Experiment 1: the Brainly channel
Hypothesis: a meaningful share of math learners on Brainly would enroll with Cuemath. Setup: a Cuemath landing page on Brainly, a co-branded sign-up flow, exposed to 50% of Brainly’s North American math learners.
Observed: 15–20 leads a day — a nice-looking number hiding a ~60% junk rate, weak interest in the programs, and registration-to-demo and demo-to-payment conversion far below every other channel.
Verdict: not an effective channel without a heavy upfront qualification step. Shut it down. The rule it left behind: an acquisition channel that skips qualification doesn’t remove the cost — it relocates it to the sales team.
Experiment 2: the freemium portal
Hypothesis: giving parents a free self-learning product would shorten and improve conversion. Setup: a new sign-up page, a freemium K-8 learning system, and four weeks of organic blog traffic routed at it.
Observed: the acquisition metrics flattered — sign-up conversion 5.2% → 9.9%, login rates 19% → 60%, 300+ registrations. The engagement metrics told the truth: week-1 retention was 20%, and demo bookings were under 1% versus 30% in the regular flow.
Then 30+ parent conversations explained why: parents wanted live human instruction, not recorded videos; they had neither the time nor the confidence to guide the child through a platform; they saw it as practice, not learning. A parallel 300-parent pilot confirmed the preference for a custom tutor over one-size-fits-all software.
Verdict: the product wasn’t ready for self-serve, and the demand wasn’t there. Scrapped it — including the parts I’d championed.
What this says about how I work
Experiments only earn their cost if you’re willing to believe their answer. Both of these produced numbers that could have justified continuing; the discipline was in looking at the metrics that measured value, not activity.