Marketers on the new normal: Mulenga Agley, Founder of Growthcurve

Econsultancy usually runs a feature titled ‘A day in the life’, which has recently taken on a slight feeling of the absurd. The typical day now looks a lot different.

So, we’ve changed our approach and are asking marketers what their work looks like now. We start with Mulenga Agley, Founder of Growthcurve.

Please describe your job: What do you do?

I’m the founder of Growthcurve. We’re a ‘Venture Growth Agency’ – that offers ‘Growth as a Service’ subscriptions to businesses that want to grow fast and look good doing it. We’re behind some of London’s fastest growing startups, and the team scale ups and corporates turn to to help them bring in new customers and incremental revenue. We specialise in customer and user acquisition – but the way we do it is unlike anything else on offer. Our growth tactics, technology and approach to creative are radically different – our
ads don’t even look like ads…

How has your typical day been impacted in the short term by the pandemic?

My typical mornings now involve trend monitoring on a whole new scale. At Growthcurve we are data obsessed – we have regular alerts across a number of platforms that notify us if there are emergent opportunities our clients could be taking advantage of.

Things are shifting so fast in the wake of the outbreak we’ve been able to help several clients have first mover advantage in their sectors by staying in front of shifting consumer behaviours. Our gaming clients are enjoying some of the lowest ‘cost per active user’ ever due to the increase in mobile device usage and one of our clients just briefed us on helping to pivoting their global reforestation funding platform to help raise money for NHS first responders.

What are your favourite tools and techniques to help you get your work done at the moment?

We’d recently started redesigning our London headquarters in Liverpool Street with beautiful plants and breakout spaces – as although we’re a crew of internet obsessed creative techies up to this point we’d favoured physically co-located campaign teams. Since the outbreak our whole company has gone 100% remote so our mission is to try to feel as close by – despite the social distancing.

We use Slack internally and with all of our clients for day-to-day comms, and we use a tool originally designed for software development (Jira) to manage our growth marketing campaigns – as we could extend it with
APIs to make it ‘talk’ with virtually every ad platform and third party tool we use.

Which companies have impressed you since the outbreak?

I’ve been particularly impressed by the way Spotify is using its scale to help protect smaller artists in the music industry from the negative effects of Covid (like not being able to run live music events) by releasing a new feature that will allow artists to fundraise directly from their fans via their Spotify artist profile pages.

How coronavirus is impacting the music industry

What trends have you seen in the last few weeks in your sector?

AppsFlyer data as of March 26 shows social apps are up 650% in organic install share in the past week alone, while non-organic installs of social media apps rose 85%, and the share of sessions in social media apps increased by 90%.

Education apps have seen a +130% rise in number of installs – suggesting people are using their time working from home to acquire new skills, health & fitness apps have seen a +140% rise in number of installs with people looking for guidance on keeping fit during lockdown and gaming apps have seen 40% rise on average.

What advice would you give a marketer right now?

Consumer behaviour is changing – tactics that will have worked in early March could very well be redundant in early April as the global fallout of the Covid-19 outbreak takes hold. It’s time to test new ideas in response to shifting consumer needs.

What does long term planning and strategy look like now at your brand?

We’ve worked with startups and venture capital firms since day one – so we’re very comfortable navigating new market conditions and uncertainty when it comes to consumer behaviour. We will be treating every client like a startup regardless of their size and use these early stage techniques to test / validate and scale growth strategies that could help brands grow in the new post Covid-19 world.

How did you end up founding Growthcurve, and where might you go from here?

I started Growthcurve after growing the digital bank Monese from scratch (0 customers) to the point where it was worth hundreds of millions – at which point I sold my share of the company to PayPal. Prior to Monese I’d spent nearly a decade in the world’s leading global advertising agencies – including AKQA, Wunderman, Isobar and FCB – with the latter years at the helm. We want to expand our idea of ‘Growth as a Service’ globally and make growing your customer base and revenue as straightforward as signing up to any
other online subscription service.