At Blue Herring CEX, I learned how to build growth when the obvious channels are closed. Direct exchange advertising in Northern Europe was heavily restricted, yet the mandate was still to acquire users, improve the economics and build trust. The answer was to connect product, CRM, community, partnerships, events and education rather than treat media spend as the entire growth strategy.
Market leadership under channel constraints
As Country Lead for Finland and Performance Marketing Lead for Northern Europe, I held end-to-end market decision authority, led five community ambassadors, coordinated approximately a dozen cross-functional contributors and managed a six-figure performance budget.
During the mandate, I improved CAC, LTV, retention and cohort performance, delivered substantial double-digit new-user acquisition growth and helped Blue Herring CEX reach the number-one centralized-exchange download position in Finland on both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
A product-led acquisition loop
The clearest example was a peer-to-peer crypto gift-card loop. Existing users could send randomized crypto, but only a new user could claim it; the sender received no direct incentive. I led the product, CRM, localization and country-team work needed to turn the concept into a reusable acquisition model.
The campaign generated thousands of new-user registrations and was adopted across several European markets. Its strength came from the social act of giving: the product mechanism itself created the reason to share, reducing dependence on restricted direct advertising channels.
Events as compliant growth infrastructure
I built the business case and secured executive sponsorship for Blue Herring CEX’s first Northern European hackathon. It attracted more than 100 participants from leading education and technology communities and generated hundreds of directly attributable registrations, national media coverage and partnership leads.
The wider event operation ranged from intimate VIP dinners to community meetups with hundreds of attendees. I handled both strategic leadership and practical delivery, including speakers, invitations, food, booths, goodie bags and event operations. A culturally targeted wearable-apparel and NFT activation also introduced people new to Web3 to custom digital assets through a more accessible experience.
Education designed to scale
I later turned education into a repeatable distribution system as Senior Partnerships Manager for Blue Herring CEX Academy. I designed a reusable 35–45 minute blockchain-education workshop format that could be deployed online, at conferences, universities and corporate events. After proving the format in practice, I distributed the operating blueprint through country teams and institutional partners across Europe, Latin America and North America.
The model scaled to more than 30 workshops in six months, reached over 2,000 attendees, increased core program KPIs by more than 100% compared with the prior year and supported approximately 10 institutional partnerships. I collaborated with country leads to enable local execution; I did not directly manage them.
The operating logic behind the growth
Across acquisition, events and education, the operating logic was consistent: build one strong central format, give local teams clear ownership and measure outcomes without bloating the central function. That made programs localization-ready and allowed execution to scale across markets while preserving the core mechanism.
The same template-based logic later became relevant to AI-enabled workflows: structure the format centrally, distribute execution and keep the evidence comparable. At Blue Herring CEX, it first proved itself as a practical system for compliant growth in markets where conventional acquisition channels were constrained.