The First Meeting
I still remember that first Zoom call like it happened yesterday.
The founders were crammed into a little office in Tel Aviv that looked more like a storage unit than a startup headquarters. I could see the whiteboard behind them — covered in diagrams, arrows pointing everywhere, sticky notes piled on top of each other. It was chaotic in a way that only early-stage startups can be.
There were three of them. Eli, the product guy, did most of the talking. He had that wired energy you only get from too much coffee and too little sleep. He was proud of what they had built, but you could hear the frustration in his voice. Dov, the quiet one, mostly listened. Every time Eli said something, you could see Dov analyzing it, weighing the implications. He was the operations brain, the one keeping the trains from flying off the tracks. And then there was Yaron, leaning back slightly, the business side of things. He was the one pitching investors, trying to keep the lights on, and you could tell from his tired eyes that fundraising wasn’t going as smoothly as he wanted.
They told me about their product. A telehealth platform designed to connect patients with licensed therapists and doctors through video. Scheduling, payment, records — all inside one app. It wasn’t bloated. It wasn’t messy. It did what it was supposed to do.
But then they got quiet. And Eli said the thing that most founders avoid admitting out loud.
“We thought if we built a good product, people would use it. But we can’t keep them. They leave. We don’t know why.”
They were adding about 500 new users every month. That sounded decent at first. But churn was destroying them. People would sign up, maybe try it once, then disappear. Their active user base never grew past a couple thousand. They were pouring water into a bucket full of holes.
That’s the moment I knew what they were really up against.
I’ve been around long enough to know that most startups want to talk about features, or marketing hacks, or the next campaign that will “go viral.” But none of that matters if people don’t stick. A leaky bucket will never fill, no matter how much water you pour in.
I told them flat out: “You don’t have a product problem. You have a story and systems problem. Right now, people don’t know why they should stay. And you’re making it way too easy for them to leave. Fix that, and your numbers will change. Ignore it, and you’ll keep bleeding money until you can’t raise another round.”
The room got quiet on their end. Dov leaned forward, scribbling something on a notepad. Yaron rubbed his forehead. Eli just stared at me for a long second, then nodded slowly.
“Alright,” he said. “Then that’s where we start.”
That was the beginning of a year-long climb.
Months 1–3: Becoming the Customer
Whenever I take on a SaaS client, the first thing I do is the same thing I do with clinics or e-commerce brands: I become the customer. Not the loyal power user. Not the beta tester who already knows the quirks. The fresh, skeptical stranger who has no reason to care and a thousand other options.
So I signed up.
And right away, I saw the cracks.
The signup was too long. Screen after screen of questions that didn’t need to be asked up front. I could feel my patience slipping with each click. By the time I reached the dashboard, I was already irritated. And when I got there? Clutter. Tabs everywhere. No clear path forward.
And then nothing. No welcome email. No “Here’s your first step.” Just silence.
I pictured someone like Yael, a 29-year-old marketing manager in New Jersey, sitting at her kitchen table late at night after another hard day. She’s been thinking about therapy for months, but it always felt intimidating. That night she finally gives in, Googles “online therapy,” clicks an ad, and signs up. She wants reassurance. Instead, she’s left staring at a bare dashboard with no guidance. She shuts her laptop and tells herself she’ll deal with it later.
And “later” never comes.
That’s where churn was happening. Not after three months. Not even after a week. Within the first ten minutes.
I told Eli and the team: “You can’t throw people into the deep end and hope they swim. You need to walk them into the water. Right now, you’re losing them before they even start. Fix onboarding, and you’ll stop the bleeding.”
We rebuilt it. Cut the signup in half. Every screen explained why the question mattered. The dashboard was cleaned up so the next step was painfully obvious: “Book your first appointment in under three minutes.”
And the silence was replaced with a welcome flow. Not robotic, not full of jargon. Real human-sounding emails:
“Welcome, Yael. We know the first step is the hardest. Let’s make the second step easy.”
By the end of month three, the numbers shifted. People were booking their first appointments instead of disappearing. The churn curve started to flatten.
One user, Lior — a 41-year-old father of two in Chicago — sent a note to support: “I almost gave up at signup, but the reminders walked me through. Glad I didn’t quit. My first session was better than I expected.”
That’s when I knew we had plugged the first leak.
Months 4–6: Showing Up in Search
Once we had onboarding patched, the next big question was growth.
At that point, every new signup was being bought. Google Ads. Facebook Ads. Even a few experiments on TikTok. The cost per user was ugly, and worse, it was unpredictable. Some weeks campaigns looked efficient, the next week they spiked. They were bleeding cash on acquisition just to stand still.
I asked them if they’d looked seriously at organic search. Eli admitted they hadn’t. “We thought SEO was too slow,” he said. That’s what most startups believe — that search is a luxury for later. But the truth is, paid ads are like gasoline. They’ll keep the car running, but without an engine, you’re just pouring money into fumes.
So I ran a check.
The results were worse than I expected. They weren’t ranking for anything meaningful. Not “online therapy.” Not “see a doctor online.” Not even long-tail searches like “same-day telehealth appointment for flu.” In the U.S., if you searched for the very thing they did best, they didn’t exist.
I told them straight: “You’re invisible where it matters most. If you’re not showing up when people are searching in the middle of their need, you’re handing those customers to your competitors.”
The room was quiet for a beat. Dov frowned, taking notes. Yaron finally said, “So what do we do?”
We built an engine.
Every service got its own landing page. But not written like technical documentation. Written like a friend answering your question in plain English. Instead of “Licensed mental health professional video consultation,” it became: “Talk to a therapist online today — no waiting list, no travel.”
We organized content around intent. Anxiety. Stress. Parenting challenges. Late-night worries. The kind of things people actually type when they’re desperate and tired.
I told them to picture Tamar, a college student in Boston, awake at 2 a.m. after another sleepless night. She doesn’t search “synchronous behavioral telehealth platform.” She types, “online therapy at night.” And if you don’t show up for her in that moment, you’ve lost her forever.
So we built pages for her. For people like her. Pages that didn’t just chase keywords, but spoke to the reality of what people needed.
By the end of month six, it started to work. Slowly at first, then with momentum. Traffic was climbing. Signups were flowing in without a dollar spent on ads.
I remember Eli calling me one morning, excited. “We just had three bookings come in overnight, all from search. First time ever.” His voice had that mix of disbelief and relief I’ve heard many times before. It’s the sound of a founder realizing the treadmill of ad spend isn’t the only way forward.
And then there was Tamar herself. She booked her first therapy session at 2:15 a.m. after typing those exact words — “online therapy at night.” Later she told her therapist, “I only found you because you showed up when I needed it.”
That’s the difference between being invisible and being present.
Months 7–9: Telling the Story
Traffic was flowing. Onboarding was fixed enough that people weren’t slipping out the back door right away. But I’ve been around long enough to know that those two things — acquisition and mechanics — aren’t enough to build loyalty.
At some point, people have to care. And caring doesn’t come from features. It comes from story.
So one morning, I asked the founders a question that I knew would make them uncomfortable.
“Why did you really build this company?”
Eli gave me the startup answer first. “Access. Scale. Efficiency. The market’s huge, and we can serve it better than traditional healthcare can.”
I cut him off. “That’s investor talk. Not patient talk. Your users don’t care about disruption. They care about whether you understand them. So again: why did you build this?”
The silence on the call stretched. Yaron shifted in his chair. Dov looked down at his notebook. Finally, Eli leaned back and exhaled.
He told me about his sister. She had moved to a new city and tried to find a therapist. She called every clinic she could find. Most didn’t answer. A few put her on hold. One finally offered an appointment — in three months. By then, she’d given up.
That stuck with him. He told me, “I couldn’t stand the thought of people needing help and being told to wait months. That’s why I built this. Because no one should have to wait when they need care.”
That was it. The real story.
Up until that moment, everything about the company’s voice was generic. “Fast, affordable telehealth.” “Licensed providers at your fingertips.” It sounded like every other app. And generic voices don’t build loyalty.
I told them: “That’s the story you lead with. Not disruption. Not scale. Not efficiency. The fact that people are being told to wait when they need help, and you exist to fix that. That’s your heartbeat.”
So we rebuilt the brand voice from the inside out.
The homepage led with a promise: “Care when you need it. Not months from now.”
The About page told Eli’s story — not as a pitch, but as a human reason.
Every onboarding email was reframed around that heartbeat: “You don’t have to wait. Start today.”
And I told them not to sanitize it. The honesty mattered more than polish. People trust raw truth more than fancy slogans.
By the end of month nine, the shift was showing.
Support tickets included messages like, “I felt like you understood what I was going through.” Reviews weren’t just about convenience anymore. They were about trust.
I remember one user, Oren, a 34-year-old father in Florida. He had signed up late one night after his wife suggested he try therapy. In his review, he wrote: “I came here because it was quick. But I stayed because it felt like someone actually built this for me, not just to make money.”
That line stuck with me. Because that’s the moment you stop being an app and start being a brand.
Inside the company, things were shifting too. The founders sounded different in meetings. Eli, who used to rattle off features, started talking about the mission first. Yaron, who had been discouraged by investors pushing for short-term numbers, now had a story he could use to explain why this company mattered long-term. And Dov, the cautious one, admitted, “I didn’t believe story would change retention. But it has.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’ve seen it over and over: when people know why you exist, they give you more grace, more patience, more loyalty.
By month nine, they weren’t just getting users. They were building believers.
Months 10–12: Building Retention
By month ten, the startup had traction. People were signing up. They were booking first sessions. They were sticking around longer than before.
But I’ve seen enough companies hit this point and stall. Growth curves bend upward, everyone celebrates, but if you don’t build retention, that curve flattens and eventually drops. New users don’t mean much if they vanish after their first appointment.
I told Eli and the team: “You’ve fixed the funnel leaks. Now you need to build walls so people stay. Retention isn’t a side project — it’s the business.”
They were nervous. Subscription models are always tricky. Charge too much, and people cancel. Make it too loose, and you’re giving away value. But I told them the same thing I’ve told e-commerce and healthcare clients for years: “If you don’t give people a clear path to stay, they won’t. You have to make the habit for them.”
So we built systems that nudged people forward without pushing them away.
The first was a subscription tier. Simple. Straightforward. One flat monthly price that bundled therapy sessions with check-ins. Instead of asking clients to rebook every time, we gave them a “set it and forget it” option.
The second was reminders. After every session, users were prompted to book the next one before leaving the app. Not as a hard sell, but as a natural next step: “Most people book their next session right away so they don’t lose momentum. Would you like to do that now?”
The third was engagement between sessions. We started sending content — not filler, but real, practical guidance. Short notes on handling stress. Quick tips for parents managing sick kids. Small reminders that said, “We’re here. You’re not alone.”
I could see the impact almost immediately.
Yael, a mother of three in Dallas, is one story that still stands out. She signed up one night for a single pediatric consultation when her youngest spiked a fever. She thought she’d use it once and delete it. But then the reminders nudged her to book again, this time for herself. She had been putting off therapy for years, telling herself she was too busy. The app made it easy. By the third month, she had upgraded to the family subscription plan.
She told support in an email: “I didn’t expect to use this more than once, but the reminders kept me from putting it off. Now it’s just part of how I handle our health.”
That’s not just retention. That’s integration.
And she wasn’t alone. Lior, the father in Chicago who almost quit at signup months earlier, was still active. He had completed eight therapy sessions and written a note thanking the company for “helping me stick with something I always abandoned in the past.” Tamar, the college student in Boston, had referred three friends by then — all late-night signups like her.
The founders felt the shift too. Dov, the cautious operator, admitted on a call, “I used to think retention was fluff. But now it’s the difference between survival and growth.”
By month twelve, the numbers told the story clearly. From 500 signups a month to 15,000 active subscribers. Not downloads. Not email addresses. Paying users who showed up, booked, and stayed.
But beyond the numbers, there was a sense of stability. Investors who had once grilled Yaron about churn were now asking how fast they could scale. Eli, who used to lose sleep watching dashboards flatline, sent me a screenshot at midnight with active users climbing and the message: “I can finally breathe.”
That’s when I knew they weren’t just growing. They were building something durable.
The Results
A year might not sound like a long time, but in startup life it’s an eternity. Twelve months earlier, this company was gasping for air — spending too much to acquire users who vanished within days, wondering if they’d built something the market even wanted.
By month twelve, it was a different picture.
The numbers were the easiest part to measure. Active subscribers went from a stagnant couple thousand to 15,000. Retention had doubled. Acquisition costs dropped because organic search was pulling in users without burning cash. The subscription tier locked in recurring revenue. Those were the charts and graphs Yaron used in his investor pitches, and they looked impressive.
But the real shift wasn’t in the dashboards. It was in the people.
I’d get calls from Eli at odd hours — midnight his time, middle of the day mine. He’d hold his phone up to the camera, showing the dashboard as if I didn’t believe him. Active users climbing. Bookings happening while he slept. He once said, “For the first time, I feel like we’re not chasing growth. It’s chasing us.”
Dov, the cautious one, looked different too. In the early months, he’d been skeptical of every change. “Will this really matter? Shouldn’t we focus on features?” By the end, he was the one pushing the team to invest more in retention and brand voice. He admitted on one call, “I didn’t think story and systems would change the numbers. But they did. I was wrong.”
And then there were the users. Their voices were everywhere now — in reviews, in support tickets, in referrals.
Yael in Dallas, who started with a single pediatric consultation, now had her whole family on the subscription plan. She wrote: “I used to dread calling doctors. Now this is just part of our lives. My kids don’t even think twice.”
Tamar, the college student in Boston, had become something of an evangelist. She’d convinced three friends to sign up, telling them, “If it worked for me at 2 a.m., it’ll work for you too.”
Lior, the father in Chicago, who almost abandoned the app during signup, was still active nearly a year later. He’d told his therapist he’d “never stuck with therapy this long in my life.”
And Oren in Florida, the young father who said it felt like the platform was “built for people like me,” had upgraded his plan and was referring colleagues.
It wasn’t just numbers anymore. It was momentum. It was word-of-mouth. It was trust.
That’s when I knew they weren’t just a scrappy startup fighting for survival. They were a company with staying power.
The Lesson
If there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of working with businesses in every shape and size, it’s this: most don’t fail because the product is bad. They fail because nobody sees them, nobody trusts them, and nobody has a reason to stick around.
That’s what this telehealth company was up against when we first spoke. They weren’t broken. They weren’t missing features. They weren’t doomed. They were just invisible, confusing, and forgettable.
And no amount of ad spend can fix that.
Startups love to chase hacks. Viral TikToks. Paid ads with clever hooks. Growth “shortcuts.” I’ve been around long enough to know they don’t last. They give you spikes, but not roots.
What lasts is the boring stuff. The old-fashioned stuff. The things most founders overlook because they’re not glamorous.
You make signup simple. You guide people step by step. You show up where they’re searching at the exact moment they’re searching. You tell the truth about why you exist, and you tell it in plain language. And once they’re in, you build systems that keep them from drifting away.
That’s it. No magic. No silver bullet. Just doing the basics consistently, with care, until they compound.
This company went from 500 users a month to 15,000 active subscribers in a year. Not because of one big campaign. Not because of luck. But because they stopped trying to be clever and started doing the simple things right.
And that’s the part most founders don’t want to hear. Growth isn’t about chasing noise. It’s about clarity. It’s about persistence. It’s about giving people reasons to notice you, reasons to trust you, and reasons to come back.
That’s the work. That’s what lasts.
Marketing Unplugged 
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