How a Diaper Brand 15x'd Revenue

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Here's something that might surprise you: A diaper brand just proved that the way most brands think about growth is broken.

Coterie 15x'd their revenue in 4 years. But here's the kicker, their revenue grew faster than their acquisition numbers.

How?

They killed the acquisition → retention handoff model that's choking growth at brands everywhere.

In a recent podcast episode, we sat down with Ankur Goyal, SVP of Growth at Coterie, to break down exactly how they restructured their entire growth organization. Plus, the customer intelligence framework that makes unified acquisition and retention possible.

🍽️ On the Menu:

Why More Customers ≠ More Revenue

Stopping Bad Customers Before They Enter Your Funnel

The Touchpoints Your Retention Team Ignores

Mining Gold from Your Subscription Data

BTW - Don’t miss the full conversation here:

Listen on Spotify 🎧 and Apple 🍎 as well.

"Revenue growth is probably more correlated with retention than it is acquisition."

That's Ankur's opening line, and it breaks the biggest assumption in DTC.

We've been programmed to think growth = more customers. 

But Coterie proved that growth = better customers who stick around longer.

Here's the structural difference:

The broken model: 

Acquisition team hits ROAS targets → hands customers to retention team → retention tries to fix what acquisition broke.

The Coterie model: 

Both acquisition and retention sit under one growth team, optimizing for the same metric, lifetime customer value.

As Ankur puts it: "There's acquisition and there's retention on the growth team... those are not separate functions."

When you optimize acquisition for cheap clicks and retention for email open rates, you're solving two different problems. 

The result? Customers acquired on discounts who churn the second you stop offering 50% off.

When both teams optimize for the same metric—long-term customer value—revenue compounds because you're not just adding customers, you're adding better customers.

Here's how to restructure your team:

Put both acquisition and retention under one leader who's measured on 6-month LTV instead of monthly ROAS. This forces both functions to optimize for the same outcome—sustainable customer value.

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Here's how Coterie predicts customer quality before it becomes a retention problem.

Ankur can tell you a customer's LTV using just 3 data points at checkout:

That's it. Not demographics. Not survey data. Just behavioral signals from the first transaction.

But the real breakthrough is preventing low LTV customers from entering your funnel in the first place.

To build your own quality system: 

1) Identify your 3 key first-purchase behavioral signals

2) Track LTV by acquisition source to see which messaging drives better customers

3) Create messaging guardrails that force every campaign to pitch product value, not discounts

Ankur's acquisition guardrail: "Every message has to make a pitch for the product."

Not the discount. Not the free shipping. The actual product value.

"Once you put that guardrail on the team, I think half of these problems and discussions on acquisition versus brand versus performance, they all disappear the second you put that guardrail."

Why? Because you're building acquisition campaigns that set up retention success. 

A customer acquired because "Coterie helps you sleep better" has a completely different retention profile than someone who showed up for "50% off diapers."

The messaging creates customer quality. The customer quality determines the LTV. The LTV determines whether your growth is sustainable.

Everyone obsesses over email flows. But Ankur discovered retention opportunities in places most brands never optimize.

Coterie customers interact with the main website once or twice during their entire relationship. But they constantly visit account management screens to modify subscriptions, change delivery dates, and add products.

For subscription brands, this means your account management screen matters more than your homepage for driving retention.

Audit your retention touchpoints: What pages do your subscription customers visit most? Are you optimizing them for retention or just treating them as functional screens? 

Start with your highest-traffic customer pages that aren't your homepage.

Confirmation emails get the highest click rates of any email type. Yet brands treat them like basic receipts instead of relationship-building opportunities.

Coterie's sizing service shows how to prevent churn before it starts.

Instead of waiting for customers to request the next diaper size, they automatically include a trial pack of the next size up in every shipment. This boosted retention rates because it solved a problem before customers knew they had it.

This is retention engineering—building systems that prevent churn instead of reacting to it.

Subscription brands sit on a goldmine of behavioral data. But most only use it for basic segmentation. 

Coterie found patterns that unlock retention opportunities:

When Coterie analyzed cancellation data, they found a clear pattern: churn spiked when customers reached Size 4 diapers. That's when potty training begins.

Instead of fighting the inevitable, Coterie built lifecycle triggers around it. Size 4 customers now get introduced to training pants and messaging about navigating this transition together.

They're using size progression—data they already capture—instead of surveys that customers won't complete.

When Coterie launched swim diapers, some customers started buying swim diapers instead of regular diapers—not because they needed them for swimming, but because they were prominently displayed.

The insight: Customers don't optimize their purchases. They buy what seems reasonable in the moment. Your job is guiding them to hero products that drive retention, not just displaying whatever inventory you need to move.

Look at your cancellation data by cohort and product. Where do you see churn spikes? 

Build lifecycle triggers around those moments instead of waiting for customers to tell you they're unhappy through surveys.