Sometimes the constraint is the media. Sometimes it's the landing page, the onboarding flow, or a channel nobody has built yet. Twelve years figuring out which one it is, and proving whether the fix actually worked.
Most recently Head of Paid Acquisition at a $272M AUM fintech startup. No. 563 on the Inc. 5000.
Meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Bing, AppLovin. No agency, no vendor, no inherited playbook. The brief was to grow investors without growing cost per investor.
Scaling usually costs efficiency. The more you buy, the worse each incremental dollar performs. That is the line most teams accept.
On 33% more spend. New invested capital up 53%. The media got more efficient and the funnel converted better. I owned the whole path, from the ad to the funded investment.
“Reporting tells you what got credited. It won't tell you what would have happened anyway.”
I started at 15, doing local SEO for my dad's water business. Since then: SaaS, eCom, DTC, B2B, fintech. The products change, the job doesn't. Figure out what's actually stopping growth, then prove the fix worked.
Most of that happens through people I don't manage. Creative held their own sign-off at my last company, so a brief had to win an argument. Tracking meant convincing engineering to give up a sprint. In-app tests meant getting onto product's roadmap.
Collaboration and communication are what actually get things shipped. Nothing is built alone.