Brainly was my first growth project.
I joined Brainly in September 2013 as the Country Manager for Poland, after being rejected as a Product Manager due to a lack of experience ˉ\_(ツ)_/ˉ
At the time, Poland was already an established market for Brainly with over 5 million monthly users and 100+ moderators. My job was to keep things moving.
A few months later came a turning point. Brainly faced the challenge of entering the US market – a critical move for securing a $9 million Series A round. We needed to prove our capability to expand beyond existing markets and succeed in the US.
With ambitious goals set, Brainly aimed for an 8% weekly growth rate. It was during this pivotal time that the CEO took a leap of faith and offered me a new role, and I became the General Manager for the USA. It was a bumpy road, which I’ll leave for another post. All in all, we managed to expand in the US and get the money.
A short while after, I also took on the role of Head of Growth.
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I will forever be grateful for what Brainly has given me:
↗ ? I had the opportunity to build a hyper-fast growing startup (we scaled from 40M unique users monthly up to over 60M in less than a year).
↗ ? I took an active role in winning two rounds (Series A in 2014 and Series B in 2016 – a total of $38M).
↗ ? I got to know every aspect of growth, SEO, PLG, and growth loops (even before I knew that’s what you call it).
↗ ? Over 20 clients we later worked with at Skalski Growth came from referrals from someone I met at Brainly (thanks, guys ??).
↗ ? After leaving Brainly in 2016, we collaborated several more times (India, Emerging Markets, Brainly Tutor), most recently in 2023.
↗ ? To this day, I am often introduced as the person who expanded Brainly in the US.
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Truth be told, there would probably be no Skalski Growth without my time at Brainly.
That’s where I learned my passion was to help early-stage startups build their growth engines, which led me to start my own company.
Since then, my team and I successfully built or contributed to growth engines for over 100 companies, including Dataedo, Pomelody, Omnipack ??, Slowhop.com, debesto.com - European windows for U.S. construction companies, SonarHome, and many more.
And the best part is – after all those years I'm still actively participating in growth projects. I never wanted to be "just" a CEO. I'm a Growth Guy at heart and I'm quite certain this will never change.
PS At Brainly?I also got to work with 100+ amazing individuals including Micha? Borkowski, Tomasz Kraus, Meric Balak, Julien Zakoian, Eric Oldfield, Patrycja Szostakowska, Marcin Langowski, Kuba Piwnik, Mateusz Burdzel, Aleksandra Favero, Dubraska Jara, Sebastian Czoch, Mateusz Zimowski, Piotr Pyznarski, Roman Barzyczak, Marta Pyznarska, Przemyslaw Mateusz Oborski, Sofía Mu?oz, Marcin Gnat, ?ukasz Wiewiórowski, Szczepan Przyby?o, Micha? ?ab?d?, Przemys?aw To?, Jason Green, Michal Gwiazdowski, Andrij Prunko, Iga Kowalska, Aleksandra Bialikiewicz
