20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC)

Episode: 20Growth: Inside Kraken’s $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn’t and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta
Release Date: April 25, 2025
Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Mayur Gupta, CMO of Kraken

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Introduction to Mayur Gupta

In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), host Harry Stebbings welcomes Mayur Gupta, the Chief Marketing Officer at Kraken, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency platforms. Mayur brings a wealth of experience from leading marketing, business transformation, and growth initiatives at notable organizations such as Gannett USA Today Network, Spotify, Freshly (acquired by Nestlé), and Kimberly Clark.

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Journey into Growth and Lessons from Spotify

Mayur Gupta discusses his unexpected transition into the growth domain, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and continuous learning. He recounts his time at Spotify, highlighting key lessons that have shaped his growth strategies:

• Embracing Chaos at Scale:
  “The biggest thing I learned at Spotify was to grow at a scale of a Spotify to be a growth stage company. You don't try to tame chaos, create a culture environment where you are thriving amidst healthy chaos...” [06:12]

• Quality of Insights:
  “There's nothing more magical in a growth engine than the quality of the insight that runs that engine...” [07:30]

Mayur emphasizes the necessity of maintaining structure without stifling creativity and the pivotal role of high-quality insights in driving effective growth strategies.

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The Role of Marketing in Product-Led Companies

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the evolving role of marketing in companies that have traditionally relied on product-led growth (PLG). Mayur delineates the differences between marketing in PLG versus traditional Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies:

• Distinct Roles:
  “When marketing parachutes itself or is asked to parachute itself in the second phase of growth... in a product led company, brand is not built by marketing, we enhance it.” [10:40]

• Data-Driven Approach:
  “Your step one is not brand building. Your step one has to be rooted in data, because that's the language the rest of the organization knows.” [12:10]

Mayur argues that in PLG environments, marketing should focus on data-driven strategies to enhance an already strong product and user base rather than solely on brand-building initiatives.

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Phases of Growth at Kraken

Mayur outlines Kraken's growth trajectory, dividing it into distinct phases:

1. Organic Growth (First 10 Years):
   Relied heavily on word-of-mouth and an exceptional product to build a user base without significant marketing spend.

2. Data-Driven Marketing Engine (Late 2021):
   Introduced a conscious marketing engine to accelerate growth beyond organic channels.

3. Integrated Growth Components (Last Year):
   Expanded the growth engine to incorporate product design and data engineering, emphasizing cohesive teamwork across departments.
   “The key is that these are the components of the engine and if you don't have the components hooked in sitting different places, it's an inefficient engine.” [16:12]

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Balancing Organic and Paid Growth

The conversation delves into the strategic balance between organic and paid growth:

• Current Allocation at Kraken:
  “It's north of 80%. It's still organic...” [22:09]

• Strategic Investment:
  Focuses on maximizing high-impact, measurable channels first (e.g., paid search, SEO) before diversifying into more complex channels like paid social.

• Adaptation to AI in SEO:
  “How do I come on top of that LLM? How do I become the brand that the LLM is going to recommend?” [19:37]

Mayur emphasizes the enduring importance of SEO, albeit with evolving strategies to align with AI-driven search mechanisms.

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Branding vs. Performance Marketing

Mayur challenges the traditional bifurcation of marketing into "brand" and "performance," advocating for an integrated approach:

• Unified Marketing Strategies:
  “I think that both work and both are absolutely must in the long term to build a long term sustainable growth model.” [28:27]

• Upper vs. Lower Funnel:
  Differentiates between creating new demand (upper funnel) and converting existing demand (lower funnel), stressing the necessity of both for sustained growth.

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Proving Marketing Efficiency and Attribution

Addressing the complexities of measuring marketing impact, Mayur outlines Kraken’s multifaceted approach:

• Methodologies Used:

  • Market Tests: Comparing different markets to isolate variables.
  • Control Group Tests: Establishing benchmarks by segregating user groups.
  • Brand Lift Studies: Assessing changes in brand perception.
  • Modern Marketing Mix Models (MMM): Utilizing AI and machine learning for comprehensive attribution.

• Continuous Experimentation:
  “We do a lot of experiments to look at because when the CAC's looking good... You've reached a saturation point, right.” [31:04]

Mayur highlights the importance of agile experimentation and data-driven adjustments to optimize marketing spend effectively.

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Strategic Growth Decisions and Learnings

highlighting strategic decisions that have significantly impacted Kraken's growth:

• End-to-End Growth Engine:
  “When Arjun came on board we decided that we want an end to end growth engine.” [39:34]

• Habit Formation and Utility:
  Focused on building user habits and enhancing platform utility to encourage repeat engagement.
  “Figure out whatever way that we can actually build habits so you bring users back to the platform...” [39:37]

Mayur credits the integration of cross-functional teams and a clear mission focused on unit economics as pivotal to Kraken’s growth success.

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Tactical Growth Strategies: Incremental vs. Significant

Mayur discusses Kraken's balanced approach between numerous small-scale improvements and occasional significant innovations:

• Incremental Improvements:
  “It is 90% basis point movements, you know, with compounding impacts and many of them.” [42:23]

• Major Experiments:
  “...keep trying. But 90% of our focus though is still on basis point movement at scale.” [42:52]

This dual strategy ensures sustained growth while allowing room for breakthrough innovations.

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Importance of "Time to Wow"

Mayur underscores the criticality of minimizing the time it takes to impress and retain users:

• Reducing Friction:
  “If the friction is too much for them to go through, they've already made a choice somewhere else...” [42:57]

• Category-Specific Strategies:
  Tailors the urgency based on the product category's decision-making timelines.

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Common Misconceptions About Growth

Addressing prevalent misunderstandings, Mayur cautions against a one-size-fits-all mentality in growth strategies:

• Mistaken Replication:
  “Work for anybody else would work for them too. This is what worked for Dropbox... But if they could look at the underlying playbook...” [44:05]

He emphasizes the necessity of customizing growth strategies to fit the unique context and foundation of each company.

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Kraken’s Brand Perception vs. Coinbase

Mayur reflects on Kraken's brand identity compared to competitors like Coinbase:

• Initial Niche Positioning:
  “We were platform of choice for the advanced crypto degen trader.” [44:16]

• Evolving Brand Strategy:
  Kraken aims to transition from an insider brand to a more universally recognized platform, similar to how Amazon and Google evolved.

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Mayur's North Star Metric

When asked about Kraken's primary success metric, Mayur identifies:

• Transacting Clients with Strong Payback Periods:
  “The North Star for the growth theme right now... number of transacting clients across the world with strong payback period.” [45:21]

This focus ensures that growth is sustainable and economically viable in the long term.

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Quick Fire Highlights

In the rapid-fire segment, Mayur shares concise insights on various growth-related topics:

• Growth Channel That Has Died:
  “Programmatic, programmatic display. DSPs.” [46:08]

• Growth Channel with Most Opportunity:
  “YouTube. That's the most underleveraged social platform in the world.” [46:31]

• Impact of AI on Growth:
  “Makes it faster, more competitive, more nimble.” [46:45]

• Ideal Background for Growth Professionals:
  “A combination of all of those things... An engineer who's a dreamer and a doer... a data ninja and an analyst.” [46:56]

• Competition with Coinbase:
  “Nothing. They are doing great and well and we love the competition.” [47:23]

• Personal Excitement:
  “Create a world of financial freedom where access to wealth is not limited to a small subset of people around the world.” [47:52]

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Conclusion

Harry Stebbings wraps up the episode by expressing appreciation for Mayur Gupta's insights and encouraging listeners to explore Kraken’s growth strategies as a model for sustainable and impactful business expansion.

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Notable Quotes:

• “There's nothing more magical in a growth engine than the quality of the insight that runs that engine.” — Mayur Gupta [07:30]

• “I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath the build it and they will come is still marketing.” — Mayur Gupta [13:11]

• “In product led companies, not in CPG... If you're in the early zero to one stage... your product is your brand, user is your brand.” — Mayur Gupta [28:27]

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This episode offers a deep dive into the intricacies of building and scaling a growth engine within a product-led company, providing invaluable lessons for founders and marketing leaders aiming to replicate Kraken’s success in their own ventures.

Transcript

[Maya Gupta]

Make your product your strongest marketing channel. Whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing made the biggest mistake and did the biggest injustice. The fundamental learning and experiment is how you think about the engine itself.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 growth with me, Harry Stebbings very simple 20 growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to uncover how they built their growth engines, the strategies, the lessons, all of it unpacked. Today we have Maya Gupta, currently CMO Kraken, one of the world's largest crypto platforms. Prior to that, he led marketing, business transformation and growth at Gannett USA Today Network. He also led growth at Spotify. He was the CMO at Freshly, which was acquired by Nestle and check this out. He was the first ever chief marketing technologist at Kimberly Clark, one of the world's most famous brands.

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[Maya Gupta]

You have now arrived at your destination.

[Harry Stebbings]

Maya, it's so good to do this.

[SecureFrame]

Listen, I've heard so many good things.

[Harry Stebbings]

From many, many mutual friends. I've wanted to do it for a while. So thank you so much for joining me today.

[Maya Gupta]

Thanks for having me Harry. I've been a fan for a long time.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's very, very kind of you. I want to start though with like Growth is this unique and weird world with even more wonderful participants in it. It's not the obvious thing to get into. How did you first make your way into the world of growth?

[Maya Gupta]

Yeah, I wish I could say it was a conscious planned journey where it was all accidental and half of it was laid out for me, half of it probably I designed. But you know, I grew up in India, did my major in computer science. Harry, like many Indians would do, other than wanting to play cricket for the country, which I had the passion for until I was in college and I realized the chances of being one of the 16 people out of a billion plus was slightly lower than 50, 60%. So did my major in computer science. Started my career as an engineer there, worked for a company called Sapient, started there, you know, as a C developer, built all kinds of systems. But there were two pivots in my career. The first one came when one of my mentors asked me to be a product manager for an ad tech product we acquired here in Miami in 06. So that's when I evolved from pure engineering to building products. And that's how I entered marketing advertising for the first time. And then after 12 odd years I kind of left Sapien to join to run E commerce for Kimberly Clark Huggies, Kleenex Cortex globally and I went on the brand site for the first time. And then after that I Spotify as a VP of growth somehow evolved from engineering to building products to running E comm and really getting into data and ad tech, then growth and then in one of the best places to work at now at the intersection of marketing, data growth and crypto.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you think about lessons from Spotify, Spotify is such a branded instrumental company. What were your biggest lessons from a growth perspective from your time with Spotify?

[Maya Gupta]

The biggest thing I learned at Spotify was to grow at a scale of a Spotify to be a growth stage company. You don't try to tame chaos, create a culture environment where you are thriving amidst healthy chaos, where you are running at 100 miles an hour even when you can see 10 meters ahead. Rather so because you have the confidence that at the 8th meter mark you'll see the next 10 and next 10 and so on. So I mean that was a fundamental learning I had because being a big organization as Spotify was even back then and much bigger now, or at Kraken where very similar journeys, it's very easy to tend to create structure as you now become a thousand plus and 3,000 people to create structure and to kill. Exactly the reason that got you here and that was my biggest lessons learned and second one more directly tied to growth was there's nothing more magical in a growth engine than the quality of the insight that runs that engine. Because it's so easy to believe. Oh let's do I have great idea, let's do these experiments and test some things. But there's a lot of wasted energy when you operate that way. The magic of a growth engine is in the quality of the insight that feeds it. So for example, when Apple and they came up with their own subscription product and we were really trying to figure out what's going to happen, the world's going to change, we started to dig into a lot in the human psyche. Why is someone coming to Spotify versus why is somebody going to Amazon or Apple? And you realize that the black background of Spotify actually resonated a lot more with users, with listeners who are active listeners. They wanted to discover, you know, they had the X factor and that match a lot more. It created an experience that gave them a sense of more control versus a white background which was more relevant to a passive list. Now you won't necessarily think about that, but there are a lot of insights that you realize actually that play a big role in how people make choices. When you have reasonably decent products, you.

[Harry Stebbings]

Fed me such a nice little teaser there. You said, there are so many things I would have done differently. When I ask you what's one or two that most come to mind, what would they be?

[Maya Gupta]

I think it was more around my learning how to operate, you know, as a player within a growth engine, within a growth stage company. And look, I grew up in India and when you grow up in an environment like India, where we are a billion plus now almost a billion and a half people, and for every spot there are thousands of people fighting for that spot, you are trained to come first. When you come second, you don't have a chance. That's just a DNA of how you, how you grow up. So when I came into the US and I started working on with these great companies and some great, incredible. I think when I was going inside the room, I still wanted to be the person with all the answers. Even when I was a leader, I wanted to be the person with all the answers versus with all the mistakes I made. I finally realized that as a leader, eventually what's more important is you become the person who has the ability to ask the right question because you surround yourself with people who can get much better answers much faster. So there's a mindset shift. And the second one, which I think is my thesis of growth and marketing in product led companies is what is the role of marketing in a product led company where the first phase of growth was purely product led, where marketing did not exist. And this is true for Kraken, true For Spotify, true for Google, because the first phase of growth was either virality network effects or just a brilliant product in a category and word of mouth. So when marketing parachutes itself or is asked to parachute itself in the second phase of growth while the company wants it and the growth has saturated, but as a marketeer you're coming and on day one you're facing the wall because you have to prove yourself. You are a new organ in the body. And in a company like Spotify, where a lot of the growth is product led truly, because an incredible product that just moves the inertia was so strong I had to realize that I was a supporting engine to marketing, whereas I was a type A and I didn't understand how to work very well with product and made a lot of mistakes in my partnership in some other. So they were more personnel learnings.

[Harry Stebbings]

That is a fantastic observation though. In terms of like what is the role of marketing in a world where PLG product like growth has been the only phase so far? How do you reflect on that? Part of my mind goes to great, it's all about brand marketing. Spotify on a Barcelona deal. And then part of me goes great, it's all about kind of respectfully growth initiatives like referral codes, incentive schemes to get existing users that first cohort to bring more. What is that answer?

[Maya Gupta]

It's one of my favorite topics because when people talk about marketing and growth we talk about as a monolithic craft and it's not. There's so many variations. And the best way to answer that is. Let me talk about one which is a total opposite. A cpg. A traditional cpg, you know, that is not direct to consumer where the only growth engine that exists is marketing. That's why marketing in traditional CPG calls the shots. They are not just marketers, they are brand managers. They own the P and L. That's the traditional world. So when we talk about marketing and a product led growth marketer is comparing themselves or hearing stories from a CPG CMO or chief Growth officer, don't do that. You're going to put yourself in a box and get really anxious because the levers they have and the authority they have will never exist in a product led company. That's the only lever a CPG company has. Now let's look at what happens in a product led organization where they got to a billion dollars without needing marketing. Yes, you can say Spotify is all about brand and the Barcelona partnership. Actually it isn't. Spotify is first about an incredible product and all the growth that is driven by product, I can bet my life on that. And then on top of that then comes a sliver of marketing. Because in product led company, brand is not built by marketing, we enhance it. Brand is built first and foremost in the 0 to 1 stage by the quality of the product and the experience you deliver. And then secondly, it's built by the users. You know, they are your biggest marketing channel after the product. And then you bring marketing to say, hey, here's the foundation, here is who we are now. How do we enhance it and differentiate ourselves and really scale it and reach? So when you go as a marketeer in an organization like that, your step one is not brand building. Your step one has to be rooted in data, because that's the language the rest of the organization knows. They understand incrementality, they understand payback, they understand user growth. And the challenge and the opportunity for marketeers to be successful is how do they then influence and inspire the rest of the organization to appreciate the value of the serendipity of brand building. At the same time, use a lot of creativity to prove the impact of that investment.

[Harry Stebbings]

My word. Thank you so much for just teeing up the next like, you know, I write these schedules and then they just mean nothing because I then hear this and I'm like, fuck it, let's just change it up. You mentioned that kind of the true magic of product and a great product experience. Do you believe in the build it and they will come?

[Maya Gupta]

I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath the build it and they will come is still marketing. It is just driven by the product. It's a world where there is infinite choice, there is infinite access from a user standpoint, compared to 25 years back where access was extremely challenging and until you saw it on the tv, you had no way to know that something new had launched. No longer. Right? So this infinite access, there's no sense of loyalty. The friction to leave your product and enter another one is absolutely nothing. So what I mean by a great product is product in of itself is the magnet. It is a strong driver. So for example, Slack has network effects baked in. So as long as you get one client and you have 10 users within a team or one user within a team, the nature of the product itself inherits network effects. Where I'm going to ask all my team to join because the value of Slack gets better and better as the entire organization bolts on. But that's not because it was a great product and people found it. You still have to do those mechanics. But the growth itself is inherently driven through the product or through word of mouth. You're still going out there, but the channels and the levers you're using are not your typical paid marketing levers just yet.

[Harry Stebbings]

Where does growth sit in your mind? We're talking about product, we're talking about marketing. Some people will put it in its own team. These are very different disciplines and there's very different ways to approach it.

[SecureFrame]

Where does growth sit?

[Maya Gupta]

Of course, it was planted back in the days of Facebook with Chamath and that team. They spun off something because the core functions were not thinking differently. Marketeers have the value of death of campaigns. So you run a campaign, you spike some growth and it dies. Product has a value of death of features and makes a product unusable. So they had to, they had to manufacture it that way. At Spotify, we had to manufacture it where I was a VP of growth on the marketing and the performance and data side, but I had a partner who was a VP of growth on the product side. For example@kraken. Three phases of growth Harry. Phase one was the first 10 years where like I said earlier, it was all organic, great word of mouth, early player, category builder. Then in late 2021, we realized that the next phase of growth for Kraken now needs a conscious engine. And we established data driven marketing as an engine. But last year we said that's not enough. We now need to bring in product design, data engineering. So now growth at Kraken, it reports to me, but it doesn't matter. You could take the entire engine and place it wherever. What's most important is that the growth engine has the components working and humming together, which is data engineering, design, product marketing and all elements of marketing. Whether that now sits in place A, place B, whether you make that engine hum by having hard lines or you somehow make it hum by having dotty lines or hard lines doesn't matter. The key is these are the components of the engine and if you don't have the components hooked in sitting different places, it's an inefficient engine.

[Harry Stebbings]

So I think a lot of founders want to build a growth engine. They're probably at series A, they've probably got or series B, they've probably got enough scale where there is enough data. If you were to advise someone starting the build out of a growth engine, having been through that today, what would you advise them?

[Maya Gupta]

What I would say is one, don't get too excited about growth because focus first on making sure that you have absolutely built a great product in a decent market. In other words, your proven product market fit. Right? So invest enough energy in zero to one before getting excited about unlocking marketing or product LED growth or network effects like this is a struggle I see in a lot of early founders. Is this inertia and excitement to just grow even before they spend enough time to optimize and get enough signals that yes, I have a decent enough product that people are coming back and showing me stickiness, showing me habits for the core value prop. And once I've proven that and I've done a few things like, okay, I can demonstrate scale that if I go after now you're saying now I'm ready for growth. That's one second. The way you approach growth, I would say, is first maximize the areas that are hardest, which is think about how can you leverage the two strongest levers of growth which are also the hardest levers. One is product. Can you bake in any amount of growth driven out of your product? Now, not every product would have inherent network effects. It depends on the nature of the product. But are you leveraging other tactical ideas like referrals? Are you leveraging virality? Are you thinking about anything that can squeeze make your product your strongest marketing channel? And then two, can you leverage your existing client base as your strongest marketing channel? And then once you've done that before, you get into the drug of paid marketing, which is important by the way. I'm not dishing on. We spend a lot on that now at Kraken. I would say the next layer is maximize every lever of organic growth that you can. So don't underestimate the value you can derive from SEO, app store optimization, all the things that are harder, conquer those and then unlock the drug of paid and do it right.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you know when you've hit the unlock? How do you know when you've saturated growth out of product and organic versus just a bit of a slow time?

[Maya Gupta]

You see that in your curves. You see, are you saturating what your TAM is, how much market penetration you've had? Is your growth rate slowing down? Is there competition Again, there are a lot more variables too. Are you in a saturated market? You know where your product is good, but it's not absolute. Category creator, right? So like look at Tesla. Category creator, more or less. Yeah, there were some hybrid cars before, but they sucked. So they really haven't spent on marketing because every Tesla is a marketing channel and every Tesla owner, 90% of them are marketing channels and advocates. But when the competition comes in as it is right now, they are starting to unlock some pieces, whether that is a pricing strategy or starting to think about how do we differentiate the brand itself.

[Harry Stebbings]

I just want to go through them. When we think about organic, a lot of people say SEO is going to be less and less important with time. That bluntly, a lot of LLMs and foundation model usage means that Google's stronghold obviously is dwindling. Will the search in SEO be less important in 10 years time or more important?

[Maya Gupta]

I don't think it's less important. I think the way you optimize for SEO is dramatically going to change because the user journey is not going to begin from these AI engines and the AI engines are going to ask that question. But how will the AI engine find you? So you now have to optimize to show up within those LLMs. So as a brand, as a product, you still have to understand how you are going to be discovered. The mechanisms of discovery are evolving dramatically with AI, but you still want to be discovered. So what you have to do, the muscle you have to build internally is now from a human discovering you through this algorithm that this company called Google wrote and keeps changing without telling you, as they shouldn't. Now that engine is an absolute machine LED LLM based model. So now the challenge for all of us is how do I come on top of that LLM? How do I become the brand that the LLM is going to recommend?

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you think about that? Today I haven't done this, but if I go to ChatGPT and say, where's the best place to buy crypto? I don't know what it would say.

[Maya Gupta]

You should try it out. And we do have an incredible SEO team that is absolutely focusing a lot on how do we show up. We monitor what percentage of search results are coming via traditional search engines and LLMs. And that's increasing, still very minuscule, but the growth rate is shifting more and more towards these LLMs. And the way you have to optimize your content is very different for what the LLMs are looking for. And we are still learning, these are still very early phases, but a lot of the conversation. Harry, nine to 12 months from now, when the percentage of searches shift from traditional SEO engines to these LLMs, a lot of the conversation for the next two or three years will be, you know, what are the best practices. There'll be tons of agencies popping up to to figure it out, to make that a business model until it becomes a commodity again.

[Harry Stebbings]

What is a healthy relationship or Ratio between organic and paid.

[Maya Gupta]

So if you're a direct to consumer e commerce business, you can pray to God and hope that more than 50% of your growth is organic. It'll never be because it's a, it's a massively CAC and unit economics driven world of direct to consumer where you're fighting for discounts. So I'm assuming it is 80, 85% paid, 10, 15% organic at Kraken. Because of our history of the first 10 years being purely organic and word of mouth, we still enjoy and are blessed with tremendous amount of organic growth.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's your ratio today?

[Maya Gupta]

It's north of 80%. It's still organic. People who are coming now if you apply, we invest a lot of energy on attribution and to decipher how many of those truly were organic and how many of those may have seen an ad and we just not attributing. So we invest a lot of energy on attributing every single interaction and that normalizes that percentage a little bit. It starts to attribute to channels that are not last search like paid social and so on. So it normalizes a bit but it's still a very healthy organic growth. The mission for us, Harry, when we started to scale our marketing engine, which is the second phase of growth around three years back, was not to slow down on organic. That's a race we are on. So a lot of effort on optimizing there. At the same time we had to build this paid engine that just had never existed or not optimized enough. So our goal has been to continue to raise the velocity of the users we bring in. And it's okay if the portfolio diversifies a little bit because if you're not spending on paid at all and the competition was spending 600 million a year and you were spending less than 10, boy, you got a long way to go to capture the market and the market's waiting for you.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what do you do then? Because it's quite easy to go. I mean, by the way, astonishing on organic, amazing work, well done. But as you said, when they're spending 600 and you're spending less than 10, what do you do then? Because you don't want to go, we'll spend 300 and just blow 300. What's the right response?

[Maya Gupta]

We started with building the engine and we went from 10 to let's say spending 50 and then we are now spending a lot more which we can share. But the focus was the goal is not to be the loudest voice the Goal was we are going to invest in educating the world on the substance of crypto. At the same time identify who our core target audience is and from a growth standpoint, obsessing over not just spending and bringing people, but obsessing over unit economics. So we spend a lot of energy, more so now, like I said, when Arjun coming on board, he's bringing a lot of more diverse perspective on what success looks like for us. So we invest a lot of energy on payback periods, what we want our payback period to be. But not just the typical traditional marketing payback. This is fully loaded payback. We apply gross margin discounts, we apply a percentage of operating expenses on our cost and we challenge ourselves, can we pay still pay that back within let's say x months and then what does your overall cost to LTV ratio look like over a 12, 24, 36 month period? So the goal has been how do we optimize that engine, scale that across geographies and then if we can prove payback and the CFO believes, okay, if you're spending 100, you're giving the hundred back in less than six months. Let's say keep spending because we can see money coming back.

[Harry Stebbings]

So there's so much for me to unpack. Here we go from 10 to 50 to a number that you can't say today. How do we approach channel spend and how do we think about channel diversification versus concentration?

[Maya Gupta]

So let's assume we are starting from ground zero where all you have is organic, you know which ones you unpack. Differentiating theory from reality. Okay, because theoretically I can say a lot of things, but reality is you pick the ones you can measure more directly and easily. Start there. Because I feel that spending on growth or spending in a product led company is like, it's like your oxygen supply. You have to be able to prove what you are getting back. You are taking almost all your spend and putting that on the lower funnel which is more directly attributable. And within the lower funnel you're picking channels that you absolutely know are last touch because you assume that you have some demand out there in the category you were just not capturing it. So start on channels like paid search, you look at some display and so on and asa Google USC channels that again are more digital users are converting and you can absolutely prove with very little ambiguity on what they're bringing back.

[Harry Stebbings]

Before we move to the next. What sort of channels are those? That's Facebook. Google Insta.

[Maya Gupta]

Not Facebook, not Instagram, because they are the second layer of Paid social platforms where attribution isn't all that straightforward. So I would bring them in the next wave of channels to unlock.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what's the first wave then where it's like directly.

[Maya Gupta]

Yes, more paid search, app store, asa. I mean those are the ones which are more last touch models typically. So you've seen your ads, you're being influenced, you're being softened. But where do more people convert? These are typically the last touch channels. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

And okay, so we've got one which is like directly attributable. What's the second phase?

[Maya Gupta]

The second phase is which are attributable but they're not last touch. Like that's where paid social, your display ad networks come in and then gradually audio and olv. Those are the ones where you now need to sophisticated create a more sophisticated attribution and measurement model. If we just look at oh, how many people came from paid social, the answer will be maybe none. But that doesn't mean it's not working because all the credit is being given to paid search. So you start to get smarter and build more advanced measurement and attribution models to understand the role that each of those touch points are playing.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you think about concentration versus diversification across them? You can pick one from each and go down it kind of drilling in that way or you can do all of them in each. A lot more expansive, a lot more diversified. How do you think about that?

[Maya Gupta]

At any point at scale, you don't want 80 to 90% of all your paid growth coming from one channel because too much at risk. Right. I would say back in my D2C days we used to obsess over it, but we would say no more than 25 to 30% in any single channel outside of organic. Also because it's not just channel diversification, it's also a different type of audiences because in crypto, for example, we live and breathe on social. Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or search. So it's also diversifying the audiences because not every audience and product type is going to be is going to make sense out of all these platforms and channels.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do your cacs get better, cheaper over time because you have a bigger brand, more people know you, they hear about you, or do they get more expensive as your core audience saturates and you have to expand to a less obvious icp?

[Maya Gupta]

Yeah. So now we are talking about brand and brand and growth, brand and performance. That's the, that's a fun, challenging, but never dying dilemma. So lot to unpack there first. I would say whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing made the biggest mistake and did the biggest injustice to labeling them. Because the moment you call one type of marketing performance and the other type something else, which is AKA brand marketing, inadvertently means that one performs and the other doesn't, which is absolutely incorrect and wrong. And for founders and CEOs and companies that haven't spent in this, their foundation is based on that. Because a lot of their marketing understanding is from 30 years back, the age of the madman, where it was a cost center, it was spray and pray with great marketing and people would come. But I feel that first of all there's a fundamental flaw in our thinking that one type of marketing works and other doesn't. They both work and both are absolutely must in the long term to build a long term sustainable growth model. The differences are they play different roles. One is needed. To your point, let's say you saturated your demand. There's no more demand out there. Doesn't matter what level of discount and scientific lower funnel targeting you are doing, there are no more people. You have to create new demand by being part of culture, by creating inspiration, educating them about the value you bring. You just cannot give an offer and expect people will convert. That's what this upper funnel, which is the phrase I like to use more than brand because otherwise brand as a phrase gets bastardized and the most hated word right now in the world of marketing and growth. So I think that that upper funnel efforts are needed to create new demand when your lower funnel efforts have saturated whatever you had on the table. That's why you as a business have to think at what point do you need both flywheels to be running? The magic is if you have a hundred bucks, how do you define and identify how much am I investing in which flywheel? And depending on what stage you are. So if you're in the early zero to one stage or one plus stage, I would say spend very little on brand. You don't have to because your product is your brand, user is your brand. Invest all the money you have to bring people in. But once you've scaled, if you're not investing in upper funnel and you're not differentiating yourself unless you're Tesla where the product has differentiated itself from the clutter, you are just going to be a commodity because you have nothing that differentiates you from the pack first.

[Harry Stebbings]

You mentioned that kind of channel saturation. How do you know when you've saturated a channel? When additional dollars won't yield the same performance level of output?

[Maya Gupta]

Yes, we do a lot of experiments to look at because when the CAC's looking good and we don't just always look at CAC in our world, we look at CAC and early ltv. Then we look at paybacks. But you will see when it's looking great, you tell the team, don't worry, just keep pushing. And you start to see a cliff in cac. Then you know, look, you've reached a saturation point, right? So you pull back and you normalize there. And then we challenge and we do tests and experiments to see. Now, as you unlock upper funnel in that market, in that particular market, can it unlock higher velocity, higher throughput? So can you expand the pipes through which new users are coming in by creating upper funnel? And that is how you prove incrementality of the upper funnel spend as well.

[Harry Stebbings]

In terms of like when to spend on brand. When we think about that, how do you think about when's that? Right? Time to spend on brand? When we have enough performance marketing. You know what's so interesting? You said it was a dirty word brand. I had Nick on from Revolut and like Nick is a performance to the fucking max. This guy was born with a Lucozade in his hand, okay? And he's gonna listen and be like you. He was. And he's like, my biggest realization is the importance of brand marketing.

[Maya Gupta]

Yes, I've had the biggest realization. The same biggest realization too, but it's not at the cost of performance. So the way I think about it is I'm going to use an analogy because this is the same question we discuss at every forum at many team meetings is how do you make a choice? How do you think about both? The way I say in product led companies, not in cpg. Again, in product led companies, you have to first think about growth and performance. A lot lower funnel effort as oxygen. You don't have that, you are dead. You do not have a chance to come back the next day. You have to know your numbers and you have to move the numbers. So if you have 100 bucks, make sure you're using enough of the hundred bucks or all of it to hit the numbers you need. That's your oxygen. Then I think about this upper funnel spend. I'm reminding myself not to use the word brand. The upper funnel spend is nutrition, is good food, you know, or just food for that matter, you won't die if you didn't have it. You will eventually die. The difference is the size, the scale and the pace of the flywheels are different based on who you are and where you are and the rest of the category, your market penetration, your core product differentiation. But in the long term, sustainable growth, you cannot not have the flywheel of your upper funnel spend. That helps build demand and build your brand.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you think about it when your competitors are doing super bowl adverts?

[Maya Gupta]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Harry Stebbings]

There's a lot of the epitome of brand marketing is I know they did cool stuff with the attribution and I don't need it like scan your screen. But like when they're doing super bowl.

[Maya Gupta]

Advertising, you're like, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And we look at that all the time. But I can tell you that there is a reason why Kraken can come out and share our numbers with a lot of confidence, which we did last week. I don't know if you saw like we shared our revenue and the volume. Not every single, but we shared our.

[Harry Stebbings]

First that didn't see it.

[Maya Gupta]

What was the revenue? Even pre IPO, you know, in 2024 numbers, we shared a billion and a half in net revenue, not gross net revenue. Hopefully I'm back here next year. We can talk about 2025 growth. We shared a ARPU. We shared the number of funded accounts. Currently, these are not lifetime funded accounts. We shared assets on platform, you know, close to 50 billion. We shared a volume which is almost three quarters of a trillion dollars on platform last year. So all I'm saying is first of all, of course, then there are coinbases of the world which are public companies. So we all know their numbers also. It's a strategy that could very well work for some of them. It is not like 2,300 million dollars of upper funnel spend is wrong. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying in our world we believe a strong balance is needed and our strategy, the way if you give me a hundred bucks at Kraken, the way we think about it is the way we'll break apart. The hundred dollars is first. We are not going to leave any growth on the table. That's our ethos now at this stage of our growth. If you spoke to me 18 months back, I would have said something very different because not many people around the world knew Kraken. That's why we also did a lot of partnerships. We are now sponsoring Tottenham Spurs.

[Harry Stebbings]

How much do you spend on That.

[Maya Gupta]

I can't give you the exact number. What I would say is in terms of percentages of my overall spend, it was single digit percentages.

[Harry Stebbings]

That tells me you have a big budget, dude.

[Maya Gupta]

Relative to the competition where they have shared, where we see the numbers publicly, we are extremely calculated. But at the same time we will spend as much as possible as long as we keep proving payback.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you think about proving efficiency with that? Proving attribution? How do you answer that?

[Maya Gupta]

It's harder but it's possible. What we do Harry, is not just the partnerships. We have a whole portfolio of upper funnel spend. We do audio, video, digital display. And if you think about what the difference is between that and lower funnel, it's just messaging by the way. Same channels, just the messaging is different. We are talking more emotionally, culturally relevance versus formal action offer. That's the only difference. Sometimes we create this, you know, really complex differences between. Oh, this is brand versus performance. Well, same platforms. I can use TV to run a lower funnel doctor campaign. I can also use TV for a very inspirational moment that really makes you step back and think about and remember me as a brand. So the way we think about attribution and quantifying the impact which by the way we get rightly so get challenged every day. Every week we spend the Sunday with Arjun, four hours huddle to tell him exactly how we are proving every single dollar. Which was truly fascinating and a great discussion. The way we do it is four different ways. One, we do match market tests, very simple because in crypto the categories across the world it gives us a great benchmark. So when we are unlocking upper funnel in market A but not in market B where bitcoin price is the same, I can show differences. So that's a match market test. We do a lot of control group tests, we get a lot of brand lift studies and most importantly we have a sleuth of short term proxy KPIs because in today's world in a product led company we don't have six months to prove the impact of X million that you already spent. So you got to give early signals. So we look at share of search, we look at direct traffic, we should look at lifts, is it fluctuating and so on. And then the last two levers, one we've unlocked, the other one we haven't fully yet is we also use MMM because MTA is no longer relevant. So we use mmm, we use a couple of different partners and we have.

[Harry Stebbings]

Our internal what's mmm?

[Maya Gupta]

It's like a modern Version of a marketing mix model that basically use AI and machine learning in different ways to attribute. They look at all your growth and sales data, to look at what were you doing in those moments. They look at all kinds of signals to tell you that you think that all the magic that's happening is because of the last touch the user had. Well, guess what, the reason why the user got there is because they were inspired because they saw you on their team's jersey which got them curious and three days later you know, they looked for you and et cetera, et cetera. So we use that model too to understand that in a non last touch attribution model here is a role that all these other touch points play. But there's nothing more magical than doing experiments and proving fair enough, I saw that signal, but now let me prove it to you by turning on and turning off. So we have moments, we do tests where I would have upper and lower funnel running together and I will only have lower funnel running and I can show you whether I see an impact or not. Now it's also possible in a market. One last point, Harry. In a market it may not have any impact because guess what, everybody knows you already or doesn't care about you. So it doesn't matter how much you spend on upper funnel, you are not seeing incrementality. Then you should pause.

[Harry Stebbings]

So do you see in North London an increased crack in account, adoption rate, sign up rate post Tottenham?

[Maya Gupta]

We've seen it. We haven't been able to attribute it back to just one activation which is Tottenham, but we have seen a lift. The reason I'm saying that is we haven't done a test which is isolated to just that partnership, but we have proven that the combination of our upper funnel has driven incrementality. What we are doing now is answering that question which you just said. Now what about at a channel and partnership level?

[Harry Stebbings]

Tell me what was the best growth decision you made and what did you learn from it?

[Maya Gupta]

I can give two the fundamental learning and experiment is how you think about the engine itself. Like have you built the engine? And for me the biggest turning point at Kraken in my growth trajectory is what we did last year where when Arjun came on board we decided that we want an end to end growth engine. We don't want it to be isolated between marketing, design, product. We want a growth engine that has end to end accountability and ownership. That is collectively thinking about three very simple things. How do we bring the most relevant Kraken Klein into our ecosystem and remove as much friction as possible to make them experience the magical moment for Kraken. That's one. That's one first most primary goal which by the way, marketing and my product growth teams work hand in hand. They are paused, they live and breathe together to solve these problems. The second is figure out whatever way that we can actually build habits so you bring users back to the platform and together with product build utility that gives them more reasons to come back to the platform than just coming back to trade. So that's the evolution that we are going through now as we expanding the aperture of what Kraken is. And third and most important is do one and two with strong unit economics. Building this engine and giving this very clear mission I think has been the biggest and most successful experiment.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's been the most tactically successful growth.

[Maya Gupta]

Experiment Channel spend the easiest one is our SEO team. We tried a phrase on a landing page which focused on the traditional ELMR framework and it said back in the day we would say come to us because this is what our product does to really changing that to respond to their psyche. And we changed that to a phrase called trade like a pro. This is for a pro product. And we saw substantial basis point lift because we were now connecting our core message to the desire that our users had to achieve a status to be part of a tribe. So like trade like a pro. So there are tons of them like that in our onboarding flow. The decision to partner with an external partner that can shrink six steps into one single step. A single decision to take in the phone number and auto fill everything else because you're using a service that can use that as an identifier to bring all your information. In other words, tons of experiments, Harry, that we've done, which I call drive convenient value. So they give convenience and remove by removing friction. But you're able to prove incremental value because if you do one, not the other, you don't grow. If you give value, but it has too much friction, people will not use it. If you remove friction and it's very convenient, but there's not incremental value, then it's still going to be hard for you to use it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is growth about 1% improvements, lots of them, they add up. Or is it about needle moving swings new product, bam.

[Maya Gupta]

It is 90% basis point movements, you know, with compounding impacts and many of them. But keep 10% to still try the next big swing. And that's what we are doing. We literally two weeks back spun off a tiny pod whose entire job is to experiment ideas that otherwise would take months to try and see. Can we get proof points in three or four weeks? And the expectation is eight out of 10 will fail, but keep trying. But 90% of our focus though is still on basis point movement at scale.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, you mentioned like the time to wow. How important is time to wow?

[Maya Gupta]

It is very important. The user that's coming to you has five other options and if you're taking, if they're waiting too long, they've already tried. Also it also depends on the category. Like if you're buying a house, you're only going to do this once, twice, twice in your life. And if you're, you know, real estate platform, you got more time. But in a, in a category like ours, people are moving, making decisions by the minute. If the market's moving and if you are not there and if the friction is too much for them to go through, in order for them to experience it, they've already made a choice somewhere else where, you know, there was much less friction. So it's, it's very important to shrink that. Whether that is your core experience and onboarding to activation or something like referrals too. We would just, you know, we are, we are about to activate our referral program again. But one of the things we were discussing yesterday is it's not just about how many users refer, but it is very important to know how fast does it take for that user to. For that new user to refer more users and how do we create that excitement and incentivize them to do it much early on in their journey.

[Harry Stebbings]

Final one, before we do a quick fire, what do most people think they know about growth? That they get totally wrong, that whatever.

[Maya Gupta]

Work for anybody else would work for them too. This is what worked for Dropbox, that's what worked for Kraken and that's what worked for Spotify. So it's going to work for me too. But if they could look at the underlying playbook, that would be exciting.

[Harry Stebbings]

The hard thing I find with Kraken's brand, sorry, just interested by this is like Kraken was always the brand for me for like crypto insiders, for the people in the know. Coinbase was the one for everyone.

[Maya Gupta]

Yes, that's spot on. That was the reality.

[Harry Stebbings]

And I don't know if that's what you want.

[Maya Gupta]

Not anymore. But that is what our 0 to 1, 0 to 2 was. We were platform of choice for the advanced crypto degen trader. That is how we grew. That's why when you look at Our numbers, our arpu, the quality of a user is two and a half, three times more than the average retail focus exchange because they brought retailers. Nothing wrong. But see what's happening though now, Harry, in the 14, 15 years of the category, this is very much like the metas and the Amazons and the Googles. They all started with a different starting point. Amazon with a bookstore, Google with the search and social platform. But they're all converging. Same thing happening in crypto. We're all starting at a different place with a different product market fit. We're all converging and then diversifying.

[Harry Stebbings]

Now, final one for a quick fire. What's your North Star today? Number of accounts means jack shit. What's the North Star?

[Maya Gupta]

Yeah, the North Star for the growth theme right now, what we call number of transacting clients, step change, growth in our number of transacting clients across the world with strong payback period. And we have a very quantified target for that payback period. And when I say payback period, it's an outcome of LTV retention, habit creation and all of that because you can't hit an aggressive payback until all those early habits and early signals are humming very well.

[SecureFrame]

Dude, I could talk to you all day.

[Harry Stebbings]

I do want to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

[Maya Gupta]

Oh, wow. Yes. I didn't get the memo for that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yes, the joys of podcasting, dude, is you can edit the silence. So just chill, it's all good. If you ever do live tv, it's terrifying. So, number one, what growth channel has died of death?

[Maya Gupta]

Programmatic, programmatic display. DSPs. Because when it came on, this is my CPG days 2011, 2012, that was the thing. But I think it's been the amount of traction and the conversion you get. I don't see that as much as in other places. I would have said tv, but on the contrary, I feel it actually works.

[Harry Stebbings]

What is the growth channel with the most opportunity today?

[Maya Gupta]

Organic, social and paid social. YouTube. I change it. YouTube. That's the most underleveraged social platform in the world, most under leveraged, even though I think it has the highest number of mouths.

[Harry Stebbings]

How does AI change the world of growth?

[Maya Gupta]

Makes it faster, more competitive, more nimble.

[Harry Stebbings]

What is the ideal background of someone coming into growth? Engineer, consultant, designer.

[Maya Gupta]

A combination of all of those things that were isolated skill sets earlier. An engineer who's a dreamer and a doer, a product, a builder, a marketeer, a storyteller, and absolutely a data ninja and an analyst who's obsessed with outcomes. They can choose to go deep in one or two, but they can't be one or the other. It's an.

[Harry Stebbings]

And what about Coinbase's brand or growth or product? Would you like to have yourself? What could you take?

[Maya Gupta]

Nothing. They are doing great and well and we love the competition. I want everything that we have rooted in Kraken to scale and grow and just enjoy the competition because I think at the end of the day, it's great for Gatefellow community.

[Harry Stebbings]

Final one for you. What are you most excited about today? So, for me, my mother's got Ms. I'm very excited about what AI does for drug discovery and prevention of relapses. I think it will make something that was previously incurable curable.

[Maya Gupta]

Yeah, I was struggling because there's so much mess happening around the world, man, it's so tough. I'm a Buddhist and spend a lot of time every day chanting in the morning and thinking about, you know, how we accomplish world peace based on the principle of cause and effect. But if I have to be true to what I dream and think about every single day outside of my family and my life philosophy of Buddhism, I would say it is to create. To create a world of financial freedom where access to wealth is not limited to a small subset of people around the world. And I'm obviously very grateful that I have an opportunity to live in this part of the world. I grew up in India and more of the world is not like US and Ukraine. While for us, a movement like crypto is a diversification strategy, it's an asset class for a big part of the world. It is a way to survive and live. So I hope that there is more impetus and focus on the substance of this movement and not the superficiality and the surface.

[Harry Stebbings]

Love this conversation. It's so great when you have, like, you know, these schedules and they just mean nothing and you then just have a great and organic chat. It's been fantastic. So thank you so much and I really appreciate the time, man.

[Maya Gupta]

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Harry. Like I said, I've been a fan. Yeah, I'll look forward to staying in touch and keep talking.

[Harry Stebbings]

My word, it was so great to.

Have Maya on the show there.

I'm just sad that he sponsored the wrong sports team. If you want to see the full episode, you can find it on Spotify by searching for 20 VC.

That's 20 VC.

[SecureFrame]

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[Harry Stebbings]

As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday with Tarvit, founder of Wise.