Here are the 18 Growth Mentors of April 2022

1. Akanksha Gupta

Describe yourself

Hi All

I am Akanksha, an Engineering Manager with Robinhood Inc. I love the intersection of product and technology. My idea of fun is to take a complex technical problem and slice it into achievable milestones. Prior to joining Robinhood, I worked with Amazon(Audible) for a few years where I shipped products around promotions and pricing, focusing on acquisition and retention of customers. Before Amazon, I was finishing my Masters in Computer Science at Columbia NYC. I worked for a few years with Microsoft as a tech consultant(yes I love to travel). I have mentored people from early in career to mid career stage and am a big advocate of Women in tech.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

Help coach and mentor people, share from my personal experiences, esp as a women in technology.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

Observing the industry and being agile to scale business and products to fit the market.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

How to own your own career

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

While at Amazon (Audible), I was tasked to revamp the way the company thinks about promotions to lure customers early in their shopping journey. Product thought about the problem in 2 ways: acquisition for new customers and retention for existing customers. I did a deep dive in the customer shopping patterns and introduced a promotion flow to upsell our existing customers. This brought more incentive to our existing customer base and opened a new way of how we target our customer journeys.

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2. Andrey Gargul

Describe yourself

I’m a growth designer turned product strategist who helps SaaS businesses to figure out their user onboarding and retention.

I spent my last 7 years as UX lead at Shopify, where I worked alongside an amazing team of designers, developers, data analysts and marketers, scaling products such as App Store and Experts Marketplace.

My over 10 years of experience in UX combined with a knack for data analytics helps me to find what blocks people from using products and simply remove that.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

I want to see how different businesses think about user experience, user activation and retention and to help them to become more user-centric.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

A growth mindset for me is the understanding that we are playing an infinite game. There are no winners or losers, and no one has figured it all. Regardless of how much you know, there is always something new to learn.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

User onboarding. So many good products fail because teams don’t understand how “try before buy” principle works for SaaS. It’s not enough to offer a free trial. It’s not enough to set up a product tour. Users come to you with their problems, and you need to design your onboarding to convince them that your product can help.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Recently, I was helping a friend to improve the conversion rate at his online store. Google Analytics showed a high drop-off from the landing page, and the HotJar Scroll map indicated that visitors don’t scroll much further than the header.

My instinct told me that customers would have all the answers. I analyzed customers’ reviews and noticed the discrepancy between the product qualities that mattered to them and the ones featured on the site. We rewrote the content in the language that spoke to customers better and reduced the drop-off by 25%.

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3. Angela Guedes

Describe yourself

Hi I’m Angela and I’ve spent the last 8 years building and scaling Customer Success teams from zero, mostly in B2B product-led SaaS companies. I’m currently at claap.io and before that worked for Belvo and spent 7 years at Typeform, where I joined as employee #16.

My experience crosses the entire post-sales strategy, having led and operationalized Implementation, Support, Customer Success and Customer Marketing programs.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

Pay back the help I had when starting out and improve my mentoring skills.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

Understanding that we’re only limited by our own beliefs. We can accomplish anything, improve anything if we adopt a mindset of research > create an hypothesis > test > learn > iterate.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Building the entire post-sales function from scratch. When everything is yet to be done, where do you start? Understand how to prioritize, what to prioritize. Thinking about strategy, tooling, team structure, building effective working relationships with Sales, Marketing, and Product teams. Reduce the noise and have an impact from day one.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

How to influence Product teams to see Customer Success as valuable partners. It came down to stop pushing every single customer request to the roadmap and starting to think like a business owner.

What metrics does the leadership cares about? What metrics is the Product Org trying to improve? And then package customer data and feedback in a way that the organization went from “Gosh, here comes CS with their requests” to “Amazing, it’s Customer Voice time!” 🙂

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4. Anna Furmanov

Describe yourself

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been a creator. I love to paint, build, design, and communicate. I also enjoy understanding people and what makes them tick.

I have 12+ years marketing experience at big name brands (Groupon, Blistex, Del Monte Foods), SMBs and startups. I’ve led marketing at two venture backed tech startups, and that’s where my heart is.

My sweet spot: Seed and Series A funded startups, and understanding the kind of marketing you need at a 10-person versus 110-person startup to hit your growth numbers.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

Having my own business and taking on clients is amazing, but I can only do up to 3 at a time and my contracts last 6-8 months typically. So this opportunity will allow me to help more people with their marketing efforts.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

A growth mindset means you’re embracing and OK with failure. Marketing is testing and learning, and without a growth mindset you’ll never be able to go beyond your comfort, to fail sometimes in order to truly succeed at other times.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Why being “close to the customer” is not just some pretty words on a page but really, really important in order to build a strong marketing foundation at your company. Doing the research, having that empathy and a strong understanding of your customer is the backbone to any good GTM and marketing strategy, and I can help uncover exactly how to go about doing it.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

I help early stage startups with their marketing efforts when they have very lean teams, so there’s ALWAYS something to be figured out!

One of the startups I worked with needed to create some polished Facebook ad videos, so I researched our options and found Casting Networks – find actors and models that have been in commercials and shoots.

Here’s what I did:

1. Created a google doc outlining project background, due date, deliverables, about your company, demographics, and script (for the video ad). It’s really important that you have done your research and know all about your buyer, their goals, challenges, fears, frustrations, etc. and the value for them from using your product before you write something like the script.
2. Created a project in Casting Networks, just like you would for 99designs, Upwork, etc.
3. Set a $ amount (e.g. $250 for a quick video testimonial)
4. The submissions roll in…like crazy. I had 150+ submissions for a video ad.
5. Hold auditions…I scheduled ~10 people within the platform and held 15 min. sessions in 1 day. More of a “”get to know each other”” and I had them recite some of the script to feel out their personality
6. Pick your favorite(s) and share the google doc that includes all the info they’ll need
7. Pay them once the project is complete (this is done off-platform)

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5. Anna Kowalska

Describe yourself

I’m passionate about helping start-ups to grow. My specialty is OKRs methodology but I support them also in people’s domain topics (for example feedback giving, accountability, learning communities). I’ve worked for over 13 years at Google in the Learning and Development space. For over a year now, I have been cooperating independently with various acceleration and pre-acceleration programs and with start-ups directly.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

I grow myself the most by helping others – it is for me big inspiration and energy source.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

It is a desire for continuous development with a positive outlook on the future combined with the acceptance of potential failures as an inevitable part of the journey. It is also being willing to experiment and try new things – creating your own opportunities rather than waiting for some to come. Learn, adapt and preserve despite challenges you face.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Goal setting and management – strong goals that link with your vision and strategy, respond to your company’s current situation and are set with the right measurement in mind to evaluate them. If this is done in the right way, it helps with prioritisation, accountability, ownership. It can be a great motivator for a team and also gives the opportunity to discuss and learn from successes and failures to help grow your business.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

I managed an internal pool of over 50 trainers dispersed globally who delivered new hire training as volunteers. Through a series of community building activities, peer mentoring, skill development, feedback and non monetary recognition, I managed to lower attrition by 50% and quality scores of my facilitators given by trainees went up by 8%.

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6. Dana Ganot

Describe yourself

I am a marketing technology professional with passion of helping other people grow. I enable and empower professionals, using marketing technology tools, to be the best they can be at their job and best they can feel in life.

My background is diverse and covers many marketing aspects: performance marketing, brand positioning, marketing operations, marketing solution architecture, data enablement and processes, marketing automation and more. Experienced working in different business segments: B2B, B2C and consultancy in leading roles.

I love bringing business objectives, data and marketing tools together to enable the best results for the business.

As a hands-on marketer, evolving within this domain, I have the privilege of helping companies transitioning into a holistic, data driven, customer focused entities and build a solid conversational marketing strategies.

I also have a special interest in diversity and inclusion – making women feel valued and appreciated at the workspace and helping them develop their professional journey.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

I love helping people grow both professionally and personally.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

A growth mindset is a positive self-development mindset which means we always want to expand our professional and personal skills.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

I enjoy helping people identify their personal strengths (essential skills) and combine it with hard marketing skills to be the best that they can be.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

I have arranged a design sprint to get different teams from the organization with different priorities, sitting in one room for one week to see we are all working towards the same goal and achieve alignment and resource prioritization from top. One solution to solve many problems in different teams.

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7. Daniel Kirstein

Describe yourself

I am an operations and finance oriented leader excelling in optimizing resources (team and $$) to unlock and accelerate company milestones. I’ve worked with multiple products and startups to help efficiently launch products, de-risk complications and effectively – get on with business.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

To give back, get more involved and help accelerate growth.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

A growth mindset actively accepts the nature of reality and then asks the question – how can I make this better?

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

How to maximize your resources and efficiently utilize your team and funding to give you the best chance to reach your goals.

Describe an out-of-the-box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Re-orienting a former company’s go-to-market plan to eliminate prior inefficiences – saving the company time and money.

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8. Doina Rosu-Savinoiu

Describe yourself

Hey, I am Doina, an investor in the Product Manager lifestyle for 12 passionate years now. I have learned, grown, adapted, and sometimes unlearned cyclically, building up a steady and beautiful baggage of Product Management methods, tools and lessons learned, that I am ready to share and detail. Let’s take together one step further into your journey towards a Great Product Manager.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

Sharing knowledge and experience is what makes us stronger, both the mentee, as gaining easy insights into someone else’s practical training, and the mentor because she/he is always motivated and pushed to grow, in order to be able to offer more.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

Never stop learning, questioning, testing, and experimenting.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

SEO

Describe an out-of-the-box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Problem: The information over the company’s tens of products was spread on several platforms and it was really hard internally to make use of it.

Solution: Implement the use of the Customer Support Chatbot internally as well, offering the same information over the company’s products, both to our customers and to our colleagues. This low-hanging fruit, helped us improve both the content of the Chatbot (with the help of our colleagues) as well as test the chatbot internally and make sure we released externally a better version. Good solutions are not only big and innovative, but are the ones that solve the painful issues, and this time, the solution was “Drinking our own champagne”.

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9. Dovile Sinke

Describe yourself

Hey, my name is Dovile – I’m a business coach and mentor for starting female entrepreneurs.

After leaving a successful corporate career in banking & consulting, I started building my own online empire. Today I have co-founded three successful online companies, including an affiliate marketing site working with biggest brands in the industry, an SEO agency and a membership platform for entrepreneurial moms in Lithuania.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

I want to show others, especially women, how much is actually possible for them in the online world.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

For me, growth mindset is a lifestyle – one where you constantly keep on learning new exciting things that makes you stay on top of your game.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

How to start and scale service-based online businesses.

Describe an out-of-the-box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Recently I run an experiment to prove that you CAN start an online business without a website, logo or perfectly crafted messages. Things people normally invest a lot in when starting, before even getting their first clients.

Guess what? Within one month I made over 10k$ revenue in simply reaching out to my audience and connections. This proves that a strong personal brand and a good offer is what truly matters in the beginning (and these are the things I teach starting entrepreneurs as well)!

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10. Faith Storey

Describe yourself

I’m Faith. I’m a full-time freelance PPC consultant. I successfully grew my freelance business to $200k in the first year and want to help others do the same. Whether you’re currently needing help with ads performance or if you’re wanting to jump into freelancing, I’m your gal. I genuinely want to help you grow and free your time to achieve a better work/life balance.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

I want to help others who manage paid ads make the jump to freelancing or help them grow their freelance business.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

Always be learning & testing.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Helping those who are done with the 9-5 and want to jump into freelancing instead. Preferably in PPC 🙂

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

There was a client who wanted to get electronic engineers to sign up for a new product. Engineers, in general, tend to hate ads. So we created memes that were relevant to this industry and got signups for less than $2 each.

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11. Faris Aziz

Describe yourself

I am an experienced product leader passionate about empowering others to succeed. I have a experience of scaling businesses from early stage through to exit and of a variety of businesses across industry verticals and platforms. I drive business impact by empowering teams to build products customers love.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

I’ve started to explore startup advisory work and I have loved the impact I’ve been able to deliver with the businesses I work with and am excited to explore other ways to share my experience and insights with more businesses that I care about to help increase their chance of success.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

To me, a growth mindset is about ensuring continuous learning and short term progress towards a long term goal. Being flexible and reactive to change is critical whilst thinking strategically and analytically to ensure impact is delivered.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Product management. I believe product thinking is key to the success of any modern business and when applied within the constraints and challenges of a unique business can deliver incredible results. I have come to realise that my experience, honed over multiple years of product management can truly help businesses succeed.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Whilst at Depop I was responsible for the growth team. Our remit was to deliver conversion rate improvements that had meaningful impact on the trajectory of the business. Through user research and product discovery we identified that search was underperforming. Simply put search terms entered were not returning the results users expected. We have denote of that ‘colour’ in particular was not being returned accurately and built a machine learning algorithm to correctly identify and return products that matched the users search term e.g. red dress. The result was an increase in absolute conversion rate of almost 2% and an annual revenue increase of several million pounds.

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12. Jeremy Ross

Describe yourself

I’ve spent the last 7 years leading growth for SaaS businesses. My specialty is going from zero to one and building a business from the ground up. I love developing product-market fit, building personas, and building an extremely tight & optimized funnel.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

As a Growth Lead at Practice, I’ve fallen in love with coaching. Our SaaS business provides coaches with infrastructure for running their biz — I’ve seen the positive impact that coaching can have in the world.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

For me, a growth mindset is an evolving way to think about the needs of the business at each stage of the organization. It’s thinking about the building blocks for growth and creating the frameworks to learn something every single day!

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Taking a business from zero to one. Starting from a place of not knowing anything to truly understanding how you fit into the market.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

For me, it was when I build my first full acquisition funnel. From the first touch to the stage of someone becoming a customer, that’s when I knew, “this was for me”.

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13. Kate Busby

Describe yourself

I’m a trilingual digital marketing professional with over 10 years of experience in the field. In that time, I’ve built high-performing marketing campaigns for startups and multinationals in a number of sectors – publishing, manufacturing, recruitment, big pharma – with a strong focus on localisation and customer conversion.

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

I would like to guide and transform committed individuals and help them reach their professional goals.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

A growth mindset means being an eternal student, no matter what your level of experience happens to be.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

If I could mentor someone on just one topic, it would be advanced organic social media strategies, because this area is significantly undervalued.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

The problem: identifying where individual prospects are in the sales funnel.

The solution: asking them simple one question to release the download of our lead magnet. The question?
“What are your current needs?”

a) Just browsing
b) Looking for help
c) About to buy

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14. Madhav Bhandari

Describe yourself

Hey, I’m Madhav! I’m obsessed with growing early-stage SaaS products (revenue between $100k – $1M ARR). I’ve done this for many SaaS companies in my decade long career (Hubstaff, Bonsai, Close, Continu etc.). A big part of my playbook is a content-centric growth strategy. I LOVE mentoring promising SaaS companies so I’m excited to be helping here!

In just one sentence, why do you want to become a growth mentor?

Apart from the fact that I enjoy advising startups, I also get to expand my knowledge about certain verticals and the business problems they tackle.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

Growth mindset means you either win or you learn. You never lose. Every failure or success is a learning.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Content-focused growth strategy. Why? Because I’ve led 5 SaaS companies go from $100k to $x million ARR with a content-focused growth strategy.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Our organic traffic growth had been flat for a year despite any additional investments we were making in blog content & we had to double our revenue in 1 year. But I noticed that we were getting some customers from downloadable templates and they were relatively easy to rank for.

So I diverted our content budget to create 400+ templates over 3 months & set up a “hub & spoke” linking structure. A year later, we 3x our signups & doubled our revenue.

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15. Rui Bom

Describe yourself

I believe the success of anyone is primarily a function of 3 things: Knowledge, Practice and Talent. I can not promise to elevate your talent but with the solid frameworks and materials I have built over the last 10+ years, as an entrepreneur and 5-star rated mentor at 500 startups, I can promise that, in a short amount of time, I will give you the knowledge and practice you need to excel at what you do.

In just one sentence, please tell us why you want to become a growth mentor?

I’m part of the very exclusive group of 5-star rated mentors working at 500 startups. I designed and taught the curriculum for two of 500’s most famous programs. Want to share the playbook that helped creating 25+ unicorns with more startups and entrepreneurs.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

If you have a growth mindset you know you can overcome any hurdles in life as long as you put your mind and heart to it.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

How to transform a powerful idea into a successful product

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Back in 2013 I was trying to raise money for my startup. I had been turned down by 200+ investors, was completely broke and was less than a week away from shutting the company down. If I were to close an investor, the approach had to change! That’s when I thought that perhaps if I would get in touch not with investors but rather with successful companies who might see value in our technology (meaning that even if for some reason we would go bankrupt one day they could still keep the tech and use leverage it for their own product). I sent out one email and got a response 5 minutes later inviting us to travel to Athens the next day for a meeting, flight and 5-star hotel paid for :). At the end of the meeting I had a $1,000,000 term sheet on the table. Long story short we closed that deal and with that allowed us to continue developing the business.

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16. Sidharth Iyer

Describe yourself

Hi, my name is Sidharth Iyer (go by Sid) and I am an ambidextrous (creative + analytical) marketing professional who loves collaborating with growth mindset folks, in a fast moving environment. I am a lifelong learner and believe in supporting other professionals become high performers.

In just one sentence, please tell us why you want to become a growth mentor?

I believe in building a longer table and not a taller fence with what I have gained as a professional.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

Growth Mindset is a habit that you develop over time and with a constant effort to being a better version of yourself today vs. yesterday.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

‘Importance of being a lifelong learner’ would be the topic. It’s the reason why I am in the position today, as it allows you to be strategic and pragmatic in decision making and develop critical thinking abilities.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

At Docebo, we were facing stiff competition for our two most important use cases – Partner Training and Customer Training – that our LMS platform can solve.

To enable our sales team with better fit and high quality SQLs, I collaborated with Product, Content and Customer Success teams to put together a blog post, a solution landing page and a one-pager elevator pitch for sales enablement.

The result over 30 Days was we were ranking #1 Organically for ‘Partner Training LMS’ and ‘Customer Training LMS’ terms in Google.

And our sales team reported of getting nearly 4X more SQLs of right fit and high quality prospects, leading to more closed won businesses that Quarter.

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17. Tom Parker

Describe yourself

As a Sales & Marketing Strategy Consultant, I work with my clients to build the technological infrastructure that start-ups, scale-ups and established SMBs need to run a successful revenue-generating business.

As a human being, I like to give back to the community by helping them learn from my mistakes (of which there are many!). I also love consumer technology, football, travelling, and video games – my Achilles heel you could say!

If you think I can help, or want to pick my brains, please get in touch!

In just one sentence, please tell us why you want to become a growth mentor?

I love to help others find the same success (through coaching/mentoring) that I have had in the last 10 years – particularly young entrepreneurs!

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

In 2 words – ‘Resilience’ and ‘Persistence’.

Growth is something that is never really achieved per se, it’s an ongoing journey throughout your entire career.

The key to success is that you keep on learning, keep trying (even after many failures), and always push to do better than you did yesterday.

Do this continuously and consistently, and you’ll get ever closer to where you want to be.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Optimising commercial processes through the use of technology – which gives smaller businesses a platform from which they can ‘punch above their weight’ and grow.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

Is there really such a thing? I’m not sure!

I don’t really believe in ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions but my consulting work challenges me to weave multiple softwares and processes together, in order to solve these multi-dimensional challenges.

I have come up with some very low-touch ways to engage B2B audiences via multi-channel outreach sequences though… Does that count?

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18. Yilin Zhang

Describe yourself

Hey! I help startups grow, identify strategies and find passion & motivations! Experience in venture capital, accelerator, fundraising. #Ex-Techstars Community Leader, G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance Chairwoman in HK, First Blockchain Ambassador in Asia.

In just one sentence, please tell us why you want to become a growth mentor?

Would like to share knowledge and insights to benefits those who want to learn more and seek for help.

In your words, what does a growth mindset mean to you?

An opening and user-oriented mindset defining strategies to embrace new challenges and markets with scale up rocket speed.

If you could mentor a startup on one topic, what would it be?

Fundraising and Growth. I found it’s a main topic and one of the challenges almost each startup will face and it’s key point for early-stage startup to learn more about the strategies, also I have relevant solid experience in this area.

Describe an out of the box solution to a complex problem that made you proud of yourself?

When we face the Covid situation challenges, I have turned online meetings vivid and engaged for startups with digital tools including icebreaker, online games and virtual match fundraising.

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Interested in becoming a growth mentor?

What we’re looking for:

• Growth marketers, product managers, and designers, with extraordinary track-records of success
• Inspirational founders that have “been there and done that.”
• Friendly people that take joy in helping other people.
• At least 5 years of demonstrable experience working in growth.
• GrowthMentor is a #givefirst platform. You should be cool with mentoring for free until you have three reviews.