Applied mathematician turned Performance Marketing & Growth professional, with 12+ years scaling mobile and web products across the US, EU, and global markets. I bring rigor to growth – building the unit economy models and budget forecasts behind the campaigns – and I'm resourceful enough to get under the hood myself: fixing tracking, debugging attribution, running AI tools across my workflow from analysis to creative to forecasting.
I've worked across crowdsourcing (AI/ML), EdTech, and e-commerce – from early-stage startups to global AI players like Nebius (ex-Yandex).
Achievements:
Hands-on with Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok, affiliate, and influencer channels – managed up to $2M/month in spend. Advanced stack includes Google Analytics, Amplitude, Tableau, and Looker.
Open to a long-term senior in-house Growth / Performance Marketing role – let's connect: hello@mariascales.com
A stealth consumer subscription app, with Meta as the primary acquisition channel and an aggressive scaling mandate ahead of a raise. I joined at the end of the December push – inheriting an account already trained on that spend, with roughly one month of observed CAC and an LTV estimated by feel, the normal starting point for an early-stage startup that can't yet wait for cohorts to mature. The plan was a staged ramp: first lock in stable performance at ~$5,000/day in Meta, then scale to ~$30,000/day.
The mandate was to scale – but the initial audit surfaced several red flags that stopped me from treating the ramp as routine:
Before any of the ~$900k/month was released, turn the red flags into a definitive answer: noise, or a real ceiling? Leadership needed a defensible scale-or-hold call – not another optimistic forecast. That meant explaining the anomalies rather than scaling past them, and getting the unit economics rebuilt on the most accurate numbers obtainable. The honest constraint: at an early-stage startup moving this fast, the data will always be thinner than a clean LTV read needs – so the model had to be as rigorous as the available signal allowed, and explicit about its own uncertainty.
1. Technical audit – explain the CPM first. Before touching creative, I audited the plumbing: Business Manager / ad-account architecture, event taxonomy, and pixel-vs-server (CAPI) consistency – to establish whether the anomalous CPM was a real auction signal or a measurement artifact. It was real: Meta was genuinely paying up to reach these users, which pointed away from "tracking is broken" and toward "the audience is the problem."
2. Creative audit – the reset test, and why nothing new could fire. When scaled performance collapses there are two very different causes: the creative is worn out (fatigue – fixable with fresh concepts), or the audience itself is used up (no creative fixes that); telling them apart was the whole job. I reviewed everything that had run – not just the failed Q5 wave but the full back-catalogue – scoring each concept and isolating the ones that had genuinely produced the best results. That review exposed the real problem: the "winning" history collapsed to one concept mapped to one narrow audience – the pocket where most of the December budget – spent before I joined – had been concentrated. That concentrated spend taught the pixel exactly where "conversions" lived, so it kept routing every new creative – the Q5 wave included – straight back into that same small, "safe" audience. This is pixel overfit.
The reset test made it visible. Across 50+ entirely new concepts, a fresh concept should reset the picture – normal opening CPM, frequency building as usual, performance recovering – because in Meta's increasingly creative-led delivery (Andromeda) a new concept should find a new pocket. None did: every concept launched straight into high frequency and the same extreme CPM, because the pixel delivered it into an already-exhausted audience rather than a fresh one. Rising frequency didn't distinguish the cases – it doubled either way; the absence of a reset across 50+ concepts did. The new concepts weren't failing on merit – they never got a fair test. What looked like the floor of a scalable audience was its ceiling.
Pixel overfit, defined: campaigns optimizing to a shallow or narrow pixel event that correlates with short-term conversion but not with the true addressable, revenue-generating audience – so reported performance looks strong precisely because the model has fit itself to a pocket too small to scale.
3. Prove it on a clean pixel. The overfit pixel couldn't test its own blind spot – it would keep routing anything new into the same exhausted audience. A new campaign or ad set wouldn't have escaped it either: Meta's learning is layered, and ad-set history is only the second layer – the deepest one is the conversion history accumulated on the pixel itself, with the ad account carrying its own priors on top. Anything launched against the same pixel inherits the same overfit prior. So I migrated to a new pixel and re-tested the creative slate from scratch: the only way to get an unbiased read on how much genuinely scalable audience actually existed.
4. Rebuild the unit economics on true numbers. In parallel, the model had to run on backend revenue, not pixel-reported conversions. I ran the reconciliation – pixel-reported vs backend revenue by cohort – and quantified how far the reported numbers had been inflated. The model rebuild itself was owned by a teammate, who reworked the unit economics on those corrected inputs (and carried the uncertainty explicitly, given the thin data).
Prevention Framework – a pixel-overfit tripwire, pre-flight checks, and the processes that keep CPMs in check.
Unit Economics Estimator – an interactive tool answering: does this growth math ever close?
Praktika is an EdTech startup that uses AI avatars to create a personalized language-learning experience. It focuses on speaking practice for non-native English speakers through an accessible mobile app. Praktika has already found a product-market fit as a startup and was preparing for the Series A round for scaling.
As Senior Marketing Manager at Praktika, I was responsible for the development of unit economy model benchmarks and establishing user acquisition at scale to achieve ROI-positive growth.
At that startup stage, it's vital to establish new student acquisition via marketing channels while meeting ROI KPIs. This will be the base of revenue growth and lead the company to close the Series A round successfully.
Thus, the challenge was to turn overall requirements into numbers, set the benchmarks, and plan and execute the scale while maintaining the ROI KPIs.
To meet these challenges, I've decided to divide the tasks into the following steps:
Thus, based on the goal decomposition, I've formed a bottom-up plan for scaling. After justifying this plan to the founders, the team and I began to put the plan into action.
We've picked the cost per subscription trial as the proxy metric because it was fast to achieve and easy to optimize across all channels.
Starting slow, we were looking for communication approaches that would resonate with users. We began by collaborating with influencers and testing these creative ideas for performance channels. After several iterations, we found ROI-positive options that allowed us to scale.
Further, we scaled all performance channels week by week and compared the weekly actual results to our initial forecast to see:
It is also worth noting that the ROI-positive publications with influencers supported brand awareness and users' trust, boosting the performance of the Meta and Google channels.
Toloka is a crowdsourcing platform developed by Yandex that connects businesses and researchers with a distributed crowd of workers worldwide to complete micro-tasks such as data labeling, image recognition, and content moderation.
Toloka's revenue depends on client request fulfillment performed by workers. Two variables are critical for margins: the number of tasks completed per day, and how long a worker stays active on the platform.
As Senior Marketing Manager, B2C, I was responsible for acquiring, engaging, and retaining workers.
The goal was to increase Toloka's margins by optimizing the worker acquisition budget – specifically, reducing acquisition costs without sacrificing revenue.
I focused on three areas to achieve this:
This case covers area 1. Areas 2 and 3 are covered in separate cases.
To enable ROI-based acquisition decisions, I needed proxy metrics that could predict worker quality early – before full performance data was available.
We defined worker quality along two dimensions: relevance (acceptance rate of completed tasks) and productivity (number of tasks completed while active). The goal was to pay more for high-quality workers and less for low-quality ones, rather than applying a flat acquisition cost across all cohorts.
Working with the Analytics team, we identified money-per-hour (mph) as the best efficiency metric – the average income a worker earns per hour, factoring in time spent on tasks and access to higher-paying work. The higher the mph, the higher the ROI.
To put this into practice, I mapped average acquisition cost against average mph for each cohort, segmented by language and country. This gave us a ranking system to reallocate budget toward the most efficient segments.
To execute the project, I aligned the User Acquisition, Analytics, and Attribution teams around a shared hypothesis:
If we acquire workers based on the mph proxy metric, we can pay more for high-efficiency workers and less for low-efficiency ones – reducing the acquisition budget by at least 30% while holding revenue flat.
"Maria achieved great results in the acquisition, retention, and engagement of ML data makers thanks to her strategic thinking, data analysis skills, project management skills, understanding of marketing tools and technologies, strong work ethic and attention to detail, and continuous improvement mindset."
– Dmitry Stepanov, Founder & GP at AAL VC · Forbes 30 Under 30 · Senior to Maria at Toloka
Toloka is a crowdsourcing platform developed by Yandex that connects businesses and researchers with a distributed crowd to complete various micro-tasks, such as data labeling, image recognition, and content moderation.
Toloka's revenue is connected with client requests' fulfillment, which workers perform. The number of completed tasks per day and the number of days the worker stays active on the platform are critical variables for business margins.
As Senior Marketing Manager, B2C, I was responsible for the acquisition, engagement, and retention of these workers.
The task was to increase Toloka's margins through new workers' acquisition budget optimization. The significant subtask was strengthening product-market fit to grow workers' engagement and retention.
To meet the challenges, I've decided to focus on the following areas:
Here, we will dwell more on actions and results in area 2. We'll review areas 1 and 3 in separate cases.
Area 2 included the following subtasks:
To accomplish the mentioned tasks and to lead the whole project, I brought together the efforts of the User Acquisition, Analytics, Attribution, Product, and Development teams.
After I figured out the average retention rate (for each cohort), I performed the following analysis:
Also, it became clear that we should consider the task complexity from the worker's perspective.
I interviewed core users to understand workers' values and motivation. The key takeaways were:
After that, I formulated the following hypothesis:
"Maria achieved great results in the acquisition, retention, and engagement of ML data makers thanks to her strategic thinking, data analysis skills, project management skills, understanding of marketing tools and technologies, strong work ethic and attention to detail, and continuous improvement mindset."
– Dmitry Stepanov, Founder & GP at AAL VC · Forbes 30 Under 30 · Senior to Maria at Toloka
Toloka is a crowdsourcing platform developed by Yandex that connects businesses and researchers with a distributed crowd to complete various micro-tasks, such as data labeling, image recognition, and content moderation.
Toloka's revenue is connected with client requests' fulfillment, which workers perform. The number of completed tasks per day and the number of days the worker stays active on the platform are critical variables for business margins.
As Senior Marketing Manager, B2C, I was responsible for acquiring, engaging, and retaining these workers.
For the Toloka Business Development team, it is critical to fulfill key clients' requests (big tech) entirely and on time, regardless of internal processes and optimization issues. These requests usually have a significant volume and obvious seasonality (meaning that their requests don't come gradually within a period of one year). As a result, a massive burst in the number of workers is needed immediately, significantly affecting the business margins and net margins of these requests.
Tasks like these happen in different types of businesses that deal with substantial seasonal sales during holidays or other events. The common feature of this particular ask is that these sales have strict time limits and KPIs.
The task was in handling big requests, handling standardization, and connected costs minimization, which are related to:
To meet the challenges, I've decided to focus on the following areas:
Here, we will dwell more on actions and results in area 3. We'll review areas 1 and 2 in separate cases.
During the research phase, it became apparent that it's crucial to build the processes of key requests' forecasting and workers' acquisition optimization via:
"Maria achieved great results in the acquisition, retention, and engagement of ML data makers thanks to her strategic thinking, data analysis skills, project management skills, understanding of marketing tools and technologies, strong work ethic and attention to detail, and continuous improvement mindset."
– Dmitry Stepanov, Founder & GP at AAL VC · Forbes 30 Under 30 · Senior to Maria at Toloka
Buddy AI is a language learning app that utilizes artificial intelligence to provide personalized English language instruction to children through a game. The idea of the app is that kids can start to talk to the virtual tutor right away, from the very first session. The app utilizes a subscription monetization model, and one of the most effective ways to acquire users at that time was to promote the app as a game for kids. Summing up, users' acquisition, retention, and monetization are the critical elements of the app's revenue.
As Senior Marketing Manager at Buddy AI, I was responsible for improving those metrics to ensure sustainable business growth for successful fundraising and break-even point achievement.
Upon my collaboration with Buddy AI, the app had active users from two primary geographies and one major and one minor user acquisition channel. After a closer look at the unit economy, I concluded that there is no way to scale while meeting the KPIs on ROI.
The main reasons for that were the unstable economic situation in those geographies (depreciation of the national currency against the US dollar) and the introduction of the implicit consent for IDFA tracking by Apple (which led to a decline in attribution quality).
To solve the business growth problem according to target ROI, I have focused on users' LTV improvement and the search for new geographies for user acquisition.
First, I've analyzed what prevents the app growth via given acquisition channels. Based on given conditions, I've decided to do the following:
To solve the problem above, I've built the unit economy model and figured out the following:
Users' retention rate, LTV, and ROI are the crucial metrics for subscription businesses.
While selecting the approach for solving the problem from area 2, I've decided to prioritize the larger geographies since it will shorten the payback period for the investments in creative localization. In particular, we focused on LatAm due to its size and potential interest in the product.
I've come up with the following hypothesis:
Besides the major hypothesis mentioned above, I've applied several typical optimizations like onboarding simplification, the process for creatives' handling, creative rotation, etc.
I led the full-stack team to accomplish these tasks, including a data analyst, front-end developer, back-end developer, UA manager, and creative producer. Also, several teams were outsourced, like designers, video editors, localizers, and country advisers.
Scentbird is a subscription-based fragrance service that allows customers to discover and try new perfumes and colognes monthly in the United States.
Scentbird utilizes the subscription model, and business growth is directly connected to active user base growth. Nevertheless, it's critical for business margins to optimize customer acquisition costs and focus on selling products with higher margins.
At the beginning of 2017, Scentbird was a startup; thus, it was critical to demonstrate steady growth with all the KPIs met, primarily including ROI.
In Scentbird, I began as a media buyer and was responsible for user acquisition on Meta.
Meta was the major user acquisition channel for Scentbird, which brought the most valuable users from the ROI perspective. My tasks were to:
The main area of improvement here was the operation processes in both different user acquisition channels and in creative and analytics streams.
At the beginning of the journey, I stumbled upon the fact that Meta's media buying budget exceeds $5M annually. Keeping that in mind, I've concluded the following:
The systematic approach would let us see the bigger picture and determine the areas for A/B testing. Thus, I did the following:
I formulated the following hypothesis:
"Maria is a great professional in the performance marketing field. She began working in my team at Scentbird as a Meta Ad Manager and grew to UA Group Head. She has successfully met her KPIs for three consecutive years with a top marketing budget under management of $2M/month. Maria has a solid mathematical and statistical background and a deep understanding of digital marketing channels and Ad Tech. She has a great ability to manage multiple projects and uses a very systematic approach to the team's benefit."
– Oleg Popov, VP of User Acquisition · Scentbird
Scentbird is a subscription-based fragrance service that allows customers to discover and try new perfumes and colognes monthly in the United States.
Scentbird utilizes the subscription model, and business growth is directly connected to active user base growth. Nevertheless, it's critical for business margins to optimize customer acquisition costs and focus on selling products with higher margins.
In Scentbird, I was responsible for the whole performance marketing stream, the primary source of the company's growth. Also, I was responsible for growth (from the marketing point of view) prediction models.
For growth forecasting and planning, we needed a framework which would let us:
The task above can be divided into the following subtasks:
I was responsible for areas 2 and 3. The marketing analytics team almost fully automated areas 1, 3, and 4. Thus, they supplied the data weekly.
To accomplish the tasks above, I performed the following:
I formulated the following fundamental hypothesis: the model mentioned above would let us find the optimal balance between marketing spending (user base growth) and ROI with an accuracy of at least 7%.
"Maria is a great professional in the performance marketing field. She began working in my team at Scentbird as a Meta Ad Manager and grew to UA Group Head. She has successfully met her KPIs for three consecutive years with a top marketing budget under management of $2M/month. Maria has a solid mathematical and statistical background and a deep understanding of digital marketing channels and Ad Tech. She has a great ability to manage multiple projects and uses a very systematic approach to the team's benefit."
– Oleg Popov, VP of User Acquisition · Scentbird