01Base camp
Learn
Before a dollar moves, we dig into your audience, your data, and your unit economics. Objectives get benchmarked and made our north star.
Growth marketing, minus the fluff
Ambitious goals?
We know the route.
An embedded squad for
Switchback is your embedded growth team — strategists and channel experts who map the route, run the experiments, and compound what works. Clear thinking, honest numbers, and real momentum from week one.
What we believe
Growth is a process, not an outcome. Nobody summits in one move — you find traction, cut back, climb, and repeat. The teams that win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that learn fastest.
That’s the whole secret. That’s the climb.
What we do
The channel stack
Every channel that matters, run by a specialist who lives in it — and a strategist making sure they all climb the same mountain.
Full-funnel acquisition across search, social, and programmatic — managed by people who treat your budget like it’s their own. Weekly pacing, honest CAC math, and the discipline to cut what isn’t working.
Hooks, ads, and landing pages built from research, not guesswork. Every concept ships with a hypothesis attached, so when something wins we know exactly why — and we make ten more like it.
Technical foundations, content engines, and answer-engine optimization so you show up where buyers actually look — search results today, AI answers tomorrow. Compounding traffic you own.
Onboarding flows, win-backs, and retention programs that turn one-time buyers into repeat revenue. The list you already have is often the fastest growth you’re not using.
A prioritized testing backlog, rapid message testing, and disciplined A/B programs that earn more from every visit. Traffic is expensive — we make sure it counts.
Tracking that holds up, dashboards your whole team can read, and attribution honest enough to admit what it can’t prove. Decisions grounded in signal, not gut feel.
How we climb
Learn. Activate. Analyze.
Optimize. Repeat.
02+1,400 ft
Activate
Lean tests launch in the first 30 days. Small bets, real spend, fast signal — momentum beats a perfect plan sitting in a deck.
03+2,900 ft
Analyze
Weekly readouts that tell you the truth: what worked, what flopped, what we’re doing about it. Egoless, in writing, every Friday.
04+4,600 ft
Optimize
Winners get doubled. Losers get cut fast — even our favorites. Budget flows to proof, not to preference.
05Summit → next peak
Repeat
Each loop compounds the last. That’s how a scrappy budget outclimbs a big one — switchback by switchback.
One loop ≈ one sprint · budget follows proof, not preference
The receipts
Proof? We got it.
Real engagements, real numbers — here’s what the climb looked like.
Lumenly
B2B SaaS · Series AA great product nobody could explain in one sentence. We rapid-tested 23 value props, rebuilt the demo funnel around the winner, and scaled paid social only after the math held.
Paid SocialCROMessage Testing6 months
+214%demo requests in two quarters
Trailkit
DTC · Outdoor gearCreative was the bottleneck, not budget. A weekly hook-testing cadence found three breakout angles, and lifecycle flows caught the buyers paid media warmed up.
Paid MediaPerformance CreativeEmail90 days
3.1xblended ROAS in 90 days
Harborline
Fintech · Consumer appTheir attribution said everything was working. It wasn’t. We rebuilt tracking, found the two channels actually driving activations, and reallocated the rest of the budget behind them.
AttributionPaid MediaOnboarding CRO5 months
−41%customer acquisition cost
The honest math
Squad vs. the alternatives
We’ll be candid: sometimes an in-house hire is the right call, and we’ll tell you so. Here’s how the options actually stack up.
| In-house hire | Freelancer patchwork | Switchback squad | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | 3–6 months of hiring | Fast, but fragmented | First tests live in 30 days |
| Channel coverage | One person, two hats | One specialist per invoice | Full squad, every channel |
| Senior talent | If you can afford it | Roll the dice | Strategist-led, always |
| Fully-loaded cost | $140k+ / yr per hire | Adds up fast | One flat monthly rate |
| Transparency | Internal politics | Weekly mystery | Candid readouts, every Friday |
| Scale up / down | Hiring & severance | Re-recruit every time | 30-day flexibility, no drama |
A week inside the squad
No mystery. Just cadence.
You always know what shipped, what it did, and what’s next. Here’s what a normal week with us looks like.
Mon
Standup & pacing
- 15-min pipeline standup
- Spend pacing check
- Week’s test queue locked
Tue
Experiments ship
- New tests go live
- Landing page variants up
- Tracking QA’d twice
Wed
Creative drop
- Fresh hooks & ad concepts
- Copy variants staged
- Design reviews with your team
Thu
Data dig
- Cohorts & funnel analysis
- Early signal triage
- Kill / scale calls drafted
Fri
The candid readout
- What worked, in writing
- What flopped — no spin
- Next week’s route, mapped
No mystery math
Flat rates. Posted publicly.
Most agencies make you book three calls to hear a number. Ours are right here — and you can see a full sample proposal before we ever talk.
Foothold
$6k/month
One or two channels, run properly. For teams finding first traction.
- Growth strategist + 2 channel experts
- 1–2 channels managed
- Weekly candid readout
- Shared test backlog
- 30-day rolling agreement
Most teams start here
Ascent
$12k/month
The full squad. Strategy through execution, every channel that matters.
- Strategist-led squad of 4–6
- Full-funnel: paid, SEO, CRO, lifecycle
- Performance creative included
- Custom dashboard & attribution
- Quarterly route re-mapping
Summit
Custom
Embedded growth leadership for hyper-growth teams with real stakes.
- Fractional head of growth
- Dedicated cross-channel pod
- Experiment velocity targets
- Board-ready reporting
- Hiring support as you scale
Want the receipts first? Download a real sample proposal — scope, deliverables, and pricing, exactly as a client would see it.
Get a sample proposalMedia spend is billed directly to you — we never mark it up.
In their words
“They killed our favorite campaign in week three because the math didn’t hold. Then they found one that did 4x better. That’s when I knew this was different.”
The humans
Whip-smart. Egoless.
No account-manager telephone game. The people in this grid are the people in your Slack.
Mara Quist
Head of Growth Strategy
Will retire your favorite campaign the moment the data outgrows it.
Deshawn Cole
Paid Media Lead
Treats your CAC like it’s coming out of his own pocket.
Ines Barros
Performance Creative Dir.
Keeps 400+ ad hooks in a spreadsheet. All ranked.
Felix Andersson
SEO & AEO Lead
Reads algorithm patch notes for fun. Genuinely.
Roz Maguire
CRO & Experimentation
Once A/B tested her own wedding invitations.
Theo Nakamura
Data & Attribution
Will always tell you what the dashboard can — and can’t — prove.
Plus a bench of senior channel specialists we bring in when your route calls for it. Meet the team on a call →
Steal our homework
The playbooks we actually use
Free, ungated, no “book a demo” tollbooth. If you can run it yourself, you should.
01Guide
The First 90 Days of Paid
The exact sequence we run when a paid account is new, messy, or on fire.
Grab it02TemplateCRO Backlog Template
How we score, rank, and ship experiments — steal the spreadsheet.
Grab it03GuideAttribution Without Tears
A plain-English setup that survives cookie-pocalypse and CFO questions.
Grab it04Toolkit13 Growth Spreadsheets
Ready-to-go pacing, forecasting, and testing sheets we use every week.
Grab itCandid fit check
We’re not for everyone
Growth partnerships fail when the fit is wrong. So let’s be honest before anyone signs anything.
Probably a fit
- You want a partner in your Slack, not a vendor behind a portal
- You can ship changes to your site and product
- You care about contribution margin, not vanity metrics
- You have at least ~$5k/mo to put behind media
- You can handle a readout that says “that flopped”
Probably not
- You want a guaranteed result by Friday
- You’re looking for set-it-and-forget-it
- Brand polish matters more than pipeline right now
- You need 6 layers of approval to change a headline
- You’d rather hear good news than true news