About Torta Studios

What We Do

Torta Studios is a retention engineering studio. We help software companies find where users drop off, figure out why, and fix it at the product level.

Not with more features. Not with more ad spend. With better instrumentation, sharper experiments, and product changes backed by evidence.

We work with consumer apps and SaaS companies that have traction but can't explain why users leave. Our job is to make the invisible visible: the activation gaps, the onboarding friction, the lifecycle moments where trust breaks down.

Why Retention

Most growth advice starts with acquisition. Get more people in the door. That works until it doesn't. And for most companies, it stops working long before they realize it.

Retention is the metric that tells the truth about your product. If users come back, you've built something worth coming back to. If they don't, no amount of marketing will fix it. The math is simple: a 5% improvement in retention compounds into dramatically different outcomes over 12 months. But most teams never look at retention as a product problem. They treat it as a finance problem (discounts, save flows) or a marketing problem (re-engagement emails). We think it's a product problem, and the fix lives inside the product.

Why Now

Three things are happening at once.

Acquisition costs keep rising. Every channel gets more expensive, more saturated, more competitive. The companies that win aren't the ones spending the most on ads. They're the ones keeping the users they already have.

Analytics tools have never been better, but most teams are drowning in data and starving for insight. The instrumentation exists. The decision layer doesn't. Companies can see their dashboards but can't connect what's happening to why it's happening.

And software is getting easier to build every day. When anyone can ship a product in a weekend, the question stops being "can we build it?" and becomes "will anyone stick around?" Taste, craft, and genuine user understanding are the only durable advantages left.

Why Us

We're practitioners, not advisors. We get into the product, the data, and the code. Every engagement produces weekly artifacts: dashboards, cohort reads, experiment cards, and readouts. Not slide decks.

We measure everything. Every change ships with a measurement plan, a hypothesis, and a cohort readout. If it didn't move the needle, we say so.

And we care about craft. The details that most teams skip (the empty states, the load times, the copy on the activation screen) are the moments that compound into trust. We sweat them because users feel them, even if they can't name them.

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The Team

Colin Thornton

Co-founder & CEO

Colin runs the front of house: strategy, client relationships, and creative direction. He built 95% of a full-stack SaaS application solo, without a traditional engineering background, because he wanted to understand the whole picture. Before Torta Studios, he worked in product at Bank of America and shipped products for 20+ companies at a dev agency. His first experience with retention frameworks came at a Techstars-backed startup where the team's data-informed pivot led to a $22M raise and 1.4M+ users.

He leads with curiosity. One client chose Torta because Colin "understood our business in a single day where it took an entire company three to four months." He comes from a family of teachers, and it shows in how he works: inside the problem, not above it.

When he's not doing this, he's watching the Bengals, quoting Lord of the Rings, or trying to convince his back that golf is still a reasonable activity.

Alan Chavez

Co-founder & CTO

Alan is the engineer and systems thinker. He brings deep retention and growth engineering expertise. Where Colin sees churn as broken trust, Alan sees the mechanics of how to fix it. He's built a following of over 1M monthly impressions, particularly among Spanish-speaking engineers and product builders, translating complex technical concepts into accessible content.

A Mexican immigrant building a tech company in America. Alan represents something Torta believes deeply: great work comes from people who show up as themselves.