Beyond the Funnel: Hannah Parvaz on Customer-Led Growth & Navigating Martech Shifts

Absolutely. The way I got here was a little bit unconventional. My background is actually in the music scene. When I was very young, like 13 years old, I got involved in Manchester in the UK and started working on under-18s club nights. It didn’t really feel like work at the time, but we were selling them out for hundreds of people, booking bands and DJs, and selling tickets. It was the time of MySpace, so we were creating communities there and having reps selling tickets within their schools. One thing led to another, and I was getting involved in other gigs and events in Manchester. Some of these events were at venues that were 18 plus – I wasn’t even allowed to go into them myself!

The whole time as a kid, I had planned to become a lawyer; that was always my plan. Then, just before university, my Oxbridge professor asked me, “Why did you decide not to do something with music?”. I’d never even considered that. I went home and told my family, “I’m going to move to London and work in music instead”. So, a few weeks later, I moved to London and started working at a live music recording company. We went on tour with quite big artists, recording their shows for live albums. While I was there, I got more involved in the marketing side. Later, I worked at record labels and did some artist management.

Then I got into a music app. It wasn’t my strategy, but I joined an app called Dice, a music ticketing app, before its launch. I joined the music team; then a head of marketing joined but left a couple of months later. That left me as the only person doing any marketing or product work for the first two years of Dice’s life. I stayed there for just under three years and scaled it up to over a million users.

After that, I had a decision to make: stay in music or tech? I decided I was going to stay in Tech. Then I went to my next mobile app. This one had been going for about two years; it was a nightlife app, so it felt like a sidestep from music. While I was there, we took it through an entire rebrand, redid the tone of voice, rebuilt the entire product – pretty much everything. We scaled it up over 500% in the time I was there. Later, I joined Curio, an audio journalism app, as their first marketing hire. I was head of growth, running product and marketing, handling all the experiments, and scaled that up to over a million users just before I left.

Yes, during that time at Curio, I won that award, which was an incredible thing. It felt like validation for that whole winding journey. It wasn’t just about my work; it also reflected the success of the teams I’d worked with. It gave me more confidence to step out on my own too. It was definitely a pivotal moment that encouraged me to think about founding Aperture and also lean more into coaching.

I think I’ve taken something from everything that I’ve done. When you’re working in music, putting together brand books, planning tours, doing event management, working on campaigns, building communities for artists : you learn all kinds of random skills that you don’t necessarily think will be applicable later. You also learn about social media and how different channels work. You just pick up lots of skills along the way. I’m always trying to take a learning from everything I do, so that I can be 1% better every day. “Every day’s a school day,” right? That approach – being resourceful, adaptable, and focused on the end result – has been incredibly helpful. The main mindset shift moving into tech was probably getting used to the data-driven nature and the speed of iteration.

Founding Aperture felt like the obvious next step after being in-house at those companies for so long and gaining those experiences. I realized I really enjoyed applying growth principles across different types of businesses. I also wanted more control over the types of companies I worked with. I found myself increasingly drawn to mission-led products – companies genuinely trying to make a positive impact, whether in education, health, sustainability, or tackling issues like food waste. I’ve always had a big hunger to help people.

So, Aperture is a growth partner that helps mobile apps and other consumer products scale sustainably through experimentation. We primarily work with mission-led products because we want to grow companies that actually improve people’s lives. So far, the companies we’ve worked with include education products, food waste reduction products, apps helping mothers with post-partum depression, supplement brands, and an app to help carers of Alzheimer’s patients.

Aperture has two sides: one side is a performance marketing agency doing creative strategy, creative production (UGC and design work), media buying, reporting, and attribution. The other is a product studio or agency where we work with companies on monetization strategy, onboarding optimization and flows, full-funnel approaches, deep retention, and CRM. This dual model keeps things interesting and allows us to apply our growth thinking across the entire product lifecycle.

A big part of what we do at Aperture is teaching customer psychology to the companies we work with. We show them the difference between a product interview and a psychology conversation. Often, when people speak to their customers, they frame it like a product interview: “How did you find this feature?” “What did you click on here?”. That’s valuable for UX, but I always say the most important thing is finding out why someone uses your product, not just how they use it.

Customer psychology interviews, using frameworks like Jobs To Be Done, go much deeper. They aim to uncover the underlying motivations, anxieties, and aspirations driving behaviour. It’s about understanding the ‘job’ the customer is ‘hiring’ your product to do in their life. We want to hear the emotion in someone’s voice, go really deep with them, and find out what language they’re using and how they’re articulating their problem.

Advertising is all about feeling. If you’re just talking about features, it’s never going to work as well. Understanding the customer’s underlying drivers and the language they use allows you to craft marketing messages and frame your value proposition in a way that truly resonates and connects emotionally. This understanding informs your entire growth strategy – from creative and channel choices to product development – ensuring it aligns with what actually motivates your audience.

I think the most common mistake many companies make is not actually talking to their customers. Between 60 and 70%… have never spoken to their customers or haven’t spoken to them in over a year – sincerely, other than maybe sending out a survey. I don’t care about surveys; I care about real conversations.

Sometimes companies come to us on the performance side and say, “No, we’ve never spoken to any customers”. The only times things have really failed is because they haven’t spoken to anyone and have said, “just advertise this specific feature”. Perhaps founders get focused on building, rely only on analytics data (which doesn’t give the ‘why’), fear negative feedback, or simply don’t know how to conduct these deeper psychology conversations. Making time for regular, deep customer conversations involving both product and marketing is fundamental.

A huge challenge, particularly in paid social and app advertising, is keeping up with the required creative velocity and diversity. The algorithms on platforms like Meta have evolved significantly, especially in the last year or so. They’ve become much better at identifying the right audience segments, but this means they often show ads repeatedly to the same small subset of people, even within broad targeting parameters. Frequencies are increasing as a result.

The only effective way to combat the resulting ad fatigue and maintain performance is to feed the algorithm a much higher volume and variety of creatives. I still encounter companies, even those with substantial download numbers and budgets (like 18-20 million downloads, spending millions per year), who think launching one new creative every two weeks is sufficient. That’s simply not enough anymore. For the accounts we manage at Aperture, even with smaller budgets, we’re launching 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50+ new creatives per week.

It’s not just about volume, but also diversity. You need different formats (static images, videos, carousels – which a lot of companies aren’t doing), different messaging angles derived from customer psychology insights, and diverse representation in your User Generated Content (UGC) or imagery. A lot of people overthink this; high velocity doesn’t mean needing 100 entirely new designs each week. It can mean iterating on successful designs with different copy, headlines, or calls to action. Leveraging AI tools properly can help scale this production, but it requires feeding the AI the right inputs and insights, not just asking it to write generic copy. 

Measurement is definitely more complex than ever, especially for mobile apps. Since iOS 14 deprecated IDFA four years ago, the in-platform reporting advertisers see is often significantly underreported. Whatever numbers you see in Meta Ads Manager using SKAdNetwork (SKAN) or even their Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) protocol are likely your worst-case scenario. We’ve seen discrepancies where platform data is 1.4x below reality at a minimum, and for some companies we’ve seen them to be 4x below reality when doing media mix modeling. Making real-time business decisions based solely on that heavily delayed and underreported data is incredibly difficult and risky.

While AEM offers slightly more granularity and less delay than SKAN, it’s not a magic bullet and still significantly underreports. There’s also still confusion around these models; I encounter companies expecting real-time results from SKAN campaigns which inherently have a 48+ hour reporting delay.  

Ultimately, the most important thing is to pay attention to your blended numbers and understand how different initiatives impact those overall business metrics. This means using incrementality tests – which I also call switching things on and off or using control audiences – to see the real effect. I tend to keep away from platform tools like Meta’s A/B testing for this; while you can have a control ad set, I find it often significantly increases CPMs and lowers conversions, creating an unrealistic environment. Therefore, I rely more on the “switching things on and off” methodology to gauge true impact.

Interestingly, we’re also seeing a big movement back away from MMP attribution and back towards Facebook SDK. We’re often seeing better performance and slightly more visibility there, just in that kind of Google Firebase SDK way where using Firebase SDK gets you the best Google performance. While getting developers to implement multiple SDKs can be challenging, and an MMP is still better than nothing (especially for managing links and basic attribution across channels), relying solely on MMP attribution for paid social reporting can be limiting now.

Extremely important. Marketing is absolutely technical now. You need to understand all of these technicalities, otherwise you’re just putting billboards out and guessing. You need to understand the nuances of tracking setup, especially for web funnels where things can get messy quickly with pixel versus Conversions API (CAPI) implementations. Improper setup can lead to duplicated events and completely skewed reporting. Marketers need to understand how data flows, how attribution models work (even with their flaws), and how to ensure they are sending as much clean, deduplicated data as possible to the platforms. Understanding UTM parameters, server-side tagging, event schemas – this is becoming table stakes.

However, it’s also crucial not to get so lost in the technical details that you forget the fundamentals of brand building and long-term strategy. Brand is still a huge part that a lot of people are sleeping on because they are thinking they have to go and be fully technical and attribute everything now. If companies are thinking longer term, they still need to be thinking in a non-technical way sometimes too. They have to think long-term: what are the seasons they can be tapping into or the messages that might be prevalent longer term?. You need a balanced approach grounded in both data and strategic brand thinking.

Coaching started somewhat organically back in 2017 when Google invited me to coach on their accelerator program after I went through 500 Startups. I found I really enjoyed it. For me, the coaching side of things really helps you challenge yourself in what you know. You can get very far into your own rabbit hole of thinking and experimentation, but sometimes until you zoom out and really look at things from an outside perspective and interrogate them from lots of different angles, you actually don’t know what you think you know.

During lockdown, when things were quieter, I leaned into mentoring more heavily on Growth Mentor, partly just to see what I knew and connect with others. I ended up becoming one of their top-rated mentors, which was validating. Around the same time, I got involved with Systm very early on, even before the co-founder joined Matt Lerner. I helped create some of the initial consumer product, acquisition, and mobile app pathways for their accelerator program, and I’m now the most senior coach looking after these areas.

What I gain from coaching is immense pattern recognition. Being exposed to so many different issues, problems, and experiences from all these different products allows you to see what’s been working across one company or multiple companies that can be transitioned into another. It constantly forces me to stay sharp and articulate complex ideas simply. The coaching work and the agency work really supplement one another; insights from coaching often inform our agency strategies, and challenges we solve for clients provide real-world examples for coaching.

My approach to content is pretty straightforward: share the learnings openly. I don’t believe in gatekeeping information. The marketing landscape changes so quickly, and I believe that by sharing what I’m learning – from client work, coaching, conferences, experiments – it helps elevate the entire industry. My philosophy is that a rising tide lifts all ships; helping everyone get better ultimately benefits us all.

So, I try to post almost daily on LinkedIn, sharing practical insights, frameworks, results from tests, or commentary on industry trends. I schedule a lot of it in advance to manage the workload, but the goal is consistent education and value sharing. It’s become a significant way for people to find Aperture and connect with me. When I attend events, people often tell me they’ve been following my content for years, which is amazing. It builds community and trust, and honestly, articulating ideas for content also helps refine my own understanding, similar to coaching.

Ultimately, I think everyone should be leveraging these AI tools. It’s like an accountant refusing to use a calculator. You know, we have to adapt to the future that we’re living in and we should be leveraging them. At Aperture, we’re using AI across the workflow. When we’re putting together creative briefs, we’re always doing our first drafts with AI. We’re doing a lot of production with AI; we’re putting out a lot of creatives themselves with AI backgrounds and then layering on our own assets like text. For copy itself, AI can be powerful, but only if you feed it with information and then use it that way, not just asking it to write generic ad copy.

There are also tools emerging that allow for programmatic video creation, stitching together different hooks and body segments, which can dramatically increase testing velocity. We’re using automation tools to build our campaigns. Embracing these tools allows us to handle the increased workload demanded by the current performance landscape, where higher creative velocity is essential. AI helps us speed up processes and take more shots on goal. However, the human element remains critical for strategy, interpreting nuanced customer psychology, ensuring brand alignment, and making the final creative judgments. AI is a powerful assistant, not a replacement for strategic thinking.

Well, I’m just working a lot, to be honest. Conference season, like the past few weeks travelling between Istanbul, Iceland, New York, London, and soon Edinburgh, is particularly demanding. The key is acknowledging that it comes in waves. I know things will likely slow down a bit in June, July, and August before picking up again in September.  

Having a strong team is absolutely essential. I have a fantastic growth lead and operations director at Aperture who handle much of the day-to-day, allowing me to focus on strategy, clients, and these external activities. My wider team is also awesome. Beyond that, rigorous scheduling is crucial. My calendar dictates my life. As mentioned, I schedule content weeks in advance. I try to protect time for deep work and also consciously plan downtime, like trying not to take work commitments in July to spend time with family and friends. It’s not always easy, and there are definitely hectic periods, but having support systems, planning ahead, and recognising the cyclical nature of the workload helps manage the pressure.