Gamelight founder Günay Azer sits down with ‘How I Grew This’ hosts Amanda Vandiver and Adam Landis to reveal the remarkable journey of transforming a bootstrapped startup into a mobile marketing powerhouse. In this episode, Günay shares how Gamelight's AI-powered platform revolutionizes user acquisition through sophisticated data analysis and personalized app recommendations. The conversation offers invaluable insights for anyone interested in mobile gaming, adtech innovation, and the future of AI-driven marketing strategies. Learn firsthand how Gamelight's cutting-edge approach is reshaping the mobile app marketing landscape through the strategic intersection of artificial intelligence, user behavior data, and targeted recommendation algorithms.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Shobeir Shobeiri, Senior Director of Business Development at Mintegral, joins host Amanda Vandiver and Adam Landis to discuss the evolution of mobile advertising and what brand advertising means in the context of mobile.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mauricio Monico, Chief Product Officer at Wish, joins Mada Seghete to delve into Mauricio's career journey, the growth and challenges of Wish, and the role of a product manager in the tech industry. Mauricio is a product leader and entrepreneur with over twenty years in the tech industry. Mauricio's professional journey encompasses a rich spectrum of experiences, from his tenure in enterprise product management at Microsoft to his pivotal contributions to consumer growth strategies at Facebook.

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.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Deepak Nair joins Mada Seghete to discuss how banks can drive digital transformation and innovation strategies and deliver a best-in-class digital experience to customers. Deepak is the Experience Transformation Leader at Citizens Bank and is responsible for managing enterprise transformation journeys that produce exceptional customer experience while reducing operational costs. He has twenty-plus years of experience in digital, marketing, CX, communications, and analytics and has been nominated for being one of the most influential industry contributors by the San Francisco Charter of Digital Analytics Association.

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.

Some people stop after creating their first successful company, but today’s guest, Sachin Bhatia, has created three products and companies that have flourished. Sachin shares how he got his parents' entrepreneurial spirit by selling water and other items as a child. He started his first company, MakeMyTrip, in 2000, and while they had a successful launch due to word of mouth, they weren’t able to keep up with demand. He learned his lesson, on the launch of his second company, TrulyMadly, they had the campaign to allow people to date not based on creed or religion in India which picked up a lot of press and was very successful. He then shares the story of how he and his Co-Founder teamed up again to build Bulbul, a video-based shopping app. More on Sachin’s story, including how his marketing campaign where MakeMyTrip asked for a second chance, his strategy for breaking down his campaigns, and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you find your podcasts.

As product leaders, you might be looking at road maps for 1-3 years from now, but our next guest is someone who seeks a challenge that takes a decade to solve. Loni Stark is the Senior Director of Strategy and Product at Adobe; fittingly, she works for Adobe; she is both a technical product leader and a creative artist with hobbies like a painting. She was inspired by her mother, who was the only woman in her job and pursued engineering, eventually landing at Stanford, where she focused on product management. At Stanford and in her early work, she learned how many critical components there are to a product's success, like the right partners, vendors, timing, and market need. She discusses the bittersweet challenge of solving long term problems, and she dives into how switching to the cloud was one of those challenges for Adobe and how they came out successfully. More on Loni's story, including how she made fake product one-pagers to get advice from other product managers, how she's trying to make enterprise onboarding as easy as consumer products, and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.

Grant Ingersoll, Chief Technology Officer of Wikimedia, joined us on the podcast this week to discuss his experience navigating his own career through identity and knowledge equity. He shares the path that led him to his current role and why he chose to take a bet on himself and start his own company. More on Grant’s story, including his beliefs that people’s views of themselves can be blockers for their own personal growth, why he is constantly reinventing himself as a founder, and Wikimedia’s roadmap to make their knowledge base reflect the global community, are shared in this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Today’s guest is Stuart Jones, the Head of Product at ITV Hub, an on demand streaming service in the UK. Stuart discusses how the pandemic has affected the television industry in many ways, specifically in the lack of available content along with the call for changes to their subscription model. More on Stuart’s story, including his early start as an airplane engineer apprentice, how his experience in various sectors brought him to TV, and his take on changing viewer habits in light of the pandemic are shared on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Martijn Lancee is the Senior Manager for Mobile Growth and Business Strategy on LinkedIn, where he has grown as a product leader over the past three years. Before LinkedIn, Martijn spent eight years at Google, where he was responsible for developing and implementing Google's app distribution strategy focused on preloads and pre-installs. Working on mobile growth preloads as a strategy, Martijn advises developers to launch a test with Digital Turbine and ironSource to understand how preloads could work for them. The challenging part is that you have to build that trust in time. Converting desktop and web users to start using your app offers more engagement and monetization. To convert users, you should constantly make effective app banners and let your users know about the benefits of using the app. You need to drive member value when launching a new feature or app. LinkedIn puts a lot of effort into ensuring that the platform is valuable to everyone with a job or looking for a job.

Tech professionals, especially those who work in product, are not necessarily the folks who first come to mind when discussing the topic of creativity. However, there is a shifting viewpoint that argues a healthy level of creativity and optimism is essential to these functions due to the responsibility of bringing technological advancements and game-changing content to a global audience. Michael Sippey, Chief Product Officer at Medium, joins the podcast to discuss his ideas regarding the inherent optimism required when creating something to share with the world, whether it’s a new app, a blog article and beyond. More on Michael’s story including his early experience running product at Twitter, the mistake he’s repeatedly made in his career that finally changed his perspective, and why he says product managers should never write an unordered list, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

When it comes to your career, taking the road less traveled will often serve you well. Knowing exactly what you’re passionate about, what you’re naturally good at and what you want to accomplish on your career path are essential components needed to live a life of intent. Today’s guest is Ana Guillen, the Senior Director of Marketing at TuneIn. She has been intentional about growing her career ever since her first job working at a local music store at 13 years old and utilizes this intent in all aspects of both her personal and professional life. Take a listen to hear more about Ana’s experience working for one of the industry’s leading record labels, her strategy for crafting intentional marketing campaigns that engage valuable lifetime users, and how she finally learned to trust her instincts. Hear all these stories and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Surendra Bashani, Senior Director of Product Management at Best Buy, joins us in the next episode of How I Grew This podcast. Surendra describes his role at Best Buy, where he focuses on various programs to see how customers behave and improve their customer experience. To measure the success of the programs, the team checks the metrics from adoption to increase engagement. They also measure customer feedback through CSAT surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, NPS, and store associates’ feedback and experiences. Growing a business depends on the company, the product's life cycle, and the problems you can solve. There are two parts to grow, marketing and creating value for customers. Furthermore, Surendra talks about the impact of mobile technology on business growth. Three main elements drive the adoption of AR and VR. Firstly, the speed and power of hardware and AI on smartphones. Secondly, faster data. Thirdly, customers' interest in the metaverse and emerging gaming experience. Finally, Surendra gives valuable advice for people who want to become successful product managers and leaders. If you also want to become a top product leader, listen to this episode of How I Grew This podcast.

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.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Benjamin Chemla, CEO and Co-founder of Shares, joins Mada Seghete to share practical insights for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, trading, and the startup ecosystem. They dive into the success story of the Shares platform, the differences between the startup ecosystem in Europe and the US, and the importance of attracting a supportive and committed initial user base when launching your product. Benjamin is a seasoned French serial entrepreneur and AMF-certified business angel with a remarkable track record of building cohesive teams and companies from scratch and rapidly scaling them across Europe and the US for over a decade. One of his notable ventures was the on-demand delivery platform Stuart, which secured an impressive €22 million in funding before its official launch. Eventually, the company's outstanding growth attracted the attention of La Poste, leading to its acquisition.

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.

What does it take to bring an iconic brand and experience to digital? What makes the Philz app one of the most loved and used apps in the industry and how do you take the specific vision of a founder and transform into an on par digital experience? That and stories of success, failure, the invention of the mobile boarding pass and how Philz ended up on HBO’s Silicon Valley are featured in our first episode of “How I Grew This” with Francisca Hawkins of Philz Coffee.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Omar Seyal, Head of Product at Cambly, joins Mada Seghete to dive into the realm of product growth, customer retention, SEO, user behavior, and personal growth in the tech industry. Cambly is an English learning marketplace where students can select tens of thousands of tutors to learn and practice English. Before Cambly, Omar was the Head of Core Product at Pinterest, Co-Founder of Egomotion, and Engineering Manager at Asurion.

Some get to join a company that redefines an industry once in their life. Sheila has done it twice. As Dropbox’s first marketing hire, she led the transition from a consumer-facing product to one with an enterprise focus. Now at Opendoor, she is redefining a 100+ year-old industry and revolutionizing the way real estate is bought and sold. This, stories of doubling market share for Opendoor in 3 months, and how brands should approach marketing and caring for customers during a pandemic, are featured in our podcast episode with Sheila Vashee of Opendoor. Listen and subscribe on Apple/Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and YouTube!

Emre Ertan is the Chief Product Officer at Getir. Emre has previously directed growth at Slice Technologies and Zum. He also co-founded not one but two companies, Mobito and Soru. Get people to share their referral links on social media, specifically mass social media avenues like timelines posts and groups. The more people share about your product, the higher the chances of their posts being featured (or “going viral”) on Facebook. This strategy takes time, requires an experimental mindset, and may require significant investments. Focus on nailing your product and service for your customers. If your product and customer service are not flawless, your viral marketing efforts can backfire on your brand. Try enabling local businesses even if you are not in a niche with a hyperlocal model. Local businesses can provide faster turnaround times and more personalized service to your customer. Have a “lighthouse customer” (similar to your ICP) who provides a base. From here, you can create a framework for services, products, and experiences for the rest of your customers. Start your business by thinking comprehensively about the problem you will solve. If you want to start a company, the problem you will solve must be a common issue for a broad audience. If the problem you want to solve is already being solved by another company, you can join forces and solve it as a part of a team.

Greg Shelly is the VP of Enterprise Digital Marketing at Canadian Tire. Greg is, admittedly, obsessed with attribution and performance, and he cares about organizations needing to understand how their investments are driving customer outcomes. Before joining Canadian Tire, Greg led the business insights and marketing analytics organization at McDonald's and spent eight years at Dell in e-commerce and digital marketing. Being in sales and on the front lines of business lets you truly understand the customer’s perspective. It is a sensible, logical start to a career in digital marketing. People who can hack together data-driven solutions can help companies understand their customers in a concrete way that gives them confidence in their marketing decisions. Pushing your comfort zone in your career is necessary to challenge yourself. After a few years, you will start appreciating those struggles for helping you grow professionally and at a personal level. A loyalty program sets the foundation of digital growth by helping companies collect data to better understand their customers. The customer ceases to be a mystery when you have data to understand them. Without a mobile-first approach, you cannot build a close relationship with your customer on a web browser. Being on someone’s phone means you have created value in their lives, and you have to make efforts to stay installed on their phones. Action-ready, non-siloed data is the key to better digital marketing regardless of the business use case. Having the right people, the right data, and the right tech makes business growth possible through digital marketing. Personalization is about being customer-centric and talking about the things that matter to them.

Carman Wenkoff is the EVP & Chief Information Officer at Dollar General. In this role, Carman has led the company’s digital transformation, implementing technology advancements to enhance the brick-and-mortar retailer’s offerings and elevate the overall customer experience. Throughout Carman’s career—from working in construction to practicing law, founding a tech company and now as the CIO of a major retailer—he has always addressed challenges head-on. In this episode, Carman shares the secrets to successfully leading a company through digital transformation, and explores how staying true to his purpose and focusing on making a difference in people’s lives have been the most important driving factors behind his success.

Patricia Martorana is the Senior Product Manager, Mobile Growth at The New York Times. Over the past four years, Patricia has grown extensively as a Product Manager. She led the cross-functional team in developing The New York Times subscription footprint and designed the customer journey within the news, cooking, and game sections. She previously had worked in marketing and editorial roles at companies such as the New Yorker and ESPN. Let your existing customers - who are friends with non-subscribers - introduce your product to new users. Plan your growth strategy with all forms of media in mind across all platforms. Monitor growth channels regularly to decide what channels are working for you and what channels are not. Use data to drive these decisions forward. When modeling or remodeling your onboarding experiences, prioritize the kinds of behaviors that you want to introduce. Before showing subscribers any push notifications, explicitly ask them for push notification permission immediately after app installation. A subscription plan is about building relationships and nurturing them over time. Your product team must adapt the product according to the dynamic growth of different user personas. Introduce new features to users and help them discover the benefits over time in a calculated manner using data - don’t bombard them with all features at once.

What are some lessons you learn after being with a company for almost a decade? How do you end up changing your life based on the products you build? This, the stories of being acquired by Adidas while maintaining the freedom to innovate and practicing what you preach, are featured in this episode of “How I Grew This” With Robert Schenkenfelder of Runtastic. Listen and subscribe on Apple/Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and YouTube!

What does it take to drive growth responsibly in today’s world of constant notifications? What are the values of the people behind the news & entertainment experiences that we engage in everyday? This, the stories of the power of mentors, and what we can all do to strike a better balance between our connected and offline lives, are told in our second episode of “How I Grew This” With Claus Enevoldsen of Flipboard.

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.

Today’s digital climate requires a focus on healthier long-term gains as opposed to easy-short term wins. But where does one start? Fabien shares how a keen act of listening and parsing of the data can inform where to take your digital product next to drive growth. At SmartNews he’s tripled the monthly active usership from when he started. Beyond this, Fabien shares how his feminism has defined everything from career choices to the way he manages his team. That story, running a French presidential campaign, the importance of decentralized systems, and his perspective on the future of jobs in mobile, is shared on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Sylvain Gauchet is the Senior Manager, Growth Product and Mobile Marketing at Babbel, an internationally successful language learning app with millions of active subscribers and the #1 innovative education company in the world. At Babbel, Sylvain focuses on areas such as growth, early product adoption, and monetization. Before Babbel. he co-founded Apptamin, a creative agency that works with brands to produce creative video ad campaigns and app store content. Product-led growth is not just about helping customers solve their problems but also about the company’s bottom line. Balancing friction with positive signals and enough rewards throughout the onboarding process is crucial to customer retention, as it ultimately affects the bottom line. Improve this process by understanding the voice of your customer and by experiencing onboarding flows of other apps you admire. Emails and push notifications customized to your category are important ways to manage the customer lifecycle and bring them back when drop-offs are detected. Humans are thick-skinned and crafty. A life-defining pandemic didn’t change our capacity to communicate. We found a way out by finding new and better ways to communicate. If customers adapt like this, then product teams must also adapt in an appropriate direction for their category. In Google UAC, launch all ad groups at once. Don’t wait for an ad group to perform well and then tweak others before their release. Google favors your initial campaigns, compares all the new campaigns against them, and reduces the reach of newly-launched ad campaigns. You don’t have to be talking to an expert to be mentored by them. Listen to their podcasts, videos, and other resources - learning from them passively is also a great way to be mentored by experts. Keep exchanging knowledge with people you meet and implement what you learn. You might make mistakes, but you will also learn from them.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada Seghete is joined by Daniel Broukhim, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of FabFitFun. They explore the evolution of FabFitFun, including the company's approach to customer acquisition, influencer marketing, the importance of content creation, and the balance between mobile and web experiences. Daniel is a highly skilled Chief Executive Officer, boasting a remarkable track record in the internet industry. His visionary leadership has propelled his company, FabFitFun, to unprecedented heights, with an astounding membership base of over one million individuals worldwide. Beyond his influential role at FabFitFun, Daniel extends his expertise as an angel investor and philanthropist, actively supporting and guiding a diverse portfolio of companies. Notable among his investments and advisory roles are Cargomatic and MediaLab. For our valued listeners, we are pleased to offer a fantastic 20% discount on the FabFitFun box, featuring an exquisite selection of seasonal items. To avail of this great opportunity, simply apply the coupon code 'HOWIGREWTHIS' during the checkout process. Indulge in an assortment of premium beauty, wellness, fashion, and lifestyle products meticulously curated to elevate your experience.

While he might not say it himself, our next guest Varun Dubey was able to have an extremely successful career leading the marketing for some of the fastest growing tech companies in India because of two things: being empathetic and analytical. In the early days of his career writing for “Digit” Magazine, he learned that many people only had a few hours of energy to use a day. Later at Qualcomm, he learned that many people had to choose between paying to charge their phones or eating that day. In those instances, he learned that truly understanding the user was critically important for achieving immense growth to hundreds of millions of users which he achieved at Practo. He also took a much more thorough approach than most when it came to tracking. At one point Varun stopping all marketing activities to make sure the entire site and product tracked all the way to billing. Once they did that they realized why users were bouncing and were able to get $2 net revenue for every dollar spent, which made the CFO their biggest advocate. More on Varun’s story including how he helped drive growth for a new category, his thoughts on Apple’s decision on IDFA, and how the marketing world has completely evolved from TV to direct response. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you find your podcasts.

Erin McFarland is the Managing Director, Marketing Channels Strategy, and Personalization at JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S. She is responsible for the optimization of JPMorgan’s industry-leading digital assets and marketing channels that deliver communication to more than seventy million customers. She has spent the last twenty years creating customer-first marketing strategies for national and global brands across healthcare, luxury, hospitality, and finance industries. Erin suggests diving deep into data because data is how customers talk to you, and it helps guide customer acquisition channels. Think of your company as a “caregiver” to your customers and build fault tolerance and stress testing into your technology. This way, you’re ready when they need you. To make life easy for your customers on mobile, automate recurring actions. Create seamless identity management across devices because privacy is a major concern of the modern customer. Cardless transactions are also a big trend in the financial services industry. Erin explains how it’s okay to change careers but not to burn old bridges because networks will matter during such changes. Have a role model that you identify with but don’t look to them for anything beyond inspiration for your career. You have to steer your path based on what you want to change and who it’s for using your strengths. When executing org-wide changes, Erin suggests building for the customer journey, experiencing what it would look like, and figuring out internal dependencies to navigate. Test your ideas because ideas are only assumptions until they’re proven. Erin’s final advice: A leader asking for the opinion of their team members and sharing credit where it’s due validates the team's skills and helps them feel seen. Invite diverse opinions, be curious to learn, and have the guts to pivot when data doesn’t agree with your decision.

During a time of crisis, it’s crucial for companies to focus on maintaining and driving growth. It’s, however, equally as important to continue to find ways to strategically add value to your customers. Mike Antognoli shares with us how he’s led the mobile product team at Allstate during the pandemic, in an industry whose customers typically have more of a hands-off approach. More on that story, how the Allstate app plays into the overall company strategy, Mike’s views on how a company culture built on trust is key to innovation, and what he learned from a failed Allstate experiment with augmented reality, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.