Marketing makes a promise. Your website and systems have to deliver on it.

In this episode, Mike Schmutz and DataXGrowth COO Bryce Drawe explore the connection between marketing and Growth Tech: the websites, data, workflows, and technical execution that help turn customer interest into business outcomes.

They discuss how a campaign can look successful while slow landing pages, lost lead-source data, or weak follow-up undermine the result. The conversation covers measurement before optimization, a shared brief for marketing and development, and a practical cycle of diagnosing, building, measuring, and improving.

For founders, marketers, and operators, this is a look at what needs to work behind the campaign.

Follow Growth IRL for practical conversations about growing yourself, your team, and your business.

Learn more: https://dataxgrowth.com

Real growth often starts with the work that is easy to overlook.

Mike Schmutz is joined by DataXGrowth COO Bryce Drawe for a conversation about personal growth, doing the boring work, and the journey of building DataXGrowth.

Together, they explore how individual habits influence a business, how their different strengths shape the way they work, and why choosing what not to do matters as much as choosing the next opportunity. The conversation also looks at responsible growth and the culture and standards they want to build.

For founders, operators, and anyone working toward something meaningful, this episode offers a chance to rethink the everyday work behind lasting progress.

Follow Growth IRL for honest conversations about growing yourself, your team, and your business.

Learn more: https://dataxgrowth.com

Before you buy more traffic, find out where your funnel is losing valuable prospects. In this podcast/episode of Growth IRL, Mike Schmutz breaks down five growth marketing tactics for SaaS companies: mapping revenue leaks, tightening the ideal customer profile and message, capturing high-intent demand, reducing time to value, and running experiments tied to business outcomes. The focus is finding the constraint that matters most across acquisition, conversion, activation, and retention, then choosing a tactic that addresses it. More leads only help when the customer journey can turn the right prospects into customers who stay. Your action: map your funnel, identify the stage losing the most valuable demand, and write one testable hypothesis aimed at that problem. Follow Growth IRL for practical conversations about growing yourself, your team, and your business. Learn more about our growth services: https://dataxgrowth.com

Some people make you feel good. The right people make you better.

Your environment doesn't determine every outcome — but it changes which outcomes feel normal and possible. In this episode, I share the one person and one moment that changed my direction, then break down exactly how the people around you shape your standards, perspective, courage, accountability, resilience, and opportunity.

You'll learn how to separate real support from blind agreement, how to give grace to people in difficult seasons without ignoring harmful patterns, and how to run a simple audit of the five people who most influence your thinking.

The best people in your life don't just protect your confidence — they protect your potential.

This week's action: contact one person who positively affected your life, name the specific thing they did, and tell them what it changed. Then offer that same honesty and belief to someone else.

Follow Growth IRL and share it with someone who's growing with you.

Welcome to Growth IRL.

In episode one, Mike Schmutz shares the path that led to DataXGrowth: 15+ years in growth marketing, the reality of building a business as a dad and competitive bodybuilder, and the discipline it takes to keep moving when the work gets hard.

Mike breaks down why DataXGrowth was built as a fractional growth partner for startups, SaaS, D2C, subscription, and high-growth brands. The goal is straightforward: bring strategy, analytics, SEO/AEO, conversion optimization, paid acquisition, lifecycle, experimentation, and lean technical execution into one measurable growth system.

This conversation is about more than agency building. It is about choosing a growth mindset that can handle hard things: taking the next rep, solving the next constraint, and staying in the work long enough for real progress to compound.

In this episode:

• The story behind DataXGrowth

• The experiences that shaped Mike's operating philosophy

• Why data, strategy, and execution must stay connected

• How fitness, family, and resilience influence the way he builds

• What to expect from future Growth IRL conversations

Follow Growth IRL for practical conversations about building companies, systems, careers, and lives that keep moving forward.

Learn more: https://dataxgrowth.com