Case study 01
A side hustle became a second business unit in 100 days.
Two founders ran a premium men's hairstyling brand: a curated product marketplace plus their own in-house line. The website existed to support their salon, not the other way around, and it showed. €12k a month, no acquisition plan, no retention, a checkout that lost people before they could pay. A hundred days later, they were calling it their second business unit.
Day 1
€12k MRR, run as an afterthought to the salon
No paid acquisition running
Checkout took 6 steps to complete
No lifecycle emails, no win-back, no retargeting
Day 100
€26k MRR, run as its own line of business
Paid acquisition scaling on a fixed weekly cadence
Checkout down to 3 steps
A lifecycle and retargeting system paying for itself
Paid acquisition
The ad account started from nothing: no pixel history, no past creative to build on. Every angle got tested cold, and only a proven winner got scaled, at a fixed 20% a week and never faster.
Retargeting
Each stage of the funnel got its own audience: people who'd viewed a product, people who'd abandoned a cart, and past buyers. A segment that underperformed got cut within days. The ones that converted got the extra budget.
Checkout and product pages
Checkout went from 6 steps to 3. Product pages that used to read like ingredient labels got rewritten around what the product actually does for the buyer, and customer video went up on the landing pages.
Lifecycle
A welcome flow, a first order discount, and reactivation sends at 30, 60, and 90 days replaced what had been total silence after checkout. Seasonal pushes and a subscription option gave repeat buyers a reason to stay on the list.
“This is our second business unit.”
Not everything worked
The honest version includes what failed first.
A batch of new ad creative burned through €3.2k before the drop in performance was obvious: click-through fell 40% against what was already running. A checkout redesign meant to speed things up slowed it down for two full weeks, until the actual friction point got found and fixed, after which conversion came back 38% higher than where it started. Around week six, scaling the ad budget further stopped working, and cost per acquisition spiked across every campaign. The fix was splitting campaigns by order value instead of running one blended audience, so each tier could scale on its own terms.
Client name withheld and identifying details generalized, per the engagement's NDA. The dates and numbers are real.