How Rise Became the Marketing Function for Hartley, a UK Home Management App Cutting Cost Per Account by 40% for a Launch-Stage Consumer App
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 good product with an awkward truth attached. 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.
Hartley had the product and no marketing. Rise became the marketing. We owned the go-to-market plan, built the stack and the measurement, set the positioning, and ran acquisition across Meta, Apple Search Ads and Google — working directly with the founders, with no in-house team for the first stretch. By the time an in-house marketing lead joined, the engine and the playbook were already running.
Challenge
Buy the user who stays, at a cost that scales.
Cheap installs looked excellent on a dashboard and did nothing for the business. Hartley only earns its keep once someone uploads their documents and sets up their household, which meant the easiest metric to optimise toward was also the wrong one.
This was a brand-new app with no acquisition history to learn from, launching across three channels that each behaved differently on both cost and quality. There was no baseline, no proven message, and no way to know which of those channels was buying real users versus filling a dashboard.
We read that early and pointed the whole funnel at accounts that stick.
Solution
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 a single source of truth. Every pound was judged on accounts that stick rather than installs that vanish.2. Set the positioning and found the audienceBefore a single ad ran we worked out where Hartley sits: complementary to comparison sites, not competing with them. Comparison sites help you switch and save in a one-off moment. Hartley handles the year-round admin. We narrowed the audience to time-strapped professional couples and the person who runs the household, and 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 mattersWe moved spend off the install and onto onboarding completion. Cost per install went up, exactly as expected. Cost per genuine account fell and funnel conversion climbed sharply.4. Backed the winners, cut the restMeta 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 producingOne-off copy tests were replaced with a concept engine and a weekly cadence of fresh assets. Plain, problem-first creative beat the clever material every time, which gave us proven concepts to scale rather than guesses to gamble on.6. Took it past paid mediaWe steered the website build and its SEO foundations, and set the lifecycle strategy for keeping and reactivating users. Lifecycle execution was handed over to Hartley's in-house lead with the plan already written.bold textbold text**
Results
Within two months the funnel was converting more than twice as many installs into real accounts, and it held.
Install-to-account conversion peaked at 69%, up from 30% at launch, and has sustained above 65% month after month. Cost per account improved by over 40%.
On creative, our winning concept performed across every period and every test, activating 56% of iOS installs consistently. It became the evidence that Hartley had found its message and the benchmark every new concept has to beat. The second concept we scaled, was backed on an early cost-per-account signal and built on the same plain, problem-first idea — in most homes, only one person knows where everything is.
How we judge creative Content
Concepts are read on the full funnel — spend, installs, accounts, activations — not on click-through. Cheap installs and high click rates are treated as warnings until the downstream data confirms them. Winning concepts get iterated close to the original rather than replaced, because the usual failure is fatigue, not a positioning gap. That's why one concept has held as the control since launch instead of being cycled out on a schedule.
Technologies & Tools
"Rise Growth Marketing Collective built Hartley's marketing from the ground up, from help with positioning through to running our paid acquisition, and did it with a flexibility that let us move fast when everything about the product was still taking shape."
Marc van Agteren, Head of Product
