Pinned · Case studies
Case study · August 11, 2026 · 8 min read
An agency spent $48,000 a month for eight months with zero attributed subscribers. What changed in 90 days when FX Replay took paid media in-house.
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Case study · August 7, 2026 · 5 min read
DoorDash's flagship segment paid nearly 3x per lead. A starved segment bought them for a fraction. A case study in reading a paid account by its segments.
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Case study · August 4, 2026 · 7 min read
A California health fund needed statewide English and Spanish signups. Cost per registration fell from $35 to $2.40 in six months. The full playbook.
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Case study · July 31, 2026 · 7 min read
See how a mens personal-care brand put its whole year on Q4 and took 46% of annual online revenue in it. Read the holiday playbook.
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Measurement & attribution · September 12, 2026 · 5 min read
Vendor reports are structured to justify next month's invoice, at honest vendors too. The five questions a report must answer, and the contract fix.
Read the article →Growth foundations · September 11, 2026 · 5 min read
A failed CMO hire runs about a year of loaded comp plus a third more in search fees, plus the stalled year. The failure math for all four paths, priced.
Read the article →Measurement & attribution · September 10, 2026 · 5 min read
Every vendor claims to be data-driven. The tell is sequence: whoever builds measurement before touching spend becomes accountable to it. The minimum build.
Read the article →Growth foundations · September 9, 2026 · 5 min read
Nothing in a founder's path teaches marketing evaluation, so hires get graded on confidence. Seven signs of the trap and the interview that escapes it.
Read the article →Growth foundations · September 8, 2026 · 5 min read
How much of a fractional CMO do you actually get? The honest answer counts latency instead of hours, and includes the two places the model breaks.
Read the article →Growth foundations · September 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Five kinds of evidence any real operator can produce and every pretender fumbles. A vetting checklist for founders, demonstrated on my own record first.
Read the article →Growth foundations · September 6, 2026 · 6 min read
Retention up 1.8x and CAC never moved. The stop-paying test that sorts channels you own from channels you rent, and the one ratio worth tracking.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · September 5, 2026 · 5 min read
Four situations where a fractional CMO fails and I decline the retainer. Run the gates in five minutes before you book anyone's call.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
Agencies target 50-60% gross margin, so about half a retainer can never buy delivery hours. The math that decides who actually works your account.
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Paid media & performance · September 3, 2026 · 9 min read
You have paid for ads for a year and never logged in. Five checks, thirty minutes, no expertise required, and the questions to ask instead of accusations.
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Measurement & attribution · September 2, 2026 · 8 min read
Blended CAC climbs three quarters running and every channel owner is right about their own line. How to separate a mix shift from a channel problem.
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Measurement & attribution · September 1, 2026 · 8 min read
Every chart in the monthly review points up and you still cannot tell if any of it worked. Three questions a non-marketer can ask about finished work.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 31, 2026 · 9 min read
A growth audit hands you a ranked list. A roadmap is a dependency graph with dates. What lands in each of the ninety days, and why measurement goes first.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 30, 2026 · 8 min read
Two titles treated as one job at two prices. The difference is decision rights, and which of your decisions the new hire is allowed to end.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 29, 2026 · 8 min read
A first marketing hire inherits no system, so seniority stalls. Sort two weeks of your own calendar into three bands and the right hire names itself.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 28, 2026 · 9 min read
A growth pod puts four part-time specialists on one slide for a fractional CMO's fee. Count the committed hours, then ask who owns the number.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 27, 2026 · 7 min read
A six-month-old strategy deck, correct on every page, and a growth number that never moved. How to tell whether you need analysis or an owner.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 26, 2026 · 8 min read
A head of growth makes your existing loop run faster. A fractional CMO decides whether that loop is worth running. A backlog test that settles it.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 25, 2026 · 7 min read
A founder gets pitched five kinds of growth help in a month. Sorting them by who answers when the number misses makes the choice obvious.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 24, 2026 · 8 min read
Fractional CMO vs full-time CMO: a six-month search plus a six-month ramp, $250,000 to $450,000 loaded, and the scope-hours test that settles it.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 23, 2026 · 8 min read
The trigger signals that mean it is time to hire a fractional CMO, the anti-signals that mean you are too early, and what hiring the wrong level costs.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 22, 2026 · 7 min read
What a fractional CMO costs: the retainer, the $12,500 audit, and how both price against an agency and a full-time CMO's loaded annual cost.
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Conversion & funnel · August 15, 2026 · 8 min read
A three-part landing page framework: the customer's pain, the ad theme it continues, the feature that answers it. Plus the hypothesis you write first.
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Growth foundations · August 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Five years, 256 weekly decks, one client. The reporting ritual that kept a consulting engagement alive and turned an account's memory into an asset.
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Paid media & performance · August 13, 2026 · 10 min read
How I built a private lender's Google Ads account from zero: campaigns split by intent, negatives as the compliance line, forecasts before funding.
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Paid media & performance · August 12, 2026 · 6 min read
A bidding tool cut cost per install 23% and added 11,000 installs. After its $8,000 fee the year finished $2,400 behind. How to price any marketing tool.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · August 11, 2026 · 9 min read
Founders who have never had a CMO supervise by checking. The weekly reporting contract I install in week one, and what it buys inside 30 days.
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Paid media & performance · August 10, 2026 · 8 min read
Customer acquisition cost benchmarks from eight industries, first-party: a $2 app install to a $2,100 signed merchant, and what each number bought.
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Growth foundations · August 9, 2026 · 8 min read
Board decks with thirty metrics end without decisions. The three numbers I report instead: LTGP:CAC, CAC payback period, and new revenue by source.
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Lifecycle & retention · August 8, 2026 · 9 min read
Several brands on one sending reputation sit one mistake from spam. The subdomain, authentication, warming and hygiene setup that protects all of them.
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Measurement & attribution · August 7, 2026 · 8 min read
When marketing can ship production code, the build-versus-buy math inverts. What I built at Leverage Companies, and what I bought.
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Conversion & funnel · August 6, 2026 · 8 min read
No customer access? Sales and support hear objections all day. The structured async method that turned their notes into voice-of-customer research.
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Conversion & funnel · August 5, 2026 · 9 min read
A lender replaced its contact form with a branching quiz that qualifies investors and brokers without hurting conversion. The build, questions and results.
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Growth foundations · August 4, 2026 · 7 min read
What a growth audit covers, what it delivers in 30 days, what skipping one costs, and how to tell a real audit from a slide deck.
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Paid media & performance · August 3, 2026 · 8 min read
At YouMail I built a search program on fifty dollars a day. How a hard budget forces a cleaner, more honest Google Ads account than abundance would.
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Lifecycle & retention · August 2, 2026 · 9 min read
Swap your email platform while a live Salesforce business runs on top of it. The canonical envelope that made the ESP replaceable. Read the migration.
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Growth foundations · August 1, 2026 · 7 min read
How Rocket Mortgage's application funnel ran a test a week for four years, and the operating system that made losing cheap enough to keep going.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · July 31, 2026 · 7 min read
Fractional CMO vs marketing agency: an agency executes inside your frame, an operator questions it. Pick by the failure mode your stage can absorb.
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Measurement & attribution · July 30, 2026 · 10 min read
Your ads optimize on form-fills while revenue closes weeks later in the CRM. How I fed Salesforce sale stages back to Meta as offline conversions.
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Growth foundations · July 29, 2026 · 7 min read
How a stalled web funnel turned out to be an org-chart problem, and how I fixed it by building relationships across product, paid, and web first.
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Case study · July 28, 2026 · 6 min read
One Rocket Mortgage upsell tile, tested three times: copy first, then a trust badge. Clicks tripled, adding an estimated 150 loans a month. Full breakdown.
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Paid media & performance · July 28, 2026 · 7 min read
A DSCR lender wrote off its Google Ads leads as junk. The leads were fine, the response was slow. The speed-to-lead system that fixed it: SMS, claim, call.
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Growth foundations · July 27, 2026 · 10 min read
How a fractional CMO and growth advisor builds a marketing team from zero: sequence each hire against the bottleneck, contractors before employees.
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Conversion & funnel · July 26, 2026 · 8 min read
A platform shipped your core feature for free. The calm playbook: treat it as validation, find the depth gap, and reframe where the problem gets solved.
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Measurement & attribution · July 25, 2026 · 6 min read
Build a customer data platform your CRM, Stripe and ad tools all agree with. Phone-first identity on AWS for about $30 a month. See the build.
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Hiring a fractional CMO · July 24, 2026 · 7 min read
What a fractional CMO actually delivers: a 30-day audit, an installed growth operating system, a team that runs it, and an engagement built to end.
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Growth foundations · July 23, 2026 · 7 min read
LTGP:CAC is lifetime gross profit divided by customer acquisition cost. The calculation, and how I ran three businesses on one number.
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Growth foundations · July 22, 2026 · 6 min read
How I turn company goals into a ranked quarter of experiments the whole org actually owns, using stakeholder interviews and one well-run workshop.
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Growth foundations · July 21, 2026 · 4 min read
A teardown of FX Replay's Black Friday: a $200K+ week at 4.5x normal new-business revenue. The offer, the calendar, and how every channel fired as one.
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Growth foundations · July 20, 2026 · 9 min read
A growth operating system is the fixed order a team diagnoses, prioritizes, fixes and sustains growth. The four phases, and why the order matters.
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Growth foundations · July 19, 2026 · 3 min read
Audits find problems and fixes decay. The operating rhythm that keeps a growth machine honest: one dashboard, experiment readouts, kill-or-scale rules.
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Paid media & performance · July 18, 2026 · 4 min read
FX Replay's affiliate program grew past 4,000 active partners returning about $5 in revenue per $1 of commission. How it was built and tracked.
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Lifecycle & retention · July 17, 2026 · 4 min read
FX Replay's email program sent receipts and password resets. Eighteen months later it sent 5.9 million a month at a 26% open rate. The rebuild order.
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Paid media & performance · July 16, 2026 · 4 min read
Ad platforms automated bidding and targeting. Creative is the lever you still control. How FX Replay scored 1,000+ variants against revenue.
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Conversion & funnel · July 15, 2026 · 4 min read
Apple and Google take up to 30% of in-app subscriptions and hide your conversion data. How YouMail moved signups to the web and cut CAC 77%.
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Conversion & funnel · July 14, 2026 · 4 min read
Two experiments at Rocket Mortgage lifted close rates 12% and 18.8% by reordering questions. How to design form tests that find real friction.
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Growth foundations · July 12, 2026 · 5 min read
Over 90% of FX Replay subscribers paid month to month, capping what any customer was worth. The annual-plan strategy that changed the economics.
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Growth foundations · July 11, 2026 · 9 min read
The six-lens teardown I run in the first 30 days: tracking, unit economics, funnel, paid accounts, creative, lifecycle. Plus a 20-minute self-audit.
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Measurement & attribution · July 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Your cost per signup keeps falling but revenue stays flat. Why ad platforms optimize the wrong event, and how server-side tracking fixes it.
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Case study · July 7, 2026 · 6 min read
How a fractional CMO engagement grew FX Replay ARR 2.6x in 18 months: fixing broken attribution, finding the pricing lever, building the team.
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Case study · July 7, 2026 · 6 min read
YouMail's app-store funnel had stalled. Moving signups to the web raised conversion from 9% to 22% and cut customer acquisition cost 77%.
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Case study · July 7, 2026 · 4 min read
See how reordering the questions in Rocket Mortgage Launchpad drove an estimated $2B in incremental loan volume. Read the test breakdown.
Read the case study →Case studies and field notes from real growth engagements: paid media, conversion optimization, lifecycle, tracking, and the numbers behind each. New articles are added every week.
Yes. Every case study is built from engagement data: ad platform spend, revenue reporting, and experiment results. Where figures are rounded or anonymized to protect a client, the article says so.
Yes. Karran takes a small number of fractional CMO, growth audit, and advisory engagements at a time. Book an intro call at karrangupta.com/book.
I write about what actually moved the numbers. If any of it maps to what you're facing, let's talk.
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