Episode Details

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Simon Lejeune, VP of Growth at Wealthsimple.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:16) - In This Episode
• (03:55) - How to Escape Local Maximum Traps in Growth Marketing
• (08:59) - Productive Laziness Mindsets
• (12:03) - The Psychological Trap of A/B Testing
• (15:55) - Balancing Clean Experiments with Bold Bets
• (18:43) - How to Use Incrementality to Measure Real Campaign Impact
• (22:32) - How to Approach Incrementality Without Large Data Sets
• (25:13) - The Best Use Cases for Incrementality Tests
• (29:58) - How to Handle ROI Conversations Without Slowing Down Growth
• (38:02) - Why Most A/B Testing Is a Waste of Time
• (47:17) - When Natural Language Becomes the Interface, Channel Expertise Stops Being a Moat
• (01:03:31) - How to Use Game Thinking to Stay Energized in Growth Roles

Summary: Simon Lejeune learned early that chasing small wins keeps growth teams stuck, a lesson that landed hard when Hopper’s CEO dismissed his price‑point test as a “local maximum” and pushed him toward ideas bold enough to reshape the business. That experience drives how he leads at Wealthsimple, where he tells teams to stop polishing the same hill and start climbing new mountains by deleting work that doesn’t matter, cutting projects when the lift is negligible, and measuring true incrementality with one simple question: “What would have happened if we didn’t do this?” He believes AI is accelerating this shift, turning deep channel expertise into a commodity and making curiosity, speed, and ruthless prioritization the real competitive advantages. Growth, in his view, belongs to teams who can abandon the comfort of optimization and pursue experiments big enough to change the trajectory.

About Simon

Simon Lejeune is a seasoned growth leader with over a decade of experience scaling some of North America’s most recognized tech brands. Currently VP of Growth at Wealthsimple, he drives client and asset growth across products like Trade, Crypto, Cash, Invest, and Tax. Before that, Simon founded Mile End Growth, a boutique agency delivering strategy, creative, and media buying for startups, and led user acquisition at Hopper, where he managed multimillion‑dollar budgets and built one of the most sophisticated in‑house ad automation engines in travel tech. His career began at Busbud and Nomad Logic, where he directed growth marketing and developed new revenue‑generating spin‑offs.

Local Maximum vs Global Maximum
How to Escape Local Maximum Traps in Growth Marketing

A local maximum trap happens when teams keep optimizing small features that look like wins but cap long-term growth. Simon uses the metaphor of being blindfolded on uneven terrain. You walk in every direction until each step feels lower, then assume you have reached the peak. When you take off the blindfold, you see you are standing on a hill while a much larger mountain waits in the distance. Many growth teams spend months, sometimes years, stuck on those hills.

Simon experienced this lesson in an uncomfortable way. During his final interview at Hopper, CEO Fred Lalonde asked him what he would change first to grow revenue in the app. Simon answered with what felt like a logical idea. He suggested testing different price points for the $5 tip option, maybe $4 or $6, to find the best revenue point.

“He looked at me and said, ‘That’s literally a local maximum, and I do not want you doing that,’” Simon recalled.

That feedback forced Simon to change his perspective. He proposed a more radical idea: building a separate app that would use Hopper’s flight data to surface ultra-cheap Ryanair-style deals under five euros. It sounded risky and unconventional, but Lalonde loved it. Simon left that meeting understandi