20Growth: How to Use Influencers to Scale Growth Insanely Fast | How to Optimise User Onboaring for Growth | How the Best Growth Teams Create Organic Growth and Community | Why LTV/CAC Models are BS with Ketty Slonimsky

Summary

Podcast Summary: 20Growth – Ketty Slonimsky on Building Insanely Effective Growth Teams, Channels, and Models

Podcast: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC)
Episode: 20Growth: How to Use Influencers to Scale Growth Insanely Fast | How to Optimise User Onboarding for Growth | How the Best Growth Teams Create Organic Growth and Community | Why LTV/CAC Models are BS
Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Ketty Slonimsky, Chief Growth Officer at Palta
Date: October 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the art and science of driving massive, defensible growth in consumer startups. Ketty Slonimsky, the force behind Palta’s powerhouse portfolio (including Flo, Simple, Zing, and more), shares her candid, practical, and no-fluff approach to growth. She and Harry dissect everything from scaling paid channels and optimizing onboarding, to the real truths behind LTV/CAC models and the role of AI and creatives in modern UA. If you want operational detail and intellectual honesty about what actually drives growth in today’s most competitive digital categories, this episode delivers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining ‘Growth’ and the Growth Mindset

• Ketty’s Path to Growth: Started in marketing, embraced product-led growth before it was a recognized term, then broadened to analytics, monetization, and user acquisition.
  • “I call it growth. You can grow through product, you can go through marketing. You need data in order to get all those insights, to grow through both.” (03:13)
• Growth: Marketing or Product?
  • Ketty stresses a holistic, hybrid discipline—growth includes activation, onboarding, monetization, packaging, and engagement, not just UA.
• The Growth Profile:
  • “Growth is about being analytical and salesy at the same moment.” (06:16)
  • Hunger, self-reflection, and a willingness to get hands-on are critical traits.

2. Compounding Improvements vs. Big Bets

• Early Stage: Solve one big use case and build the growth machine around it; only then optimize and iterate.
  • “At the very beginning you need to nail your core use case … Then you start the optimization phase.” (04:16)
• Defensibility Is Built, Not Bought:
  • “Defensibility cannot build through those small moves ... you really need to make a moat.” (04:16)

3. The Palta Venture Builder Model

• What is Palta?
  • A venture builder incubating consumer health apps to $100M+ ARR with centralized support (growth, analytics, infrastructure).
  • “We look at red ocean categories where there are already players that are doing more than 100 million … and figure out how to outplay them.” (09:19)
• Product Discipline:
  • Only continue with ideas that can realistically hit $100M ARR.

4. Testing and Killing Ideas

• Real example: Wear the Wall app nailed retention but was too niche to scale to Palta’s targets and was killed.
  • Importance of identifying truly scalable use-cases vs vanity metrics like popularity or retention in a narrow niche. (10:11)

5. Launching and Scaling Consumer Apps – Palta’s Playbook

• Launch Process:
  • UXR the area → fake door tests → assemble a product+tech founder team → MVP with paid UA (typically Meta as first channel) → test and iterate. (12:41)
  • Start with web onboarding to avoid app store fees, allow attribution, and charge more; later blend with app onboarding for organic reach.
• Avoiding the ‘Funnel Business’ Trap: Don’t over-optimize acquisition funnels at expense of product strength—great for cash machines, less so for generational companies. (13:58)

6. Paid vs Organic Growth Myths

• “Times have changed … I don’t think you can live just with organic and organic is very hard to get. So you need to start with paid.” (15:02)
• Good early UA: Three-month payback, 140–180% ROAS. “You need to get to organic and anchor into shareable loops … Organic is how you become a billion-dollar business.” (16:04)

7. Growth Moats: Shareability, Community, and Enduring Use Cases

• Natural Retention:
  • Categories with enduring needs (e.g., tracking health, embedded workflows) are best.
  • “If you thrive into tribes and communities, you amplify organic far more.” (16:04)
  • “People often dream up businesses where there is no natural retention—don’t do that.” (17:37)
• Commoditized Categories: Win by velocity, unique distribution, or community, not just product. (12:41)

8. LTV/CAC Models and Why They’re Often Misleading

• “We use the cohorts we have, apply Palta’s LTV models and try to figure it out. But we keep that space—tomorrow it can be much lower.” (31:31)
• Early LTV/CAC can be “bullshit” when based on short cohorts/channels—not predictive beyond first few months.

9. Scaling Creative for User Acquisition (UA)

• “TikTok is a game of creatives. With TikTok you need to launch around thousands of creatives per week to make it successful.” (33:34)
• Creative Factories & AI:
  • 70/30 split: 70% permutations of proven concepts, 30% new.
  • AI tools (MidJourney, Veo) power bulk creative production. (35:05)
  • “The creative and the ad is the hook, the body and the CTA … you can play with the hooks and permutations.” (35:05)
• Hiring AI-Native & Gen Z Talent:
  • “You need to bring native AI people … 17-year-olds who can bring real leverage there.” (53:27)

10. Influencers & Channel Strategy

• Influencers have not scaled as a major UA channel for Palta. “We never managed to scale the channel. It can go to … $1M spent and for us it’s like nothing.” (37:30)
• Overhyped & Underhyped Channels:
  • Meta is increasingly overhyped and expensive; YouTube and Google demand-gen are underutilized, especially for B2C. (52:04, 52:33)
  • “B2C companies are underestimating YouTube. It can be really big.” (53:11)

11. Monetization Tactics: Paywalls, Upsells, and Trials

• “We almost don’t do free trial. We do enterprising, which is different. Upselling bundles and 2nd/3rd tier subscription … Not many players in the industry are doing that.” (23:27)
• Upsells and add-on subscriptions can add up to 20% to LTV (22:47)
• Web onboarding represents up to 80% of new subs (apart from Flo, which is 50/50 web/app). (24:26)
• Test everything: “Run 1,000 experiments on the paywall to get what’s right for you.” (25:41)

12. Product Activation & Retention

• Many teams miss the need to onboard after paywall conversion:
  • “Users don’t remember what they really managed to buy … if you don’t do a good job around taking the user and really explaining them why you should be enjoying your premium … then don’t be surprised why the users churn.” (26:22)
• Retention: Optimize D1/D7 first, then onward; focus on delivering a real solution, not just reengagement spam. (47:31, 48:29)
• Engagement drivers differ by category (e.g., period trackers = monthly; fitness = weekly). The metric should fit the use case.

13. Building and Structuring Growth Teams

• Growth teams should be hungry, builder-style, experimenters who are hands-on and ready to adapt.
• Avoid the ‘star’ Silicon Valley hire:
  • “I believe it should be someone young, fresh, with the skill set of being a builder … You need to be ready and open for the changes all the time.” (43:26)
• Centralization: Core functions like legal/data can be centralized but UA/CRM should remain company-specific. (46:03, 46:43)

14. Role of Advisors vs. Internal Hires

• Best model: Internal, hands-on team + experienced growth advisor for strategic perspective—advisors must be truly embedded. (56:34)
• Most “growth leaders” and podcast wisdom is “fluff … and very, very, very far from the reality.” (55:18)

15. Notable Quotes / Memorable Moments

• On Overreliance on Frameworks:
  • “Good luck with applying frameworks to mature products. It won’t work.” (07:39)
• On Natural Retention:
  • “People dream up businesses where there is no natural retention—don’t do that.” (17:37)
• On Paywalls and Testing:
  • “You need to test probably … 1,000 experiments on the paywall to get what’s right.” (25:41)
• On Growth Mindset:
  • “Even if 95% [of your experiments] gonna be a failure, you’re gonna win big after getting all those insights.” (58:01)
• On LTV/CAC Models:
  • “LTV/CAC is mostly BS for early stage. We keep that space [because] tomorrow it can be much lower.” (31:31)
• On Growth People:
  • “Are 90% of growth leaders full of shit? — Yeah.” (55:12)
• On Talent:
  • “Bring in AI-natives … who can bring real leverage. This is like a natural addition to all UA teams.” (53:27)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Ketty’s Growth Philosophy and Background: 02:24–04:16
• Defensibility and Compounding: 04:16–05:40
• Palta Model & Identifying Winners: 08:10–09:19; 09:19–10:50
• Early Growth Machine Playbook: 12:41–14:40
• Paid vs. Organic, LTV/CAC Myths: 15:02–17:15; 31:08–32:44
• Community & Natural Retention: 17:37–19:34
• Monetization, Web Onboarding, Upsells: 21:03–24:46
• Scaling Creatives with AI: 33:34–35:54
• Influencers, Channel Effectiveness: 37:28–38:08; 52:04–53:18
• Growth Team Structure: 39:08–44:30
• Retention and Timing: 47:00–51:23
• Overhyped/Underhyped Channels: 52:04–53:18
• Biggest Growth Learnings: 58:01–58:48

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Summary in Bullet Points

• Growth is a combo of product, marketing, analytics, and UX—don’t pigeonhole.
• Early growth: Nail the product’s core use case and build a user acquisition machine, then optimize in small increments.
• Defensibility is built with process, data loops, and community—rarely exists day one.
• Palta only pursues apps with clear $100M+ ARR opportunity; kills narrow successes ruthlessly.
• MVPs are launched with paid UA (often Meta), using fake door tests and data-rich web onboarding for better retention, attribution, and pricing.
• Paid channels get you started—don’t expect pure organic/viral for most categories today.
• Optimize for shareable, retentive use-cases: communities, workflows, and products with natural ongoing user needs.
• LTV/CAC is a fuzzy science early—stay flexible.
• To win on UA: Run hundreds–thousands of creatives weekly; leverage AI (MidJourney, Veo) for creative production.
• TikTok, Meta, and Google are Palta’s staple channels; creative velocity and AI are critical to scaling.
• Influencers often disappoint at scale; YouTube is a secretly killer channel for B2C.
• Monetization: Avoid free trials, focus on “enterprising” (direct pay), upsells, and multi-subscription layers.
• Post-paywall onboarding is crucial—users forget what they bought, so reinforce value to prevent churn.
• Growth teams should be hungry builders, not just star hires.
• Internal teams + deeply embedded advisors work best; frameworks, benchmarks, and most “thought leader” content is often misleading.
• Retention differs by category and is about nailing the natural frequency of use, then layering in engagement features.
• Product, timing, messaging, and channel selection matter more than copying frameworks or competitors.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This is a masterclass in operational growth from a leader who’s scaled multiple consumer health unicorns. Ketty Slonimsky’s advice is unsparing—pushing founders to go beyond frameworks, copycat tactics, or conventional “best practices.” Instead, she stresses real, ongoing experimentation, the building of an internal testing muscle, and constructing enduring, embedded use cases and communities. Growth is a discipline of iteration, technical experimentation (especially with new creative and AI tools), product acumen, and—most importantly—understanding what NOT to do. This episode is full of real numbers, war stories, and actionable advice any founder or marketer in a competitive category can put to use.

Transcript

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 growth with me Harry Stebbings. Now in 20 growth, we analyze how the best growth leaders build growth teams, run growth experiments and execute at the.

Highest levels when it comes to growth.

Today we have one of the best joining us in the form of Ketty Slimsky, Chief Growth Officer at Palta, the platform behind apps like flo, the number one female health app with 77 million MAU simple and Zing AI, where she leads a centralized growth function across the portfolio. Before that, she was the first VP of Product and Growth at Heliosx, a £900 million ARR bootstrapped DTC Health Tech business. And she's also advised companies like Sondermind, Runner, Guardio, Cheddar and many more. 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. Money for global security and privacy standards such 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 [e-mail] and once SecureFrame LOC compliance Pendo makes sure your product truly 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 iO20 product.

You have now arrived at your destination. Ketty I am so excited for this. I've heard so many great things. I'm also an incredible fan of some of the apps that you've been a part of building. So thank you so much for joining me.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

[Harry Stebbings]

We were talking before about growth being.

Kind of this weird discipline. I just want to start with like when did you realize you were in growth and what was that? Ah, I'M actually a growth leader and I love it.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I started marketing, switched to product led growth before they even called it product led growth. It was called conversion optimization, like 15 years ago. Then I did monetization, then I did some core product roles. And at some point I started to go wide and broad. This is where one growth guru gave me an advice. You can do marketing and product, you should fit to one of them. Like, and luckily I didn't take that advice and I said, I'm going to do just wide and broad roles. So I started to take user acquisition, product analytics, product growth as like one big discipline. And I called it growth. And I don't care how other people call it, but I call it growth. You can grow through product, you can go through marketing. You need data in order to get all those insights, to grow through both. And this is what I call growth.

[Harry Stebbings]

Because before we were just chatting and you said a lot of people say they're in growth, but actually that kind of in marketing. So for you, just so I understand, growth is an easier acquisition is monetization.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I'll call that product led growth, which consists of activation, onboarding, monetization, pricing, packaging, paywalls, all that stuff around. Sara, which is like a part of marketing and product engagement, could be easily a part of growth. In my previous job at hello Sex, I owned product as well.

[Harry Stebbings]

My question, when I hear that in.

Terms of the onboarding, the paywalls and.

Everything that you mentioned, there is growth, a game of incrementality, moving 1 to 2% in each of these different levers, or is it a game of we should try something totally crazy and totally move the ball out of the park?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think it really depends on the stage. At the very beginning you need to nail your core use case and build a growth machine around that core use case. Then you start the optimization phase and those small optimizations, they're going to compound and you need to make it really at speed. At some point when you feel you nail that core use case, you need to build defensibility. And defensibility cannot build through those small moves. You really need to make a moat of this defensibility built a great product with clearly defined broad need that can expand into multiple use cases.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think anyone has defensibility on day one? A lot of VCs are like, oh, I'm worried that X could do this or Y could do that. Yeah, of course Google could do it on day one. Do you think anyone actually has defensibility and is it built through process?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think it's built through process. Like think about current companies in AI space, right? They built much of the feasibility through data loops. They sharpen that within communities, within their product. Users make prompts, they create things, they sharpen the mechanism of how this whole AI thing works. And if you nail that use case, you're going to become defensible because other companies need to run after you and after that data. And if you make it at speed and at scale, you can win the game.

[Harry Stebbings]

When we go back to this conversion and optimization and you said data multiple times already. I think very much of science being in the weeds and being a very technical mind. When we chatted there just now and I was like, no, no, we need to actually just like go to the show because I don't want to have this chat outside of the show. You said something really interesting about the profiles of people that can succeed in growth. Who do you think can succeed in growth given what we just said?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I believe in people who are hungry, smart, proactive, they want to win, they're self reflecting. Because you can miss lots of opportunities if you don't do that, smart people can figure it out. I think growth is about being analytical and salesy at the same moment.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why salesy? That's interesting.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Think about onboardings and web onboardings that Palta nailed years before this space got overcrowded. It's basically a long funnel where I warm you up to purchase a product that you have never seen and only after that you download the app and start playing with it. Right? So what is it? It's a long salesy process, up to 100 landing pages, right? You need to nail sales in order to warm up those cold leads to make them purchase.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think most people get wrong when they think about that process?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Most of the people, they just copy what exists and think that works for noom. That's probably going to work for us as well. They don't think about the value and the uniqueness of their specific audience and product.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's so interesting, I hear so many times and we chatted about this again before like first principles and frameworks in quite a mature, well articulated industry. Like consumer subs and growth both are in different respects. People think that you can take frameworks off the shelf and just apply it. To what extent is that true versus not true?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Good luck with applying frameworks to mature products. It won't work. The way Palta operates, for example, we're commonly going to take something that works for one of our companies, apply that in like just the Company we are incubating currently, but then we're going to test the hell out of that to make it work.

[Harry Stebbings]

Palta is this kind of weird beast in a respectful way. It's amazing. But what is Palta for those that don't know. And then we can dive into the machinery of how you build incredibly successful.

[Ketty Slimsky]

So Palta is a builder. We are a venture builder. It sits in the intersection of per company and venture capital. We create the ideas and then we partner with founders to make those ideas happen. And we give them everything from the very beginning to make it scale really fast. So we give them growth, analytics, data, infrastructure, finance, legal support. We build such category leaders as Flow, Simple Love and Zing. Palt is going to hit 550 million this year in revenues. We grow each year 50% and even more. We raised around 200 million from top tier investors. One of them is VNV Global and Palta is Avocado in Spanish. So we are building health tech, B2C mobile subscription.

[Harry Stebbings]

Got you. Okay, fantastic. And so when we think about that, I'd love to know you go through lots of different ideas when you're creating new ones. How do you know? And you said about testing really incessantly. How do you know when to really go all in versus discard? And let's move on to another idea.

[Ketty Slimsky]

So the way Pelt operates, we look at red ocean categories where there are already players that are doing more than 100 million in error and then figure out how to outplay them and to out build them. So we're going to create, create products and scale really fast, put lots of capital so they can become the leaders in the space. Each company that cannot hit less than 100 million were not interested. So at the peak we had nine apps and at some point we killed some of them. They either didn't nail the product market fit or they were too narrow and couldn't hit 100 million. So now we stayed with four leaders.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can we go with one that didn't hit product market fit? And what did you learn?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Let's go into a different example. Let's do the example that hit product market hit. That was super narrow.

[Harry Stebbings]

Let's do it.

[Ketty Slimsky]

So one of them was called Wear the Wall. It's a product that could basically foresee how you're gonna feel based on the weather around you. Can be mood swings, headaches, everything. So we had terrific long term retention, but we nailed just a very narrow segment of those who suffer from really tough migraines and like cannot get out of the house for three days because of the weather, we couldn't scale it ever to 100 million. It had a poor market fit. We were frustrated of killing something with rather high retention. But we needed to do that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, so many things to unpack there. Number one, respectfully, why do that business that doesn't feel like there's many categories. You said red Ocean, people making 100 million. I don't know anyone making 100 million telling you about kind of emotions tied to weather.

[Ketty Slimsky]

We said weather is huge, half is huge. Let's blend.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why the hundred million? That feels like a bit of an arbitrary number. If you can get it to 10 million and it's super efficient and profitable, why is that bad?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Because each business gonna be compared to flow and when you have flow in the portfolio which is a more than 75 million miles, 6 million active subscribers, second year retention of 80% and more than 65% organic traffic. The numbers that companies can just dream. You need to match those numbers with the new kids that you are raising. Right. We have simple. Simple is a weight loss management tool. They are going to hit 200 million in ARR. We have Zing, which is a powered fitness coach with hyper personalized and super engaging workouts. They're going to hit around 50 million NRR. They grew four times since last year. And we have Lavi. Lavi is a cosmetologist making face care accessible. They're going to hit around 20 million in error this year. They're growing 30% month over month.

[Harry Stebbings]

These are actually really interesting products and really interesting stories. Zing, for example, again, sorry for like going off schedule. I'm just too interested. It's such a crowded market and I'm always pushed all of these different products and you know, I'm pushed ladder to the extreme and 50 others. How do you succeed in a market where there's seemingly complete commoditization and no differentiation?

[Ketty Slimsky]

So it comes to the way how we basically launch products and how we run the whole play the way we operate. First we're going to UXR the area and see like if there is something there worth our attention. Then we're going to do some fake door tests. We're going to send SCAC willingness to pay how the unit economics might look like at scale. If it's there, we greenlight. We'll bring a tiny team of two founders, commonly a tech founder and business or product founder. We're going to put a lean crew behind them. We're going to launch an MVP and build the core use case this is where Poltagrowth comes in. We're going to literally scale very fast. The first use case, how we do that, we start with paid user acquisition. Commonly one channel going to be meta. We scale to 3,5k daily. This is where the algorithms start to optimize. And this is where you see through unit economics. Once it's there and we nailed it, then we're going to expand to the next use cases. We commonly start with web onboardings because you avoid 30% fee. There is attribution there which makes user acquisition more efficient. But there are things that people commonly don't talk about. The nature of credit card payments drive higher retention and on web you can charge more. This is how consumers perceive pricing on web versus mobile. Now there is a catch around funnels. If you over invest into the funnels and start obsessing about that instead of over obsessing about product, it gets you to the funnel business and that's fine. But most VCs won't back that business. It's probably not the business that's going to go to IPO and build a multi billion valuation. Right? Though if you are really great at that, you can run killer um, machines and funnels at scale and get to tens, even hundreds of million in error.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you think if we go back to the start of that where you said hey, we like to go to one channel, we like to do paid and we like to see what works there and just test out that unit econ in that first testing phase. I'm always taught that actually if you need to grow your product early through paid, it's not good, it's not a good product. It should be word of mouth, it should be viral. To what extent is that complete bullshit?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think times have changed. So when Flo was born they run on purely organic. We do just product, we don't do monetization. Monetization. UA came years after within the current products in the red ocean market. I don't think you can live just with organic and organic is very hard to get. So you need to start with paid, bring users in, see how the whole unit economics look like. And if you may even scale that use case and if you have PMF and then see how you grow that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Business further, what is good unit economics? I know that's a really hard question to ask but like you know is a 2 to 1 LTV to CAC ratio good? Does it need to be 5 to 1? What impresses you versus doesn't?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Again it comes to like do we need to match floor numbers or we're talking about standalone businesses. So if we're talking about standalone businesses.

[Harry Stebbings]

If you imagine me being like an early stage founder.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Thinking through this, needing your help. That's how I think about it.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think when you just run paid, you need to think about payback around three months and you can run with 140, 180%. Ross. This is probably what I would be looking for. If you just do paid at some point and very early, you need to get to organic and this is what we start to discuss. You better build that and anchor into shareable loops. Where for example, why flow partner mode exists? Because women want to share their insights with their partners. Right. Why running app might be super successful as they basically built around the habit of running marathons in communities. If you thrive into tribes and communities, you amplify organic far more than with single use apps. Think about natural retention. So flow has that natural retention where users come back month after month since being teenagers to like Perry and post menopause and this is huge. This is how you become billion business.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's also unique though. And again I'm kind of going off script but in the way of like the use case is enduring for obvious reasons. Dating on the other hand sucks.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you agree then that there are just inherently shit categories like dating where you go in, out, you get married, now I mean you're gone.

[Ketty Slimsky]

You want to outsmart. Think about categories and product first and then think where and how you build your products instead of just, you know, fantasizing of building a business where there is no natural retention.

[Harry Stebbings]

What are other categories that have this enduring retentive feature that people don't think about?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think currently it's coming to workflows. If you're embedded into the workflow and each piece of your workflow, think about ChatGPT, think about other companies in the space. This is what builds you defensibility and that really tremendous retention. You are becoming very hard to replace. Think about work or something, right? And if you see it like in your email and search and other different tasks that you are performing during the day and you use just that one tool which is hugely embedded, knows everything about you and sits deep inside your data, this is what's going to bring your attention. The flexibility.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you think about the painkiller versus vitamin when we think about those, you know, you said there about kind of weight loss management app with what's simple, simple, simple. People don't like losing weight. It generally is like diet, exercise, change of habit. It's much easier to sell chocolate than it is carrots in many respects it's.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Much easier to sell GLP1s. You know I'm board advisor at hello sex which is GLP1 company and when you compare GLP1s to habit management, it's unbeatable. People are lazy. People want to sit on their couches, to eat junk and to become lean. It's a hard business of trying people to work out and to eat healthy. You need to have this inner motivation that most of the people don't have.

[Harry Stebbings]

So we were talking about the paid in the early stages there and actually the payback and the roas fantastically helpful. I'm a founder listening to this and I'm going okay. But I'm in a red ocean category and I'm competing against a Simple or a Flow or one of these apps.

[Ketty Slimsky]

You don't have a chance. Yeah, we built unfair advantage like we built growth 100 million plus machines from day zero. What the age of palta is cross pollination synergy between the apps. For example simple playbook will double Flow's conversion. The shared acquisition strategies that we use help us to scale new ventures with the same ROI. We get fantastic terms with all ad networks Braze PayPal. It's something that small size and mid sized players cannot even dream about.

[Harry Stebbings]

So you have cross referral networks between the apps. So basically you get cheaper customer acquisition because a Flow member will become a simple member and a simple no, it.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Doesn'T work like this the way it works. So basically we can take tactics and playbooks from one app to another. Think that Flow is running thousands of experiments per year. We're going to learn out of that 1,000 experiments and apply them to other apps. Flow is rather big and they don't take big risks. So we can do something more risky in a small company, take those findings and roll out in the apps in the group.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is there an example that comes to mind of one where it was a risky experiment and it worked and you took it to another one.

[Ketty Slimsky]

We introduced upsells second subscriptions and third subscriptions and we rolled all of that in the whole group by the way. Second subscription and third subscription. I don't mean here. Tiering in the world where CPMs are very high and user acquisition super expensive. You don't make a living from one subscription. You introduce additional revenue streams embedded into the product like extra value that you sell a second subscription, a third subscription. We do lots of upselling as well and we use all those strategies in all the apps in our portfolio.

[Harry Stebbings]

So just so I understand that, and I'm a venture capitalist, so we're inherently naive and ignorant, which is why we do what we do. A first subscription is like, okay, I'm a premium flow member. Okay. And then a second subscription is adding my partner to it. Adding insights. What is it?

[Ketty Slimsky]

So, for example, you're subscribed to get personalized workouts, right? Zing. But we also sell a body scanner. And you can get a subscription for a body scanner in addition to various upsells of workouts, of recipes, and other stuff that you're going to purchase from us at the very first minute you open the vault.

[Harry Stebbings]

Got you. Got you. So basically your first subscription does the payback and makes me neutral in terms of spend. And then your second and third is basically profit.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely.

[Harry Stebbings]

Got you. How much of revenue do you want to be from 2nd and 3rd?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Not sure I can answer that. But let's say, let's put it in a different way. All the upsells going to add around 20% to the LTV.

[Harry Stebbings]

And you don't worry about like I feel a little bit pissed off when this happens. Sorry, Katie, but it's like, you know, I've paid to come. It's like private members clubs. I've paid to come in some ridiculous amount and now you're charging me a ridiculous amount just to eat there.

The restaurant's free to go in.

Do you know what I mean? It's like I'm having my.

[Ketty Slimsky]

But I'm doing that after a long web onboarding where I warmed you up and you're ready to open the wallet and you're already there. And it's just a small another feature that I want you to purchase in order to be successful.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think people are doing the second and third subscriptions? Well today?

[Ketty Slimsky]

No.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Palta has nailed all those tactics around web onboardings, payment infrastructure and the whole sales piece of paywalls. Intrapricing. We almost don't do free trial. We do enterprising, which is different. Upselling bundles and second and third tier subscription. Not many players in the industry are doing that. Some players that are noom, they know that as well. But for me and Valtech.

[Harry Stebbings]

Sorry, you said you don't do free trials. Why not?

[Ketty Slimsky]

With free trials, you bring free trialists, which is a very weak signal. You want to bring payers, people who have high willingness to pay. And this is how you want to optimize your algorithm.

[Harry Stebbings]

But I'm really put off by the like enter app paywall And I'm like, oh, well, it's not an app.

[Ketty Slimsky]

We do web onboard mornings.

[Harry Stebbings]

How much of net new subscribers is Web onboardings?

[Ketty Slimsky]

So 80% will be coming through web in all our companies apart from Floor where it splits 50. 50.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's amazing though. Well done because the cut is just brutal. I mean the Apple cut is insane.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely.

[Harry Stebbings]

We invested in a company that does like rooting away from Apple. Just as like it will be a great company.

[Ketty Slimsky]

There are some pros and cons to do web onboarding. Think about web onboarding and if you don't have a free tier, you might never grow to become a floor. So it's like a game with pros and cons. It's a game of you can bring pairs with high willingness to pay and nail this whole unit economics and user acquisition. But you won't get mail, you won't have that word of the mouth. So better to blend both tactics in both worlds. By the way, Floy is still doing the free trial. Floor is a different product.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm so interested. Don't do free trials because it brings like lower quality people who don't have the willingness to pay. When we see the paywall, there's many different options for paywalls. Do you have like a strong opinion around? It's good to give people four options. Just give people one option, highlight one option and put most recommended on it. Any lessons around paywall optimization or preference?

[Ketty Slimsky]

The best lesson going to be put a PM nails monetization from day one and test the hell out of that. You need to test probably to run like 1,000 experiments on the paywall to get what right for you.

[Harry Stebbings]

So you use paid to get a shitload of traffic in see what the traffic does.

[Ketty Slimsky]

We apply best practices from the portfolio and then we test the hell out of it.

[Harry Stebbings]

They pay, they come in. And the trouble with most AI apps today is if they do get there, it just churned within like seven days. Is there anything that you've learned in terms of onboarding and retention in those first user actions that people don't think enough about?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think it comes to the nature of the product. You need really to solve the need to do that in a fascinating way where you nail the first use case. You build a whole onboarding and activation around that use case and not something fluffy and broad. And only after that you expand more use cases. The second one gonna be the whole activation. What most of the teams many times forget. I just sell premium and then what I care about is how do I improve Cancellations and churn. But what happens in between? You need to activate your users on the subscription. Users don't remember what they really managed to buy. They don't remember your features. You know, we run a super interesting survey at FL where we asked our paying customers if they use feature X or they use feature Y, if they engage with that feature, if they enjoy that feature. And you know, the answers were around. I don't really distinguish between the doctor's report and this and that insight. Oh, I couldn't find it. Oh, I didn't know it really exists. So if you don't do a good job around taking the user and really explaining them why you should be enjoying your premium and what you paid for, then don't be surprised why the users churn. And now let's do like something truly amazing to get them back when they just are pissed off of your product.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think it's one of those ones where it's a bit like email newsletters where people often don't send them very much because they're afraid that when they do they're going to churn. And it's like people don't like to actually show you the depths of the product because they're afraid the more that they hassle you and go, hey, look how amazing it is, the more they remind you of the subscription that you have. Do you know what I mean? And that's the worst thing ever, I find, when it's like, oh, I don't want to remind them of the subscription. It's like, that's not a good thing.

[Ketty Slimsky]

You want to remind them that they have a problem and we are the best solution for their problem. This is what you want to do, really?

[Harry Stebbings]

I totally agree with that. When we think about going back to this kind of, hey, we test and we iterate and we use performance marketing to get a lot of people in. And then you said it's about that ability to transition to shareable loops where organic shareable loops. How do you know when it's the right time to go from paid? Let's smash meta with three to five. Well, I'm not smashing matter, to be honest, with three to five grand a day, but you're spending on meta with three to five grand a day to hang on a minute, we need two shareable loops and it needs to be.

[Ketty Slimsky]

More organic, it needs to run parallel. Once you nail your first use case, you'll have that like unit economics. You start to scale. You need to start working on your product and those shareable mechanics within the product. But you cannot get any mechanics if the product is weak and if it's not built on the natural loop. Otherwise just the road nowhere.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think about growth loops? Everyone talks about a growth loop and I'm like, is this just another Silicon Valley ism of frameworks? And what does that actually mean to you? And if I'm a founder trying to build a growth loop, what does that actually mean?

[Ketty Slimsky]

You know, I'm a big fan of that theory. When I work with founders and I work with founders for like more than 20 years and with different founders, I find it very hard to explain and I find myself very much talking about funnels and creatives tailored to the use case. And this is what easy and simple basically to deliver the message that I managed to deliver. And at the end it doesn't matter how you call that. It's like building that UA engine that can scale.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you build a UA engine that can scale most for the last few years or 20 years has been SEO. We're seeing that really move and change. Given the dominance of web for you, how do you think about the transition away from SEO and how that changes your strategy?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Part of we don't do SEO, first of all, the best organic you can get is word of the mouth and this is where you should aim. It's like building the great product that solves the problem and brings other users in. This is what flow does with the rest. I believe the current opportunities lie within communities. Building those communities where the users are Discord, Reddit, YouTube following. I'm not a fan of talking about like you know, SEO ao if one going to replace another. Probably yes, probably no. Not all the companies are built for SEO and for good SEO you need to be in a specific niche probably to build some programmatic SEO for B2B SEO or AO can work in our niche for health tech. This is not a strategy to go.

[Harry Stebbings]

Word of mouth does wonders for your Unity Con. When we go back to Cat 2 LTV and trying to understand that Unitycon the half the odd thing is we're an early stage company as you said, we're testing one channel 3 to 5K. I don't have LTV. How do I figure out unit econ when I'm really early and when you're testing new ideas, you don't have 12 month cohorts. What do you do then?

[Ketty Slimsky]

We use the codes we have, apply pultos, LTV models and try to figure it out. But we keep that space meaning. I know that if currently I'm looking at let's say roll as 140 tomorrow when the real numbers come up it can become 110 or even 90%. You need to think how you make it really smart and don't like try just to be at the surface of 100 because tomorrow it can be much lower.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can you take me to a time when you use Palta models but way overestimated where it would be and what did you not see?

[Ketty Slimsky]

So we did it with one of our companies. We thought that we are someone in the area of 114. The real data start to come. We realized very quickly we are around 110. We start to bring different channels in and different channels can change a lot. Your LTV for example TikTok that brings like very different type of users that we realized in a few weeks can go under 100 and we start to rethink how we make this whole thing work.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said TikTok brings in very different users. We find this too just for our core shows given they bring in transparently a lower quality, much more high churning user and actually often have zero impact at all. We have videos with 25 million plays and they bring in like 12 subs. I mean like. And we have videos with 2000 plays that bring in 50. I mean is it not worth then doing this kind of junk food short form of low quality?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think it's worth. Palta commonly works with Meta, Google and TikTok. Those are three channels we try to nail within each company. Sometimes it takes us a while to nail that. For example with Flo it took us a year to unlock TikTok which we scaled tremendously this year.

[Harry Stebbings]

What did you do to scale it and why did it take long?

[Ketty Slimsky]

TikTok is a game of creatives. With TikTok you need to launch around thousands of creatives per week to make it successful.

[Harry Stebbings]

Well, pause a thousand creatives a week. What do you mean by that?

[Ketty Slimsky]

We are playing a very different game in order to scale the way POLTA scales and POLTA spends hundreds of millions as a group on user acquisition. So as a centralized growth function we build a creative factory where we launch around hundreds of creatives per week. And with AI it becomes thousands.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can you talk? What does actually hundreds of creatives a week mean? Does that mean hundreds of short form videos?

[Ketty Slimsky]

We're probably going to Split it into 70, 30, where 70 going to be like the permutations of the old concepts that work. 30 are new form creatives. Fascinating can be videos, it can be static. Don't Underestimate static. For example, floor is 50%, I think. Static?

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you mean? So what do you mean static?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Static creatives like static ads, not videos.

[Harry Stebbings]

Wow.

[Ketty Slimsky]

And it's much easier to produce those, much cheaper as well. And you can produce that with AI.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's so smart though that you do the permutations on what worked before. Of course, yeah, I've done this on LinkedIn a lot. We basically have like my top 20 LinkedIn posts and then you can just do, I mean obviously put it in ChatGPT and say, hey, give me three variations and then schedule 60 days worth. And it's basically guaranteed viral ish bangers.

[Ketty Slimsky]

So basically the creative and the ad is the hook, the body and the cta. Right. And you can play with the hooks. So you can just take the body and think about 30 hooks for the same body and then like 30 permutations of the CTA and this is how you get to that crazy number. Then you get like all the mentions possible and this is how you win. So on TikTok you need to have three times more creatives than on meta.

[Harry Stebbings]

Wow.

[Ketty Slimsky]

And you need to work really with like TTTC or their creators marketplace. Do creatives in house blend them and this is how you win.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you use AI to take 100 creatives and use to get a thousand?

[Ketty Slimsky]

So basically we work with like you know, midjourney veo and it changes a lot.

[Harry Stebbings]

It does, of course.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Like you know, on a weekly basis you can replace the tools. Basically the idea is to have a very strong team that amplifies those tools. Someone who is like on it, someone who is saying, cool. So now let's test this. Let's try this. Let's see if that bring us into a different speed. Those are modern growth teams where you have like people who are AI native and this is their job. You know who I'm dreaming to bring into growth teams? Prompts. Like the people who gonna just prompt and build growth machines. Like literal growth machines. As you know, probably in two years time it's not gonna be relevant. So you build a growth machine where it can learn the trends on TikTok of the last five days and your performance on TikTok and recommend you like what you should apply tomorrow in the creative and watch your campaign's performance, blend it together with creative performance and tell you what to do.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm worried that in a world of AI and creative, the value of content goes down because the supply is infinite. And so when you go from 100 to 1,000 and you use Veo and MidJourney and 5 million other tools that there are, it goes down in value. Do you share that concern?

[Ketty Slimsky]

No, because I think it's about diversity, velocity and volume. At the end the creatives will find the way to the right audience and if the audience is not right, then your creative sucks.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you use influencers?

[Ketty Slimsky]

We do. We never manage to scale the channel. It can go to, let's say up to 1 million spent and for us it's like nothing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think people waste a lot of money on influencers today?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. But I do believe when talking about organic there is an opportunity in the market to hack it to bring like you know again TikTok AI native person who gonna like launch 30,000 videos per day and see if he can get to great influences or build brand out of that. Probably this window won't be open for a long time but can be super interesting.

[Harry Stebbings]

How has your role changed as a growth leader in the last 18 months? You've been doing this for 20 years in different form factors.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think we should talk a bit about partners, like how I got the role.

[Harry Stebbings]

Sure.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Four years ago Polta decided to build centralized growth function and they decided to centralize even more functions such as data and analytics, finance and legal. And I was brought in to build the growth. Palta is a decentralized ecosystem with independent companies where they have their own leadership, their own teams, their own growth teams and roadmaps and there is no top down control. Yuri, the CEO said hey, this is Katy, she knows growth, she's going to support you. No mandate, no seat at the table. And I love those challenges. I love ambiguity, I love chaos, I love building from nothing big and porous. So I understood that I need to treat myself as a product and to deliver value fast.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is it hard though when you're not involved in the company day to day because the team's like well you don't know what I'm dealing with. You don't know what I'm going through. You don't have the data that I have.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. I took a plane, I spent weeks with founders and their teams to understand what, what they're doing, to dig into their data, into their experiments, into their ways of working. And this is where trust start to click. They basically invited me to do like bigger bets with them together. What I try to do is not to tell them what growth is and how they should be operating, but basically solve their immediate challenges and help them to scale, help them to win.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think growth operates best as A separate function or as an integrative part of a product team, a marketing team, a sales team, you name it.

[Ketty Slimsky]

It really depends the way PolTA operates. At the very beginning we incubate those companies and we launch the products. We hire one UA manager and 1pm PM that nails the funnels. Basically when the company hit around 3,5 million RR before that, Palta runs the show.

[Harry Stebbings]

So up to that point just Paltrow runs a show. We're doing performance marketing. We're getting to see if we have PMF and then we're hitting 3 to 5 million.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. And then we hire UA and PM.

[Harry Stebbings]

For every 10 ideas that you have, how many get to that stage? Do we have a lot of fails?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Nope. We also don't tend to launch too many ideas in one quarter. So it can be like one idea or even one idea in six months.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, gotcha.

[Ketty Slimsky]

We never wanted to become a factory of apps, so we never wanted to have more than let's say 10, 12 kids. Otherwise it becomes unmanageable. And you want that cross pollination and synergy. This is the edge of palta.

[Harry Stebbings]

So we get to this ui, we.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Get to the stage and this is like your first lean growth team which is commonly sitting under the founder at some point, like when they scale to let's say 5, 8 million, I want to hire the leader for the team. I don't hire for titles, I don't have fluff, I don't hire managers that just can manage. So I'm going to bring someone who can lead the team and be hands on at the same moment. At that point they still can operate like a separate team sitting on the founder. They're rather lean once they scale what the rule of thumb is one UA manager per one channel matching the number of growth PMs and it becomes like a department at that point POLTA becomes fractional. It means that I'm still deep in their numbers, in their experiments. Like I know everything that is going on there. I approve their board plans, I run with them weekly meetings. But they become like a standalone and independent beast. Where do they sit? I don't think it's about the perfect place as at the end it's about people, companies, DNA, product and marketing leaders skill set. And you cannot bucket people into frameworks. It's all about efficiency and the processes at flow. Product led growth is a part of product where marketing is a separate function that consists of marketing growth marketing, brand marketing, product marketing at simple growth function is a standalone function that works great with product and Marketing over the years as Zing and Lavi, since they're like the youngest kids, they're still a part of growth marketing, including funnels, commonly sitting under the founder.

[Harry Stebbings]

When we think about building out that growth team, there's a lot of founders who'll be listening to this. And I'm thinking of several of our portfolio companies that you'll be listening to. And they're going, okay, I need to probably I've hit that 5 to 8 million stage. I need to start thinking about this as an independent function or as like an independent role, so to speak, within the team. Should I hire a head of growth, a stellar Silicon Valley badged person and spend a lot of money on them, or should I try and hire someone young, someone fresh, but maybe who doesn't have that experience? How do you think about that?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I probably would not hire that Silicon Valley.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think what you need to bring to the table is hunger, is lots of dignity, lots of dedication, lots of experimentational mindset and you cannot get there. When you basically worked for like best in class companies, seeing how growth runs there and you come into a small company, what are you going to do there? You don't have the motivation to work in a lean team. You don't have the motivation to do the dirty job basically and to run like those, you know, basic experiments to build the infrastructure. I believe it should be someone young, fresh, with the skill set of being a builder and doing that over and over again. Because in one quarter you build and optimize for X, in another quarter you need to rewrite the whole thing and like rebuild what you have built because it doesn't stick anymore. This is the mindset. You need to be ready and open for the changes all the time.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why do growth people most often not work?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think it depends who you hire at palta.

[Harry Stebbings]

They work how many people are in the centralized growth function within palta?

[Ketty Slimsky]

So basically the way I build the centralized function was around setting common standards, cross pollination, making the process efficient. And I looked at three pillars of growth. User acquisition, product growth, serum and engagement. I put a leader.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what's the final one?

[Ketty Slimsky]

CRM and engagement.

[Harry Stebbings]

CRM and engagement.

[Ketty Slimsky]

And then I put a leader for each pillar. This is how we run it. We integrate with the companies and we can act as fractional cgo, fractional vpua, execute the project inside the company or even outsource that. And with small companies we are basically incubating them. We are currently five people, but it goes like to director level and we don't hire PM's copywriters and basically the execution functions inside the central function. I would never do a better copy than flow can do. Of course.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can I ask you, I'm always struck by does CAC get better or worse over time?

[Ketty Slimsky]

CAC can get worth over time if you scale not efficiently, but if you build a growth machine with creatives and funnels tailored to your use cases, you can keep CAC stable.

[Harry Stebbings]

What has been the biggest growth decision you made that turned out not to work? What did you learn?

[Ketty Slimsky]

One of the biggest decisions were to start centralizing the UA function where we analyzed that each company is very unique, their creatives are unique and we cannot build it as like holistic function that just gonna provide like a chunk of creatives and assets and campaigns to the independent companies. So we pivoted very quickly and decided that all growth should stay within the companies and we're just going to support the scale.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so you're like, hey, there's commoditized functions like finance, like legal, like absolutely.

[Ketty Slimsky]

We even were thinking about doing that with CRM function and realized it won't work either. We can do economies of scale for data vendors, resourcing talent, but we cannot really replace the growth functions in the companies.

[Harry Stebbings]

One thing we haven't talked about, which is probably criminal of me, but it's actually retention. We've mentioned Alex Schultz before the show. He says to me all the time, retention, retention, retention is the only thing that matters. The only thing that matters. I think Duolingo has been so successful because they have such good retention numbers. I think that D360 is 35% which is given the category they're in. Well done. How do you know what is the right retention metric to go for? Is it D7, D30, D3, 60 at.

[Ketty Slimsky]

The beginning you optimize for D7 and you look at D1 and D3 because you cannot really optimize for D30 as you don't understand like what is happening in your activation process. So let's say the first six months up to 12 months, you're going to be optimizing your annealing, your activation and onboarding and only after that you're going to be watching like your further metrics. Having said that, you should have in mind you need to build that defensibility and you need to see that flattering retention curve which we are seeing with the products that have a very strong PMF in our group as well.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah, 100%. You see that with flow, I'm sure.

[Ketty Slimsky]

And saying that with flow. We've seen that with other products. Products as well.

[Harry Stebbings]

How much do you care about like D30 retention, say, versus usage? Do you get what I'm saying by that? So it's like for a flow, for example, people may not need to check it every day.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so it's like not an engagement game, but retention is fundamental.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. I think again, it comes to the nature of the product and what are you solving for and what is the solution?

[Harry Stebbings]

Does that differ across your portfolio?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. You aim probably for a couple of workouts throughout the week. Right. But from like a woman who is tracking her period, the natural use case going to be monthly, does that suggest success?

[Harry Stebbings]

Like checking monthly, Is that a close enough gauge of whether you were a successful user? No.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think this is what can tell you that you nailed your natural use case and now you need to start building on that. Meaning you need to build content and content loops. How? Basically I bring women to check in the content, the guidance to see if today, for example, it's safe to have sex. If today I have a desire to have sex with my partner. This is what many floor users are coming to. They're not just coming to track their period. They want to get the insights about their health and the whole life around that period.

[Harry Stebbings]

Push notifications are a kind of drug for engagement, where it's like, hey, we can just push, notify and boom. And we saw that in the first 10 years of probably iOS and app engagement.

[Ketty Slimsky]

At scale, by the way, it can be very expensive with braze and other tools.

[Harry Stebbings]

Talk to me about that. Is push notifications a overused, overhyped way to engage an audience?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. When we just start and scale and build the products, we commonly have like basic email flows and not pushes within the time. Like let's say six months after we start to build basic journeys with push notifications around the user journey, when the company really scales and like they nail the unit economics and the use case, we start being harder on CRM, push and email together. The more is not the best way to go here. But if you don't have enough, it's probably not going to work as well. You need to find that balance and it's just about testing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you find there's a wide variance in conversion depending on copy?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. Copy timing. And it has nothing to do with creative and design, so you can just screw it.

[Harry Stebbings]

And anything on timing that's interesting.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely. Like you need to find the hook, the real, the best timing. It's not about the hour of the day. It's about the best timing for the user to get that notification. It should be relevant, it should be tired to some kind of event. This is how it's going to work and not just send at 10am Push that. Today is going to be a great day for you.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why did you not decide to build your own braze or push notification technology within palta?

[Ketty Slimsky]

So flow does that and within the rest we use braze which becomes very expensive at scale to build our own solution. It's also super expensive. For example, we did it for payments and it took a year and a big team to make it happen though we have one of the best solutions in the industry.

[Harry Stebbings]

Listen, I'd love to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Yeah, sure.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what is the most overhyped channel today where everyone's super excited and you're like meta? There's many channels within meta at the.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Level of the channel we don't really distinguish if it's Facebook, Instagram or whatever. And I think it's overhyped as it's getting really tough to get to good user economics there. You need to try really, really, really hard with creatives and with the funnels to get it right at scale. When we're talking about hundreds of millions.

[Harry Stebbings]

In spend, what's under hyped? Why are not many people YouTube?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely.

[Harry Stebbings]

You see great return on YouTube.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think YouTube can be great when we think about Google ecosystem. So Google search is like overhyped. The whole demand generation piece of Google is underhyped and YouTube is a huge part of that. We just started entering YouTube with like short term and long term videos and it can become huge. It can beat all discovery channels.

[Harry Stebbings]

So funny the people who've done it so so well. It's actually Monday dot com.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Absolutely.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah. I had Aaron the founder on and he was like it was a real game changer for us. And at the scale of Monday it's pretty fascinating.

[Ketty Slimsky]

But I think B2C companies are underestimating YouTube. It can be great. It can be like really big.

[Harry Stebbings]

What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 to 18 months?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think how the growth team should look like.

[Harry Stebbings]

Unpack that one.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think if we were talking about user acquisition managers and growth PMs you need to bring native AI people like 17 years old teens who spend the time on TikTok like 24 hours a day who can bring you real leverage there and then native in AI tools. I think this is Like a natural addition to all UA teams.

[Harry Stebbings]

I get you. I've just got. Having worked with many of them, the challenge that they bring is unreliable. Listen. And it's a very general statement, but, like, they are just inherently very unreliable. They have very little respect for things like time. Like, you'll say, we'll meet at 10. They'll rock up at 10:45 and text 10 minutes before being like, where are we meeting again? It's a completely different world. And it's like, oh, I didn't do that. We agreed that you'd do that.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I would probably run 100 interviews, find the best one who can do it on time and hire one.

[Harry Stebbings]

My hard thing with these guys also and girls is the really good ones know they can make a shit ton of money doing it for themselves.

[Ketty Slimsky]

I know. So why would I think you bring them for a very short time period? They enjoy working for like a big brand, getting some recognitions from their friends, whatever, and after that they're going to leave you, but it's fine.

[Harry Stebbings]

Actually, one who's amazing is Zuriya Parvez, who's duolingo, actually had her on the show because she's done all of duo socials and she stayed for five, six years, which is amazing.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Years is like incredible for any growth person in any company.

[Harry Stebbings]

Insane. Are 90% of growth leaders full of shit?

[Ketty Slimsky]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the biggest BS that you hear from growth leaders on podcasts?

[Ketty Slimsky]

What best frameworks look like and how different heads of growth share their best failures and best wins, which is commonly fluff and very, very, very far from the reality. And how you run the operation in the reality, the metrics and the benchmarks, which are average and average commonly absolutely misleading. Or the benchmarks that you need to at least be looking at. But then like, your product is different. How you even look at those metrics and benchmarks, you know that flow doesn't have real competition. So we look at duolingo metrics and benchmarks. Is it really comparable? Not really. And when others compare to flow or to best players in the market, are you playing the same game? You don't have your own value and leverage, but then like, how are you comparing to that median?

[Harry Stebbings]

Help me out, growth advisors. I always want internal. I just think it's better to have things internally done. How should founders think about the decision to have a growth advisor versus I should hire a growth team that's internal and 24 hours a day?

[Ketty Slimsky]

I think the way you think about it is you need an internal growth team, fully integrated and Then you hire like a couple of hands on people who can run the show and as we said, like young, hungry head of growth who can manage the show by still being hands on. You will miss that big strategic perspective and experience and knowledge from the industry that the growth advisor can bring. But then it's probably a matter of how you integrate them and how you work with them. They can give you everything and then can give you nothing. It really depends on what is your ask. How do you work together, how do you set the whole processing and mentoring thing around that? For example, the way I work, I commonly mentor the head of growth. We solve weekly challenges. I'm being fully integrated to the team. I learn the founder, I learn how they think, how they create. So I can like be fully integrated and support the growth and understand their product and their challenges as opposed to, you know, just come in, tell a couple of fluffy smart sentences, let them break their heads around the execution and go away.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah, six months, well paid. Thanks guys. Yeah, and then by the time, by the time it's done, it's like, I don't know if it was really successful. Absolutely. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started in.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Growth that 100 experiments at the end compound into something very big. And even if 95% of them gonna be a failure, you're gonna win big after getting all those insights and knowledge.

[Harry Stebbings]

Which company would you most like to be head of growth for that you haven't worked with? Not because it's like a sexy company or a cool company, but because you think they would most benefit from a growth playbook that you would bring.

[Ketty Slimsky]

OpenAI is huge. They have a very interesting playbook of consumer virality going up market currently to end price. I would love to lead growth there and see how we can complement the playbooks that are currently running.

[Harry Stebbings]

Katie, listen, I love this. You saw with my tweets. I hate it when people are fluffy or bring first principles or just bluntly don't answer the question. You've been fantastic. I've so enjoyed this. So thank you so much for doing this with me and it's been awesome.

[Ketty Slimsky]

Thank you, that means a lot. It was a pleasure.

[Harry Stebbings]

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