Intro: the Simply product

Simply (formerly JoyTunes) builds the world's favorite apps for picking up a creative hobby. Across Simply Piano, Simply Guitar, Simply Sing, Simply Tune, Simply Draw, and Simply Piano XR, the platform uses AI to listen, give real-time feedback, and personalize every lesson to the learner. Millions of people in over a hundred countries use Simply to learn an instrument, find their singing voice, or start drawing, all guided by songs they already love.

Simply runs a consumer subscription business. That means a large, global base of learners paying on personal cards, most of them arriving through a free trial before converting to paid.

The challenge

Simply runs a consumer subscription business at scale, and its revenue depends on every recurring charge. Failed payments on those subscriptions were a large and silent source of lost revenue:

• Involuntary churn: subscribers were cut off by a failed recurring charge, not by any decision to stop playing or learning. For Simply that is more than lost revenue. It interrupts the habit of playing, drawing, or singing that keeps a learner engaged, and breaks the experience right when momentum matters most.

• Generic retry logic: default retry settings apply one schedule to every failure and don't adapt to issuer behavior, which is especially costly across a global base of consumer cards.

• Disconnected recovery: retries and customer emails weren't synchronized, adding confusion and pushing some users to give up on the renewal.

• Trial-to-paid drop-off: on top of recurring failures, the first charge when a free trial converts to paid is especially failure-prone, and a generic decline there meant a learner was lost before ever becoming a paying subscriber.

Across millions of consumer subscriptions, generic declines and issuer variability quietly compounded into meaningful lost revenue every month. Simply needed recovery that captured more of it, ran hands-off, and improved on its own.