How Clarity on the numbers changes every decision that follows
Objective
Deliver a unified analytics infrastructure to support Digital Science’s ambitious 40% revenue growth target.
Obstacle
Fragmented billing systems, no single source of truth, and a stretched internal team unable to build the foundations.
Outcome
A three-phase data roadmap covering revenue reporting, funnel visibility, and product analytics.
Background
Digital Science’s B2C products (spanning Overleaf, Writefull, and ReadCube) were growing fast, but the data infrastructure had not kept pace. With Overleaf generating roughly 90% of B2C revenue and a £10M growth gap to close by FY26, leadership needed to make high-stakes decisions quickly. The internal analytics team were talented and committed, but spread impossibly thin across three brands, multiple stakeholder groups, and competing priorities. Foundational reporting work kept getting deprioritised in favour of urgent requests. 173tech was brought in to conduct a thorough discovery and deliver a phased roadmap that would build what the business needed without disrupting what the team had already built.
Challenges
£10M Gut Decisions: Digital Science’s leadership was being asked to steer toward £33M while flying blind on the metrics that mattered most. There was no unified view of subscription health, no reconciliation between BigQuery and NetSuite, and no systematic way to attribute revenue growth to specific initiatives, cohorts, or geographies.
Manual Manipulation: At Digital Science, answering a post-launch question required manually joining MongoDB, Stripe, Recurly, and NetSuite data, a process that could take weeks if the team was already handling other priorities.
Fragmented Truth: With a small internal team and multiple sources required, it was unclear the best approach to create a self-serve analytics function.
Solution
Discovery Phase: 173tech began with a thorough discovery process, working directly with finance, product, and analytics stakeholders to understand not just the technical landscape but the commercial pressures behind it. This gave a very clear picture to Digital Science on the full time and cost of implementation against the anticipated return on investment.
Unpicking Complex Relationships: During the review, two material complications emerged: the need for longitudinal year-on-year views requiring models to be built twice across Recurly and Stripe before stitching them together, and the requirement to reconcile with NetSuite rather than rely on billing data in isolation. This user-level stitching across MongoDB, Stripe, Recurly, NetSuite, and Salesforce created the infrastructure needed to identify activation signals, flag churn risk early, and understand which product interventions actually moved revenue rather than just activity metrics.
Impact
Augmentation: The roadmap was deliberately structured to augment Digital Science’s existing team rather than work around it. The internal had already built impressive foundations and our plan builds on that rather than starting from scratch. This included implementing a CI/CD pipeline setup, developer environment isolation, and enhancements designed to make the codebase more robust and collaborative going forward. Not only does this make the analytics more solid, it makes it easier to expand the internal team.
Clear ROI: The discovery process did NOT just identify what was broken, it quantified what fixing it was worth. At Overleaf’s scale of roughly 400,000 subscribers, a two percentage point reduction in churn would retain nearly 8,000 additional subscribers and save close to £1M in annual recurring revenue. On the funnel side, improving overall free-to-paid conversion from approximately 1.3% to 1.8% across 16,000 weekly registrations would generate over 4,000 additional subscribers annually, roughly £400,000 in incremental ARR. The case for the investment wasn’t built on aspiration, it was built on the data that already existed, waiting to be properly connected.
Creating Value For Digital Science...
We evaluated data from across 12 data sources ,
Identified a path to £33M in recognised revenue,
And delivered an actionable roadmap that turns 70% manual reporting into self-serve analytics for every stakeholder.
Get In Touch
Our friendly team are always on hand to answer questions, troubleshoot problems and point you in the right direction.
