Shiva Sharma, global growth marketing leader and author
Growth that survives the P&L.
Most growth looks good in the ad platform and falls apart in the P&L. For more than a decade I have built and run digital revenue across India, the US, the UK, Europe and the GCC on a simpler rule: if it does not show up in contribution, it did not happen.
- +80%Combined digital revenue in a single quarter
- <8%Marketing spend to revenue while US sales grew 90%
- 4×+Blended ROAS sustained across three years
- 150+Client engagements before going in-house
What I believe about growth
Six convictions, earned the expensive way. Each one comes with the tool I built to act on it.
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Contribution is the only scoreboard.
Revenue and ROAS describe activity. Contribution after marketing tells you whether growth is making money. Every plan I sign off is written in CM1, CM2 and CM3, and judged there.
Build your P&L -
Scale on the margin, not the average.
A channel’s average ROAS hides what the next rupee returns. Budget should keep moving until marginal return meets break-even, and stop there, however good the dashboard looks.
Plan your media -
The platform grades its own homework.
Attributed conversions are a claim, not a fact. Holdouts and geo tests settle what the spend actually caused, and the gap is usually wider than anyone in the room wants it to be.
Design a lift test -
Retention is an acquisition strategy.
The CAC you can afford is set by what customers do after their first order. Cohorts should decide the budget, not the other way round.
Audit your customers -
Every discount is a loan against margin.
At a 40% margin, a 20% discount needs twice the orders just to stand still. Price, bundles and payment design usually beat blanket promotion, and they do not train customers to wait.
Simulate an offer -
Waste hides in the long tail.
Most search accounts leak a fifth of their spend on queries nobody would have bid on deliberately. Finding it is the cheapest growth a business will ever buy.
Find the waste
The toolkit
The models I use to run growth, rebuilt for anyone who runs it. Free on screen, private by design, and board-ready as a PDF through Gran.
Your break-even ROAS, in ten seconds
- Contribution margin P&L builderCM1, CM2, CM3 and EBITDA per order and per month, with RTO, COD, channel comparison and a board-ready report.
- Customer economics auditUpload your orders file and get cohorts, LTV, CAC payback and RFM segments in seconds. The file never leaves your browser.
- Growth plan and revenue forecastA 12 to 24 month plan from spend, CAC and retention to revenue, CM3, EBITDA and cash, with downside and upside cases.
- Media plan and budget allocatorSplit a budget across channels by marginal ROAS, find the profit-maximising spend, and phase it across the sale calendar.
- Google Ads wasted spend auditUpload a search terms report and get the phrases wasting spend, a ready-to-paste negative keyword list and projected monthly savings.
- Pricing and offer simulatorCompare a discount, a price increase, bundles, free shipping and COD-to-prepaid on what each does to contribution, before you run it.
- Incrementality test designer and readerPlan a holdout or geo test with the right length and size, then read the result: true lift, significance, incremental CPA and ROAS.
- Schema Studio and AI readinessBuild linked JSON-LD for 26 types, validate it against Google’s current rules, audit any page for AI-answer readiness, and manage AI crawlers and llms.txt.
How I operate
The operating system behind the numbers. None of it is clever; all of it compounds.
One P&L, every channel
Website, marketplaces, assisted sales and every country planned on one cadence, with one definition of revenue. Channels that are optimised separately end up competing for the same customer.
Realised revenue, not reported revenue
Spend is held against money that arrived: net of returns, RTO and cancellations. A sale the courier brings back was never a sale.
Quality sets the budget
Intent is scored early and demand is routed to where it converts, so budgets chase propensity rather than volume. Cheaper leads that never close are the most expensive kind.
Measurement is infrastructure
Server-side tagging, Conversions API and a clean event schema come before scale, not after. You cannot defend spend you cannot see.
Weekly reads, monthly resets
Marginal returns are read every week, budgets move every month, and one structured test runs every quarter. Cadence beats heroics.
Compliance is a design input
In health, wellness and Ayurveda, AYUSH, ASCI, DMRA and FSSAI rules (and FTC and FDA in the US) shape the creative from the first draft, so campaigns scale without being pulled.
Proof, in numbers
The situation, what changed, and what it did to the numbers. Brands are withheld; figures are shown as percentages and ratios.
Multi-market wellness brand
The challengeWebsite, tele-sales and marketplace revenue were planned separately, each optimised to its own metric.
What changedOne planning and budget cadence across markets, a reset channel mix and full-funnel acquisition on Meta and Google.
OutcomeCombined digital revenue up 80% in a single fiscal quarter.
India D2C with assisted sales
The challengeHalf of website sales needed a tele-sales agent to close, which capped scale and raised the cost of every order.
What changedQualified purchase intent earlier in the funnel, then scored and routed demand so the contact centre worked a smaller, higher-propensity pool.
OutcomeUnassisted share moved from 50% to 70% and website run-rate doubled in a quarter, with CM2 positive.
US expansion
The challengeGrow the US business quickly without buying growth at the expense of margin.
What changedFull-funnel paid acquisition with every dollar of spend held against realised revenue, not platform-reported conversions.
OutcomeUS run-rate up 90% in one quarter, with marketing spend kept under 8% of revenue.
Marketplace growth, India
The challengeMarketplace growth was tied to rising marketplace ad spend.
What changedBuilt external demand and brand recall through Meta and Google, measured against downstream marketplace revenue.
OutcomeMarketplace run-rate up 62% with no increase in marketplace ad spend.
Three-brand launch from zero
The challengeLaunch three D2C brands from zero and make them pay back.
What changedFull-funnel performance marketing, marketplace optimisation, real-time P&L dashboards and an AI-powered consultation platform that captured first-party intent.
OutcomeSeven-figure (USD) D2C revenue within ten months of launch and blended ROAS above 4× sustained over three years.
Operator’s Notes, a monthly newsletter
The one shift that matters each month, and what to do about it.
For founders and marketing leaders who run growth. Platform changes worth acting on, the number behind the headlines, and a playbook you can use the same week.
Books
Two books about how we work and live, written from the same conviction as the day job: small systems, applied consistently, change outcomes.
Essays
Longer pieces on unit economics, scaling and measurement. All writing
- How to set break‑even ROAS for every campaign A step-by-step method for working out the ROAS each campaign needs to make money, from your own margins, and using it to decide what to fix, cut and scale.
- How to compare couriers on your own data Rate cards tell you what a courier costs. Your orders tell you what it really costs. A method for ranking couriers on delivered rate, COD RTO, speed and cost per delivered order.
- How to calculate contribution margin for a Shopify store A step-by-step guide to CM1, CM2 and CM3 for D2C brands: what goes in each layer, the costs most brands miss, and how to turn it into a daily number.
If growth is the conversation, let’s have it.
Advisory conversations, speaking, podcasts and media. Tell me what you are working on and I will reply personally within two working days.