Browse Case Studies

Gojek is a Southeast Asian super app that started as a motorcycle ride-hailing service in Indonesia and evolved into a comprehensive platform offering 30+ services including ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, payments, and financial services. By the time of their IPO (Indonesia's largest ever at ~$27-28B valuation), Gojek had 2.7 million drivers, completed 3 billion orders annually, and dominated the region through early investment in brand, operational excellence, and solving uniquely local problems that global competitors overlooked.

Wise is an international money transfer platform that has achieved extraordinary word-of-mouth growth, with 70% of new customers discovering the product through referrals. The company grew from 16 million customers to acquiring 1 million per quarter by focusing relentlessly on three product pillars—price, speed, and ease of use—and measuring customer advocacy through NPS to drive product decisions rather than traditional A/B testing.

This is an interview with Sachin Consul, Chief Product Officer at Uber, discussing his product philosophy centered on extreme dogfooding and a 'ship, ship, ship' mentality. Over his 8+ years at Uber, Sachin has personally completed 700-800 driving and delivery trips while also taking 5-10 Uber rides weekly and ordering 3+ Uber Eats meals weekly, using these experiences to identify product improvements and maintain deep empathy for drivers and couriers. He emphasizes the importance of cutting decision-making cycle time, running daily standups during critical periods, requiring live product demos for launches, and operationalizing dogfooding through quarterly competitions and fix-it OKRs that commit to resolving 300+ user-reported issues per team per half-year.

Intercom, a 14-year-old customer communication SaaS business making hundreds of millions in ARR, faced declining growth and nearly hit zero net new ARR before pivoting to AI-first agents (Fin). Six weeks after GPT-3.5 launched, Owen McCabe led a dramatic organizational transformation—cutting costs, firing 40% of employees, and betting ~$100M on AI—resulting in Fin growing 300%+ annually and reaching eight-figure ARR with a path to $100M+ ARR within three quarters.

Handshake, a 10-year-old career marketplace with 18M students and professionals, launched a data labeling business in January 2024 by leveraging its massive network of experts (500k PhDs, 3M master students) to create high-quality training data for frontier AI labs. In just 4 months, the new business hit $50M in revenue; by 8 months they're on pace to exceed $100M ARR—rivaling their core business in annual revenue.

Mercor is a labor marketplace connecting AI labs with expert professionals to evaluate and train AI models. Founded by 19-year-old Brendan Foodie in January 2023, the company grew from $0 to $400M in revenue run rate in just 16 months—the fastest ascent in history. The company operates at the intersection of the exploding demand for model evals and reinforcement learning, hiring highly skilled professionals (lawyers, software engineers, doctors, etc.) at $95-$500/hour to create evaluation rubrics and training data that improve model capabilities.

Lovable is an AI-powered vibe coding platform that launched in November 2024 and hit $200M ARR in under one year with 8M+ users, making it one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history. Elena Verna, Head of Growth, attributes the explosive growth to building in a hot emerging category, creating a genuinely lovable product experience, heavy reliance on word-of-mouth and founder/employee social media, and a unique approach to growth that prioritizes shipping new features and building in public over traditional optimization. The company maintains growth through constant product iteration, influencer marketing, and a culture of high-agency hiring that enables rapid experimentation.