For Shopify brands serious about retention

Most dashboards show you revenue. We show you whether you're actually growing.

Real Numbers connects to your Shopify store and tells you the truth: which customers are coming back, which ones are slipping, and what to do about it — every day, every week, every month.

5–7 years of order history analyzed · ~60 seconds to install · Works on every Shopify plan — no Plus required
app.realnumbers.ai · Daily pulse
Daily pulse · Tuesday, March 18

We delivered.

$4,200 in revenue (+8% vs prior Tuesday). 12 new customers, 2 customers crossed into super fan status. But 14 first-time buyers slipped past day 30 today — that's the lever.

1 order
9,741
−12 today
2 orders
3,782
+6
3 orders
1,551
+3
Super fans
2,443
+1
The problem

Top-line revenue is the wrong number to optimize.

Most brands track sales. The brands that compound track who's coming back. The difference shows up around year three — when one is still spending to acquire customers it already had, and the other is reaping the loyalty it earned.

"Our revenue chart looked fine. We were losing customers faster than we were keeping them. Nobody on the dashboard told us that."

— Founder, a mid-size DTC brand we now work with

1

Revenue hides retention rot

A good acquisition month covers a bad retention month. The math catches up — usually right around when CAC starts climbing.

2

Cohort data is hard to build, harder to read

Shopify's exports don't tell you 1OC→2OC conversion. They don't show super fan velocity. They don't compare cohorts month-over-month.

3

And when you see the gap, you don't know who to call

Is it a creative problem? A CX problem? A data problem? Most analytics tools end with a chart. We end with a name.

How it works

Connect once. Get the truth every morning.

Real Numbers installs as a custom Shopify app — about 60 seconds, no engineering required on your end. We pull every order back to the beginning of your store, then deliver three reports tuned to three time horizons.

01

Daily pulse

A 60-second read on whether yesterday won. Did we win, or didn't we? What's the one play for today? Delivered to your inbox at 7 AM.

02

Weekly brief

Pattern detection across all three pillars — Acquisition, Retention, Expansion. The big play for the week, with diagnosis. Delivered Monday mornings.

03

Monthly health check

The strategic question that matters this month. Cohort retention matrix. LTV by tier. Super fan conversion velocity. Where to invest next.

What we measure

Three pillars. Honestly scored. Every report.

Acquisition

Are new customers coming in profitably?

New customer counts, CAC trends, MER, channel mix, creative fatigue detection. We tell you when paid social is cooling before it shows up in revenue.

Retention

Are they coming back — and moving up the ladder?

1OC→2OC conversion, super fan velocity, cohort retention matrices, the customer ladder. The signature view: how many customers sit at each rung, and which way they're moving.

Expansion

Are super fans earning more than they cost?

Super fan revenue share, LTV by tier, at-risk customers. The math on whether retention investment is paying off — and where the next dollar should go.

What makes us different

A dashboard tells you what happened. Real Numbers tells you what to do.

We started Real Numbers because every brand we worked with already had four dashboards — and still didn't know what to do on Monday morning. So we built the one that ends with a decision, not a chart.

A typical dashboard

"Here's your revenue."

×20 widgets, no priority order
×Revenue prominent, retention buried
×You build the narrative yourself
×Charts end where decisions begin
×No path to expert help
Real Numbers

"Did you win? Here's why. Here's what to do."

One headline. One play. Every day.
The customer ladder is the signature view
The narrative is written for you
Every pattern routes to a specific action
Routed to a vetted specialist when needed
Who it's for

Built for operators who care about year three.

Real Numbers is for DTC brands past the launch phase — somewhere between their first $1M and their first $50M — who've outgrown Shopify's built-in reporting and want to understand their retention math honestly.

Founders running lean

You don't have a head of analytics. You need to walk in Monday morning and know what matters. We replace 30 minutes of dashboard scanning with a 60-second read.

Growth teams at $5M+ brands

You have the data but no time to build cohort views from scratch. Real Numbers does that work for you, and tells you when the picture changes.

Agencies & consultants

You manage multiple brands and need a shared language for retention health. Real Numbers gives you the same scorecard for every client.

Partner network

When Real Numbers spots a gap, you don't have to figure out who to call.

Paid media review
When acquisition cools and CAC creeps. Routed to vetted creative + media partners.
CX diagnostic
When 1OC→2OC conversion lags benchmark. Routed to retention and lifecycle specialists.
Data architecture review
When your questions outgrow your tooling. Routed to platform + analytics engineers.
Common questions

What you're probably wondering.

Real Numbers installs as a custom Shopify app via OAuth — about 60 seconds. We request read-only access to orders, customers, and products. We never request write access to anything. Customer emails are hashed before we use them for analytics; the originals are encrypted at rest and only decryptable when you explicitly export a segment (e.g. to Klaviyo). We don't store addresses, phone numbers, or payment information.
No. Real Numbers works on every Shopify plan — Basic, Shopify, Advanced, and Plus. We're not a Shopify Plus partner; we're a custom-distribution app, which means we work with every store regardless of plan tier and don't pay revenue share that gets passed on to you.
Up to 7 years. Shopify defaults to 60 days of order history, but we've been granted the read_all_orders scope by Shopify specifically so we can build multi-year cohort retention analysis. Your first backfill pulls everything, typically 1–4 hours depending on store size. After that, webhooks keep us current in near-real-time.
Real Numbers is currently in private access. Pricing is set based on store size and engagement level — get in touch and we'll walk you through it. The first conversation is a no-cost audit of your current retention math.
Those are great tools — and they're dashboards. Real Numbers isn't competing on number of widgets or breadth of integrations. We're built around one thesis: brands that compound win on retention, and retention math is hard to read at a glance. So we wrote the narrative for you, built the customer ladder as the signature view, and route every pattern detected to a specific action (or, when appropriate, to a vetted specialist). You'd use them together, not instead of each other.
We're starting Shopify-first because the data model is consistent and we can guarantee a clean install experience. WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and custom platforms are on the roadmap. In the meantime, if you can export your order history as CSV, we can ingest it through a separate uploader path — get in touch.
Three partners with complementary expertise: a retention methodology lead who's built playbooks for dozens of DTC brands, a paid-media and growth strategist who runs an agency working with mid-market and Plus brands, and a data + product lead who's spent a decade building B2B SaaS analytics platforms. We built Real Numbers because we kept running the same cohort analysis from scratch for every new client — and decided the analysis itself should be the product.
Get started

Find out what your real numbers are saying.

Request access — we're onboarding a small group of brands directly so we can hand-hold the first install and walk you through what we find.