Listen Now

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada is joined by Katherine Kelly, VP of Higher Education Marketing at Handshake, to discuss how Handshake leverages mobile growth opportunities in higher education and the job market. Katherine started her career working in higher education and moved over to tech. She was an associate producer at ESPN, an Instructor of Design History, and a Research Assistant at The Victoria and Albert Museum. Katherine was also an Editor, Writer, and Host of her web series, ‘Just the Tips’.

Ben Okkenga is the Senior Product Manager at RTL2, a TV network from Germany. Ben has spent the last ten years building growth in various departments. Currently, he is responsible for RTL2 projects and products, like the gaming website, mobile apps, and Smart TV applications. In this episode of How I Grew This, Ben talks about how to attract, engage, and retain users on your app, the product that brought RTL2 Connect the Smart TV Award, and how to succeed as a product manager.

Yoann Pavy is a growth marketing leader, passionate about disruptive businesses, growth marketing, and culture. He is the CMO of Nude, a UK-based FinTech app that helps first-time buyers save for their deposits faster. Yoann and his team are working on designing growth features within the app that would be useful to the end user and bring more first-time buyers. As a result, they have developed three growth features. One is called ‘Team Up’, where couples or friends can view each other's lifetime ISA balance, see their time-until-you-buy combined, and get double the government bonus. Another one is the ‘Nude Giveaway’, which is a lottery-type feature, and the third one is ‘Gift Time’, a new unique feature on the market that allows a customer to share a payment link to their friends and family to contribute to their Nude Lifetime ISA. Yoann also talks about what paid channels they use, how to create a balanced mix of social advertising, some of his career ups and downs, and bits of advice for mobile marketing enthusiasts.

Tomas Warden joins us today from Telstra, where he has spent the past thirteen years in various roles. Currently, he is the Principal of Digital Engagement and Experience, responsible for driving the E2E digital experience strategy across Telstra's digital sales and service channels. Telstra is Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company. In this episode, Tomas shares insights from his career, mobile growth strategies, and how his team drives growth through the company's app.

Branding means more than simply creating a logo and placing some ads. As Jeff Bezos said: "Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room". The main question is how to do it successfully. In this episode, Gessica talks about some of the best practices and channels for building your brand. Gessica is a computer scientist with a deep passion for marketing and is currently the CMO at Paired, an app that focuses on building deeper connections with your partner.

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.

Caitlin Roman brings her collective experiences in consulting at McKinsey and Product at LinkedIn & Medium to the world of sports news at The Athletic. Having come up in these subscription powerhouses, Caitlin has a potent combination of high-level business strategy experience along with the tactical ability to work side by side with her teams to execute. All of these elements were crucial for a subscription business like the Athletic during a tumultuous 2020 in sports. Caitlin and her team released a number of initiatives during this time including different content formats like short format commentary and breaking news, and pricing strategies to keep users tuning in even when sports weren’t in play. If there’s a word we would use to describe Caitlin it would be resilient! Far before she was leading her team through the bumps of the pandemic, she had two keystone experiences that she shared on the show that shaped her. The first is her passion for media at a young age. Working as a newspaper editor in both high school and college, Caitlin sought out the challenge of the daily deadline for her daily newspaper. She talks about the late nights and stress but attributes this as the reason why she loves working in the trenches with her teams today, drawing similarities to product management. Before Caitlin found her way to LinkedIn, she lived and worked in Ethiopia as a part of a Gates Foundation initiative in agriculture. During a solo trip in a gorge in Kenya, she fell and broke her back and had to self-rescue. After this grueling experience she recovered, but Caitlin didn’t only not fly home but continued her work at the time setting up microfinance systems for farmers. To hear more about Caitlin’s amazing story about how she found her way into the product in subscription powerhouses, how she thinks about leading her teams, and her adventures in Ethiopia, take a listen to this episode of How I Grew This.

As marketers, we all hope that our efforts will transform a brand and have it become the talk of the town. Our next guest, Brandon Rhoten, has been able to do just this at several of the brands he has transformed. Brandon has worked at Wendy's, Papa John's and Potbelly and although his approach has differed with each challenge the results have been the same: transformational change. We learn that a company looking to adapt and evolve doesn’t need to hop on the hottest trend; it needs to isolate its market problem and find a solution that aligns with its brand’s positioning. In the case of Papa John's, it was moving their advertising to digital channels from traditional ones. For Wendy's, it was reasserting its voice with clever and funny ads on social platforms like Twitter to engage with a younger audience. In this episode, Brandon shares exactly how he approached evolving the marketing strategies at each of these companies to adapt to the times and ultimately get incredible results. Hear this and how they hired comedians for Wendy's Twitter account, why PotBelly hired former professional football player Peyton Manning and why Brandon studies the financial news as much as anything else, all on this episode of How I Grew This.

In this episode of How I Grew This podcast, Kar Paramasivam talks about the growth strategy at Blue Apron, a direct-to-consumer, chef-designed meal kit company. Starting his career as a banker, Kar shifted his focus to startups, where he got his first opportunity to lead a growth team at Shipt. From this point, Kar made his way through companies like Spacious.com (acquired by WeWork), Nutrafol, and CUUP, to his current role as a VP of Growth at Blue Apron. Kar shares some successful campaigns and approaches his team adopted to leverage Blue Apron's app and increase user retention and engagement.

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed the healthcare industry to its limits, but it also led to new opportunities in terms of accelerating digital transformation. In this episode, we discuss the growth of digital transformation in healthcare with Tracey Weber, SVP of Digital Products, UX and Operations at CVS Health. Tracey joins us with over twenty-five years of experience in leadership roles across multiple consumer industries and extensive digital operations. Before joining CVS Health, Tracey was the General Manager of Marketplace and Digital Ecosystems at IBM, the President and COO of Gilt Group, and held several other leadership positions at companies like CitiBank, Travelocity, and Barnes & Noble. Today, Tracey shares some of the newest trends companies adopt to fulfill the rising consumer expectations for digital healthcare experiences.

Today we talk with someone who has seen the very beginnings of mobile and has helped some of the world’s biggest brands learn how to adapt and innovate by going mobile. Our guest is Matt Hudson. From the early days of mobile at just twenty-one, he helped Rock Fish build their mobile app and strategy, and he’s gone on to the same for Sam’s Club, Charles Schwab, and now Belk. Matt shares several campaigns that drove an incredible amount of growth, like the “App Attack” campaign. To drive downloads to the app, they had stores compete to see who could drive the most downloads, and they ended up driving 1.5 million total downloads through that campaign. Hear this and how Matt was featured in the Washington Post by proposing to his wife via Words With Friends, how he got started in mobile, and why he believes there’s still so much opportunity for growth and more all on this episode of How I Grew This.

As people's reliance on technology grows every year, many travelers believe a positive digital experience is the number one criterion when choosing an airline. So airlines try to meet the latest technological demands to remain competitive and grow their business. To better understand the most recent digital trends in the airline industry, we invited Kevin Bowling, Senior Director of Digital Experience at Hawaiian Airlines. Leading the digital experience technology team, Kevin is responsible for mission-critical customer-facing products, including HawaiianAirlines.com and iOS and Android apps. Today, Kevin shares Hawaiian Airlines' approach to digital innovation to better engage and retain different types of travelers.

The days of unsaturated channels and growth hacking, as we used to know it is over. Our guest today, Bharat Bhatia, dives deep into new strategies and the understanding of the product that has helped him achieve continued growth. Bharat comes from the gaming industry, an industry that he explains has one of the tightest bonds between product and marketing. He shares how he and his team approach that integration through in-app growth channels. In addition, with today’s growth channels like Facebook and Google ads more saturated and restricted, he breaks down how he has approached growth, especially when reaching the tipping point of scaling beyond existing audiences. Hear more about how Junglee Games grew through COVID, how he has managed to take better care of his physical health, and the most important and unexpected lesson he learned at business school, all on this episode of How I grew this.

Travis Trembath, Vice President, Fan Engagement at PGA TOUR, joins us in this episode of How I Grew This podcast. The PGA TOUR is the premier sanctioning and organizing body for men's professional golf, representing the best players in the world. Currently, Travis serves as the voice of the fan for the PGA TOUR and is passionate about building great teams and positively impacting people. Today, Travis shares some insight on the PGA TOUR’s strategy for acquiring and engaging fans, delivering the right content on the right platform for different types of fans, and advice on how to become an engagement, insights, and marketing leader.

Andy Rebhun is someone you just get excited to talk to. He’s an extrovert with opinions and vision. He is an accomplished Marketing Executive, who has delivered first-to-market products and profitable growth for billion-dollar brands across Fortune 50 companies like the McDonalds Corporation and Ford Motor Company. He is currently Vice President of Digital at El Pollo Loco, where he is responsible for CRM, E-Commerce, off premise delivery, loyalty program, and social media. Andy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin Madison and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management. In this episode, Andy dives into (1) how he got tapped to manage marketing for an 800+ restaurant market before 30 yrs old, (2) how he took the McDonald’s app from 0 to 5M users, (3) how he navigated COVID to triple digital sales at El Pollo Loco, (4) along the lessons he learned along the way.

Lynn Blashford, CMO of White Castle, has risen the ranks during her 10 years at the company. White Castle, known for pioneering the fast food industry, turns 100 years old in 2021 and operates with a long term vision which runs counter to today’s hypergrowth and short-term gains environment. Maybe unsurprisingly, this mindset has allowed them to weather the storm of 2020 both by taking care of their employees as well as how they’ve strategically diversified the business. White Castle was one of the first non-pizza companies to roll out online ordering and was the first fast food chain to adopt the vegan Impossible Slyder in the nation. Beyond just the bottom line, Lynn spoke about how the private nature of the company allows them to take care of their people and the communities they serve. One of the beautiful stories she shares is how healthcare workers could eat for free when the pandemic lockdowns began. Hear more about how White Castle has adapted to the many challenges of 2020, Lynn’s advice for her younger self, and of course, Lynn’s behind-the-scenes story of how the film “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” came to be, all on this episode of How I grew this.

Today, most SaaS companies were started in the last few years or at the beginning of Web 2.0. Our guest Rick Stollmeyer, Co-Founder and current Executive Chairman of Mindbody, however, saw an opportunity back in 2001, when he started the company out of his garage. In March, Mindbody saw 90% of their appointments disappear through the platform, which led the team to innovate and drive towards a virtual fitness platform. Fast forward to today, and they see this as their most significant growth opportunity. Hear more on Rick’s story, including his leadership training in the Navy, the lesson he learned when his former boss refused to give him equity, his transition to Executive Chairman, and so much more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

Our guest today, Siddarth Jena, has learned a lot about growth running the largest platform for fans of India’s most popular sport, Cricket. Siddarth came into Cricket.com at a time when they had to scale their marketing efforts from 0 to 100, he shares how they tested Google, Facebook, affiliates, and many other growth channels to capture the market. They were able to rapidly test and then scaled their growth channels to drive 5 million installs in just 4 months. Hear more on Siddarth’s story including his love for travel, how he and his team adapted marketing during COVID, how to deploy empathy in your marketing efforts and so much more in this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

In today's episode, Alex McNamara shares his unique approach to solving client problems and delivering growth for brands. Alex is the Head of Growth Marketing at Cruise, leading the charge for Cruise's first customers. Before joining Cruise, he was the Director of Growth at iProspect, with responsibility for the overall direction of pitch strategy, media planning, and activation. Alex shares how he and his team are building Cruise's marketing strategy and details the campaign he contributed to for Intel featuring Tom Brady. He also discusses the power of feedback, learning from mistakes, and leadership for personal and professional growth. Along with Gosha Khuchua, Alex hosts the 30 Minutes CMO podcast, where he talks with marketing and advertising experts.

Today’s guest, Chetana Deorah, talks about the role of design to drive business outcomes for some of the top companies in the world. Growing up in the hustle and bustle of Mumbai, Chetana’s curiosity and rebelliousness led her to dabble in the life sciences before finding her calling in UX design. She’s taken her success and translated it into not only hockey stick growth for profit-motivated companies but also inspiring the next generation of designers from under-resourced communities in the Bay Area through the Inneract Project. In her own words, the role of a designer is to ask not the what or the how, but the why. In a time where mobile and technology platforms are pushing to A/B test, fail fast, and use analytics to adapt to our new world, Chetana reminds us that oftentimes the sole goal of creating growth may be limiting. She reminds us we must start with why. Hear more about Chetana’s incredible story of how one becomes a design leader, the reason why she believes Netflix stays so adaptable (her answer will stay with you), as well as some of her own questions around what the future looks like in education, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.