“Essentially what we ended up doing was triaging sort of a different funnel metric each quarter right so one quarter is like we gotta tackle bounce rate all right now we gotta tackle sign up rate now we've gotta tackle pro conversion rate now we gotta tackle retention.”

One Funnel Metric Per Quarter — Serial Focus Turned A Crappy App Into A Profitable One

From 2015 to 2017, AllTrails worked through bounce rate, sign-up rate, pro conversion, and retention — one per quarter — on minimal capital. By end of 2017 they hit profitability. This serial focus is the anti-pattern to roadmaps that spread effort across everything simultaneously. Constraint created clarity: what is the single weakest metric, and can it be meaningfully moved in 90 days?