Only Crits came in with the hard part already built: a loved tabletop dice brand on Shopify, a paying subscriber base, and a healthy B2B custom-order pipeline. The problem was everything underneath it, running on manual hand-offs and scattered records instead of a system.
Where it started
Every custom order was relayed to the supplier by hand. The wholesale form had no gating, so low-intent leads were burning real hours. Support inquiries in Gorgias had no connection to Shopify or Airtable records, and SOPs lived in scattered places instead of one system.
Mid-engagement, a second problem came into focus: the Mystery Box subscription base had stalled around 335 active subscribers, with acquisition running episodic and promo-driven instead of systematic.
Killing a $499-a-month upgrade with verification
Recharge pitched a Plus upgrade at $499 a month against the current $99 Starter plan. We tested the pitch against the live account and the documentation: 5 of the 8 pitched features were already available on Starter, and the locked checkout upsells were gated by Shopify Plus, not Recharge, so no upgrade would have enabled them.
We then showed that a milestone-rewards path could run on the existing Starter plan in a live test, at roughly a tenth of the pitched cost, and profiled six alternative platforms before rejecting a switch entirely, since migrating would have moved over 300 live payment tokens for no real gain.
Turning churn into a solvable problem
A one-page decision report pulled every figure live from Recharge: 90% of churn confirmed voluntary, with product volume as the top cancel reason at twice the share of price. That reframed the entire retention conversation from guesswork to a ranked list of real levers.
The same instrumentation pass connected GA4 to Microsoft Clarity and put the Mystery Box subscribe funnel live across all three products, giving the team a measurement layer that hadn't existed before.
The work didn't start with tactics. It started with diagnosis: gate the leads, systematize the desk, and verify every vendor claim against the live account before spending. That discipline paid for itself on the very first decision.
