Clients / Uncapped
Case study · Uncapped
Resetting Uncapped’s GTM to double revenue in nine months
A Series A revenue-based lender hired marketing to scale one plan, then the 2022 market turn invalidated it. The answer was a fast commercial reset, not better campaigns.
Julian Moore · Chief Marketing Officer · November 2021 to August 2022 · ExCo
The situation
I joined Uncapped to build the marketing team and GTM for a planned US banking proposition. Then the 2022 tech-market reset arrived. The banking launch was paused, ecommerce, the core lending segment, deteriorated as consumer demand fell, and Meta and Google costs kept rising while customer quality dropped.
The company still had growth targets. What it no longer had was a market that matched the acquisition engine it had built. Optimising the existing campaigns would have meant improving a machine aimed at a weakening segment.
The diagnosis
The reset started with customer and revenue data, not channel dashboards. The question was not “how do we generate more leads” but “where can this business still grow safely and economically, and how do we rebuild acquisition around that”.
The data pointed at B2B SaaS. Recurring revenue gave those businesses a fundamentally different risk profile from discretionary ecommerce, which mattered to a lender deciding who could absorb and repay growth capital. That single conclusion changed the ICP, the messaging, the channels and the products.
The demand programme came after the commercial diagnosis. Run the sequence the other way and you scale acquisition into a market that is leaving.
The work
What changed
Four workstreams over nine months, with the ICP reset done in roughly the first three.
ICP and GTM reset
Reset the ideal customer profile, positioning and GTM within about three months of the pause, moving the centre of gravity from ecommerce towards SaaS and higher-quality segments. New lending products were launched for SaaS and ecommerce as the market changed under us.
Paid rationalisation, organic build
Cut around 30% of media spend that no longer cleared the bar, and became far more selective about where to pay for demand. Investment moved into high-intent organic: SEO and content built around the real questions and financing needs of the customers we now wanted, not traffic for its own sake.
Regional go-to-market
Ran the UK, US and European markets as different markets, with activity and messaging adapted to each rather than one global message. A new MarTech stack made the whole engine cheaper to run and easier to measure.
Team rebuild
Reduced dependency on fragmented agency support and hired in-house across growth, SEO and content, backed by flexible specialists. Every role was managed against commercial outcomes: qualified demand, customer quality, CAC and revenue, not channel metrics.
Operator detail
How it worked in practice
The ICP call was a risk call
SaaS won not because it was fashionable but because recurring revenue changes lending risk. Deciding who to acquire first was as much a credit decision as a marketing one, which is why it was made with the ExCo from underlying revenue data.
Cheap leads were the expensive kind
As ecommerce weakened, paid channels kept producing volume that underwriting increasingly declined. Spend was judged on funded customers and their quality, not cost per lead, which is what justified cutting c.30% of the media budget in a growth business.
Organic had to earn its keep fast
Content and SEO were pointed at high-intent financing questions from the new segments, so the programme produced qualified demand quickly rather than a long-term brand bet. Quarterly SQL targets were consistently exceeded through the reset.
In-housing was an economics decision
Fragmented agency support was expensive per unit of output and slow to redirect during a reset. Bringing growth, SEO and content in-house cut the cost of iteration when the plan was changing monthly.
Outcomes
Results
| Metric | Start | Outcome | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue run-rate | £2m | c.£4m | 9 months |
| Marketing-sourced share of recognised revenue | c.50% | c.80% | during tenure |
| Customer acquisition cost | baseline | -33% | during tenure |
Revenue run-rate
£2m → c.£4m
9 monthsMarketing-sourced share of recognised revenue
c.50% → c.80%
during tenureCustomer acquisition cost
baseline → -33%
during tenureRevenue doubling is a company outcome during my tenure. The shift in marketing-sourced share, from c.50% to c.80% of recognised company revenue, and the 33% CAC reduction are the marketing results underneath it. The paused US banking launch was a market decision, not a marketing outcome.
What truly sets Julian apart is his dual capability: he’s as comfortable strategising at the ExCo level as he is rolling up his sleeves for hands-on work. He’s a genuine player/coach.
What I took from it
When the market moves, re-diagnose before you re-optimise. The most dangerous instinct in a downturn is to work the existing engine harder, because efficiency gains on the wrong ICP compound the problem.
The other lesson is speed. The reset held because the ICP decision was made quickly, from revenue data, with the ExCo, and then everything downstream was rebuilt to match it inside a quarter.
About Julian Moore
Julian Moore is a growth CMO specialising in fintech and B2B SaaS. Across 20 years he has led growth in six fintech and SaaS leadership roles, from pre-seed startups through PE-backed scale-ups to listed businesses including Xero, with three company sales during his tenures (Contis to Solaris, Bullhorn’s Vista to Insight transaction, and Jillion pre-launch). He runs Marketing Momentum, a fractional CMO practice for fintech and SaaS founders.
More about Julian →Has the market moved faster than your GTM?
If growth assumptions from your last raise no longer hold, the fix starts with the ICP and the economics, not the ad accounts. That reset is work I have done and can do with you.