{"kind":"doc","doc":{"title":"Case Study: Building Tornado's Growth Engine","section":{"slug":"posts","name":"Posts"},"rkey":"1675271943000-case-study-tornado","cid":"bafkreig7wcjm5jqaevn3wnxj2d7cjxegw5u4i2oerg3ixf4p2hg7l2miwy","renderKey":"bafkreig7wcjm5jqaevn3wnxj2d7cjxegw5u4i2oerg3ixf4p2hg7l2miwy@2023-02-01T09:31:00Z@2026-08-25T00:32:14Z@Posts|","href":"/posts/1675271943000-case-study-tornado","publishedAt":"2023-02-01T09:31:00Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-25T00:32:14Z","tags":["growth-engineering","data-analytics","marketing","customer-engagement","a-b-testing","fintech","scalability"],"description":"Growth engineering at Tornado: analytics, experimentation, and personalization systems behind major gains in customers, revenue, and engagement.","readingMinutes":2,"markdown":"# Case Study: Building Tornado's Growth Engine\n\nTornado was a web and mobile brokerage, freshly rebranded from Nvstr when I joined in 2021. I was the growth engineer: between marketing, product, and data. Build the systems the team needed, then read the results.\n\n## Learn & Earn\n\nThis is the part I'm still proud of. We launched it that fall: daily investing lessons in the app, written for wherever you were as an investor, with cash dropping into the brokerage as you finished them. I led the technical build.\n\nDAU/MAU pushed past 30%. People went through more than a million lessons.\n\nThe same stretch we were deep in with the Minnesota Timberwolves. College Night, tickets for students, free accounts if you had a .edu. A real partnership, not a logo on a board, and it was a lot of fun.\n\n## Analytics\n\nI stood up Segment, Amplitude, Iterable, and Tune so we could actually see the funnel. Amplitude is how we figured out which lessons landed for which kind of investor. That work won Amplitude's 2022 Pioneer Award for Product Innovation.\n\nCustomer count grew 390% and revenue 800% in six months. Engagement 400%. CAC payback dropped to under 9 months. Paid ROAS up 1,732%. Deposits up 1,025%.\n\n## A/B/N testing\n\nBuilt in-house from scratch. Once we could actually test features and design changes, page conversion went up 200%.\n\n## Campaign personalization\n\nWrote propensity-score models for marketing. Month-over-month in-app engagement and DAU climbed 60–110%. DAU/MAU doubled. 3-month retention up 745%.\n\n## Scaling\n\nTrading volume grew 1,400%, with more of it going into ETFs, ESGs, and diversified portfolios. Deposit CAC dropped 80%+. User base up 150%, engagement up 1,000%. Monthly spend scaled to $1M with one-year payback still intact. Overall CAC fell 90%.","media":{},"series":{},"related":[{"title":"Who Really Wants Carbon Offsets?","href":"/posts/1738778326344-who-really-wants-carbon-offsets","section":"posts","description":"We expected electric-vehicle drivers to engage most with carbon-offset messaging. The strongest response came from truck and SUV drivers.","publishedAt":"2025-02-05T09:58:00Z"},{"title":"AndreiBot-3000","href":"/posts/1738693093717-andreibot-3000","section":"posts","description":"A GPT-2 system trained on approved Aspiration emails generated additional variants for the existing A/B testing program in 2020.","publishedAt":"2025-02-04T10:18:00Z"},{"title":"Scalability → Buildability","href":"/posts/1739212426700-scalability-buildability","section":"posts","description":"A system scales internally when each feature leaves behind primitives that make the next one easier to build.","publishedAt":"2025-02-10T10:33:00Z"},{"title":"Case study: Aspiration's CRM platform","href":"/posts/1625156340000-case-study-aspiration","section":"posts","description":"Two years running CRM and lifecycle at Aspiration. A platform migration, first-party analytics, and campaigns that lifted lead conversion 53%.","publishedAt":"2021-07-01T09:19:00Z"},{"title":"Shitposting Towards a Pizza Oven","href":"/posts/1731475962422-shitposting-towards-a-pizza-oven","section":"posts","description":"Automated YouTube Shorts about pizza lead viewers to shouldibuyagozney.com with its one-word answer: \"yes.\" The algorithm grows daily.","publishedAt":"2024-11-12T21:32:00Z"},{"title":"Datamosh","href":"/art/1791519648658-datamosh","section":"art","description":"An iOS app","publishedAt":"2026-10-09T04:20:51Z"}],"prev":{"title":"Obsidian as a CMS","href":"/posts/1670659200001-obsidian-as-a-cms"},"next":{"title":"AI-Legion on Bluesky","href":"/posts/1681369200000-ai-legion-on-bluesky"}}}