AI ECAD Tool · Organic Growth & Paid Ads
Flux needed to scale its user base efficiently. I was brought on to drive 15% MoM growth in Q3 through organic marketing, and grew monthly active users 11x instead. By combining organic content, influencer partnerships, and paid ad optimization, I continue to deliver 25% MoM growth.
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.
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. Teach the basics. Show honest progress on a product that was actually trying something new, and let people watch it get built.
The community came first. Growth was what it produced.
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 positioned as a step in the right direction, never as the finished answer.
The goal was monthly active users, and everyone was optimizing for a single country. I had already localized content for four different markets, so the question answered itself. 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 single partnership high stakes and every mistake expensive.
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.
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 though. 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.
Month over month the videos kept getting more views, the creator program kept expanding, and the content got sharper as I learned what actually converts someone watching into someone using. 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.
The numbers above are the first stretch. I joined in May 2023 and I'm still there. Three years later it's still compounding.
This case study covers the opening months of the work at Flux, from May 2023. It's a snapshot of how the system was built, not the full history of the company.
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