Case study: Zil Money / OnlineCheckWriter

Role: Product Marketing Lead (2022-24), then Head of Growth and Marketing (2024-26). US B2B payments platform: ZilMoney.com, OnlineCheckWriter.com, Zil.US.

The situation

A US fintech with a sticky product, a small budget, and a marketing function that didn’t exist yet. Revenue around $0.5M ARR when I joined.

What I did

• Built the growth engine on under $50K a month. Paid acquisition across Google, Meta, X and programmatic display in tier-one media properties, organic SEO, affiliate partnerships through CJ and Awin, and in-house referral loops. Trial CAC under a dollar. Four percent trial-to-paid on card products.
• Ran a two-horizon test cadence. Weekly A/B tests for signup cost, two-month cohort sales-lift analyses for real revenue attribution. Many ads only showed their value in the longer window. Blended CAC halved.
• Made the call that became 70 percent of revenue. Leadership wanted to push Pay by Credit Card. The cohort data said Payroll by Credit Card had better retention and expansion. I argued for it, won, and took it from zero to multi-million ARR in 18 months.
• Built the measurement, not just the campaigns. In-house PowerBI cohort and retention analytics, then a marketing-mix model on three years of spend. It showed the biggest line item was the weakest performer by a wide margin, and a quietly underfunded channel was carrying most of the modelled media revenue. Most of the effect was carryover that last-click never credits.
• Tripled check-mailing revenue in the same 18 months with content-led SEO and reactivation into the existing base.
• Built a 22-person team from scratch. Each function built by me first as proof of concept, then handed to 2-3 person pods: SEO, content, lifecycle, PR, analytics, brand. Kept paid ads hands-on.
• Ran PR as an engine. A writing team placing the CEO in Forbes and Entrepreneur weekly, earned coverage in Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi, Arabic and English placements across GCC media, and the Malappuram Marathon with Malayala Manorama as a brand property.
• Moved the team onto AI-augmented workflows across content, SEO, lifecycle email and analytics, and wrote the playbook for it.
• Launched Zil.US end to end.

Result

$0.5M to $16M ARR over four years, 16x of it in the last two. Card products from zero to roughly 70 percent of revenue.

What broke, and what I’d do differently

• Last-click attribution ran the budget for too long before the mix model replaced it. Build the measurement before scaling the spend.
• Demos were load-bearing on one person. When I stepped back, demo conversion dropped sharply. Systemise the handoffs earlier.
• Growth outran the team’s documentation. The playbook came late. Write it as you build.

What transfers to your business

The two-horizon test cadence, cohort-based product bets, in-house attribution, and a PR engine that runs weekly. None of it needs a big budget. It needs discipline and measurement.