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Marketing Academy · Field Work●Marketing Fundamentals
All projects·From: The Marketing Flywheel
MiniAudit· 30 minutes

Where's the Friction? Auditing a Flywheel's Weakest Force

Rent the Runway

Objective: Given churn, support, and referral data for a subscription business, identify which of the three flywheel forces (Attract, Engage, Delight) has the most friction and recommend the single highest-leverage fix.

You're a lifecycle marketer at Rent the Runway reviewing this quarter's retention dashboard before the flywheel review meeting.

Use the lesson's friction/force framework to find the biggest leak in the wheel, not just list every metric.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets
FreeBuild the friction signal table

Free, sortable for ranking which force has the most friction

The process

1 step

Step 01 of 01

Auditing friction points across Attract, Engage, and Delight

The lesson's Step 2 lists friction signals: high early churn (broken onboarding), long support response times (kills Delight), confusing pricing (kills Engage), no referral program (wasted Delight energy).

First-30-day churn is 22% (category benchmark ~10%), support first-response time is 36 hours, pricing page bounce is normal, and there's no referral program. Which force has the most friction, and what's the highest-leverage fix?

Google Sheets— List each of the 4 friction signals next to the force it damages and whether it beats a stated benchmark.

Procedure

  1. List all 4 signals with their benchmark comparison
  2. Tag each signal to Attract, Engage, or Delight per the lesson's mapping
  3. Rank which force has the most simultaneous friction signals
Sample output
SIGNAL | VALUE | BENCHMARK | FORCE DAMAGED
30-day churn | 22% | ~10% | Delight (onboarding)
Support first-response | 36 hrs | <24 hrs | Delight
Pricing bounce | normal | normal | Engage (no issue)
Referral program | none | n/a | Delight (wasted energy)

Delight is damaged on 3 of 4 signals.

Healthy

Signals map cleanly to a single force with 3 of 4 pointing the same direction.

Unhealthy

Treating all 4 signals as equally weighted instead of ranking by force.

What this means

Delight carries the most friction here; fixing Attract spend would not touch any of these 3 signals.

So what do I do about it?

SymptomActionEffort
22% first-30-day churn against a 10% benchmarkRebuild the onboarding email sequence before adding any new acquisition channelhalf day
YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

A friction-signal table ranking which flywheel force (Attract, Engage, Delight) is leaking the most, plus one recommended fix.

See a reference example
Sample output
ThredUp Q3 flywheel friction audit (excerpt)

SIGNAL | VALUE | BENCHMARK | FORCE DAMAGED
First-order NPS | 28 | 45+ | Delight
Reactivation email open rate | 11% | 22% | Delight
Referral-sourced signups | 4% of new users | n/a | Delight (underused)

Delight is the weakest force. Recommendation: launch a formal 'give $10, get $10' referral program before increasing paid acquisition spend.

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

  • Correctly tags each friction signal to Attract, Engage, or Delight
  • Identifies the force with the most simultaneous friction signals, not just the single worst metric
  • Recommended fix targets the identified force, not a generic 'spend more' answer