Growth Talks: Growth Marketing Strategies & Insights

Sit down with growth leaders and marketing executives from leading brands and companies across industries and stages. From exploring the evolution of growth marketing to walking the tightrope between brand and performance marketing to the epic saga of launching an ecommerce brand—we’ll dig into it all! Our guests will share their wins and war stories, and arm you with actionable insights on how to craft best-in-class strategies, execute with efficiency, and build your dream team.Growth Talks is brought to you by Right Side Up and hosted by Krystina Rubino, general manager of offline services.

Growth Talks: Growth Marketing Strategies & Insights is a business podcast hosted by Right Side Up, with 40 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Right Side Up hosts Growth Talks: Growth Marketing Strategies & Insights, a business show with 40 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #3

  How to Build a Growth Engine That Scales in the AI Era | Andrew Silard (Grove, Notion, Maven)

  Sep 15, 202646 minS2

  In this episode of Growth Talks, Andrew Silard, fractional head of growth and advisor to companies including Maven Clinic, OpenRouter, Just AI, and Appy, joins Right Side Up Founder and host Tyler Elliston to unpack the growth lessons from his time leading growth marketing at Notion and Grove. He breaks down the critical shift from exploration to exploitation, why spreading your budget too thin across channels can quietly stall growth, and how the "spike test" can reveal whether a channel is actually worth doubling down on. Andrew also shares how AI is reshaping marketing teams in real time—from Slack-based AI agents to the risks of vibe-coded prototypes that never scale—and offers a practical framework for CMOs deciding when to build AI tools in-house versus buy point solutions. ️ Key Takeaways: Exploration and exploitation require different skills. The scrappy experimentation that gets you to product-market fit can actually work against you once it's time to scale and focus. Run a spike test before you commit. Pushing 5–10x more investment into a channel for a short burst reveals whether your product-channel fit is real or illusory. Segmentation is a growth unlock, not a nice-to-have. Getting precise about who you're solving a problem for sharpens positioning and turns loose product-market fit into tight product-market fit. Marketing's job is to be the voice of the customer. Pairing quantitative data with real customer conversations builds the credibility to influence the rest of the organization. AI adoption in marketing is still early. The biggest near-term wins are Slack-based AI agents and a centralized "context brain"—not fully AI-native teams. ⏰ Timestamps 00:00 Welcome & Introducing Andrew Silard 00:50 Building Growth Across Startups: Lessons from Notion and Grove 01:20 Exploration vs. Exploitation: The Two Phases of Growth 05:09 Signs You're Stuck in Exploration Mode 07:53 The Spike Test: Validating Product-Channel Fit 16:55 Understanding Marginal CAC and Incrementality 18:13 Segmentation, Positioning, and Go-to-Market Strategy 24:49 Marketing as the Voice of the Customer 28:15 Where AI Is (and Isn't) Delivering Value in Marketing 32:16 AI Agents in Slack and the Rise of Devin 36:22 Building an AI-Native Marketing Team: Buy vs. Build 41:19 Should Growth Teams Go All-In on AI? 44:14 A/B Test 45:38 Growth Strategy in 2026: Efficiency vs. Growth 48:59 Building Early-Stage Marketing Teams in the AI Era Mentioned in this episode: Notion: https://www.notion.com/ Grove Collaborative: https://www.grove.co/ Maven Clinic: https://www.mavenclinic.com/ OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/ Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/ Cognition (Devin): https://www.cognition.ai/ We'll be dropping episodes every other week. Want to follow along and listen to new episodes when they're released? Subscribe to Growth Talks on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Episode #2

  The Stacked S-Curve Playbook for Sustained Growth | Tatiana Birgisson (Serval, Rippling)

  Sep 1, 202655 minS2

  In this episode of Growth Talks, Tatiana Birgisson, COO at Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform, joins host Krystina Rubino to unpack the mental models that have carried her from founding a beverage company out of her dorm room to scaling go-to-market at Rippling to building an entire function from scratch in a category that barely exists yet. Tatiana breaks down her "stacked S curves" framework for sustaining growth, explains why executional excellence is the only way to know when a channel is really fizzling out, and shares how Serval discovered it had less than 1% visibility in LLM search results—and what they did to fix it. ️ Key Takeaways: Growth isn't one curve, it's many. The best growth leaders launch the next channel before the current one peaks—waiting for the metrics to soften means you're already too late. Executional excellence comes before diagnosis. You can't tell if a channel is truly maturing until you've ruled out that you're just running it poorly. LLM visibility is the new SEO. Serval found they had under 1% visibility for their core terms in AI search tools—and treated it as a wake-up call, not a footnote. Management is changing. Fewer standing meetings, fewer layers, more "super ICs"—the best managers are still doing the hardest work themselves, not just coordinating it. Judgment beats hours. In an AI-native world, the edge goes to whoever can spot the highest-priority problem and apply exceptional taste—a skill Tatiana has seen consistently in parents. ⏰ Timestamps 00:00 Introduction with Krystina Rubino 01:25 From Founder to Operator: Lessons from Mati Energy 06:58 Building Rippling's Cross-Sell Function from Scratch 14:54 The Stacked S Curve Model, Explained 17:41 Knowing When a Channel Is Really Peaking 20:37 Defending New Bets to a Skeptical CFO 22:50 Why Serval Bet on LLM Search Over Google 30:22 The A/B Test 37:24 Unlearning "Professional Management" 44:42 GTM Strategy that Cuts through the AI Noise 46:49 Why Parents Make Great Operators in the AI Era 55:09 Tatiana's Favorite Growth Non-Hack Mentioned in this episode: Serval: https://www.getserval.com/ Rippling: https://www.rippling.com/ We'll be dropping episodes every other week. Want to follow along and listen to new episodes when they're released? Subscribe to Growth Talks on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Episode #1

  Building AI Fluency, One Uncomfortable Step at a Time | Nikki Jackson (Gusto)

  Aug 18, 202647 minS2

  In this episode of Growth Talks, Nikki Jackson, Head of Demand Generation at Gusto, joins host Krystina Rubino to share how she's spent the past year building AI fluency across her entire team—from scrappy, self-taught agent building to structured Learning Days and quarterly OKRs. Nikki breaks down exactly how she got a whole demand gen team comfortable experimenting, failing, and sharing in public, and why that discomfort is the real unlock. Nikki also digs into how she measures the ROI of AI adoption, how she's using Claude as a "second brain" to move faster with data, and why staying customer-first and authentic matters more than ever in a world full of AI-generated noise. She closes with a candid take on women, AI, and marketing leadership—and why nobody actually has it all figured out. ️ Key Takeaways: Lean into the uncomfortable. Real AI fluency comes from hands-on building and failing in public—not waiting until you feel ready. Structure accelerates adoption. Dedicated AI Learning Days, IT/security onboarding, and quarterly agent-building OKRs turned curiosity into consistent team-wide progress. ROI isn't as fuzzy as it feels. Time savings and efficiency gains from AI agents can be tracked concretely—don't let "it's hard to measure" become a blocker. AI is a second brain, not a replacement. Conversational access to data frees up strategic time and elevates conversations with analysts instead of eliminating them. Authenticity is the differentiator. As AI content scales, a distinct voice and point of view—especially for women in marketing—become the real competitive edge. ⏰ Timestamps 00:00 Meet Nikki Jackson: Building AI Fluency at Gusto 01:02 How Nikki's AI Journey Started 03:34 Structuring a Team-Wide AI Rollout 07:24 Clearing IT and Security Hurdles 08:46 AI Learning Days in Action 09:56 Quarterly Agent-Building OKRs 12:07 Measuring the ROI of AI Fluency 16:10 Building a Prioritization Rubric with AI 19:04 AI as a Second Brain for Data 23:27 The A/B Test: Nikki's Quick-Fire Round 29:42 Women, AI, and Marketing Leadership 34:57 Staying Authentic Amid AI Slop 39:40 Marketing to Busy SMB Owners 44:44 Brand Storytelling at Gusto 46:16 Creating Demand Before the Search Begins 50:48 Nikki's Favorite Growth Non-Hack Mentioned in this episode: Gusto: https://gusto.com/ We'll be dropping episodes every other week. Want to follow along and listen to new episodes when they're released? Subscribe to Growth Talks on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Growth Talks: Growth Marketing Strategies & Insights

  Our Favorite CMO Insights of 2025 | Krystina Rubino

  Dec 30, 202515 minS0

  <p>As you look ahead to 2026, what’s rising to the top of your marketing priorities?</p> <p>In this special episode of Growth Talks with Krystina Rubino, we highlight our favorite CMO insights on building brands that customers trust and love. </p> <p>It's packed with insights on subjects all CMOs should be thinking about today, such as brand versus performance marketing, incorporating AI into your marketing strategy, and how to build and enable your team.</p> <p>🗝️Key Takeaways:</p> Tamara Mendelsohn, COO at Overstory and former CMO at Eventbrite, shares why brand and performance aren’t competing priorities...

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  Growth Talks: Growth Marketing Strategies & Insights

  Rethinking Your Customer Journey Map | Matt Gehring ( Dutch Pet, Everlane, Rothy’s )

  Dec 16, 202557 minS0

  <p>The fastest-growing brands treat customer insight like a strategy—not just a survey.</p> <p>In this week’s episode of Growth Talks, CMO & Advisor, Matt Gehring joins host Tyler Elliston, founder and CEO of Right Side Up, to unpack what it takes to succeed in your first 90 days as a marketing leader.</p> <p>Drawing from his leadership roles at Dutch Pet, Everlane, and Rothy’s, Matt shares how to map the customer journey, turn post-purchase insights into smart segmentation strategies, and use real-time data to drive repeat purchases.</p> <p>Find out why acting on customer insights early...

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