Growth, Data & My Customers

By Matt Russell, Executive in Residence at Savd

Last week, I spoke to student entrepreneurs at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business about the physics of growth marketing and scaling a business. As I delivered the talk, I realized these principles apply equally to early-stage startups, growing consumer brands, and established enterprise organizations. Whether you are a student founder, a seasoned corporate growth leader, or building the next great SaaS platform, the ultimate question is the same: How do we actually scale this thing?

When searching for answers, teams often jump straight into the tactical weeds (“Should we run more Meta ads?” or “What is this budget actually doing for the pipeline?”). You must first zoom out and examine the true mechanics of scale: how to uncover the human behavior behind your analytics, how to personalize your acquisition to attract your most valuable customers, and how to identify the specific variables that actually multiply your growth.

The playing field is surprisingly level: today, a startup with a $50 monthly budget has the exact same access to ad platform algorithms as a Fortune 500 executive. Your true advantage is your ability to be purely, structurally customer-centric.

Here are three ways to use that advantage to rethink your growth strategy.

Beware of Averages (Build for the Right Customer)

When you log into any marketing platform, you are bombarded with averages: average cost-per-click, average customer acquisition cost, average conversion rate.

Here is the secret: ad platforms like Google and Meta do not execute on averages. They execute on a 1-to-1, highly personalized basis. They act as matchmakers between your business and specific users.

In almost every business, customer value is not evenly distributed. A tiny percentage of your users (the right ones) will drive the vast majority of your revenue, your best product feedback, and your strongest long-term retention.

This is where growing organizations often stumble. Customer acquisition strategy frequently becomes dangerously disconnected from the rest of the business. Teams operate in silos: Marketing optimizes for the cheapest cost-per-acquisition, Sales converts whoever will buy, and Account Management or Customer Success is left dealing with the fallout of a poor fit.

Remember, a customer relationship does not end at acquisition. Bringing in the wrong type of customer creates operational nightmares and financial drag down the line. To fix this, you have to break down organizational silos. 

The companies doing growth marketing most successfully have a deep understanding of who their best customers are and the exact value proposition that resonates with them. They do not waste time chasing the bad, low-retention customers that other, more siloed organizations are chasing. And because they understand this exponential value up front, they are able to pay more to acquire the customers they actually want, making them fiercely competitive at media buying.

There are a lot of layers to the onion regarding how far you can go in calculating the exact lifetime value of a customer, but the reality is that every step along this path is a good step. Start by figuring out who your exponentially valuable customers are across their entire lifecycle, and align your acquisition engine specifically to match with them.

Data is Not Insight

We are all drowning in data. If you only look at the numbers, you will end up optimizing for vanity metrics that make a dashboard look green, even if they do not help the business.

To avoid this trap, you have to understand the difference between data and insight:

• Data tells you WHERE to look. (e.g., “Our cost to acquire a customer just spiked 10%” or “Conversion rates on the main pricing page dropped 26%.”)
• Insight tells you WHY it is happening. For example, I once worked with a retail healthcare client whose data showed that a specific store location had terrible online conversion rates. The purely data-driven reaction would be to cut their ad spend. When we looked for the insight (the human behavior behind the data) we realized users were not converting because the store was so popular that it had no available exam slots during peak hours. The solution was an operational fix to route that overflow traffic to nearby stores, rather than a marketing fix.

Data is powerful. You need to train your teams to find the human story before they react to the dashboard.

Understand Your Growth Equation

Growth in any business is ultimately just an algebra problem. There is a critical distinction between how average companies and high-growth organizations treat that math: the difference between optimizing and maximizing.

• Optimizing is about efficiency. It is reducing friction and cutting waste. It is important, but it has a hard ceiling. You can only optimize a cost down to zero.
• Maximizing is about scale. It is finding the specific variable in your business that, if expanded, makes the entire pie bigger.

Google’s former Chief Evangelist and friend of SAVD, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau wrote a book, “Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai” that describes this phenomenon along with other key principles for high growth. Bonsais are created by constantly cutting and restricting (optimizing). Sequoias are created by building a massive root system and expanding (maximizing).

Take YouTube, for example. Their basic revenue equation is: Total Users x Sessions x Watch Time x Ad Load.

YouTube knows that their golden key is Watch Time. If they maximize watch time, everything else thrives. It creates more natural ad inventory, which generates more revenue for creators, which leads to higher-quality videos, which brings in more users who stay longer. It feeds a massive, healthy ecosystem.

Find your golden key variable. Focusing on it allows your leadership team to zone in on long-term maximization rather than endless, short-term optimization.

The Strategic Discipline of Growth

Everything your business does starts and ends with your customers. 

If marketing is chasing average leads, if analysts are reporting the “where” without the “why,” and if leadership is focused on optimizing costs rather than maximizing core value, growth stalls.

The companies that win are the ones that maintain strategic discipline. They know their growth equation, they rigorously align their cross-functional teams around acquiring the right customer, and they look past the dashboard to find the human story driving the numbers.

You do not need another platform or a new tactical hack. You need to align your entire organization around the fundamental physics of your growth.