Acquisition for a product-led growth design platform
I ran paid and organic campaigns that moved people from first registration to product usage to enterprise pipeline, and built the dashboards our executives and board used to read growth.
Work
Ideas are only as good as their execution.
This is what I own today, where I've worked, and what I've built, with the numbers I'm allowed to share. When a number isn't public, I say so instead of rounding up.
What I do today
Director of Growth Marketing at Journify
I'm leading our US expansion and the move from sales-led to product-led growth, with self-serve sign-up. My lane is acquisition, experimentation and the growth systems underneath them, working alongside our founders, marketing, sales and engineering teams.
- Paid acquisition. Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, run in-house.
- Signal engineering. Getting revenue data back to the ad platforms so they learn from deals, not clicks.
- GTM engineering. The tools, data and automation between a first touch and a sales conversation.
- Building the team. Hiring and partnerships for the US.
Proof from the work
What I've built, and what it did
Fifteen years across Autodesk, Workday, InVision and startups, plus several businesses of my own before that. These are the moments I'd point a growth leader to.
Building a US growth engine from scratch
At Journify, a VC-backed B2B startup, I'm leading US expansion and the shift from sales-led to product-led growth, with self-serve sign-up, the same PLG motion I ran acquisition for at InVision. I run paid acquisition in-house and do the GTM engineering and signal engineering underneath it, so the ad platforms, the CRM and the sales team all learn from the same revenue data. I went from improving one part of a big machine at companies like Workday to building the whole machine for a new market.
Teaching growth alongside Sean Ellis
I was one of two instructors who built and taught CXL's growth marketing course, alongside Sean Ellis, who coined the term "growth hacker." I also built its persuasive psychology course with Roger Dooley, author of Brainfluence.
Several businesses built, one sold after it hit seven figures
A wedding photography studio named one of the top five in the state within 18 months, and a frozen yogurt shop that hit seven figures in sales, with more than 10,000 customers and 60 employees, before I sold it. Every job was mine at some point, from the books to the Facebook ads.
Two books and a podcast that feed a real estate brand
The best growth engine I've built is the one at home, for the real estate and lending brand my partner Tim and I built over 20 years. The Nourishing Asian Kitchen and The Nourishing Asian Homestead bring in readers who want to grow and cook their own food. The Call To Farms podcast, past 100 episodes and 80,000 plays, turns those readers into listeners who are ready to buy land. Then Tim's real estate and lending team at The Homesteading Agent helps them find and finance it. Each piece is content people want for its own sake, and each one hands off to the next. About 95% of the business comes through referrals, and a large share of those start with the books and the podcast.
How I run growth
The loop I keep coming back to
What happens in the ad platform feeds the CRM, the CRM feeds sales, sales feeds revenue, and revenue goes back to the ad platform so it learns who's worth finding next.
- Start from revenue and work backward.
Decide which outcome sales and finance care about, then choose what the ad platforms should optimize toward.
- Fix the plumbing before scaling spend.
UTMs, routing and CRM fields first. Doubling a budget on broken tracking doubles the confusion.
- Write the hypothesis down before launch.
One per test, with the result recorded whether it won or lost.
- Let AI take the hours and keep people on the judgment calls.
Automation makes the work fast. Knowing which data to trust still takes someone who knows the customer.
- Credit the handoffs.
Most funnel leaks happen between teams, and the fix is usually a conversation, not a tool.
Operator lessons
What the work taught me
- A cheap lead nobody calls back is the most expensive lead in the account. I learned it in real estate and mortgage lending long before I ran ads for a SaaS company.
- The best AI work I did this year started with a product decision, not a prompt.
- Hire for clean handoffs. I look for people who care more about passing the baton than their own split time.
- You don't really get growth until you own the business. When the cash register is yours, you know by Friday whether an ad worked, and I still run every budget like that money is mine.