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Kristina had never imagined working for a bank but when the opportunity came along to innovate the mobile experience for N26 she took it. Coming from a background in fashion e-commerce, Kristina asked, "How could we transform the learnings about mobile UX from e-commerce and apply them to the financial world to make everything less painful?" This and stories of why you shouldn’t build what your customers ask for, and reasons to always speak your mind, are featured in this episode with Kristina Walcker-Mayer of N26.

Daniel Shlossman is the SVP, DIgital + Growth @ sweetgreen. He leads marketing, product, and digital channels. In his three years at sweetgreen, Daniel has been focused on enabling customer growth through channel expansion and improvement, including the launch of sweetgreen’s off-premise business, via Outpost and delivery. Daniel’s incredible background includes roles at Uber (as Head of West Coast Operations & Marketing) and at NFL (as their Director of Product for Fantasy Football). Disruption in any market starts with passionate founders who see opportunities to scale in all domains and are not limited by a particular mode or channel of growth. Don’t think that you need to build a mobile app because “everyone else is doing it”. A mobile app gives you the opportunity to use your resources to add value to your customers’ lives and grab a huge chunk of the market in the process. Even with a great product-market fit, your team is the most crucial aspect of building a mobile app. A collaborative culture among people who love to work together allows for that facilitation across different departments and different channels and is crucial to make growth happen. You should identify opportunity areas and really go after them. Even if you don’t know something - you will make mistakes and learn from them. It’s important to have candid conversations to get better with each decision. Follow a detailed diagnosis process within your team to learn from your mistakes as well as projects that were fully or partially successful. Sometimes, the best ideas come from taking something your customers already love and making it even better. One great way to turn such commonplace ideas into massive growth opportunities is to combine a few popular features that customers are experiencing in your app or your competitors. Also, look at enhancing key features to add something new to the app. Successful pivots in tough times like the pandemic require nimbleness and agility in executing a response to the new situation. At sweetgreen, they found this opportunity via shifting operations to donations to frontline medical workers in need. They repurposed and adapted their existing processes to respond to this opportunity. Personalization allows you to get close to the customers. At sweetgreen, Daniel thinks about personalization from the perspective of the customer. This way, personalizing a service goes far beyond small changes that give customers some control over the product you create for them. It means letting them care about the product in a way that grants them ownership of the product resulting from the service, including full customization of chosen ingredients.

Ron Schneidermann is the CEO of Alltrails, where he spent the past six years helping grow the company, which is now one of the top five health and fitness apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Before joining Alltrails, Ron led growth teams at Yelp and co-founded Liftopia, the global leader of ski lift ticket bookings. Ron shares that the two most important things for any company are momentum and culture. If you lose either of them, they are impossible to rebuild. Have belief in your business model and look at the advantages in context. When you cannot control certain aspects of the funnel, let full-funnel growth (across all stages) be the central driver of your business. If your app is “content-centered,” your data sets hold the power to convert and retain users. First, focus on improving the quality of data you can provide to your audience. Don’t get attached to results because any growth experiment can fail. Instead, focus on learning from successful and failed experiments. Find and monitor feedback loops based on what your users respond to. The key to growth is to keep adapting as your audience adapts because they are the chief driver of your business growth. Re-engagement via push notification may put you at risk of annoying your customers. People may forget that they have the app installed, so it’s always better to focus on outside-the-app strategies such as SEO, personalized content, and reminders via emails to drive re-engagement through deep links into the app. Try not to depend on one platform because it can make a huge dent in your growth charts if the platform changes. Try to own your channels of growth as much as possible. Daily and sometimes even weekly metrics may be distracting. Monthly metrics provide a more accurate view of your audience’s changing consumption habits and are a healthier way to monitor growth. Ron shares that to maintain culture momentum during growth, your company’s senior leadership has to be the culture vanguard and train the rest of the leadership across the org. This becomes easier if people in your organization have a personal connection to your mission and stay longer. Ron’s final advice: be honest with yourself when making important decisions because you will be proud of the practical decisions you make and reactionary paths you avoid after you retire. Having a personal set of core values helps identify opportunities and enjoy the process of executing them.

Holly Chen is an award-winning marketing and growth advisor who credits her inner rebelliousness and overall questioning of conventional thinking for leading her into a career in Growth. And she’s been a standout from the beginning. In Beijing, Holly was one of the few Chinese nationals majoring in Italian in the entire country. After taking on her first role at the United Nations, she felt the need to move to something where she could better measure the impact of her work and joined an early stage startup in New York City. Her entry into Product Management and Marketing teams at that start up eventually led to her becoming the Head of Growth at the Google Store, in charge of distinguishing the various Google Store and hardware brands. She then went on to build Slack’s Digital Marketing and Performance Marketing function globally driving user acquisition, retention, and monetization across SMB and Enterprise customers. Amidst her current work as a growth advisor, Holly is a co-founder of Ceilingbreakers.us, a coaching platform that is rethinking the way tech leadership looks by creating a direct line to top executive coaches for specifically people of color, women, immigrants, LGBTQ+, and other underrepresented groups. Hear more about where Holly believes growth sits within a company, advice to those building their own multi-touch attribution systems, and her advice for her younger self on this episode of How I Grew This. App she can’t live without: Apple Podcast App Animal she would talk to if she could: Cats App she uses that others wouldn’t expect: Chinese apps

Lisa Kennelly has been the CMO at Fishbrain for over three years and oversees marketing operations, strategy, and vision. Since the fall of 2020, Lisa has been responsible for growing and managing Fishbrain’s eCommerce marketplace. Outside of Fishbrain, Lisa is an advisor and mentor of multiple early-stage founders and startups. Fishbrain is a mobile app and online platform with map-based tools, fishing forecasts, social networking features, and recommendations on fishing gear. Fishing is the most popular hobby in the world… and is huge in the US, Fishbrain’s biggest market. During the pandemic, Fishbrain was a beneficiary of other businesses and sports shutting down and also from becoming the primary online retailer focused on a variety of fishing gear. Riding this wave, Fishbrain has grown to over 13 million users. Lisa led Fishbrain’s marketing expansion beyond their (mostly) paid advertising campaigns. Fishbrain’s social network feature attracts new users and contributes to their user retention. Fishbrain grows through SEO, word of mouth, influencers and even offline marketing (billboards, radio ads, etc) in some southern US states that have a thriving culture of anglers. Sometimes, all that is required to stand out in the market is observing a pattern and disrupting it with a bold design decision. At Clue, a female reproductive health app, Lisa and her team disrupted the ongoing pattern of having a pink-themed female health tracker app. This bold design decision contributed “big time” to their growth. If you are working with influencers, focus on micro-influencers because they are more approachable and have a more dedicated fan base. Nail your product benefits, product positioning, and its messaging. Be rigid about how influencers can use them and how they must not use them. If you are in a newer, less-saturated niche, SEO is a great channel because it’s easier to find content gaps in the niche and fill it with high-quality content. Lisa shares that to increase your premium subscriptions: make your pro membership content truly valuable and meant for the regular, high-frequency user - not just the occasional user. Split testing can be used to avoid making decisions. Sometimes, you just have to believe in your ideas and execute them because non-determinant results of A/B testing can be paralyzing. Lisa also shares management lessons for CMO’s: empathy, honesty, vulnerability, and direct feedback help connect with employees. Sometimes, simply giving your employees a kind ear to vent can do the trick. Consuming leadership content has also helped Lisa in her quest of becoming a great CMO.

How does a woman go from teacher to running Kids and Family content at Netflix? What happened along the way to lead Michelle, a pre-med student in college to a career building the experiences for the companies we know and love. That and stories of failed experiments, taking an unconventional path to product management and why empathy is your most powerful tool are featured with Michelle Parsons of Netflix.

Today’s guest, Nicole West, isn’t afraid of raising her hand and taking a risk, especially when it’s a project no one has ever done before. She’s built a reputation over her 14-year career at Chipotle in taking those tough jobs and turning them into big opportunities. For instance, in 2013, the then CMO asked Nicole if she would start up the new Ecommerce division of the marketing team. Pushing fear aside, she took the job. Today, she’s been at the helm as Chipotle has gone through a digital transformation which has seen digital ordering hit meteoric heights, with digital orders now accounting for over 20% of company sales. More on Nicole’s story of how she rose the ranks, her advice to those who are inspired by her story, as well as ways Chipotle is staying true to its mission of making the world a better place, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more.

So much of learning how to drive meaningful growth is finding unsaturated and ripe growth channels and relentless focus on the actual end-user. This is our next guest's philosophy, Dharmesh Gandhi, the Senior Vice President and Head of Product at RentoMojo. Dharmesh shares how early in his career at Amazon, he learned how you could easily spot what seems like a popular growth option and not always get the return you’re looking for, especially when scaling. He adjusted his approach to play the long game and focus on important but not urgent growth methods. As he says in the interview, once something becomes urgent, it’s too late. He built out a multi-year roadmap that would allow continued growth through different channels. That experience also helped him when RentoMojo had to make dramatic shifts when COVID happened. They decided to implement a subscription pause, which reduced churn by 35% and played a significant role in helping the business continue to thrive even during the lockdown. Hear more on Dharmesh’s story, including how culture was the most critical driver of growth at Amazon, how he became the odd one out in his family and didn’t work on the family business, his time management, and so much more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

EPISODE SUMMARY: Makoto Rheault-Kihara leads user acquisition at Hopper, one of the fastest-growing travel apps with over 60 million in sales to date. Makoto was previously the Director of Marketing at Cruisehub, an OTA aiming to modernize the cruise industry and lead search engine marketing at Busbud, a bus travel booking platform in 80 countries. Hopper differentiates its paid social strategy by focusing on user acquisition AND long-term trust through investing in paid social and other mobile ad channels. They use Facebook as the primary focus of their paid social ads with TikTok as a growing secondary channel. Paid social is becoming a lot more abstract and therefore more creative. Makoto believes paid TikTok ads must be kept fresh, platform-focused, and generated at a higher frequency. The pandemic did affect the travel industry but Hopper still achieved a 110% YoY growth last year and is on track to do over $1B of business this year. They did this by following a diversification strategy based on customer needs and expanded into hotels and car rentals. Hopper’s customer-obsessed culture and self-contained, autonomous teams have helped them grow multiple product arms simultaneously. A weekly catch-up call and an executive team focused on cross-team communication help these siloed teams at Hopper learn from each other’s challenges and successes. Sometimes ads that marketers like don’t appeal to actual customers and may end up performing worse than some simple customer-oriented ads. Over time, Hopper moved to these customer-centric ad creatives which helped them reduce expensive failures and triple their RPM (revenue per 1000 impressions). At Hopper, Makoto focuses on maximizing the overall contribution margin of a cohort and on-target rate to check their ability to drive revenue from specific target purchases or user actions. Because Hopper diversified across three generic categories (hotels, flights, car rentals), their ad targeting still focuses on great creatives and has not changed much since IDFA deprecation in iOS 14.5. Interested in joining the Hopper team? Click here to check out their open positions! https://www.hopper.com/careers/

Today we’re joined by Brian Witlin, CEO of Yummly. Brian’s life has been dedicated to building and scaling consumer-focused startups and commercially successful teams over several years. In this episode, Brian shares his experiences of building and scaling Yummly and other companies along with his core message of living a well-rounded life, which is especially useful for founders in the early stages of their career. Yummly is a recipe discovery platform with a mission of helping people become the best version of themselves whilst achieving their goals in the kitchen. In the episode, Brian talks about how Yummly moved from conception to its current state by empowering its consumers and taking risks. In the episode, Brian describes how cooking went from being a way of sustenance to a form of healthy living throughout the pandemic. Brian also talks about the importance of relevant lifecycle messaging and how Yummly leveraged this to shift from an acquisition-focused to a retention-oriented growth strategy. In the episode, Brian shares how user-centered design and design thinking sparked his curiosity and has helped him start several new businesses. He also talks about his passion for helping set other entrepreneurs up for success. Brian also explores why recipe and food hardware startups struggle to attract investors and wind up early. Finally, Brian also shares his advice for startup founders on separating their identity from their work and avoiding burnout.

Jayne Peressini is the Senior Director, Mobile Marketing and Growth @ Electronic Arts (EA). Her team manages user acquisition, retargeting, and user retention across the multiple genres of games that EA produces. Jayne’s interest in gaming dates back to the pre-iPhone era when her Dad purchased her a console on which she became hooked to playing games. Jayne believes that mobile gaming helps people gain a sense of community and can sometimes act as a welcome distraction, which is why mobile gaming metrics have been going through the roof during the pandemic. She also believes in taking a challenging campaign and iterating through to make it work. She fondly recalls a campaign where she challenged assumptions about women playing sports and eventually succeeded after multiple iterations. Furthermore, Jayne firmly believes in the idea of “you only fail when you quit” and also emphasizes the importance of working together through failure in order to achieve success as a team. Jayne thinks that, especially after IDFA deprecation in iOS 14.5, gaming companies should focus on overall user lifecycle metrics. She favors choosing the right time to transition them across the lifecycle instead of using interruption marketing. Jayne’s team management philosophy revolves around giving due credit and providing genuine encouragement regularly. Jayne advises younger folks in gaming to reach out to mentors with whom they identify personally and ask them for specific advice while also encouraging senior mentors in the industry to share their knowledge freely.

Today we’re joined by Sue Cho, who has been the Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Calm for three years. For over a decade, Sue has focused on all their engagement, retention, and conversion. In this episode, Sue talks about everything from career advice, her current work at Calm, her vision for the team, and her badass dog Lizzy. Sue starts by telling us about her radical decision to move to the mountains, how the lockdown period was great for Calm’s business and how it suited her personality. Next, she shares her accidental journey into the world of email marketing and how she found her community in this job. Sue advocates embracing a data-driven approach, especially when it comes to matters of subjective opinion. At Calm, Sue emphasizes finding the right metrics that move the needle on business goals and giving Calm’s users a consistent experience regardless of their platform. She also highlights an exciting challenge that she’s working on that, if executed well, would help them avoid Apple and Google conversion taxes. She talks about her team and provides insightful advice for email marketers to improve email open rates, and even shares a cool exercise for this. Sue describes her process for activating new users and converting them into power users through gentle yet personalized reminders. Sue also shares how she developed authority in her field with a combination of her Asian-American values of hard work and perseverance, her opinionated nature, and a data-driven approach to her work. Her entrepreneurial attitude shines through as she talks about why she started the San Francisco chapter of the Email Geek’s club. In the rapid-fire round, Sue shares the one app she would never delete from her phone, an animal she would love to talk to, her badass dog Lizzy, and the most unlikely app on her phone.

Today we’re joined by Prathamesh Dembla, the Head of Growth at Licious. Prior to Licious, Prathamesh was Head of Digital Marketing at Milk Basket. In this episode, Prathamesh talks about the positive effects of both lockdowns, working from home and one key skill that has benefited reliable professionals during these challenging times. He also shares what has helped him develop his business acumen and how his love for teaching makes him a better marketer. Prathamesh discusses various growth hacks he has implemented at Licious and how Branch has helped them with the attribution and channel optimization of these strategies. Prathamesh also stresses how “atomic personalization” helps them with conversion rate optimization. Prathamesh then goes on to share key takeaways from his experience as a co-founder of Infinity Minds, a personal development company for children. In terms of risk-taking, Prathamesh breaks down how he decides which risks to take and how startups can avoid “analysis paralysis” with an execution-first mindset. As Head of Growth at Licious, Prathamesh talks about his biggest challenge during and after a period of hypergrowth amid COVID-19 lockdowns. Prathamesh then finally talks about his leadership style and the power of compounding in business, relationships and health.

Ashish Bajaj is the Head of Marketing at MediBuddy, which joined forces with DocsApp in 2020 to become India’s largest digital healthcare platform. Previously, he held roles as the Head of Media and Brand Alliance at Ola and as a Channel Marketing Manager with Microsoft. In this episode, Ashish fondly shares warm anecdotes from his current and past work experience to highlight the positive impact those projects have had on the lives of their customers. Ashish believes that the impact their campaigns leave and the value they contribute to their customers’ lives provide a much greater high for marketers. Ashish opens up about his outdoor sales experience working for his family in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and how that contributed to his growth story. Finally, Ashish also shares potent advice for new startups who often get distracted by the hypergrowth of other startups in a race to achieve “unicorn” status.

Noa Gutterman is the Director of Marketing at VSCO. Before this VSCO, she spent six years in the digital marketing game in various roles. Noa runs VSCO’s marketing function and in the ten months since joining she has hired four team members, built up the entire lifecycle and product marketing functions and refreshed VSCO’s paid acquisition strategy. Noa shares details of an upcoming influencer marketing campaign, targeting the Gen Z generation that she is very excited to see the results of. She breaks down the strategies that can be used to find influencers, the difference between a normal and micro-influencer and what your first step should be if you are also aiming to kick off an influencer marketing campaign. Noa also breaks down VSCO’s approach to re-engaging users. She shares a step-by-step approach from discovering what users like most about the app and what behavior patterns most commonly lead to these revenue generating actions to then how to encourage those behaviors through owned and paid channels. Hear Noa’s advice for her younger self, why she has marketing in her blood, why the VSCO growth team sits within the product function, the one animal that Noa would most like to talk to, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Frank Hulsebosch is the Head of Digital Marketing Europe at Banco Santander. Before this role, he spent two years as a digital marketing manager in the Benelux region of Europe, also at Banco Santander. Frank was responsible for driving for Banco Santander’s Benelux region’s digital transformation, launching a new mobile home banking app, new digital onboarding journeys, and CRO programs to optimize online channels. He then moved on to lead the digital marketing strategy and performance of Santander’s Consumer Finance unit in Europe. Frank shares an honest account of his transition from a media agency to leading the Santander Benelux region’s digital transformation. He mentions that he oversold himself during the hiring process, which did enable him to get the role but led to a lot more stress further down the road as he struggled with a lack of experience in the world of mobile banking. Frank provides career advice for aspiring growth leaders: “do more.” Frank found himself completing his assigned tasks during his first internship and then always searching for more work to do. This approach significantly increased his rate of learning over that of his peers, accelerating his career. Hear more career advice along with why you should never give up when starting something new, the reason why other people don’t want you to succeed, the impact of COVID-19 on the mobile banking industry, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Today's guest, Sachin Singla, is someone who didn't stick to one career or path but found his way to marketing via other paths like finance and consulting (not unlike our host Mada). Sachin talks about how marketing has adapted and how marketing teams have needed to pivot and become more agile in the age of COVID-19. Mainly looking at your customer segments, Sachin explains how the lockdown rules vary wildly in India and how brands need to make their messaging reflect their target market's current state.

Master at building community on the internet, Casey took his passion for user-generated content and built a career on creating sustainable growth strategies for companies like Pinterest, Grubhub, and Airbnb. At Pinterest, he drove an increase in sign-ups from Google by 50%, a tactic today that's still copied by Instagram and LinkedIn. Casey talks how companies can react to coronavirus, the mindset around building growth teams, and shares practical advice on decisions that build fulfilling careers. Hear all this and more on this episode of How I Grew this. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

Ian Moore is the Head of Subscription Growth at Verizon Media. Before joining Verizon Media in August 2020, he spent five years at The New York Times, where he was the Growth Media Strategy Director. As the son of a first-generation American, Ian’s educational path pointed towards medicine, but that wasn’t where he found his career passion. An Economics professor turned things around. His professor taught him about the power of persuasion. From there, Ian felt inspired to predict human behavior through incentive programs. Ian dives into the concept of codeswitching early in his career and how his mentality has changed as he’s become more confident in his abilities. He reminds us to let the work do the talking. Quality work is going to do the talking. A turning point for Ian’s career is when the CEO of the New York times shared with him some advice he'd never forget (you're going to have to tune in to hear what she said). This interaction and his experience of pioneering subscriptions at the New York Times positioned Ian as an expert in subscription growth. Hear this and how his tenure at the New York Times shaped his view on how to drive subscription growth, how he’s investing in an online company replacing physical optometry appointments, what it’s like to build consumer relationships with legacy products, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Growth and product are a completely different beast when you sell physical products and not software. Despite those challenges, our next guest Ramneek Khurana has grown Lenskart to help India’s vision problem. Ramneek went to Georgia Tech and expected to go to a major consulting firm, but he took some advice that led him into physical products as he started his career at Michelin Tires. Since Michelin was the top tire brand, Ramneek made very marginal improvements and eventually got bored and wanted to solve a bigger problem. That led him to co-found Lenskart, an optical eyewear chain that produces over 300,000 glasses a month. They saw the large gap in the Indian market for a convenient, stylish eyeglass brand that also helped tackle the millions of Indians who weren’t able to get glasses. Unlike almost every other eyeglass manufacturer, Lenskart focused on mobile and digital from the very beginning, making it easier for customers and allowed them to scale quickly. Some of their best growth campaigns came out of COVID. They received tons of videos from customers to showcase they could still help people get eyeglasses even during lockdown and turned it into a massively successful TV campaign. Hear stories like this, how they won the award for Best Mobile Innovation at Branch’s 2020 Mobile Growth Awards, how Ramneek manages his time as the company grows and changes, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.