When Lumen Analytics signed our engagement letter in August, they were doing $80K MRR, had burned through $14M of a $22M Series A, and the board had given the founders 18 months to either get to $500K MRR or sell. Nine months later they cleared $720K MRR with capital to spare. This is what we did, what we didn't, and what compounded.
The diagnostic. Every engagement starts with a 30-day diagnostic, and Lumen's surfaced four things. First, paid acquisition CAC had tripled in 18 months — but not because the market had gotten harder. They'd diluted their best campaigns by bolting on broad-match keyword expansion that ate budget without converting. Second, their organic content program was ranking, but for the wrong terms — high-traffic, low-intent BoFu searches that brought tire-kickers, not buyers. Third, the marketing site was a 2021 Webflow template with 3.2-second LCP and a demo form that converted at 1.9%. Fourth, the founder was personally writing every sales follow-up. Removing him from the loop would be the single highest-leverage change in the engagement.
What we shipped, in order of impact.
Paid restructure. We consolidated 40+ campaigns into 6. Killed brand-bidding waste. Migrated all conversion tracking to server-side via stape.io. Within 60 days, CAC dropped 38%. By month 6, it was down 62%.
New marketing site. Eight-week build in Next.js, deployed to Vercel. Sub-1s LCP. Embedded ROI calculator on the pricing page (the same kind we now ship to every client). Demo-request CVR went from 1.9% to 8.4% in the first 30 days.
Topical authority program. We mapped 60 commercial keywords across 12 topical clusters and shipped 72 long-form articles + 11 customer case studies in nine months. By month 9, organic was driving 47% of trial signups.
Lifecycle infrastructure. HubSpot-powered lead scoring + routing wired into Salesforce. The founder was out of the sales response loop by month 4. Trial-to-paid conversion went from 11% to 23%.
What we didn't do. No rebrand. No "thought leadership" podcast that no one would listen to. No paid social influencer plays for a niche B2B SaaS. No conferences. No PR push. Boring, focused, compounding work.
The four leverage points that compounded. Most engagements I run, I can identify two or three structural decisions that did 80% of the work. For Lumen: (1) server-side conversion tracking that finally gave Google's bidder accurate signal, (2) the topical map that prioritized BoFu commercial intent over MoFu/ToFu volume, (3) the new site's ROI calculator that made buyers self-qualify before talking to sales, and (4) the lifecycle program that took the founder out of the inbox.
The lesson, generalized. The bottleneck in most growth-stage SaaS isn't 'more channels' — it's tighter integration of the channels they already have, plus removing the founder from operational paths he never should have been in. Diagnose first. Ship the boring structural fixes. Watch compounding do its thing.
