From unknown to 11x growth in three months.
Flux needed to scale its user base efficiently. I was brought on to drive 15% month-over-month growth in Q3 through organic marketing, and grew monthly active users 11x instead. By combining organic content, influencer partnerships and paid ad optimisation, I continue to deliver 25% MoM growth.
A social presence with nobody driving it.
When I joined in May 2023, Flux had accounts. What it didn't have was anyone whose actual job was to think about them. Social was being run on the side by someone outside of marketing, posting to keep the lights on and make the company look like a place worth working at.
It's what happens at every startup that grows faster than its marketing function. The team knew results had to come from social eventually. There just wasn't a plan for where any of it was going.
So the brief I got was a number. Fifteen percent growth in monthly active users, month over month, through organic.
Hardware engineers can smell a pitch.
Flux is a browser-based PCB design tool. The people who use it are hardware engineers, and hardware engineers are one of the most skeptical audiences on the internet. They have to be. Their work either functions or it doesn't, and no amount of marketing changes which one.
You cannot entertain your way into that community. They spot a surface-level explanation immediately, and the moment they do, you're done. What they respond to is proof and teaching. Show the thing working. Explain how it works. Assume they're smart.
At that point nobody in the category was doing that. Everyone talked at engineers without ever teaching them anything. So the strategy wrote itself: become the account that gives the community something of real value every time it posts. The community came first. Growth was what it produced.
Three bets, made in the first six months.
None of these were clever. They were obvious once you understood who was on the other side of the screen, which is usually how it goes.
Every post had to leave someone in the community better off than before they saw it. Basics explained properly, real work shown in progress, nothing oversold. The product was a step in the right direction, never the finished answer.
The goal was monthly active users and everyone was optimising for a single country. I started making the videos twice, once in English and once in Spanish, properly translated rather than subtitled. Twenty countries activated in three months.
Sourcing, briefing, negotiating, managing, run end to end. In 2023 the hardware community online was a fraction of what it is now, which made every partnership high stakes and every mistake expensive.
The collab that went nowhere.
Early on we paid a creator for a single influencer video. It went nowhere. No signups, no lift, nothing worth reporting.
The creator never understood the product. We handed over a loose brief and quietly hoped enthusiasm would cover the gap, and it never does, especially with a technical product where the value only lands if someone explains it correctly.
After that, no collaboration started until the creator understood what the product did and why it mattered. Tighter briefs, real onboarding, clear scope, and the willingness to close out a collab that isn't earning it rather than renewing loosely. Every partnership since has worked.
Views are easy. Signups are the job.
By the end of those first months I was running three accounts, the Flux one plus my own in English and in Spanish. The personal accounts crossed a million organic views in under two months. The one that broke out was the global expansion story.
Views were never the point. Plenty of videos get a million views and produce absolutely nothing for the business. What made these different is that they were built to make one specific person curious enough to go and open the product. That's the whole skill. Earning the kind of attention that ends in a signup.
Organic social stopped being treated as top-of-funnel decoration at Flux and started being reported like any other growth channel, tied to trials and to revenue.