How to scrappily hire for, measure, and unlock growth | Crystal Widjaja, Gojek and Kumu
Crystal Widjaja (guest), Lenny Rachitsky (host), Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Crystal Widjaja and Lenny Rachitsky, How to scrappily hire for, measure, and unlock growth | Crystal Widjaja, Gojek and Kumu explores scrappy growth tactics, smart analytics, and hiring to unlock scale Crystal Widjaja, former Head of Growth at Gojek and now CPO at Kumu, shares how she’s driven massive consumer growth across Southeast Asia using scrappy, high‑leverage experiments and rigorous data thinking.
Scrappy growth tactics, smart analytics, and hiring to unlock scale
Crystal Widjaja, former Head of Growth at Gojek and now CPO at Kumu, shares how she’s driven massive consumer growth across Southeast Asia using scrappy, high‑leverage experiments and rigorous data thinking.
She explains why American startups can learn from Asian companies’ bias toward doing things that don’t scale, like renting stadiums to recruit drivers or running Wizard-of-Oz tests over WhatsApp.
A major focus is on building growth models, improving retention through pre‑conversion steps, and setting up analytics that generate true insights rather than vanity metrics.
Crystal also covers how to structure and hire growth teams, and she highlights her nonprofit Generation Girl, which helps young women in Indonesia pursue STEM.
Key Takeaways
Do scrappy, non-scalable experiments to validate ideas before building.
Crystal describes tactics like renting a stadium to onboard 60,000 drivers, running subscription tests via WhatsApp and interns, and faking in-app flows with screenshots—using Wizard-of-Oz setups to prove demand before investing in engineering.
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Even with tiny user bases, you should still run experiments.
She argues that 30 users are vastly better than zero for learning; trends usually stay consistent as you scale, only their precision changes, so early-stage teams should still formulate hypotheses and test them rigorously.
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Retention problems are usually solved one step before conversion, not at retention itself.
Instead of vaguely “improving retention,” she focuses on the specific preceding friction (e. ...
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Clarify your growth ‘physics’ and pull existing levers before inventing new ones.
She models the market, product, business model, and channels (including offline levers like visible drivers) to find underused assets—such as turning drivers into salespeople for Gojek’s e-wallet—rather than overhauling everything at once.
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Most analytics efforts fail because they track KPIs, not user journeys and context.
Teams often log bare events with no properties and end up with dashboards that are “interesting” but not actionable; instead, events must carry rich contextual properties so you can answer “why” behaviors occur and change real-world decisions.
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Hire growth people with strong statistics instinct and a bias for quick impact.
Effective growth hires understand sampling, bias, and experiment design, and they avoid spending months integrating tools; they look for fast, high-leverage tests (like a Twilio SMS script) that move key constraints immediately.
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Small UX and lifecycle tweaks can be massive growth unlocks.
Examples include adding a pause button to reduce subscription churn, sending drivers tailored SMS nudges to raise acceptance rates, speeding up search to boost friend-finding conversion, and reframing e-wallets as a ‘virtual credit card’ with clear visuals.
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Notable Quotes
“The only thing better than having data on what your customers are doing is having data that you can actually act on.”
— Crystal Widjaja
“If you don’t have a tested hypothesis and can’t think of a way to run an experiment, that idea is pretty useless.”
— Crystal Widjaja
“Do not treat metric gathering as entertainment. Real news is information that changes what you do in the real world.”
— Crystal Widjaja
“We’re not wizards—you can’t change the physics of your universe. Start with what already works and pull the right levers there.”
— Crystal Widjaja
“Listeners, please do instrumentation correctly. Please don’t track your KPIs. Please track your user journeys and experiences.”
— Crystal Widjaja
Questions Answered in This Episode
How would you adapt Crystal’s ‘physics of growth’ framework to a B2B SaaS product with long sales cycles?
Crystal Widjaja, former Head of Growth at Gojek and now CPO at Kumu, shares how she’s driven massive consumer growth across Southeast Asia using scrappy, high‑leverage experiments and rigorous data thinking.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What are some concrete examples of rich event properties you could add today to turn your existing tracking into real insights?
She explains why American startups can learn from Asian companies’ bias toward doing things that don’t scale, like renting stadiums to recruit drivers or running Wizard-of-Oz tests over WhatsApp.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Where in your current user journey might a small pre-conversion tweak have an outsized impact on retention?
A major focus is on building growth models, improving retention through pre‑conversion steps, and setting up analytics that generate true insights rather than vanity metrics.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If you limited yourself to three low-code or no-code ‘Wizard-of-Oz’ experiments this quarter, what would they be and how would you run them?
Crystal also covers how to structure and hire growth teams, and she highlights her nonprofit Generation Girl, which helps young women in Indonesia pursue STEM.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How could you use underutilized “offline” or human levers in your business (support, sales, delivery, community) to drive growth the way Gojek used its drivers?
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Transcript Preview
... I felt like it was a problem that was very solvable. And we ended up renting a stadium to just hire, like, 60,000 drivers (laughs) in a couple of weeks. So, I think, looking back, it was certainly a risk. Like, when I got there, it was in a house, and I realized, "I've probably made a huge mistake." But we were growing very quickly already, even at that small scale of, like, 4,000 orders per day.
(Instrumental music.) Crystal Wijaya has been leading product and growth teams at some of the largest consumer businesses in Southeast Asia, including Kumu, where she's currently the chief product officer, and Go-Jek, where she built and led the growth team through their early years of what is now the largest super app in Southeast Asia. To put this in context, Go-Jek completes more rides per day than Lyft, and more food deliveries than GrubHub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash combined. And it's the number one mobile wallet in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In my opinion, American startups have a lot to learn from startups in Asia. And Crystal has been at the ground floor of some of the biggest successes there. In our conversation, we cover the biggest growth unlocks that Crystal has seen across the companies she's worked at, what growth investments usually pay off, and which often don't. We dig into growth models, a bunch of pro tips for accelerating growth, why most analytics efforts fail and how to avoid that, how to hire and structure your growth team, and we also talk about the nonprofit that Crystal started that aims to help young women get into STEM, called Generation Girl. Crystal is such a star, and I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I did. And with that, I bring you Crystal Wijaya. If you're setting up your analytic stack but you're not using Amplitude, what are you doing? Amplitude is the number one most popular analytic solution in the world, used by both big companies like Shopify, Instacart, and Atlassian, and also most tech startups. Amplitude has everything you need, including a powerful and fully self-service analytics product, an experimentation platform, and even an integrated customer data platform to help you understand your users like never before. Give your teams self-service product data to understand your users, drive conversions, and increase engagement, growth, and revenue. Ditch your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter, and grow your business. Try Amplitude for free. Just visit amplitude.com to get started. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?
At least 40%.
And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chockful of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.
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