How I Grew This

Jean-Sebastien Laverge, the Chief Growth Officer at Tilting Point, joins us in the next episode of How I Grew This podcast. As a CGO, JS oversees more than forty game titles. Before Tilting Point, he worked for twelve years at Gameloft, where he helped generate significant annual revenues by developing retention and monetization strategies. Tilting Point is a leading award-winning free-to-play games publisher that empowers independent developers to accelerate their growth. It started as a premium game publisher then shifted to the freemium model. The team has now built a new model called progressive publishing. Some of the company's most successful games include Star Trek Timelines, Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest, and SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off. Tilting Point approaches growth in three directions. Firstly, paid growth, which is about user acquisition. Secondly, organic growth includes ASO, distribution platform optimization, IP integration, and marketing buzz. And lastly, monetization growth improves the user's LTV. Some of the most impactful paid channels remain Facebook and Google. When you synchronize the three axes you can unlock maximum growth for your game. According to JS, to engage and bring people back into the game, you can advertise specific offers or push notifications and emails. If you want to start in the gaming industry, you need to be passionate about it, be analytical, and understand data and statistics. If you are a leader in the gaming industry, be transparent and find good talent to help and support you.

Diego Dzodan, the co-founder and CEO of Facily, joins us in the next episode of How I Grew This podcast. Before starting Facily, Diego worked for Facebook and Instagram as the VP of Latam. He spent ten years at SAP, where he focused on driving growth across countries by strengthening relationships with customers while working with them to innovate and deliver business value. Facily is the leading social commerce marketplace in Brazil. It operates in nine Brazilian cities and has over 12,000 pick-up points. Faci.ly focuses on lower-income segments of the market and tries to offer the best possible prices to its consumers. To achieve that, Facily connects the consumer and the producer and helps with logistics. Facily also asks their customers to form groups to buy at better prices. One of the main priorities Faci.ly has is getting the operations on track to continue to scale and increase the efficiency under which it can deliver orders. The company wants to expand in all major cities across Brazil and test in Mexico and Colombia. Working in the corporate world results in gaining many valuable insights and lessons when starting a business. You encounter all the positive and negative aspects of the business world. It becomes easier to think big when you have seen big companies perform well and you learn how to plan for the long-term. But one of the main lessons that exceed the corporate world is learning to stay close to details and build something different from what the market offers. Leaving a good job and starting a business requires you to be prepared from many angles. First, take your finances into account. Second, having your family's support is crucial. Third, you need to be emotionally ready to take that step.

The pandemic has certainly brought about many changes to the world - one of them being how companies do business. Since the onset, marketers from various industries have been working to figure out how to stay relevant and continue to appeal to consumers when priorities and advertising systems are constantly evolving. Today’s guest is Jason Wilson, Overstock.com’s Director of Marketing. He shares how he’s led his digital marketing team to success in a time when consumer spending habits have been drastically altered. More on Jason’s story, including how he effectively grew a campaign 44% without having to increase his budget, his take on the four new pillars of digital marketing, and how Overstock.com was uniquely positioned to survive the economic downturn of the pandemic, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

In the age of increasing levels of automation, it’s easy to get bogged down with the desire to automate as much as possible. However, this isn’t always in the best interest of your product’s users. Chris Yu has worked in various fields, from venture capital to gaming, before landing at Microsoft-acquired productivity app, MileIQ. Chris shares his perspective on the importance of giving your users choice, the ability to trade off product decisions based on a north star metric, and his stance on how mobile has quickly surpassed the web experience. Hear these stories and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.

What can be gleaned from the stories at the geographic and technological edge between the US and China? As a Bay Area native, how did a journey back to China lead to strategic growth for American companies like LinkedIn and Tesla who hadn’t yet unlocked the Chinese market? Hear about the way Pinterest grew pre-IPO, how Linus is leading his team with compassion at Coinbase, and how his appearance on a Chinese dating show became a user acquisition strategy. Hear all this and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.

How do you achieve growth when the system is full of obstacles? With today’s guest, Lomit Patel, we talk about choosing to take decisive action towards your goals whether that’s in your own career or with your product. From working his way up the ladder to his dream job to having the foresight to push for utilizing AI at a time when it was still very new, Lomit has proved to be a catalyst for immense growth. More on Lomit’s story on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

How does someone with a passion for cooking end up leading a team driving business-critical decisions? What does it take to teach yourself how to code then apply that to how you are able to help a company grow? This story, how she learned to tell stories with data at Visa, the 2x2 matrix thinking model, and when to make a career jump into (or out of) the startup world is featured on this episode of How I Grew This with Farah Abuzeid of Depop.

What does it take to recreate the organic growth of the largest online delivery grocery in the US in a new market like Mexico? How do you define growth when new markets take time to mature and show actual business outcomes? Our next guest, Adithi Sampath, has worked across a variety of industries building products in gaming, insurance, and now is forging the online grocery experience for Walmart Grocery Mexico.

Aim big. This theme, along with successful cross-collaboration, aligning with strong mentors, and leading by example, seems to be common in many growth stories. How does the theme of family fit in? Manoj Tolety shares what he’s learned from becoming a parent and how human behavior, a dash of luck, and hard work drives both personal and professional growth. This, traveling the world every 6 months for eBay, increasing his app budget by 3x, and more are featured on this episode of How I Grew This with Manoj Tolety of StubHub. Listen now on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher!

What does it take to build a leading Peer-to-Peer car-sharing company when the market is exploding with new competitors? How do you continue to drive growth after your company gets acquired? This, the stories of learning from failure, recruiting his first users one by one, and the decisions he made that ensured the product remained a market leader, are in our third episode of “How I Grew This” with Vincent Saint-Martin of OuiCar.