How to Leverage Marketing to Scale a Product and Secure Series A Funding
$30M Series A · 5× revenue in <3 months
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.
| Metric | Target | Result | How measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | – | ×5 | Against Praktika's profit KPI targets, which were exceeded |
| Series A round | – | $30M, closed in under 3 months | Company funding round |
| Influencer collaborations | – | 50+ worldwide | Campaigns run across platforms and geographies |
| Scaling control | – | Weekly plan vs fact | Cost per action, trial-to-subscription conversion and remaining headroom, per platform and geo |
Table 2. Outcomes as stated in this case. The scaling plan was built bottom-up from the unit economy model and checked against actuals every week.