The Breakout Growth Podcast

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at TripActions, a mobile-first corporate travel platform that has quickly achieved a $4B valuation. In the 10 months since Meagen joined the company, the overall team size has tripled from a few hundred employees to over 1000.  In the interview, Meagan shares her insights into what is driving this breakout growth. She covers a  broad range of topics including:How her team is organizedThe process that her team follows to accelerate growthHow her team fits into the broader organizationWhat the company does to drive cross-functional alignment and ensure that everyone is “rowing in the same direction”Meagen credits a lot of the growth to strong product/market fit in the $1.5 trillion corporate travel market. She explains that TripActions delivers on a powerful value proposition for both businesses and their traveling employees. For businesses, TripActions helps drive significant savings, reaching up to 34% of their total travel budget (the second largest controllable expense in businesses). But where TripActions really shines is their ability to help improve the actual traveler experience.  Travelers get 24x7 365 travel agents to help them ensure their travel goes smoothly.  See detailed TripActions growth study at https://growthhackers.com/growth-studiesLearn more about Meagen Eisenberg here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meageneisenberg/Learn more about TripActions here: https://tripactions.com/Learn more about Sean Ellis at www.SeanEllis.me Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Casper Rouchmann, Templafy's head of growth and product owner, Oskar Konstantyner. Templafy is an Enterprise SaaS platform for helping companies stay consistent with their branding and compliant in their messaging. Their solution helps teams keep templates consistent ranging from PowerPoint to email. Templafy is one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe and was recently ranked as the fastest-growing company in Denmark. Oskar and Casper explain that some of the key advantages supporting this rapid growth are a great product, rapid deployment across an organization once it has been purchased and a very low churn rate.Oskar and Casper have both worked to further accelerate growth with growth hacking. In the interview, we explore the challenges and opportunities of using growth hacking when a product is relatively expensive, has a long sales cycle and has multiple stakeholders involved in a purchase decision. We agree that cross-company alignment around the right North Star Metric is critical for unlocking the power of growth hacking and go on to discuss potential North Star Metrics for the business. Despite the challenges, Oskar and Casper are confident that a strong team and a clear focus on enterprise customers make an affective growth hacking approach possible. Learn more about Casper Rouchmann at https://www.linkedin.com/in/casper-rouchmann-growth-hacker/?originalSubdomain=dkLearn more about Oskar Konstantyner at https://www.linkedin.com/in/konstantyner/?originalSubdomain=dkLearn more about Templafy at www.templafy.com Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com, a SaaS platform disrupting the $1.3 trillion business travel market. As the former CMO at Hubspot, Mike provides an interesting perspective on growth since he now oversees all of the key growth levers in the business.   Initially, Lola wasn't focused on the B2B market. The founder previously helped build Kayak.com so he has a strong background in the consumer travel space.  But by studying their early passionate customers the Lola team realized their product was resonating most with business travelers. Given Mike’s background growing B2B SaaS companies, he was an ideal CEO to recruit to help lead the company into this opportunity. Mike credits Lola’s rapid growth to having a fantastic product serving a very large market. Lola provides value to both travel managers and road warriors. For travel managers, Lola helps them save significantly on their travel expenses and gain better visibility and control over their corporate travel. For road warriors, Lola helps improve the overall travel experience. As CEO, Mike believes an important part of his role is to keep the overall team aligned and pulling in the same direction. One of the most effective ways he helps to drive this alignment and cross-functional collaboration is through a monthly full-day meeting between the functional leads. By carving out a full day, they go beyond surface level reporting to actually working with each other to achieve the company objectives. Another key part of Mike’s role as CEO is to ensure that the company isn’t just growing quickly but it is maintaining strong unit economics as it does so. He explains that the B2B travel space has attracted so much investment capital that it would be easy to pursue growth at any cost. He believes that it is critical to take a more sustainable approach to growth. Learn more about CEO Mike Volpe at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevolpeLearn more about Lola at www.Lola.com  Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Dennis Poulsen, CEO of Valuer, along with their CMO, Taylor Ryan. Valuer helps major enterprises tap into startup innovation strengths via their AI-powered matchmaking platform. Sean’s goal with this interview is to understand what is truly driving breakout growth success for Valuer. Since launching in early 2018, the Demark based business has scaled rapidly due to a surprisingly short sales cycle and an effective lead gen program.In the interview, we explore the problem that Dennis and his cofounders originally set out to solve, how they were able to build initial traction for the platform and when they had enough validation to aggressively start scaling.We also analyzed today’s growth engine which starts with aggressive customer acquisition.  Most new sales leads are generated via content marketing that aims to increase awareness among enterprises that startups can help solve their digital transformation and corporate innovation challenges. This content marketing has helped valuer achieve strong organic search traffic.  The Valuer team works to convert web traffic to qualified sales leads by optimizing site content such as case studies and reducing friction to completing the demo request forms. They are able to capture additional leads for outbound sales calls by analyzing IP addresses of the businesses that visit their website without completing a lead gen form.  Once leads are generated, the sales team works to quickly arrange a demo of how the platform works. Given that Valuer sales efforts are focused on large enterprises, the sales cycle is surprisingly short, typically ranging from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. All of these elements of the growth engine ultimately are working to increase the number of synergistic matches between startups and large enterprises. Learn more about Valuer at Valuer.aiLearn more about CEO Dennis Poulsen here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennisjuulpoulsen/Learn more about CMO Taylor Ryan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorryan/ Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

For this episode, we look back at the first six episodes of The Breakout Growth Podcast to uncover key cross-company learnings from each of the breakout growth interviews. Ethan Garr, SVP Growth at Robokiller, returns to help me uncover the key commonalities and differences between these breakout growth companies.I interviewed Ethan in episode 2 about RoboKiller and the path they took from product/market fit to an acquisition by IAC. Ethan has also been helping write more in-depth growth studies on each of the companies featured on the podcast (available at GrowthHackers.com/growthstudies).So Ethan is really the perfect person to help me uncover some of the key learnings across these breakout growth companies. Some of the areas that we explore include:The role of product/market fit and mission in driving growthWe compared growth engines and key growth drivers across each of the companies (Acorns, RoboKiller, Transferwise, Resi, Freshly and GenM)We compared the leadership styles to find what is critical to driving sustainable growthFinally, we dug into some of the challenges that each company is facing or will likely face as they work to sustain their rapid growth rates Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Mayur Gupta, CMO of Freshly, the number one direct-to-consumer, fully-prepared, meal delivery service in America. They are on a mission to deliver healthy, tasty, and convenient meals that are fresh and ready to eat in minutes. They have attracted over one million subscribers and expect to deliver almost 35 million meals this year. Sean’s goal with this interview is to understand what is truly driving breakout growth success for Freshly. According to Gupta, the real growth drivers to date have been leveraging the intersection of health, taste, and convenience as the basis for strong product-market fit. That, along with the ability to instill a mission-driven culture and mindset, has allowed them to use rapid iteration as their catalyst for growth. This kind of rapid iterative thinking is specifically important to Freshly because meeting the demands of a diverse market requires continuous optimizations to attract and convert target customer segments. For example, people who previously were buying frozen meals have different expectations in regards to variety as compared to recent empty nesters. Freshly has applied growth testing to developing menu variety, and now they are looking to serve additional markets such as vegetarians. Activation for Freshly happens when customers make their first order. Once they try Freshly, customers are able to appreciate the intersections of great taste, healthy meals, and convenience. Freshly also has a referral program that incentivizes customers to recommend the healthy, convenient meal service to their friends. When a friend successfully subscribes to Freshly, both parties receive $40 in free Freshly meal credits. The Freshly team has also been able to discover and scale profitable paid customer acquisition channels. Freshly’s growth to date has been built without a strong focus on brand building and only recently has the company started to put more focus on organic growth and to emphasize its brand and PR initiatives.Learn more about the Freshly success story in the growth study here https://growthhackers.com/growthstudiesLearn more about CMO Mayur Gupta here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/inspiremartech/ Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Moe Abbas, CEO of GenM, a marketplace for digital marketing apprenticeships that has attracted over 60,000 students and 30,000 businesses in its first 2 years of business.   Sean’s goal with this interview is to understand what is truly driving breakout growth success for GenM’s marketplace. GenM’s growth starts with strong product/market fit and a worthy mission of fixing the broken internship model. Their solution connects students with businesses for digital marketing apprenticeships. The language of “apprenticeships” is an intentional departure from the more traditional language of internships. But the solution goes beyond language to actually require that new businesses sign a commitment to true mentorship and teaching for students. GenM complements this hands-on training with courses that help the students bring real marketing skills to the relationship. GenM’s business model makes the program free for students and businesses pay just $89/month. The GenM team optimized to this price point after realizing that higher price points changed the nature of the relationship between the apprentice and the business.  At this price point, businesses are willing to mentor and teach the apprentice.      The North Star Metric for the entire team is to expand the weekly active apprenticeships. As a two-sided marketplace, this North Star Metric is driven by distinct growth engines for both the business and the student sides of the marketplace. Students are largely attracted to free education and on the job experience. Businesses, on the other hand, are attracted to the idea of mentoring and teaching an apprentice in exchange for 10 hours/week of marketing help.  In his role at GenM as CEO, Moe Abbas has worked to nurture a “test and learn” growth mindset across the company. This is evident in the rapid experimentation that the team has with everything from how they onboard new businesses and students to the prices that they charge for the service.  Learn more about Moe Abbas here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moeabbas/?originalSubdomain=ca And learn more about GenM here: www.genm.co  Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Alexandra DePledge, CEO of Resi, a UK based company that aims to reduce the challenges of home renovation and building projects. After only 2.5 years, they have built Resi to become the largest architectural platform in the UK.Sean’s goal with this interview is to understand what is truly driving breakout growth success for Resi. While Resi’s goal is to build a broad platform for the full range of building challenges, they narrowed their initial solution to a low level, affordable entry product so they could ensure a quality solution and achieve initial product-market fit. By onboarding customers into this solution, the Resi team was able to learn about other pressing challenges that people face with their home building and renovation projects. From this initial solution, they have expanded into architectural planning and design services, financing solutions and even a marketplace for builders and contractors. They have developed a unique team structure that combines both a team to iterate around these new opportunities and an operating team to capitalize on product/market fit for the solutions that have been validated.One highly effective tactic for Resi is a free telephone hotline to answer any questions about the home building and renovation process. This hotline is available to both existing customers and non-customers, providing a powerful way to build trust and eventually cross-sell a broad range of building services. Given that the typical family rarely does a home renovation or building projects, Resi does not have a long-term engagement loop. So instead, they focus on building a strong referral loop via ambassadors. They also benefit from significant average revenue per customer which they can use to fund the paid acquisition loop. Learn more about Alexandra DePledge here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-depledge-mbe-22b57a14/?originalSubdomain=ukAnd learn more about Resi here: https://resi.co.uk/ Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Ethan Garr, the SVP of Growth at Teltech, the makers of RoboKiller. RoboKiller has been nominated by Apple as the App of The Day in addition to consistently being ranked in the top twenty for utility app downloads. It has been featured on both local and national news programs around the USA as an important solution to battling robo callers. Due largely to the growth success of RoboKiller, Teletech was acquired by IAC earlier this year.Sean’s goal with this interview is to deconstruct what is truly driving breakout growth for RoboKiller. Their growth starts with strong product/market fit and the worthy mission of reducing the number of robocalls that annoy all of us on a daily basis. Their solution is a mobile app that detects robocalls and wastes the time of the spammer by keeping them on the line with a recorded voice that appears to be a real human. The more these callers waste their time with the RoboKiller bots, the less time they have to annoy us.In his role at RoboKiller, Ethan helped to conceptualize the RoboKiller solution, iterate it to product-market fit, and ultimately drive its scale and adoption to a breakout hit. Ethan credits their success to, “product-market fit, people, and passion.” He believes that when these three points intersect, they drive rapid, sustainable growth. The team has conducted obsessive optimizations and an aggressive outbound PR effort.Early in their career, Ethan and Sean worked together in marketing to build Uproar.com, the largest online gaming community at the time, which listed on NASDAQ and was acquired by Vivendi Universal in 2001. Learn more about Ethan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-garr-08b101/And give RoboKiller a try here: www.RoboKiller.com Get full access to Growth with Sean Ellis at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe

TransferWise VP Growth, Nilan Peiris, discusses the company's breakout growth success. They have achieved this through strong product/market fit, building customer advocates instead of expensive advertising, closely monitoring Net Promoter Score, entering the Brazilian market, and evolving KPIs aligned with the mission.