Why subscribe?
It’s my mission to discover and scale the use of the best practices for scaling companies across product, growth, hiring, etc. I write a lot about product development, network effects, growth loops, and scaling startups effectively.
Who am I?
Hi, I’m Casey Winters. I help companies scale. I’ve worked on scaling multiple startups to large technology companies as an employee and as an advisor. I started the marketing team at Grubhub and scaled Grubhub’s demand side acquisition and retention strategies. We built a city expansion playbook and compounding loops of sustainable growth with low or no CAC and strong retention. This helped drive Grubhub from 3 cities to 1,000+ and from a $1 million series A to now a $7 billion exit.
After this, I joined Pinterest and led the growth product team. I joined amid a shift from a social network to a personalized recommendations system, from social driven growth to SEO, and from a U.S. only to international first. Pinterest had 40 million active users. We turned SEO into a scalable acquisition strategy, increased conversion to signups/mobile 5x, and replaced our email and notification system for scale. Pinterest now has over 200 million active users with the majority of them outside the U.S. and is valued at $18 billion.
Most recently, I was Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. I joined shortly before the pandemic, and helped us survive through the pandemic by switching to a product-led strategy, launching two new products, and focusing our strategy. The company is now cash flow positive and growing again.
I started my career as a marketing analyst at Apartments.com, and that helped me understand that the way online companies grow is very different from what you learn about in school. From there, I started implementing these strategies at Apartments.com and sister site Homefinder.com.
My experience at all of these companies and over the last year as a Growth Advisor in Residence at Greylock Partners has taught me me to seek out and solve for the bottlenecks that prevent companies from growing faster. Sometimes, it’s that the teams aren’t structured properly, or that they don’t have access to the right data. Frequently, they just don’t know where to start because it’s their first time scaling a company. I help these companies identify the right challenges to focus on and implement solutions from the CEO all the way down to ICs that allow for more sustained growth, and it’s a lot of fun.
