Tripling an AdTech platform to $5M managed budget.
Tripled the user base to $5M in managed ad budget, then set the strategy to grow LTV across the customer base.
01 · The problem
What Spaceboost actually needed.
Spaceboost ran an AdTech platform that managed paid advertising budgets for its customers, and growth was the existential question. More budget under management meant more revenue, but acquiring and retaining advertisers in a crowded market is expensive and churn-prone. The immediate problem was scale: the platform needed materially more advertisers and budget to reach viable size. The deeper problem surfaced once growth worked. A platform can triple its user base and still lose money if each customer's lifetime value never covers the cost to acquire and serve them.
02 · Context and insight
The reframe that set the direction.
AdTech sits at the intersection of two hard surfaces: the advertiser-facing experience that makes complex media buying feel manageable, and the channel integrations that actually move budget. Customers stay because the platform reliably grows their return on ad spend, not because of any single feature. That reframed the work twice. First, as App Experience lead, the question wasn't "what features ship next" but "where does new managed budget come from, and how do we open a repeatable channel for it." Then, as Head of Product, the reframe was that LTV, not signups, was the metric connecting the CEO's revenue goals to the CTO's roadmap.
03, The approach
The decisions that mattered.
Aim one tribe at one outcome: new managed budget
Leading the App Experience tribe (growth, core, e-commerce, partnerships), I aligned four squads that could easily have run four disconnected roadmaps around a single number: managed ad budget on the platform. Partnerships opened the channel, growth drove acquisition into it, core made the product sticky, e-commerce monetized it. The deliberate tradeoff was narrowing each squad's focus so the tribe compounded toward one goal instead of optimizing local metrics.
Launch Google Channel Sales as the primary lever
Rather than chase budget across every ad channel at once, I bet on Google as the largest, most defensible source of managed spend and launched a dedicated Channel Sales program. Concentrating go-to-market and integration on one channel made acquisition repeatable and the value proposition legible. That focus tripled the user base to $5M in managed ad budget, the outcome that earned the move to Head of Product.
Reframe product strategy around LTV, not signups
Promoted to Head of Product reporting to the CEO and CTO, I redefined the strategy around increasing lifetime value across the customer base. Growth had proven the platform could acquire budget. The next question was whether each customer stayed and grew. Choosing LTV as the organizing metric traded away the easier signup-and-acquisition story, but it tied the roadmap to the company's actual economics and to the goals both reporting lines cared about.
04 · How it's built
Close to the stack, not above it.
This was a product-leadership role, not a hands-on engineering one: strategy, tribe alignment, and channel go-to-market. The notable build-side tradeoff was channel concentration. Betting the Google Channel Sales program on a single ad platform, rather than spreading integration effort thin, made the growth motion repeatable but concentrated platform risk in one provider's API and economics.
Focusing a four-squad tribe on a single Google Channel Sales program tripled the user base to $5M in managed ad budget. That proof point moved me into the Head of Product seat reporting to the CEO and CTO. From there the work shifted from raw growth to durable economics: a product strategy built around increasing LTV across the customer base, with cross-team initiatives aligned to that one metric.
What I’d carry forward
Tripling a user base proves you can acquire. It does not prove you have a business, which is why the role evolved from growth to LTV. The clearest lesson: channel concentration is double-edged. Betting on Google made the growth motion fast and repeatable, but a platform that grows on one channel inherits that channel's risk, and I'd want the LTV strategy to explicitly de-risk that dependency.