Defining Growth Engineering with Alexey Komissarouk (EP25)

Joining us on this episode is Rodrigo Hutt, VP & General Manager @ Viome Life Sciences a D2C biotech company that is revolutionizing personalized health care ($169.5M in total funding). He's had a diverse career path across multiple industries including biopharma, entrepreneurship, e-commerce, to now health tech innovation. He shares with the current challenges around health prevention in the U.S., Viome’s approach to education-based marketing, and how he thinks about phases of growth startups go through. More highlights include: The importance of maintaining an entrepreneurial mindset and executing with speed. Cultural values for high-performing teams. Breaking down Viome's customer segmentations. How he thinks about prioritization in phases for growth. What his priortization scoring model is (hint: impact > cost > effort). Follow us and our guests: Rodrigo Hutt on LinkedIn and Twitter Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

On this episode Cam Bodenstadt, the VP of Growth at Pipe (a modern capital platform) joins us and shares insights on their marketing strategy, team management styles, and the importance of understanding lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC) in how they approach growth. He emphasizes the need for a formula for growing a company and optimizing it to increase customer LTV and reduce CAC, while maintaining a high-functioning team through listening, trusting, and learning from mistakes. Additionally, he talks about Pipe's tooling and collaboration process, AI and ChatGPT's future impact on the industry. More highlights include: Diving into early growth opportunities and audience learnings at Pipe. Managing contractors and teammates for growth teams. What were the early stage qualifying metrics that he used to drive sales leads? Building trust w/ the Sales team and creating a lead threshold for success. Follow us and our guests: Cam Bodenstadt on LinkedIn and Twitter Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

Alexey Komissarouk has built Growth Engineering organizations for Masterclass and Opendoor. He joins us on this episode and helps break down Growth Engineering as a craft, how to use engineering as a leverage point for growth, and what his obsession is with joining companies going through hyper growth. Plus he shares the different aspects of creating a Growth Engineering team, how these organizations should be built out over time, and the three ways to find Growth Engineers (hint: find ex-founders). More highlights include: Stage he joined Opendoor, understanding the business model, and how the growth engineering team started. Learnings from building the growth stack at Masterclass. The best-in-class stack he recommends when walking into a new team / org and the initial problems a Growth Engineer will encounter early-on. Reporting responsibilities and training for Growth Engineers and Product Managers. Discussing customer data platforms (CDP) and their value. Follow us and our guests: Alexey Komissarouk on LinkedIn and Twitter Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Resources: Engineering Growth Newsletter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

Jacob Fenton, VP of Customer Experience at StockX (ex-Amazon, Ex-GoFundMe) has helped scale the online scarcity marketplace for the past few years. StockX has raised $690M in total funding to date, operates out of multiple countries, and has become part of the cultural zeitgeist. His internal entrepreneurial spirit led him to create their Business Operations team launching vertical after vertical, to now deeply focusing on the overall customer experience. We dive in with Jacob on what the successful components are that's made StockX scale so rapidly, the challenges of connecting and engaging a dual sided community, and the underlying framework that he's used in his career across different industries and products. More highlights include: How he constructed the Business Operations team and his hiring persona at StockX? Managing marketplace dynamics with operational complexities and brand releases. How they've operationalized brand partnerships and creating flexible marketing budgets. How StockX culture works and the factors that make them successful. The COVID e-commerce business accelerant and how it impacted StockX. How does StockX culturally thinking about hiring growth candidates? Follow us and our guests: Jacob Fenton on LinkedIn and Twitter Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite a SEO, content strategy, and growth design agency has helped MasterClass, Thumbtack, and Upwork jump start into hyper growth. On this episode, Ethan helps demystify SEO and how to build the right SEO and content strategy depending on company stage. Also, he breaks down keywords versus topics, how to build topic authority (even if you have none), how companies should design their content org, plus our hot take — what he thinks SEO agencies should optimize for but often don’t. More highlights include: What is SEO in basic, business, fortune 500 terms? What are the three types of SEO? (Hint: Technical, programmatic, and editorial for growth and brand content) Building a content strategy around topic themes Measurement and timelines for SEO What metrics should be tracked depending on company stage? Follow us and our guests: Ethan Smith on LinkedIn and Twitter Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

Bao Vuong, President and Co-Founder of Placemakr has grown the tech-enabled hospitality platform by 100% on average since their inception and recently got their Series C with a total of $127 million in funding. How? By providing value to all their different stakeholders. From the early days of mitigating risk for real estate investment firms to pivoting to a pop-up hotel operator to building a rental flexible SaaS platform when COVID derailed the entire industry. Bao has navigated very turbulent real estate waters to build and scale an industry leading product. In this episode we discuss: The complexity of the different stakeholders in their business. Managing a portfolio of different offerings to increase revenue within their buildings. How they scaled their team – 200 operations and 100 sales/product/finance. How they’re mitigating risks with data to create the right pricing mix (hello algorithm!). How they use an internal growth formula to bring on customers at the right time for the right product. Placemakr’s vision for a new asset class in real-estate. Follow us and our guests: Bao Vuong on LinkedIn and Placemakr on LinkedIn Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

Ian Yung has been around the startup block scaling numerous e-commerce brands and marketplaces from Parachute Home, Touch Of Modern, Simple Habit to now the SVP of Revenue at Tonal now in their Series E with $450M in total funding. Ian strings together the connective thread of challenges that he’s had throughout his career scaling companies he’s worked at including the different growth challenges with capital, time, and creative constraints, instituting team collaboration to problem solve, plus he breaks down the growth framework that he built at Tonal. More highlights include: How to know if you've hit channel saturation, linear tv experiments, incrementality tests, and growth tracking Designing an org to maximize growth and reporting structure with cross-functional growth partnerships Internal versus external brand alignment and experiments Balancing the need for synchronous versus asynchronous communication Unifying brand and performance marketing teams Approach for multi-attribution and media mix modeling Follow us and our guests: Ian Yung on LinkedIn Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Resources: Andrew Chen “The Law Of Shitty Clickthroughs” Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

How did Chris Maurice, the co-founder and CEO of Yellowcard solve for the massive problem that existed of sending payments from the west internationally? By creating a transparent and customer centered crypto exchange in Africa that’s now grown into 16 countries on the continent. Chris shares what the biggest contributor has been for their growth, marketing tactics and programs developed for early user adoption, and how the current and future recession will impact the crypto industry. More highlights include: How to build trust into a B2C fin-tech product How they solved for security issues prior to regulation Scaling the team and how to manage across different cultures Developing education programs and community building for user acquisition Multi-market organizational design and multi-language support Follow us and our guests: Chris Maurice on LinkedIn and Twitter Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

Vikas Hebbar is a serial marketer and founder having had a focus on growth in his career, currently serving as the VP Growth Marketing at Tia. He’s helped e-commerce, healthcare and gaming companies scale through brand and growth marketing. In this episode, he unlocks how his diverse career path made him a better marketer, reveals how to go from big box budgets to getting scrappy w/ smaller startup budgets plus Nima and Vikas get into a healthy debate if the job of marketeers is to convince customers to buy your product or not. More episode highlights: Advice to younger folks getting into marketing to challenge societal narratives. Where does product end and marketing begin? How he defines and optimizes for user activation? How to overcome the uncertainty of CAC payment windows? The state of capital markets and capital allocation. Follow us and our guests: Vikas Hebbar on LinkedIn Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.

Jared Fliesler is a master at organizational design and growing products for Google, Square, Slide, and Scribd. He now advises startup founders how to build better, faster and stronger companies. He’s helped them raise over $60 million in growth capital btw. He shares tactics to use as a founder to stay connected w/ a growing team, plus how to be a human centered founder. More episode highlights: His vision for operational and organizational design that scale. Creating effective feedback loops for growth. The cultural forces that impact a career path in tech and how to advise your team on either an IC or management path? What the principle and SWAT team model is? Breaking down tabletop management. Knowing when to be a driver of company culture and when to be a passenger. Follow us and our guests: Jared Fliesler on LinkedIn and Twitter Nima Gardideh on LinkedIn and Twitter Pearmill on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email [email protected] to be a guest. Full transcript available on our site. Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.