Frank Growth

Jason Shafton

5.0 (5)
Marketing
Updated Monthly

Frank Growth is a sharp, execution-first podcast about how companies actually grow. Hosted by Jason Shafton, it features candid conversations with founders, operators, and investors who are in the work right now. The focus is real decisions: distribution, demand, pricing, org design, incentives, and what breaks once the early playbooks stop working. No hype. No recycled advice. Just clear thinking from people accountable for outcomes.

6d ago

Stop Buying Users Who Leave with Michelle Matthews

Episode #237: Michelle Matthews - Acquisition is the easy part in health and wellness This episode is about the gap between what marketing promises and what the product delivers, and what that gap actually costs a company. For growth leaders, founders, and product teams building for people who show up on a bad day. Michelle Matthews is a product and service designer with over 15 years of experience building consumer and healthcare products, at scale and from inception, including work with Brightline and Headspace. She started as a social worker, and she brings that systems view to onboarding flows, research practice, and behavior change design. Jason and Michelle cover where marketing hands off to product, why a clean divide between the two breaks the story users experience, and how to measure real change instead of engagement. She describes a user interview at Brightline where a participant walked from marketing assets through the end of onboarding and asked, are you messing with me. When a mental health company overpromises, the fallout is not just churn. It is bad reviews, lost trust, and therapists warning each other on Reddit before they apply. What you'll hear The three B's from Irrational Labs: name the behavior you need, find the barriers in someone's real life, then design a benefit that counteracts each oneHow Brightline rebuilt onboarding by body storming the signup as a phone call, so the first question is how can I help you instead of what is your child's insurance card numberWhy targeting the entire mindset matrix brings in low-intent users who leave bad reviews, skip appointments, and damage lagging metricsThe pre-research exercise: write down your assumptions, your biases, and the answer you are hoping for, then rewrite any question that leads people toward it Chapters 00:00 - Cold open: are you messing with me00:41 - Why acquisition is the easy part in health and wellness02:50 - Social work to UX and what therapy training carries over03:40 - The day someone signs up for Brightline is not a good day04:55 - Selling research to a team that just wants to ship05:54 - Where marketing stops and product takes over07:09 - Headspace versus Calm: the Tylenol and the vitamin08:31 - Engagement metrics versus real change, and the three B's10:07 - Why marketers and researchers keep landing in the same rooms12:08 - Where a growth-obsessed CMO gets it wrong14:28 - Mindsets instead of personas, and the cost of spray and pray15:42 - What overpromising costs: reviews, trust, and hiring17:44 - Growing from ego versus growing in a way you can sustain19:31 - Career advice for early-career designers in an AI job market21:20 - Nobody is sticking around: the first thing to look at22:31 - Design is not just screens23:04 - Lightning round and Soft Futures Links & resources GuestMichelle Matthews, product and service designer, consumer and healthcare productsLinkedIn About Frank Growth Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow, real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston FrancoisSubscribe / Follow Jason
Sep 8

Turn Marketers Into AI Strategists with Elyssa Steiner

Episode #236: Elyssa Steiner - Rebuilding a 21-person marketing team in 30 days Marketing is not a lead factory. It is a growth system, and the operating model is the ceiling on what ships.For CMOs and marketing leaders who inherited a team built for a smaller company. Elyssa Steiner is Chief Marketing Officer at Kahua and a B2B growth leader with more than 15 years of experience. She came from nearly nine years at Cantaloupe, through multiple acquisitions and the sale of the company, into construction project management software, and restructured a 21-person team in her first 30 days while the revenue org was verticalizing around her. She and Jason get into how she backed marketing targets into revenue targets in a workshop with the VP of sales three weeks in, why she refused to accept MQL volume as the definition of success, and how she built 14 vertical ICPs using internal knowledge and AI as a first draft. Her VP of sales called them 90 to 95 percent of the way there after 45 days, and they became custom GPTs the whole revenue org now uses. What you'll hear Structuring marketing around verticals instead of channels, with solution marketers embedded in each sales pod as the vertical SME and one digital team running paid across all of themBacking marketing targets into revenue targets using historical conversion data, then tracking marketing sourced opportunities and closed won deals by vertical instead of MQL volumeThe mistake she names directly: scaling AI before standardizing the process, which she says she learned firsthandHow to run the ICP exercise yourself, ship it at good enough, and let your sales SMEs throw darts at it rather than spending six months making it perfect Chapters 00:00 - Why marketing teams have a throughput problem, not a strategy problem02:31 - Leaving fintech for construction software, and what carries over03:14 - What she found walking in the door, and why the team was hungry for clarity07:12 - Keeping four vertical pods from turning into four silos08:19 - Writing marketing OKRs that back into revenue, and why not MQLs10:09 - Building 14 ICPs with AI in 45 days12:39 - ABM from 18 accounts to 400, and the budget constraint reframe14:07 - Selling AI to federal buyers when trust is the whole story17:05 - Throughput across brand, product marketing, and advocacy18:59 - The daily AI mandate, no layoffs, and everyone becoming a strategist22:41 - Marketing to a buyer who has been burned before23:38 - Lightning round Links & resources GuestElyssa Steiner, Chief Marketing Officer at KahuaKahuaLinkedIn About Frank Growth Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow, real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston FrancoisSubscribe / Follow Jason
Sep 1

The Marketing Engineer with Nick Lafferty

Episode #235: Nick Lafferty on Marketing Engineering, Category Creation, and Closing His Own Deals He was the first marketing hire at Profound, and within weeks he was shipping production code and taking sales demos himself. For founders making their first marketing hire and for marketers deciding what to learn next. Nick Lafferty is the Founding Marketing Engineer at Profound, where he joined as the first marketer on a 20-person team that has since grown to 200 and raised Series A, B, and C in 10 months. He walks through what a marketing engineer actually does, what broke as the company scaled, and why he put himself in the lead round robin and gave close to a hundred demos when there weren't enough AEs to cover pipeline. He also breaks down the system he built to connect HubSpot deal data to LinkedIn impressions, the interview question he opens with, and why he is openly against token maxing. Before Profound, Nick ran growth at Loom through its acquisition by Atlassian. What you'll hear Why the first marketing hire should be a marketing engineer, with a product marketer as the fast followHow Nick shipped a social proof quote to the live contact sales page in 15 minutes using Cursor, and the required "how did you hear about us" field that powers his attribution systemWhat broke first at speed: lead routing running through a Google Sheet, deliverability issues, and then more meetings than sales reps to take themHow Profound builds a category by publishing research to customers in Slack first, then LinkedIn, then email and webinars Chapters 00:00 - Cold open: "I have contracts with real ARR tied back to my name"00:45 - Frank Growth intro: three things going wrong with marketing teams02:11 - Nick's background, from Loom to Profound03:02 - What a marketing engineer actually does03:50 - The first thing he ever shipped, and it's still live04:45 - Building the LinkedIn to HubSpot attribution system05:47 - The result: 20% of inbound lead forms from LinkedIn06:37 - What broke first at scale08:18 - Hiring the first four marketers09:14 - The interview question: show me your GitHub repo10:21 - What Loom taught him about horizontal products12:00 - Marketing a category that didn't exist 18 months ago13:23 - The research drumbeat, and giving customers early access in Slack15:04 - Why Profound turns away the self-service market15:45 - Profound University and the marketing engineer job board16:34 - From analytics product to AI agent workbench17:37 - What to look for in a first marketing hire today18:50 - Anti-token maxing, and where marketing engineers come from20:04 - Lightning round21:30 - Jason's top three takeaways and one thing to do this week Links & resources Guest Nick Lafferty, Founding Marketing Engineer, ProfoundLinkedInX/TwitterProfoundProfound on LinkedInProfound Index About Frank Growth Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow: real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston FrancoisSubscribe / Follow Jason
Aug 25

Nobody Has The Playbook Yet with Dave Steer

Episode #234: Dave Steer on repositioning a brand around AI in three months Webflow's CMO had 90 days to relaunch the website, reposition the brand, and ship an ad campaign.For marketing leaders whose board just told them to become AI native, and who don't have a playbook for it. Dave Steer is CMO at Webflow, leading brand, demand, and product marketing after two decades at GitLab, Cloudflare, Twitter, Facebook, and Mozilla. His mandate came from the board and leadership team, timed to Webflow Conf three months from his start date. We cover how he reorganized a 50-to-60-person marketing team around AI tools, why he ran positioning as an executive exercise with April Dunford rather than a marketing one, and where he draws the line between what a human writes and what an agent touches. He also walks through Webflow's AEO Maturity Index, a study of 2,000 US websites where the average site scored about two or three, and where the problem was site structure rather than content volume. What you'll hear Why positioning is a corporate strategy activity, not a marketing activity, and who has to be in the roomHow the team moved from a relay race of specialists to treating everyone as an orchestrator and connectorThe two instincts that go wrong first: buying a pile of ChatGPT licenses, and optimizing for day one instead of day twoWhere the human/agent line sits: the human owns the argument, the agent owns the permutation Chapters 00:00 - The human owns the argument, the agent owns the permutation00:33 - Three ways marketing leaders are handling the AI mandate badly02:24 - The three things every CMO has to be expert in now03:11 - Where the three-month mandate came from05:00 - What "agentic" means when the web has two audiences06:14 - April Dunford and why positioning is an executive staff exercise07:13 - The AEO Maturity Index: 2,000 sites, average score of two or three08:40 - Rebuilt, not retooled: ending the relay race12:26 - Four human roles: strategist, orchestrator, creator, connector17:13 - The single biggest mistake CMOs are making right now18:55 - Lightning round20:49 - Top three takeaways and one thing to do this week Links & resources Guest Dave Steer, Chief Marketing Officer, WebflowWebsiteWebflow ConfLinkedIn About Frank Growth Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow. Real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston FrancoisSubscribe / Follow Jason
Aug 18

Stop Writing Only for Humans with Jesus Requena

Episode #233: Jesus Requena — Dropping SEO entirely to optimize for LLMsSanity stopped producing SEO content and started building pages only machines will read. Roughly 60% of last month's signups came from LLMs.For B2B growth leaders watching organic traffic fall and trying to work out what replaces it. Jesus Requena is CMO at Sanity, and previously led growth marketing at Figma, demand gen at Unity and Algolia, and growth at Hex. After watching client SEO traffic fall to a tenth of what it had been, he stopped SEO content production entirely and rebuilt Sanity's content for LLMs to parse rather than humans to read. He walks through the three-layer playbook: fixing contradictions across 100 to 200 pages on their own site, converting roughly 1,000 FAQ pages from user-centric to LLM-centric, building five single-topic microsites excluded from Google, then correcting third-party citations that conflicted with their own story. Sanity moved from ranking 15th or 20th in LLM visibility to top five. What you'll hear Why visibility comes from reasoning: if an LLM can reason your concepts clearly, it recommends you, which makes first-party consistency the starting point How they executed it — crawling their own site to find unclear terms, writing content no human is expected to read, and partnering with AirOps to fix obsolete third-party citations Why attribution breaks when signups arrive through a CLI or MCP without ever touching the website, and the self-reported "where did you find us" question they fell back on Where to start from zero, in order: audit your own site, then third-party mentions, then microsites — plus the caveat that Reddit's influence is fading and LLMs are pulling more from videoChapters 00:00 — Cold open: "We literally just stopped any SEO content" 00:38 — The AEO shift: what's going wrong and what works 02:12 — Meet Jesus Requena: Figma, Unity, Algolia, Hex, Sanity 02:45 — The common thread in marketing to technical audiences 04:30 — SEO traffic drops to a tenth, and the bet that followed 06:15 — The three layers of AEO content 08:22 — Citations, visibility, and going from 15th to top five 10:37 — Authority, and becoming the thought leader for the LLM 12:07 — 1,000 FAQ pages and five microsites excluded from Google 14:23 — Why brand investment went physical: events, swag, billboards 17:30 — Measuring attribution when nobody clicks 19:17 — Is the growth repeatable or is it timing? 20:41 — Where to start from zero 22:38 — Scaling agents, and humans handling the exception 23:59 — Lightning round 25:14 — Jason's top three takeawaysLinks & resourcesGuestJesus Requena — CMO, SanityWebsiteLinkedIn About Frank GrowthFrank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason
Aug 11

His AI Employee Works While He Sleeps with Andrew Mok

Episode #232: Andrew Mok — What the CMO job becomes when AI runs the mechanics HeyGen doubled to $200M ARR in eight months, is cash-flow breakeven, and runs on about 130 people. Its CMO explains how marketing actually operates there.For marketing leaders deciding what to keep, what to cut, and what to hand to an agent. Andrew Mok spent 12 years at Turo building a category nobody believed in, then joined HeyGen as CMO four months ago in the middle of its fastest growth stretch. He walks through the operating details: a verticalized stack that runs inference 10x cheaper than general video models, 100 to 200 customer interviews a week piped into an internal MCP that any employee can query, and a personal agent named Mara (marketing automation and research agent) that hands him a metrics digest on his drive into the office. He's also blunt about the parts most people won't say out loud — that job replacement is real, and that it will come mostly from lean AI-native companies growing into big ones, not from big companies running layoffs. He does three to five customer interviews a week himself, and that's the metric he checks every week. What you'll hear The three Cs he runs on — customers, company fundamentals, culture — and how customer voice became infrastructure instead of a slide: 100–200 interviews a week, curated by agents, queryable for pain points, churn reasons, and competitor chatter.How Mara actually gets used: metrics digests over voice in the car, deep dives before he reaches the office, and why documents and decks went from a multi-week exercise to 30 seconds.What was slowing the company down: leading with technical capability instead of the human problem, which works on AI enthusiasts and stalls with the mainstream. Plus how Turo handled its worst crisis — the New Year's terror attacks — by putting everything in the open instead of covering it.Jevons paradox applied to video: lower the price and friction, and quantity goes up. HeyGen's five-person internal video team produces roughly 100x more video than a company not using AI tools, and it's the biggest video team Andrew has ever run. Chapters 00:00 — Cold open: AI-native companies will hire far fewer people00:49 — Intro: if AI handles the mechanics, what's left of the CMO job03:29 — 12 years at Turo and what long tenure teaches you about brand04:34 — The New Year's terror attacks and handling crisis with transparency05:44 — Turo vs. HeyGen: trusting a stranger with your car vs. a company with your likeness06:52 — Who the real customer is: small business owners, skewing older, not AI enthusiasts08:26 — Why he left Turo, and the introvert founder story behind HeyGen09:51 — $200M ARR, doubled in eight months: what marketing changed at that velocity11:09 — Breakeven economics: owning the model and running inference 10x cheaper12:16 — Customers, company, culture: 100–200 interviews a week and an internal MCP13:56 — Mara, the marketing agent: morning digests, campaigns, weekly team updates15:27 — Which bottleneck disappeared first, and what's still hard16:23 — AI and jobs: replacement comes from lean new companies, not big layoffs18:21 — Jevons paradox: lower the barrier to video and demand outstrips it19:50 — Hyperframes: why HTML, and why they open sourced it21:56 — What surprised him inside an AI company: refusing deepfakes when allowing them would pay23:17 — Lightning round23:51 — The creator who kept her livelihood after long COVID24:45 — Where to find Andrew25:20 — Jason's top three and one action for this week Links & resources GuestAndrew Mok — CMO, HeyGenWebsiteLinkedInX MentionedHyperframes — HeyGen's open source HTML-based video rendering framework, on GitHubJulia McCoy's YouTube channel About Frank Growth Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston FrancoisSubscribe / Follow Jason
Aug 4

What is Growth Design? with Philip Lowe

Episode #231: Philip Lowe - Growth creative isn't art, and the customer is the judgeHow to build creative that moves a number (a click, a conversion, a download) instead of creative that only wins the room.For growth marketers, creative directors, and in-house studio leads deciding what to test, what to produce, and what to kill. Philip Lowe runs creative, brand, and marketing operations at Quicken, and previously built Instacart's growth creative team from scratch after starting there as a creative director for CRM. He and Jason worked together at Soothe and Headspace, and this conversation covers what actually separates creative that's good from creative that performs: hiring people who understand both brand and performance, testing hooks, concepts, and narratives as a stage gate before anything gets produced, and knowing where AI helps and where it doesn't. Philip walks through the four-pillar roadmap he uses (exploration, production, learning, infrastructure) and explains why the old path of $30,000 per storyboard and a week and a half of waiting is no longer the only option. He's blunt about the limits too. An AI-generated couple reviewing their finances cycled through eight facial expressions in seconds, which is a non-starter for a brand that has built 40 years of trust. What you'll hear Why growth creative sits at the intersection of brand and performance, and why separating the two is the biggest mistake leaders make How Philip built and staffed a growth studio at Instacart, and why the asset was the vehicle and the insight was the point Where AI delivers, including stylized worlds, claymation, stop motion, and surrealism, anywhere imperfection is the aesthetic, and where it falls flat on human emotion, eyes, hands, and quiet moments What the job of creative becomes in CRM and lifecycle when AI is reading the inbox and open rates stop being the focusChapters 00:00 - Three seconds to hook, like a comedian on stage 00:29 - What growth creative is, and why it's not decoration 01:24 - Sooth, Headspace, and having conviction in the work 04:11 - Growth creative vs. brand creative vs. design 05:56 - The kangaroo video: when it clicked 07:24 - Building Instacart's growth creative team from scratch 09:27 - Good creative vs. creative that performs 11:05 - Testing before you spend a dollar producing 12:41 - Taking on ops: from tastemakers to operators with good taste 14:24 - What changes when production gets cheap 16:38 - The four pillars: exploration, production, learning, infrastructure 18:20 - Where AI delivers a performance and where it doesn't 20:31 - Real humans, real stories, and trust in finance 21:56 - CRM and lifecycle when AI reads the inbox 24:12 - Breaking through when agents do the browsing 25:53 - Hiring for taste 27:01 - The one thing leaders get wrong 27:39 - Lightning round 29:48 - Top three takeawaysLinks & resourcesGuestPhilip Lowe, creative, brand, and marketing operations at QuickenLinkedInTikTok About Frank GrowthFrank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow: real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason
Jul 28

Growth's Most Dangerous Trap With Sara Wallace

Episode #230: Sara Wallace — Repositioning a consumer cashback app into a B2B platformIbotta is known as a cashback app. It's also a white-label promotions platform for the largest retailer in the world.For marketers at consumer companies standing up an enterprise or platform business alongside the one that made them. Sara Wallace is Head of Brand Marketing at Ibotta, which runs both the consumer cashback app and the Ibotta Performance Network. Five months into the role, after building executive marketing and global AI go-to-market strategy at Google Cloud, she's working the problem of building B2B awareness for a company whose recognition lives almost entirely on the consumer side. We get into why she treats the two audiences as genuinely separate rather than migrating one into the other, the one channel where that split breaks down, how she handles AI thought leadership under legal and compliance constraints, and why she argues brand is the engine that makes performance marketing work rather than a luxury line item. She also walks through Ibotta's annual State of Spend findings, including a decline in grocery list-making as shoppers plan loosely and let promotions fill the gaps. What you'll hear Why Ibotta doesn't try to convert cashback users into a B2B audience, and where the two narratives still collide (social media) What Google Cloud taught her about selling to CIOs and CTOs: show how you support the work their org is already doing instead of proving you're the smartest in the room Why public AI messaging stays stunted at most companies — legal exposure, and stories that aren't fully baked yet How to make the case for brand investment when leadership is pushing for immediate ROIChapters 00:00 — Cold open: brand building feels like a luxury, and why it isn't 00:45 — Intro: most companies die from brand confusion, not obscurity 02:33 — Two distinct audiences, not one rebrand 03:32 — Building awareness for the Ibotta Performance Network 05:01 — Google Cloud lessons: talking to technical buyers like people 05:46 — Rebuilding momentum under a new CRO after the CMO left 06:33 — Talking about AI inside legal and compliance limits 07:55 — Founder-led content and the CEO-hosted podcast 08:46 — Enterprise marketing lessons: Walmart, Uber, DoorDash 10:51 — Differentiating against Amazon DSP, Google Ads, and Meta 11:37 — Denver as a hiring market outside Silicon Valley 12:36 — What she hires for: ownership, fail-fast, decision-making 13:23 — State of Spend: fewer lists, more promotion-driven baskets, private label 15:28 — Brand as the engine for performance marketing 16:44 — Brands she admires: Nike and Shopify 17:52 — The overlooked story: Ibotta as a technology company 18:47 — Lightning round 19:29 — Jason's top three takeaways and the 10-minute actionLinks & resourcesGuestSara Wallace — Head of Brand Marketing, IbottaWebsiteLinkedIn About Frank GrowthFrank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason

5

out of 5

5 Ratings

Honest and Fresh

05/06/2024

Sutton216

Can’t wait for more episodes of this. Love the honest take and the spouse POV

Frank Growth is a sharp, execution-first podcast about how companies actually grow. Hosted by Jason Shafton, it features candid conversations with founders, operators, and investors who are in the work right now. The focus is real decisions: distribution, demand, pricing, org design, incentives, and what breaks once the early playbooks stop working. No hype. No recycled advice. Just clear thinking from people accountable for outcomes.

Creator

Jason Shafton
Years Active

2024 - 2026
Episodes

43
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Jason Shafton
Show Website

Frank Growth