My guest today is a growth engineer, investor, advisor, author, and serial entrepreneur who has had seven successful exits.
Travis Steffen currently serves as the CEO of GrowFlow, an industry-leading, venture-backed suite of software products for companies in the cannabis industry. As CEO, he leads the vision and strategy of this fast-growing team of 60.
Although he’s been building, scaling, and successfully exiting businesses for the past 12 years, he started his career in 2008 as a professional online poker player in 2008. Using some of the same skills that made him successful at the poker table has translated well for him in his entrepreneurial journey.
He is also the author of Viral Hero, where he not only dispels the myths of viral marketing but also provides a proven playbook for creating explosive growth through marketing.
Now, let’s hack…
Travis Steffen.
Highlights from the episode
- [10:57]: Travis explains the leadership, structural, and organizational issues that GrowFlow had prior to when he came on board as CEO. They lacked a clear communication structure, unified sense of company goals or values, and no analytics. But, customers were still flocking to the product itself. He was able to come in and iron out the company’s processes, helping them get the most out of a great pre-existing product market fit.
- [20:02]: Travis didn’t need a formal business education to get into entrepreneurship and business development. His master’s degree is actually in exercise physiology and biomechanics. As he went along, he learned as much as possible from books, mentors, colleagues, and other sources, as well as hands-on experience.
- [28:25]: “Conversations with customers and surveys with customers will lead you to the promised land.” For both feature development and pricing considerations, asking customers directly whenever possible has been a successful strategy for GrowFlow.
- [30:25]: Travis discusses how heavy state regulation presents some unusual challenges to the cannabis industry in particular. Small actions must be reported accurately, meaning that these heavy compliance requirements need to be integrated with other business concerns like sales and customer acquisition.
Resources and links from the interview
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