A craftsman measuring a metal frame in a workshop
Meisterwerk

Turning trial churn into €100k MRR

Research-led decisions that lifted Meisterwerk's trial-to-paid conversion from 10% to 30%.

At a glance

Company
Meisterwerk - B2B SaaS for craftsman & field-service SMEs
My role
Service Designer - research, synthesis and prototyping, end to end
The problem
Trials weren't converting - and nobody knew why
The solution
Research-led decisions on what to build next
Impact
Trial-to-paid 10% → 30% · €100k MRR · seed round closed
The Meisterwerk product on laptop and phone: a team planning board and on-site signature capture
The product: a planning board for the office, documentation on site.

The company

Software for the people who build things.

Scheduling, jobs and on-site documentation in one tool for craftsman and field-service SMEs. New customers start on a self-serve trial.

The situation

Plenty of trials. Not enough customers.

Some trials never logged in. Others used it daily, then vanished. With a seed round approaching, the founders needed to know why.

Decision 1

Don't redesign anything yet.

Everyone assumed churn lived in onboarding. Instead, I went looking for where trial users actually make their decision.

Instead ofRedesigning onboarding immediately - fast, visible, and possibly wrong.

Research synthesis board mapping interview cards by sentiment and company size
Every interview mapped by sentiment and company size - green to red.

The research

Over 100 customers - including the ones who said no.

Short cold-call interviews: how each company actually works, where Meisterwerk fit the workflow and where it didn't, and why the ones who walked away never bought.

Trial churn personas with simplified journey maps
Three trial-churn personas, built from the interviews.

What we found

Churn wasn't one problem. It was three.

Decision 2

Treat three problems as three problems.

Never activated. Used daily, then gone. Engaged, but didn't buy. Each pattern got its own fix - one “fix conversion” push would have missed two.

Meisterwerk product and design work
Concepts tested with trial users before a line of code was written.

Decision 3

Build the missing workflow - don't polish the funnel.

For many, Meisterwerk did parts of the workflow well, but the job ran on past where the product stopped. So I prototyped the missing pieces and tested them with real trial users before anything got built.

Flowchart connecting recommended workstreams to concrete actions
From recommended workstreams to concrete, owned actions.

Decision 4

Make the findings impossible to ignore.

Research synthesised into workstreams and concrete actions - built for decision-making, not documentation.

The impact

€100k MRR - and a closed seed round.

Trial-to-paid conversion rose from 10% to 30%. Record months followed.

Slack message celebrating a record month: total MRR €113,272
Slack, a few months later.
“Working with Sebastian was an absolute gamechanger for our overall business and growth strategy and gave us massive confidence to make the right calls, which led to achieving our revenue and fundraising goals.”
Nick Sonnenberg Nick SonnenbergCo-founder & CPO, Meisterwerk

Looking back

What stays with me

The best part was going straight from research to product. Not a report that ends in recommendations, but features I designed, prototyped and tested with the customers who'd struggled, then saw built. Start with the human journey, learn from it, turn it into the product. That is where I add the most value.

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