NewFlower Roadside

Abel had a vision and nothing else: modernize roadside assistance with better UX, transparent pricing, and none of the legacy baggage of AAA or Good Sam. No brand, no product, no customers, and two incumbents with decades of brand equity and distribution baked into insurance and auto manufacturer partnerships.

The question was not whether the idea was good. It was whether anyone would actually pay for it, and whether they could be acquired for less than they were worth.

The temptation with a startup this early is to build the full product and then find out. We built toward the cheapest possible answer to the only question that mattered: will strangers hand over a card for this?

That meant the brand, the app, the billing, and the paid acquisition all had to exist at once, because a sign-up number means nothing if any one of them is missing. It also meant the spend stayed deliberately small until the cost per acquisition was known.

This project wasn't just marketing, it was a full product launch.

We created the brand from scratch, designed and developed a complete web application with user authentication, Stripe subscription billing, and a dispatch interface for service providers.

Then we built the landing pages, wrote the copy, and ran the paid acquisition. Blended cost per acquisition landed at $62.78 across the whole campaign, and the best weeks ran $10 to $19, which is what proved the concept could acquire customers profitably once the targeting tightened.

The startup ultimately shut down due to funding constraints before achieving product-market fit.

Competing against AAA and Good Sam, companies with decades of brand equity and partnership distribution through insurance and auto manufacturers, required significant runway.

While the marketing worked, the market timing didn't. But the systems we built proved customers would sign up for a modern alternative.

A case study that ends in a shutdown is an odd thing to publish. We publish it because the part we were responsible for is the part that worked, and because the honest version is more useful than a highlight reel.

59 strangers paid for a roadside assistance product that did not exist a few months earlier, from a brand nobody had heard of, against two incumbents. That is the question a founder actually needs answered before raising, and it was answered for a fraction of what building blind would have cost.