Who is Karran Gupta?

The work

Same job, four seats

Find the number that matters, fix what sits upstream of it, build the weekly rhythm that keeps it moving. That is the job, whichever chair I am in.

• Founder My first growth work was in businesses where the ad budget was my own money. Two of them were built and sold. Nothing teaches what a customer actually costs faster than paying for one yourself.
• Operator inside a large company At Rocket Mortgage I led experimentation across the digital client experience: a test a week for years and $2B in incremental loan volume. The biggest wins came from the order of questions in a form. The funnel outranks the channel.
• Chief Marketing Officer First head of marketing at Leverage Companies, across a lender, a wholesaler and an education business: one north-star metric computable from the books, a speed-to-lead system for the lender, and a customer data platform I built myself. CMO at FX Replay: rebuilt measurement, took paid media in-house, moved the plan mix to annual, built a ten-person team. ARR went from about $5M to $13M.
• Advisor to brands YouMail for eight years: a web funnel that cut CAC 77% and 250 consecutive weekly performance decks. DoorDash New Verticals, Intuit Mailchimp, Every Man Jack, Carlyle, Saje Wellness, Coffee Meets Bagel, and a California health fund that cut CPA 93%. More than $20M in paid media managed across Meta, Google, TikTok, Apple Search Ads and affiliates.

What I believe about growth

Six things the work keeps proving

• Order matters Growth is a machine you run in a fixed sequence: diagnose, prioritize, fix, sustain. Skip a step and the fixes fight each other. The growth operating system
• Fix the signal first An ad platform optimizing on the wrong event will spend your budget finding the wrong people, efficiently. Why ad platforms optimize the wrong thing
• Funnel before channel You cannot judge a channel through a funnel that leaks. Fix the funnel, then read the channel. The 30-day growth audit
• Pricing is a channel A plan-mix change beat every ad optimization we ran at FX Replay. Unit economics set the bid ceiling. The pricing lever
• One number, every week A 45-minute weekly review against one dashboard keeps a bad week from becoming a bad quarter. The weekly growth review
• Engagements should end The best outcome of a fractional engagement is a full-time hire who succeeds. What a fractional CMO engagement looks like

Start here

If you only read six things

Sixty articles on the blog. These six answer the questions founders ask before a first call, and show two engagements end to end.

• How much does a fractional CMO cost?The retainer, the audit, and how both price against an agency and a full-time hire.
• When to hire a fractional CMOThe signal is rarely a failing team. What too early and too late look like.
• Who should lead your growth?Agency, consultant, head of growth, growth pod or fractional CMO, on one axis.
• Rocket Mortgage: $2B from two testsWhat question order in a form is worth.
• FX Replay: 2.6x ARR in 18 monthsMeasurement, economics, then team, in that order.
• What a growth audit coversAnd what skipping one costs.

Or browse by topic: hiring a fractional CMO, growth foundations, measurement, paid media, conversion, lifecycle, and the case studies.

Work with me

Three engagement shapes

• Fractional CMOI lead your marketing part-time and own the growth P&L. Retainers start at $20,000 a month.
• Growth auditA 30-day, fixed-scope teardown ending in a 90-day roadmap. $12,500.
• Performance advisoryMonthly working sessions for teams that execute well and need senior judgment on the calls.

Beyond marketing

An operator on the real estate side too

Outside client work I am an active real estate investor and operator: sourcing and underwriting acquisitions, running renovations, leasing, and managing the assets I hold. A portfolio gets the same treatment as a growth engine, measured weekly and built to compound.

Running marketing for a lender and a wholesaler at Leverage Companies showed me the industry from the inside as well. Operators and investors are welcome to trade notes.

Questions

Frequently asked questions