My guest today is Victoria Repa. Victoria is the founder and CEO of BetterMe, a fitness app based out of Ukraine. I’m very excited to have Victoria on the show because she has such an incredibly unconventional background and story that I find very very inspiring. In this interview, we talk about Victoria’s early upbringing in a tiny village in the east of Ukraine, how she educated herself early on, her move to Kyiv, her transition from working on transportation logistics to technology, her work on viral content - and how that led her to building a company with global ambitions from Kyiv. We also explore her personal life and systems - which I find incredibly inspiring and intimidating for how she not only makes time and space for contemplation, but also finds this introspection essential to her work. What’s also incredibly inspiring is that she’s just 26 - and she brings to her life and work an intentionality that I find incredibly rare. I’m very excited to welcome Victoria Repa to How Things Grow.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Victoria’s path from having zero experience in tech, to being CEO of a company behind the most-downloaded fitness and health apps
• How Victoria learned to craft viral content for one of the biggest content companies in the world. 
• How Victoria leveraged Facebook insights to discover niche topics and launch BetterMe.
• How Victoria and her team ‘test-drove’ the early versions of the app by trying out the practices on themselves.
• Why BetterMe has 6 different health and fitness related apps in the appstores.
• Victoria’s self-care and self-improvement practices – and why she says business is a “spiritual game”. 

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/how-viral-content-can-trigger-habit-change-at-scale-with-victoria-repa-founder-ceo-betterme/

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My guest today is one of the leading experts in the world on games and growth in games. He’s a man who who has helped launch & grow many many hit mobile games. He started his gaming career at Playdom, where he helped the game Social City get to 5 million installs in the first week of launch. He was the founding product manager at Scopely, where he helped grow the daily actives for Dice With Buddies 30x. Yes, you heard that right - 30x. Subsequently he moved to Zynga, where he served as the Franchise Lead and Head of Product for the whole Games With Friends portfolio. Right now he’s the VP & Commercial Leader at Blizzard Entertainment.  I had a chance to meet Josh when I was at Zynga not too long ago. I found him incredibly generous with his time and knowledge - and always eager to see people around him succeed. Today’s conversation is a master-class on games, and about what happens behind the scenes that makes games such enjoyable experiences. If you’ve wondered about why hundreds of millions of players love Candy Crush, Farmville or Words With Friends and spend many many hours on these games, this interview has some answers. We talk about the early days of social gaming, the elements that make games habit-forming experiences and how Josh thinks about making, growing and learning about games. We also talk about how the same elements that make for great games also make services like, say, Spotify compelling. I always learn so much every time I listen to Josh - and I’m thrilled for this conversation.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• The secret to unlocking virality of games as a growth product manager, even as the bar for sharing content on social platforms has gotten higher
• How Josh and his team found opportunities to improve upon an established game like Words With Friends 2
• How Words With Friends 2 was intentional about making it to the top of iTunes charts.
• How the concept of “core loop design” increases user retention for digital products 
• What sets the games that have survived the longest apart from others
• Josh’s strategy for gleaning research from new games without playing them all
• Why Josh says you need a “two-legged stool” on your team

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/art-science-making-games-fun-with-josh-lu-vp-blizzard-entertainment/

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My guest today is Elena Verna. Elena is a growth advisor - she advises a number of companies - and helps scale businesses with marketing, product, analytics and growth. Elena joined SurveyMonkey as an analyst a year and a half out of college - and found herself trying to understand a growth trajectory that was incredible. Yet this was a growth trajectory that no one on the team had insight into. As an analyst, Elena wrote the queries that helped answer many of the fundamental questions underlying the business and what was driving its growth. Over the next 7 years, she grew to become the SVP of Growth. In her next role, she became the SVP of Growth, Marketing, Product & Design at the cybersecurity company MalwareBytes - and much like at SurveyMonkey, she helped drive an understanding of exactly what was driving growth in a business where there was very little understanding of this. In this interview, Elena talks about what she learnt as she grew with the business, how she learnt that not every problem could be solved through quantitative optimization, how she learnt to trust her team and lead, about the death of the person who inspired her the most, about how she breaks down & understands the drivers of growth - and much much more.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• How the SurveyMonkey team started to figure out where their early growth was coming from – and what were the things that surprised Elena.
• What it was like for Elena to understand the qualitative aspects of growth.
• How Elena and her team’s focus changed as the company grew.
• Elena’s professional role model, how this person inspired Elena – and what it was like when this person passed away.
• Why Elena used to create a SurveyMonkey account every day during her time at the company.
• The persona of the user that was pivotal to the early growth of Malwarebytes – and how Elena’s team zeroed in on this persona.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/decoding-freemium-the-unlikely-drivers-of-cybersecurity-adoption-more-with-elena-vernagrowth-advisor-ex-svp-of-growth-marketing-product-design-at-malwarebytes-ex-svp-of-growth-at-surveymo/

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In today’s episode, we take a very short break from regular programming - as I present to you my talk at my alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras last year. This is a talk called ‘The Unseen Forces Driving Mass Adoption Of Technologies’ - featuring 8 key takeaways from season 1 of How Things Grow.    I spoke to some of the smartest engineering students in India - the Indian Institutes of Technology(the IITs) tend to be super-selective and have an acceptance rate of under 1%. Fun fact: in one of my favorite Dilbert strips, Asok says: “Luckily, I’m an IIT Graduate, superior to most people on earth, so I finished the project myself.” Dilbert asks him: “Are you tired?” Asok says: “I am trained to only sleep during national holidays.”(https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-09-15 ) These were the kind of kids I spoke to.   Anyway, while some of the effect is lost in podcast form because the actual talk was accompanied by a slide deck, I think you’ll still find some of the takeaways & highlights from season 1 very interesting.   Without further ado, here you go on my talk: The unseen forces that drive mass-market adoption of technologies - 8 lessons from season 1 of How Things Grow.

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My guest today is Mauria Finley. Mauria has lived in very interesting times - and worked on some industry-defining products. Her first job out of college was at Netscape, where she not only saw from close up the large scale adoption of the internet but also helped build utilities and products for it like email, chat and browser features. She then worked on mobile in the days before mobile apps, when mobile was primarily a work and productivity platform - before working with PayPal and eBay. She started her first business Citrus Lane in 2011, which was born of a spreadsheet that went viral. After selling it to Care.com, she started her current company Allume that provides personal styling powered by data.    In this wide-ranging conversation, we delve into so many topics - from how she approached building utilities during the early days of the internet, to building infrastructure for the early days of mobile, to starting an eCommerce company in the age of Amazon - and how she thinks about combining data and human judgment to build a personal styling business.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• What about working at Netscape compelled Mauria.
• What Mauria tells the class at Stanford as to how they should pick their first company.
• Why Mauria thinks a recession is a great time to build a company.
• Why there was a debate at Paypal about the potential of mobile – and Mauria’s argument that swayed the decision.
• How Mauria’s first company was basically a productized version of a spreadsheet that went viral.
• How becoming a mom helped Mauria prioritize better.
• How Allume combines data and human judgment to help women make fashion choices.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/making-the-internet-work-building-an-ecommerce-business-in-the-age-of-amazon-and-more-with-mauria-finleyceo-of-allume/

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My guest today is Eric Seufert. Eric is the Head of Platform at N3twork, the founder of MobileDevMemo.com, author of the book ‘Freemium Economics’ - and one of the foremost experts on mobile user acquisition today. Eric started his career as an analyst at Skype, and went on to work with gaming companies like Digital Chocolate, Grey Area and Wooga - before heading up user acquisition for Rovio, in which capacity he headed up much of the launch activity for Angry Birds 2, which launched with over 25 million installs in the first week after its launch. Eric has also consulted with over 30 app development companies on their growth - and developed the growth and user acquisition platform Agamemnon, which was acquired by N3twork in 2017. Eric has worked on an incredibly wide variety of apps - and he’s seen it all, from the early days of mobile growth where you could basically buy bot installs to hit the top 10 ranks on iTunes to today’s increasingly sophisticated world of automation and programmatic growth. Indeed, his site MobileDevMemo.com is one of the resources I learn so much from and recommend very often to folks. In this fascinating and in-depth conversation, we dive into not only the state of mobile growth over the years and the forces that defined the evolution of mobile growth - but also into Eric’s fascinating career and work that has led him to develop an incredibly nuanced perspective on the past, present and future of growth on mobile.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• How Eric got his start in user acquisition & growth from following his curiosity about freemium.
• How Eric’s fears about the possibility that his company would fail impelled him to start his blog – and how his blog got him his next job.
• The difference between mobile and desktop when it comes to user acquisition.
• Do you have be a big established company with a huge balance sheet to build a commercial successful app?
• The anxiety that Rovio had before Angry Birds 2 about living up to the original – and Eric’s team’s strategy for launch.
• Why programmatic is so hard to make work.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/a-brief-history-of-mobile-user-acquisition-with-eric-seuferthead-of-platform-at-n3twork-founder-at-mobiledevmemo/

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Today’s is a unique episode. I have two amazing guests to offer two different perspectives about a theme that I’ve always been very very fascinated by - influencer marketing, and the economics of internet fame. Sophia Yeh(aka Sophia Beatbox, or Sophia Kiddbeatz) is a YouTuber and influencer manager. Sophia literally grew up with Youtube. She started making videos in high school, and really took off on the Youtube platform as a teenager making these really cool beatboxing videos. After growing her presence on Youtube for a number of years, she moved over to the business side of influencer marketing - in helping influencers strike deals with brands. Adam Hadi is the VP of Marketing at Current, and is known as one of the foremost experts in the world at influencer marketing, particularly for mobile apps. Adam began his career as an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and made his way into mobile app marketing for The Topps Company, in which capacity he stumbled upon the wild world of influencer marketing. Since then, he’s headed up marketing for leading apps such as Draft, Quidd and now Current - and advised a host of other apps on influencer marketing. Between them, Adam & Sophia bring very unique perspectives on influencer marketing - on what it’s like to be an influencer, on what it takes to grow an audience as an influencer, on the unique and peculiar challenges of being a creator and a businessperson, on how deals are made on influencer marketing platforms - and so much more.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• What inspired Sophia to make Youtube videos in high school - and the first results she saw on her first 4 videos.
• How Adam stumbled upon influencers while running campaigns for a soccer app.
• How influencers like MiniMinter & KSI evolved with the Youtube platform and expanded their brand from just FIFA related content to much broader themes.
• How Adam essentially hunted down his target influencers at the conference PAX East.
• The most important factor that contributes to an influencer’s early growth - and why ignoring this caused Sophia’s Youtube to die down for a bit. How this factor impacts Youtube’s algorithms.
• What catalyzes influencers who grow really big - or expand their brand in dramatically different ways?
• What results Sophia saw when she tested videos that didn’t show her beatboxing
• How marketers evaluate a new channel for influencers who are present on it. Is there a minimum audience size at which a platform becomes interesting for marketers?
• Why influencer marketing can be intimidating for performance marketers - since they dont have a lot of raw data to base decisions off of. What Adam recommends doing to make these assessments when there is imperfect data.
• Why platforms such as Google have had some reluctance to embracing influencer marketing
• The Adpocalypse - and how that hit influencers badly, and how Sophia reacted to the hit her channels were taking. 

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/the-inner-workings-of-internet-fame-with-sophia-yehcmo-at-most-amazing-adam-hadivp-of-marketing-at-current/

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My guest today is Cameron Adams. Cameron is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, the graphic design tool website that recently was valued at over $1 billion. In today’s interview, we talk to Cameron about his long and checkered career. We talk about his work on Google Wave, which seemed to be a product way ahead of its time - and which gathered some incredible buzz but saw limited adoption. In his next startup Fluent, he seemed to have everything going for him with a huge surge of user interest - in spite of which he had to shut it down. Cameron was third time lucky with Canva, which has a steady start and growth before it really took off in the last couple of years. In today’s conversation we talk about Canva’s gradual rise and the forces behind it. We go into some of the key product decisions they’ve made in their pursuit of the mission of making design accessible to everyone.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• The promise of Google Wave to rethink email as it was reimagined for the modern age - and what the problem with this approach was.
• How the economics of Cameron’s next startup Fluent didn't quite work out even though it had 80000 users on its waitlist.
• What inspired Canva’s onboarding process to make the design process seem less intimidating to users.
• How the proliferation of visual media like Facebook, Instagram & Pinterest helped drive the adoption of Canva.
• How Canva built up relationships with bloggers & social media marketers to support its launch & post-launch growth.
• How Canva’s growth after its early year 1 growth was a function of its growth marketing strategy that was intentional about bringing users in the door.
• What Canva learned about why people tended to go with low-quality imagery - and how this insight led Canva to pick the freemium model and to offer much lower prices than alternatives.
• What Cameron had to learn as he progressed from a creator to a manager of large teams as Canva scaled.
• What drove Canva’s huge wave of growth in 2017 that converted its user growth into tangible revenue growth.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/making-design-accessible-to-the-world-with-cameron-adamsco-founder-cpo-at-canva/

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My guest today is Cat Lee. Cat Lee is the newest partner at Maveron, a $160MM consumer-tech fund, primarily focused on funding hyper-growth startups at the series A and seed rounds. Cat has had a long history of working on some groundbreaking growth projects - and taking huge leaps in her own career. She worked on the Facebook platform team starting in 2008, and helped drive the adoption of Open Graph, which drove some breakout growth for Facebook outside of its own platform. She then joined Pinterest in 2012 as the Head of Growth, and helped drive 3x growth in MAUs for the then fledgling platform - and set it on the path to scale & sustainability. After working on growth & marketing at Pinterest for over 4 years, she transitioned to being the Head of Culture at Pinterest, in which capacity she did some very interesting & tremendously impactful work, before she moved to being a VC at Maveron Partners earlier this year. In this fascinating & wide-ranging conversation, we talk not only about Cat’s unconventional career choices but also explore the elements that made Facebook and Pinterest’s growth machines as powerful as they were. We talk about the gender diversity problem in venture capital - and how Maveron’s approach has yielded dramatic results. Cat has had so many dimensions to her work and career - and all of these make this a fascinating conversation.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• What inspired Facebook’s Open Graph. How Facebook’s teams approached pitching Open Graph to publishers at a point when they didn’t have a lot of leverage or clout.
• What inspired Cat to join Pinterest - and why Pinterest was invite only at first even when it had millions of users. How Pinterest’s network effect was driven by content more than social interactions between users.
• How mobile traffic overtook web traffic in 24 hours of the launch of Pinterest’s mobile apps. 
• What inspired Cat to move to a head of culture role, even though this was a role whose success wasn’t as objectively measurable as that of growth roles. How Cat assessed the possible impact she could have heading up culture - and how she approached changing the elements of the culture that she felt needed changing.
• What inspired Cat to move to the VC space - and her very elaborate research & learning process before making the move.
• Why the % of VC money going to women is so low(at about 2.2%). How the lack of diversity in the VC space impacts this. Why Maveron’s leadership team’s composition unusual in terms of diversity - and how this has changed their results compared to most VC firms(even though these results weren’t something they tracked actively). 
• What inspired Cat to go on a sabbatical after working on two high growth startups - and what her personal goals were during this sabbatical.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/facebook-pinterest-growth-cat-lee-maveron-vc-diversity/

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My guest today is Lomit Patel, VP of Growth at IMVU. Prior to IMVU, Lomit managed growth at many early stage startups including Roku (IPO), TrustedID (acquired by Equifax), Texture (acquired. by Apple) and Earthlink. Lomit is a frequent speaker at different conferences and recognized as a Mobile Hero by Liftoff. In today’s episode, we talk about one of the pivotal moments in Lomit’s career - when he presented a one word strategic plan to kick off a massive transition within his company IMVU. We go into the circumstances that preceded his one word plan, his thinking behind it - and how he not only rallied his team to execute upon his one word plan, but also drove some massive impact as a result of executing this plan, which resulted in 50% year on year growth after years of flat growth numbers. In this episode, we go very deep in exploring the anatomy of a huge transition that originated in Lomit’s one word strategic plan - and I find some of the details in here incredibly fascinating.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• The context in which Lomit joined IMVU - and in which he presented his one word plan. 
• Lomit's team’s shock when he presented his one word plan.
• IMVU had an established desktop product - and there was a lot of skepticism around whether to make the transition that Lomit proposed. What Lomit did to get people comfortable around the transition - and the tradeoffs that the team had to make in picking features.
• When there is a major change, the impetus has to come from the top.
• Lomit didnt have a lot of mobile gaming experience. What gave him the confidence that he could execute the transition that he proposed.
• How it was such a freeing experience to enjoy being a kid in Malawi. As Lomit grew up and went to college, what inspired him to look at internet businesses - and move to America.
• How IMVU onboards users by having them take a small step - and gradually advance within the from there as they become familiar with it.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/the-one-word-strategic-plan-with-lomit-patelvp-of-growth-at-imvu/

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