Here's something a growth marketer told me that I haven't stopped thinking about.

"People just overcomplicate it. Growth marketing is a funnel. Fix one problem at a time. The basics always work."

That's Quentin Goumy, Growth Marketing Lead at Instant. He's worked across dozens of DTC brands at Superbolt, spent time at HubSpot, studied financial economics at Columbia, and now leads a team of five building one of the more interesting retention products in ecommerce right now.

He is not the guy who's going to tell you to double your Meta budget and see what happens.

Quentin sits at this interesting intersection of growth and marketing that I've been thinking about a lot lately at Vibe. The growth team amplifies everything product marketing ships. The two functions are more dependent on each other than most orgs want to admit.

Here's what stuck with me.

98% of your website visitors leave and never come back.

That's the problem Instant was built to solve. Most ecommerce brands are pouring money into Meta to drive traffic, and the moment those visitors bounce, they're gone. No cookie. No retargeting email. No second chance. And if they do get an email, it's the same abandoned cart message every brand has been sending for 15 years.

Instant's bet is that personalization is the fix. Not "we noticed you left something in your cart" personalization. Real personalization. Knowing that a shopper browsed in the morning but only buys at 9pm on a Thursday. Knowing they need five touchpoints before they convert, or that one email is all it takes before they tune you out entirely. That's where the AI actually earns its name.

Their best performing ad looked like a scam.

I asked Quentin about how Instant grew so fast, and his answer was not what I expected. Paid marketing drives 80% of their net new business. Their breakthrough creative was a "breaking news" style ad featuring their 21-year-old CEO announcing he'd raised $18 million to fix retention marketing. It looked unpolished. It converted like crazy. They closed more deals from that one ad than in all of Q1 before it.

The lesson he took from it wasn't about the format. It was about speed. Once they found something that worked, they didn't make five more versions of it. They made 100. And they built a system to go from learning to live creative in under an hour.

You can't fix CAC with more media spend.

This is the thing Quentin comes back to again and again. Most brands treat rising CAC like a media problem. Throw more budget at it. Optimize the targeting. Try a new channel. His take is that it's almost never a media problem. It's an offer problem. A creative problem. A landing page problem. The funnel is broken somewhere upstream and no amount of paid spend is going to fix it.

Which is also why he stopped measuring click rates and open rates in isolation. A gorgeous Klaviyo dashboard doesn't mean your retention is working. If you're only emailing your VIP segment with 20% off every time, of course engagement looks great. The P&L tells a different story.

He wishes he'd stayed closer to the basics sooner.

I asked Quentin what he'd tell himself earlier in his career and his answer was simple. Stop trying to be clever. The fundamentals of growth marketing haven't changed. More people in, better actions taken, lower costs over time. Every time you feel the urge to chase a new tactic or obsess over a secondary metric, zoom out and ask where the funnel is actually leaking.

There's a Tunisian saying I shared with him at the end of the episode. If you complicate things, they will be more complicated. If you make them simple, they will be simpler.

He said it sounded like startup advice. I think it's just good advice!

🎧 Listen to the full episode

Before I go…

I’m heading to Paris this weekend to run the 2026 Paris marathon for Cancer Research UK. I lost my grandfather to cancer in 2013, so this one means a lot.

I am linking to my fundraising page here. Every donation, no matter how big or small, will help support Cancer Research UK’s vision of a world where everyone lives longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.

If you’re able to support me, I would be so grateful. Thank you for helping me honour my grandfather in this special way. 💖

Until next time!