How I Grew This

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.

Inés Ures, CMO at Deliveroo, shares her views on growth when it comes to product and retention and how marketing strategies have changed in a post-COVID world. More on Inés’ story, including her unconventional path to becoming a CMO, how Deliveroo pivoted their marketing plans to support restaurants and frontline workers, and the increasingly prevalent shift from paid to organic growth strategies, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Morgan Brown is the VP of Growth at Shopify and the author of the book “Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success”. Prior to Shopify, Morgan led the product team at Facebook and was the Chief Operating Officer for Inman News - the leading news source for real estate and technology. Given the size of the Shopify brand, they optimize metrics and data analytic processes from a “merchant-first” perspective. This helps guide them toward their mission of making online commerce easier and better for everyone. There's no value in a spiking lead conversion rate if they don’t become customers. Shopify relies on its growth marketing team (which Morgan is the VP of) for user acquisition. They also have a growth product side that focuses on activation signup, activation trials, and success retention. Internally, growth goals are divided into “missions” and mission teams include channel experts, product leaders, data scientists, engineers, and other cross-functional roles. This decentralized split of marketing teams helps these growth pillars move forward without friction as self-contained units. Commerce is no longer a discrete point where you drive customers from point A to point B, but it's really about being where that action is going to take place. Shopify recently partnered with TikTok to take their merchants where their customers are and bring the tools of giants like Instagram closer to their merchants.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Hovhannes Avoyan, Founder and CEO of Picsart, joins Mada Seghete to share how his daughter's negative experience led to the creation of Picsart, the platform's growth and unique features, as well as how to use AI to drive more growth for their app or companies. Hovhannes is a seasoned entrepreneur and investor, having founded several successful startups, including Sourcio, Monitis, and CEDIT. His extensive experience encompasses building enterprise software, SaaS web platforms, and consumer mobile products, showcasing his diverse expertise in these domains.

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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.

Our guest on this episode of How I Grew This, Dan Bishop, is currently the Senior Vice President of Global Mobile and Digital Marketing at Citi. Most people that build a career in startups stay in the startup world and most who go to Fortune 500 brands stay in that world. Dan has built a career traversing through both. He got his start seeing innovations that would change the world years later, first at JumpTV creating Online TV deals before Netflix and then at UStream seeing the early days of live streaming. Being at companies that were years ahead of the rest of the world showed him what true innovation looked like and how to find the sweet spot of timing to build, launch and grow digital products. He shares his story of how he made it to Citibank and how most other large brands still have a Web 1.0 marketing tech stack in 2020. Beyond marketing software, Dan shares one of the most critical components is finding people who truly understand what innovation takes and how he finds them. More on Dan’s story including his time working with Jason Calcanis, the product he launched at TurboTax being able to scan and file taxes back in 2010 and how COVID-19 has changed the financial industry on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

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.

On this episode Archie Abrams, Senior Director of Product Management, shares how he thinks about balancing supply and demand at Lyft, even as markets have been forever changed by COVID-19. Before this, he was the 10th employee at udemy. Over the course of his 7.5 years there he helped to scale Udemy from no revenue to hundreds of millions in revenue and over 600 employees. More on Archie’s story, including how perceived value plays into the psychology of your user, why it’s important to utilize the behaviors of your best customers, and why you should reevaluate immediately killing unsuccessful strategies, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

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.