About

Nice to meet you, I'm Alessandro

I've spent more than 15 years in growth and performance marketing across travel, technology, entertainment and consumer products. I've worked with companies including Disney, Expedia, Mozilla and Getty Images, helping them find new customers, enter new markets and decide where to invest.

I started out very close to the execution: keywords, bids, campaigns, landing pages, budgets. I still love that level of detail, and I think it matters more than people sometimes admit. But over time, I became increasingly interested in the bigger questions behind the numbers.

Was a campaign genuinely bringing in customers who wouldn't otherwise have come? Were those customers finding enough value to stay or return, and did the economics justify the investment? Were we building a stronger business, or simply spending more to make the numbers go up?

Those are the questions I keep coming back to. More traffic, customers or revenue can be encouraging, but they don't necessarily mean a business is getting stronger.

Why this site exists

The honest answer is simple: people kept asking me questions.

In my spare time, I've helped friends and founders work through the practical questions that come with building a business: how to find their first customers, explain what they're selling, tell whether it's working and decide what deserves attention when time and money are scarce. I've always enjoyed those conversations.

Those conversations kept bringing me back to the fundamentals. A two-person startup and a large international company may look completely different, but many of the questions underneath are the same. Who is this for? Why would someone choose us? What should we invest in, and what should we stop doing?

Eventually, I realised I'd accumulated years of lessons, frameworks and opinions, but they were scattered across presentations, spreadsheets, old notes, conversations and, mostly, my head. Writing them down seemed a good way to make sense of what I'd learned and share the useful parts.

This site is partly for other people and partly for me. I've found that explaining an idea clearly is one of the best ways to discover whether I really understand it. If it doesn't survive being written down, it probably needs more thought. Some ideas here will change as I learn, and I always welcome a good counter-argument.

Principles over hacks

I'm not especially interested in growth hacks, secret tricks or whatever a platform happens to reward this month. Tactics matter, and I've spent much of my career working with them. But platforms change, competitors catch up and a clever shortcut quickly becomes standard practice. Understanding why something works matters more than knowing that it worked once.

I'm more interested in the principles that remain useful as those tools change:

How demand is created, and how much marketing is simply capturing.
How to recognise growth that is incremental, economically valuable and likely to last.
How to decide where the next pound should go, rather than rely on averages.
How to test ideas properly, especially when the real problem sits outside marketing.

Working across different industries has taught me how often the same problems return, usually dressed in different clothes.

The context changes. The principles usually don't.

Growth is a system

One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking has been moving away from seeing growth as a collection of marketing channels. Paid search is not a growth strategy. Neither is paid social, SEO or AI. They're levers, and they can only pull as hard as the business behind them allows.

Growth depends on how well a business reaches people who need what it offers, converts that interest into customers and creates value throughout the relationship. It also has to earn enough from those relationships to keep going. Product, pricing, distribution and customer experience shape the outcome. Measurement helps us see where value is being created or lost, and whether an apparent improvement is real. Doubling a paid budget won't fix a weak proposition, and better attribution won't repair a confusing checkout.

More marketing investment is sometimes the right answer. But often the most useful improvement lies somewhere else in the business.

What I do

I help businesses work out where meaningful growth can come from, how to evaluate the opportunities and what is worth investing in. That means looking beyond acquisition figures to the value customers receive and the contribution those relationships generate.

In practice, that usually means helping with things like:

Finding the opportunity. Understanding which customers, products and markets offer real headroom, rather than chasing volume for its own sake.
Allocating investment. Deciding where the next pound can create the most value, using marginal returns rather than averages or last year's plan.
Measuring what matters. Looking beyond attributed conversions to understand what changed because of our actions and what those changes contributed.
Testing and learning. Designing experiments that resolve real uncertainties and turning what we learn into better decisions.
Connecting the dots. Working across marketing, product, pricing and customer experience when the biggest barrier to growth sits outside a campaign.

Whether it's a startup looking for its first dependable customers or an established business trying to make better use of a significant budget, the aim is the same: clearer thinking, better decisions and growth that holds up over time.

If any of this resonates, I'd love to hear from you.