The Challenge
Apple ATT broke web-to-app attribution, so CAC was uncomputable. Standard analytics (GA4) reported 10x lower MRR than the App Store. Activation, D30, and channel performance were invisible, and strict consumer privacy regulations required explicit consent without destroying signup conversion.
The Approach
I designed a resilient first-party stack: an in-app self-attribution survey paired with email bridges to bypass ATT attribution breakage, an unauthenticated Apple S2S webhook (Spring Boot) for deterministic subscription truth, a 13-event telemetry framework, and a five-view BigQuery + Metabase dashboard. Consumer privacy compliance was built natively into onboarding.
Impact
Truthful MRR, deterministic LTV:CAC, and an investor-ready dashboard. Paid acquisition could be confidently deployed with a real measurement loop.
