- Lifecycle onboarding: a multi-phase email program built around the moments that predict activation, because in PLG the funnel's most expensive leak is between signup and first value, not before signup.
- Growth reporting that the exec team could act on weekly: trials, activation, and funnel stages in one place, with definitions everyone agreed on.
The one idea worth stealing
In self-serve SaaS, attribution is not a reporting chore, it is the steering wheel. Every hour spent making the numbers channel-accurate pays back as budget that stops going to the loudest dashboard. Most startups optimize creatives for months while allocating spend on numbers that are quietly wrong; reverse that order and the same budget buys more growth.
Specific performance figures from this engagement are shared in conversation, not published.