The Hypergrowth Experience Pearmill

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 nima@pearmill.com 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 nima@pearmill.com 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 nima@pearmill.com 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 S****y Clickthroughs”

Want to share your hyper-growth story with us? Email nima@pearmill.com 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 nima@pearmill.com 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 nima@pearmill.com to be a guest.

Producer, Editor & Audio Engineer - Leah Jackson @ Puka Puka Creative.