Why one growth playbook stops working when startups expand into new categories

One of the most common assumptions in mobile growth is that entering a new product category is mostly a targeting challenge. If you’ve built a working UA function in one vertical, the thinking goes, you should be able to apply the same playbook somewhere else with a different audience.

I’ve rarely seen it work that way.

Over the past several years, I’ve worked across entertainment, photo and video editing, Health & Fitness, Mental Health, and utility products. Each of these categories pulls people in for different reasons, keeps them for different reasons, and responds to a different creative language. Expanding into a new vertical has never felt like adjusting campaign settings to me. It has meant rethinking how the whole UA function approaches the product, every time.

That’s the lesson that’s shaped how I think about building organisations, more than any single channel or platform change.

Early in my career, I had the chance to build UA functions from the ground up more than once. In one of my previous roles at a wellness technology company, I joined to help stand up a Google and web acquisition direction as the market adjusted to iOS 14. The strategic logic was sound, but the organisation wasn’t ready to execute it yet. The product, engineering, and operational pieces that direction depended on were still being built elsewhere. That’s a lesson that has stayed with me: a channel strategy only works if the organisation around it is prepared to run it.

When I joined Reface as the first in-house UA manager, the company had already proven that people wanted the product. What it needed was the internal capability to support that demand. I restructured how the department worked, put a system in place for how new creative concepts and variations got tracked, and for a long stretch, sat down with the design team every week to plan new creative and iterate on what already existed. None of that was glamorous. It’s also the part of the job that actually determines whether a team learns something or just keeps repeating itself.

As Reface grew, so did the product portfolio. Entertainment expanded into Health & Fitness, Mental Health, photo and video editing, AI tools, and utility. That’s when I stopped thinking of UA as a channel function and started thinking of it as an organisational capability, one that has to be partly rebuilt every time the product changes.

Companies routinely underestimate how much shifts between categories. What earns attention in an entertainment product doesn’t earn trust in a health product, and neither looks much like what makes a utility app feel useful in the first ten seconds. Even when the channels stay the same, almost everything underneath them changes: the creative concepts, the onboarding, what users expect, how they retain, and the signals you use to judge whether something is actually working.

So I’ve never treated expansion into a new category as a targeting exercise. It starts with research, before any campaign gets built: why people use these products, what gets them to install, what problem they think they’re solving, what kind of messaging feels credible to them. Only once that’s understood does execution begin.

That’s the biggest difference I’ve noticed between teams that scale into new categories well and teams that struggle. The ones that struggle try to reuse tactics. What actually transfers between categories are the systems behind the tactics, not the tactics themselves. The execution has to be rebuilt every time.

My own role has changed the same way the organisation has. As a UA manager, the job was building processes and getting real visibility into the data. Later, as Marketing Lead, I owned the marketing strategy for two products and built out the first team around it. Today, as Head of User Acquisition, I lead UA across the whole portfolio, and the work looks a lot less like optimising individual campaigns and a lot more like building an organisation that can carry several products at once.

That shift changes what you pay attention to. Instead of asking whether a campaign is performing, you start asking whether the organisation can consistently make good decisions across multiple products. Communication between teams starts to matter as much as media buying. Shared process becomes as valuable as a good creative idea. Organisational design becomes part of the performance strategy, whether you planned for that or not.

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One of the bigger changes over the last year has been automation. Managing several products across different categories eventually hits a point where manual execution becomes the bottleneck. The team doesn’t scale with the number of products the way you’d want it to, and the market doesn’t wait for you to catch up. That pushed us to look hard at which parts of the process actually needed a person making a judgment call, and which didn’t. Today, around 80 percent of account-level changes happen automatically, though what that looks like differs by product and category. The goal was never to make every product behave the same way. It was to free up time for the problems that actually need experience and context behind them.

That’s what building a UA organisation has come to mean for me: the systems get more standardised, and the thinking behind them has to get more adaptable, not less.

Looking back, I don’t think the real lesson from building these organisations has been about channels, bidding strategies, or creative formats. It’s that UA teams don’t scale by repeating the same playbook across different businesses. They scale by knowing what should stay constant and what has to change every time they walk into a new category.

This covers mostly what that looked like in the earlier years of building this out – the part of the story that’s easiest to point to. The organisation has kept moving since: more products, a bigger team, more of the process handed over to automation. The infrastructure, the communication, the decision-making systems remain the foundation. Everything on top of it starts over with understanding the product, the people using it, and the market you’re walking into.