Growth Secrets from Pinterest, Airbnb, Reddit, Thumbtack and more

This chat originally appeared on VentureApp between Casey Winters, growth advisor in residence at Greylock VC, and Katie Muto, growth at VentureApp.

Casey Winters is one of tech’s most preeminent growth experts with incredible experience on the front lines of growth and marketing at Pinterest and Grubhub, and advisory roles at Airbnb, Reddit, Thumbtack, Eventbrite, and more. Now, Casey is putting all of that experience to perfect use at Greylock Partners as their Growth Advisor in Residence.

Our team was lucky to chat with Casey about growth secrets from his treasure trove of experience. Fun fact: In his spare time, Casey loves to listen to music and go bouldering. But we’ll get back to that…

Even though our team was very excited to chat with Casey, we decided to kick the conversation off with a question from the audience — Craig Zevin asked whether growth should be baked into the role of product managers rather than entirely new growth orgs.

So, in Casey’s advisory roles, here’s what he would tell teams considering whether to hire and build specific growth teams:

As you can imagine, we had a lot of questions from the audience. Next up, Nikin Tharan asked Casey to explain the toughest challenge or failure he had to overcome and a lifelong principle he learned from it? Hint: it has everything to do with communication style and lessons learned at Grubhub about changing management style to work better with others…

Now let’s get into the topic at hand: growth. Now, if you’ve read anything about growth marketing, you’ve heard a certain phrase tossed around — growth hack or growth-hacking. It’s actually become one of the most despised phrase in the marketing industry since it indicates success via a silver bullet. Ronnie Deaver, the Sponsorship & Program Coordinator at MIT Enterprise Forum, decided to ask Casey his opinion…

Now to get into the nitty gritty of Casey’s growth experience, we asked if he could share a specific growth experiment from his days at Pinterest and to elaborate on whether the results surprised him. His experience touched on a topic that all startups grapple to understand and master with their own customer base — user onboarding.

We also asked Casey to name some startups who truly nail user onboarding. Some of his favorites? Slack, Instagram Engineering, LinkedIn, Dropbox. And his least favorite? It’s a good one and an example you would probably agree with. Hint: it’s a social product that proves confusing to many outside of highschool/college. Read to find out the worst user onboarding experience according to Casey Winters.

We continued our conversation with another growth focused question for Casey —cautionary advice for eager growth teams like ours:

What are some of the biggest & most consistent barriers to growth you’ve seen at various companies?

Venture here to read the rest of our chat with Casey Winters, growth advisor in residence at Greylock Partners and former growth lead at Pinterest and GrubHub.

PS — feel free to ask Casey your own questions about growth and marketing – the chat lives on forever and he will receive an alert that you asked a question or left a comment. 👍