Case Study: Building Tornado's Growth Engine

Tornado 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.

Learn & Earn

This 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.

DAU/MAU pushed past 30%. People went through more than a million lessons.

The 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.

Analytics

I 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.

Customer 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%.

A/B/N testing

Built in-house from scratch. Once we could actually test features and design changes, page conversion went up 200%.

Campaign personalization

Wrote propensity-score models for marketing. Month-over-month in-app engagement and DAU climbed 60–110%. DAU/MAU doubled. 3-month retention up 745%.

Scaling

Trading 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%.