Context
Baraka is a DFSA-regulated investing platform serving the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. Growth in regulated wealthtech is constrained on every side: compliance-first messaging, high trust thresholds, and acquisition economics that punish undisciplined spend.
Mandate
Own the full growth engine and its budget across performance, CRM, SEO/content, influencer, brand and offline, and make it commercially accountable, reporting to the CEO.
Strategy
Re-architect the acquisition mix across Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit and Apple Search Ads on top of rebuilt MMP attribution (Adjust), so channel decisions ran on true efficiency rather than platform-reported numbers. Scale the channels money can’t easily buy: referral, influencer and partnership programs grown to roughly 35% of total acquisition, with referral cohorts delivering about 25% higher LTV than paid. Treat retention as acquisition’s multiplier: onboarding redesign, activation nudges and engagement loops with Product and Data lifted Day-7 retention 20%. And run the whole operation AI-native, LLM content pipelines, agentic workflows and compliance-aware RAG that scaled content output more than 5× and cut topic-to-publish from days to under an hour.
Operating model
In-house team plus an external agency network, run on an experimentation-first rhythm; GTM leadership for UAE local stocks (DFM/ADX) across paid, CRM, in-app, content and influencer.
Outcomes
- CAC reduced by more than 30%
- Funded accounts scaled 2.5×
- More than 2.0× ROAS on new customer cohorts, with full cohort and LTV visibility
- Referral, influencer and partnerships at ~35% of acquisition; referral LTV ~25% above paid
- Day-7 retention up 20%
Transferable principle
In regulated products, the durable growth advantages are attribution honesty, owned channels and retention, media buying is the commodity layer.