Overview
Modern Animal is a membership-based, tech-enabled veterinary company: modern clinics paired with an app for 24/7 virtual care, web and in-app booking, and pharmacy. Founder and CEO Steven Eidelman had built the model in San Francisco and Los Angeles and was expanding into Dallas and Austin. Winston Francois was brought in to run growth as one coordinated system: acquire new members faster in every market, and build the analytics to see the full membership lifecycle from first app open to activated member.
The mandate:
- Hit aggressive monthly new-member targets in each market
- Build a reliable membership funnel, from app-first-open through onboarding to activated member
- Support new clinic openings with local demand and press
The challenge
- Scaling a membership model across four markets at once (SF, LA, Dallas, Austin), each with different demand and different economics.
- Fragmented measurement: web-to-app attribution gaps and no single source of truth for the onboarding funnel.
- Aggressive monthly new-member goals set market by market, with strong performance in SF and Dallas but a soft launch in Austin.
- Paid media, PR, web, and analytics all needed to move together rather than as four separate workstreams.
The approach
1. Full-funnel performance marketing across markets
- Ran paid search and paid social (Google Ads and Meta) for app-install and web-booking objectives across SF, LA, Dallas, and Austin.
- Localized creative and reallocated budget market by market, pulling spend from soft locales and doubling down where installs were efficient.
- Drove down acquisition cost: the become-a-member cost per result fell 25% week over week on web campaigns, from $50.25 to $36.25, with a further 23% drop the following week.
- Course-corrected the Austin launch quickly by refreshing creative and lowering spend to protect overall efficiency.
2. Membership lifecycle analytics and funnel optimization
- Advised on the demand-analytics stack, recommending Amplitude and a Branch upgrade to close web-to-app tracking gaps.
- Stood up abandoned-cart and onboarding-funnel tracking so the team could measure each stage from app open to member activation.
- Helped define canonical, consistent metric definitions across web, paid, and organic so every partner worked from the same numbers.
- Confirmed organic web-booking conversion was on target at roughly 15%, giving the team a trustworthy baseline.
3. Local PR and a rebuilt homepage to convert demand
- Secured local-market and trade press, including a KRON-TV interview and an LA Business Journal story on national expansion, timed to new clinic openings.
- Shipped Homepage 2.0 on deadline after two rounds of client visual QA, tightening the path from landing page to booking.
- Coordinated press, web, and paid so each new market opening had demand and coverage working together.
The results
May 2023 – January 2024
| Metric | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| SF new members, July 2023 | 992 (+35% MoM) | Within eight members of an aggressive 1,000-member goal |
| SF app installs, August 2023 | 2,097 (+6% vs goal) | Beat the monthly SF target |
| Total app installs, August 2023 | 8,257 | Across SF, LA, and Dallas, fueling a simultaneous multi-market expansion |
| Daily SF app installs | 25 → 68 / day | Roughly 2.7 times the daily install rate by end of July |
| Web become-a-member cost per result | -25% WoW ($50.25 → $36.25) | More efficient paid social spend |
| Homepage 2.0 | Shipped on deadline (Aug 31) | Cleaner landing-to-booking experience |
By the August close, Modern Animal had beaten its membership goals in both SF and Dallas, expanded into two new Texas markets, and had a measurement foundation that finally connected paid spend to activated members.
The engagement wound down cleanly as each workstream delivered, and the relationship stayed warm well beyond it.
“Jason and the Winston Francois team have been invaluable partners to Modern Animal from Day 1 helping us launch our first veterinary clinic in 2020. They worked hand in hand with our small team at the time to navigate ambiguity, iterate on strategy, and drive relentless focus and efficiency on execution. Years later, as both our teams have grown, Winston Francois has helped us again at a different stage of our evolution as we continue to grow across more markets and tens of thousands of customers.”Steven EidelmanFounder & CEO, Modern Animal
What we learned
- A membership business lives or dies on funnel visibility: web-to-app stitching and onboarding measurement mattered as much as ad spend.
- Localized creative and market-by-market budget allocation consistently beat a one-size-fits-all approach.
- Moving fast on the soft market, Austin, protected efficiency across the whole portfolio.
- Paid, PR, and web compound when they run as one system: press and a better homepage lift paid conversion.