Explore every episode of the podcast The Initial

Maarten van Pijpen spent 15 years at Booking.com.

a place where experimentation wasn’t a project.
it was the culture.

now he’s chief growth officer at Unravel.
a travel app that feels like TikTok,
but lets you book instantly.

in his first 35 days, he:
– chose an experimentation tool
– lined up 10 experiments
– started building a data foundation

but this conversation isn’t about tooling.

it’s about:

→ how to move from top-down founder energy to bottom-up ownership

→ why shipping fast without tracking is dangerous

→ how a €1M mistake didn’t kill his career
(but actually strengthened it)

→ why failures were celebrated at Booking

→ how to scale leadership so you’re not the bottleneck

we talk about culture.
trust.
empowerment.
and what it really takes to build a data-driven company —
without killing speed.

if you care about experimentation, growth, or leading teams in scale-ups and how all of these dynamics work, this podcast is for you.

the wrong Culture inside a company, kills even the best specialists.

this is what Ruben de Boer, 15+ years in Experimentation, has noticed again and again:

we need to create the right environment for CRO & Experimentation to flourish.

not by pushing CRO

but by bringing it to people and teams

his course on Udemy has 25000+ students and is very much about the basics of CRO and Experimentation,

but these days Ruben teaches how to make Experimentation mátter to the business, and to leadership

follow him on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rgdeboer/?originalSubdomain=nl

or take one of his Udemy courses: https://www.udemy.com/user/rubendeboer/

we unpack one of the fastest built experimentation engines i've seen!! In this episode, I sit down with Kameron Tanseli (Growth Engineering) and Rosie Hoggmascall (Growth & Product) from Fyxer.ai and we retrace the steps of building a 500+ /year experimentation program.

We go deep into:

• Why their first onboarding experiments actually made things worse
• The tooling shift from PostHog to GrowthBook (and why it mattered)
• How decentralized ownership (no PM, no heavy process) unlocked serious speed
• Why every engineer acts like a founder
• How Slack transparency builds experimentation culture
• Using AI agents to automate experiment reporting, analysis, and cleanup
• What “time to value” really means in an AI product
• The emotional side of onboarding (“inbox shock”) and how it impacts retention
• How to prioritize when you’re scaling from 5 → 70+ people

We also explore:

• ➤ The difference between growth and product prioritization
• ➤ How to surface insights across support, sales, and product
• ➤ What’s still impossible to automate in experimentation
• ➤ The tracking challenges of building inside Gmail and Outlook and of other AI tools

as a Behavioral Psychologist, dr. Florien Cramwinckel has helped the CRO and Experimentation world increase sales for S*x Toys, Children's playhouses ánd Fintech. Florien shares how CRO, experimentation, finance, sex, and play are related and can how to improve their business, society, and people's lives.

she shares what she knows about "Pleasure Shoppers", and how they differ from Purpose Shoppers. How sextoys are connected to equality, safety, and communication.

...we talk about that borrowing money is so frictionless,

...why investing scares us, and how we should revert that effect

and what to do if you've made an ethical mistake (in the case of Lucia placing fake reviews on a webshop)... 😱

follow Florien and learn from research in her newsletter: https://behavioraltimes.com/

you can find the dissertation she speaks about here: https://floriencramwinckel.nl/the-social-dynamics-of-morality/

in this episode, Lea Mattern shares hard-won tactics for driving experimentation adoption inside organizations.

Based on her experience at Condor Airlines and German brands she worked with at Konversionskraft, we break down what actually works when you work at a Center of Excellence trying to increase experimentation adoption.

4 practical guidelines we cover:

1. do internal marketing ('yes, be annoying, lol');
2. make experimentation low-effort (bring or lend your own developer);
3. talk to POs about what they need and how you can help them with experimentation;
4. Use designers as Trojan horses: they already have the ideas, you just need to teach them experimentation;

-- do this with empathy, and adoption stops being a battle. 👑.

• Follow Lea Mattern on Linkedin.

this podcast was brought to you by The Initial. we help organizations install in-house experimentation programs and teach CRO agencies how to do this successfully. For the love of experimentation.

In this episode, Alisa Antypova (ex-Preply & ADC Consulting) opens the door to her world of experimentation.

She talks about her start in data science, building Preply’s experimentation platform from the ground up, and how decisions become sharper when you test instead of guess.

We explore airlines, marketplaces, and other complex systems where a single decision can create wide ripple effects. We talk about holdouts, the quiet truth tellers, and the risk of scaling tests that don’t really matter.

Alisa shares the mistakes she’s seen, the traps teams often fall into, and why understanding what doesn’t work may be one of the most underrated skills in experimentation.

Follow Alisa on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisa-antypova/

Article she referenced on airlines and experimentation:

https://adc-consulting.com/cases/how-latam-airlines-embraced-business-experimentation-for-revenue-management/

In this conversation, Giedrius shares his journey from academia to working on experimentation at Vinted.

He talks about the messiness of testing in a marketplace, where every A/B test affects both sellers and buyers. We discuss why shared metrics matter, and how difficult, yet worthwhile, it is to build a culture that truly experiments.

We get into the slow, steady work of improving this craft. The friction teams face when moving toward a data-driven way of working. And the patience that process demands.

Giedrius also reminds us that experimentation isn’t only for large companies. Small teams and big teams alike can learn from user behavior, if they take the time to test with intention.

In this conversation, Kevin Anderson (ex-Vista, ex-ING, now a consultant) shares his journey from web analyst to product manager at VistaPrint, and how he’s experienced experimentation from every angle.

We talk about what it really takes to scale experimentation across an entire organization. That includes leadership pushback, the slow work of proving value, and the mistakes that still sting.

Kevin explains the difference between agency support and building experimentation in-house. He shares why ownership matters, and why experiments only last when the organization truly owns them.

We also look ahead. We discuss AI, what may change, and what will likely stay the same. The need to test, learn, and stay curious.

Follow Kevin on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinanderson/