Thursday, May 22, 2025

From Startup to Scale: How Winning Marketing Teams & Strategies Evolve

From Startup to Scale: How Winning Marketing Teams & Strategies Evolve
Michal Bubernik, Margarita Vasilevski, Sam McLellan & Jeet Niyogi

 

 

 

Quick Read Summary

Scaling marketing teams is not mainly a headcount problem, it is a complexity problem.

The winners build a marketing operating system that can absorb more channels, more creative, more measurement, and more product collaboration, without breaking speed or accountability.

Early on, the best teams lean on versatile generalists, and they borrow capability through agencies, contractors, and platform partners. Later, they earn the right to specialise, but only once the core growth loop is repeatable.

Budget matters, but not as a flex. It matters because it signals whether the company can learn at pace, prove payback, and scale responsibly, especially when investors expect you to be able to run traditional user acquisition, not only organic growth.

Most importantly, modern growth marketing strategy is increasingly inseparable from product and retention. If marketing and product are not in tight, ongoing contact, you cannot build a durable retention game.

 

 

Scaling marketing teams is really about managing complexity

In early stage companies, marketing looks deceptively simple. You might have a couple of channels, a handful of creatives, and a narrow set of markets. In that world, a single sharp marketer can feel like a full team.

Then scale arrives, and everything multiplies. More channels, more geographies, more creative variants, more measurement edge cases, more stakeholders, and more risk if you get it wrong. Margarita Vasilevski describes living through the full arc, from running marketing as a one person band to operating inside a much larger organization with more resources and more sophisticated processes.

The practical implication for marketing leaders is straightforward. Your job is not to add bodies, it is to build a system that makes performance repeatable as inputs multiply. If you do that, headcount becomes an output of complexity, not a guess.

 

Hire for range first, then add specialists when the work becomes repeatable

At the startup stage, the most valuable hire is rarely a narrow specialist. What you need is range, someone who can set direction, execute, diagnose, and negotiate for resources.

Margarita puts it plainly, early teams typically have one to two people doing everything, you want a swiss army knife skillset rather than a specialised one.

She also gives a memorable shorthand for what that “range” looks like in practice, a strong early hire is “SNACK,” smart, negotiators, analytical, creative, knowledgeable.

You can turn that into a hiring rubric without making it feel like a checklist exercise. When you are interviewing your first growth lead, probe for:

  • Evidence they can negotiate outcomes, not only buy media, this includes getting alignment across product, creative, and leadership
  • Evidence they can think analytically about performance and diagnose why something moved, not only report that it moved
  • Evidence they can shape creative direction, even if they are not a designer
  • Evidence they can learn fast, and build lightweight process as they go

Once you have a repeatable acquisition and retention loop, specialisation becomes a force multiplier. That is the point where dedicated creative intelligence, influencer performance marketing, measurement, or lifecycle ownership can pay back, because the business can absorb deeper expertise without losing coherence.

 

Budget is a strategy signal, not just a constraint

Most marketing teams do not fail because they lack ambition, they fail because they cannot afford enough learning cycles to reach clarity.

Sam McLellan gives a blunt example from consulting, some companies operate on around $10,000 a year, and while you can do something with that, it is going to be slow growth.

The deeper point is not that every company must spend big. It is that if you want to be a growth company, you need enough budget to test, prove, and scale. You also need to show that you can eventually do “the traditional part” of user acquisition, because investors tend to discount pitches that rely only on organic traction.

A useful way to pressure test your budget plan is to ask a single question, what do we need to learn in the next 90 days to unlock our next stage of growth, and what does it cost to learn that at speed.

If you want a simple decision structure, keep it to three parts:

  • Baseline: enough spend to establish creative learnings and channel benchmarks
  • Proof: enough spend to demonstrate payback trends, even if you are not fully scaled
  • Scale readiness: enough operational investment to spend more without quality collapsing

That last item is where teams often under invest. They focus on buying more media before they have measurement discipline, creative throughput, and product alignment.

 

User acquisition is becoming growth, and growth is inseparable from product and retention

One of the most important shifts in modern marketing is semantic, but it reflects a real operating change. Teams used to label almost everything “user acquisition.” Now the leading teams describe the work as growth, because it includes product, lifecycle, CRM, and retention, not just buying users from a single network.

The panel’s most concrete warning is about silos. Product retention is too important to treat marketing and product as separate tracks. If product and marketing are not talking on a regular, almost daily basis, siloed work will not function, especially if you want to build a strong retention game.

Jeet Niyogi reframes this as a product market fit discipline. It is not enough to have surface level enthusiasm, what matters is whether the deeper funnel works and whether retention supports scale.

If you are a marketing leader trying to make this real inside your company, do not start by creating more meetings. Start by creating shared inputs and shared decisions:

  • Agree one retention oriented definition of success, and make it visible to both product and marketing
  • Establish a cadence where marketing performance signals inform product priorities, and product changes inform marketing strategy
  • Treat lifecycle and CRM as part of the growth system, not an afterthought once acquisition “works”

That is the difference between a team that can buy installs, and a team that can build a compounding growth engine.

 

Start narrow with channel mix, then expand only when you earn the right

Scale does not come from being everywhere. It comes from knowing what works, why it works, and how to reproduce it.

Margarita recommends starting with a small set of channels, then expanding once you have traction. In practice that might be two to three channels, learning them well, then adding complexity.

She also notes that some channels are easier entry points for teams building their early acquisition muscle, with examples like TikTok and Meta as more accessible starting places.

There is a second layer here that experienced leaders will recognize. Channel decisions are not only about CAC, they are about organizational load. Each new channel adds:

  • New creative formats and production demands
  • New measurement and attribution wrinkles
  • New platform relationships and learning curves
  • More points of failure across geos and audiences

So a disciplined growth marketing strategy treats channel expansion as a capability milestone, not as an ambition statement.

A practical move that fits this mindset is to define one “proof channel,” one “scale channel,” and one “optionality channel.” The third is intentionally small, it exists to keep learning alive without destabilizing the core.

 

Outsource the heavy lift early, but keep the learning loop in house

Startups often ask whether they should outsource user acquisition or bring it in house. The most useful answer in the transcript is not ideological, it is operational.

There is a realistic per person capacity limit, and it depends heavily on complexity. A simple rule of thumb offered in the discussion is that one person can manage around $1 million to $2 million in spend if the setup is simple, but as you add networks, geos, tracking, and creative needs, the workload rises quickly.

The panel also points out an uncomfortable truth about platforms and partners. If you are spending at higher levels, you tend to get more partner support and strategic help. If you are small, you may not get the same lift.

That reality pushes early teams toward a blended model:

  • Use contractors or an agency for the heavy lift, such as creative production bursts, initial measurement setup, or specialist buying support
  • Keep an internal owner accountable for the strategy, the learning agenda, and the decision making
  • Document what you learn, because the goal is to build a repeatable system that survives people changes
  • Add full time specialists only when you can keep them fed with a clear backlog and a clear definition of success

There is also a growth lever that is often underused by early stage teams, the mix of organic and paid. Michal Bubernik highlights paying attention to the ratio of organic users, marketing driven users, and the strength of referrals and your “base.”

That is not just a reporting exercise. It is a strategic input, because it tells you whether paid is amplifying an already healthy loop, or whether paid is trying to compensate for a product that does not yet retain.

 

Conclusion

Scaling marketing teams is not about copying what big companies do. It is about building the operating discipline to handle more complexity without losing speed, learning, or accountability. The teams that win hire for range early, align marketing tightly with product and retention, spend enough to learn at pace, and expand channels only when they can support the operational load.

If you treat scale as a systems problem, not a staffing problem, you give yourself the best chance to grow without breaking what made your early traction possible.

 

 

Speaker bios

  • Michal Bubernik, Head of Marketing, Pixel Federation. Michal focuses on empowering teams to grow personally and professionally, with a long career in marketing and team leadership.

  • Margarita Vasilevski, Vice President of Performance Marketing, Scopely.  Margarita oversees user acquisition for the company’s midcore portfolio and global centers of excellence in influencer performance marketing and creative intelligence. She specializes in scalable, data driven growth across mobile and PC.

  • Sam McLellan, Chief Marketing Officer, BigBrain Games.  Sam is a mobile growth leader who has led product and marketing teams across mobile gaming and beyond. His experience spans monetization strategy, paid marketing, creative production, user acquisition, and marketing analytics, and he currently oversees product, growth, and monetization at BigBrain Games.

  • Jeet Niyogi, CMO, Fliff. Jeet previously held senior marketing roles in mobile games and has a long track record of measurable growth, with a focus on acquiring users, improving retention, and increasing monetization.

 

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