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Performance Marketing & User Acquisition Leader

Seva Evlakhoff

$25M+ in paid ads managed across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snapchat. I build and lead growth teams, run creative research, and figure out why some creatives print money while others burn it. Mobile apps and e-commerce.

vsevolod.jevlachov@gmail.com Write me on LinkedIn Paris, France
Seva Evlakhoff
$25M+
Ad Spend Managed
20+
Apps & Brands
10+
Years in Performance Marketing
About

Performance marketing & user acquisition leader who builds teams, creative systems, and scalable growth

I build and lead growth teams, scale ad spend into seven figures a month, and figure out why some creatives print money while others burn it. I've taken campaigns from test budgets and scaled them, and killed just as many that looked great on paper but didn't match the market.

I've worked every side of the ad ecosystem, not just the buying seat: product side as UA and Head of UA (mobile apps, EdTech, photo and video), performance and marketing agency side, ad-network side (adtech, programmatic, native), and affiliate/CPA including building teams independently. Knowing how every party in the funnel actually makes money is the edge I bring.

  • → Build and lead UA/marketing teams from zero. Hired, trained, and managed dozens of media buyers across multiple companies and projects
  • → Creative strategy tied to data, not taste. A continuous creative-research process across products: concepts from it became core UA creatives and influenced an estimated $40M+ in revenue
  • → Cross-functional with product, design, and engineering. I speak both languages, from SKAN attribution and conversion funnels to creative briefs and brand positioning
What I solve

How I help companies grow

Spending but not scaling?
I find what's blocking growth in your creative and targeting, fix it, and build the system to keep scaling. From test budgets to 7-figure monthly spend.
No creative pipeline?
I build end-to-end creative processes: structured A/B testing frameworks, pretesting systems, concept briefing for designers and video makers, and full production workflows backed by continuous creative research.
Building a marketing team?
I've hired, trained, and led UA teams across multiple companies and projects. Full onboarding, documentation, processes, and culture from scratch.
Entering new markets?
Audience research, localized creative, go-to-market strategy. Scaled campaigns across 20+ geos with Tier 1 focus.
Want to launch a new product?
Full go-to-market: positioning, creative strategy, channel selection, budget planning, and team setup. From zero to first users.
Need someone technical who gets marketing?
I build tools, dashboards, and automations. From API integrations to analytics pipelines. Not just running ads, but engineering the systems behind them.
Experience

Career timeline

2025 - Present
Paris, France
Co-Founder
Creagen - Creative Research Agency
  • Co-founded on-demand creative research agency serving growth teams across mobile apps, SaaS, e-commerce, and fintech
  • Built and launched Creative Digest, a subscription intelligence product delivering 25+ ad concepts and trend analysis per report
  • Delivering ad audits, market expansion research, and creative strategy for brands running $5K-50K+/day in ad spend
2022 - 2024
Remote
Senior User Acquisition Manager
Instories (Photo & Video App)
  • Grew monthly ad spend from $375K to $1.3M across Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google as core UA for the flagship iOS app
  • Ran 30+ creative-research and market studies; concepts I surfaced became core UA creatives and contributed an estimated $40M+ in revenue across two products over the following years
  • Worked with product and engineering on attribution (Appsflyer, SKAN), analytics (Amplitude, Power BI), budget planning
  • Led creative strategy: brainstorms, ad concepts, structured A/B testing, creative retrospectives, internal training webinars
  • Managed TikTok influencer campaigns (TTCC, Spark Ads) with internal creator team
2021 - 2022
Limassol, Cyprus
User Acquisition Lead
LiveXP (Education App)
  • Built UA strategy from scratch across Meta, Google, TikTok, and Telegram
  • Improved mobile tracking and attribution working directly with dev teams (SKAN, UX/UI debugging)
  • Led creative strategy and brand identity: guidelines, video/graphic creatives, briefing designers and motion designers, copywriting
  • Negotiated and managed partnerships with affiliate networks, agencies, and service providers
2020 - 2021
Lithuania
UA & Media Buying Team Lead
Contract Projects - Dating, Mobile Apps, E-commerce
  • Built and led UA teams for 3 companies on-demand, each with tailored acquisition strategies
  • Ran campaigns for e-commerce brands including Joom, Lazada, Lamoda through agency partnerships
  • Hired, trained, and onboarded media buying managers. Wrote documentation, manuals, training materials
  • Led integrations with new ad networks, trackers, and analytics tools across diverse verticals
Case Studies

Growth in action

Case 01
Creative Intelligence
Case 02
Campaign Architecture
Case 03
Audience Discovery
Creative Research

Built a creative-research system behind $40M+ in revenue

How a self-initiated monthly research process uncovered the concept that became the company's top revenue driver across two apps.

Challenge

  • No structured process for discovering winning creative concepts
  • Teams relied on gut feeling and surface-level competitor copying
  • Creative pipeline was reactive, not proactive

What I did

  • Built a cross-source creative-tracking system from scratch: top and high-potential ads across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and native networks, spanning app and e-commerce categories, not just category leaders but adaptable concepts from adjacent verticals
  • Built an audience and market discovery system: new audiences, markets, and niches inside our category
  • Built a structured pipeline to test, implement, and rework sourced concepts into production creatives
  • Delivered prioritized, actionable concepts to the creative team on a monthly cycle
$40M+
One concept from this research became a core UA creative for years. It powered ~90% of daily spend on a second app launch and contributed an estimated $40M+ in combined revenue across both products.
Campaign Architecture

Doubled daily ad spend by rethinking campaign structure

How switching from region-based to language-based targeting unlocked growth that had been stuck for years.

Challenge

  • Daily spend stuck at $15-20K for years with no clear path to scale
  • Campaigns structured by GEO tiers (Tier 1, Tier 2) and regions (LATAM, EU)
  • Creatives were translated and localized per region, but growth had plateaued

What I did

  • Hypothesized that regional structure was limiting audience reach
  • Designed experiment: restructure campaigns from region to language targeting
  • Reached Spanish, French, Korean, Portuguese speakers in the US and globally
  • Rolled out step by step, measuring incrementality at each stage
2x
Daily ad spend scaled from $15-20K to $30-35K. Unlocked multilingual audiences in every market that were previously invisible under regional targeting.
Audience Discovery

Found untapped audiences that grew daily spend 37% in one month

How data-driven audience research broke through a growth ceiling when new regions, features, and concepts all failed.

Challenge

  • Core audience was 70% women aged 21-35. Growth had plateaued
  • Company wanted to expand but nothing worked: new regions, new features, new creative concepts all tested and failed

What I did

  • Researched US market through public stats, reports, and articles
  • Mapped audience sizes by segment (gender, age, interests) in Meta
  • Cross-referenced external data with our internal performance data
  • Analyzed competitor creatives, positioning, and target audiences
  • Built top-10 audience shortlist, led brainstorm with creative team, developed testing packs
+37%
2 out of 10 tested audiences hit. Daily spend grew 37% within one month, opening an entirely new growth vector for the company.
Expertise

Skills, tools & markets

Performance Marketing

  • Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
  • TikTok Ads
  • Google Ads
  • Snapchat Ads
  • Native Ad Networks
  • Programmatic / DSP
  • Affiliate Marketing

Strategy & Research

  • Creative Testing Frameworks (A/B, Pretesting)
  • Creative Concepting & Production Briefs
  • Market Research & Competitor Intelligence
  • Audience Segmentation
  • Brand Positioning
  • Go-to-Market Strategy

Analytics & Attribution

  • Appsflyer / SKAN
  • Amplitude
  • Power BI
  • Google Analytics
  • Ad Spy Tools
  • App Store Intelligence

Leadership & Operations

  • Team Building & Hiring
  • Budget Planning & Forecasting
  • Cross-functional Collaboration
  • Vendor & Agency Management
  • Process Documentation
  • Training & Mentoring
Technical & AI Skills
AI Workflows (Claude, GPT) AI Content Generation Prompt Engineering API Integrations (Stripe, REST, OAuth) Mobile Development (iOS, Android, Capacitor) Swift / SwiftUI React / Node.js / Express MongoDB / Redis Stripe Payments & IAP Sentry / Analytics Pipelines CI/CD & Railway Deployment PWA & Service Workers No-Code & Automation
Markets (Tier 1 focused)
USA UK Europe Australia New Zealand LATAM / Brazil Asia Middle East CIS Africa
Industries
Mobile Apps Photo & Video Health & Fitness Education E-commerce SaaS Fintech

Education

Master's, Marketing Management

ITMO University
2015 - 2017

Bachelor's, Marketing

St. Petersburg State University of Finance and Economics
2011 - 2015

Languages

RussianNative
EnglishFluent
LithuanianFluent
FrenchLearning

International

20+ countries lived and traveled. Mostly focused on Tier 1 markets: US, UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand. Run campaigns across all major geos including LATAM, Asia, Middle East, CIS, and Africa.

Let's work together

Email me Write me on LinkedIn
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