Strategy Breakdown: Airhelp

May 24, 2026

When I joined AirHelp, demand was not the question. People wanted the product. The harder question was whether that demand could become a profitable, repeatable business.

That is where many internet companies get into trouble. Growth can make almost anything look healthy for a while. It can cover up weak unit economics, messy operations, poor prioritization, and channels that only work when money is cheap.

At AirHelp, the job was to move from startup growth to a business that could scale without burning through margin. There was no single transformation moment. It was mostly a sequence of operating decisions: which channels deserved more money, which products deserved people, which teams were creating leverage, and which work was keeping everyone busy without improving the company.

Over time, that moved the business from unprofitable growth toward EBITDA-positive performance.

The Problem

AirHelp had a simple promise: help travelers get paid when airlines owed them compensation. The customer pain was clear. The market was large. The product was easy to understand. The business behind it was not simple.

Every claim touched legal rules, country-specific regulation, claim validation, airline resistance, customer communication, payment flows, and support costs. This was not a pure software business where every extra user had almost no marginal cost.

Every new claim could bring revenue. It could also bring cost. So the real question was not "how do we grow?" It was "how do we grow without building a bigger loss-making machine?"

That changed how we managed the company.

From Volume to Quality

The first shift was to stop treating all growth as good growth. Traffic, claims, users, and bookings all look good in a dashboard. But in a claims business, volume can be misleading. Some claims are valuable. Some are unlikely to win. Some channels bring users who convert. Others bring work for the operations team and little else.

Geography mattered too. Some markets had strong legal economics. Others were slow, expensive, or unpredictable. So we started looking at growth by quality, not only quantity.

The useful metrics connected marketing, product, operations, and finance:

• Top line Claim Submissions
• Eligible claim rate
• Acquisition cost per claim
• Processing cost per claim
• Payback period
• Contribution margin by channel
• EBITDA impact by initiative

That changed the questions in the room. Not "which channel brings the most users?" but "which channel brings profitable claims?" Not "which product gets engagement?" but "which product improves conversion, claim value, or operating efficiency?" Not "where can we spend more?" but "where does the next euro create return?"

The metrics were not the hard part. The hard part was making the company actually use them.

Making the Numbers Operational

Once the right metrics were clear, we had to run the company around them. Marketing could not optimize alone. Product could not ship features because they looked good in a roadmap. Operations could not be treated as a cost center that cleaned up after everyone else. Finance could not only report results after the fact.

We needed one operating model. That meant linking acquisition, funnel conversion, claim economics, legal success rates, operating capacity, margin, cash timing, and board reporting.

The business became easier to read. Decisions also got faster. A channel with high CAC could still be worth funding if it produced high-value claims with a strong chance of success. A cheap channel could be bad business if it created low-quality claims and extra operational load.

Product went through the same filter. A feature was useful if it increased conversion, reduced friction, improved claim completion, lowered support cost, built customer trust, or helped the operating system scale. If it did not do one of those things, it needed a very good reason to exist.

That became the standard.

Cutting Work That Looked Strategic

One of the hardest decisions was cutting work that sounded right but did not earn its place. The clearest example was the mobile app.

On paper, it made sense. AirHelp served travelers. Travelers use phones. Travel problems happen in real time. A mobile app felt like a natural extension of the product. But that was not enough.

The question was whether the app deserved scarce product, engineering, and leadership time compared with other work that had a clearer path to profitable growth.

This is where companies often hesitate. They keep funding projects because the strategy still sounds plausible, because the product already exists, or because shutting it down feels like admitting defeat.

But opportunity cost is real. A team working on a low-leverage product is not working on something better. Roadmap space has a cost. Executive attention has a cost. Engineering dependencies have a cost.

The mobile app was not the best path to profitable growth. So we cut it.

That freed up attention and capacity. It also sent a useful message inside the company: sounding strategic was not enough. Work had to prove it belonged. That shift mattered. We got better at saying no.

Focus

A lot of companies talk about focus. Fewer are willing to disappoint people to get it.

Focus means killing good ideas, not only bad ones. It means stopping projects that have internal supporters. It means accepting that a smaller roadmap can produce a better business.

At AirHelp, the goal was not to do more. It was to put more force behind fewer things. We focused on work that could move the financial model:

• Better claim intake quality
• Higher conversion in markets with strong economics
• Less operational waste
• More disciplined acquisition spend
• Product work tied to the core claim flow
• Team goals linked to EBITDA, not activity
• Board reporting based on metrics, not storytelling

That was one of the main lessons for me. Small companies can run on energy for a while. Scaled companies need systems. The leadership job changes from finding growth to allocating resources against the best growth.

It sounds less exciting. It is usually more valuable.

Explaining It to Investors and the Board

A big part of the work was making the strategy easy for investors and the board to understand. They did not just need ambition. They needed to see the business logic.

We had to show where growth was coming from, which growth was profitable, which volume we did not want, where complexity was coming down, how product supported the financial model, and what we had stopped doing.

That changed the story. Not "we are growing fast." Instead: "We understand the engine, and we are improving it."

Those are very different businesses in the eyes of investors. One depends on momentum. The other can be managed.

What I Took From It

AirHelp reinforced something I now see often: most growth problems are not really marketing problems. They are operating model problems.

Companies often think they need more leads, more traffic, more features, or more sales activity. Sometimes they do. But often the real issue is simpler and harder: they do not know which activities create economic value and which ones create motion.

Leadership has to make that visible. Once it is visible, decisions get cleaner. You can cut products that do not matter enough. You can fund channels with better economics. You can redesign teams around leverage. You can talk to the board with more confidence.

That is what we did at AirHelp.

We stopped chasing growth as a headline and started managing profitable scale as an operating system.

Impact Breakdown over 3.5 years