Episode #25: Hyperlocal Growth Strategies with Jeff Aksengor

How to build a localized go-to-market strategy and how to readjust your content strategy during a pandemic. Our latest episode with Jeff Askengor reveals this and more.

In this episode of Mobile Growth & Pancakes, Esther Shatz is joined by Jeff Aksengor, Global Head of Growth at Podimo. Jeff discusses how content consumption trends have made a broad shift during the pandemic. He also shares his insights on creating a localized growth strategy for hyperlocal content platforms.

Check out all the other episodes of Mobile Growth & Pancakes here.

To connect with Jeff:

Timestamps:

00:43 – Introduction to Jeff and his time at Podimo
01:38 – Jeff’s transition from competitive break dancing into mobile growth
03:13 –  An overview of Podimo’s market and product strategy 
08:15 – Identifying and responding to change in content consumption patterns during the pandemic 
14:15 –  Building a localized go-to-market strategy 
21:37 – Customer persona strategy for the local market
23:45 – Lessons from the growth of Podimo 
26:40 – Balancing exposure and profitability in the freemium model for content apps
35:51 – Tips for aspiring growth marketers and mobile growth resources

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It boils it down to the personas, the personas might not be age bracket dependent but what they usually have in common is certain lifestyle aspects or common denominators and those are the levers that we are going for

Jeff Aksengor

Key Takeaways:

Jeff works for Podimo, an open podcast platform that offers best-in-class exclusive short-form audio content. His role as the Global Head of growth involves designing and implementing a global growth strategy and operations. He also supports creators through a brand new revenue share model. Most of Podimo’s growth has been shaped by the pandemic, as the company started in 2019 and Jeff joined in September of 2020. 

Jeff was a competitive breakdancer, but he also had a passion for all things growth and marketing. He played an active role in promoting breakdancing events. So, it was not much of a leap when he entered a career in mobile growth.

Creating content that’s in English and relatable for audiences in specific geographic areas is cost-expensive. However, in certain areas, English may not be the dominant language. Therefore, creating hyper-local content needs a balance between English content and localized content, as both have their advantages. 

Alone time has incrementally become a bigger priority for content consumers during the pandemic. Monitor the consumption data and identify the data sets with the most impact to extract deeper insights on your user base. Recommend similar shows to users and help them expand their content horizon to improve your retention metrics. 

For a content-focused business, content is the biggest asset and a brand differentiation factor. If your content has unique value, be willing to educate your audience to convince them to pay for that content.  A growth strategy from these models requires testing based on common denominators within your user persona, market preferences, and market competitors.  

Creating a localized content strategy is about aligning creators’ brands with your own and using research data to understand the local market more deeply.  

Be ready for failures when testing for growth because you won’t be able to minimize those failures in the future if you don’t learn from failures in the present. Think of how well each insight will scale and reduce the action plan to a few actionable steps that you can take today to fuel that growth.

Look at consumption trends and maturity of each market individually to know when you need to provide more content for free or when to scale the freemium model back. Your content differentiation will drive growth in all markets, but each market will have its own onboarding strategy.

Three crucial insights on the connection between organic mobile installs and paid installs

What billions of data points taught us on paid and organic installs?





    Full Transcript:

    Esther Shatz: I am joined today by Jeff Aksengor who is director of growth at Podimo. Jeff, do you want to introduce yourself quickly?

    Jeff: Absolutely. I’m Jeff. I’ve been with Podimo since September last year. That is pretty much a lot of time, at least a big share of the company lifetime because we started back in 2019. Since then, we’ve experienced great growth and a lot of things have happened, especially because a lot of that lifetime, you can say, has been through the COVID-19 period, which is, as you know, quite unstable and turbulent, et cetera. In a nutshell, what I’m in charge of is the global growth strategy and operation, of course. I’m both a technical toolkit, you can say, but also support a lot of the local market development and strategic directions there.

    Esther: Amazing. Before we go too deep into that, I do have to ask how one goes from a competitive breakdancer to a mobile growth expert. [chuckles]

    Jeff: [laughs] Well, I think it’s a great question. I’ve always been a fan of the commercial size of [unintelligible 00:01:57] Even though I was basically competing and breakdancing, I was always a part of events and building up marketing activities, and trying to promote whatever workshops there might be. I think it has always been my parallel passion, you can say, to just focus on the marketing and growth side of everything. It hasn’t been a huge leap or jump for me. It was basically just shifting more time into what I do. Thank you for asking. Thank you for spotting it in my LinkedIn Bio. [laughs]

    Esther: I think you might be the first person we’ve had on the podcast who can add breakdancing to their CV. [crosstalk] I had to bring it up. It’s very cool.

    Jeff: However, if one fact is becoming mainstream now, breakdancing just got accepted as an official sport in the Olympics.

    Esther: Wow, I did not know that.

    Jeff: True. Yes.

    Esther: That’ll be one of the few Olympic sports we might actually watch in this household. [laughs]

    Jeff: Exactly. It’s like their attention drive or at least unlocking new audiences, maybe. It’s a good strategy [inaudible 00:03:07] .

    Esther: Yes. Growth for the Olympics, very good. Reaching at new generational audiences. All right, let’s go straight into it. Generally, here we tend to focus on more traditional growth strategies, like UA and Organics. I would love to cover– First of all, Podimo, it’s a content app, right? It’s about being able to surface relevant channels, relevant audio materials for users who come in. How would you say that you look at growth from the content perspective rather than, “This is my UA strategy and this is my organic strategy” and call it a day?

    Jeff: I think it’s a great place to start. Maybe I can throw a few words about the product itself. As mentioned before, we kicked off at the end of 2019. We are pretty much a very new company still, a young company. Currently, we live in Denmark, which is our number one market, you can say. I’m not saying that it’s strategically number one. We’re equally focused on all our markets, but it’s where it all began. This is where it all started. Now we live in Germany, Spain, and in Latin America. Our goal is to offer best-in-class short format audio to the end-users. Basically, we’re focusing on content that can’t be found anywhere else. We’re basically focused on offering a hyper-local content catalog, depending on the market needs. We’ve recently added a massive audiobook catalog to the product, as we believe that there’s a strong correlation between those formats. Also, we believe that there’s lots of added value towards the end-user by having that as well.

    Esther: Can I ask you quickly just about when you mentioned hyper-localized content as something you’re focused on, when your focus is hyper-local, how much do you need a very local team to be able to support those efforts? First, how much can you scale without going region by region?

    Jeff: That’s a great question. It needs to be a balance because there will be content formats that are, let’s call it more prone to localizations, or it can be global shows, basically English-centric, usually. Then the stories would be a great fit for whatever market you localize. Of course, you would basically translate them, localize them, and publish them there. That’s it. of course, a more cost-efficient strategy.

    However, there will be formats that are not prone to that, a lot of them aren’t. There is a lot of curation going on locally. We are always dependent on having a local curation team and a curation-content strategy as well, in place. That is how we differentiate because this is basically saying, “Look, we deliver the feel of the local market and the vibe of the local market, or culture, or whatever talk-of-town there is, through those verticals that we focus on currently, those genres. That goes from true crime, entertainment, self-development, et cetera, basically the conventional genres. There will be fiction, but most of it is non-fiction right now.

    Esther: I would imagine that you had, probably, a plan set in place for 2020 that was probably disrupted, I’m guessing, [laughs] around March time?

    Jeff: Absolutely. I think, like everyone in the audio or video consumption industry, everything that has to do with habits and daily routines has been pretty much turned upside down. In our case, given the fact that podcast is a format that usually is consumed during commute– We really expected our listening activity to drop, because we thought, “Well, this is not going to happen.” It wouldn’t serve the same purpose, because there is no commute. People are basically staying at home, working from home, and there’s no need to consume that type of audio format.

    That was basically an assumption that we had. I can get back to how that went. We also expected that the potential economical instability may cause the need to trim the amount of subscription services out there. We’re not a premium-cost platform, I would say, compared to our competitors in the markets we are. However, everything counts. I think that the average person, at least in the Nordic right now, has six-plus subscriptions for audio and video.

    I think, times like that, I guess, makes you reflect a bit about how much you should actually have, and maybe make it a healthy choice because then you just end up sitting on your couch and binging whatever flicks that there are. What we saw quite clearly is that a new routine popped up. The me-time has become more– What we can see is just the me-time, as you know, the entity or the concept of me-time, has become more important. To drift away to amazing stories and nurture that me-time has become a thing. That’s something we’re really seeing in our consumption patterns.

    Esther: How do you pick up on that? You have, obviously, an event that nobody planned for, that severely disrupted, which is a true podcast. It was natural to think of the two together. How do you start to detect this change? How do you figure out, “Okay, there is–” We know the commute is gone. Fine. This is something we all figured out pretty quickly. How do you figure out that there is this actual consumption shift that’s relevant for you to capitalize on?

    Jeff: Absolutely. That’s a great question. I think that happened incrementally. It didn’t happen overnight because I mean, given the fact that we are at least in, you can say, eight different, very different markets. I mean, Latin America is somewhat different there, but, let’s say, eight quite different markets and some of them had restrictions. Some of them didn’t, some of them chose to do the lockdowns at a certain point, some didn’t. What we did is basically monitor the consumption by market, and specifically in those markets where we have the biggest data sets, and could drag some significant learnings out of that.

    What we saw is that, if you look at an MAU, just an MAU-based view on it. Obviously, we saw some change patterns, but that gained traction again, so we didn’t see any huge dropouts or drop-offs there. What we saw is a shifted time of the day where users would consume, launch the app, and then have their sessions. Also, obviously, there’s a slight shift in the type of content that’s consumed, I wouldn’t say it’s drastical and I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s significant, but we’re seeing more, it’s more skewed towards what you would probably spend time listening or viewing in the evenings, which is more True Crime formats, like really something that can make you drift away.

    Whereas this is an assumption that we have currently, we still need to validate it, that is, when you’re basically commuting or you, on your way to work or a job interview or whatever, you need something that can trigger some sort of inspiration, motivation and maybe that’s a bit more in the self development entertainment genres. Whereas what we see, well, I mean, True Crime is also entertainment, but what I’m saying is maybe the comedy type of entertainment, whereas the evening, evening and me-time consumption is really about drifting away and getting in depth of an enticing and super interesting story, et cetera.

    Esther: Right. You don’t want to get lost in something else when you’re on your way to important meetings, so that’s awesome. You identify these changes, you see that there is this different pattern in consumption. How do you react to that? How does your growth plan change? How do you create the shift to match that?

    Jeff: Right. What we do is, I mean, the content pieces that we’re seeing performed well, those are the ones we use to, on one hand, to curate more localized content like that, for the future shows and new shows that are coming up. Also, we look at retention, right? I mean, what we’re seeing is, if there’s a super popular show that doesn’t really connect or has a spillover to what we offer on the platform, you would see a lot of people come in for that, and you would see them leave again, and that really makes sense.

    From the everyday context where you’re basically entering a sneaker shop, and all of a sudden, in the corner, there’s like, there’s a barista making coffee and you’re like, “Wow, that’s strange.” There might be some who, who smelled the coffee and went in just for that, and never cared about the sneakers. Weird analogy, but you get the point. That is a thing.

    Of course, I think many similar platforms and products experience that. You would really need to think about how do you retain those who come in for a certain show, but also discover the amazing look-alike shows or similar content, or maybe even expand the horizons by just discovering new categories that happened so that the interests of the user. Of course, the onboarding has something to say, but also the CRM, the way that the product recommends new shows and content pieces has a lot of this, has a huge role to play in that. I hope that answers the question.

    Esther: It does. Yes, I mean, it brings another question, which is basically, if we look at, I think, especially in what we see in this post COVID world is that if you hadn’t let content drive a lot of what you were looking towards, and a lot of what you were understanding, you’d probably have missed a very high potential. You’d be catering towards something that wasn’t really happening.

    My question is, you have this one driver, which is content and getting that sense of “Okay, what’s fueling here, what am I serving?” Then you also have the brand side. You’re trying to craft a specific, we can have debates on the importance of brand but I think everybody has some sense of understanding that brand is an essential component. How do you balance these two? Can you work them together? Do you let content lead the way and say, “Forget the brand we’ll figure that out after.” Do you limit your content within the brand? How do you balance these two concepts which can often compete?

    Jeff: Right. That’s a great question. To be transparent, this is something we talk about day in and day out. “When is it brand and when is it content?” We all agree and that’s also based on the cool facts is that it’s always the content that drives awareness. In a nutshell, we’re just a platform but we offer amazing content. It is the content, it will always be the content that drives the intent, because that’s what we sell. That’s what the platform is all about and we are also very focused on selling, not selling, well, producing and selling very, very high quality content. Exclusive content that is clearly well produced and has put lots of thoughts and curation and investment behind it and that’s what drives business forward.

    We believe that, and this is really again a differentiation factor where we say, “Look, we completely appreciate and acknowledge that there’s a free trend in the vertical within which we operate. However, we also need to emphasize that amazing content costs, and you need to invest in that.” We’re seeing that more and more users and that’s just maybe a consumption trend is realizing that.

    There’s a reason why a platform like Podimo is charging a fee because that doesn’t only cover obviously the production cost, but it also supports the creators. We have a model where we support the creators and basically directly from the premium revenue that you as a user are paying based on your consumption patterns, a cut of that is directly given to the creator.

    Esther: Amazing, I think, one of the questions probably that happens here is, when content is the driver, and the ability to have really quality content and to focus your energies on that. How do you create a growth strategy around that? You can sit and say, let’s just find the best content, but obviously, if everyone could do it, then in a way then we’d be in a different ballgame, how do you turn that into a growth strategy? How do you create that process and set goals around it?

    Jeff: Right. I mean, test and learn, it is the way forward, especially in the business we’re in. We could go for a plethora of verticals and types of content, types of creators, we call them partners. I think that the curation strategy is really all about how do we test and learn and monetize of course, but also how do we make the selection as bulletproof as possible? That’s basically based on the trends in the culture, the commercial potential, the cost of production, et cetera.

    I think there’s lots of thought that’s put into how do we select and reduce the next steps or the next, let’s call it, the roster of potential content productions into what we believe will be the best fit for our consumers, but also for the market that we’re in because this is equally important for nurturing the existing but it’s also a huge part of building our PR, do those, I wouldn’t call it news jag, but ride the wave of already existing pressing topics in the society. Whether that’s being true crime cases, or being a politically something, political obstacles or topics that are trending, et cetera.

    How this differentiates from a newspaper is that this is the depth. This is where you get the depth and you get really the option to drift away and feel that you are inside that story that you’re consuming, which is I would say quite quite an important entity when we curate.

    Esther: I’d love to understand how you look at audience and audience growth because clearly the people that will be consuming are the key indicators of what content belongs. You’re reading true crime has this popularity and I know we touched on local markets earlier, but even within a specific local market of course there’s age ranges and demographic consideration. How much do you play around with– Okay we decided “This is the audience we’re going after, which means we need to figure out this branch of content, and how much are you seeing who’s coming in and saying “Hey maybe there’s this group we didn’t consider. Let’s see how we optimize and iterate for them.”

    Jeff: Great question. The easiest and most concise answer to that– There’s a lot of complexity around this topic and internal considerations. It boils it down to the personas, the personas might not be age bracket dependent but what they usually have in common is certain lifestyle aspects or common denominators and those are the levers that we are going for.

    I will not be able to tell you about our personas, that’s pretty sensitive for our business but what I can say is that’s really something we work with. When unlocking a new market and building the go-to market strategies locally, this is what it’s all about for us because the easier we can lock in on those personas, the easier it makes it for us to curate content but also to drive the growth outside of the app towards the product.

    Esther: How much do you need to tap into a specific persona? Do you need somebody on your team who fits that demographic? Do you need focus groups? How much does research get you and how much do you need tangible somebody there to tie this in for you?

    Jeff: It’s usually a combo, a part of content curation strategy is to look beyond the content itself, it’s also to look at what is the target audience for this, what is the– In the old school terms the “readership” [chuckles], in this case it’s the “listenership.” But what is the brand of the partner or creator we’re doing it with and is it aligned with what we think would drive this forward and get the momentum that we expect?

    I think it’s a combination of a lot of internal discussions, also learning from all of our markets. This is the beauty of being in a global team where you basically are in the tower and fetching all the learnings and trying to mix the formulas that you can push back and amplify the go-to market strategies. The short answer is it’s always a mix, lots of user surveys and user research, qualitative and quantitative as well, consumption behavior, conversations with our partners. The curation team is a big driving force there as well.

    Esther: Have you ever gotten it completely wrong? Have you ever had something that you were so sure was the right pathway and just bombed completely when you tried to launch it live?

    Jeff: Absolutely. This is a part of the learning curve that we’re in. If we have this conversation five years down the line, I would assume and expect that we would have less of those because the dataset becomes bigger and you’re learning is more in check and stable and you have more or less a formula of everything you do. In this stage we’re at and also during those very shifting times, absolutely, there’s been bets that have not met what we expected and I needed to shift the strategy. We live and we learn. [chuckles].

    Esther: Do you find that you are able to take those random, “We thought this would work and it didn’t”? Is there something in the process that you detect as, “We didn’t take this into consideration, we need this in future processes,” how do you go through that pathway of minimizing five years down the line where you don’t feel like you’re having as many of them? How does that look?

    Jeff: This is a big part of my daily work, and that is to cap those learnings, but also analyze them and really look at it from a scale perspective. How much of that is actually scalable? You said it yourself, you said true crime is a growing category, it’s super popular in the media streaming services that we’re seeing and there’s a lot of content out there that is about that. We do know that in some of our markets this is an amazing growth driver and in some of our markets it’s just not, this is a cultural thing. In some markets there might already be so much true crime in the news and media that it’s not really a thing you want to subscribe for.

    Esther: It’s not the escape when it’s your day-to-day. [chuckles]

    Jeff: It’s not the escape, it’s actually the opposite right? You just get the same as you consume in your day-to-day information flow. It’s just an example, but locking in on those learnings and taking a stand in how do we scale this? And if not, what is the role of this learning for those existing markets? Are we going to change it, are we going to keep it as is? Are we going to use it to maybe create a new category that we believe could then be the best fit for the market that we’re answering et cetera.

    That’s an interesting and ongoing process because as you get better at getting the learnings, you also get better at analyzing them and reducing them to a few specific actions that are becoming displayed when we roll out whatever activities.

    Esther: I’m going to shift gears a little bit, I think one of the big challenges definitely in the world of content consumption, but we see at places like fitness apps of plenty of other places where you have content that in the one hand can be free and is free in many situations and on the other, you mentioned it before, premium content is something that you understand, “Okay I opt in for this.” There’s a reason that people choose to subscribe to five or six different streaming services instead of streaming online wherever they can find it. I’d be interested to hear how you balance this idea of, “We need to prove that our content is valuable, right? We need somebody to already have that buy-in that is worth the cost.

    On the other hand there’s a limit to how much we want to give for free when maybe we’re supporting a specific type of engagement that won’t profit us in the long term.” How do you guys look at that? How do you create the balance between making sure you’re growing your user base profitably versus just getting eyes on you that don’t actually stick around or don’t convert into something monetary long-term?

    Jeff: This is a great question and I think it’s a question that also has a different answer, depending on which market you’re talking about. Truth is from a competitive standpoint– We do know how our compensation is and of course we are in a very competitive landscape, so competitor analysis and differentiation is just the talk of the town internally. This is how it is for us, this is our day to day conversation. What we do is, we need to look at what are the consumption trends, what is the– Maybe the maturity of what we offer in a certain market.

    Let me give you Spain for example, what we do is not a well-established format in Spain yet. There haven’t been subscription services and podcasts that you need to pay for, it’s not something that is widely acknowledged in a market like Spain for instance. Whereas, it’s completely different in Denmark and Germany, we’re seeing the same patterns when we do competitive analysis. Even that question needs to be answered based on what market we are talking about.

    In some markets, less is more, absolutely, we know that we’d rather have better retention than massive volumes and then lots of churn. What we do know for sure is that content quality is unbeatable, if it’s the friction in a free premium-model that we’re going to go with or not, it’s the content that will drive retention. That’s at the end of the day what the product is about and it’s maintaining that quality level is the common denominator for us.

    Esther: Do you have different onboarding flows and different models per market? When you’re launching in Spain, is it a completely different model of how you launch in, say, Germany or how you launched in Denmark?

    Jeff: We’re getting there. It also is a question of market maturity. We are still a new company. Again, if we’re going to have a conversation five years down the line, then there’s going to be much more clarity in my answers, but I think we’re still in the phase of logging in on how do we approach market X, Y, Z, and also, what is the perfect on-boarding strategy for Spain? What is the perfect on-boarding strategy for Denmark and Germany? Yes, given the fact that we have a local team in all of the markets, that’s what we believe is needed, to have a hyper-local approach. Then yes, the on-boarding will be aligned with that, and it will be slightly different from market to market.

    Esther: How long do you give as testing periods when you’re in the stage that you’re in of really learning and figuring out? It sounds like you guys have been pretty agile. It’s one of the benefits of early day companies as well is being able to actually say, “Okay, let’s respond to what we’re seeing and not just that, the plan that we decided for ourselves a few months ago.” Let’s say we’re talking about on-boarding in Spain where you’re in this market, where you’re creating something that’s more new to the market that doesn’t relate to user behaviors, how long do you feel that you give an experiment to run before you say. “We have to scrap this.” Or, “This is our way. Let’s close the chapter on this, move on to the next task and keep an eye on how things are going”?

    Jeff: Well, this is a scientific type of answer or question. It really depends what type of experiment you’re doing. If you’re more in the qualitative space, let me put it that way, then obviously you don’t need a massive group of people before you can start seeing some common denominators, the patterns, et cetera. On the other hand, if you’re doing some ACL activity, it’s also very difficult to measure it because that’s just the nature of the format. A lot of the thought and the planning is going into how do we utilize formats where we can get instant reach and lots of that so that we can learn from it fast. It’s really all about handpicking the methods and the channels and pleasure and thanks for having me. Variants, you can say, that would give you fast and as significant as possible, at least, learnings. It’s really a mix, I would say, of the methods we are using there.

    Esther: Let’s shift away from growth for a minute. I’m just curious, we obviously went through a massive global change over the past year or so, and I think content consumption is one of the things that is being looked at in a completely different way. I mean, if we look at how people have many, many regions subscribed to different streaming services, audio services, what the expectation is of back to normal life and do we go back. Do you think that there was a permanent shift in the market? Me-time, for example, is something that is the new normal and this is something we take or do you see us going slowly, slowly back to the old ways of, “We’re back on the commute. This is what we’re looking for. Everything is as it was.”

    Jeff: This is a personal opinion. I think it’s extremely difficult to break a habit. Again, from a marketer’s perspective, breaking a habit is much more difficult than riding the wave of an already existing one. I would say I’m not afraid of that. The commuting is gone for good now that people haven’t been doing that for a year’s time. I think everything will get back to normal as soon as the conditions are right because that’s how it’s been done for decades. I think what we will learn from here, and that’s basically something that we need to focus on, and that is we have unlocked a potential new habit that we need to focus on, and that is what’s the most interesting there. I think this is really a question of what we have learned during those, a year and a half for now, I think, and how are we going to induce that in our day-to-day strategy?

    Esther: Nothing goes away, you add. Basically, you assume that the previous habits are there. Now, we have this additional layer to add in and I guess continue to build off. I don’t want to know what the next year has in store for us in terms of a dramatic routine altering whatever, but just continuously layer each new behavior on top of the next.

    Jeff: Exactly. We would take it as an amazing and quite unique opportunity. Although it’s been turbulent and tough for most of us, I’d say, we also take it as an opportunity to learn and to potentially spot new areas where we can build retention and intent.

    Esther: Are you ready for the quick fire round?

    Jeff: Absolutely.

    Esther: All right. It’s not too scary, I promise. If you could give just one tip to an aspiring growth marketer, what would it be?

    Jeff: Test, learn, don’t be afraid to fail.

    Esther: Favorite growth resource?

    Jeff: Oh, my user base.

    Esther: Nice. Okay. Who is the person, speaking about going back to normal life, the person in the mobile growth world that you’d most want to take for lunch and why?

    Jeff: That’s a good one. I think it’s going to be someone who has been in the business for a long time. Obviously, it would be Mark Zuckerberg.

    Esther: I’m always surprised that more people don’t answer Mark Zuckerberg because it’s like– Yes, I would also want to go to lunch with Mark Zuckerberg and see what’s in there. The most important question. When you’re at lunch with Mark Zuckerberg, let’s say you’re at a pancake house, what is your favorite type of pancake?

    Jeff: It would be, for sure, with vanilla ice cream.

    Esther: Any pancake with vanilla ice cream works.

    Jeff: Any pancake with vanilla ice cream. It’s the best.

    Esther: Really, you like ice cream more than you like pancakes is what I’m getting from this?

    Jeff: Well, no. I think it’s a combination. I love pancakes.

    Esther: I’m with you. Every time I finish this round, I instantly need to find a way to get myself a pancake with. Now, I want it with ice cream. That’s–

    Jeff: You’ve got to try to have it. It’s an amazing–

    Esther: I’m American. We’ve had pancakes all the time. If we can put ice cream on it, we put ice cream on it. If we can put dough in it, we put dough on it. That’s how we roll. I will tell you, I once had a pancake that was made into an ice cream cone with the ice cream in the middle which was messy but it was a treat and I highly recommend it.

    Jeff: It must be super messy but you need to just hurry up and eat it.

    Esther: Worth it. They make things, that’s what soap is for. Okay. Amazing. Jeff, thank you so much for joining and for sharing. Where can people find you if– I know you’re in a studio now, so how much can people follow you– Where can they hear more?

    Jeff: I think for sure check out the platform. That’s, I guess, the best place to start to know a bit more about what I’m doing indirectly. Follow me on LinkedIn. That’s where the business magic happens. There’s not much more break-dancing going on. Otherwise, I’d put out–

    Esther: I was going to say, is there a channel somewhere?

    Jeff: I could have pumped in a break-dancing promotion for myself, but no, not a lot of that is going on and I’m getting a bit older, have less time. For sure, check out LinkedIn. Of course, LinkedIn profile, check out Podimo’s Instagram and Facebook accounts and check out the platform.

    Esther: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeff.

    Jeff: Pleasure, and thanks for having me.

    About Esther Shatz
    For some it goes: Moses -> the elders -> People of Israel. For most of us here it's simply: Everything that happens in the mobile world -> Esther -> Storemaven. When not on maternity leave, Esther is leading all consultancy and product marketing activities as Senior VP.

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