Appi Camper is an interview series that shines a spotlight on today's mobile elite, showcasing their expertise and knowledge. Growth leaders share trends, strategies to navigate the current market, tips to overcome present challenges, and how they approach these impacts to successfully emerge as an Appi Camper.

Spotlight with Frank Jiang

Frank is the co-founder and CGO of SWIDIA, a specialized growth marketing team solving the toughest growth problems for those innovating in their spaces. Starting his career in strategy consulting, Frank drove growth for fortune 100 brands across CPG, retail, financial services, and tech. With a passion in entrepreneurship and VC, he founded SWIDIA and dove into the frontline of growth, working closely with hyper growth startups and refining the latest growth tactics alongside some of the brightest minds in the venture space. 

What are the trends you are seeing as a result of Apple’s OS updates surrounding IDFA? Any notable effects, strategies, or workarounds you can share? 

In the post IDFA world, we see a ton of confusion mainly due to the lack of / compromised visibility. This resulted in brands’ performance turbulence across testing, optimization, and scaling efforts. Due to the increased complexity of attribution and analytics, we also started to notice a gap in certain skillsets / resources. Many brands started to re-evaluate their org structure, partnerships, channels, and overall approach. The blessing in disguise in this post IDFA era, however, is that when people take their eyes off platform metrics that they grew so used to rely on, and focus back on the blended CAC - the source of truth - they have a chance to rethink what really matters and adapt/evolve.

What are some of the challenges for growth marketing during this time? 

Growth marketing as an integrated, iterative, adaptive and holistic function has become essential to success, especially for brands leveraging paid channels to grow and learn. As the functions of growth marketing become clearer, being able to bring together the right leaders and operators will be difficult, as these roles become more in demand and harder to engage/recruit. These talents are what organizations need to prioritize and build core capabilities around. High caliber growth marketing talent is either forged through years of experience, or nurtured through newer educational content from reforge, demand curve, and other thought-leaders. It will be more important to find growth operators that are able to use that knowledge/experience to develop a foundation that future-proofs against volatile platform changes. Long gone are the growth hackers and cookie cutter frameworks.

What is your current work setup (remote, in office, split)? What are your recommendations for keeping yourself and your team members connected and motivated? Are there any tips you can share about how to make it work?

As a team that’s been remote before the pandemic, we are glad to see more teams adjusting to the new normal and navigating the balance between productivity and flexibility. A few things that worked well for us: We love our discord channel. We set up lounge and meeting rooms where we can keep our communications going at any time; We host virtual happy hours and bring on our friends (check out skribbl.io and Scener!); We book trips around events and get a fun airbnb for everyone to hang out at. We believe people perform best when they feel the best, and empathy is key when it comes to a remote-first work culture.

What are you doing to stay positive and balanced with so many changes in the mobile industry? 

On the up side of remote work you have flexibility, more time due to less commute, autonomy, and extra stretchy pajamas outside the scope of your zoom window. On the down side you have less in-person interaction / networking, more distraction at home, and less routine. So I complemented this work style with more events (locally and in other cities), visits to nearby cafes for work sprints, routine workouts, and new passion projects - I recently joined an underground pingpong club in my neighborhood, and hit up this legend for weekly sax lessons - both created routines that kept me active and productive. If you have something you’ve been meaning to try and learn, it might be a great time to kick that off!