← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 101 | The Rise of User Generared Content and How to Use It | TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality | Hiring for Growth: When and Who with Sandy Diao
01:16:18
Sandy Diao is one of the most exceptional growth leaders of the last decade. Sandy has scaled products to over 200M+ users and led growth teams at Descript, Meta and Pinterest. She is also a prolific writer all on things growth here. ...
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- [00:00]
A
This is 20 growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 growth is the show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss how to scale brand marketing, how to scale paid marketing, how to create virality in a product, how to scale products to millions of users. This show today is one of the most granular that we've done in years. I think you'll love it. I absolutely adored doing it. I'm thrilled to welcome Sandy Diao, one of the most exceptional growth leaders of the last decade. Sandy scaled products to over 200 million users and led growth teams at Descript, Meta, Pinterest. She's also a prolific writer and we've included the link to her blog in the show notes. I love it and it's exactly what I love in a blog. Tactical Granular. So many good takeaways there. But before we dive into the show today, Secure Frame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast growing businesses including Nasdaq, AngelList, Doodle and Coda, trust Secure Frame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards such as AS, SOC2 and ISO 27001, CMMC, NIST standards and more. Backed by top tier investors and corporations like Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes list Of the top 100 startup employers for 2024 G2's best software awards for Higher Satisfaction Products and a recipient of the 2024 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, something I definitely never got in school myself. Learn more today@secureframe.com and once secure Frame locks down compliance, Pendo makes sure your product lands with customers. Whether it's the software you build or the software you buy, your tech stack should be creating results, not creating roadblocks. Well, Pendo's no Code Software Experience Management platform makes your software better with tools to see where users get stuck. Guide them with in app, messaging and constantly improving your UI. It's so easy that over 14,000 businesses use Pendo to increase revenue, lower costs and reduce risks. Businesses love the control. Engineers love the freedom. Everyone wins. Start for free today at Pendo IO forward/20 product and after Pendo shows you what users need, Miro helps your team bring those ideas to life. You know what kills momentum? It's not a lack of ideas. It's the chaos between the idea and actually executing on it. My fund was stuck in this loop. Great investment. Theses endless partner alignment calls scattered deal memos across 10 different tools. We were moving at the speed of bureaucracy, not at the speed we needed to to win deals. Then we started using Miro's innovation workspace. And honestly, it changed how operate. So here's what clicked. Miro AI doesn't just give you a blank canvas to dump ideas. It actively helps you structure your thinking. We used it to synthesize founder interviews and diligence notes, pull out key patterns and turn them into an actual investment memo in hours, not days. And speed is really important. Miro's AI sidekicks review your work like a seasoned GP would, pointing out gaps in your thesis and suggesting what to dig into next and when we needed to map out portfolio strategy, Miro generated frameworks and visual roadmaps right from our board. No switching tools, no waiting. Help your teams get great work done with miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. That's miro m I r o dot com. You have now arrived at your destination. Sandy, it is so great to have you on the show. It's so funny you said before about liking the show. I love your writing, which is why I was so excited to make this happen. So thank you so much for joining me.
- [03:39]
B
Yeah, this is gonna be fun. And thanks for the compliments on my writing as well. It means a lot coming from someone whose storytelling and content I've really admired for a really long time.
- [03:49]
A
That is very kind. And you see, my job is to get very wise people like you on the show and then I get credit for the good stuff that you say. It's a brilliant business, really. I wanna start. I think we're shaped a lot by the experiences that we have. You've worked at Pinterest, you've worked at Meta Instagram, you've worked at Descript, what we use to edit and love. When you think about those experiences which most meaningfully shaped your approach to growth, do you think. And what did you learn there?
- [04:18]
B
The experience that most meaningfully shaped my experience and overall focus on growth, I think, has to be Pinterest. It was really formative for me in school. I actually studied finance, and I was on this path and trajectory of essentially becoming an investment banker because I thought all the smart people who make a lot of money around me are becoming investment bankers. So I studied really hard for that, Took all the right classes. In one fateful encounter with some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Sandhill Road, which was one of the perks that I got for winning a student leadership scholarship on campus, I completely changed my mind on that. I did a complete 180. I thought, wow, this is such an incredibly creative world. Here are some of the investors who've put the first dollar into companies like Apple and Facebook. And now these companies are serving hundreds of millions of customers and users. And the impact was just, you know, mind blowing for me. So much so that when I went back to my room that day, I pulled open a website that I just recently come across, www.pinterest.com. and Pinterest was a product that I personally resonated with a ton because I was a person who had this really scattered desktop with a bunch of images. I would sometimes organize them into folders, zip them up, email them to friends. And Pinterest solved exactly the problem that I was facing, which is having pictures and images be a lot more socially shareable almost in this cloud like way where it's storing all of it on the Internet for me. So I actually reached to the company cold and they were a small little team in Brandon street in San Francisco at the time, went into the office actually, because they saw my email and they're like, hey, why don't you come in and brainstorm some ideas with us? That turned into a full fledged interview and they said, basically, join and help us solve any kind of problem that we're facing. So, you know, lo and behold, I decided to give up that investment banking career, join Pinterest. And one of the first things that I did in that first week was basically answer 500 support tickets. You know, I was bouncing off the walls and doing every little bit of work that was required to grow the company. And that was such a formative experience because after that I started to look at the data around the customer support tickets. What were the most common questions, what were the inquiries? Who was writing in? It was just written with golden nuggets. There a lot of businesses, right, we weren't monetizing at the time. We're like, ooh, advertising. You know, we can actually charge these businesses to promote their content. A lot of questions around, you know, hey, I want to see more analytics. I want proof points that Pinterest is working for my business. I also came across a lot of issues around the onboarding. People needed to kind of understand how to best use Pinterest. So all of these insights then led to growth hypotheses, right? Hypotheses around building onboarding flows, hypotheses around monetization, hypotheses around how we should be best onboarding and messaging customers. So this led me to really touching every possible channel under the sun Paid acquisition, email marketing, product notifications, designing in product onboarding flows, et cetera, et cetera. So the reason Pinterest was so formative and the reason is to kind of share with you a lot of my early career being a growth generalist, doing anything possible to help the company grow. And that's really the spirit and what I looked for in all of the roles thereafter. A lot of the roles I tended to be drawn to were when the company decided, hey, we're going to hire a head of growth for the very first time, or we're building a brand new go to market team or building a brand new growth team, who's the best person to kind of come in and build this foundation? And I was the first person to raise my hand. So Pinterest really did shape who I became in my overall growth career.
- [07:53]
A
My word, you gave me so many different things to unpack there. Literally. I've been scribbling ferociously. I just want to start at the beginning growth hypothesis. Now, the joy of this show is that so many founders listen with notebooks and they're like, I'm learning from the best in the world because this is exactly what I'm going through. And so I quite like to get granular. And I also learned from this too. By the way, Sandy, what is a good growth hypothesis and what is a bad growth hypothesis?
- [08:19]
B
That is a great question. In my view, a good growth hypothesis has two components to it. The first component is an insight and the insight has to be data inspired or backed by some kind of context. And then the second part of a good growth hypothesis is that you have some kind of story around the customer and your understanding of what that data point means. Actually, I'll give you a great example here of something that I learned in my time at Descript. Descript was not a data driven company. It was a very data inspired company. And a lot of our hypotheses, our growth hypothesis hypotheses, came from a combination of these two. The reason that we weren't data driven is that one of the mistakes or one of the common things that we see with a lot of growth teams, including orgs I was a part of, is looking at data, blindly, seeing charts, mapping out funnels. You see a drop off point and you're like, wow, that's below benchmark or that's below the average of our competitors. We should probably go and do something about it. It's not always true. And the reason it's not always true is that every product is uniquely serving a different Market, there are certain types of customers on. If you're serving the spectrum of consumers vs prosumers vs businesses vs you're in healthcare vs you're in creator economy, et cetera. I mean, there's just so many different variables. You look at the data, you can't instantly assume just because there's a drop off there that that's actually going to be the thing that we need to fix. And this was very true at Descript, where in a lot of the early days when I was trying to solve top of funnel acquisition, the product itself was always a desktop app. And I always felt like this was the biggest thing that was holding back distribution. You know, we had no web, we had no mobile. I had all my surfaces limited to just desktop, right? And so I felt that was limiting our growth. And I looked at the funnel and said, wow, there's a big drop off between people who essentially sign up and then download the app. Two years later we have a web version of the app. I thought, this is going to be our step. Function increase, like we're just going to blow up. User acquisition, conversion rates are going to triple and I can just go on vacation after this because the growth team is going to hit all of our targets. We launch web, we drive traffic to it, conversion rates drop across the board, right? Activation goes down, monetization goes down, revenue goes down. I'm just scratching my head wondering how could this possibly happen. Web is frictionless and the data shows us that this should have driven a massive increase. The context we didn't understand is that when somebody think about yourself in the shoes of someone who's downloading a desktop app, somebody who spent the time to install an app is going to sign up, they are going to give it a try. They were going to get pretty deep into the product flows because they just invested all this time upfront in setting up the product. So that's an example of data driven without the customer story and the context behind that. So, you know, for me, a go to growth hypothesis always has those two components to it.
- [11:10]
A
And so where do you see founders make biggest mistakes with hypotheses?
- [11:14]
B
The first is looking at competitors and saying, this thing really worked well for them. Let's copy it over and do it. Probably not just founders and CEOs making that mistake, but folks in growth like myself as well. You get very jealous when you look at other companies. You hear about how well they're doing and then you think, let's copy it. During my time at Pinterest, we were trying to solve that onboarding problem that I was telling you about earlier, where Pinterest does require a bit of a shift in understanding on how to use the product, because you go from local file storage, saving images, to doing it on the web and having it be more of a social experience. And how do you best articulate that value? How do you best articulate that understanding to new customers? Well, one of the things we did at the time was we looked at our closest social network competitors, right, like the Facebooks of the world, and we said, hey, they have this 7 part onboarding email series and they set up their onboarding flow in these ways and that they ask these questions. If Facebook's doing it this way, you know, they serve hundreds of millions of users. We probably have to do it exactly like that too. So without really that data inspired view, without really that customer context on who we're serving, which is by the way, very different than who Facebook was serving at the time, we ended up just copying that, right? We spent, you know, several weeks reconfiguring a lot of the product, onboarding, the email onboarding, and then we launched it and didn't drive Lyft. And you know, we kind of kicked ourselves and said, why did we spend all this time on that? I mean, it happens at the small scale. It also happens at the big scale. You know, when I was at at Meta, during the years when we were at, you know, 3 billion family of apps users across all the different products, there was already a time in which we were still looking at companies like Google and saying, hey, they just built this standalone app that helps people understand how small business owners should be using Google to accelerate their growth. And we thought, hey, maybe we should build an app too. You know, there's these moments where you kind of have this jealous eye of looking at competitors and you try to copy that strategy. But again, we need to understand that we're in a different market, we serve different customers, timing is different, distribution is different. We have to take a more customized approach to how it is that we're approaching growth. So that's probably one of the first common mistakes. I think the second thing I would say is trying to figure out how to build, best build a growth organization. It's really tough because growth as a team isn't really thought about usually until something goes really wrong. Oftentimes growth teams or head of growth and growth leaders are hired to essentially solve big growth problems. That usually comes when growth starts to decelerate or when you look at a really hairy growth problem. And you think, I need somebody else to spend time on this, not myself. But that tends not necessarily to be the best time to hire a growth team, nor is it the best way to think about the framing on how to best build a growth team. The growth teams that I see that have the most impact are the ones where there are some early signs that there's channel fit with some kind of growth channel that's working. And then you build a team customized in a way around that. So instead of saying I want to have growth, I just want to preempt all the channels that I could possibly cover, performance, marketing, SEO, email marketing, et cetera. And then just like have that person in so I can prepare for the future. Generally, I find that doesn't work. Instead it's a company saying, wow, we've grown to where we are because of SEO. And the first person we should probably bring on the team probably has a little bit more of an edge or background in this. So they can be sort of a player, coach, right? They can build the team over time, but they can also execute or at least figure out who to hire to execute on these different types of strategies. So these are, you know, two of the common things that I see.
- [14:51]
A
I do want to go into, like how to build the growth team. But you mentioned the channel fit there. How do you know when you have channel fit?
- [14:58]
B
Number one, Channel fit is an interesting one. There's kind of a quantitative way to go about it where you look at the numbers and you say the conversion rates are here, the scale is here, conversion rates is kind of the first piece. Know you, you look at, you basically say, these are the customers that we intend to bring into the fold of our product. And when you look at how well they convert, how well they retain, how well they monetize, you basically see that you have the customers that you intended to go after. So they're essentially performing at benchmark relative to what you're desiring. The second piece is actually looking at whether or not your incremental investments are going to drive proportionate returns. So there are some channels that tend to be these one off blasts. Examples here include things like pr, for instance, you get a lot of media coverage, or maybe you go viral with one influencer and then you try to figure out is this replicable. And you realize very quickly that a lot of those things aren't necessarily replicable. It just happened that there was this one outlet or this one influencer that had a really strong overall fit with who you're going after. But it's very hard to replicate at scale. So when you find that those incremental investments aren't generating proportional outcomes, you basically say this is not necessarily a channel that has scalable fit for us, so we don't necessarily want to build a predictable system around this. These are two of the early signs that I tend to look at.
- [16:15]
A
Do most channels not get worse over time? If we look at all performance marketing channels, they generally always get worse over time as you saturate audience and then costs go up. Do they not all get worse over time? Over time? I'm trying to think of what gets better as a channel over time.
- [16:29]
B
I would share these observations. The first one is that channels get worse, but not necessarily because the channel is going to stop working for you, but because the audience that you're trying to tap into at the time is going to essentially run out, if you will. So like let's go back to the Descript example. If we're trying to hit the total TAM of podcasting, which you can essentially do by maximizing your overall reach, or you've cycled through the audiences and you have impression capping and all of that to make sure that you're not hitting the same audience over and over again and you know that they're not going to convert over time. I mean, at some point you're going to see that channel saturation happening and you're going to see your overall cost spike and the efficacy on the channel go down. But let's assume that, you know, Descript, as a company wants to continue to grow, we're going to start to reach out to short form content creators, long form content creators. Now you expanded the total drop addressable audience on that platform. You can actually overcome that saturation cap in a particular channel, like for example, paid social, by expanding your audiences over time. I find that this is true with other channels as well. If you think about that methodology, even like SEO, right, when you're targeting specific topics or groups of keywords, let's say Descript early days, we're really targeting transcription, targeting podcasting workflows over time. You can start to also target some of these video editing jobs to be done, like removing background noise from videos or cropping videos, or creating vertical format videos, et cetera. So once you do that, you can still continue to see these step function increases in the efficacy and in the results of the channel. So in my view, the channel saturation comes less because the channel itself stops working for you, but because you've kind of exhausted one set of audiences. But Naturally, as a company grows, the product grows, the markets that we serve grow over time and our audiences become a lot more generalize, if you will. We go down market, we go up market, et cetera.
- [18:21]
A
It's really interesting that you said it's the saturation of the audience, not the channel that breaks, which is fascinating. One of the reasons I love growth so much, I think it's a little bit like venture, which is like you have a portfolio, you invest bets, so to speak, and you see what grows. But then I speak to the CMO of HubSpot who says to me like, oh, HubSpot grew to 50 million in revenue on one channel and 100 million on a second channel channel. And I'm like, oh, concentrated channel strategy, that's what we should be doing. How do you think about breadth versus depth in channel makeup?
- [18:54]
B
The CMO of HubSpot is a very smart and wise person because the consistent observation I've had in being the first growth person and had a growth in multiple companies now and advising many more is observing that the fastest growing companies and those who really nowhere to double down experience the power law of distribution. Meaning that if you have a product that you're launching in the early days, you're very clear about the positioning, the messaging and who you're going after. To succeed in growing that user base, you essentially need to find the one or two channels that will drive the power law outcomes for your distribution and user acquisition overall. And naturally when you hear that, you must understand that if you have a very focused customer, they're probably going to be spending their time hanging out in very specific places. Going back to an earlier question you had, you know, what are some common mistakes? Probably the third mistake that I've personally made in my own career and that I see a lot of new growth teams make, is they have this list of hypotheses around different channels they should be testing and the list is 10 plus. They think of their job as building a roadmap to eventually get to testing every possible thing. Community marketing, product led marketing, every possible marketing channel under the sun and seeing if it works. And it's done in a very data driven, well informed way. The problem is that a lot of those early channels need to come with a stronger context based hypothesis around what are the advantages of our product. I'll give you an example here. If you're building a consumer product, let's say, you know, you're the student team that I mentioned earlier, flow GPT, you're essentially building a social platform for consumers and if you have a product like that, you want to start thinking about what natural advantages do you have as a, as a social product. One of them is that you're going to be generally more socially shareable. The product itself produces outputs that can be shared to social platforms. You want to start thinking about referrals and other types of loops and network effects as your first original channels, rather than how do I drive net new cold audiences from paid acquisition or SEO, things of that sort. So the idea here is that with power law distribution, you want to basically have these hypotheses that tie to your intuition. Even if there's no data in the early days around it, it around what some of your unfair advantages are. If you will, for distribution. Start there and then start to go down the list. Your job is not to list out every possible marketing channel under the sun. Look at what everyone else is doing, say there's opportunity there, but you can eventually later. But you don't always start there. You want to start with essentially where you have the greatest gravity for conversions and ultimately monetization for your product.
- [21:29]
A
I'm so fascinated. I obviously know the Descript product. Product. I would like to say back to front, really. I live a lot of my life in it, in product growth for this script. Seems tough. At best it's small number multiplayer. At worst, it's solo player, which it often is. Like for me, how did you think about, okay, I'm in product growth. How like refer. How does that. What did you think?
- [21:54]
B
It's such a good point. Descript, definitely if you've been in the product before. Audio, video editing through text itself, the experience itself, firstly, from a brand principles perspective, we try to keep it pretty pristine and I hope this was your experience as well. You don't get distracted by endless notifications. You're not bombarded by house ads. We're not trying to upsell you at every corner and turn. If you're on a paid plan, we don't try to get you to buy the more expensive plan. Probably should have done a little bit more of that, to be honest with you. But part of our brand principles was, you know, we don't want to disrupt the workflow. We want you to get the most value as a, as a creator. But one of the challenges here is that the product is such a prime surface for enabling more of these collaborative flows. And we know that broadly speaking, content creation, media creation is a team sport. There's multiple touch points, there's a review process, there's collaboration baked into it that should have been one of our natural advantages. But in the early days of Descript, actually, it turns out one of our strongest advantages was actually social sharing. We came across social media this accidentally when oftentimes in the early days of descript, we had these customers who loved us so much that they would actually publish a full length tutorial and review video on channels like YouTube. And we were always happy to see this. At first we thought, oh, this is just the positive externality of having a great brand and a great product. Let's just thank them and move on. But then we had a light bulb moment where we realized, wait, in every single one of these videos that are being watched, on average, you know, 30 to 50,000 views, they're actually providing a link back to the product. Some people do it, some don't. So our first experiment was, well, why don't we reach out to these customers, since we have their contact anyways, and ask them to add a link? Okay. Adding the link actually increased the amount of traffic that we were getting from these videos. And then ultimately what ended up happening was we decided to pilot our first affiliate program. We said, why don't we increase the stakes here, make it even more interesting for creators to talk about descript and their content. So the social sharing flywheel came in where we know that if you create an account on descript, you have an inherent built in audience because you're trying to show the video to at least one plus other person video and or podcast. And then the second piece is if you do talk about or show descript in your video or talk about it in your content, then we want to incentivize you with a 15% recurring commission on paying subscribers that you refer to us. And you would be a lot more likely to put the link up front and center right, because you get something positive out of it. So we launched that. And the ROAS was incredible, or the return on ad spend was incredible there. Ad spend, roughly referring to the incentives that we were offering with the 15% commission and kickbacks to customers we launched, that worked really well. And that's when we decided to open the floodgates and say, any customer that comes into descript is now going to be invited to become an affiliate. Right. So social sharing was a natural advantage. It just came baked in with the fact that we were going after content creators. So we didn't necessarily see a surface for more of the product collaborative loops in the early days. But one of our earliest natural advantages was that being a product for content creators, there's so much baked in social sharing potential that we were able to lean into that build out affiliates as a channel, drove over 25% of the new users that we were getting in that entire year. And it was virtually self service. Right. We didn't have to do too much except respond to questions and inquiries inbound.
- [25:22]
A
That's fascinating. Again, so many things I want to unpack there. You said roas return on ad spend. I'm a founder that is navigating kind of the early days of growth and I need your advice. What is a good ROAS and what is a bad roas? And is there a a slight guide measuring stick for how I should think about how well we're doing?
- [25:41]
B
It's a great question and one that there's a lot of information out there for. If you look at any piece that's written about return on ad spend, people generally say to be efficient with your capital, you want to land somewhere between 3x to 5x of your return on your investment. Now here's the interesting thing that I find about roas and pretty much every growth scenario that I've been in in. I don't think roas is necessarily the best target to start with. I think the best target to start with when you're investing in some of these paid channels or channels with cash or financial investment upfront is to actually figure out whether or not this is a viable channel that firstly you can actually get up and running and working and there I think break even or better is actually pretty good. And then you start to optimize from there. There are very few zero shot or few shot attempts at running a channel like paid social where as soon as you launch right out of the gate you're like, wow, that hit close to 3x. Like this is amazing. Let's just keep going from here. No, it always takes this process and the process is figuring out the right combination of the audiences. Are you targeting based on interests? Are you targeting more based on more granular customer level data like lookalikes or retargeting? It's a combination of the creative that you're throwing into these conversion optimized systems. Creative probably makes the most difference. Like one example I'll share with you actually is a lot of people really want to use video content for ads these days. But it turns out that for paid social platforms like meta static ads still actually do a better job of converting people into downloads or people who actually click into websites specifically for, you know, more desktop web sites surfaces. It feels a little counterintuitive but if you actually think about it, a conversion optimization system is basically saying, I'm trying to find a user who's likely to take a certain action if your conversion event is, I want somebody to download my app or get deep into the product experience. When you're watching videos as a consumer yourself, how likely is it that you're going to basically click a button, pause all the entertainment that's going on in your social app, and then go far into a product software experience and then like, use that thing to its entirety and then go back to the app? It's very unlikely. So in some ways, targeting some of these video placements is more interruptive to the consumer experience. Whereas a lot of static ads, you know, you're kind of browsing, click something, open to a new tab, you can kind of get some things done, you can come back to it, right? You're not. It's not really interrupting your entertainment flow, if you will. So, you know, that's kind of one example on the, on the creative side of things, you know, lastly, it's just kind of figuring out how much you want to be investing in this channel. So maybe your first test or your first pilot was, you know, you spent $5,000 over two weeks and your expected LTV on the product is $100 or something like that. And you're trying to basically figure out how to juggle and make the user economics work. One of the next things that you need to do is essentially figure out if you were to increase the budgets 20% from here, 50% from here, are you going to see the numbers go up or down and there are all these different, different pieces that you need to essentially juggle and figure out, is this going to be a viable channel for us before we even look at roas? And hopefully after making adjustments to all of these, you start to see roas go in a positive directional trend where it increases. But I would say if you're starting out and you're break even or better, it's like a good sign, then you optimize from there. You hit 3x, great, let's kind of maintain from here. But that's kind of the philosophy that I've always had. And if it helps to not rule out paid social as a channel so early because there's so many teams that go, I just can't get paid ads to work for me. And part of that is because they haven't really given it enough time to experiment across all of these variables that we touched upon.
- [29:25]
A
My God, I'm loving this so you said about kind of channels, sometimes it's not always about getting 3x straight away and sometimes break even or a little bit better is good enough. Do good channels, channels that ultimately perform form, do they always break even? Have you ever had periods where you have to go through a trough to get to the good and actually be worse than break even or do good channels always at least break even?
- [29:48]
B
It's a good question. I think break even is worth shooting for because it in the short term gives you the flexibility to be able to invest in it more. But there are certainly channels, especially at more of the maturing growing stages of a company, that you're going to see a loss in your investment in the short term. I'll point to two examples here. One of them is the traditional way of doing SEO. Not, not as much in the modern day, but a lot of the traditional investments you make in SEO, particularly editorial SEO, where you're targeting more top of funnel intent, you know, informational intent, like for example, Descript, we would create guides on how to become a content creator or how best to create a story for your podcast, things of that sort. Right. Stuff that doesn't really necessarily resonate with someone who's exactly looking for a video or audio editing tool in their podcasting workflows. But eventually we'll, we'll get there and we just kind of want them in the, the fold of our ecosystem. So for a lot of SEO strategies in the early days, if you want to kind of build that topical authority, get the traffic for these types of keywords, you would invest in these editorial SEO pieces at the time, you know, maybe we'll say three to four years ago. When you start to invest in these SEO strategies, there are a lot of costs associated with hiring writers, getting designs on these pages, building out, landing pages at scale and, and the costs there essentially create this loss leading moment where you start to get traffic, the users come in, but they're not actually monetizing at the right rates. Now over time though, you build that audience, you have the topical authority. When you start to launch pages that are more targeting transactional intent, you rank a lot faster as well. So you're able to use that foundation, the momentum that you've built, to essentially create more of a moat for these topics that you care about. So with Descript, for example, we wouldn't have been able to rank for some of these video editing pages and some of these use cases and topics we cared about if we hadn't built that original topical moat in content creation more Broadly earlier on. Right. So it's treated as an early investment. So that's kind of one area. I think the second area, you know, true to my experience across multiple teams now, is sometimes with launch of new products, you kind of have to go all in and you have to build the brand in a way that gives you that momentum and that energy to be able to build distribution off of. So at Descript, for example, we would actually spend a good amount, a good chunk of our marketing budget on creating brand videos for some of these launches that we have. So for example, when Descript really decided we're going to go after the video editing market, we basically worked with a video production studio that, you know, six figure video that would essentially allow for us to retell the narrative of the brand. But we knew that that video would be used for different surfaces like the website, it would be used for paid ads. We could cut it up in all these different ways. That's a really big investment. I mean, there's no visible ROI on that. Right. I'm not necessarily going to see users come in because they watched a video on YouTube, but you can use that as a conversion engine for all these different surfaces. And the payback on that is going to be a much longer period of time. So negative roas, so to speak, for that direct initiative overall positive in the sense that when you have that momentum and energy from that brand video launch, you can then use it and pair with all these other distribution channels. So these are two examples of you're not going for break even. You can't go for breakeven in the short term. You kind of have to think about it as how are these assets, these foundations, strategically placed so that I can build additional growth vehicles on top of them.
- [33:15]
A
You mentioned when you have a channel that works, it's a case of how much do you put in and double down. How do you advise me as a founder on that? Because if I have a 3x channel or plus and it looks great, do I put all the chips in or do I tentatively increase it over time, fearful that if I just put in way too much too soon, it'll destroy the channel very quickly.
- [33:39]
B
I think it depends on the size and stage of where the company's at. If you're in the early days and your main goal is to basically prove out product market fit, really channel market fit, and really accelerate your month over month growth to get to the next place where you can continue to raise money and get to the next stage in your company. I don't think There is actually any downside to going all in. Obviously you want to figure out what the future holds as well. But when you find a channel that's actually very cost efficient and there's scale there, you want to make sure that you're basically figuring out where the cap and the maximum capacity on that channel looks like an example I'll share with you. You is one of the companies that advise. They're called Answers AI. They basically are a co pilot for you when you're studying and when you're trying to tutor yourself. So you can use their app, mobile app, or you can use their Chrome extension. Take a screenshot of a problem that you're working on and it will essentially guide you to the answer or help you quiz yourself, right? So very, very useful functional tool for anyone that's studying. But for this team in the early days, you know, they try to a lot of different channels, but one of the channels that really worked well for them was user generated content, which is that they would reach out to these nano micro creators who didn't necessarily have a massive following, but they would essentially help create these very authentic videos about being students using the products. And the way that a lot of the modern social video algorithms work is that small creators and big creators alike have equal choice shots at distribution based on what customers and viewers are engaging with. So micro creators, nano creators can go from, you know, zero to 500,000 or zero to a million views, just as likely as some creator that already has a million views. So this UGC strategy worked really well for them. So much so that they decided to double down, triple down, and kind of make it the core growth engine for their company. And the next natural extension from there is let's create our own branded content because we have more control over the cadence, over the messaging. And one of the co founders in the company became essentially a TikTok Instagram Persona, right? Who can create these videos kind of on demand for the company as well and drive very, very similar amounts of views and traction and growth for the company. So, you know, that's kind of an example of where you really want to figure out how you can double down in the early days and just put your chips on the things that you know are already working, leave a little room for figuring out what the next steps and what the next future holds. But at the same time, those next channels are actually adjacent to what it is that we're already doing, right? We're not going to just go wildly test the next hypothesis of, you know, hey, let's like randomly touch on SEO because we think there's something there. You want to do it because you have some early indication that there's channel fit, given the audiences that you're going after.
- [36:27]
A
You said SEO, you said future. We're seeing the world change quite seismically in terms of how people discover and learn about products. If you were to advise me, again, a founder or a growth leader, how do you think about and how would you advise that I should think about SEO? In a changing world of growth and.
- [36:46]
B
AI, SEO is going to be increasingly unignorable. You probably have actually heard or read or seen if you've spent any time on the Internet or LinkedIn at all. There are a lot of people who come out with predictions that SEO is dead or that we've moved on to this new world called GEO or Generative engine or answers engine optimization. So there's a lot of predictions, I think, on how this overall channel distribution is changing. But there's a few observations on how companies are growing today that I think make SEO completely unignorable. The first one is that as boring as it sounds, SEO foundations are unchanged. And what I mean by that is some of the same systems that we rely on to get our websites indexed, our content seen, visible, crawled by Googlebot and the rest of the Internet are still the Same systems that LLMs and generative engines are relying upon to treat the World Wide Web as a knowledge base or a rag system, if you will, so that it can get answers to some of these questions that we're using LLMs for. When we're talking about Generative Engine Optimization or Generative Engines more broadly. They're like search in some ways, but they're actually also quite different. Search engines are still essentially in the game of trying to surface your own first party content, your own direct links. Generative Engines are all about citations and mentions. Generative engines, what they do is they take a query, they break that down into different subqueries in the background, they take those questions, and your job is to figure out how your content answers those questions, summarizes that information and generates a net nutrition response. Right? It's not going to spit back verbatim what you as a brand wanted to express. And then we also have third party citations too, where it's referencing the content and materials of the Internet, what media articles are saying, what people in forums are saying about these different products and experiences. So it's a bit of a different ball game, if you will, than specifically SEO. But the foundation is the same. In order to get your content viewed, visible, indexed in these knowledge bases that are essentially being indexed by these systems, you still need to focus on the same things, and that includes managing core web vitals, making sure that your website is actually crawlable, has structured data, it's comprehensible, loads fast for the crawler as well as the user, has a good engaging experience, has a lack of bounces, et cetera. And then the thing that you need to build on top of that is understanding how different generative engines work, which goes back to what we were sharing earlier. They're really trying to essentially summarize these sources and generate mentions or citations of these brands. So what you're trying to do is get that content to answer questions. Now this actually produces kind of a revival, if you will, of some of the SEO strategies that I think have sort of died off, if you will, like, for example, editorial SEO. Everyone's so skeptical about it. It's like, why would I create a blog about industry or this topic that I'm in? Well, now you have a good, good reason to do it is because if your brand or your website becomes a topical expert on this subject matter, then LLMs are more likely to directly cite you and, you know, point to your brand and mention you as, as an expert in these things. And also for a while, you know, community marketing was kind of this, like, very slushy gooey. Like we don't know how to measure this and there's only, you know, kind of a few ways to go about this. Well, community marketing now, I think broadly extends to this idea of how do we manage community sentiment across not just our own channels like Discord or our emails and our newsletters, but also these broader channels like what are people saying about us on Quora, on Reddit, on LinkedIn, on X& all of these other different places sprawled across the Internet. So I think that our definition of these channels is continued to evolve over time. And my recommendation for anyone that's thinking about solving for distribution in SEO or GEO is don't forget, SEO is the foundation. If you do the things that are good for SEO traditional, you're going to benefit from it, from geo. And that's already been proven by many companies who already start to get a lot of organic traffic from generative engines, even without optimizing for those mentions and citations. And the second thing you layer on are some of these new tactics, like the expansion on community marketing more broadly, but then also starting to create content that's really focused on helping to answer some of these questions. That you're going after based on your target audiences.
- [41:00]
A
On paid marketing, I want to stay here. Before we move to brand marketing, we touched on so many different channels. I'm thrilled also to hear that you say that in terms of the backbone of what GEO has become as SEO, what paid marketing channel do you think is overrated today?
- [41:14]
B
I want to talk about one particular strain of influencer marketing. So influencer marketing is a very broad category actually. It encompasses the paid sponsorships and encompasses, encompasses some of the affiliate marketing that we talked about where you have more revenue share type of arrangements. It also encompasses the user generated content strategies. The one that I think is overrated is the first bucket, which is sponsored content. So for a period of time now, I would say really over the last four to five years, influencer marketing has become a little bit more structured in how companies go about it. It tends to be brands who have a little bit more brand marketing budget and then they basically go out to creators and they say, let's work with mega creators, right? Let's find someone with 500,000 to 1 million plus followers because that's where all the influence and these audiences are. And then you have these traditional CPM deals where you're saying, I'm going to basically pay to reach their premium audiences and it's going to cost me upwards of 20,000 plus dollars for single placements. And it's sort of this gamble, if you will, where you're looking at recent average view counts, you're estimating engagement. It's sort of this like whole manual media buying placement process. A lot of companies still do that today and I'm sure that there are wins along the way. The challenge here is that I've never seen influencer marketing through that kind of sponsorship placement work without an incredible amount of quantity and scale, meaning that you're just going to need a massive brand budget. So actually if you talk to a lot of influencer marketing agencies or managers, they'll basically tell you I need at least $10,000 to make this thing work. And as probably an early stage growth team, you think like, wow, that's a lot of money. You need to figure out if you want to do even the second version of this. That model has not worked as well. Instead, I think the strategy that teams should be indexing more towards is kind of this newer evolution on influencer marketing, which is what we talked about earlier with the answers AI example where this user generated content view where the placements are done at more of a sort of granular audience micro level. You're really more focused on the content and you're going to let the natural advantages of these social platforms, AKA the distribution algorithms, solve the problem of reaching the right audiences for you. So for me, sponsored influencer marketing, definitely overrated. I don't think any team really needs to touch that unless they've like really kind of run out of cycles on the user generated content side of things. And you know, certainly an area that I hope teams will be a lot more performant around, around the spend.
- [43:40]
A
For one thing that I've seen really rise up in the last few months actually is sponsored ugc, which is these UGC platforms often at universities or around young communities where they say, hey, give us a $25,000 spend and they literally get like a thousand people at university to post a review of your Chipotle dinner. I'm just making it up and they give them 25 bucks. How do you feel about sponsored influencer elements like that?
- [44:08]
B
I think they're great. And the UGC example is a really good one we should dive into because UGC itself, one of the goals is distribution. But we also have to think about the other byproduct that you get out of ugc, which is that you now have a video asset that you can use for other types of surfaces. Think about all the places that you could add that to on your homepage, on your website. Overall, one of the most powerful UGC strategies actually that I've seen and has worked well for a lot of the companies that I work with recently is turning UGC into a whitelisting ad strategy. So for those who maybe aren't familiar with the concept of whitelisting, it's essentially where you work with a third party who's not necessarily directly employed by your company and you can actually promote your content directly through their account. There's a lot of benefits to doing that. Firstly, that it feels less salesy when it's not you that's talking about about the product that's at hand, but instead basically promoted through the name or the Persona of somebody else who seems to be a customer of the product itself. So whitelisting actually has great effects for essentially paid social ads where now instead of let's say that you're Descript and you have to promote all of your content through the Descript account. Now, the creator that you're working with, let's say, you know, podcaster Pat Flynn or something, we whitelist through his account. The ad is coming from him directly, the video is him talking. There's a lot More authenticity baked in that just naturally the conversion rates are higher. Now imagine having the 25,000 videos that you talked about in this Chipotle example here. You can do that with all of those creators. It's this massive media engine. It's organic because they've posted the video. You get, you know, the algorithm distribution, you get the positive word of mouth through increasing your own conversion rates by the social proof that lives now on your website. And you get the added benefit of being able to boost it on demand because of the fact that these are people that you work with. So there's so much that you can do with ugc and it's something I'm, you know, to answer your question, I'm, I'm really excited about it. I think it's a sort of hack, if you will, or something that I think more companies are going to be looking towards activating in the earlier stages.
- [46:20]
A
What paid channel did you expect to be a big hit? You know when you're like psyching yourself up, this is going to be so great. And then it happens and you're like, that wasn't what I thought it was. And what did you learn?
- [46:33]
B
Let me pick TikTok ads for a moment here. I'll point to some of the work that I did with a company called Limitless. They're consumer hardware product. It's essentially a product that's a pendant that you wear on your neck and helps you remember everything that you've seen, said or heard. And very, very good for personal productivity, self reflection and whatnot.
- [46:55]
A
It's down toroken, eh?
- [46:57]
B
Yes, that's right. Yeah, exactly. Amazing product, amazing team with that product. I felt that it was such a good fit for TikTok because it's a consumer product. In some of the early experiments that we did, we just found that TikTok actually wasn't as performant as channels like Instagram. I have some hypotheses for this. The first one is that one of the things I've noticed about TikTok is it has such a powerful organic distribution engine. So oftentimes if you're thinking about how to best use TikTok, it's trying to figure out where are some of the content corners on TikTok where there's going to be a natural fit for the product rather than thinking about jumping to paid right away. So for example, I don't know if you've had experiences using TikTok shops before, but it's this like really cool combination of live stream where a sort of anchor or hosts can talk about the product and drive conversion conversions directly to selling the product or just directly accessing the shop itself and driving sell through that. There are certain products that work really well on TikTok shop, for example, certain price points, probably, you know, sub hundred dollars products that are very visual in nature, right? Like Pop Mart for example, is a product that's very, very visual. They're physical products. You can do a lot of demonstrations with it. And if you find a product that like fits really well with these organic surfaces, try to focus, focus on those surfaces first instead of going into ads. I think the ads, you know, in my view are still, they're still nascent, they're still developing. They're certainly going to be a type of product. Like if you have a mass consumer appealing mobile game, that might be a really good corner to focus on with TikTok ads. But broadly speaking, I was just disappointed because I thought, you know, consumer product, one of the largest consumer platforms to reach users on in the world, decently robust targeting, conversion optimized, et cetera. But it just, it didn't kind of pan out the way that I thought. And so my, my learning there is for a lot of these social channels, you kind of have to figure out what their strengths and advantages are. For meta, if you're a brand, there's virtually no or very, very limited organic distribution for you. So paid is naturally kind of the way to go and they really make that engine work. So for us at the time for Limitless, the paid social on Instagram worked much better than we saw with TikTok.
- [49:12]
A
To what extent do you think TikTok was creative? I know it sounds strange, and I don't mean that rudely against your creative, but it's like there's a very distinct type of video that works on TikTok, I find for different audiences. Do you think it was creative or do you think it was platform?
- [49:26]
B
I think it's the combination of the product, how that product manifests into creative, and then the ultimate fit of that creative on that platform. So I share in your observation.
- [49:34]
A
If we take a flip, I've so enjoyed that on paid. If we take a flip to brand, it's a really hard element that you do have to consider as well. How do you think about brand marketing given the lack of attribution and lack of data that surrounds most of it? And how do you advise me as a founder or a growth leader?
- [49:53]
B
The first thing I'll say about brand is basically figuring out what that means at the company and For Descript in the early days, the brand was essentially an extension of the product experience itself. The way that we built the product, the principles that drove the product design, things like simple yet powerful things like not wanting to be disruptive to the workflows of our customers, became the brand ultimately. And we knew that when we heard some of these reviews and testimonials being created about the product. People just describe and articulate the Descript brand as being these keywords and these terms without us ever having mentioned it on the website anywhere. So I think the first piece is for a lot of early stage products, especially if you're self service or product led, the brand is going to be the product identity itself. And you don't really have to artificially create brand marketing that essentially tells users what it is. It will just live in the minds of users. I think the second piece I would add on top of that is the brand itself can be very shaped by some of these bigger launch moments that I was talking about. I mentioned the creation of this brand launch video that we had when Descript launched video editing. Before that, we actually had another version of the video produced by a company called Sandwich Video. The phenomenal storytellers, that entire team. And for that video we had this really colorful use cases montage where we essentially covered all these different scenarios in which a content creator was, you know, struggling to get things done, struggling to remove the US and ums, et cetera, and Descript just being this like, very simple to use, like you don't have to think about it twice type of solution. That video was incredibly powerful in actually helping us design all of these other brand elements. We would take all of the colors in that video, we would take the characters and the Personas displayed in that use cases montage and kind of use it across our landing pages and our website. And it created this brand consistency that I think is important. So in the early days, in reflection on what we did with brand marketing at Descript stemmed first and foremost from the product experience. But for new customers who are trying to figure out what to expect coming through the door into the product before they got to experience those moments of the brand for themselves, you can kind of figure out a way to construct that experience for them through highly visual, highly story told content like a video, for example, and that worked really well for us. Our investments there were, I would say, minimal, but really, really worked because we really doubled down on that sort of singular brand consistency, consistency. Now what early stage founders should be thinking about in terms of creating the brand I think firstly the answer is not a website redesign. Which is probably the number one solution I hear when companies say, I'm ready for building a brand now, I'm ready to get past my mvp, my prototype, I'm going to hire this agency and do like a whole website redesign. Everything's going to shoot up until right after that. Almost never does, in fact, always creates a little bit of a dip in the short term actually, because you're changing the gravity or the, the expectations of the customer. But instead just really kind of thinking about how do we manifest the brand first and foremost from the product experience and then thinking about what are some of the ways in which we can kind of catapult that brand and mirror that experience. For some of these outbound external audiences, it could be a video, it could be something else entirely that you create. But I think those are the better questions to ask instead of just kind of going down this playbook or this path of the way that I create a new brand for myself or usher myself into a new brand era is by redesigning our logo or renaming ourselves or figuring out how we redesign the website in its entirety.
- [53:31]
A
You mentioned launches there. I'm permanently kind of conflicted on this. I'd love your thoughts. How important is a launch? In one side of my head I'm like, it's such a meaningful moment, take advantage, it can catalyze everything. But then in others I'm like, in the scheme of life, it is a momentary hit that actually won't correlate to long term success and great product wins out. And I oscillate between the two. How do you think?
- [53:57]
B
I think it depends on what is being launched. To draw on some anecdotes from Descript. There are launches that drove nothing where the launch moment was, we announce something, we celebrate ourselves, we have a webinar and announce things and you know, back to business as usual. Nothing has really dramatically shifted in terms of the gravity of the audience or ability to convert customers. There are also other launches that do things like expand, for example, the use case of the product. In the case of Descript, really leaning into the user experience of video editing and launching features that are really focused on video editing dramatically increases the tam. You would expect essentially the business to take a step, function increase thereafter. And putting the right energy around letting people know about that launch is worth it because you're essentially able to serve a market that may have traditionally looked at the product, were hopeful about it, solving their problems, but maybe didn't come back because it didn't really fulfill their needs or the problems that they were solving at the time. Those are some of the examples. There are also launches that I think sometimes that can feel a little bit boring, that actually can really change the trajectory of growth for a company. So at descript, one of the features that we were working on was enabling multilingual transcription. When you originally used the version of Descript that we had, it was English primarily. So we still had a global audience because there's a lot of English content creators in different markets across the world. But more broadly, you wouldn't be able to transcribe into other languages like Spanish or Hindi or German, et cetera. Now we launched multilingual transcription. I thought, okay, this is just such a small feature launch. You're just adding a dropdown menu and people can now choose the different languages they want to transcribe in, maybe get a little bit of a boost, you know, but it's not a needle moving initiative. So that one was a little bit quiet. But as soon as we enabled that in the product, we did a corresponding feature announcement through our product newsletter. There was just a lot of organic pickup around it, right? It was just these markets saying, like descript, finally, this product that we've been wanting to use in our markets for so long, supports the languages in ways that we've been wanting to use, became this engine also for distribution and more of these localized campaigns that we could now run in different markets as well. So extending user acquisition more broadly. So I think that feature launches are really important. And if I had to kind of zoom out on the descript timeline, I think one thing that the company did really well is have this really strong cadence of feature launches to drive this parallel path of growth campaigns that we had. We released new features or fixes every two weeks. We had a very, very fast, aggressive release cycle. Now the bad part of it is customers kind of looked at us as like, if you remember the old days of Facebook, people complaining, the news feed shifted basically every other week. People just are used to things and they don't want change all the time. But the interesting thing about these release cycles is that they gave the growth team more surfaces, more use cases to play with. And every time you have a new feature like multilingual transcription, like background noise removal, like, unless upgrade into the voice cloning model, it gives the growth team new creative extension to grow our SEO strategies, to grow our paid marketing campaigns, to grow the number of topics that we can touch upon and all of the different channels that we have. And I Think it's this really cool rhythm and engine that essentially drives growth. Sometimes it happens organically, like in the multilingual transcription scenario that I was telling you about. Other times it creates like these bigger go to market moments, like us being able to start targeting video editing users because we knew that we wouldn't churn through all of them, because now that the feature actually solved these needs, it's something that would be incredibly valuable to customers.
- [57:41]
A
We chatted a little bit beforehand and you said when you hit the website, you have transcription, you can have video editing, you can have podcast editing. How do you create messaging that works well for everyone without isolating users, but also mean something to people? Does that make sense?
- [58:02]
B
Such an important question. I have a particular take on this that may be different from what some of your other experts and guests have advised. I would say that there's some common convention or understanding out there that for positioning and messaging a product, you have to be very granular and specific. Right. And that's not bad advice. You want to figure out who you're selling to be very clear about who this is for and not try to sell to the entire universe, because that never works well for anyone. But I find that with these, I'll call them prosumer product or self service products, you can actually get away with being relatively horizontal with the functionality of the product, so long as you're tailored with the entry points. And let me explain what I mean by this. Earlier, Harry, we were also talking about the strengths of point solutions, and you and I both actually agreed in that conversation that point solutions are very valuable because sometimes you just need a specific tool to get the job done for a specific area. And I think consumers and people who are in that moment of trying to solve something. Couldn't agree more. Right. That's why point solutions are so prolific and everybody wants to use them with descript and how we figured out this broader, very horizontal messaging of all in one audio and video editor, which in theory should sell no. 1 because it doesn't sound like it's powerful enough for anything. That worked well for us because we had these very precise entry points. And these were done through two different ways of segmenting these entry points. The first were use cases. Right. We're trying to figure out, are you here for podcasting, video editing, transcription, voice cloning, et cetera. The second are these very micro jobs to be done removing background noise from audio, removing background noise from video, if you have a entry point, or we'll call it a landing page, specific to each of these specific jobs to be done, you can get somebody to want to learn more about the product and so long as you can kind of promise them that you'll point them there and they can get the thing done, they enter the ecosystem and then they find that there's a lot more that they can do. Because if their starting point is a video, they're naturally going to have other types of editing needs. So the way that I've always recommended a lot of early stage companies to think about their overall brand surface and that positioning and messaging is don't corner yourself to saying, I have to make this one segment of the market work and if it doesn't work, I don't have pmf and then I have to pivot and redo the entirety of the existence of my company and our mission. No, instead, try to be a little bit more horizontal actually with the overall value proposition and then over time build out these entry points so that when you're talking to a customer segment who you know reflects this particular use case, send them that entry, entry point and then let also the powers of organic distribution help people find you across these more targeted entry points as well. What you will find is that when people start with that entry point, the second place they go is they try to understand the broader vision of the company as well. We were actually able to show this, prove this with data at Descript, we found that a median or over half of the sessions of users coming in from these very, very specific landing pages, their second path was to go to the homepage, they'd click the logo mark in the corner and then they'd go to the homepage and see what the broader product value proposition was. So much so that the homepage itself drove actually more of the conversion and boosted conversion rates in comparison to these individual landing pages. And that was a bit of a surprise to me. I thought, who would want to actually spend more time to learn about these solutions when they can just get directly into the product itself?
- [61:29]
A
I love that in terms of the different entry points you illustrated there and the jobs to be done, it did make me think though. Gosh, this is quite a sophisticated growth engine. So my subsequent question to you was, if I'm in this, gosh, I'm an early stage founder. Listening to you going, this sounds incredible, but quite sophisticated. How do I know when is the right time to make my first growth hire? If we go to that people element.
- [61:55]
B
Yes. So building growth orgs, hiring for growth. I also may have a bit of a different take on this. Just because of my own personal experience here, I don't think there is necessarily a stage where it's too early to bring in somebody to focus on growth. I think the standard advice out there is wait until you're post PMF and have something that isn't just a high turn engine. You're wasting your cycles on growth. But my definition of growth is a lot more full stack, it's a little bit more comprehensive. I think every festival founder in the early stages is saving a part of their brain and probably spending half or more of their time figuring out growth. That's why you see such a big focus on founder led brand, founder led sales, founder led marketing. Right. It's literally, you know, first person who is the CEO, the executive, maybe even somebody on the founding team, they are ahead of growth essentially. So to say that there isn't more time or energy than an investment that we could be making in the early stages, I don't think that's necessarily true. True. The other problem I see is if you wait to hire for growth, you have a bit of a chicken and egg problem. A lot of founding growth hires I see on the job descriptions, it's, you know, we want experience with all of these acquisition channels and I want you to like fix our decelerating month over month growth. And the chicken and egg problem comes in where you don't know if you have product market fit because you don't have either measurement on longer term retention or longer term retention is, isn't looking good. And then you want to bring in somebody to fix like all of the above, the acquisition plus the retention. I think that if you actually in the early days try to build for some of that distribution into the product like we were talking about earlier, figuring out your natural advantages, build a product that is socially shareable, that has more of those product collaborative loops built in, targets existing demand. By building out these entry points, you can actually get to a place where you're solving for a lot of that early product market, channel, market fit with this growth person. In the early days. I know this to be true because in the early days of descript, not to say that there wasn't any growth before coming in, but it was very sporadic growth. If you looked at our charts, you know, we had these like spikes whenever media covered us or whenever an influencer talked about us. It wasn't repeatable, it wasn't systematic. It wasn't until we had a team that was really thinking about how do you stabilize the numbers here? How do you increase incremental investments and have the proportional outcomes follow suit to those numbers. And then how do you control your own growth destiny that we were able to basically take control of these numbers and drive a growth story or a picture ideally in the way that we wanted to. So I think actually growth hires being part of the early teens is something we're going to see a lot more of. This is actually a trend I see already reflected in some of YC's latest cohort batches where if you look at some of the roles they're hiring for, so many teams that are less than five or 10 people are already want a founding growth marketer or a founding head of growth or a growth hire. And I think they're seeing this really clear need where the founders are already starting to invest in growth, but they want to be more intentional about building into their companies.
- [65:01]
A
Should the first growth hire be a jack of all trades, young hungry hustler, or should it be a Casey Winters Elena Werner reforged style pedigreed growth leader if you can get them with a mega sea draft?
- [65:17]
B
It's such a great question. Here's an interesting observation I'll share with you. I think it could potentially be both. The interesting thing about the reforged community and some of the more experienced growth hires is that I see this insatiable thirst, hunger and desire to continue to be hands on on even though they're very senior and they know a lot. Right? I think the commonality in the hungry growth hire and the more experienced growth operator and executive who comes from all these sort of season runs of growth is the willingness to continue to be hands on, continue to kind of adapt and learn. That's probably the trade I would index on. So I don't think that either higher is necessarily bad or the worst option so long as that person, that individual is still willing to be hands on and try these things. If we were trying to figure out GEO today you have to be hands on. You kind of have to go through the motions yourself. You have to figure out what works, what doesn't. You can't just really trust what I say, what you hear on other podcasts, what you read on LinkedIn. Because the reality is that those channels are constantly changing. The biases that that ChatGPT may have for mentions from Reddit or Quora, they could be changing every other day. You optimizing for GPT mentions is very different than you optimizing for perplexity mentions, etc. You're not going to know what to do for your brand until you have Lived experience there. So, you know, for me I would pick either or, which is hard because in the job description you are specifying a salary range of course, and a, and a years of experience. But I think the more important thing is somebody who's willing to be hands on, kind of of adapt to this very, very quickly changing growth landscape, but very quickly can develop this strategy, if you will, that helps us make less mistakes and accelerates our ability to make decisions.
- [67:04]
A
How quickly do you think, you know, if a growth hire is not going to work out?
- [67:08]
B
In my experience, it does take a bit of time. I think that has to do with my own personal management style where I see a lot of potential in individuals and I kind of try to lean into the strengths of individuals. One thing that I like to do that companies don't love to do is hire a generalist pool of growth talent. But that becomes very hard sometimes if, let's say the specific thing that we need right now is a notifications or a lifecycle manager. We obviously need someone who's well versed in some of these tools and systems like Braze or have experience being very data driven or pulling their own data, et cetera. So you kind of want to index on that. But I also like to hire folks who have a, a broader mix of backgrounds. And the reason there is because the generalist is going to be able to adapt from problem to problem. Let's say that we built out the notification system and you know, we have capacity for testing new channels across, you know, affiliates or other types of things. We want to be able to kind of have that individual touch, multiple aspects of growth. And for me that has always been the more performant way, at least in smaller teams, of being able to accelerate the impact and the result results of a growth organization. I think that the more mature a company becomes, you need specialization because you need people to consistently stay up to date on, make sure that they have, you know, sort of full end to end ownership and responsibility of these specific channels. But probably my, my bias is to basically hire generalists, figure out what their superpowers are and then have them lean into those channels in the early days. And if it doesn't work out, then they can actually even shift their priorities to other things they're working on. And this is something that I've just found to be true in a lot of the roles that I've hired for.
- [68:52]
A
Sandy, this has been such a joy. Can we do a quick fire round where I say a short statement and I basically have a load of notes from this where it would be like another three hours for you and I'm wary that you are going to give birth in a week and it could be that long conversation but but there's so many elements I want to discuss so I'm going to do them in a quick fire and to whatever extent you can do them in a quick fire style, credit to you. Sound good?
- [69:20]
B
Let's do it.
- [69:21]
A
Onboarding what are your biggest lessons? Is simple, always better.
- [69:25]
B
Don't be scared of friction. Friction sometimes produces higher intent, higher quality users. The Descript desktop example is a great example. Get somebody to go through the hoops and hurdles of downloading something they're a lot more likely to stick on. Additionally, also don't be afraid to showcase your pricing and your packaging during onboarding as well, because monetization awareness should be built into a part of the onboarding. Especially if you have a product that has a lot of paid value that's that's locked away. You want people to instantly understand what those are.
- [69:56]
A
Push notifications, are they dead because they've been so overused? How do you think about that?
- [70:03]
B
Push notifications are a point of friction as well. Actually it's a strategy of friction and it's the best strategy with friction is figuring out when and how we show up in front of customers. They can work really well when you place them in those really important moments of value. For example, if you're building a mobile game, if you get a push notification when you've lost the game, or just as you've finished your duolingo lesson or forgot a streak and it reminds you to come back, I think those are really important moments of value that the customer wants to be notified about. So I don't think they're dead. I think they just have to be used more strategically and we shouldn't just treat them as these blast everybody messaging channels.
- [70:45]
A
What's the most underrated growth channel today?
- [70:48]
B
The most underrated growth channel has to be the user generated content that we were talking about, where we're essentially working with creators to create content about our products. And oftentimes we don't necessarily even need to directly compensate. You can directly compensate, of course, but giving free product and giving users access to the product is just such a great way to naturally build advocates out there, produce content, use it for white listings, so on and so forth. Very, very economically efficient, accessible by anybody from a really big brand to a startup that's just building growth for the first time.
- [71:20]
A
What company do you not work with in a growth perspective? That you think it would be most cool to work with.
- [71:27]
B
I love Perplexity because it really does solve a lot of my research needs. It has this really simple yet effective UX UI that helps me get done a lot of the things that I care about. I would love to figure out some way that, you know, we can start to build in more of these social sharing, product sharing loops into Perplexity because I do find that it's a bit of a solo sport. But the reality is that I use a lot of the outputs for collaboration with my fellow peers in academia as well as in some of the growth work I do as well.
- [71:58]
A
When you look across the landscape final one at who has nailed growth strategy in their respective field? Who do you think comes to mind first?
- [72:07]
B
It's tough to say because I don't know their actual strategy and it's hard to know if a company is intentional about growing quickly or not. But I would definitely point to ChatGPT and some of the ways in which they roll out products and features. Just yesterday as of this recording, they released the Atlas browser and it's just really incredible how unified some of these experiences are. That's something I wish we had at Meta. When we rolled out new features or when we brought apps into the fold of the company, they weren't very interoperable, meaning that you had these very separate surfaces. You had very different intentions. But with ChatGPT, everything they roll out from you know, originally the GPTs marketplace to then agents to now Atlas just are so seamlessly integrated. It doesn't feel like you're using another product within their suite. It just feels like you're naturally extending the usage of their main products. And so I really admire the product growth thinking that goes on in how they are continuing to release and innovate new features.
- [73:06]
A
This has been utterly fantastic. Thank you so much. Honestly, shows like this are why I love what I do because it's like a topic that we're both incredibly passionate about. I learn a shit ton from and an amazing amount of founders get to hear your wisdom on. So thank you so much for joining me and this has been so much fun to do.
- [73:24]
B
Thank you. This was super fun and I learned a lot from just kind of hearing how you ask these questions as well because I can tell you've been exposed to a lot of these growth problems.
- [73:36]
A
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