The Edtech App That Stopped Growing
The Prompt
Your client runs a vernacular-language exam-prep app (government job exams: SSC, banking, railways) with 8 million downloads and ₹90 crore revenue from a ₹999/year subscription. Revenue has been flat for four quarters despite downloads growing 20% per quarter. Diagnose and fix.
Structure & Hypothesis
Analysis & Data
Activation is your collapsed stage. Dig.
A rate that halves while volume doubles is usually a mix problem: the marginal installer differs from the historical one. I'd split activation by acquisition channel and by language. Hypothesis: growth marketing widened targeting — cheaper installs from users outside the core exam-aspirant profile, or from languages where content is thin.
Rate collapse + volume growth → always decompose by cohort before blaming the product.
Sharp. 70% of new installs now come from a viral short-video campaign in Bhojpuri and Marathi — languages where the app has only 15% of its question-bank translated. Those users activate at 9%. Hindi-channel installs still activate at 37%.
So growth bought the wrong audience for the current product — or the right audience for a product that doesn't exist yet. Two honest paths: refocus spend on Hindi-belt channels where the product is complete, or treat Bhojpuri/Marathi as the next product investment since the demand signal is real — 70% of installs is not noise. Given flat revenue and a working Hindi engine, I'd do both sequentially: fix the spend now, build Marathi content next (larger exam population than Bhojpuri), launch properly in two quarters.
Recommendation
Recommend
- Immediately re-weight acquisition spend toward channels/languages where the product is complete; stop buying installs the product can't serve.
- Build the Marathi question bank to 90% coverage in two quarters — the campaign proved demand; meet it before re-opening the spend tap.
- Add an activation-by-cohort dashboard as a permanent guardrail: any channel activating <25% gets auto-flagged before budget scales.
- Address the renewal softness with exam-cycle-aligned renewal offers (renew before prelims at a discount), but treat it as secondary.
Key Takeaway
What this case teaches
When a funnel rate collapses while volume grows, the cause is almost always who's arriving, not what they find. Decompose by cohort first — and recognize that "bad" traffic is sometimes tomorrow's product roadmap announcing itself.