groaº

Research across 1,000+ business leaders on AI adoption in 2025 confirmed what we have been building around at groa°. AI maturity consistently stalls at the insight layer. Organisations generating intelligence but not changing behaviour. Siloed data, disconnected tools, excessive manual hours filling the gaps. Drowning in intelligence, starved of coordination. The organisations pulling ahead had closed that loop. AI determining what happened next, in real time, rather than adding to the reporting layer nobody had time to read. Retention is exactly that kind of problem. The signals already exist inside every ecommerce stack. The coordination layer is what turns those signals into action. That is what groa° is built to be. Retention-First Growth® · groa° Explored in depth by groa° creator Emma Powell.

In 2025 I was one of the voices behind research drawn from 1,000+ business leaders on how organisations are actually adopting AI. The finding that stayed with me most: AI maturity consistently stalls at the insight layer. Organisations generating intelligence but not changing behaviour. Drowning in data, starved of coordination. The ones pulling ahead had closed that loop. AI determining what happened next, not reporting what already had. That finding sits at the heart of everything we are building at groaº. The retention layer is where that loop either closes or doesn't. Grateful to have contributed to this work led by Polly Barnfield, OBE and team.

Do you know your funnel tax? I spent a decade looking at ecommerce unit economics before I named it. Once I did, I couldn't stop seeing it everywhere. Here's what it looks like in practice. A mid-size DTC beauty brand, $12M online, comes to me with healthy-looking dashboards. AOV of $60, 60% gross margins, $42 blended CAC. Solid on paper. But on the first order they're already –$6 per customer, and most of the growth you see on the dashboard is just replacing the customers who left last month. Most ecommerce brands now spend $1.30 to earn $1.00. Profitability depends on customers returning. ~70% never do. So take those 200,000 new customers. 140,000 of them disappear after one purchase. You spent $5.88M acquiring them and recovered $5.04M, an $840,000 write-off that never comes back. The 60,000 who return? Just two more purchases each generates $4.32M in gross profit, at a fraction of what you paid to acquire them. Same spend. Same revenue line. Completely different business underneath. That's funnel tax: the portion of your acquisition budget funding customers a system was never built to keep. The instinct when you see this is to add channels. More email, more SMS, more paid. I understand the logic but it doesn't solve it, because when each channel optimises for its own attribution they end up competing for credit on the same purchase rather than governing the customer's progression to the next one. The channel is not the unit of measure. The customer's economic trajectory is. Repeat buyers are 21–28% of your customer base and they're generating 41–46% of your revenue. That concentration is only protected when your architecture carries context forward across the lifecycle rather than resetting it at every transaction. Funnel tax is what you pay every month until the architecture changes. Four questions will tell you where your system currently sits. → maturity.groa360.ai If you want to understand the full methodology, it's in the book. → Retention-First Growth®: The Future of Profitability in Ecommerce Links in comments.

Thank you Aoife Teague, we’re incredibly grateful for the partnership and support around Emma Powell’s book launch, Retention-First Growth®. Looking forward to our panel in Paris next month with Polly Barnfield, OBE where we’ll be discussing agentic AI, zero-party data and what’s next.

Great conversation and a powerful reminder that data discipline remains one of the rarest advantages. Emma Powell Heidi Henneman

A thoughtful listen with our co-founder Heidi Henneman distilling 25 years of beauty industry experience into one conversation with Mike Ryan. Heidi brings a rare, holistic perspective shaped across creative operations, brand building, influencer ecosystems, and community-led growth. The conversation traces how those elements connect across the full customer relationship, not just the moment of acquisition, and why that distinction increasingly defines brand longevity.

Most AI in marketing is reactive, a smarter assistant, not a strategist. It answers, it executes, but it doesn’t anticipate. At groaº, we see the barriers holding brands back: siloed data, AI noise, and the widening gap between everyday operators and the top 10% performers who leverage retention-first growth. groaº changes that dynamic. It’s built on agentic AI, intelligence that doesn’t wait for commands but acts on context. It connects every layer of growth, data, decisions, and delivery through a unified intelligence loop. This ecosystem interprets intent, aligns context, and drives profitable action in real time, making advanced growth systems accessible to every brand. groaº helps teams to think faster, act with precision, and scale holistically. Fragmented data becomes living intelligence. Every signal strengthens the next, compounding performance across the entire growth system. The future of growth belongs to agentic systems that think with you, turning insight into impact and momentum into measurable profit. groaº’s private beta is now in progress, working with select brands ready to move beyond the acquisition-era and build the next generation of growth intelligence. 🔗 in comments.

Customer experience collapses when data lives in silos, and so does retention. We’re now in private beta, helping brands close the gap between insight and action, turning retention into a living growth engine.