About
An engineer who got tired of marketing that couldn't prove itself.
Yardstick Growth is Vlad Kost. Software engineer by trade, ten years building systems, and the owner of two businesses in Colorado that pay for their own marketing.
Why the name
A yardstick is the thing you measure with. It's also what you judge results against. Both readings are the point: we measure before you spend, and we agree what success looks like before we start.
It's a deliberately unglamorous name for a deliberately unglamorous approach. There's no growth-hacking here, no secret channel. There's arithmetic, done before the money moves.
Where the experience comes from
Not from client case studies. From operating two businesses of our own — a day spa in the Denver metro and an RV rental company — where every marketing decision is spending our own money, and every mistake shows up in our own books.
That work included:
| What | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|
| Built booking, invoicing and payments software from scratch | We can fix the part of your funnel that sits after the click |
| Wired offline conversions into Google Ads | Your account can optimize on revenue instead of form fills |
| Card-present terminals, deposits, no-show fees, automatic retries | Marketing only counts once the money is collected |
| Cut hosting from $144 to $25/month across 13 projects | We read the vendor bills nobody reads |
| Moved two phone lines off a legacy provider, saving $80/month | Same |
| Migrated years of business history off a vertical SaaS platform | Your data doesn't have to stay hostage |
These are our own businesses, not client engagements — we'd rather say that plainly than imply a client list we haven't built yet.
How we work
Numbers before opinions. Every recommendation traces back to a source you can check — your analytics, your books, or a query we'll show you how to run.
We say when the answer is no. We've walked away from a retainer we'd already written because the profit model said it would lose the client money. Knowing which work to refuse is most of the job.
Free things come first. A correct business listing, a working phone number, a redirect on a dead domain. These beat any campaign, and we'll tell you about them before quoting for anything.
You own everything. Accounts, code, data, ad history. If we part ways, you keep the work and nothing stops functioning.
Honest limits
We are small — that means direct access to the person doing the work, and it also means we can't take on everyone. We don't do brand campaigns, social media management, or press. We aren't the right choice for a business that needs volume creative output.
We're a good fit when the question is "is this working, and how would we know?"