CLIENT
Hartley - Home Management App
INDUSTRY
Consumer app · PropTech-adjacent
SERVICES
GTM strategy, marketing stack, paid acquisition, creative, SEO, lifecycle strategy
BUILT ON
Meta Ads
Apple Search Ads
Appsflyer
PostHog
Hartley keeps a home running, so the people living in it don't have to remember everything.
Renewal reminders, a chat assistant that reads your household documents, and one tap to local help when something breaks. It's a useful product.
The catch: it only proves that to someone once they've uploaded their documents and set their household up. A download on its own is worth nothing.
THE CHALLENGE
Buy the user who stays, at a cost that scales.
Cheap installs looked great on a dashboard and did nothing for the business.
Hartley only proves its worth once someone uploads their documents and sets their household up. We were launching a brand-new app with no acquisition history to learn from, across three channels that each behaved completely differently on cost and quality.
So the easy metric, the install, was the wrong one to chase. We read that early and pointed the whole funnel at accounts that stick instead.
WHERE WE CAME IN
Hartley had a product and no marketing. So we became the marketing.
Rise owned the go-to-market plan, stood up the stack and measurement, and ran strategy day to day, working straight with the founders. There was no in-house marketing team for the first stretch.
We built the function, launched it, and made it work before anyone joined to take it on.
When an in-house marketing lead came on board, the engine and the playbook were already running.
WHAT WE DID
1
Owned the plan, built the stack
We wrote the go-to-market plan, stood up the marketing tooling and measurement, and defined the funnel from install to account to activation through one source of truth. From day one, every pound was judged on accounts that stick, not installs that vanish.
2
Set the positioning and found the audience
Before a single ad ran, we worked out where Hartley sits: complementary to comparison sites, not competing with them. We tested who it was really for, narrowing to time-strapped professional couples and the person who runs the household, and we built trust into the message from the start, because a new app asking to hold your documents has to earn it.
3
Optimised to the outcome that matters
We moved spend off the install and onto onboarding completion. The cost per install went up, as expected. The cost per genuine account fell, and conversion through the funnel climbed sharply.
4
Backed the winners, cut the rest
Meta carried the value, so it got the weight. Google's cheap-but-empty volume was wound down. Apple Search Ads was sharpened toward the keywords that actually produced accounts.
5
Built a creative system that keeps producing
We replaced one-off copy tests with a concept engine and a weekly cadence of fresh assets. Plain, problem-first creative beat the clever stuff every time, and gave us proven concepts to scale rather than guesses to gamble on.
6
Took it past paid media
We steered the website build and its SEO foundations, and set the lifecycle marketing strategy for keeping and reactivating users. When Hartley's in-house marketing lead joined, we handed lifecycle execution over with the plan already in place.
THE RESULTS
Within two months the funnel was converting more than twice as many installs into real accounts, and holding it.
69%
of installs converted to an account at peak, up from 30% at launch
£6.50
best monthly cost per account created, down from £10.79
850
quality accounts created in the strongest single month
65%+
install-to-account conversion sustained month after month
THE CREATIVE
"Household Admin, Handled"
One concept kept performing across every period and every test. Clear, plain, and true to what the app actually does. It became the proof that Hartley had found its message, and the benchmark every new idea had to beat.
56% activation rate on iOS, consistently
"The Shared Home"
The next concept we scaled, on a strong early cost-per-account signal. Same plain, problem-first idea, this time for couples: in most homes, only one person knows where everything is.
Scaled on a strong early cost per account
POSITIONING
Built to sit alongside the tools people already use
A deliberate strategic choice, baked into the messaging from day one: Hartley complements comparison sites rather than competing with them. They help you switch and save in a one-off moment. Hartley handles the year-round admin that keeps a home on top of itself.