DigiCom - Growth Marketing Podcast · Digicom

Episode 6: An Interview with Alanna Gregory, Head of Growth at Cash App & Afterpay US

·18 min

Alanna Gregory begins by tracing the path that led her to Cash App after joining through the acquisition of Afterpay. She now leads media and performance marketing, CRM, customer engagement, and MarTech growth marketing operations. At Afterpay, she ran the global growth team across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Europe, the US, and Canada. Her earlier time at Hairstory gives the episode a more startup-driven angle. She says she joined as the 10th employee. The company had a product, but no real marketing yet. That opened the door for her to lead digital and help grow the business across the marketing function, the digital function, and both D2C and B2B, since Hairstory sold into salons and hairdressers. The conversation then goes back further to her start on Wall Street. She says she began as a research analyst and spent about five years publishing research. From there, she and the interviewer dig into how growth work changes as a company scales. She says that once a product launches and the business evolves, messaging can shift over time. The first target customer often broadens and expands. That means the value proposition that works for the beachhead customer can differ from the one that lands with the expansion customer. She argues that growth marketing and product marketing can feel almost synonymous in the early stages. She also says that a strong growth marketer from zero to one, or one to three, needs to understand product marketing. When the discussion turns to advice for founders and listeners, she points to unit economics. She says the first step after validating messaging and finding one or two channels that work is making the model repeatable. That means paying close attention to the economics and looking for ways to scale with confidence. She notes that in zero to one, CAC matters, but it is not the whole destination yet. In one to three, the work is about tightening those economics so growth can be pushed with more certainty. She also pushes back on the habit of jumping from channel to channel. In her view, fewer channels that scale well are often better, especially when focus matters. Near the end, she turns to career perspective. She says careers are not linear. She encourages people to treat failures and wins as part of the same path. When she decides whether to work on a product, she looks for conviction in the product and the category, plus confidence that she can add value. She calls that the happy marriage of the two.

As heard by us

A grounded growth-marketing interview about scale, unit economics, and channel discipline.

Gregory's path from Wall Street research to Hairstory, then Afterpay and Cash App, gives the discussion a clear spine and keeps the focus on how marketing changes as companies move from early traction to scale.

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Why you'd press play

For when your growth plan needs fewer slogans and more unit economics.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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