Paid Ads, Scroll Stoppers & Finding Your People with Kathie Feng

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Validate your Ideal Customer Profile before you rebuild your product, offer, or messaging — most founders are solving the wrong problem beautifully, and no amount of paid ads will fix a misaligned ICP.

2. Content that converts starts with knowing exactly who you are creating for — scroll-stopping creative is a symptom of deep audience clarity, not a hack you can layer on top of vague positioning.

3. Finding your people — the community and collaborators who energize rather than drain you — is not a soft goal, it is a business strategy that directly impacts your output, your visibility, and your longevity.

EPISODE OVERVIEW

Kathie Feng has spent 13+ years leading growth for some of the most recognized brands in the world — Constellation Brands (Corona and Modelo), Discover, Capital One, Shiseido, and Pave, an a16z-backed fintech unicorn. Now as the founder of Signal Growth, she brings that same enterprise-level rigor to founder-led companies who are ready to stop guessing and start building growth that compounds.

In this episode of Growth Strategy with Alyssa Evans, Kathie breaks down the real mechanics behind content that converts, why paid ads underperform when your foundation is off, and what she actually learned scaling global brands that most startup advice skips entirely. You'll also hear her talk about the loneliness that comes with scaling — and why finding your people isn't a nice-to-have, it's the thing that keeps you going.

This one is for the founder who's doing everything "right" and still hitting a ceiling. Kathie knows exactly why that happens — and what to do instead.

 

From Corporate to Founder: What Kathie Had to Unlearn to Build Signal Growth

 

Kathie spent over a decade inside organizations with massive budgets, established audiences, and entire teams behind every campaign. When she made the leap to founding Signal Growth, the hardest part wasn't the strategy — it was the identity shift. She talks openly about what she had to let go of, and what surprised her most about building something entirely her own.

She also reflects on the belief that has carried her into rooms she never expected to be in — and why dreaming bigger, planning strategically, and executing fearlessly isn't just a motto, it's the operating system she runs on.

Key Lessons

• Leaving a corporate role means leaving more than a salary — it means leaving an identity, and rebuilding that identity as a founder is one of the most underestimated challenges of entrepreneurship.

• The skills that make someone exceptional inside a large organization — managing up, navigating politics, optimizing within constraints — are different from the skills required to build from zero, and recognizing that gap early saves a lot of pain.

• Global exposure — different markets, different consumer behaviors, different cultural contexts — is one of the most underrated strategic advantages a founder can have, because it breaks the assumption that your local market is the whole world.

 

Why Your Paid Ads Aren't Converting (And It's Probably Not the Creative)

Before you hire a media buyer or overhaul your creative, Kathie says there's a diagnostic step most founders skip: validating whether your ICP is actually right. She walks through how she approaches this with Signal Growth clients — and why the most common growth problem she sees isn't a traffic problem or a budget problem, it's a clarity problem that paid spend just amplifies.

She breaks down the relationship between audience clarity, scroll-stopping content, and ad performance — and why content that converts is always downstream of knowing exactly who you're talking to.

Key Lessons

• Paid ads are an accelerant — they make what's already working grow faster and what isn't working fail faster. Investing in ads before validating your ICP is one of the most expensive mistakes a founder can make.

• Scroll-stopping content is not a creative trick — it is the natural output of deep, specific audience understanding. When you know exactly what your person is afraid of, tired of, and hoping for, the hook writes itself.

• Most founders blame the product when conversion drops. The right first question is always: are the right people seeing this? ICP misalignment looks exactly like a product problem until you diagnose it correctly.

Content → Convert: Building a Content Strategy That Actually Moves People

Kathie and Alyssa dig into what a real content strategy looks like for a founder-led brand — not the post-every-day advice, but the intentional architecture behind content that builds trust, drives action, and compounds over time. Kathie shares what she learned running content for global brands and how she's translated that into a framework that works for smaller teams.

They also talk about the difference between content that gets engagement and content that converts — and why chasing the former without building toward the latter is a trap that keeps a lot of founders spinning.

Key Lessons

• A content strategy without a conversion architecture is a brand awareness play — which is fine if that's your goal, but most founders need content that moves people toward a decision, not just an impression.

• The most effective content is built around your audience's real language — the words they use to describe their problem, their goal, and the solution they're looking for. That language comes from research and listening, not from what sounds good to you.

• Consistency compounds — not because of the algorithm, but because showing up repeatedly in the same voice builds the familiarity that makes people trust you when it's time to buy.

Customer Segmentation, Pricing Psychology & Breaking Through Your Growth Ceiling

One of the most practical parts of this conversation covers what to do when growth stalls. Kathie walks through how customer segmentation — looking closely at who your best customers actually are — creates a roadmap for where to go next. She also gets into pricing: why founder gut-feel pricing consistently leaves money on the table, and how to build tiers that match your customers' actual willingness to pay.

She introduces the idea of GTM as a living system — something that requires ongoing attention and optimization, not a strategy you set once at launch and revisit annually.

Key Lessons

• Your best customers contain the blueprint for your next best customers — segmenting by behavior, outcomes, and characteristics tells you exactly where to focus acquisition efforts when you've maxed out one audience.

• Pricing is a signal. Charging too little doesn't just hurt revenue — it attracts the wrong customers, creates misaligned expectations, and undermines the perceived value of everything you deliver.

• A go-to-market strategy that isn't reviewed and optimized every 30 to 90 days is a strategy that's slowly becoming irrelevant. Markets move, audiences shift, and your GTM needs to move with them.

The Loneliness of Scaling — And Why Finding Your People Is a Business Decision

Kathie gets real about something most growth conversations skip: the isolation that comes with building something. The bigger it gets, the harder it can be to find people who understand what you're navigating — and that loneliness has a real cost on clarity, creativity, and decision-making.

She and Alyssa talk about what it means to intentionally build your community as a founder — not just your audience, but the people around you who challenge, support, and energize you. And why that, more than any tactic, might be the most important growth decision you make.

Key Lessons

• The loneliness of entrepreneurship is real and it is a business risk — isolation leads to tunnel vision, poor decisions, and burnout faster than almost anything else a founder will face.

• Your community is not just your audience — it includes the peers, collaborators, and mentors who help you think better, move faster, and stay the course when it gets hard.

• Finding your people is a strategy, not a luxury. The founders who scale sustainably almost always have a small, tight network of people who genuinely understand what they're building.

LINKS & RESOURCES

Everything mentioned in this episode:

Signal Growth — Kathie's growth strategy firm

Kathie Feng on LinkedIn

Growth Strategy Podcast — growyourstrategy.co

@growyourstrategy on Instagram

@growyourstrategy on LinkedIn

→ Found this episode useful? Share it with a founder in your world who's hitting a growth ceiling. Then DM @growyourstrategy on Instagram or LinkedIn and tell Alyssa the one thing you're going to apply this week.

 

 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is Signal Growth and what does Kathie Feng do?

Signal Growth is a growth strategy firm founded by Kathie Feng that helps founder-led companies turn momentum into market dominance. Kathie brings 13+ years of experience leading growth for global brands including Constellation Brands (Corona and Modelo), Discover, Capital One, Shiseido, and Pave — an a16z-backed fintech unicorn — and applies that enterprise-level rigor to companies ready to scale with clarity and intention. Her work focuses on AI-powered growth systems, 90-day revenue engines, and the strategic foundations that make paid ads and content actually work.

Why aren't my paid ads converting even with good creative?

According to Kathie Feng, the most common reason paid ads underperform has nothing to do with the creative — it's an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) problem. When you're targeting the wrong audience, or your positioning doesn't match what your best customers actually need, paid spend amplifies the misalignment rather than solving it. The fix is to validate your ICP first: look at your best existing customers, understand what they have in common, and make sure your messaging speaks directly to them before you scale your ad budget.

What does 'content that converts' actually mean?

Content that converts is content built around a specific audience with a specific problem, designed to move them toward a decision rather than just an impression. Kathie's framework starts with deep audience clarity — understanding exactly what your ideal customer is afraid of, tired of, and hoping for — and builds content from that foundation. Scroll-stopping hooks, strong calls to action, and consistent voice are all outputs of that clarity. Without it, even well-produced content struggles to drive meaningful action.

What is ICP validation and why does it matter before rebuilding anything?

ICP validation is the process of confirming that the customers you're targeting are actually the right customers — people who have the problem you solve, the budget to pay for your solution, and the motivation to act. Most founders skip this step and jump straight to rebuilding their offer, messaging, or product when growth stalls. Kathie's approach is to diagnose first: look at which customers are getting the best results, staying the longest, and referring others. That data tells you whether you have an ICP problem, a messaging problem, or a product problem — and the answer is rarely all three at once.

How should founders think about pricing tiers?

Kathie recommends building pricing tiers around your customers' willingness to pay at different levels of value — not around what feels comfortable to you as a founder. The most common mistake is pricing based on gut feel or competitive comparison without understanding what different customer segments actually value and what they'd pay for access to it. This means talking to customers, testing price points, and structuring tiers so that each level reflects a meaningfully different outcome, not just more features.

What does it mean to treat GTM as a living system?

A go-to-market strategy is a living system when it's treated as something that gets reviewed and optimized on a regular cadence — typically every 30 to 90 days — rather than something you build once at launch and revisit annually. Markets shift, audiences evolve, and the channels and messages that worked six months ago may be underperforming today. Kathie's approach is to build feedback loops into your GTM from the start: what's converting, what's stalling, what's changed about your audience's behavior, and what needs to be adjusted in response.

How do you find your community as a founder and why does it matter for growth?

Finding your people as a founder means intentionally building a network of peers, collaborators, and mentors who understand what you're building and can challenge, support, and energize you — not just an audience of followers. Kathie and Alyssa both speak to the real loneliness that comes with scaling, and the business cost of isolation: tunnel vision, slower decisions, and burnout. Practically, this means showing up in spaces where other founders at your level gather, being genuinely useful rather than just promotional, and investing in relationships before you need them. The Growth Strategy Women's Club at growyourstrategy.co is one place to start.

What is the Growth Strategy Podcast and who is it for?

Growth Strategy with Alyssa Evans is a podcast for women entrepreneurs, brand builders, and founders who want to grow their businesses with intention rather than hustle. Each episode features real conversations with founders, strategists, and experts — covering topics like content strategy, paid ads, AI, marketing frameworks, and the personal side of building something from scratch. New episodes drop weekly and are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Find everything at growyourstrategy.co.