Five years of retention knowledge, now available to every brand: the groa° story
Maybe* Team Partner Stories April 2026
Emma Powell spent five years building retention strategies for DTC brands. Every insight was hard-won. Every campaign iteration was done by hand. groa° exists to make that expertise available to every brand, not just the ones that can afford a specialist.
There is a gap in the DTC world that most brands do not even know exists. They are focused on acquisition, spending the majority of their budget driving people into the top of the funnel, while quietly losing customers at the bottom. Only 3% of brands are doing live email marketing. The top 10% of performers on Klaviyo generate seven times more revenue per recipient than the industry average. That gap is enormous, and almost nobody is talking about it.
Emma Powell has been talking about it for years. As founder of R360 Growth, a retention-first strategy agency working with beauty, wellness, and health brands, she has spent half a decade proving that the most powerful lever for sustainable, profitable growth is the one most businesses ignore.
“Retention growth is sustainable, profitable growth. If you don’t know your customer lifetime value, you are running very hard to stand still. You wouldn’t try to build a house with the roof first. Start at the foundation, which is your data.”
The problem was not the strategy. The strategy worked. The problem was scale. Emma could share what she knew with the clients her agency worked with directly. But the rest of the market, the 97% of brands not running a retention-first strategy, stayed out of reach.
groa° is the answer to that problem. And the Maybe* platform is what made it buildable.
The cost of doing it manually
Before groa° existed as a platform, the work was done by hand. Every time. A typical retention report for a single brand meant going into Klaviyo, then into Shopify, then into third-party apps, then pulling everything together manually. Two to three days of work, every cycle, just to understand what had happened, before any thinking about what to do next could begin.
“Even in 2025, we are pulling everything together manually, cross-referencing data across platforms just to reach the starting line for strategy.”
The deeper problem was not just the time. It was that no tool existed to close the loop. A data warehouse will tell you your metrics. But nothing told you what to do next. Nothing said: change the tone in email four; increase the frequency by 1 day between emails two and three; send at 7 in the morning, because curiosity performs better at this stage of the lifecycle.
“The gap is a layer that pulls together all that information and gives us what we need. That would be life-changing. And then tells us what to do next.”
That tool did not exist. So groa° built it.
The scale problem that agentic AI solves
The groa° vision is not just to make retention reporting faster. It is to democratise access to the top-decile retention strategy. To take everything Emma and her team have learned over five years, every test, every campaign result, every top 10% case study, and make it available to every DTC brand, not as a service, but as an operating system.
Michael Fasosin, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at groa°, describes the shift in terms of what only becomes possible at scale.
“We can take the best practice cookbook knowledge of what Emma has done as a retention strategist for years on Klaviyo and Shopify, package it up and scale it to all of the DTC brands out there. We want to unlock and democratise access to retention strategies at scale, which means the top decile performance of the best DTC brands is available to the many.”
Michael frames the ambition in terms of access: everything Powell has built and validated over a decade as a retention strategist, systematised into an operating model that puts top-decile Retention-First Growth® performance within reach of every DTC brand.
The analogy he returns to is Joe Wicks: a fitness instructor who started one-to-one, then moved to group sessions, then scaled to millions through an app. The knowledge did not change. The delivery did. That is what agentic AI makes possible for groa°. Emma's expertise, available to every brand, running continuously, without her needing to be in the room.
There is $4.8 trillion of churn globally in 2025. Most of it is preventable. Most brands are not trying to prevent it.
Why they built on Maybe* rather than from scratch
The decision to build groa° on the Maybe* platform rather than from the ground up was straightforward for Emma. The question is not whether to build on a platform. The question is what you do with the time and resources you save by doing so.
“I don’t see why anyone would rebuild this from scratch in 2025 when Maybe* already exists. Their security, data plumbing, and infrastructure are done. Instead of burning cash on duplication, I’d rather partner with the team that’s staying on the edge and make sure we’re always up to date.”
Michael frames it in terms of what building from scratch would actually have required. Data scientists. Klaviyo and Shopify specialists. Infrastructure engineering. VC funding before a single line of product code was written.
“What we are able to do in partnership with Maybe* is work together as one team to do this quickly, because you guys have not just infrastructure but experience and knowledge. Working together, we can build this quickly, test and learn, fail fast and succeed faster.”
The Maybe* platform handled the infrastructure. Groa focused on the IP. Its proprietary flywheel physics and analysis algorithms designed to run in a live, channel‑agnostic customer ecosystem, are where the real defensible value sits.
What the platform makes possible
groa° runs fully headless. Their customers interact through groa°’s dashboard and their chat interface. Maybe* runs behind the API, handling orchestration, memory, model routing, and tool execution. groa°’s team builds the product, not the plumbing.
The specialist agent suite, covering Churn and LTV analysis, Segment intelligence, and Campaign Audit, shares a single memory and vector store. A conversation with the Churn Agent builds context that the Segment Agent can draw on in the next session. No siloed reporting. No starting from scratch each time.
Model routing is automatic. Heavy analytical queries are handled by reasoning models. Fast lookups use fast models. groa° gets optimal performance with no routing logic to maintain.
50%
projected weekly efficiency gain for Emma’s team once groa° is live
7x
more revenue per recipient for top 10% Klaviyo performers vs industry average
1,248%
increase in loyalty sign-ups achieved by R360 Growth for a client last Black Friday
For Emma, the most exciting part of the build is not the infrastructure. It is the training.
“With these five agents, we can finally codify the last five years of work; the patterns, the edge cases, the top‑decile outcomes into a system that learns in real time. Instead of relying on one‑off decks and workshops that get forgotten, we’re embedding that operating knowledge into agents that continually test, refine, and improve with every client they touch.”
Democratising access, not replacing expertise
One of Emma’s clients pushed back early. If you build this, they said, you are putting yourself out of business. Why would you want people to use your brain?
Her answer cuts to the heart of what groa° is actually for.
“That’s not the point. The point is democratising access. This democratises access for people to use the retention-first growth strategies that we’ve created. We’ve road tested them. We know they work. I’d much rather share the knowledge and focus more on education, which ultimately is 98% of North America that are not doing live email marketing.”
The goal is not to automate Emma out of relevance. It is to give every brand access to the kind of strategic thinking that was previously only available to those who could afford a specialist agency. groa° is guided by the top 10% guardrails. Available on a platform for smaller brands. Available via Slack or Notion for larger ones. Running continuously, not on a quarterly cycle.
Michael describes the ROI case in terms that any founder or operator can verify in their own numbers.
“If you focus on particular use cases which impact business, and then think about the outcomes which are measurable, which they can see in their top line and bottom line, then you will be successful in AI. Build stuff that solves a problem people need. Demonstrate evident business outcomes. That’s the starting point.”
What comes next
groa° is in private beta, with a full launch into DTC brands imminent. Emma’s book, Retention First Growth, is published alongside the platform, embedding five years of strategic knowledge into the public domain and into the bespoke AI Agents that Maybe* has enabled.
The longer-term vision extends into B2B. Churn is not just a DTC problem. Any SaaS business running a Series A or above is thinking about retention. Any business with a recurring revenue model lives or dies by it. groa°’s Flywheel Health Index™, a methodology for understanding the health of the entire growth engine, not just the acquisition funnel, is designed to make that case visible and actionable.
For Emma, the one-line version of what Maybe* makes possible is simple.
“Efficiency is the immediate win. Once Groa is fully live, it will make us more efficient week to week by stripping out rework and context‑switching. For agencies and in‑house teams, that kind of 360‑degree view and operational leverage isn’t just a productivity boost; it changes what their existing headcount can realistically deliver and the level of outcomes they can sustain for clients.”
For Michael, the one-line version of what Maybe* is as a partner is just as direct.
“The enabler to bring your USP to life.”
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