Frank Growth

Frank Growth is a sharp, execution-first podcast about how companies actually grow. Hosted by Jason Shafton, it features candid conversations with founders, operators, and investors who are in the work right now. The focus is real decisions: distribution, demand, pricing, org design, incentives, and what breaks once the early playbooks stop working. No hype. No recycled advice. Just clear thinking from people accountable for outcomes.

Frank Growth is a business podcast hosted by Jason Shafton, with 43 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Jason Shafton hosts Frank Growth, a business show with 43 episodes published.

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  Episode #239

  Your Back Office Is Obsolete with Adam Spector

  Sep 29, 202621 minS2

  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 The question Adam asks before hiring, and the Claude project tied to Chore's CRM that now pulls the weekly sales metrics his former head of go-to-market used to compile How Adam reset his go-to-market team: one metric per person, a set number of qualified leads per month in each channel Why the team pushed back on that target, and why Adam decided it was not going to be a fit long term The objection Chore hears most ("that seems expensive"), and Adam's math on a roughly $1,500-a-month service versus 10 to 20 hours of a founder's time Growth by subtraction: why managers shouldn't be a crutch, and Adam's view that managers may be irrelevant at fast-moving companies within a year or two Chapters/ Timestamps 00:00 - Cold open: the go-to-market team pushes back 00:40 - Intro: founders have a curiosity problem, not a team problem 02:07 - What Chore does and who it serves 03:20 - Splitting the company and building a profitable services business 04:24 - Why referrals are Chore's main growth channel 05:36 - Premature hiring and asking "How can we solve this with AI?" 06:55 - "That seems expensive": 2-3% versus 10% on admin 08:33 - Resetting the go-to-market team 10:39 - Hiring curious builders 11:36 - Ollie, Chore's AI ops co-pilot 12:55 - Why AI doesn't have to kill services margins 13:38 - Growth by subtraction and managers as a crutch 14:43 - What managers are for in the future of work 15:35 - The hiring audit: automate, outsource, delegate 16:48 - The most expensive back-office mistake founders make 17:27 - Lightning round 18:37 - Where to find Adam 19:15 - Top three takeaways and one action for this week 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. Promotional links Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason

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  Episode #238

  The Best Kept Secret Sport with Ozge Erturk

  Sep 22, 202627 minS2

  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 The demand capture vs. demand creation split, and why she's "not in the business of making you a hockey fan" How she reset the marketing org: full-funnel ownership, paid media brought in-house, vertical-agnostic functions The influencer marketing bet that didn't translate into subscribers, and her two hypotheses for why How to make free content and a paywall work together instead of choosing one Chapters 00:05 - Cold open: the Kyle Larson test 00:44 - Three ways companies get niche audiences wrong 03:21 - Demand capture vs. demand creation 05:31 - What changed leaving Amazon for FloSports 07:46 - The marketing decisions behind profitability 09:29 - 95% sign up for one event: pricing and annual plans 10:53 - Fast Company and #1 in the App Store, with zero paid media 12:06 - Why the influencer hire didn't work 14:44 - Hiring a technical marketer, not a brand marketer 16:34 - What industrial engineering taught her about marketing 17:45 - Roku, fast channels, and the paywall strategy 19:25 - One playbook or one per sport? 20:39 - The participatory audience nobody is serving 21:55 - "Best kept secret in sports": feature or bug? 23:15 - Lightning round 24:55 - Jason's top three takeaways 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 Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason

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  Episode #237

  Stop Buying Users Who Leave with Michelle Matthews

  Sep 15, 202627 minS2

  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 The three B's from Irrational Labs: name the behavior you need, find the barriers in someone's real life, then design a benefit that counteracts each one How Brightline rebuilt onboarding by body storming the signup as a phone call, so the first question is how can I help you instead of what is your child's insurance card number Why targeting the entire mindset matrix brings in low-intent users who leave bad reviews, skip appointments, and damage lagging metrics The pre-research exercise: write down your assumptions, your biases, and the answer you are hoping for, then rewrite any question that leads people toward it Chapters 00:00 - Cold open: are you messing with me 00:41 - Why acquisition is the easy part in health and wellness 02:50 - Social work to UX and what therapy training carries over 03:40 - The day someone signs up for Brightline is not a good day 04:55 - Selling research to a team that just wants to ship 05:54 - Where marketing stops and product takes over 07:09 - Headspace versus Calm: the Tylenol and the vitamin 08:31 - Engagement metrics versus real change, and the three B's 10:07 - Why marketers and researchers keep landing in the same rooms 12:08 - Where a growth-obsessed CMO gets it wrong 14:28 - Mindsets instead of personas, and the cost of spray and pray 15:42 - What overpromising costs: reviews, trust, and hiring 17:44 - Growing from ego versus growing in a way you can sustain 19:31 - Career advice for early-career designers in an AI job market 21:20 - Nobody is sticking around: the first thing to look at 22:31 - Design is not just screens 23:04 - Lightning round and Soft Futures 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 Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason

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  Episode #236

  Turn Marketers Into AI Strategists with Elyssa Steiner

  Sep 8, 202629 minS2

  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 Structuring marketing around verticals instead of channels, with solution marketers embedded in each sales pod as the vertical SME and one digital team running paid across all of them Backing marketing targets into revenue targets using historical conversion data, then tracking marketing sourced opportunities and closed won deals by vertical instead of MQL volume The mistake she names directly: scaling AI before standardizing the process, which she says she learned firsthand How to run the ICP exercise yourself, ship it at good enough, and let your sales SMEs throw darts at it rather than spending six months making it perfect Chapters 00:00 - Why marketing teams have a throughput problem, not a strategy problem 02:31 - Leaving fintech for construction software, and what carries over 03:14 - What she found walking in the door, and why the team was hungry for clarity 07:12 - Keeping four vertical pods from turning into four silos 08:19 - Writing marketing OKRs that back into revenue, and why not MQLs 10:09 - Building 14 ICPs with AI in 45 days 12:39 - ABM from 18 accounts to 400, and the budget constraint reframe 14:07 - Selling AI to federal buyers when trust is the whole story 17:05 - Throughput across brand, product marketing, and advocacy 18:59 - The daily AI mandate, no layoffs, and everyone becoming a strategist 22:41 - Marketing to a buyer who has been burned before 23:38 - Lightning round 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 Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason

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  Episode #235

  The Marketing Engineer with Nick Lafferty

  Sep 1, 202624 minS2

  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 Why the first marketing hire should be a marketing engineer, with a product marketer as the fast follow How Nick shipped a social proof quote to the live contact sales page in 15 minutes using Cursor, and the required "how did you hear about us" field that powers his attribution system What broke first at speed: lead routing running through a Google Sheet, deliverability issues, and then more meetings than sales reps to take them How Profound builds a category by publishing research to customers in Slack first, then LinkedIn, then email and webinars Chapters 00:00 - Cold open: "I have contracts with real ARR tied back to my name" 00:45 - Frank Growth intro: three things going wrong with marketing teams 02:11 - Nick's background, from Loom to Profound 03:02 - What a marketing engineer actually does 03:50 - The first thing he ever shipped, and it's still live 04:45 - Building the LinkedIn to HubSpot attribution system 05:47 - The result: 20% of inbound lead forms from LinkedIn 06:37 - What broke first at scale 08:18 - Hiring the first four marketers 09:14 - The interview question: show me your GitHub repo 10:21 - What Loom taught him about horizontal products 12:00 - Marketing a category that didn't exist 18 months ago 13:23 - The research drumbeat, and giving customers early access in Slack 15:04 - Why Profound turns away the self-service market 15:45 - Profound University and the marketing engineer job board 16:34 - From analytics product to AI agent workbench 17:37 - What to look for in a first marketing hire today 18:50 - Anti-token maxing, and where marketing engineers come from 20:04 - Lightning round 21:30 - Jason's top three takeaways and one thing to do this week 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 Work with Winston Francois Subscribe / Follow Jason

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