The Boardroom

Welcome to the first Issue of The Boardroom.

Here's the deal I'm making with you, subscribers of The Boardroom: Once a month I'll tell you what actually happened in these two businesses - the revenue, the subscriber counts, the things that broke, and the decisions I'm still sitting with. Four times a year we'll get on a call and I'll put it on screen and answer whatever you want to ask.

Not the version told afterward, with the failures compressed into a paragraph about resilience. The version I'd tell you across a table over coffee.

July 2026 was my second full month out of a thirty-year full-time career in media, marketing, and tech. Here's what it looked like.

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The numbers

Domus Formation ended July with 22 paying subscribers to the & Altar app - a mix of individual at $30 a year and household at $50, with some early discounting in there. That's $75.83 in monthly recurring revenue. About $910 a year.

64 people finished a free trial in July. 11 converted. That's 17.2%, which is a genuinely good rate for a trial that doesn't ask for a credit card. Most benchmarks put that range somewhere between 9% and 18%, and the honest asterisk is that 64 trials is far too small a sample to know anything - the real number could be anywhere from 8% to 26%. Ask me again at 300.

Active users went from 6 at the start of the month to 100 by the end of it. There are 66 trials running right now.

The consulting engagement with a diocesan foundation is closing at a fixed monthly retainer for up to 32 hours. It accounts for 96% of my revenue.

Everything else - two small paid publications - adds about $25 a month.

So: a consulting business with a product attached. That's the honest description of where this is in month two.

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What the media actually did

Two things landed in July. The Diocese of Springfield's Catholic Times ran a feature interview, and I was a guest on The Catholic Man Show.

Traffic spiked to about 320 on one day and 275 on another. Both decayed within a week. That's what press always does, and if I'd only looked at the spikes I'd have concluded it was a nice week and nothing more.

The floor is the discovery:

Before July 14, traffic to the Domus site was effectively zero. After August 3 it's holding steady at 60 to 80 a day. The spike was temporary. The baseline moved permanently. That's what turned 6 active users into 100, and it's the only reason there are 66 trials running right now.

If you're deciding whether a podcast appearance is worth the day it costs: don't measure the spike. Measure where the floor sits three weeks later.

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The thing I got wrong

Every person who started a free trial of & Altar got a welcome email that said their first daily reflection would be waiting the next morning.

None of them ever got one - which really hurt those who were wanting to receive it via email (versus the app or website).

There were two separate bugs: The signup flow never created a preferences record, and the daily send query filtered for active subscriptions only - which excluded every trial by design. Either one alone would have broken it. Together they meant that in the entire history of the product, no trial user expecting an email had ever received the thing the welcome email promised.

128 people were affected. And here's the part that still bothers me: thirteen of them cared enough to go find the account settings and manually turn daily email on. They took a deliberate step to fix it themselves. They still got nothing.

Those thirteen were my most engaged users. They believed the promise enough to troubleshoot it.

Nobody caught this because I never ran the trial as a trial user. I tested the app. I tested the emails in isolation. I never signed up as a stranger and waited to see what showed up. My marketing was ahead of my plumbing and I had no mechanism that would have told me.

It's fixed now, and everyone affected got a direct note from me - not a broadcast about how some users may have experienced an issue. A real one, saying you were right, it wasn't arriving, that was our fault.

If you're shipping anything with a lifecycle email sequence: go be your own customer this week. Sign up with an address you don't check often and see what actually arrives.

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The lesson that reorganized the strategy

Twenty-two people found Domus, tried it, and paid me. That's $910 a year and it took content, media, product work, and a month.

Meanwhile two emails showed up that I did nothing to earn. A parish asking about a $750 annual agreement. A men's group in Wisconsin asking about $500 a year for fifty men.

Two deals I didn't work for are worth more than the twenty-two subscribers I did.

At $30 to $50 a year, individual subscriptions need volume I won't have for a long time. One parish agreement is worth 25 to 30 individual subscribers. And unlike the individuals, institutions arrive already knowing they have a problem.

I built the funnel for the wrong buyer. Not the wrong product - 17.2% conversion says people who try it, buy it. The wrong buyer.

We're B2C and B2B. B2B is what keeps us in business. August is going to look very different because of two emails I didn't ask for.

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The consulting engagement turned into something else

I took the diocesan consulting work to cover runway. I've been at it almost every Tuesday or Wednesday.

What I found is a market.

Catholic institutions - dioceses, foundations, parishes - are years behind on technology, and largely unprepared for what's arriving. Donor data trapped in giving platforms that don't talk to anything. No segmentation, no journeys, no privacy framework covering data moving between diocesan, parish, and foundation systems. Sophisticated missions running on tools nobody chose deliberately or that were poorly implemented in fragmented ways across dioceses.

There are almost 200 dioceses in the United States. Almost every one has a foundation. Each has parishes underneath. Almost none of them has someone who has led a large technology consulting practice sitting at the table.

I can see the shape of the problem from thirty years of doing exactly this. And I'm the one who happens to be in the room.

They're taking me to a national convention this fall and have been open about case studies and references with other dioceses. That may end up worth more than the retainer.

Which means the honest read on "96% of revenue is consulting" isn't the product isn't working. It's that I went looking for runway and found a second business.

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The two decisions

I said no to a good opportunity that wasn't mine. Mid-July, after letting it consume more of the month than it should have. It was a genuinely good thing offered by genuinely good people, and it wasn't mine to carry right now.

That's the hardest kind of no. Nobody trains you for it. A bad opportunity declines itself; a good one sits there being good at you for weeks. What made it possible was finally admitting the cost wasn't the hours - it was that I couldn't give full attention to anything while it was open.

The second half of July was noticeably clearer.

And I've been working after hours more than I planned to. That's the other thing the back half of the month made obvious. Not catastrophically - just steadily, in the way that doesn't feel like a decision at the time and turns out to have been one.

I went into August with an intention to correct it. I'll tell you in the next issue whether I did.

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What I'm watching in August

Two parish conversations to close. A pricing decision on parish partnerships that's been sitting undecided and is now blocking revenue rather than just marketing copy. And the Ad Alta offerings - this one included - finally going live after being built and unpublished for weeks.

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One ask

Founding subscribers get to shape what this becomes.

Tell me which half of this issue you'd want more of - the numbers, or the thinking behind them. Hit reply. I read every one, and the answer determines what Issue #2 looks like.

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I'm grateful you're here. Thank you.

Deacon Michael

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Ad Alta: The Boardroom adaltaleadership.com/boardroom michael@adaltaleadership.com

In fieri. Ad alta.