In this episode, I chat with Savvas Zortikis about an Analytical approach to Viral Marketing. 

• Hear Savvas talk about how he studied Word-of-Mouth like a mad-scientist.
• He turned his hard-earned knowledge into six digestible chunks of 'execution-ready' methods - and launched it on Product Hunt. No surprise, it went viral. 
• SaaS product customer retention - how he figured out what it takes to have high retention and NPS. 
• Round of rapid-fire questions on Growth and Retention. 

About Savvas Zortikis

• Savvas is a CEO of Viral Loops, a venture-backed viral and referral marketing platform for building referral campaigns, ambassador programs, viral competitions, and sweepstakes.
• On his free time, he pursues his passion for understanding network effects, the science behind word of mouth and branding. He’s been featured in Forbes, Inbound.org and Fortune.

I met up with Sean Sheppard to learn about his growth based product/market fit approach.

My takeaways:

1. Quickest path to product/market fit
2. Product Management Special:
   1. Skills, attitude, and mindset for achieving a great market fit
   2. Product Development Vs. Market Development
   3. A clear and actionable pathway to achieve the skills and knowledge needed to win as an early stage founder or a product manager 
3. The new set of hard skills needed to succeed as a startup founder

References:

Market Acceleration Program from GrowthX.

About Sean Sheppard:

• Founding Partner at GrowthX - A seed-stage venture capital fund.

• Co-founder of GrowthX Academy - A training ground for tech sales, marketing, and design professionals.

• Contributor for Huffington Post and mentor to several high-growth start-ups

• Named Top 20 Sale Influencers in Silicon Valley

Financial services growth marketing series is where I invite top thought leaders from the financial services industry to share their wisdom on what drives growth.

Mike Barlow shares his insights on:

• Integration Vs. Disruption: What's the right psychological mindset when it comes to growth
• Top challenges and opportunities for Fintech leaders in 2017
• Evolving role of financial services CMO in light of AI and Data Science technologies
• And tons of other stuff: reading rituals, bias in AI, and favorite data anecdotes...

You may follow Mike via Twitter or LinkedIn if you choose to keep up with his exciting adventures. 

Financial services growth marketing series is where I invite top thought leaders from the financial services industry to share their wisdom on what drives growth.

In this episode, Scott Wentworth shares his wisdom on:

• How to avoid the commoditization of financial services products & services
• Five step content creation process that took Scott several years to crystallize from having worked with some of the top financial services thought leaders...
• How to develop a unique point of view to improve resonance with your audience
• Last but not least - the impact of the political shift in financial services industry, and how it specifically affects you as a financial services growth leader.

Scott was kind enough to put together his blueprint for our podcast listeners in a PDF format to make it easy to share with others in your organization: info.wentworthwriting.com/data-leaders

More options to reach Scott are his Linkedin or his website. 

In this podcast episode, Gaurav discusses growth hacking, machine learning, and copywriting. 

Gaurav has been part of mission-critical teams at two San Francisco startups, LinkedIn Slideshare, and Klout. He previously cofounded ThisYaThat, an online book portal for the Indian market, which won the Wharton Entrepreneurship VIP Seed Award and was the first non-US venture to receive an entrepreneurial grant from Wharton’s Innovation Fund.

He was featured in Hindustan Times, Yahoo Finance, YourStory, and TechCircle. He is also the co-inventor of an application-agnostic user search engine. Most recently, he has been building Profillic, a product to fix candidate screening by applying machine learning to the problem of skill validation.

He is finishing up his Master’s, from Columbia University, with a focus on computational linguistics/natural language processing and machine learning, and he collaborated with the data services, machine learning, and business analytics team at Google Nest this summer.