TrustedHousesitters: Turning Advocacy Into a Growth Engine

Every marketplace founder wants customers who tell their friends. Few build a business where that becomes the primary growth engine.

TrustedHousesitters has. It has grown into a global membership community spanning more than 100 countries, with advocacy at the heart of its success. Members don't simply use the product: they champion  it.

For many businesses, that would be the end of the story. For TrustedHousesitters, it's the beginning of the next one.

Over the past few years, we've partnered with the business to strengthen its leadership team, placing its Chair, Chief Product Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and, most recently, Board Growth Advisor Drew Wrangles.

With the US central to TrustedHousesitters' next stage of scale, the board doubled down on marketplace growth as a priority. The business wanted another leader who had already built marketplace products where competition is fiercest and customer expectations are highest. Drew’s experience across Taskrabbit, Drizly and TripAdvisor brings exactly that lens, combining deep product expertise with first-hand experience of creating trust, community and network effects in the US market.

From earned virality to engineered virality

The most valuable forms of growth are earned. They come from trust, great customer experiences and communities that are genuinely willing to advocate for a product. You can't manufacture that with advertising spend.

But while earned virality creates momentum, it doesn't necessarily create a system.

The next stage is about engineering the conditions that make advocacy happen more often, more consistently and at greater scale.

That isn't simply a question of launching a referral programme, but about reducing the friction between a customer having a great experience and choosing to share it. It's about designing onboarding that gets members to value faster, creating product experiences that naturally encourage recommendations, and building communities where trust compounds over time.

Those aren't marketing initiatives. They're product decisions.

Which is why we're increasingly seeing growth become a cross-functional discipline owned jointly by product, engineering, data and marketing, rather than sitting within a single team's budget.

Why marketplace leadership is changing

TrustedHousesitters isn't unique.

Across marketplace businesses, the economics of growth are shifting as customer acquisition has become more expensive and privacy changes have made targeting less precise. The easy wins from performance marketing have largely disappeared.

Businesses with high retention and strong customer advocacy are increasingly treating those strengths as strategic assets to be engineered rather than fortunate by-products of a good product.

That changes where investment goes. Instead of asking how to spend more efficiently on acquisition, leadership teams are asking how to improve activation, reduce onboarding friction, strengthen network effects and make referrals part of the core product experience. Growth becomes less about finding the next marketing channel and more about building a product that creates its own demand.

It's also changing the leadership profiles businesses need.

We're seeing growing demand for executives and advisors who have scaled trusted digital communities, built product-led growth loops and understand how trust, technology and community reinforce one another. For businesses expanding internationally, particularly into the US, that experience is increasingly market-specific. What drives adoption in one geography doesn't automatically translate to another, which is why boards are looking for additional expertise from leaders who havealready navigated those challenges.

Why this matters for investors

For founders and management teams, this is an evolution in how growth is delivered. For private equity investors, it's increasingly becoming a question of capability.

Many portfolio companies already possess the raw ingredients for stronger organic growth: loyal customers, high retention and products that people genuinely recommend.  The opportunity is building the leadership capability further to turn those advantages into a repeatable operating model.

Appointments like TrustedHousesitters' Growth Advisor are not about fixing something broken. They're about challenging the playbook - building on the systems, behaviours and experimentation culture that will help unlock the next growth curve.

The takeaway

One of the more interesting shifts we're seeing in executive hiring is that growth leadership is becoming less specialised and more integrated. The businesses creating the most durable competitive advantage aren't necessarily those spending the most on acquisition. They're the ones building organisations where product, data, marketing and community work together to turn customer advocacy into a scalable growth engine.

That's where we're increasingly helping founders, CEOs and investors build leadership teams. Not around functions, but around the capabilities required for the next phase of growth. Increasingly, those capabilities sit at the intersection of product, growth, technology and commercial leadership - not within any one discipline.