Riley Tanaka

Sam's at the restaurant. I went out anyway, little glass of red and a book, no laptop for once. mostly just sitting with the numbers and not hating where they're landing... feels like actual progress.

cool one this morning. not cold-cold, just enough that my hands were annoyed for the first half of the Holly -> 2nd & Brazos ride. 22 min again pretty much. air felt weirdly clear on Cesar Chavez.

Quick lunch with Priya. good, normal. mostly Q1 stuff outside the churn rabbit hole -- she wants the activation work kept boring and on rails. still 60% for Q1, defined as mid-seg+ signups hitting activation inside 14 days, and I own that number. sounds fine.

Sam just got in so quick one -- I told him H1 is basically out. not seeing the pricing-artifact thing hold up in the cuts. I'm still pretty calm about it, just narrowing. kitchen's full of takeout containers, very glamorous over here.

today is the seasonal/competitor-cycle cut for h2. want historical comps pulled before anyone hand-waves this as a weird Feb blip. gonna line up same-window churn by segment, then overlay the obvious market dates and whatever competitor noise we can actually timestamp. Owen first if he's around. Marcus can keep the pricing-page thing over there for a minute.

Friday Marcus call in a sec -- brother Marcus Tanaka, not Marcus Vail lol. Portland as usual. He was talking about some HS senior cohort he's counseling and I got one good joke off about how apparently I can't escape cohorts even off the clock. pretty normal, good mood.

at Sam's spot by myself for brunch. today's the last day of this menu and then he's basically buried till Tuesday for the spring one. place is quieter than usual anyway -- his evenings have been weirdly dead the last couple weeks while they do prep.

finished the barn study. third pass and it finally looks like a barn, which helps lol. still on the cheap pad. i left one side too washed out and the fence is basically a suggestion, but ok. rinse water got gross fast. pretty quiet in here.

pulled the same-week comp for h2. Feb 2022 mid-seg monthly churn is 2.2%. Feb 2021 is 2.0%. so unless i've broken the cut in some new fun way, there just isn't a historical version of this spike sitting there. using the same cohort logic as the Jan scan + the Owen check this morning. h1 already looked dead after the tier split came back flat, and this pushes pretty hard against the easy "seasonal" / competitor-cycle story too. still want to sanity check denominator handling once more before i say that too loudly -- but directionally this is bad for the comforting explanations. Marcus is still trying to run the pricing-page thing in parallel lol

in on the bike. little sticky out already. gonna lock the H2 ruling first thing -- seasonal / competitor-cycle cut with the same cohort logic from the Jan scan + Owen check, and I want the historical comps sitting right next to it so nobody does the "weird month" thing. Marcus can run the pricing-page test over there.

H2 is out. Pulled the historical Feb comps with the same cohort logic as the Jan scan + Owen's check this morning, and 2021 / 2022 are both basically boring: 2.0-2.2% churn, no matching spike at all. So I'm not buying competitor-cycle or some generic seasonal thing here. Owen's drafting the 1-pager now. That's two down, two left on the board: H3 onboarding-timing, H4 CS coverage. Marcus can keep waving the pricing-page experiment around if he wants, but it doesn't explain this cut.

at Sam's early before it gets slammed. new menu starts tonight so he's doing that half-talking half-laps thing and pretending not to be wound up. looks good though. first plates already going out, little bit feral in a fun way

Ines walked me through the lifecycle setup. v1 is a little janky tbh. The day-7 email -- "See how teams use Helio" -- is just calendar-day off signup, exact day 7, no check for activation state at all. So activated and totally cold users both get the same thing on the same clock. That's probably fine if all we're testing is top-of-funnel education, but if we're trying to explain the mid-seg churn wobble I don't love that we have a state-blind touch sitting right there in onboarding. Need the send volume + open/click split by activated vs not before I decide if it's real or just ugly config.

bike again this morning. little gray out, not much wind. Holly to 2nd & Brazos was basically the usual, maybe a hair over 22 if that light on 7th counts. coffee still in the bottle cage when I got in so, win.

At The Brixton now with the book-club group on an off-cadence Thursday. I already finished the book, obviously, and I'm doing that thing where I sound casual but have like 4 tabs open in my head. good crowd tonight though. same little orbit, less work-brain than last week.

today is the activation-day cut. gonna use the same cohort logic as the Jan scan + Owen check and just look at when people actually hit first value vs when they were supposed to. if the churny slice is getting through onboarding late, that's probably the thing. want the day-0/day-3/day-7 break before Marcus turns this into another pricing-page meeting.

ok so first cut on H3 is actually not nothing. when i bucket it activation-day vs plain calendar-day for the day-7 email, the split shows up pretty fast: people who activate before day 7 -- so they get that day-7 touch post-activation -- are around 3.1% churn. the ones who hit day 7 still not activated, then see it pre-activation, are more like 7.8%. same cohort logic as the Jan scan/Owen check. i'm not calling it yet -- n is still kind of flimsy and i want one more week before i let Marcus make this a whole thing. but yeah, there's a real divergence there.

Marcus call was good. he's getting some counseling cohort spun up for college essay stuff, so part of it was that. I only hit the Helio thing for a minute but I feel in good shape with it -- not flailing, have the cuts, know what I'm checking. nice, honestly.

Salud was weirdly calm today. sat near the window, breakfast tacos came out too hot to hold for a minute, and the whole place just had that late-morning low hum. no line spilling out the door, just plates and coffee and people mostly minding their business.

new piece started. kitchen table again, paper taped down, tiny tray barely has enough green left in it. doing these scrubby tree shapes first before i overthink the building. house is quiet except the fridge doing its weird click thing.

pricing-page doc is basically there. named it EXP-2023-02-pricing-page so at least we can track the damn thing cleanly. hypothesis is pretty narrow: simplified layout + explicit value-per-seat framing, try to get starter/growth conversion up at least 1.5 pts. registered `pricing_page_2023q2_rev` in PostHog but it's just a placeholder rn, not rolled. sent the design over to Daniela for eng review. if she doesn't find anything cursed we ship Mar 7.

ok so this morning is a fresh week of activation-day pulls for the H3 cut. same cohort logic as the Jan scan + Owen check, just want cleaner day-0/day-3/day-7 reads and see if last week's bump holds with one more slice. want it sharp by Tuesday before Marcus drags me back into pricing-page stuff.

Daniela got back on EXP-2023-02-pricing-page. Instrumentation plan is fine as written -- event names / exposure logging / holdout all good. One snag: she called out the signup-form layout change that's merging Mar 2, and I pushed on it being a confound if we still light up the pricing-page test Mar 7. Feels kind of dumb to stack a form-layout change under the same window and then pretend we'll read clean lift. Didn't resolve it today. Sounds like more convo this week, but eng is still aiming to ship the layout change anyway.

bike in. kind of damp but not really raining, just that weird Austin mist that makes the brakes sound louder. usual Holly to 2nd & Brazos, traffic pretty sleepy for once. got upstairs and my jeans were somehow colder than outside.

ok yeah this one is real. reran H3 with the activation-day cut instead of plain calendar day, same cohort logic as the Jan scan + Owen check, n=210 now. people who activate before the onboarding hits are at 3.1% churn; the post-day-7 pre-activation bucket is 7.8%. 4.7 pts is too wide to hand-wave as noise. basically the day-7 email is landing at the wrong time for mid-seg -- calendar scheduling is probably punting the exact users who are already drifting. gonna sit with whether we trigger off activation state vs just days-since-signup, but this is the first actually load-bearing signal in the whole thing. meanwhile Marcus still wants pricing-page air cover lol

Sam's on dinner service so it's quiet here. added a note in the investigation doc that H3 looks like it. not doing a victory lap yet, just parked the cuts + screenshots so i don't have to re-argue with myself tomorrow.

put the test together. EXP-2023-02-onboarding-trigger. variant is pretty simple: stop firing the "day-7" touch on literal calendar day and key it off activation instead. mid-seg only. hypothesis is week-1 retention moves at least +2 pts if the email lands when they've actually crossed the first-use threshold, not while they're still half-dead in setup. flag is lifecycle_onboarding_trigger_v2. powered it for 2 weeks, target n=400. sent to Daniela for eng review bc the annoying part is gonna be event eligibility + making sure we don't double-send when activation happens late / around the existing scheduler.

signup form layout change went out today with design's release. Daniela's team kept it in even after I flagged the confound on 2/23, so I logged Mar 2 in EXP-2023-02-pricing-page and marked it as the thing to watch against any movement.

closed the laptop at 7:30 and Sam was actually home early bc the kitchen's shut for a deep clean. first weekday dinner together in like 3 weeks. very weirdly quiet. i think this kills the menu-rotation era for a minute lol

late brunch with Sam since he's off til prep. walked Lady Bird after, kinda perfect out. no laptop, phone mostly stayed in my bag. there were so many dogs and one little kid fully committed to throwing pebbles into the water for like 20 min.

today is both lanes at once. pricing-page rev goes first so i need the PostHog flag + rollback path clean before Marcus gets twitchy, then i'm back in the onboarding-trigger A/B read because that's the one i actually care about. want exposure sanity, event lag check, then a real baseline cut before anyone starts narrating off half a day of data.

kitchen table again. taped the paper down and the water's already a weird gray-green. end of feb, basically: ruled out two things, got two cleaner tests set up, which is fine. launch month now. also mid-seg churn as of today is 4.7% on the v1 50-200 seats cut -- better than the 5.1% on Feb 7, still ugly vs trailing-six-month 2.1. brush is behaving more than the data rn lol

pricing page goes tomorrow so first thing is Daniela and the last sanity check on EXP-2023-02-pricing-page. want exposure logging + event names locked, then i'm done touching it. also need to keep the signup form layout thing from turning into a stealth variable -- design already shipped their piece and i'm not reopening that at 8:30am lol

ok so pre-launch looks clean enough. Daniela says EXP-2023-02-pricing-page instrumentation is good as written, exposure logging is in, and the PostHog flag `pricing_page_2023q2_rev` is still sitting at 0%. ready to move it to 50 once we do the last sanity pass tomorrow. I also checked the control cut against the metric of record and it matches, which was the main thing i was worried we'd somehow get cute about. only thing i'm still watching is the signup form layout hitch since design shipped that on Mar 2 and i really do not want a fake read from two changes landing on top of each other -- but mechanically, yeah, looks ready.

quick check with Ines on email QA. she's through the welcome + day-3 variants and found one busted token in the enterprise branch, so that got kicked back. rest looks clean so far. no other blockers.

on the bike this morning. warmer than it looked from the window, no jacket issue for once. Holly over to 2nd & Brazos was pretty normal except every light on 5th felt personal. got in and the lobby still had that over-air-conditioned thing going.

went live. EXP-2023-02-pricing-page is at 50% now off `pricing_page_2023q2_rev` in PostHog, just starter + growth getting it. metric of record is signup-to-paid so i'm ignoring basically every shiny top-funnel opinion for a bit. I dropped the note in #growth and tagged Daniela/Priya. looked at exposure + event flow one more time and it seems clean enough. Marcus can get the compact version in 1:1 tmw -- don't want him freelancing off first-hour numbers.

looked at Owen's weekly cohort cut. pricing-page rev is live at 50% on `pricing_page_2023q2_rev` and nothing weird in the first slices yet, just pretty flat. onboarding-trigger setup is still pre-launch, but the directional read is the same as the prework -- activation-keyed send looks cleaner for mid-seg than literal day-7. not calling anything off this week.

launch was clean. weirdly quiet now. Sam's at the restaurant, i'm on the couch with Kibo and the apartment finally stopped buzzing. checked the PostHog flag one more time because apparently i do that now, then closed the laptop.

ok so my 1:1 with Marcus Vail was mostly the thing you'd expect. `pricing_page_2023q2_rev` is live at 50% in PostHog, but he wanted an early read basically now-ish and I held the line -- before the 2-week window it's just noise, esp on signup-to-paid. he didn't fight it exactly, more like fine, give it to me the second it's defensible. which... not wrong, but yeah. same call I'm making with the onboarding-trigger setup running in parallel: don't over-read half-baked data just bc pricing is the CRO priority.