Mayur Gupta on Why 80% of Kraken's Growth Is Still Organic

The Hardest Growth Levers Come First

Most founders get this backwards. They hit product-market fit, raise a Series A, and immediately pour money into Facebook ads. Mayur Gupta, CMO at Kraken and former VP of Growth at Spotify, says that's exactly the wrong sequence.

Before you touch paid marketing, maximize the two hardest levers: product and existing users. Can you bake network effects into the product itself? Can you turn your current customer base into a marketing channel? Referrals, virality, word of mouth—these are harder to crack than paid search, which is precisely why they compound.

Make your product your strongest marketing channel. And then two, can you leverage your existing client base as your strongest marketing channel? And then once you've done that, before you get into the drug of paid marketing, I would say the next layer is maximize every lever of organic growth that you can.

— Mayur Gupta

At Kraken, that philosophy built something rare: after a decade of zero marketing spend, they still pull more than 80% organic growth. When competitors were spending $600 million a year and Kraken was under $10 million, the organic engine didn't slow down. It accelerated.

Start With Channels You Can Measure, Not Channels You Like

When Kraken finally unlocked paid marketing three years ago, they didn't start with Meta or Instagram. They started with paid search, app store ads (ASA), and Google UAC—channels where attribution is direct and last-touch.

Why? In a product-led company, every dollar needs oxygen-level accountability. You can't afford ambiguity when the rest of the org speaks in payback periods and LTV:CAC ratios. Gupta's team went from $10 million to $50 million to a number he can't disclose by proving incrementality at every step.

The second wave? Paid social, display, and OLV—channels that work but require sophisticated attribution models because they're not last-touch. The third wave is upper funnel: audio, sponsorships, brand plays that create demand when lower-funnel channels saturate.

You pick the ones you can measure more directly and easily start there. Because I feel that spending on growth or spending in a product-led company is like your oxygen supply. You have to be able to prove what you are getting back.

— Mayur Gupta

No single paid channel should represent more than 25–30% of total growth. It's not just risk management—it's audience diversification. The users you find on Reddit and Discord are fundamentally different from those on Meta or Google.

Brand and Performance Aren't Enemies

Gupta hates the term "brand versus performance." The framing is broken. Calling one type of marketing "performance" implies the other doesn't perform, which poisons every budget conversation in a product-led company.

Both work. They just play different roles. Lower-funnel performance captures existing demand. Upper-funnel brand creates demand when you've saturated the market. If you're still in the zero-to-one or early scaling phase, spend almost nothing on brand. Your product is your brand. But once you scale and competition heats up, you need both flywheels spinning.

Whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing made the biggest mistake and did the biggest injustice to labeling them. Because the moment you call one type of marketing performance and the other type something else, inadvertently means that one performs and the other doesn't, which is absolutely incorrect and wrong.

— Mayur Gupta

At Kraken, the unlock was proving incrementality. When CAC starts to cliff on paid search, you run upper-funnel experiments in that market to see if you can expand the pipes. Can brand spend increase throughput in saturated channels? If yes, keep spending. If not, pull back.

Growth Engines Need All the Components

Growth doesn't live in one department. At Spotify, Gupta was VP of Growth on the marketing side, with a counterpart VP of Growth on the product side. At Kraken, the growth engine includes data engineering, product, design, and every element of marketing—all reporting to one leader.

The reporting line doesn't matter. What matters is that all the components are hooked in and humming together. If they're scattered across silos, you're running an inefficient engine. Campaigns spike and die. Features pile up and make the product unusable.

The magic isn't in org charts. It's in the quality of the insight feeding the engine. At Spotify, when Apple launched its own subscription product, the team dug into human psychology and discovered that Spotify's black background resonated more with active listeners who wanted discovery and control, versus Apple's white background for passive listeners. That insight shaped everything.

Gupta's advice for founders at Series A or B: don't get too excited about growth yet. Prove product-market fit first. Build a product people stick with. Then maximize product-led and organic levers before you open the paid spigot. When you do spend, obsess over fully loaded payback periods—gross margin discounts, operating expenses, the works. If you can pay back in under six months, keep spending. If not, go back to the insight.