Case Study: Plumb's

How a 1-star veterinary app became a 4.9-star product with 93%+ subscription renewals, using the team already building it

1 → 4.9

App Store rating
across 781 global reviews

93%+

Basic subscription
renewal rate

Acquired

Parent company
subsequently acquired

Client: Plumb's Veterinary Drugs (VetMedux / Clinician's Brief family)

Industry: Veterinary publishing and clinical reference, 40-year heritage

Product: Mobile app used daily by veterinarians to reference drug monographs, dosages, and prescribing information

Engagement: Product Diagnostics and Fixes: customer research, product strategy, product redesign, development oversight

Timeline: Approximately 4.5 months end to end: 6 weeks of Product Diagnostics followed by 3 months of Product Fixes

Headline result: App Store rating from 1 to 4.9 stars across 781 global reviews. Basic subscription renewals above 93%. Pro subscription renewals exceeding the company's own revenue forecasts. Parent company VetMedux subsequently acquired by Instinct Science (Mainsail Partners)

The Situation

Plumb's is an institution in veterinary medicine. For 40 years, their drug monographs have been the reference standard for practising veterinarians: detailed records covering dosages, usage data, side effects, and prescribing guidance for every drug a vet might use.

The mobile app was their first step into digitising that reference. It carried the full library into a single product serving general practice vets, emergency clinicians, and specialists, each with fundamentally different workflows and pressures.

The company decided to redesign the app using a small internal marketing team and an outsourced development partner. The development team were skilled at building software, but nobody in the process had product strategy or customer insight expertise. The marketing team made visual decisions. The development team made structural decisions. Nobody connected the two to what customers actually needed.

They redesigned the app without ever speaking to the veterinarians who used it every day. The result was a product that looked different but was actually harder to use than what it replaced.

When the update launched, App Store reviews dropped to 1 star. Customers were threatening to cancel subscriptions. The internal team's response was that people just don't like change. They'd learn how to use it.

A strategic advisor already working with the business saw it differently. The problem wasn't customer resistance. It was a product built without any understanding of its customers. He brought us in to find out what had actually gone wrong.

Phase 1: Product Diagnostics

We needed to understand why the redesign had failed, not just that it had. Phase 1 runs our Dual Lens approach (Customer Intelligence and Product Efficiency), building on what the business already knew about its customers and adding direct research to find the why behind the numbers.

The core insight: The redesign had been driven by visual preferences and technical capability, not by any understanding of how veterinarians actually use a clinical reference tool under pressure. Social media-style scrolling patterns had been applied to a product where speed, precision, and reliability in high-pressure clinical moments are what determine whether customers renew their subscriptions.

Lens 1: Customer Intelligence

This is where Customer Intelligence does the work that analytics can't: speaking directly to real-world customers to understand the why behind the numbers. Analytics can tell you what's happening inside the product. They can't tell you what's happening around it: what vets are actually doing in a consultation, the pressures they're under, the conditions they're working in, and where this product needs to fit into a clinical day that has very little room for friction. What we found:

Three distinct segments, treated as one audience: A general practice vet checking a routine dosage between back-to-back appointments has a fundamentally different workflow from an emergency clinician assessing drug interactions for an animal on multiple medications. Specialists dealing with exotics needed to hunt out niche treatments from within the same broad library. Emergency clinicians faced a specific gap: the product had introduced a feature for checking drug conflicts, but it was poorly positioned, hard to navigate, and didn't surface the most critical issues clearly. The product treated all three segments as one audience
Speed and working conditions are clinical realities, not preferences: Vets have back-to-back clients, often checking dosages on their phone while walking between rooms. They need to find a specific drug from over 600 monographs, go straight to the dosage, and get back to their patient. Most vets use a small subset of those monographs for the majority of cases, making fast access to frequently used drugs even more important. The conditions vary widely: some vets work outdoors with horses or livestock, some aren't native English speakers and struggle with spelling drug names, and COVID had placed additional time constraints on practices. The product had been designed as though every vet was sitting at a desk with time to spare
Research and discovery: Outside the practice, vets described a different behaviour entirely. At home, they would browse through the latest monographs, new drugs, and updated data, staying current with developments that could make a difference to their clients. New entries weren't clearly labelled as such, making it difficult to see what had changed during a browsing visit
Budgeting and diagnostics: Vets routinely juggle what a full diagnostic workup requires against the budget constraints their clients face, working out what's achievable within the budget available. This often results in return visits and further diagnostics if the animal hasn't recovered. The product surfaced single diagnostic options rather than multiple pathways, giving vets nothing to work with when they needed to weigh alternatives against a client's budget
Client handoff broken: Vets provide takeaway instructions for pet owners as part of most consultations. The instructions were written in medical framing that pet owners didn't fully understand. Owners needed content focused on common questions about drug administration, written in plain language with as little clinical terminology as possible

Lens 2: Product Efficiency

The second lens turns the camera on the product itself: a systematic review of how the product is structured, how information is presented, and where the experience helps, gets in the way, or silently costs the business. What we found:

Navigation overloaded: Six primary sections when the diagnostic revealed three would do. Icons had no labels and weren't easily recognisable. Category groupings were organised around the business rather than around how vets think, meaning vets often didn't know where to look for things
Finding and accessing content was broken at every level: Monographs had been designed as large, Instagram-style visual tiles, showing two to three per screen. Scrolling through over 600 entries on a mobile device was impractical, and search results used the same oversized format. The previous app had filtered search results as vets typed and offered a complete browsable list of monographs; the redesign removed both, replacing them with cards requiring endless scrolling. Different content types were barely distinguishable in results, forcing vets to work harder to separate monographs from guides and other content depending on their current workflow. There was no way to jump directly to frequently used drugs, and once inside a monograph, no way to jump to a specific section. A vet who only needed the dosage had to scroll through the entire document
Content structured against the clinical workflow: There was no way to get a clear overview of everything within a monograph without viewing each piece of content individually, creating long scrolling pages with no sense of what the monograph contained at a glance. Content types had been separated within the app, so moving from a monograph to a client handout meant exiting, starting a new search within a different content type, and finding the relevant handout from scratch. Checking a drug and preparing a client handout are part of the same consultation. The product treated them as separate tasks
Readability failures: Font sizes too small, colour choices that made text hard to read in bright clinical environments or outdoors. Multiple font sizes and heading levels across pages, making them complex to scan. Labels written in academic language rather than the terms a vet would naturally use
Technical instability: The app loaded too much data at once, causing it to frequently freeze or crash when searching or scrolling through large monographs. Vets rely on this tool during live consultations. Delays have real clinical consequences

Neither lens alone would have been enough. Together, they gave the business something it hadn't had before: the customer segments defined by what each actually needed from the product in the moments that mattered, and exactly where it was helping, falling short, or silently losing revenue, all in one view.

Phase 2: Product Fixes

The conclusion was unambiguous: the product needed to be rebuilt around how veterinarians actually work. We developed a product strategy informed directly by the Customer Intelligence findings, working alongside the existing team to re-prioritise the roadmap around speed of access, readability in any environment, and a structure that matched how vets think about drug information and how they actually serve their clients day to day in practice.

The strategy translated into specific, evidence-backed product decisions:

Product restructured around three workflows: The diagnostic showed three distinct usage patterns (routine lookup, emergency assessment, and browsing to stay current), but the product treated them all as one. We restructured the entire product around these three workflows: a home screen with search and favourites for speed, a features section giving sight of all content in one place for browsing, and notes for personal reference. Navigation reduced from six unlabelled options to three clearly identified sections
Speed of access redesigned for clinical pace: Customer Intelligence showed vets checking dosages between back-to-back appointments, often on their phones while walking between rooms. We introduced a favourites feature on the home screen so vets could save their most-viewed drugs and reference material for one-tap access during consultations, rebuilt search around a scannable list format with recently viewed items, and reinstated the filtering and browsing lists vets had been asking for since the previous redesign removed them
Content restructured for clinical scanning: Monographs rebuilt so vets could see everything available within a single scroll and decide what to drill into, rather than committing to viewing each section individually. Content labels introduced across the entire product so vets could determine at a glance what type of content they were looking at, whether in search results, browsing, or within a monograph
Segment-specific tools redesigned: The contraindications checker was redesigned and renamed to the Interactions Checker (a simpler term for vets where English wasn't their first language), built for emergency clinicians assessing animals on multiple medications, surfacing the most critical conflicts first with the ability to drill into detail. Understanding each segment's workflows, we connected related content directly: general practice vets could move from a monograph straight to the accompanying client handout, emergency clinicians got direct access to the Interactions Checker pre-populated for the drug they were already viewing
Client handouts rewritten for pet owners: Takeaway instructions for pet owners rebuilt using plain language, focused around the common questions people ask about drug administration. The clinical framing that owners struggled to understand was replaced with content written for the person taking the animal home
Readability and stability fixed: Font sizes, colour palette, and page layouts simplified for readability across all working conditions, including outdoor and bright clinical environments. Data loading restructured so the app no longer pulled entire monographs at once, eliminating the crashes and lag vets were experiencing during live consultations

Before anything went into development, we prototyped and tested with real veterinarians. This confirmed the strategy was working and caught additional issues before committing to development. We then oversaw the development process to ensure what had been designed and validated was actually delivered in the final product.

Within months of launch, the metrics confirmed the strategy was working.

The Results

1 → 4.9 stars

App Store rating across 781 global reviews

93%+ renewals

Basic subscription renewal rate

Above forecast

Pro subscription renewals dramatically exceeded company projections

Acquired

VetMedux subsequently acquired by Instinct Science

The fixes were built by the team already in the business. No new hires. No new technology. The product decisions changed, and the numbers followed.

Renewal rates are the number a PE investor screens for first in a subscription business. The shift from mass cancellation threats to 93%+ renewals represented a fundamental change in the product's commercial profile. The App Store rating, now at 4.9 stars across more than 3,000 reviews, confirmed that the strategy didn't just fix the immediate problem; it compounded.

The product strategy and customer research that rebuilt Plumb's contributed directly to the commercial profile that made the business attractive for acquisition.

“We have 781 global reviews in the iOS App Store with an average rating of 4.9 and strong comments as well. Plumb's Basic renewals have increased to over 93% this past month, and our Pro renewals are dramatically higher than forecast. Our team really appreciates your strategic insight and the product strategy development work on Plumb's. It is truly making a difference for our users.”

Elizabeth Green, CEO & Founder, VetMedux

VetMedux was subsequently acquired by Instinct Science, a veterinary software platform backed by growth equity firm Mainsail Partners. The acquisition consolidated Plumb's into a PE-backed SaaS portfolio, with Elizabeth Green joining the combined leadership team as President of VetMedux.

What This Means for PE-Backed Tech

Plumb's is not unusual. In PE-backed subscription businesses, the product is rarely a lever in the value creation plan at all. The commercial fundamentals are sound, the customer base is loyal, but nobody has connected what customers actually need to the product decisions that determine whether they renew. When that connection is missing, reviews are the first number to show it. Renewal rates follow, and they're harder to recover.

The Pattern

When product metrics stall, the instinct is to build more, redesign, or hire more people. But without understanding what customers actually need (from their own words, in their own context) every product decision is a guess. Phase 1 reveals what's broken and tells you exactly where to invest for the highest commercial return. Phase 2 turns those findings into the specific product decisions the team can ship.

This applies to any technology business with a strong underlying asset where product experience is an underused lever in the value creation plan.

Plumb's illustrates Product Diagnostics and Fixes applied to a subscription business: 4.5 months from diagnosis to delivery, using the team already building the product, taking Basic renewals to 93%+ and Pro renewals dramatically above forecast. The same team, the same technology, the same data. What changed was the quality of the product decisions, grounded in what customers actually needed.

We're now applying this approach with PE-backed tech portfolio companies. A focused intervention sized to deliver a clear commercial multiplier inside the hold period, working alongside operating partners and management teams to move the metrics that determine valuation. For subscription businesses, that starts with the product decisions that drive reviews and renewals. Plumb's shows what's possible when product experience becomes a lever in the value creation plan.

About: Building Great Tech is a two-person consultancy bringing 30+ years of combined product and technology experience to a single PE-focused practice. This case study describes work led during a product consultancy engagement with Plumb's (predating BGT as a vehicle), and illustrates the Product Diagnostics and Fixes methodology we now apply with PE-backed tech portfolio companies.

Building Great Tech | Plumb's Veterinary Drugs Case Study