Eat Sleep Cycle: €1m+ in new revenue in six months

The challenge

Eat Sleep Cycle runs cycling tours from hubs in Spain and France, alongside an ecommerce store. Growth had stalled. Previous in-house generalist marketing hires hadn’t moved the numbers, and the business had set an ambitious target: grow tour bookings by 40% year on year.

What we did

1. Fixed the foundations. We cleaned up tracking and adjusted the martech stack so every channel could be measured on bookings and revenue, not vanity metrics.

2. Set a North Star metric. One number for the whole team to grow, with a new go-to-market strategy and channel mix built around it.

3. Ran structured growth experiments. We tested search engine marketing, SEO, organic LinkedIn and Instagram, paid social, direct outreach and email, each with a hypothesis, a budget and a success threshold.

4. Doubled down on what worked and cut what didn’t. Paid Meta ads were ruled out as a scalable top-of-funnel channel, and direct outreach was ruled out for building relationships with cycling hubs and clubs. The validated channels got the budget, and we kept iterating on them.

The results

• Over €1m in revenue in the first six months
• Monthly revenue up 4x within six months
• €2.25m in opportunities created, contributing to 290 closed or progressing deals
• Top-3 keyword rankings up 72% and search impressions up 563% year on year

The relationship has continued for more than two and a half years, and Eat Sleep Cycle has since opened a new hub in France.

What other startups can take from it

Hiring a generalist marketer and hoping is not a growth strategy. A clear North Star metric, trustworthy tracking and a disciplined test-and-cut experimentation process will tell you which channels deserve your money, and which ones to stop funding.