Case Study · Nav · 2015 to 2023 · VP Marketing / CMO

Stagnant to 362%: Rebuilding Nav's Growth Engine

· Logan B. Jones-Olson

The situation

In 2015 the company was called Creditera. It had a real product, business credit data for small business owners, and real conviction from the founders. What it did not have was growth. Revenue was flat, the customer base was small, and there was no marketing organization to speak of. I was the marketing hire. Not the first marketing leader. The marketing hire.

What I walked into

A blank org chart, a brand nobody could pronounce with confidence, and a category, business credit, that most small business owners did not know existed. There was no paid engine, no lifecycle program, no affiliate motion, no customer marketing function. Every channel we would eventually run had to be built, staffed, and made accountable from zero.

The upside of a blank org chart is that nothing is sacred. There were no legacy agencies to unwind, no inherited dashboards to distrust. There was just the question that ended up defining the next eight years: what actually produces a customer, and what does that customer cost?

The moves

  1. Reposition and rebrand. Creditera became Nav. I led the rebrand end to end: naming, identity, migration, and the harder work of repositioning the company from a credit-data lookup into a financial health platform for small business owners. A rebrand is a growth decision disguised as a design project. The name had to carry a bigger product roadmap than the one we had.

  2. Build the marketing org from zero to 20+. Paid acquisition, brand, PR, content and SEO, lifecycle, and analytics, hired in the order the funnel demanded, not the order a textbook suggests. At peak I had roughly 25 direct reports. My rule for early hires: athletes over specialists, because in year one everyone runs more than one channel.

  3. Scale paid from roughly $50-100K a month to approximately $1.5M a month. Google, Meta, and paid social, scaled while holding CAC and payback targets. The discipline mattered more than the number. Every step up in spend had to re-clear the same unit economics bar, which meant creative testing, landing page work, and bid strategy carried the growth, not budget courage.

  4. Build customer marketing from 0 to 6 and drive retention up triple digits. Acquisition gets the applause, but the retention team changed the economics. Lifecycle segmentation, onboarding, and win-back programs took retention rates up triple digits, which quietly raised what we could afford to pay for every new customer.

  5. Stand up affiliate, partner, and influencer programs. Built from scratch, these delivered roughly 10% of new signups at the lowest CAC of any channel in the mix. Pay-on-performance economics meant the channel got cheaper relative to auctions every year it compounded.

The numbers

What broke along the way

Plenty. A growth story this long that reports no failure is a story with the interesting parts removed.

The rebrand cost real short-term momentum. Migrating a name, a domain, and years of accumulated equity from Creditera to Nav meant trading visibility the old brand had earned for a name that could carry the roadmap, and the trade takes longer to pay back than any launch plan admits.

Paid scale outran creative more than once. At $50K a month you can hand-craft every ad. Somewhere on the way to $1.5M a month, creative production becomes the bottleneck, and fatigued ads will quietly ruin your CAC while the dashboards still look busy. Creative production had to become its own operation, staffed and measured like one, before spend could keep climbing safely.

And not every channel earned its keep. Some bets that looked strategic did not survive the CAC and payback guardrails, and killing a channel someone on your team built is one of the least fun recurring meetings in growth.

What I would tell you if you are facing this

Stagnant is not a spend problem. Nobody at Creditera needed a bigger budget in 2015. They needed positioning a customer could repeat, an org built in funnel order, and unit economics that every channel had to re-clear as it scaled.

Build retention before you think you need it. The triple-digit retention gains did as much for the 362% as any acquisition channel, because they raised the ceiling on what acquisition could pay.

And build one channel you own. The affiliate and partner program was never the biggest line on the mix chart, but it was the cheapest, and it compounded while the auctions got more expensive every year. Rented growth stops when the spend stops. Owned growth keeps showing up.

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