How Thema kept users engaged using in-house product tooling

Thema's caller ID and personalization features succeed only if they feel instant and trustworthy. The team used its own SDK and analytics to grow engagement without trading away that experience.

The challenge

A caller ID and spam-blocking app works in the most time-sensitive moment on a phone: an incoming call. Anything that feels slow or intrusive there costs user trust immediately.

The team wanted to understand which features brought users back, and to monetize responsibly, without introducing friction into the core calling experience.

The in-house stack

What we tested

1. Experiment 1

   Placement away from critical moments

   Hypothesis: Keeping ads out of the incoming-call flow protects retention without meaningfully hurting revenue.

   Learning: Protecting the core moment made the product feel more reliable, and revenue could be recovered in calmer parts of the experience.

2. Experiment 2

   Feature discovery

   Hypothesis: Surfacing personalization features earlier gives users more reasons to return beyond spam protection.

   Learning: Users who discovered more than one core feature showed stronger return behaviour in cohort views.

3. Experiment 3

   Frequency tuning

   Hypothesis: Remote frequency caps let the team find a balance between engagement and monetization per audience.

   Learning: Being able to tune without a release made it practical to respond to what retention data was showing.

The outcome

Engagement and monetization were reviewed side by side in Insights, so no change was judged on revenue alone.

Monetization settings became a living configuration rather than a fixed decision made at launch.

Takeaways

• Protect the moment your product exists for.
• Give users more than one reason to come back.
• Measure engagement and revenue in the same view.