You raised. The clock started. Now you have to prove the growth holds.
The round bought time, not answers. Over the next few months the company has to show activation, retention and revenue that hold up in the next investor conversation.
What's usually missing is someone senior dedicated to turning those signals into product decisions.
A one-week diagnostic, or a 4 to 8 week sprint with execution alongside your team. See formats
Danilo Campos · founder of MeuCarrinho (acquired by Buscapé) · 15+ years in product and growth · ex-Empiricus (churn from 30% to 9%)
Growing products go through one of these moments.
People sign up.
But they never reach the value.
The top of the funnel works. Sign-ups, downloads, leads. But most people disappear before experiencing what the product actually does well.
The usual diagnosis is to blame acquisition. So the company buys more traffic, and the hole in the middle of the funnel only gets bigger and more expensive.
Result: you pay to fill a leaky bucket, and the bill grows along with the growth.
The numbers went up.
But part of that is paid media and sales effort, not product.
The top-line chart grows. Acquisition works, sales hits target, investor updates look good.
But cohort retention doesn't follow, and that tends to surface only when someone looks at the growth more closely.
Result: growth that depends on spend, not on product. The day the spend stops, the number stops climbing.
Every product decision goes through you.
And the roadmap became a request queue.
Priorities shift every week. You decide what goes into the product while also selling, hiring and talking to investors, and product ends up being the last seat at the table.
Hiring helped with execution, but not with direction. Without someone holding a mandate to say no, the roadmap becomes a list of whoever asked loudest, most recently, or with the most leverage.
Result: more people working, without that turning into more focus. The round bought execution capacity, not decision capacity.
The product works.
But the company is trying to be many things at once.
New money in the bank creates the temptation to open fronts: new segments, new use cases, sales chasing increasingly different profiles because the growth target demands volume. Each decision makes sense on its own.
But the product loses focus, positioning weakens, and the roadmap tries to serve everyone.
Result: growth without a clear market direction, which is exactly what the next round will question.
If you recognize yourself in any of these situations, what's usually missing isn't more people, more process or more effort.
What's usually missing is someone responsible for turning those signals into decisions, before they turn into churn, stagnation or a harder round to raise.
Three times the problem wasn't what it looked like.
−70%
churn in the first 7 days, from 30% to 9% in 3 months · Empiricus
Acquisition worked, but 3 out of every 10 subscribers cancelled in the first week.
The company was betting on a superapp. The hypothesis was that product was missing.
I went and talked to the people who cancelled. Those interviews, cross-referenced with an analysis of where the journey stalled, showed something else: subscribers weren't reaching, in the first few days, the thing that made them buy. We traded the superapp for focus on the core value, with a clear metric and experiments in activation and onboarding.
→ R$15M+ in ARR impact. The same principle applied to freemium made app revenue grow 50% in the first month.
2M
downloads without a cent of paid media · MeuCarrinho
A shopping list app I founded, with zero paid media budget.
Everyone was watching downloads and active users. But an active user who opens the app and doesn't use it turns into neither retention nor revenue.
I started measuring what actually signalled value received: items added per active user. I redesigned the experience around that and attacked growth on two fronts: organic acquisition, through SEO, ASO and distribution partnerships, and recurrence, through list sharing and reminders that brought people back.
→ 22x in engagement over 12 months and month-3 retention from 5% to 25%. The company was acquired by Buscapé.
R$50K
in MRR by the third month, on a new product · Cogtive
The technology was proven, but only in two specific scenarios. The real question was whether that could become a product for more people, without breaking a lean team.
It looked like a question of engineering effort: just build more and cover more cases.
I ran two fronts in parallel. Conversations across segments, to find where the pain paid. And POCs, to learn what was actually viable inside the operation the company had, not the one it wished it had. The ICP came out of the intersection.
→ The same method, applied later to a second product, validated 37% purchase intent in one month: of 8 customers in the pilot, 3 asked to discuss a commercial proposal on their own.
Start small. Grow if it makes sense.
Three formats, from an outside look to product leadership inside the company.
1 week
For those who want to understand the bottleneck before committing to anything bigger.
I look at activation, retention and revenue data, talk to the team and to a few customers, and hand back the bottleneck named, with what to do about it.
The entry point. Usually the first step.
4 to 8 weeks
For those who already know they have a problem and want to attack it.
I work alongside the team to investigate causes, make decisions and implement changes, in activation, retention, monetization or product focus.
I don't hand over a report with recommendations. I stay involved until the change actually happens.
Duration follows the bottleneck, not a package: onboarding responds in weeks, retention needs a full cycle. The timeline is set in the diagnostic.
Recurring · on request
For those who need the product function structured, not one problem solved.
I work next to the founder to set direction, turn business signals into clear priorities and structure the product function.
I can be the company's first product person.
Format defined together with the company's leadership.
What shaped the way I work
MeuCarrinho
Co-founder and the only person responsible for product, from concept to the acquisition by Buscapé.
I built product, growth and operations with no prior structure and no playbook.
Empiricus
I cut churn from 30% to 9% leading product for more than 450 thousand subscribers.
It isn't just having operated at large scale, it's having seen what breaks when growth accelerates before the product is ready for it.
Cogtive
I killed an AI product with high usage, because customers didn't see enough value in it.
Healthy usage metrics can hide the absence of real adoption. Knowing when to stop is worth as much as knowing where to invest.
Legurmê
I entered a category with high differentiation and low turnover, betting the product would make up for it. It didn't.
Differentiation doesn't rescue a wrong market choice. That decision made the first years more expensive and slower than they needed to be.
I've worked in very different contexts and, despite the differences, I kept seeing the same pattern.
A good product doesn't scale on its own.
At some point, growth starts to depend less on new features and more on the quality of the decisions.
Recognizing that pattern, and knowing what to do about it, is the center of the work I do.
Who this is for
Works best for companies that:
- · already have a product live and paying customers, even if just a few
- · have a technical team building
- · don't have a dedicated senior product person
- · raised recently, or reached this point without raising
This isn't the right path if you
- · don't have a product live or paying customers yet (that's a different job)
- · want someone to execute a backlog instead of deciding what goes into it
- · want to outsource product entirely instead of building the capability in-house
Want to start with the diagnostic? Just fill in below.
No pitch. No sales process. You talk, I listen, and we decide together whether it makes sense to move forward.
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