The Ledger
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Gupta: Early startups should avoid brand spend until they reach scale
“So if you're in the early zero to one stage or one plus stage, I would say spend very little on brand. You don't have to because your product is your brand, user is your brand. Invest all the money you have to bring people in. But once you've scaled, if you're…”
Gupta: Separating brand and performance marketing was a massive mistake
“Whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing made the biggest mistake and did the biggest injustice.”
Gupta: Scaling companies must thrive in healthy chaos over rigid structure
“You don't try to tame chaos, create a culture environment where you are thriving amidst healthy chaos, where you are running at a hundred miles an hour, even when you can see 10 meters ahead.”
Gupta: Active listeners preferred Spotify's dark UI over white backgrounds
“The black background of Spotify actually resonated a lot more with users, with listeners who are active listeners. They wanted to discover, you know, they want, they had the X factor, and that mattered a lot more. It created an experience That gave them a sens…”
Gupta: "Build it and they will come" is just hidden product marketing
“I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath the build it and they will come is still marketing. It is just driven by the product.”
Gupta: LLM optimization agencies will surge in the next three years
“Nine to 12 months from now, when the percentage of searches shift from Traditional SEO engines to these LLMs. A lot of the conversation for the next two or three years will be, you know, what are the best practices? There'll be tons of agencies popping up to f…”
Gupta: DTC e-commerce can never achieve more than 50% organic growth
“So if you're a direct to consumer e-commerce business, you can pray to God and hope that more than 50% of your growth is organic. It'll never be because it's a massively CAC and unit economics driven world of direct to consumer where you're fighting for discou…”
Gupta: Performance marketing is oxygen; upper-funnel marketing is nutrition
“In product led companies, you have to first think about growth and performance, a lot lower funnel effort as oxygen. You don't have that You are dead. You do not have a chance to come back the next day. You have to know your numbers and you have to move the nu…”
Gupta: Kraken generated $1.5B net revenue and $750B volume in 2024
“Even, even, even pre-IPO, you know, in 20, 24 numbers, we shared a billion and a half in net revenue, not gross, net revenue. Hopefully I'm back here next year. I can, we can talk about 20, 25 growth. We shared our ARPU. We shared the number of funded accounts…”
Gupta: Upper and lower funnel marketing differ by messaging, not channels
“If you think about what the difference is between that and lower funnel, it's just messaging, by the way. Same channels. Just the messaging is different. We are talking more emotionally, culturally, relevance versus formal, action, offer. That's the only diffe…”
Gupta: Multi-touch attribution is no longer relevant for marketers
“We also use MMM because MTA is, is no longer relevant.”
Gupta: Kraken created an experimental growth pod expecting 80% failure rate
“We literally two weeks back spun off a tiny pod whose entire job is to experiment ideas that otherwise would take months To try and see, can we get proof points in three or four weeks? And the expectation is eight out of 10 will fail, but keep trying.”
Gupta: Kraken's ARPU is 2.5x to 3x higher than average retail exchanges
“That's why when you look at our numbers, our ARPU, the quality of a user is two and a half, three times more than the average retail focus exchange because they brought retailers.”
Gupta: YouTube is the most under-leveraged social platform in the world
“YouTube. That's the most under leveraged social platform in the world. Most under leveraged, even though I think it has the highest number of miles.”
Gupta: Crypto is a survival tool in developing nations, not just an asset
“While for us, a movement like crypto is a diversification strategy, it's an asset class, for a big part of the world, it is a way to survive and live.”
Gupta: Kraken, Spotify, and Google achieved initial growth without marketing
“The first phase of growth was purely product-led, where marketing did not exist? And this is true for Kraken, true for Spotify, true for Google, because the first phase of growth was either reality, network effects, or just a brilliant product in a category an…”
Gupta: Over 80% of incoming Kraken users arrive through organic channels
“It's not of 80%. It's still organic, people who are coming.”
Gupta: Kraken scaled paid marketing spend from $10M to over $50M
“We started with building the engine, and we went from 10 to, let's say, spending 50, and then we are now spending a lot more, which I, we can share, but the focus was, we, the goal is not to be the loudest voice.”
Gupta: Scaled companies should cap any paid channel at 30% spend
“At any point at scale, you don't want 80 to 90% of all your paid growth coming from one channel because too much at risk, right? I would say back in my DTC days, we used to obsess over it, but we would say no more than 25 to 30% in any single channel outside o…”
Gupta: Crypto growth relies on Discord and Reddit over Meta and Search
“Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search.”
Gupta: Tottenham Hotspur sponsorship is single-digit percentage of Kraken's marketing spend
“What I would say is in terms of percentages of my overall spend, it was single digit percentages.”
Gupta: Growth should be 90% micro-optimizations and 10% big swings
“It is 90% basis point movements, you know, with compounding impacts and many of them, but keep 10% to still try the next big swing.”
Gupta: Kraken relied entirely on organic word-of-mouth growth for 10 years
“At Kraken, three phases of growth, Harry, Phase one was the first 10 years where, like I said earlier, it was all organic. Great word of mouth, early player, category builder. Then, in late 2021, we realized that the next phase of growth for Kraken now needs a…”
Gupta: Kraken's search traffic from LLMs is minuscule but rapidly accelerating
“We monitor what percentage of search results are coming via traditional search engines and LLMs, and that's increasing. Still very miniscule, but the growth rate is, is, you know, shifting more and more towards these LLMs, and the way you have to optimize your…”
Gupta: Changing Kraken copy to "trade like a pro" drove substantial lift
“And we changed that to a phrase called trade like a pro. This is for a pro product. And we saw substantial basis point lift because we were now connecting our core message to the desire that our users had to achieve a status to be part of a tribe.”