Growth Multiplier: Recent Episodes
Ricky Willianto
The pursuit of growth is never-ending for any business - from a small startup all the way to a large global corporation. The Growth Multiplier podcast examines pathways, strategies, and hacks companies have explored and tested in their efforts to scale up their businesses. In each episode, host Ricky Willianto - co-founder of Ravenry - speaks with CEO's, growth hackers, product managers, and marketers all around Asia to find nuggets of wisdom and insights from their journey multiplying growth. Ricky and his guests discuss viral marketing, community building, pricing strategies, channel development, and also company culture and people. Growth Multiplier explores not only replicable successes, but also phenomenal failures that we all can learn from.
In this episode, Joan Low (ThoughtFull) talks about:
- The importance to building a strong fundamental understanding of jobs to be done, especially in a startup that affects people's wellbeing directly
- Focusing on her purpose and refusing to compromise on quality and positive impact over growth at all costs
- Why timing plays a big part in helping skyrocket Thoughtfull's growth
- Why founders need to have hands-on involvement in the problem discovery process
- The importance of creating a great experience for your first customers, especially when you are in a B2B industry that relies on word-of-mouth.
Connect with Joan Low here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joan-low-thoughtfull/
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Sebastian Mueller (MING Labs) talks about:
- How UI/UX framework in China and the rest of Asia are unique and highly localised
- Design strategies for early startups and ideas that have not achieved product-market fit.
- Why revealed preferences provide better insights for designers than reported preferences.
- How design is a powerful driver for growth in any business.
- How designers have the power to reshape the world, and change human behaviours.
- How and why Ming Labs bootstrapped its way to become a global design services agency.
Connect with Sebastian Mueller here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smueller1512/
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Rajiv Lamba (SurveySensum & Neurosensum) talks about:
- How he built a tech company as a non-tech founder
- The counterintuitive concept of the importance of keeping your core product simple
- Why he chooses to focus on sustainable rather than aggressive growth
- How he makes the most of the synergies between his two brands to maximise sales
- The importance of lifelong learning in setting the direction for your business’s growth
Connect with Rajiv Lamba here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajiv-lamba/
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Jeremy Au (Monk's Hill Ventures) talks about:
- His experience building Conjunct Consulting and CozyKin
- How to balance business and cultural growth
- Why founders are 100% accountable for the culture and the environment of the business they built
- His views on the difference between running a VC-funded versus a bootstrapped startup
- His personal development tips and tricks
Connect with Jeremy Au here: http://www.jeremyau.com/
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Allan Teng (Workato APJ) talks about:
- How engaging in conversations allowed him to stumble upon the company’s MVP target segment
- Why personal touch is important for enhanced customer adoption
- How he focuses on net retention revenue and strategically targeting the right customers to grow the business
- How he keeps pace with the company’s growth
- How creating opportunities for customers and prospects to interact improves sales
In this episode, Milan Reinartz (Intelligent Video Solutions) talks about:
- How and why he became an entrepreneur
- His journey building two media startups: Postr and iVS
- The strategy he's used at Postr to increase user retention and speed up growth
- How he's built an organisational culture that is focused on pace of work
- Why transparency in a startup is key in aligning priorities and helps everyone determine how to do their work
- How he's grown iVS by 500% in less than 1 year
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Jamie Lee (The Kind Friend) talks about:
- The importance of mental wellness and journaling
- How she turned an Instagram account into a business with multiple revenue streams
- How listening to customers ensures excellent product market fit
- How she achieves harmony between work and personal life
- Who her biggest role model is and why
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Irzan Raditya (Kata.ai) talks about:
- How he took Kata.ai from the brink of death to having processed 1 billion customer conversations
- Why channel-market fit is as important as product-market fit
- Why being laser-focused in your vision is key for a startup founder
- How he learned to let go of a profitable business in favour of a scalable business
- The importance of building a strong customer relationship that survives product pivots and near deaths
- Focusing on collaboration rather than competition in the SaaS market in Indonesia
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, David Fallarme (Asia Head of Marketing at HubSpot) talks about:
- How HubSpot has built a blog that generates more visitors that Harvard Business Review and TechCrunch combined
- Looking at content as a long term growth strategy
- Why Asia requires a portfolio of growth strategies due to its fragmented nature
- Why it is important to make bold moves
- How your employees can become your marketing channels
- How he manages his information diet to ensure personal growth
- His personal productivity and personal growth stack
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Junwen Lee (Head of Product at CardUp) talks about:
- How finding adjacent problems to solve for your customers is key to growth
- Why it is important to tap into your early adopters as a word-of-mouth channel
- How you can ensure the early stage growth does not wane by coupling awareness campaign with referral strategies
- How to optimise your viral loop based on your customer segments
- The difference between the B2B and B2C buying cycle and buying psyche
- Using context as a way to accelerate product adoption
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Zenos Schmickrath (former CTO Hmlet, current director at SEA Founders) talks about:
- Why founders need to build new skillsets as their startups grow to beyond 10 people
- What to look out for as your startup starts to scale
- Why mission and vision statements become even more important in a larger organisation
- Why founders need to find a way to build a support system for themselves
- Why he is juggling 5 different projects right now, and
- Why he is passionate about nurturing the founders community in Southeast Asia
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Michele Ferrario (StashAway) talks about:
- How StashAway built credibility and customer trust in its early days
- Focusing on building an amazing product and customer experience
- Bringing sophisticated investment strategy to the masses using tech
- Why a digital wealth manager should know what NOT to digitalise
- Investing in the right employees to scale superior experience
- The importance of persistence in the early days of a startup
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Foti Panagio (GrowthMentor) talks about:
- Hiring freelancers to learn from them as a personal growth hack
- Why competitors should not deter you from starting your business
- How to balance bootstrapping with building a great product
- Starting with a minimum lovable product instead of an MVP
- Using social proof as a way to kickstart his initial growth
- Using karma as his north star metric
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Hsu Ken Ooi (Iterative) talks about:
- Why he is building a YC-style accelerator in Asia
- The early days of his two startups Decide.com and Weave
- Leveraging social proof to grow Weave and Decide.com
- Relying on human psychology rather than just logic to come up with early growth hacks
- Learning to love the problem instead of the solution in early stage companies
- Why it is important for founders to invest in themselves
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Leo Tumwattana and Reza Saeedi (Sorted) talk about:
- The concept of hyperscheduling and how it has multiplied his productivity
- Not giving his product away for FREE as a way to get people invested early
- Getting featured by Apple and how it boosted his downloads
- Curating a high quality private community
- Looking as users as influencers and ambassadors
- Using a fair pricing model to attract and retain users
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Charles Allard Jr (Delvify) talks about:
- Using behavioural science to encourage people to make better decision for the planet
- Helping eCommerce vendors generate up to 5x more sales
- Ensuring clarify of vision and mission in your startup in building a highly aligned team
- Listening to customers early
- Building thought leadership using deep insights and your own learnings
- Optimising a startup for an exit
- Leveraging mentorship as a way to shortcut your personal growth
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Robert Lai (Kaliber Performance Marketing) talks about:
- Investing in content marketing and LinkedIn as a way to grow organically
- How Kaliber generated $800k ARR in 10 months
- Generating content that adds value and is enjoyable to consume
- Moving quickly rather than aiming for perfection
- Building a culture of open communication with his team and his clients
- Focusing on doing ONE great thing in his company and highlighting that one value proposition
- Looking at fellow founders and celebrities as his role models
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Jesse Hanley (Bento and TalentTree) talks about:
- Building startups to solve his own problems as an agency owner and a marketer
- How bootstrapping is not inferior to having external funding
- Relying on personal network and Twitter to grow both his startups
- Focusing on being a good online neighbour and building personal relationships with all his clients
- Building a B2B SaaS product successfully while completely bootstrapped
- How de-risking his businesses and learning how to turn capital into cashflow helped him remain bootstrapped
- Not fussing over perfection and instead focusing on putting your work out there for people to see and give feedback
- Enjoying the journey of business building rather than being overly focused on just long term KPI's
- Friendship as a metric of success
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Robin Vander Heyden (ManyRequests) talks about:
- Leveraging Facebook Community, Reddit and ProductHunt to get early customers
- Building specific content for every step in the marketing funnel
- Prioritising distribution channels before product development as a growth strategy to bootstrap development
- Pre-sale as a way to validate your business model and idea, and recruiting early adopters
- Leveraging multiple customer channels to generate micro-conversion to find captive leads
- Establishing clear structure and processes that help scale the operational aspect of the business early on
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Felix Wong (AngelHub and WHub) speaks about:
- Analysing the right channels for your business
- How to build a powerful network of people what can be your ambassadors
- Keeping audience in his network activated
- Focusing on quality rather than quantity of connections on social media
- His personal pivots from being a mathematician to marketer
- His methodical approach to learning and how he managed to master ONE new skill every year
- How he built a side project curating products in a specific niche
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Yeap Ming Feng (currently Head of Growth at Seedly) speaks about:
- How he's helped Seedly grow to reach 1.1 million monthly visits in Singapore
- Finding a niche in the crowded financial services segment in Singaopre
- Using a bottom-up approach to determine the right content to create for their audience
- Leveraging user-generated content to increase community engagement
- Identifying relevant triggers that create a domino effect of user actions and activities across Seedly's platform
- Tracking metrics across all growth experiments and activities
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Edward Hutchins (currently at Thoughtworks) speaks about:
- The differences between customers in the US and in China
- Successful and unsuccessful growth strategies he's tried in China
- Helping large organisations move much more quickly and startup-like
- Looking at best practices as a starting point and for inspiration, not as a destination
- Aligning on prioritisation framework to accelerate decision making process with stakeholders
- Using growth tools and strategies to quickly identify the most effective product positioning and messaging
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
In this episode, Jim Tan (currently Head of Growth at BCG DV and Pelago) speaks about:
- How he's helped Pelago, a travel startup, grow to 1 million users
- Pivoting and finding growth strategies for a travel startup in 2020, the worst travel year in recent memory
- The chicken-and-egg problem of a marketplace startup
- The importance of localisation as a growth strategy in a fragmented market like Southeast Asia
- Building an experiment-driven culture within growth teams
- His experience as a growth expert at Skyscanner, Pelago, and GoGoVan (currently GoGoX)
Podcast information:
- Website
- Feed
- Host: Ricky Willianto
Arriving in February 2021, host Ricky Willianto - co-founder of Ravenry - explores strategies and hacks startups and organisations use to multiply their growth. This trailer provides snippets of insights from upcoming episodes featuring founders and growth experts across Asia.