Zachary Murray

Foreplay.co

Bootstrapping the fuck out of foreplay.co

Creative Director / Growth Design

Head of User Acquisition at NAGA (Fintech, Forex, CFD, Stocks, Crypto, BNPL, Prop)

If you're in fintech, you know that acquiring high-quality customers is tougher than ever. Regulation changes, rising ad costs, and saturated markets make it difficult to scale profitably. But these challenges are exactly what keeps me hooked. 

Over the past 8 years, I’ve worked with big fintech players, including NAGA Group, Zilch (a unicorn) and others, where I: 

▪️ Managed $3M+ ad budgets per month across multiple channels.
▪️ Ran campaigns in 120+ countries, adapting to different regulations and compliance restrictions.
▪️ Built 3 user acquisition teams from scratch, including one at Zilch, where the marketing team alone had 150+ people.

In addition to that, I’ve consulted or helped launch and optimize paid ads channels for 200+ companies across 6 sectors - fintech, forex, crypto, SaaS, B2B services, and eCommerce.

But beyond the numbers, what really matters to me are results and impact. Seeing a campaign take off, improving traffic quality, generating more (and better) leads - that’s what keeps me going.

If you're looking for strategic guidance on paid acquisition, need help troubleshooting performance issues, or want an expert to audit and refine your campaigns, let’s connect here or through an email – stanislav@galandzovsky.pro

🇺🇦 Stanislav Galandzovskyi, PhD

Still processing conversations from iFX Dubai last week.

The real insights didn't come from panels — they came from booth talks, coffee chats, and those random hallway conversations.

Here are 7 patterns I kept noticing:

1️⃣ Brokers launching prop firms as client acquisition funnels
2️⃣ Prop becoming the talent pool for CFD
3️⃣ Call centers still being the biggest bottleneck
4️⃣ Pure IB models getting squeezed without marketing engines
5️⃣ Need for both brand AND acquisition (not one or the other)
6️⃣ PSP issues often being infrastructure problems in disguise
7️⃣ Prop and CFD merging into one ecosystem

Swipe for details on each. Curious what landed differently for you.

Stanislav Galandzovskyi

Acquisition & Growth Expert in Fintech (Forex, Prop Firms, Crypto, SaaS, B2B Services) • Managed $3M+ monthly ad spend & ran paid ads in 120 countries

iFX 2026 Insights

Most people building for MENA are building for a market that doesn't exist. They treat it as one region. It isn't. There are 20 countries, and they are all different. 

Let’s take the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

Saudi Arabia skews a younger, more patriotic audience, increasingly shaped by Vision 2030. The market is ambitious, growth-hungry, and proud of its identity. Positioning through scale and innovation works here. But if your brand looks like another offshore project passing through, trust won't come. 

Egypt is price-sensitive with low card penetration. Coming in with a premium product expecting Western-style margins, Egypt will humble you fast. Friction at checkout is real, cash on delivery is still dominant, and people prefer to pay in installments over committing to the full amount upfront.

The UAE is a wealth hub, expat-heavy, with a high-net-worth buyer who has seen every pitch before. 
This audience googles, cross-checks, reads reviews. Crypto narratives and copy trading don't resonate the way they do in the West. Wealth in the UAE is traditionally preserved through gold and familiar equities – and some businesses coming in miss that completely. Above all, the UAE is about building long-term client relationships.

MENA is one of the most exciting regions to market in right now. You just need to invest more in the upfront research 😉


P.S. This photo is from sunny Dubai. And it reminds me that it’s Friday and it’s time to switch gears. So Happy Friday, everyone! Make it a good one.

One of the biggest mistakes is to treat brokerage and prop firm acquisition as the same job. They're not that close.


For brokerages, it's Google – top one, 80% plus of acquisition budget. Their audience is already searching: "trading platform", "CFD broker", "buy bitcoin". The intent is there. Of course, you can find exceptions – Brazil, for example, where Facebook works better because of regulation issues. But if you advertise in a normal way as a fully regulated broker, Google is where the volume and scalability live.

Prop firms are different. Facebook is top one – 80% of budget, sometimes even higher. Google sits at just 20%. The mechanics explain why: Google CPC for prop terms is around $2-6, with limited search volume. 

Facebook scales without a ceiling – but it requires strong creative, constant testing, and building awareness before intent exists.

The channel choice reflects the customer's mindset. Google buyers are rational and ready. Facebook buyers need to be convinced first. That distinction shapes your entire funnel – landing page, offer, onboarding.

Together with Roman Garanin and Ievgen Iugrinov we covered this and much more in the full episode of Dealers Connect podcast. Link in the comments.

There are 3 types of prop firm traders you need to know.

Know the difference and you can:

→ Create the right message for each type
→ Spread your budget based on who actually converts
→ Explain why CAC is climbing and point to the exact cause
→ Rescue a creative that "tests poorly" by showing it to the right person
→ Trace refunds, churn, and silent accounts back to a persona mismatch 

Here are the three personas in every prop firm's audience ↓

Fintech isn't Temu. You can't just push an ad and expect a sale. 


Most prop firms try anyway, and when volume slows, they spend more or add a promo. That's not the fix. Most people won't buy the first time they see an ad – so if there's nothing pulling them back, that traffic is just gone.

Promos don't solve that. They help in the short term, but they compress margin and train people to wait for discounts. So the cycle continues.

The fix is building the 360 marketing.

That means giving people more than one touchpoint before asking them to buy. Brand awareness content on FB and YouTube so people recognize you before the offer hits. 

Boosting content that already exists so it reaches more people. A learning funnel or email sequence for beginner traders, so they warm up before they see pricing. A look at whether the checkout flow itself is losing people, not just the ads.

The firms winning right now aren't necessarily spending more. They're showing up more often, in more places, before asking for the sale. Performance campaigns work better when awareness has already done some of the work.

The story of how a prop firm turned off its most effective creative.

Sounds strange?
More like insane.)

Here’s what happened.

A young prop firm was actively testing creatives.

Several videos showed strong performance:

— High CTR
— Low cost per view
— Solid engagement

They optimized their campaigns exclusively for challenge purchases.
The last step. Bottom of the funnel.
And the result?

The videos driving strong awareness and engagement but not converting immediately… were simply turned off! Because “they don’t sell.”

What’s the real problem?

Marketing isn’t one type of ad. And it’s not one metric.

There are at least four core objectives in advertising

1️⃣ Awareness — so people know you exist
2️⃣ Engagement — so they interact with you
3️⃣ Lead generation — so they move closer
4️⃣ Conversion — so they buy

When you optimize everything for conversions, you’re saying:

— We only care about the 1–2% of traders who’re ready to buy right now.
— And the other 98%?
— You hand them straight to your competitors.

Do you know what I love sharing?
Non-obvious tactics that can work for fintech companies. 


This time – native ads for prop firms. I know it can sound like a black box, but let’s try to unpack it and see what it can deliver? 

Let’s start with Taboola that can add 20-30% in revenue (in case of proper value tracking and content-first funnels)

👇

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