Justin Gerrard
California
Overview
Hey, I’m Justin . I’m a former founder and early-stage marketing leader with 15+ years of experience scaling consumer startups, including three exits across gaming and dating. Now I partner with early-stage, venture-backed founders as a Fractional CMO to design the GTM architecture that clarifies: who they’re building for, sequences the right growth bets, and sets the company up to scale without one-off tactics. Here are some of the companies I built and helped scale: Bae (Co-founder/CMO) ↳ Co-founded a dating app, and grew it to 300k users, which led to an acqui-hire by if(we). The Meet
About
Hey, I’m Justin . I’m a former founder and early-stage marketing leader with 15+ years of experience scaling consumer startups, including three exits across gaming and dating. Now I partner with early-stage, venture-backed founders as a Fractional CMO to design the GTM architecture that clarifies: who they’re building for, sequences the right growth bets, and sets the company up to scale without one-off tactics. Here are some of the companies I built and helped scale: Bae (Co-founder/CMO) ↳ Co-founded a dating app, and grew it to 300k users, which led to an acqui-hire by if(we). The Meet Group (Director of Marketing) ↳ Transformed a dating app called MeetMe into a live-streaming platform, driving $55M in incremental revenue. if(we) was acquired by the publicly traded The Meet Group. Twitch (Director of Performance Marketing) ↳ Built and led Twitch’s performance marketing function, managing an eight-figure budget to drive expansion into new gaming-adjacent categories. Backyard (Head of Marketing) ↳ Executed a viral TikTok UGC strategy for a gaming-based live video chat platform, acquiring 6M users with an $8k/month budget, leading to an acquisition by Discord. Discord (Product Marketing Lead) ↳ Ran ASO (App Store Optimization), developed the paid ads creative strategy, and launched the Activities gaming product as the PMM lead, boosting user acquisition, revenue, and engagement. I work with early-stage, venture-backed founders across the full Growth and GTM surface area, including: → Audience definition and GTM strategy → Scalable acquisition systems (paid, creators, UGC, ASO, campus) → Early marketing team design and hiring from my 200+ fractional operator network I enjoy sharing weekly tech trends on LinkedIn and co-host the Rush Hour Podcast with Tien-Wei Huang, where we break down the biggest tech stories through a Silicon Valley lens (links to episodes on my site)! If any of the above resonates, let’s connect. DMs are always open!