Case study 04
Losing 73% of active users to Uber Eats, and staying alive anyway.
A regional food delivery company had built the market across the Balkans: over €20M in annual recurring revenue, a €45k monthly acquisition budget, bootstrapped and profitable. Then Uber Eats arrived with a global brand, a subscription program, and a rider fleet the company couldn't match. Active users dropped 73%. Average order value fell 45%. Lifetime value against acquisition cost fell to 0.5. The company went from market leader to nearly irrelevant in under a year, and the board panicked. This isn't a story about hypergrowth. It's a story about what it takes to not die.
Right after the collapse
LTV to CAC ratio at 0.5, losing money on every new customer
Active users down 73%, average order value down 45%
Reactivation campaigns landing flat
A board in panic over a rapidly declining brand
14 months later
LTV to CAC ratio back up to 4 to 1
136k active users, stabilized
€9.6M ARR, down from the €20M peak, but profitable again
Cash-flow positive, a stable pillar of the local market again
Cutting losses first
Wasteful ad spend got killed and campaigns that weren't earning their budget got paused immediately. Before anything else, the bleeding had to stop.
Finding who still cared
Aggressive re-segmentation and reactivation campaigns went out to find the users who hadn't already switched over. Positioning shifted from "fast delivery" to local loyalty and community, since the company could never out-app a global platform.
A referral program built to reignite growth
Referrals paid €150 to the person who sponsored and €150 to the new customer, but only after their third order. It was expensive, and it worked: growth loops that had gone quiet started moving again.
Rebuilding the lifecycle from zero
Non-transactional brand content, a welcome sequence with a discount, and automated reactivation for the top 10 LTV customers every six months replaced what little reactivation used to exist. Paid acquisition restarted too, at €12k a month instead of the old €45k, and judged strictly on ROI instead of installs.
The board wanted a unicorn story. What they got instead was a survivor, still standing after a global competitor moved into its market.
Against a giant with a bigger budget, the answer isn't outspending. It's outlasting.
Not everything worked
Staying alive cost real money too.
€400k went into referral credits before the program's return actually stabilized. Tens of thousands of users left for Uber's app anyway; no amount of lifecycle work was winning all of them back. The board wanted a growth story, not a survival one, and the honest answer was that acquisition is rarely the right response to a brand in free fall. A tight lifecycle system is.
Client name withheld and identifying details generalized, per the engagement's NDA. The dates and numbers are real.