Approach
How we work
We have one belief that shapes everything: assumptions are dead. You don't grow by being clever in a meeting room. You grow by finding where your funnel leaks, running the smallest experiment that could fix it, measuring honestly, and doing it again — faster than your competitors. Everything below is in service of that.
The method
The Growth Marketing Canvas™
Every engagement starts here. The Canvas is a single-page framework we built to do one thing: turn an infinite list of "we could try…" into a focused, testable plan your whole team agrees on.
It works by mapping your funnel, exposing the bottlenecks, and forcing a hard question at each stage — what's the one metric that matters here, and what's the cheapest experiment that could move it? Marketing, product, sales, and success all feed in, so the plan reflects the whole business, not one department's pet ideas.
It's been downloaded 56,000+ times and used by 2,000+ companies. It's free. You can run it yourself — or have us run it with you.
The funnel
The AAARRR funnel
We optimise the whole customer journey, not just the part that's fashionable this year. The current "GTM engineering" wave is mostly obsessed with the top of the funnel — cold outbound, enrichment, AI SDRs. That's fine as far as it goes. It just isn't the whole job. We work all six stages:
- Awareness Get the right people to notice you.
- Acquisition Turn attention into leads worth having.
- Activation Make the first experience land.
- Retention Build the habit. Keep them.
- Revenue Tune CAC and LTV for margin, not vanity.
- Referral Turn customers into your cheapest channel.
A shop that only does stage 1 will sell you "more leads." We'll ask whether more leads is even your problem. Often it isn't.
The principle
Own your stack
This is the principle underneath every build, and it's where we differ most.
The standard go-to-market stack is a set of rented platforms — HubSpot, Marketo, Klaviyo, Clay, Segment — that hold your data, charge you more as you grow, and become the thing you can't leave. We build the opposite: an open stack, on infrastructure you control, that does the same jobs and stays yours.
Open tools have caught up. There is a credible, well-supported open-source or fairly-priced alternative for nearly every box in the rented stack — CRM, marketing automation, email at scale, the customer-data layer, analytics, experimentation, orchestration. We've mapped the whole thing.
This isn't ideology. It's arithmetic and leverage: lower total cost over time, no per-contact tax, your data in your warehouse, and the freedom to change anything without asking permission.
AI
AI, the un-puffy version
Everyone's selling "AI transformation." We're allergic to it. Here's exactly how AI shows up in our work — three layers, all concrete:
- 01 We use it internally — to analyse your data, generate experiment hypotheses, draft creative variants, and watch your funnels. We'll tell you precisely what we use, which model, and where it runs.
- 02 We deploy it in your stack for specific, measurable use cases: lead scoring, content localisation, support deflection, retention prediction. ROI you can point at — not a vibe.
- 03 We're explicit about the trade-offs. European-hosted models (Mistral and friends) where data sensitivity demands it; OpenAI or Anthropic where they genuinely win and the data allows. We'll always tell you which, and why.
Most teams are stuck at one of two extremes: "ChatGPT everything" or "we can't touch AI because GDPR." We're the shop that navigates the actual trade-off, technically.
Sovereignty
European-first, sovereign by default
Because we build on open tools and host on European infrastructure, sovereignty comes mostly for free. Your data stays in Europe. Your stack runs on infrastructure subject to European law. You're not exposed to a vendor's pricing whims or a foreign jurisdiction's reach.
We don't lead with this, because most teams don't shop for sovereignty — they shop for pipeline and margin. But when it matters to you (and increasingly it does), it's already handled. We'll always be transparent about what runs where.
Heritage
Where we came from
We won't pretend we're new. MAD Kings started in 2016 as a growth-marketing agency — workshops, the Growth Campfire meetup series, a growth academy, full-funnel experimentation for real clients. We grew to 16 people and tripled revenue in 2018. The Decathlon teardown we published is still read today.
"Growth marketing" as a label has aged. The work hasn't. We've simply caught up to what the discipline became — technical, full-funnel, AI-native — and dropped the parts that were always hype. Ten years of running funnels is the reason we can build yours properly.
Who's behind this
Jean-Christophe Cuvelier
Founder. Fronts the Growth Marketing Canvas, runs the funnels, takes the intro calls. You'll be talking to a person who's done this since 2016 — not an account manager.