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Episode #241: Will Sartorius - AI didn't kill the creative job, it moved it
How to split ad creative work between AI and people so your ads stop sounding like everyone else's.
For founders and marketers running paid social who launch plenty of ads but learn little from them.
Will Sartorius, CEO of Selfmade, took over the performance creative agency after a failed acquisition left it with very little money in the bank, and rebuilt it with AI tools as GPT came out. He and Jason Shafton break down which parts of creative work AI now handles well, like tagging reviews and running time series and gap analysis on a Meta account, and which still need people: copy that makes someone feel something and angles no one has tested yet. Will walks through his "cover the logo" test, the multi-agent system Selfmade uses to write and review static ads, and why he tells lean brands to spend 50 bucks a month on a hundred AI statics before investing in storytelling.
What you’ll hear
Chapters
Links & resources
Guest
Will Sartorius - CEO, Selfmade
Selfmade website
LinkedIn
Twitter
Newsletter
About Frank Growth
Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow - real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.
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Episode #240: Bryan House - Tearing up the enterprise GTM playbook as a challenger brand
Elastic Path cut its website to two forms, its marketing team from 13 people to 3, and its implementation bids to a third of the price of competitors.
For B2B leaders at challenger brands whose activity metrics look busy while growth stays flat.
Bryan House is CEO of Elastic Path, a composable commerce platform competing with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Commerce Tools in a market where nearly every company already has a commerce platform. Looking at the data, he found little to no correlation between sales and marketing activity and outcomes, and not one downloaded analyst report form fill had ever turned into an opportunity. He and Jason get into cutting the top of the funnel down to two forms, putting competitors on the homepage, bringing implementation in-house to remove the incentive gap with systems integrators, and using AI and better product to move commerce implementation toward six weeks and $100,000.
What you’ll hear
Chapters
Links & resources
Guest
Bryan House - CEO, Elastic Path
Website
LinkedIn
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
Episode #239: Adam Spector - Why startups should automate or outsource before they hire
How to decide whether a task needs a new hire, AI, or an outside vendor.
For founders of early-stage, venture-backed companies with 5 to 75 employees who are about to add headcount.
Adam Spector is the founder and CEO of Chore, which runs the back office (HR and fractional chief of staff work) for early-stage, venture-backed tech companies with 5 to 75 employees. Chore came out of a company that raised about $10 million but couldn't raise its next round; Adam split it in two, took the services team, and set out to make it profitable. We cover why he now asks "How can we solve this with AI?" before every hire, what happened when he gave each go-to-market team member a monthly qualified-lead target after his head of go-to-market left, and why he thinks founders should outsource admin instead of building an internal team for it. One detail: Chore averages 2-3% of a customer's total monthly expenses, against about 10% at the average company.
What you’ll hear
Chapters/Timestamps
Links & resources
Guest
Adam Spector - Founder and CEO, Chore
Chore Website
LinkedIn
X
Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast
About Frank Growth
Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow - real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.
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Episode #238: Ozge Erturk - Hitting #1 in the App Store on zero paid media
FloSports is profitable, covers 25+ sports, and has a million subscribers. Its CMO explains how that math works.
For subscription operators, growth leads, and anyone marketing to an audience the mainstream ignores.
Ozge Erturk is the CMO of FloSports, a profitable streaming company covering wrestling, motorsports, cheer, jiu jitsu, and D2/D3 college athletics - categories most media companies won't touch. She joined four years ago and reset the entire marketing department, expanding its scope from brand and acquisition to the full funnel, bringing all paid media in-house, and treating pricing as a growth lever. In this episode she breaks down the split between demand capture and demand creation, why she refuses to spend money manufacturing interest that doesn't exist, and what she learned running subscriptions at Amazon and Match.com Group before this. She also explains why 95% of FloSports customers sign up to watch one specific event, and why that single fact shapes everything about the pricing and retention strategy.
What you'll hear
Chapters
Links & resources
Guest
Ozge Erturk - CMO, FloSports
Website
LinkedIn
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
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
Chapters
Links & resources
Guest
Michelle Matthews, product and service designer, consumer and healthcare products
LinkedIn
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
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
Chapters
Links & resources
Guest
Elyssa Steiner, Chief Marketing Officer at Kahua
Kahua
LinkedIn
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
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
Chapters
Links & resources
Guest
Nick Lafferty, Founding Marketing Engineer, Profound
LinkedIn
X/Twitter
Profound
Profound on LinkedIn
Profound 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
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
Chapters
Links & resources
Guest
Dave Steer, Chief Marketing Officer, Webflow
Website
Webflow Conf
LinkedIn
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
Sanity 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 hearGuest
Jesus Requena — CMO, Sanity
Website
LinkedIn
Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.
Promotional linksEpisode #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
Chapters
Links & resources
GuestAndrew Mok — CMO, HeyGen
Website
LinkedIn
X
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
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