Turning downloads into transactions, and transactions into habit

The situation

Caura is a payments app that makes the admin of owning a car easier, bringing things like road tax, city charges, MOT, servicing and insurance into one place.

The commercial challenge was that many of those needs happen infrequently. Someone might download the app today but not need to renew their insurance or tax for another six months. If we couldn’t give them a useful reason to transact quickly, there was a good chance we’d lose the relationship before reaching the products that generated meaningful revenue.

So the problem wasn’t simply acquiring more users. We needed to acquire drivers when they had an immediate reason to use Caura, get them to a first transaction quickly, and then give them enough reasons to come back that Caura was still relevant when the next valuable transaction arrived.

What I did

I shifted acquisition towards drivers with a near-term reason to use the app. The rollout of clean-air and congestion charges gave us exactly that opportunity, so we became increasingly targeted by geography and vehicle profile, supported by local partnerships, PR and content that helped drivers understand the new charges and how to pay them.

One of the strongest examples was the launch of Bristol’s Clean Air Zone, where we worked with the Mayor of Bristol, created video content and appeared on BBC Radio Bristol to explain the scheme and position Caura as a simple way to manage it.

Once a driver had signed up, the next job was getting them to a first transaction quickly and then giving them reasons to return. I worked closely with product to rebuild onboarding and lifecycle journeys, surface the next relevant task after somebody completed one, develop referral mechanics and introduce AutoPay. We also used the information customers gave us, such as an upcoming renewal, to prompt the right service at the right time.

Paid acquisition alone couldn’t carry the model, so I also built a much broader organic content programme around the realities of owning a car: clean-air zones, tax, MOT, servicing and other questions drivers were already trying to solve. That created a lower-cost route into the app while making Caura a more useful resource between transactions.

As the business evolved, I also led the rebrand and supported the move towards B2B white-label partnerships, which created another route to revenue alongside the much harder direct-consumer economics.

Getting someone to download the app wasn't enough. We needed a reason for them to use it now, and another reason to come back.

The result

Quarterly transacting users grew around nineteenfold, from fewer than 1,000 immediately before I joined to nearly 18,000. The month-one transaction rate doubled from 20% to 40%, acquisition cost halved, and the business reached seven-figure gross merchandise value.

That materially improved usage and engagement, although retaining customers long enough to monetise higher-value annual products, particularly insurance, remained the harder part of the model.

The business increasingly developed B2B white-label partnerships alongside the consumer proposition, creating a revenue route less dependent on acquiring individual drivers in highly competitive markets.

What it took

The hard part was trying to build repeat usage around needs that were naturally infrequent, without the budget or pricing advantage to buy customers cheaply in categories like insurance.

That pushed us to be inventive about where demand came from: local partnerships around new clean-air zones, PR and useful content, tightly targeted acquisition, and much closer work with product on what happened after somebody arrived.

A lot of the job was joining those pieces up, acquisition, onboarding, lifecycle and product, so every transaction increased the chance that the customer would use Caura again rather than starting from zero each time.

There was a limit to what lifecycle work could solve when many underlying needs were annual and some of the highest-value products weren’t yet consistently price competitive.