The framework that will profitably scale your brand

WORLD VIew

We’ve entered a new era of growth. The old days of last-click attribution, novelty of digital platforms, growth hacking, and technical approaches to digital marketing are over.

Today, a psychology-first approach to understanding your customer is vital. You need a marketing strategy that knows how to captivate, earn attention, and sell. Creative needs to be built by social-natives who never saw the world in horizontal framing. And you need the data chops that can apply science to bring all of these things together with profit in mind.

When everything around you is changing: we see it as a moment of opportunity, not fear. After all, all you are left with is a blank piece of paper and Ballpoint.

WHAT MAKES US UNIQUE

An even split of left and right brains

Too many otherwise brilliant marketers over-index as statisticians and analysts, without a deep understanding of creative, copywriting, or psychology. Both in equal measure are required, which is why we built Ballpoint in that way from day zero.

In-house hunger to grow like the 0 to 1 days

Before agency people, we were early-stage startup hires (and founders). We’ve been responsible for the 0 to 1, not just there at the right time. That mindset can’t be replicated by those who have only worked on established brands.

Marketing your CFO will love

This isn’t 2018. We can’t live with 12 month payback periods. We put contribution margin in the dashboard because if that’s not working, your business isn’t working. Incrementality is life. Blue screens, late nights building a growth model is what (some of us) do for fun.

Creative that’s truly social-first

Creative strategy IS paid social strategy, which is why half of our team are creative. But not only that, these are people brought up on social. Your social strategy needs to be more Real Housewives of Clapton than it is big TV media buys. Don’t worry, we’ve got you.

Growth mindset, process, and engines

Growth isn’t a name for startup marketing. Growth mindset teaches us to learn. The growth process designs a system to test and learn quick. And the growth engine understands that every business grows as a system, interlinked together.

Performance marketing that we can still nerd out over

Let’s not beat around the bush, while growth is our philosophy, performance marketing is the nuts and bolts of what we do a lot. And alongside the creative minds and psychologists, we also have the technical people as happy in a python script as they are an ad account.

Working process

Strategy

Good strategy is about a clear diagnosis of problems and understanding of ambitions. Before we begin work, we'll audit to find the bottlenecks in your business. Our strategy will then be focused on overcoming those.

Laser focus on the bottleneck

Focus is key and most startups are spread much too thinly. Almost all big businesses got big through a single growth engine. We will focus singularly on that.

Set a clear north star

Whether it's active subscribers, CM3 or recurring revenue. We agree what we're working towards and then build a dashboard around that goal.

Learn through growth sprints

We run our growth sprints fortnightly or weekly depending on stage of your business. Every sprint we launch new experiments to try to break through the current bottleneck and increase the north star.

Insights become experiments, experiments get tested, and the results become compound as we learn more.

Accelerate growth

As we break through the ceiling you're at, we launch into acceleration mode – based on the conditions we set together. We continue to push incrementally each month until we hit your next ceiling and restart the process again.