The Breakout Growth Podcast

Atlassian is the powerhouse behind popular productivity software brands including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello. Their solutions help more than 170,000 businesses, and in this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr are joined by Atlassian’s Senior Growth Product Manager, Andrea Ho.    Today, Atlassian is one of the most respected and fast-growing companies...

You likely know Shutterstock as a stock photography company, but in this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, we discover that in its 17-year history, Shutterstock has grown into a creative powerhouse that provides everything from motion and special effects to music and full production services.   When Jamie Elden joined as Chief Global Revenue Officer the company was positioning itself around...

Television advertising used to be the domain of large, Fortune 500-type companies with deep pockets who could afford to invest in channels with low ROI visibility. For startups, TV advertising seemed to be an expensive experiment that would be pretty tough to prove its effectiveness. However, in this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast with Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr, we find out that things hav...

The lines between product and growth are often gray, and in this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean and Ethan share more about this trend with their guest, JD Millwood, Vice-President of Product at Curve.    Curve is a Fintech company on a mission to simplify the way people spend, send, see and save money. JD describes the Curve debit card as the first over the top platform...

In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean and Ethan have a learning-packed discussion with Pat Kinsel, Notarize’s Founder and CEO. Notarize provides an online service that makes the process of getting documents legally notarized fast and easy. Instead of meeting with a notary public in person, the entire process is managed digitally with integrated online meetings and digital sign...

Recently, we have focused the lens of The Breakout Growth Podcast on the role of product in driving sustainable growth. We had a super-interesting conversation with Georgia Vidler, Canva’s former Head of Product, and this week we picked up that theme with Maria Thomas, Buffer’s Chief Product Officer.    Buffer provides social media tools to facilitate authentic engagement with end-user...

Looking back after you have stepped away from something is often a great way to gain valuable insights, and in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean and Ethan have the unique opportunity to gain retrospective learnings from a conversation with Georgia Vidler, who, until recently, was Canva's Head of Product.    If you are not familiar with Canva, their tagline says it all: “Amazi...

“Ultimately, what it meant was we had to figure out ways we could resonate with an older audience . . . Stop talking to 18-year-olds and start talking to 50-year-olds!"    This turned out to be a key, data-driven learning for Bradley Fehler, Echo’s Head of Growth, and fortunately, he and his team started to figure this out before 2020 brought unexpected and explosive growth.   Brad joi...

Slip on your Oculus headset and FitXR will get your heart rate up. They are combining gaming, fitness, and virtual reality together to create immersive experiences where users can go dancing or jump into a boxing ring. The immersive part seems to really be working! “There have been some mishaps,” laughs Product Lead, Nejc Skoberne. “A few of our community members shared pictures...

Few industries have been hit harder by Covid-19 than gyms, but despite the lockdowns and forced closures, many have actually weathered the storm. In this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, we will find out how one company helped make that possible, and why their growth approach was crucial in supporting clients through these turbulent times. Daan Bakker is VirtuaGym’s VP of...

We thought Noom was a weight loss company, but in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr discovered that weight management is actually just the gateway the company is using to meet much larger objectives. In-fact, as Artem Petakov, Co-Founder and President of Noom explains, Noom is the largest consumer-facing healthcare company in the world, and its goal is to help...

Is it just luck that determines which companies successfully find and harness Product/Market Fit? Or are there specific strategies teams can employ to systematically take ideas through this elusive gate?    In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis digs in with product management coach, speaker and author, Itamar Gilad to answer these questions and explain and uncover what every o...

In this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, we (Sean and Ethan) invite you into our virtual living rooms for a cup of coffee and a bit of a change from our usual conversations with CEO’s, heads of growth, and leaders from the world’s fastest-growing companies. Our goal with the podcast is always to make growth more human, accessible, and actionable for our listeners. S...

“It is a superpower for anyone working in growth to know how to get their own data”   CEO Holger Seim and his co-founders developed Blinkist to help users fit learning into their lives by reading or listening to “Blinks” - 15-minute summations of non-fiction books. He explains, “sometimes you need a three-course dinner, sometimes you need a snack, we are the snack.&rd...

With a product management system that helps organizations get the right products to market, faster, by centralizing feedback and making insights from customers available all in one place, Hubert Palan, Founder and CEO of Productboard has created a new category.    The idea of a blue ocean awaiting a unique invention always sounds exciting, but in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, we lea...

Brian Stoner says that Google, Facebook, and many other companies have made it their business models to track you online, but in this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, he explains to hosts, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr, that while regulation may ultimately be the answer to this problem, consumers can fight back today with DuckDuckGo’s all-in-one mobile and desktop privacy solutions.   At...

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr speak with Kyle Jansen, Vice President of Growth at Skillshare, an online learning community that offers 30,000 classes focused on creative pursuits. As Covid-19 dramatically increased demand for online learning, Skillshare has leaned into a culture of experimentation where everyone in the organization is encouraged to contr...

With the Universe mobile app internet entrepreneurs create complete websites using only their iPhones. Joseph Cohen, the company’s Founder and CEO started with the idea that if you could empower creators to “build the internet” you could unlock a wave of creativity (4:36). In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast he shares the Universe journey with Sean Ellis who is joined...

Technically, Klarna is a Fintech company; a Swedish bank that provides online financial services such as payments for online storefronts, direct payments, and more. However, in this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast we learn that Klarna is not an ordinary Fintech startup at all. Their breakout growth success, which has seen a valuation increase from $2.5B to more than $10B in just the past ye...

Tim Ash ran the strategic Conversion Rate Optimization agency, SiteTuners for over 20 years, a business that has generated over $1.2 billion in value for its clients. At the core of that success was a deep understanding of neurobiology, which Tim explores in detail in his new book ‘Unleash Your Primal Brain’. In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tim to...

Currently valued at around $13 Billion, ZoomInfo, made its Initial Public Offering on NASDAQ in early June. It was the technology sector’s largest IPO of 2020, and in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews ZoomInfo’s, CEO Henry Shuck. We discover how using data, technology, and insights, Henry and his team have built a platform that today is used by more tha...

With more than 4000 course offerings on its online education platform, over 65 million people have found opportunities to learn new skills and improve their lives through Coursera. That demand is growing rapidly as Covid-19 changes how we work and interact with the world around us. In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Shwetabh Mittal, Coursera’s Senior Direct...

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tally’s Vice President of Growth, Mark Powlen. Tally offers an automated debt manager, which analyzes a user’s financial profile to determine the best and fastest way to pay down credit card debt. Their algorithm finds the lowest available interest rates and leverages an integrated credit line to saves customers mone...

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis is joined once again by Ethan Garr to discuss what’s driving growth at the world’s fastest-growing companies. The conversation focuses on learnings from Sean’s interviews with companies nailing growth in the challenging world of Hardware. While Sean and Ethan expected growth for businesses building hard goods to be vastly...

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews the Global Co-CEO of Finder, Fred Schebesta. Finder is on a mission to help people make better buying decisions with comparison tools, guides, and news, and their breakout growth story is one of constant reinvention. Fred wants Finder to be more than a unicorn, and to sustain growth long into the future (12:50). To do this, he b...