Pinned · Case studies
Case study · August 11, 2026 · 9 min read
An outside agency's paid media at FX Replay logged zero attributed subscribers for eight months. What changed when I took the account in-house.
Read the case study →
Case study · August 7, 2026 · 6 min read
DoorDash's flagship segment paid $801 a lead. A starved segment bought them at $300. A case study in reading a paid account by its segments.
Read the case study →
Case study · August 4, 2026 · 7 min read
A California health fund needed statewide registrations in English and Spanish. In six months the cost per signup fell from $35 to $2.40. How I did it.
Read the case study →
Case study · July 31, 2026 · 8 min read
A men's personal-care brand put its whole year on Q4 2020. The holiday quarter delivered 46% of annual online revenue. How I ran the growth engine.
Read the case study →All articles
Conversion & funnel · August 15, 2026 · 9 min read
The three-element landing page discipline I use: the customer's pain, the ad theme it continues, the feature that answers it, plus a written hypothesis.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · August 14, 2026 · 8 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.
Read the article →
Paid media & performance · August 13, 2026 · 11 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.
Read the article →
Paid media & performance · August 12, 2026 · 7 min read
A keyword tool cut cost per install 23% and added more than 11,000 installs. Counting its $8,000 fee, the year finished about $2,400 behind. How to price any tool.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · August 11, 2026 · 10 min read
Founders who have never had a marketing executive supervise by checking. The weekly reporting contract I install in week one, and what it buys in 30 days.
Read the article →
Paid media & performance · August 10, 2026 · 9 min read
Nine first-party acquisition prices, from a $2 install to a $2,100 signed merchant. A CAC benchmark counts only when it names what was bought.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · August 9, 2026 · 9 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.
Read the article →
Lifecycle & retention · August 8, 2026 · 11 min read
Several brands sharing one sending reputation sit one mistake from spam. The subdomain, authentication, warming and hygiene build that came first.
Read the article →
Measurement & attribution · August 7, 2026 · 9 min read
When marketing can ship production code, the build-versus-buy math inverts. What I built at Leverage Companies, and what I bought.
Read the article →
Conversion & funnel · August 6, 2026 · 9 min read
How I ran voice-of-customer research with no customer access: structured async elicitation on the colleagues who hear objections all day.
Read the article →
Conversion & funnel · August 5, 2026 · 10 min read
A lender swapped its static contact form for a branching quiz that qualifies investors and brokers without killing conversion. Here is the build.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · August 4, 2026 · 8 min read
What a growth audit delivers, what skipping one costs, and how to tell a real audit from a slide deck. From a fractional CMO and growth advisor.
Read the article →
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.
Read the article →
Lifecycle & retention · August 2, 2026 · 9 min read
The email platform needed replacing while a live Salesforce business ran on top of it. A canonical envelope made the ESP a swappable part.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · August 1, 2026 · 8 min read
How I ran a test a week on Rocket Mortgage's application funnel for years, and the operating system that made losing cheap enough to keep going.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 31, 2026 · 8 min read
Fractional CMO vs agency: an agency executes inside your frame, an operator questions the frame. Pick by the failure mode your stage can absorb.
Read the article →
Measurement & attribution · July 30, 2026 · 11 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.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 29, 2026 · 8 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.
Read the article →
Case study · July 28, 2026 · 7 min read
A conversion case study: re-testing one Rocket Mortgage upsell tile, copy then a trust badge, tripled its clicks and added an estimated 150 loans a month.
Read the case study →
Paid media & performance · July 28, 2026 · 8 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 architecture that fixed it.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 27, 2026 · 11 min read
How a fractional CMO and growth advisor builds a marketing team from zero: sequence each hire against the bottleneck, contractors before employees.
Read the article →
Conversion & funnel · July 26, 2026 · 9 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.
Read the article →
Measurement & attribution · July 25, 2026 · 8 min read
The CRM, the payment processor and the marketing tools all disagreed on who each customer was. How I built a phone-first CDP on AWS for about $30 a month.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 24, 2026 · 8 min read
What a fractional CMO and growth advisor actually delivers: a 30-day audit, an installed growth operating system, and an engagement built to end.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 23, 2026 · 8 min read
LTGP:CAC is lifetime gross profit divided by customer acquisition cost. The calculation, and how I ran three businesses on one number.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 22, 2026 · 7 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.
Read the article →
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.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Founders past product-market fit ask which channel is next. It rarely is. The system I run to diagnose, prioritize, fix, and sustain growth as one machine.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 19, 2026 · 4 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.
Read the article →
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.
Read the article →
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.
Read the article →
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.
Read the article →
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%.
Read the article →
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.
Read the article →
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.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · July 11, 2026 · 10 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.
Read the article →
Growth foundations · 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.
Read the article →
Case study · July 7, 2026 · 7 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.
Read the case study →
Case study · July 7, 2026 · 8 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%.
Read the case study →
Case study · July 7, 2026 · 4 min read
A funnel optimization case study on Rocket Mortgage: a test-a-week experiment program drove an estimated $2B in incremental loan volume at a 42% win rate.
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.
Book an intro call