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Schedule a CallA fast-growing DTC fitness brand | Funding round preparation
A fast-growing DTC fitness brand was heading into a funding round when it discovered something troubling: the canned reports from its billing platform were incorrect. The numbers they'd been relying on for months were significantly overstating their membership base.
The billing platform's out-of-the-box reporting counted people as active for months after payment failures, inflating subscriber counts by 15-25%. Because the team trusted these reports as their source of truth, the overstatement went unnoticed until finance tried to reconcile for investor diligence. By then, the discrepancies were everywhere. They were about to walk into an investor meeting and present numbers they couldn't defend.
Week 1: We mapped their billing platform's canned reporting logic against what finance actually needed for investor reporting. The root cause became clear quickly: the platform's built-in reports weren't designed for this level of accuracy. Failed payments weren't triggering churn for 60-90 days, leaving ghost subscribers inflating every metric.
Weeks 2-3: We built a data model that properly handled payment failures, pauses, and churn timing. Then we delivered clean reporting layers so finance, product, and leadership could each pull the numbers they needed without conflicting with each other.
Without fixing this quickly, two bad outcomes were on the table: keep presenting the billing platform's incorrect numbers and permanently lose investor trust, or delay fundraising to manually rebuild metrics in Excel.
Apiary gave them option three: accurate, automated metrics delivered in time for the investor meeting.