Frank Growth

How to build creative that moves a number (a click, a conversion, a download) instead of creative that only wins the room.

For growth marketers, creative directors, and in-house studio leads deciding what to test, what to produce, and what to kill.

Philip Lowe runs creative, brand, and marketing operations at Quicken, and previously built Instacart's growth creative team from scratch after starting there as a creative director for CRM. He and Jason worked together at Soothe and Headspace, and this conversation covers what actually separates creative that's good from creative that performs: hiring people who understand both brand and performance, testing hooks, concepts, and narratives as a stage gate before anything gets produced, and knowing where AI helps and where it doesn't. Philip walks through the four-pillar roadmap he uses (exploration, production, learning, infrastructure) and explains why the old path of $30,000 per storyboard and a week and a half of waiting is no longer the only option. He's blunt about the limits too. An AI-generated couple reviewing their finances cycled through eight facial expressions in seconds, which is a non-starter for a brand that has built 40 years of trust.

• Why growth creative sits at the intersection of brand and performance, and why separating the two is the biggest mistake leaders make
• How Philip built and staffed a growth studio at Instacart, and why the asset was the vehicle and the insight was the point
• Where AI delivers, including stylized worlds, claymation, stop motion, and surrealism, anywhere imperfection is the aesthetic, and where it falls flat on human emotion, eyes, hands, and quiet moments
• What the job of creative becomes in CRM and lifecycle when AI is reading the inbox and open rates stop being the focus

• 00:00 - Three seconds to hook, like a comedian on stage
• 00:29 - What growth creative is, and why it's not decoration
• 01:24 - Sooth, Headspace, and having conviction in the work
• 04:11 - Growth creative vs. brand creative vs. design
• 05:56 - The kangaroo video: when it clicked
• 07:24 - Building Instacart's growth creative team from scratch
• 09:27 - Good creative vs. creative that performs
• 11:05 - Testing before you spend a dollar producing
• 12:41 - Taking on ops: from tastemakers to operators with good taste
• 14:24 - What changes when production gets cheap
• 16:38 - The four pillars: exploration, production, learning, infrastructure
• 18:20 - Where AI delivers a performance and where it doesn't
• 20:31 - Real humans, real stories, and trust in finance
• 21:56 - CRM and lifecycle when AI reads the inbox
• 24:12 - Breaking through when agents do the browsing
• 25:53 - Hiring for taste
• 27:01 - The one thing leaders get wrong
• 27:39 - Lightning round
• 29:48 - Top three takeaways

Guest
Philip Lowe, creative, brand, and marketing operations at Quicken
LinkedIn
TikTok

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow: real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

Ibotta is known as a cashback app. It's also a white-label promotions platform for the largest retailer in the world.

For marketers at consumer companies standing up an enterprise or platform business alongside the one that made them.

Sara Wallace is Head of Brand Marketing at Ibotta, which runs both the consumer cashback app and the Ibotta Performance Network. Five months into the role, after building executive marketing and global AI go-to-market strategy at Google Cloud, she's working the problem of building B2B awareness for a company whose recognition lives almost entirely on the consumer side. We get into why she treats the two audiences as genuinely separate rather than migrating one into the other, the one channel where that split breaks down, how she handles AI thought leadership under legal and compliance constraints, and why she argues brand is the engine that makes performance marketing work rather than a luxury line item. She also walks through Ibotta's annual State of Spend findings, including a decline in grocery list-making as shoppers plan loosely and let promotions fill the gaps.

• Why Ibotta doesn't try to convert cashback users into a B2B audience, and where the two narratives still collide (social media)
• What Google Cloud taught her about selling to CIOs and CTOs: show how you support the work their org is already doing instead of proving you're the smartest in the room
• Why public AI messaging stays stunted at most companies — legal exposure, and stories that aren't fully baked yet
• How to make the case for brand investment when leadership is pushing for immediate ROI

• 00:00 — Cold open: brand building feels like a luxury, and why it isn't
• 00:45 — Intro: most companies die from brand confusion, not obscurity
• 02:33 — Two distinct audiences, not one rebrand
• 03:32 — Building awareness for the Ibotta Performance Network
• 05:01 — Google Cloud lessons: talking to technical buyers like people
• 05:46 — Rebuilding momentum under a new CRO after the CMO left
• 06:33 — Talking about AI inside legal and compliance limits
• 07:55 — Founder-led content and the CEO-hosted podcast
• 08:46 — Enterprise marketing lessons: Walmart, Uber, DoorDash
• 10:51 — Differentiating against Amazon DSP, Google Ads, and Meta
• 11:37 — Denver as a hiring market outside Silicon Valley
• 12:36 — What she hires for: ownership, fail-fast, decision-making
• 13:23 — State of Spend: fewer lists, more promotion-driven baskets, private label
• 15:28 — Brand as the engine for performance marketing
• 16:44 — Brands she admires: Nike and Shopify
• 17:52 — The overlooked story: Ibotta as a technology company
• 18:47 — Lightning round
• 19:29 — Jason's top three takeaways and the 10-minute action

Guest
Sara Wallace — Head of Brand Marketing, Ibotta
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

How to scale a medical franchise when you can't train a local owner to interpret biomarkers.

For operators and founders standardizing a complex, high-trust service across many locations.

Jim Donnelly scaled Restore Hyper Wellness to 260 locations before starting Humanaut Health, a concierge longevity practice he's now bringing to market through a franchise model he describes as ten times more complex. With his third location opening in Dallas, he walks through how he splits growth across corporate sites, franchisees, and a real estate joint venture, why the company hires and trains every doctor centrally, and how it backs a results guarantee tied to a client pledge and an accountability protocol. He shares concrete numbers, including 87% of clients arriving with metabolic dysfunction showing no sign of it six months later, and a Dallas clinic set to open cash flow positive and profitable in month one. It's a tactical look at standardizing a category most people can't yet define.

• The two rules of franchising anything: provide value constantly and remove the complexity a franchisee can't handle, plus the test that if you need exceptional operators, you don't have a franchise
• How Humanaut centralizes doctors, tech, and supply chain while leaving franchisees local hiring, sales culture, and marketing, each backed by a playbook
• Why most medical businesses fail by leaning too far to the medical or the business side, and the "you can't start at your PhD" progression that got Jim here
• Reframing longevity as health optimization you feel today to drive retention, and the unit-economics bar: high AUV, 20%+ net margins, and a sub-two-year payback

• 00:00 — Longevity is a bad word: reframing it as health optimization
• 02:48 — The 25-year path to Humanaut: health clubs, Restore, cancer, a car crash
• 05:03 — The value prop: proactive care, a focus three, and a results guarantee
• 08:58 — Franchising health optimization: provide value, remove complexity
• 13:37 — Unit economics: AUV, margins, and opening profitable in month one
• 18:39 — What it actually takes, plus the lightning round

Guest
Jim Donnelly — Co-Founder and CEO, Humanaut Health
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois: Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason: Subscribe / Follow Jason on LinkedIn

Most owners can tell you last month's revenue but not which customers actually make them money. This episode gives you the math to find out.

For founders and operators—especially DTC brands—who suspect they're spending too much to acquire customers who never come back.

John Zdanowski is co-founder and CEO of Weekly Accounting and a Harvard MBA who describes himself as a sonar engineer applying signal-processing math to business data. He previously co-founded Assembled Brands, a $100M fund that has seen the financials of 3,000+ emerging consumer brands—the vantage point where his core thesis formed: most brands optimize for revenue growth and quietly lose money on customers who only buy once. In this episode he walks through his "fourth statement" (audience to first-time customer to repeat), the sets of books every business already has or still needs, and why he runs accounting on a weekly cadence instead of monthly. He gets specific: the lifetime-gross-profit-to-CAC ratio, why a 1.7 ratio means you're grinding the engine, and how he turns a quarterly goal of $189,000 for 6,100 customers into a weekly target of $14,500 and ~470 customers.

• The "fourth statement" framework: turning audience → first purchase → repeat into unit economics you can forecast growth and saturation from
• How to run the numbers weekly—divide a quarterly goal by 13, compare this week to the same week last year—for 52 feedback loops a year instead of 12
• The common mistake: optimizing for revenue growth and losing money on one-time buyers instead of optimizing for contribution
• The first number to calculate: lifetime gross profit (purchases per customer × average order value × gross margin) ÷ CAC, and why anything near 1.7 means you're overspending to acquire

• 00:00 — The fourth statement: audience, first purchase, repeat
• 01:16 — Why most owners are flying blind on customer profitability
• 02:44 — Assembled Brands, and optimizing for contribution over revenue
• 03:59 — The break-even math on a first-time DTC customer
• 05:22 — What bookkeepers actually deliver vs. what you need
• 07:07 — Two sets of books, then a third, then a fourth
• 08:05 — Weekly cadence: 52 feedback loops instead of 12
• 09:53 — Daily vs. weekly vs. monthly, and troubled to world-class
• 11:58 — The integrated financial model: weekly tied to the quarter
• 14:45 — Warning signs your accounting is broken
• 15:25 — Why accounting is a venture-scale opportunity
• 17:11 — Inside the Weekly Accounting platform
• 19:48 — The one number: lifetime gross profit to CAC
• 20:32 — Lightning round
• 21:59 — Takeaways and a 10-minute action

Guest
John Zdanowski — Co-founder & CEO, Weekly Accounting
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

Most B2B companies fight to win one customer segment. WellHub has to win three at the same time.

For marketers and operators running multi-audience, marketplace, or multi-country growth.

Robin Izsak-Tseng is VP of global B2B marketing at WellHub, a corporate wellness platform serving over 40,000 companies across 18 countries. She runs a three-sided marketplace — HR buyers, fitness partners, and the employees who use it — through three distinct teams that report to one CMO. In this episode she breaks down how those teams stay aligned without becoming siloed, how acquisitions like Urban Sports Club buy instant brand recognition, and why pulling back GymPass paid search and web properties too early after the rebrand opened a door for a competitor in Brazil. She also names the simple mistake complex teams make: assuming the same level of market maturity everywhere, when a household name in one country still gets "what's WellHub?" at marketer dinners in another.

• How WellHub structures three marketing teams (B2B, partners, B2C) under one CMO and keeps them aligned around a single company story
• Using zip-code-level data to map partner supply down to individual neighborhoods, not just cities
• Why cutting GymPass search bids and web properties too soon let a competitor gain authority in Brazil
• When to put the product in employees' hands first (a SoulCycle class, 30 days on the diamond plan) so engagement opens the door to HR

• 00:00 — The market-maturity trap (cold open)
• 00:42 — The three-sided growth engine
• 02:46 — Inside WellHub's triple-sided marketplace
• 04:48 — Proving ROI on employee wellness
• 05:49 — Acquisitions and instant brand recognition
• 08:24 — The GymPass to WellHub rebrand
• 10:08 — Martech, HubSpot, and AI disruption
• 15:35 — Events and the product-led sell-through
• 20:11 — The biggest mistake: assuming market maturity
• 22:58 — Lightning round

Guest
Robin Izsak-Tseng — VP of Global B2B Marketing, WellHub
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois: Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason: Follow Jason on LinkedIn

How to decide which growth bets to fund when every idea on the table already looks good.

For marketing and growth leaders drowning in too many opportunities and a team that's too small to chase them all.

Seth Lowery is VP of Marketing at Octane, a fintech that has originated over $8 billion in consumer loans and runs both a lending arm (Roadrunner Financial) and an in-house SaaS layer—with close to 50% of the company in product and tech. On Seth's first day, his CEO handed him a single rule: a new initiative needs to clear $10 million in incremental originations to get approved. In this episode he breaks down why that number is a guideline rather than a hard rule, how it forces his team into P1/P2/P3 backlogs, his four-prong method for working with sales, and how he runs three different go-to-market motions—OEMs, dealers, and B2B2C—at the same time.

• The $10M incremental-originations bar, and why Seth treats it as a compass rather than a cage
• The four-prong method for sales and marketing: to sales, for sales, through sales, and in lieu of sales
• Why the hardest no's are the easy internal asks—a better-looking slide deck, an event t-shirt—and why he tells his team "let me be the bad guy"
• How he runs three GTM motions at once while deliberately keeping Octane's own brand in the background

• 00:00 — Cold open: the problem isn't too few ideas, it's too many
• 00:33 — Intro and the initiative-overload problem
• 02:35 — Lending company or tech company?
• 03:40 — Where the $10 million rule came from
• 05:13 — How the rule changes what to run and what to kill
• 06:30 — The hardest no's and "let me be the bad guy"
• 07:57 — Running a remote team to results, not hours
• 08:40 — The four-prong method for sales and marketing
• 11:21 — Hiring for B2B and channel marketing over fintech
• 12:15 — Octane's moat: the octane score and the soft pull
• 12:54 — Running three GTM motions at once
• 15:04 — The overlooked lever: loyalty
• 15:34 — The two biggest prioritization mistakes
• 16:33 — Lightning round
• 17:53 — Jason's top three takeaways

Guest
Seth Lowery — VP of Marketing, Octane
Website
Roadrunner Financial
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois: Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason: Follow Jason on LinkedIn

This episode is a tactical playbook for marketing to a buyer that ignores LinkedIn, retargeting, and white papers: the school district.

For operators and founders selling into education, or any relationship-first market where you can't performance-market your way to pipeline.

Blakely Neilson came from finance and joined the founding team at Parallel Learning, an EdTech company building virtual special education services for school districts in over 25 states. She built the B2B marketing function from scratch as the company pivoted from DTC to B2B, which meant trading paid social and paid search for conferences, webinars, email, and thought leadership, and shifting the message from emotion and urgency to compliance, scale, and risk mitigation. She gets concrete about what works: a lemonade-stand booth during a California heat wave, a Taylor Swift email sent the minute the engagement news broke, and using AI to track Google alerts so the message can adapt when a district like Wake County cuts $18 million from special education.

• Why the DTC-to-B2B pivot meant moving from paid acquisition to an organic mix of conferences, webinars, email, and thought leadership, with messaging built around compliance, scale, and risk mitigation
• How the team pairs marketing with revenue at conferences, sets up pre-conference meetings, and uses creative on-the-ground tactics like a lemonade stand during a heat wave to drive top-of-funnel leads
• Why leading with "we're radically changing the field through AI" backfires with late-adopter special-ed buyers, and why the message instead focuses on absorbing administrative burden
• How to keep one core message constant while tailoring execution state by state, using Google alerts to flex when budgets get cut

• 00:00 — Cold open: why most B2B EdTech marketing is boring
• 00:27 — Why EdTech marketing breaks the standard playbook
• 01:33 — Meet Blakely Neilson and Parallel Learning
• 02:32 — From finance to building marketing through a DTC-to-B2B pivot
• 03:39 — Building trust with relationship-first district buyers
• 04:44 — Making conferences a real pipeline driver
• 05:59 — The webinar formula that stands out post-COVID
• 07:17 — Marketing an AI product to AI-skeptical buyers
• 08:27 — Pop culture, the Taylor Swift email, and humanizing B2B
• 11:05 — Awareness vs. conversion in a two-sided marketplace
• 11:45 — Scaling across 25 states with Google alerts and AI
• 13:01 — Sales and marketing operating rhythm
• 13:50 — Lightning round
• 15:22 — Jason's top three takeaways

Guest
Blakely Neilson — Founding team, Parallel Learning
Website
LinkedIn (Blakely)
LinkedIn (Parallel Learning)
Instagram

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

He founded an AI company in 2014—when AI was a punchline—bootstrapped it with zero outside capital, and landed Fortune 50 clients.

For founders and growth operators figuring out how to build (and sell) AI products in a market that shifts every few weeks.

Alex Roy is the founder of SalesBox AI, a single-founder, bootstrapped company he started in 2014 after 20+ years in martech (MarketFirst, TrueInfluence). With no outside funding, he reached Fortune 50 clients through a partner-led, agency managed-service model—building the part of the product that generated both capital and data first. In this episode he walks through why he moved from lead-centric to a buying-group, opportunity-centric model, how SalesBox's agents work toward one unified revenue goal, how he proves ROI to enterprises burned by AI promises, and why he says product-market fit now lasts "maybe a month."

• Why he scrapped lead-centric and account-based marketing for a revenue/opportunity model that scores and prioritizes buying groups
• How he bootstrapped: building the managed-service module first to capture both capital and data, then reaching Fortune 50 through a partner-led agency model
• Where founders go wrong—chasing the hype to "hop off" in a couple of years instead of building, and not yet knowing when to override the agent
• How to apply it: start with a pilot before a full rollout, and learn how the system makes decisions so you know when to step in

• 00:00 — Cold open: don't build it for free
• 00:31 — Intro: the three AI traps
• 01:50 — What breaks when you scale revenue
• 02:29 — Betting on AI in 2014
• 03:39 — Building in 2014 vs. 2026: PMF as a moving target
• 05:10 — Why bootstrap, and what it cost
• 05:52 — Landing Fortune 50 clients with no VC logos
• 06:38 — What makes SalesBox AI different
• 08:00 — How the platform works
• 08:51 — Lead to account to buying group
• 09:45 — Hype vs. real: start with a pilot
• 10:27 — What AI can't do: knowing when to override
• 11:37 — Proving ROI to burned enterprises
• 12:56 — What founders get wrong about timing
• 14:39 — Advice: get someone to pay the first dollar
• 15:38 — Lightning round
• 16:22 — Live demo: RevOps, voice agents, LinkedIn
• 20:47 — Where to find Alex + the offer
• 21:28 — Closing takeaways

Guest
Alex Roy — Founder, SalesBox AI
Website
LinkedIn

Mentioned
Get $1,000 in SalesBox AI credits

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

How a lean team runs acquisition, retention, and cross-sell across a travel marketplace and a fintech suite on a single brand.

For growth leaders who own multiple products serving one customer across very different trust thresholds.

Divya Ramaswamy runs growth across travel and fintech at Super.com—acquisition, activation, retention, and cross-sell—on a lean team of around 16 people. The products span hotels, flights, cash advance, credit, cash back, direct deposits, and a new pharmacy product, built for everyday Americans that premium brands typically walk past. She explains how the Super+ membership ties these disparate products together, why turning a $79 hotel booking into a fintech relationship is the hardest conversion they face, and what building financial trust actually requires beyond performance marketing. She also walks through the company's first major brand push—New York subway and out-of-home ads, plus becoming NASCAR's official savings partner—and why ruthless prioritization is the underrated lever that keeps the team focused.

• Why Super+ membership is the flywheel that ties travel and fintech together, not just a perk layer on top (the “house and rooms” frame)
• How the team predicts cross-product adoption using behavioral signals—booking frequency, product bundles, in-app activity like games and surveys—alongside direct user research
• Why a direct travel-to-fintech handoff doesn’t happen, and how they build the journey through “value moments” instead (cashback on headphones, gas savings on the drive to a hotel)
• How they split channels by intent—Google for demand capture, Meta for storytelling—and use quarterly OKR resets to ruthlessly prioritize on a lean team

• 00:00 — Why trust in fintech can never be taken for granted (cold open)
• 00:29 — Intro: one growth function across travel and fintech
• 02:16 — What Super.com is, in one sentence
• 02:42 — The day-to-day operating model: acquisition to cross-sell
• 03:40 — Running one growth function across products that don’t behave alike
• 04:32 — The Super+ membership flywheel (house and rooms)
• 05:59 — The customer Super.com is built for
• 07:01 — Turning a $79 hotel booking into a fintech relationship
• 08:19 — Signals for predicting cross-product adoption
• 09:22 — Channel strategy built on customer context, not product category
• 10:20 — Google vs. Meta: capturing demand vs. storytelling
• 11:36 — What building financial trust actually requires
• 12:36 — The brand push: NYC subway and out-of-home
• 13:43 — Betting on quality creative and the NASCAR partnership
• 14:45 — One creative team, one brand voice across products
• 15:44 — The most underrated growth lever: prioritization
• 16:51 — Hard lessons on meaningful testing and embracing failure
• 17:57 — Advice for leading a complex product portfolio
• 18:33 — Lightning round
• 19:15 — Where to find Divya + closing takeaways

Guest
Divya Ramaswamy — leads growth (travel and fintech) at Super.com
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

What it actually takes to turn your CFO into a growth ally instead of a gatekeeper.

For founders, CEOs, and CMOs trying to align finance with marketing and growth investments.

Simon Heyrick is the CFO of Sun World International and was Jason's CFO and then CEO at Soothe. In this conversation, Simon walks through what changes the moment you step into the CEO seat ("overnight, there was a shift in the relationships"), what every CFO role across green Dot, Soothe, and Sun World has had in common, and how he evaluates growth pitches from CMOs. He shares the story of Soothe's brand refresh that didn't survive a single board member's objection, the TV spend he'd take back in hindsight, and why at Sun World — a 50-year-old PE-backed agriculture IP business — the finance model runs out 25 years and the data sets matter more than the AI strategy.

• The two CFO archetypes — growth partner vs. growth gatekeeper — and how risk tolerance separates them
• How to pitch growth investments to a CFO without getting dismissed (skip the impression counts, bring an intellectually honest ROI story)
• Why institutional investors rarely understand operations, and how to manage the "feet below the surface" dynamic
• What Simon learned moving from tech and marketplaces to a 50-year-old agriculture IP company where customers are farmers, not consumers

• 00:00 — Stepping into the CEO seat: the loneliness shift
• 00:54 — Introducing Simon Heyrick
• 02:19 — The through line across a CFO career
• 05:37 — From CFO to interim CEO at Soothe
• 08:33 — What translates across every CFO role: managing institutional investors and the under-promise / over-deliver rule
• 11:32 — The growth bet Simon greenlit and the brand refresh that didn't land
• 14:16 — Growth partner CFO vs. growth gatekeeper CFO
• 17:21 — How CMOs should (and shouldn't) pitch growth investments
• 21:53 — Inside Sun World: a 50-year-old PE-backed agriculture IP business
• 24:31 — Climate risk, varietal IP, and a 25-year forecast model
• 25:56 — Data as the linchpin of the AI strategy
• 28:07 — Lessons across five C-level roles, and advice to a younger Simon
• 30:57 — Lightning round
• 32:33 — What a founder should do this week to turn their CFO into a partner
• 34:17 — Jason's three takeaways

Guest
Simon Heyrick — CFO, Sun World International
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason