Growth Studio

Growth Studio helps early stage and high-growth founders scale from $3m to $25m ARR through strategic growth direction and execution. 

We start with deep customer research to build your growth roadmap, then take ownership of implementation—managing your paid acquisition, optimizing conversion funnels, designing growth experiments, and orchestrating your retention strategy. 

Built by operators who've scaled companies to $XXM+ ARR, we provide the strategic leadership of a CMO plus hands-on campaign management, all without the overhead of building an in-house team.

Founder

Samantha Leal • Growth & Marketing Advisor

I help early-stage startups with acquisition, retention, and monetization strategies to scale to 8-figures.

If you're a founder, here are some of the areas that I can help you with:
• Growth Loops
• Acquisition Strategy
• Paid Social
• Lifecycle / Email Marketing
• Customer Research / JTBD development
• Content Marketing
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Engagement & Retention
• Monetization
• Team building / Hiring


Companies I've worked with:
- Kinedu (500 Startups, StartX): Leading early childhood development app that empowers parents with personalized, science-based activities and tracking tools to optimize their baby's cognitive growth.
- Leadsales (StartX, Latitud): B2B sales automation platform that transforms cold leads into warm conversations through intelligent outreach and engagement.
- Terapify (YC, 500 Startups) - The leading spanish-speaking mental health platform connecting Latin American users with licensed therapists through online therapy sessions.
- Prequel - Education company building the common core of life skills that schools aren't teaching, empowering kids aged 9-18 to launch businesses, build products, and achieve real-world success.
- Curious Cardinals - Online platform connecting high-achieving college students from top universities with K-12 students for personalized mentorship and academic enrichment.
- Huex Labs - Enterprise AI solutions provider specializing in automating complex business processes through custom machine learning models.
-Mely AI - Cutting-edge AI platform that streamlines customer service operations through intelligent automation and natural language processing.

Growth & Marketing Advisor

Prequel

Leading all marketing and growth efforts for Prequel.

We often underestimate what kids can do, but at Prequel, we not only empower them – we are setting a new standard.

At Prequel, we help 9-18 year olds accomplish what their parents think is impossible.

Head of Growth & Marketing

Prequel is a group of EdTech brands that aims to help the world's most ambitious kids learn 21st century skills that prepares them for the new global economy. Our brands include: AlphaX, Beta Camp, and Apollo School.

Head of Marketing

Synthesis

Scaling the best ideas from Ad Astra, the school our cofounder started with Elon Musk at SpaceX. Synthesis teaches kids 8 to 14 collaboration, critical thinking, and decision-making skills by challenging them to wrestle with complex simulations of real-world problems.

As the Director of Marketing I was responsible for setting the strategy and overseeing marketing functions including user acquisition, customer LTV through communication strategies, lifecycle engagement campaigns, conversion efforts, and product marketing.

Within 8 months, as a team of 3 in the marketing team, managed to spearhead their growth efforts and scale the number of paying subscribers by 340%

Director of Marketing

YSpace, York University

YSpace is York University’s entrepreneurship hub creating positive change by fostering a community of innovators, entrepreneurs, and changemakers. 

As a Growth Consultant, I provided strategic and tactical guidance to specifically assigned ventures on their user and revenue development goals.

Two of the companies I mentored, ended as the top 5 finalists on YSpace Tech Accelerator Demo Day.

• Huex Labs - developed AIDA, a voice-enabled conversational AI to enable food chains and brands to better serve their customers in live business environments.

• Mely AI - an enterprise AI-powered solution, with a proprietary technology to extract key information from complex documents and specialized in Supply Chain and Logistics.

Growth Consultant

Kinedu

Kinedu's mission is to unleash early childhood development at scale by fostering quality learning experiences at home, school, and everywhere in between. 

Trusted by more than 8MM parents worldwide, Kinedu's iOS and Android app is available in 3 languages (English, Spanish, and Portuguese) and provides personalized, engaging video-based developmental activities for children under the age of 4.

Joined Kinedu in early 2014 as the 1st marketing hire and employee #4.

Responsible for all consumer growth-related functions including user acquisition, customer LTV through communication strategies, lifecycle engagement campaigns, conversion efforts, product marketing, partnerships, and pricing.

VP of Growth Marketing

Joined Kinedu in early 2014 as the 1st marketing hire and employee #4.

- Define marketing objectives and strategies to support the company’s goals.
- Plan and execute marketing, email, and social media, and user acquisition campaigns
- Design, build and maintain social media presence and community management
- Measure and report performance of all digital marketing campaigns, and assess against goals (ROI and KPIs)
- Analyze user behavior, conversion data and customer journeys, funnel analysis and multi-channel attribution
- Identify trends to optimize spend and performance
- Design and implement new growth strategies
- Plan, execute, and measure experiments and conversion tests
- Collaborate with Product and Design teams to optimize user experience and increase conversion rates
- Customer insights, and feedback loops

Content

Hey, I'm Sam 👋
When I discovered growth marketing, something clicked. It perfectly blends what fascinates me: understanding people and building systems that make businesses grow.

Over the past decade, I've helped startups scale from 0 to 8-figures by looking at growth holistically. For me, it's never just about finding one magic lever - it's about building a complete system that works. From scaling products to 8M+ users to helping founders navigate their path to $XXM in revenue, I've learned that sustainable growth comes from understanding the full picture.

What sets my approach apart? I look at your entire customer journey - from acquisition to activation, conversion to monetization. It starts with deeply understanding your customers and product, then building a growth system that connects all these pieces. No generic playbooks, no isolated tactics - just strategic moves that compound over time.

I'm known for moving fast and diving deep. Instead of following generic playbooks, I help startups find their unique path to scale by deeply understanding their customers. The result? Growth strategies that actually work for their specific business.

If you're at $3M+ ARR and want to scale efficiently while maintaining strong unit economics, would love to chat.

Want to know more? Check out samanthaleal.io

Samantha Leal

Inertia Academy

Inertia is a live cohort-based program where 10-13-year-olds go deep into their curiosity, explore future-shaping technologies, and build a unique portfolio of projects.

Designed and delivered the pre-teens program curriculum for 500+ students focused on launching businesses, recording interviews with CEOs, attempting Harvard’s Mt Everest Challenge, and exploring technologies like AI, Blockchain, Quantum computing and Robotics.

Program Director

- Facilitated discussions using virtual games for four cohorts of 6-14-year-olds from 20+ countries at an ed-tech startup out of SpaceX to help students learn how to problem solve.
- Collaborated with faculty leads to build and test curriculum focused on teaching kids about risk, first principles analysis, second-order thinking, team dynamics, and negotiation.

Lead Faculty

Ametros Learning Inc.

• Managed the design and development for an ed-tech startup to build 30 experiential learning courses used by 2000+ students that use artificial intelligence (natural language processing) to build skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, and effective communication
• Gathered requirements from stakeholders to build roadmaps, A/B test, and ship new features for the platform. Products led include:
o Coding assessment tool for incoming engineering students at the University of Waterloo
o Interpersonal communications course for students at Athabasca University
o Virtual Co-op in fin-tech and architecture for over 250+ students at Athabasca University 
o Case-based simulations for 500+ business students at Toronto Metropolitan University
o Digital Wisdom (Designing an online social platform) course for high school students

Product Manager

Course Karma

•	Built an education startup focused on continuing education courses for health care professionals starting with dentists
•	Led strategy for growth while liaising with over 50 dental course providers across North America to build a portal used by more than 3000 dentists every month

Operations

Morningstar

•	Evaluated over 30 media and telecom companies on their business model, issue exposure and management gaps while rating its future risks through policies on data privacy and security, gender equality, product governance and climate footprint.
•	Developed risk ratings for tech, media and telecom companies worldwide to help investors identify and understand financial and material risks at the security and portfolio level.

Associate - Tech, Media and Telecom Research

Ontario Ministry of Energy

- Built market intelligence reports investigating potential opportunities for Ontario energy companies to expand the electrical distribution system in Latin America based on current infrastructure, market trends, culture and risk governance 
- Developed a market entry strategy for Ontario companies to build energy storage and smart grid technology in Argentina through a public bidding process that will raise renewable energy targets from 8% in 2018 to 20% by 2025 in the country

Master's Capstone Project Consultant

Graduate School of Business - University of Cape Town

- Designed a business plan for the Vice Chancellor of UCT to build a state of the art innovation center which will offer an environment for students from poor and fragile communities to work with the top ranked MBA school in Africa 
- Created monthly reports on alumni business progress by consolidating 20+ financial reports - these reports were used by the director to manage program operations and demonstrate impact to potential partners like the Mastercard foundation

Growth and Strategy, Master's Internship

Microsoft

- Led business intelligence and set strategies for the Cloud Solutions Provider platform for the Director of Microsoft Canada’s Partner Division resulting in over 100,000 commercial partners to leverage cloud computing to deploy Microsoft services 
- Created an automated model to track the growth of Microsoft Surface product lines using specific marketing metrics that resulted in targeted spiffs for partners, boasting record sales for the Microsoft Canada Commercial channel

Business Excellence Manager

University of Waterloo

Conducted telephone calls to alumni, parents and partners, fundraising close to $10,000 alone in less than two months working 7hrs/week with one of the highest success rates of over 45% resulting in a state of the art Health Services Facility

Student Development Associate

My mission is to build education systems that help students become the best version of themselves. 

Over the past three years, I have designed and delivered over 1000 sessions for more than 1200 students from 30+ countries focused on skills like curiosity, inner confidence, and adaptability. I’ve also built 30 experiential learning courses using AI used by 1000+ students for universities across North America.  

I recently founded Inertia Academy, where 10-13-year-olds unlock their potential, explore future-shaping technologies, and build a unique portfolio of projects.

taplio

The Battle

Samantha Leal

Zain Punjwani

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?