Toby — Q2 2026 Growth Playbook

Growth thesis#

The under-pulled lever this quarter is reliability + activation — not acquisition. Toby's loss curve isn't a top-of-funnel problem (CWS conversion on residual high-intent traffic is ~30%, very strong). It's a value-realization problem: the New Adopter persona sticks at 58.4% weekly vs. 83-94% for every other segment, and a live blank-page reliability incident is taxing CWS rank in real time via the 2026 WAU + review-recency + Core Web Vitals algorithm (see: research-docs/toby-delta-2026-05-05-v3.md). Until those two are fixed, every acquisition dollar leaks through the same hole; once fixed, the existing channels (CWS, word-of-mouth, the dormant public-collection loop) compound on a non-leaking base. What proves us wrong: if Phase 2's welcome A/B fails (neither variant ≥34% D7 at n≥2,000/arm by 2026-05-26) AND the blank-page hotfix lands AND CWS install-conversion still falls 2 consecutive weeks post-rewrite, the diagnosis is wrong and the bottleneck is structurally upstream (likely platform — Chrome 133 native sync absorbed our wedge).

Current growth loop (diagnosis)#

Toby runs on a broken CWS-organic-search loop today, supplemented by ungovernable word-of-mouth.

• Primary, declining: CWS organic search. Page views collapsed Oct 8 2025 (5,170 → 897/day, -83%, never recovered). Installs steadied at ~250/day because conversion on residual traffic tripled (8% → 30%) — high-intent users still find Toby, but volume is gone. The loop doesn't compound; it bleeds. (Source: product/learnings.md.)
• Secondary, real but not engineered: word-of-mouth. 31% of surveyed users discovered Toby through referrals ("saw on coworker's screen"). Per the soul doc, this is not engineerable as designed — Toby has no in-product referral mechanic that closes the loop. (Source: product/strategy/soul.md.)
• Latent, dormant: the content/curator loop. 31,770 users have ever made a public list (~3% of total); 14,306 active card-share links; Free-Tier Archivists (1,848 users, 18.6% public-share rate, avg 224 lists) curate prolifically. This is Toby's only native viral surface and the growth program has never explicitly activated it. (Source: toby/01-personas.md.)

Verdict: of the three, only the dormant curator loop is meaningfully under-pulled. CWS is structurally constrained until rank recovers; word-of-mouth is ambient and resists engineering. The curator loop is the one new compounding motion available this quarter without engineering investment.

Where we're betting this quarter (top 5 bets)#

Pulled directly from toby/strategy/bets.md. ICE = I × C × E.

• reliability-blank-page-fix (ICE 576, Must) — ship a hotfix or guarded error-state UI for the live blank-page incident. Falsifying signal: 1-star "blank screen" reviews continue within 14 days of the fix. Owner: TBD. (see: toby/strategy/bets.md#reliability-blank-page-fix)
• pricing-reality-reconcile (ICE 600, Must) — close the $4.50 vs $6/$10 contradiction. 1-hour audit. Blocks role-based-paywall-gating. Owner: TBD. (see: toby/strategy/bets.md#pricing-reality-reconcile)
• phase-2-welcome-ab (ICE 192, Must) — welcome-screen A/B (decision review 2026-05-26). Falsifying signal: neither variant ≥34% D7 at n≥2,000/arm. Owner: Jad. (see: toby/strategy/bets.md#phase-2-welcome-ab)
• cws-narrative-repair (ICE 392, Must) — listing retitle + cloud-sync description + Netflix/Amazon social proof + CWV benchmark. Falsifying signal: no measurable install-conversion lift 4 weeks post-rewrite. Owner: TBD. (see: toby/strategy/bets.md#cws-narrative-repair)
• public-collection-pride-loop (ICE 336, Should) — the under-pulled growth lever this quarter. Surface and reward Free-Tier Archivist creators via X "public collection of the week" + curator-spotlight slot on gettoby.com. Falsifying signal: 10 weeks of features generate <50 trackable installs. Owner: TBD. (see: toby/strategy/bets.md#public-collection-pride-loop)

Also queued as Should/Could (do if bandwidth allows): chrome-133-vs-toby-comparison-page, lapsed-pro-reactivation-campaign, seo-content-cadence-2-weeks, x-relaunch-soft, role-based-paywall-gating (unblocks after pricing audit).

OKRs (Q2 2026, 7 weeks remaining)#

• O1: Stop the bleed — restore CWS-rank trajectory and review average.

  • KR1: Ship blank-page reliability hotfix by 2026-05-24. Baseline: blank-page bug live and visible in CWS reviews. Target: zero new 1-star reviews citing "blank screen" within 14 days of hotfix.
  • KR2: Publish the rewritten CWS listing (title + description + social proof + CWV benchmark) by 2026-06-01. Baseline: current listing, $0 conversion lift signal. Target: +20% install-conversion in the 4-week measurement window.
  • KR3: CWS rolling 30-day review average stops declining (week-over-week non-negative) by 2026-06-30.

• O2: Earn the activation moment — prove (or kill) the welcome A/B and lift D7.

  • KR1: Phase 2 welcome-A/B fully instrumented and live at canary 5% by 2026-05-19. Baseline: 0 commits as of 2026-05-10 (silent slip risk). Target: experiment reaches n≥2,000/arm by 2026-05-26.
  • KR2: At decision review 2026-05-26, at least one variant hits ≥34% D7 retention. Baseline: 32.92% V2-only. Target: ≥34% on the winner.
  • KR3: New Adopter persona weekly stickiness rises from 58.4% to ≥65% by 2026-06-30 (measured against toby/01-personas.md baseline).

• O3: Find a price anchor that holds — and activate the dormant curator loop.

  • KR1: pricing-reality-reconcile complete by 2026-05-13. One short doc, single authoritative number.
  • KR2: role-based-paywall-gating design doc shipped (not built) by 2026-06-15 — defines which team / admin / sharing features move behind paid and which stay free. Baseline: card-count gating today. Target: design ready for Q3 build.
  • KR3: 4 public collections featured (X + blog) by 2026-06-30. Baseline: 0. Target: 10 by end of Q3.

Anti-bets (what we're NOT doing, and why)#

• Pre-announce AI organize / smart-naming features on any public channel. AI relaunch is deferred Q3 → Q4 2026 (research-docs/toby-delta-2026-05-05-v3.md). Cost if we change our mind: tiny upside (excitement); large downside (expectation gap, brand soul promises "calm not capability", and we'd be cheating against our own anti-promise in toby/strategy/compass.md).
• Pay for acquisition while CWS rank is unrecovered. Math doesn't work at $54/yr ARPU with <5% full-price conversion (product/strategy/next-actions.md). Killed in bets.md. Cost if we change our mind: 1-2 months of CAC burn that won't pay back at current LTV.
• Migrate the active-extension L2 or attempt cross-platform expansion (Firefox/Safari) this quarter. Killed implicitly by the team capacity reality — one commit in 10 days; the existing engineering can either ship Phase 2 + reliability or it can do a platform port, not both. Cost if we change our mind: Phase 2 slips further, reliability lingers, both OKRs evaporate.
• Punch down at OneTab / Workona / Session Buddy / Arc publicly. Those accounts are dormant or pivoted; brand-poison move. Comparison content is fine (e.g. queued OneTab Alternative blog post); trash-talk is not. Cost if we change our mind: the demographic we want to win — ex-Arc users especially — includes former-fans, not former-haters.
• Pursue a 60-min Atlassian/Dia partnership discovery meeting this quarter. One-way door per toby/00-state-of-the-project.md; Dia 1.16.0 already shipped pinned tab groups + Recently Closed. The decision belongs at the founder level and after the v3 research dossier's full Sept-2026 falsifiable check-in, not as a Q2 line item. Cost if we change our mind: we may give up the partnership window — but the cost of mis-timing the move is materially worse.
• Launch a top-of-funnel paid-marketing push around the "Toby vs Chrome 133" theme. The free chrome-133-vs-toby-comparison-page is proposed and worth doing; the paid push isn't, until conversion economics fix. Cost if we change our mind: see "paid acquisition" above.

Red-team pass#

Walked the playbook back through three lenses. Strongest objection in each is captured; weakest residual goes to Open questions.

• Sceptical investor: "You have 7 weeks left in Q2 and one commit in the last 10 days (b9bea18c, a fallback Slack message). Your two engineering-shaped OKRs (O1 reliability hotfix, O2 Phase 2 A/B) require Jad to be back and shipping by 2026-05-19 at the latest. Where's the evidence the throttle is recoverable rather than structural?" Rebuttal: Jad's OOO was planned; Phase 1 (the larger ship) cleared before he left, Phase 2 is fully specced with halt triggers in tasks/phase2-todo.md, the work is sliced into 12 implementable PRs and the experiment plan was authored by Jad himself. Recovery is the more likely path. Residual: if 2026-05-19 arrives with no Phase 2 commits, the playbook's middle disintegrates and O2 is dead. That's the OKR most at risk.

• Frustrated user: "I'm one of the people 1-starring you because every time I open a new tab I get a blank screen and panic about whether my saved collections are gone. Why is reliability the third item in your bet list instead of the only thing on the page?" Rebuttal: it isn't — reliability-blank-page-fix is the first OKR's first KR. The bet ordering in the doc is by ICE score and dependency, not priority of action. O1 KR1 is the actual top priority. Residual: the soul doc says "every interaction should reduce anxiety, not add it" — every CWS review currently saying "blank screen" is a soul-anchor breakage. The longer this lingers, the more brand equity is auctioned away invisibly. We could be measurably late even hitting the 2026-05-24 target.

• Competitor / Dia or Atlassian PM: "Your differentiation lives entirely in things we can clone in one product cycle — visual collections, shared collections, notes per tab, recently-closed recovery. Dia 1.16.0 already shipped two of those. What's structurally yours that we can't take?" Rebuttal: the ambient new-tab surface (per axiom 2 in toby/strategy/compass.md) is the only thing structurally ours — Dia requires invocation; Toby occupies the gap between invocations. Plus the 9-year curation moat (richer per-user data than any new entrant can backfill). Residual: we can't fully rebut this. The "ambient new tab" surface is structurally yours as long as Chrome lets extensions replace the new-tab page. If Google deprecates that override (a 2027-2028 plausible move), the moat thins fast. We've taken no defensive action against it.

Open questions (graduate to bets when answered)#

• Has Phase 2 silently slipped? Plan targets "week of Apr 20", zero commits visible as of 2026-05-10. Resolves when: a commit lands on feat/onboarding-welcome-experiment OR Jad confirms the new ETA in writing.
• Is CancelSubscription.tsx retention-discount integration shipped? Backend is live (cbc92a78d) since Jan 2026 but no frontend commit confirms wiring. Resolves when: a commit references the integration OR support tickets confirm users see the offer in production.
• Does the "ambient new-tab surface" axiom survive Google deprecating new-tab override permissions? Strategic 2027-2028 risk. Resolves when: Google publishes a deprecation roadmap OR we get a credible signal from a Chrome team contact.
• Is there an inbound team-buyer signal we're missing because it lives on Slack/LinkedIn, not X? toby/x-strategy.md flagged the team-buyer pillar as invisible on X (4,908 active multi-team users, only 79 paid yearly Team subs). Resolves when: an operator-led 1-week LinkedIn-DM canvass of 25 multi-team team admins surfaces ≥3 explicit "I want a paid Team plan, but [reason]" responses, OR the canvass yields nothing and we drop team-buyer as a pillar.
• What's the true full-price new user conversion rate? Sitting in product/strategy/next-actions.md Action 1 unresolved. Resolves when: the data-pull lands. This number determines whether the flywheel is structurally viable at $54/yr.
• Will the reliability hotfix close not_using cancellation reason (39% of churn)? Hypothesis is that blank-page failures drive part of not_using (users churn because product was broken, not because they didn't value it). Resolves when: 60 days post-hotfix, churn-survey not_using share is re-pulled and compared to today's 39% baseline.

Doc index (read these alongside)#

• Compass — identity, axioms, anchors. Authoritative on who Toby is.
• Bets — rolling queue of every in-flight / proposed / validated / killed bet, with falsifying signals.
• State of project — current shipments, immediate next steps, open questions (toby-pm).
• Personas — 7 segments accounting for 100% of active users (toby-personas).
• X strategy + X content pipeline + X engagement targets — channel-1 audience map, voice, drafts.
• Blog & SEO pipeline — channel-2 SERP landscape, queued drafts.
• Codebase strategic anchors: product/strategy/soul.md, product/strategy/next-actions.md, product/learnings.md, research-docs/toby-research-2026-05-05-v3.md, research-docs/toby-delta-2026-05-05-v3.md, tasks/phase2-todo.md, tasks/onboarding-experiment-plan.md.