About
Thomas Keller (Director of eCommerce at Oats Overnight) hit a familiar problem: the business was scaling, but the numbers behind subscriptions weren’t reliable enough to make high-stakes product decisions.
They needed to answer, “Is this actually working?” with confidence. With SourceMedium as the source of truth, the team made a bold acquisition-SKU decision and saw first-time subscriber rate move from 30% to 82%, alongside a 50% lift in subscriber LTV.
Oats Overnight is a ready-to-eat oats brand founded in 2016. As the team grew, so did the complexity of subscriptions, new SKUs, and cross-channel measurement.
The challenge
- Their subscription growth slowed despite strong acquisition signals.
- Key subscription and SKU decisions required numbers the team could defend.
- Legacy systems and “black box” tools made it too easy for definitions and data quality to drift.
By mid-2022, the company hit a roadblock: despite signs of strong customer acquisition, subscription growth slowed.
As they dug deeper, they noticed:
Large-looming data quality issues, complicated by the maintenance of legacy systems and new product SKUs.
Off-the-shelf data products lacked flexibility, raising questions about accuracy due to their black-box nature.
Native platforms lacked the depth needed to make confident decisions.
Thomas, who has a background in statistics, was fully aware that making decisions based on unreliable information is a dangerous game to play, much less how easy it is to manipulate data to tell you what you want to hear.
He needed something definitive.
The solution
- The team aligned on subscription definitions and made cohorts comparable across SKUs and channels.
- They used segmentation and drill-down (first-order value, cohorts) to validate what was driving LTV and repeat behavior.
- They used those views to make product and budget decisions with confidence, not “dashboard math.”
As soon as SourceMedium was deployed to Oats Overnight’s stack, it helped the team rework how they measured and managed subscriptions. Access to accurate numbers enabled them to discontinue a flagship acquisition SKU and launch an 8-pack sampler, among other changes.
Discontinuing that flagship acquisition SKU was a big gamble.
Looking back, Thomas and the team realized that they wouldn’t have felt confident making that decision without SourceMedium connecting their data streams across e-commerce and marketing.
What changed
- Decision enabled: The team sunset a flagship acquisition SKU and launched the 8-pack sampler based on what the data showed, not what “felt right.”
- How they validated it: Segmentation by first-order value and cohort behavior tied subscription outcomes back to acquisition and retention inputs.
- What got faster: Faster testing, clearer unit economics, and more confident budget decisions across channels.
The results
-
82% first-time subscriber rate
First-time subscriber rates surged from 30% to over 82%. Defined as the share of first-time customers who started a subscription. Timeframe: reached in the period after the acquisition-SKU change described above. -
93,000+ subscribers added
Subscriber count increased from 47,000 to more than 140,000 in less than 12 months. -
50% subscriber LTV increase
Subscriber LTV increased by 50% within 6 months.
“SourceMedium has transformed our business,” said Thomas, and as Oats Overnight continues to scale, SourceMedium remains the company’s source of truth, trusted by Thomas, the Oats leadership team, and its external agency partners.