From €190 CAC to €25 for AI skin assessment app
CHALLENGES
1. CAC was unsustainable at €190. The app was acquiring users at a cost that the unit economics couldn't support at scale. 2. The product assumed women were the users. Initial positioning, copy, onboarding flow, and channel mix were all built around a female user. Brand voice carried the conventions of the female skincare category. 3. Customer interviews had been conducted but never systematically analyzed. The data was sitting in raw form. Patterns within it hadn't been surfaced. 4. The category was saturated. Female skincare apps are one of the most competitive consumer categories in Europe, fighting for attention against established brands meant burning marketing spend at a CPM premium. 5. One value proposition was being pushed to every segment. Even when prospects from different segments engaged with the app, they were all being shown the same positioning, the same flow, the same message.
SOLUTION
Re-analyzing the customer interviews Strategy: Re-examine the interviews the team had already done, looking for patterns the founder hadn't surfaced. Outcome: A pattern emerged across the interviews with women in relationships: they were running the assessment and ordering products for their boyfriends. The boyfriends didn't know how to navigate skincare on their own. The actual end-user of the assessment was often the male partner, but the app was speaking only to women. Two-layer ICP rebuild — segment AND mental model Strategy: Don't just shift the ICP from women to men. Understand that men brought a fundamentally different mental model to the category, and rebuild the product's value proposition around it. Outcome: Two different value propositions, not one. The same underlying product, but completely different framings: exploration for the female segment, fast answer for the male segment. Product flow and brand rebuild for the male user Strategy: Rebuild the homepage, onboarding flow, and brand language around the male user's actual mental model, speed and clarity. Specifically addressed men with beards, a segment with distinct skin needs that the existing brands weren't speaking to clearly. Outcome: Product flow simplified for the male user. Conversion improved immediately because the message matched how men were already approaching skincare. Channel reallocation Strategy: Move acquisition spend from saturated female-skincare channels to less competitive male-skincare ones. Outcome: Acquisition costs fell sharply once the brand stopped paying premium CPMs in a saturated category and started speaking the right language to a less-served one.
RESULTS
Re-analyzing the customer interviews Strategy: Re-examine the interviews the team had already done, looking for patterns the founder hadn't surfaced. Outcome: A pattern emerged across the interviews with women in relationships: they were running the assessment and ordering products for their boyfriends. The boyfriends didn't know how to navigate skincare on their own. The actual end-user of the assessment was often the male partner, but the app was speaking only to women. Two-layer ICP rebuild — segment AND mental model Strategy: Don't just shift the ICP from women to men. Understand that men brought a fundamentally different mental model to the category, and rebuild the product's value proposition around it. Outcome: Two different value propositions, not one. The same underlying product, but completely different framings: exploration for the female segment, fast answer for the male segment. Product flow and brand rebuild for the male user Strategy: Rebuild the homepage, onboarding flow, and brand language around the male user's actual mental model, speed and clarity. Specifically addressed men with beards, a segment with distinct skin needs that the existing brands weren't speaking to clearly. Outcome: Product flow simplified for the male user. Conversion improved immediately because the message matched how men were already approaching skincare. Channel reallocation Strategy: Move acquisition spend from saturated female-skincare channels to less competitive male-skincare ones. Outcome: Acquisition costs fell sharply once the brand stopped paying premium CPMs in a saturated category and started speaking the right language to a less-served one.