The Breakout Growth Podcast

How can growth teams win by borrowing a bit from their engineering counterparts? Find out in this week’s Growth Snack: The Breakout Growth Podcast Short. Here, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr discuss the idea that growth teams win when they “Write the Report Before they Run the Experiment”.  Ethan says growth teams that do this run better experiments, more frequently, with more predictable outcomes. Sean likes the idea because he has seen just how difficult it can be to get high-tempo testing to take flight. Because this technique forces teams to start with the end in mind as they run experiments, he believes it is a good habit to get into if you are looking to improve your growth trajectory. If you want to learn more about applying this concept after you listen, visit, “Write The Report Before You Run The Experiment” on BreakoutGrowth.net https://bit.ly/3sEo8f0We discussed: * Writing the report first is a good idea if you want to test more effectively (28.81)* Why faster testing shouldn’t come at the expense of quality learnings (01:18)* Documenting what you are going to do; a lesson from GoPractice!  (03:48)*  Begin with the end in mind to think ahead and drive test/learn cycles (04:26)*  Who should build this habit (05:34) Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast is sponsored by Rise with SAP and features Garima Sinha, Instacart’s Head of Growth. Instacart makes it easy to get groceries conveniently delivered to your home, but that is just the beginning. The company is working to bring that same convenience to a wide range of products we use in our daily lives. Garima joined less than a year ago after serving in growth roles at Facebook, so we wanted to learn more about what drove her successful transition and how her experience can help other growth professionals.  People are more mobile in their careers than ever before, but moving from one large fast-growing company to another, especially in a leadership role, can be difficult.  Garima explains that while it was not an easy decision to make the change in the first place, Instacart offered new challenges that she was hungry to embrace. When she says, “there was much to do,” you can hear just how excited she was to take on her new role. Bringing her passion for both the challenges and the mission clearly have been key elements of her success at Instacart, but Garima also offers practical insights when making this kind of career change.  From building a team culture where individuals play a key role in the decision-making process to spending the time to dive into the levers she had less experience with, Garima shares a path that others can follow. And of course, because she is specifically leading growth, this episode is full of actionable insights around data and experimentation as well.  Please remember to check out this week’s sponsor, RISE with SAP S/4Hana Cloud. If you have ambitious goals, SAP is the technology partner you need to scale and drive innovation. Instead of relying on stitched together solutions to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations, leverage the flexibility of SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution to gain the insights that will help drive your breakout growth success.  RISE with SAP Link: bit.ly/3u27Ay6 Please take a moment to rate and review The Breakout Growth Podcast wherever you listen. We discussed:* Grappling with the decision to move from Facebook to Instacart (04:28) * Thinking of growth as the full funnel (13:47)* What Garima did first when taking on this role (15:41)* Conviction; why growth leaders shouldn’t give up easily on their first instincts (34:47)* Deferring decisions to the teams (35:58)And much, much, more . . . Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

Ron Schneidermann, CEO of AllTrails, discusses his unconventional growth strategy that landed the app a whopping $150 million in funding. He reveals how focusing on product/channel fit before traditional market fit transformed AllTrails into a favorite for outdoor enthusiasts. Ron shares insights on navigating startup challenges, the importance of sustainable growth, and the impact of COVID-19 on user engagement. He also emphasizes humility and strategic alignment with investors as keys to fostering a thriving company culture.

In this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, hosts Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr speak with Jon Chang who recently took on the Head of Growth role at Nate. Nate is a new service that allows consumers to buy products from any e-commerce site with just one click. You may remember Jon from his first appearance on the podcast when he was a growth lead at Klarna, a rocketship Fintech company now valued at more than $45 Billion. His experience and approach offer valuable insights for leaders at fast-growing companies struggling to hire the right people to build on strong growth rates as well as individual growth and marketing professionals who are looking to find their next great opportunities. This week’s episode is sponsored by Rise with SAP. Why did Jon leave this nearly 6000 person rocketship for a fast-growing, but relatively small 70 person startup? Well, when we saw Jon had shared a LinkedIn Post, by another former guest, Mayur Gupta (formerly Marketing/Growth lead at of Freshly and Spotify and now at Gannett Publications), it gave us a great starting point to answer that and other questions: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6883531385433321472/ Mayur encourages every marketer to get startup experience at some point in their journey, and suggests that the earlier the better. Jon agrees, and as a self-described builder, he explains not just why this matters, but also how it informs his approach for hiring and leading growth.  Jon is obsessed with building teams and driving organizational efficiencies, but his approach is anything but clinical. From his thoughts on mentoring to his focus on soft skills, this discussion is really about a people-driven mindset to powering growth.  Please remember to check out this week’s sponsor, RISE with SAP S/4Hana Cloud. If you have ambitious goals, SAP is the technology partner you need to scale and drive innovation. Instead of relying on stitched together solutions to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations, leverage the flexibility of SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution to gain the insights that will help drive your breakout growth success.  RISE with SAP Link: bit.ly/3u27Ay6 We discussed:* Moving from Klarna to Nate (03:35)* Why startups need jack-of-all-trades personalities to be successful (06:20)* Auditing the experience before you apply for a job (13:15)* Challenges of measuring your impact in large organizations (20:30)* Jon’s approach to Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

This week's episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast is brought to you by Rise with SAP and includes some incredible stories! Paul Malicki is the founder and CEO of Flapper, Brazil’s first on-demand private aviation marketplace, and his journey has been anything but boring. Hold onto your hats, as he tells Ethan and Sean about a negotiation he had in the Philippines where the other party placed a grenade and a gun on the desk and asked whether Paul was still not willing to budge from his proposed 70/30 revenue split?   That story stems from his days launching Easy Taxi in developing countries, but the excitement has continued, as Paul moved from building a terrestrial taxi service to now building a taxi service of sorts for the skies. Paul’s vision is to turn private aviation into a mainstream travel option. From creating a marketplace where travelers can book empty seats on private jets and helicopters to offering on-demand charters, Flapper is blazing its own trail to breakout growth success. In 2019 the business grew 251%, and even with the challenges of the global pandemic, Paul and his team still were able to realize ~100% year over year gains in 2020. Driving growth through the tumult required a quick pivot to leverage the skyrocketing demand for cargo and ambulance flights, but a scrappy, growth hacker’s mindset helped to keep the business on track through these difficult times. Flappers ascent has been anything but easy. Aviation has traditionally been a tough industry in which to win, and Paul explains that it took 228 meetings to raise seed money for the business, and another 530 meetings to fund his Series A. But, he explains his determination very simply: “I was already here, I liked what I was doing, and it was a sexy business.”  So sit back and enjoy one of our most fun and entertaining conversations of the year. We still get into the gritty details of team structure, growth engine, and all the other important elements of growth you expect from the podcast, but through Paul’s experience taking on challenges in developing, and not always friendly environments, we view growth from a unique and exciting vantage point.  Before you jump in learn more about RISE with SAP S/4Hana Cloud here. If you have ambitious goals, SAP is the technology partner you need to scale and drive innovation. Instead of relying on stitched together solutions to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations, leverage the flexibility of SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution to gain the insights that will help drive your breakout growth success.   RISE with SAP Link: bit.ly/3u27Ay6 Fasten your seatbelt for this one!  We discussed:* A vision to change the way we travel (4:56)* Why private aviation can be affordable (6:53)* Learnings Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, brought to you by Rise with SAP, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr are joined by Sean’s co-author of “Hacking Growth” Morgan Brown. The book was published back in 2017, so in this episode, we get to hear the two guys who literally wrote the book on growth “geek out” about their most important growth learnings since their initial collaboration. Morgan’s perspective on growth has been shaped by the leadership roles he has held at Inman News and Facebook, and in his current Vice-President of Growth position at Shopify. These companies are an order of magnitude larger than anything he and Sean had worked on prior to writing the book, so as we dive in we look to understand how the sheer scale of these businesses has impacted Morgan’s perspective.  Would he write a different book or change anything today with the benefit of hindsight? Morgan found incredible value in the understand, identify, execute, approach, that has molded Facebook into the most sophisticated growth organization in the world. At Shopify, he is now working to grow a team that leverages structured thinking to run trustworthy experiments that use the playbook of “Hacking Growth” at scale. Sean’s own experiences working with fast-growing companies since writing the book guide his thinking on these topics, and that makes for some fascinating discussion!  There is plenty to learn in this episode, but before you jump in learn more about RISE with SAP S/4Hana Cloud here. If you have ambitious goals, SAP is the technology partner you need to scale and drive innovation. Instead of relying on stitched together solutions to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations, leverage the flexibility of SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution to gain the insights that will help drive your breakout growth success.  RISE with SAP Link: bit.ly/3u27Ay6 Thanks for tuning in and please rate and review the Breakout Growth Podcast wherever you listen. We discussed:* Scale matters: the humbling experiences of working at Facebook, the world’s most advanced growth organization (05:36)* The sheer number of funnels: why scale offers so much opportunity to experiment (06:47)* Building “trustworthy” experiments: developing the muscle to gain valuable learnings across an organization (11:51)* Big bets versus smaller optimization: Morgan’s belief in Hacking Growth’s iterative process to drive value (20:18)* Find the root cause: Learnings from Facebook’s understand, identify, execute approach  (25:47)* Two books in one: Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In the last 48 months, the fintech app Truebill, which helps users manage their personal finances, has had 47 months of exceptional growth. But in this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, brought to you by Rise with SAP, Ethan Garr and Sean Ellis find out that before this hypergrowth tear began, the company was actually on death’s doorstep. Four years ago, the two-year-old startup had just three months of runway remaining, and Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Yahya Mokhtarzada was told by one of his investors that the only option was to sell. He figured the company had the bandwidth for two more experiments; one of those tests would change everything! The test shifted the business from an affiliate to a premium subscription model, and the surprising conversion result didn’t just buy more time, it was the final piece needed for Truebill to achieve Product/Market Fit. Since then, Truebill’s breakout growth success has been a story of “eternal tweaking” where Yahya has come to learn that if you are doing growth right, resources never free up the way you expect. As Chief Revenue Officer in a B2C business, he sees his role as one of setting up teams to stay focused on the things that matter and ensuring individuals can continuously thrive by leveraging their creativity. And creativity seems to be one of the key success factors for Truebill. If you download the app, you might be surprised by the “pay what you think is fair” pricing model, and other unique elements that drive users to aha moments where they start thinking about their finances and saving money in different ways.    There is plenty to learn in this episode, but before you jump in learn more about RISE with SAP S/4Hana Cloud here. If you have ambitious goals, SAP is the technology partner you need to scale and drive innovation. Instead of relying on stitched together solutions to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations, leverage the flexibility of SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution to gain the insights that will help drive your breakout growth success.  RISE with SAP Link: bit.ly/3u27Ay6 Thanks for tuning in. Please subscribe and share the Breakout Growth Podcast with your colleagues and friends.  We discussed:* “The app I always needed:” how an annoying $40/month subscription fee drove Truebill’s inception  (04:14)* Chief Revenue Officer: a very different role in B2B vs. B2C (07:01)* “We weren’t the cool kids:” Struggling to find traction and Product/Market Fit (11:10)*  Crunch time: 3 months of runway and time for two experiments. What a last-chance test on premium subscriptions taught Truebill (22:27) Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

Show Notes: In this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, brought to you by Rise with SAP, Ethan Garr and Sean Ellis speak with Kieran Flanagan, Hubspot’s Senior Vice President of Marketing to learn what’s driving Hubspot’s unstoppable growth. With more than 100,000 customers and over $1 billion dollars in ARR, Hubspot is simply on fire.  Kieran has been a growth leader at the company for nearly ten years. During that time the business has gone through massive changes. From its giant bet on Freemium to a more recent shift from inbound marketing to inbound media, the company has continuously reinvented itself in its quest to become the #1 CRM for scaling businesses. However, despite Hubspot’s enormous scale and $37 billion valuation (at the time of recording), the insights and learnings from this discussion relate to businesses both large and small. Yes, at this size, Kieran does explain that he and his team have to focus on big bets because small optimizations just won’t have enough impact, but his framework for making smart decisions, taking risks, and building a culture where innovation can thrive is applicable for any company looking to drive breakout growth success. Kieran is also forthcoming about the moments when he felt stuck trying to tackle specific problems. The strategies he employed to overcome these challenges offer practical lessons to help listeners see their way forward when they encounter roadblocks to growth.  Before you jump into the episode, we encourage you to learn more about RISE with SAP S/4Hana Cloud. If you have ambitious goals, SAP is the technology partner you need to scale and drive innovation. Instead of relying on stitched together solutions to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations, leverage the flexibility of SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution to gain the insights that will help drive your breakout growth success.  RISE with SAP Link: bit.ly/3u27Ay6 Thanks for tuning in to this episode with Kieran Flanagan, Hubspot’s Senior Vice President of Marketing, and please share the Breakout Growth Podcast with your colleagues and friends.  We discussed: *  Hubspot’s evolution into a modern-day CRM built for the internet (03:12)* From “inbound marketing” to “inbound media:” why Hubspot is betting on building a true media organization to power growth (06:50)* Organizing for growth as a large organization: With more than a billion dollars in ARR, Hubspot’s marketing team must think on a much bigger scale to source demand (08:28)* The changing world of content consumption and “community” a Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, Ethan Garr and Sean Ellis chat with Mark Tan, Director of Product, Platform & Community at Wyze, a smart home tech startup offering affordable cameras, lighting, sensors, and other devices to more than 5 million customers. But this conversation goes well beyond just the Wyze growth story. Mark is a leader in the growing Community-Led Growth movement, so it’s through that lens that we look to understand how companies are leveraging their own audiences of passionate users to achieve success.  Over our 50 episode history, we have noticed that many of the world's fastest-growing companies leverage the strength of their own communities to drive outcomes. Glowforge showed us how a passionate userbase literally crowdsourced the company’s 3D laser printer into existence. EVBox credits its customer advocacy efforts as a major reason why the company has been able to lead an entire industry. But is Community-Led Growth an actionable approach or just new packaging for good product management?  Mark explains that CLG is a real discipline that when executed with intentionality drives significant value. He has used it to power growth at Wyze, and in his former role at Amazon Video Games. He acknowledges that there are challenges in tracking community impact, but he explains how he and his team are using this approach to deliver value for their audiences.  So let’s dive in with Mark Tan of Wyze and find out more about Community-Led Growth, a powerful mechanism for reflecting customer empathy into your products.We discussed: * (11:40) Measuring the impact of community-led growth efforts on overall growth rate.  * (20:26) Why direct feedback from customers isn't enough. There is a lot more honesty when customers talk to each other.* (21:17) Why detractors in your community can actually be beneficial.   * (23:20) Why hardware companies must embrace community-led growth to remain competitive.  * (30:36) How to organize your team for more effective community-led growth efforts.  * (49:02) The most important new thing that Mark has learned about growth in the last couple of years. And much, much, more . . .  Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

“Are you creating impact?” That is the fundamental question that drives Heap’s Chief Marketing Officer, Lynn Girotto. Heap’s analytics platform is designed to help digital product managers “know where to look” by automatically surfacing insights and identifying friction points across the customer journey. Thanks to a unique approach to capturing data, where every end-user interaction is tracked, Lynn feels Heap is able to drive impact in more meaningful and valuable ways for clients.  This episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast struck a chord for hosts Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr. When data is democratized, accessible, and easily visualized it drives curiosity and inspires creativity, but too often data becomes a black box that holds back growth. Heap exists to help teams align and leverage data, and that seems to couple well with Lynn’s approach to marketing. Leveraging experience in senior marketing roles at top brands including Pepsi, Microsoft, and Starbucks, she is focused on helping her team see and measure their impact across the organization. From building a brand and tracking share of voice to optimizing Heap’s freemium offerings to build a pipeline, Lynn describes an approach to growth where constant inspiration and fostering a fun and supportive environment is powering growth. From balancing the needs of self-service and higher touch clients to using data and insights to allocate resources, this episode offers something for anyone looking to create impact in their organization. So take a listen as we dive into Heap’s story with Chief Marketing Officer, Lynn Girotto. We discussed: * Solving a key pain point (4:44) * From Starbucks and Pepsi to Tableau and Heap (7:05) * The Grandma Test, and a new approach to analytics (9:37) * Self-service vs. hands-on customer relationships (22:00) * “Are you creating impact,” and other CMO challenges (25:08) * Measuring impact: brand, go-to-market, and customer insights (27:36) * Fostering creativity and constant inspiration (30:25) And much, much, more . . .  Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe