Welcome to the podcast. Today we have Peter Schroeder who is the head of growth at Onna, and we are going to discuss growth. Maybe it's maybe some other things as well, but first and foremost, let's just get some context on you. It's kind of a weird time that we're living in. So, Peter, how are you holding up with all this Corona virus stuff going on?

Hey Blake, thanks for having me and thanks for checking in. it's a crazy time, in tech. I say to my team and I say to everyone every day, we're very fortunate to still be working, and I think that we get the lighter end of everything that's happening. So yeah, just staying positive, saying grateful every day.

and I think we should, we should all do the same on a daily basis.

yeah, definitely. hats off to everybody out there, all the nurses and doctors and everything. Obviously right now, a weird time we're living in. Yeah. The show must go on and let's. Let's give some people some ammo that they can take right now is a great opportunity for side hustlers and people working online to either start a project or continue building it and having a little bit more time at home to do that.

So let's help them grow a little bit. But, but before we get into the details and getting ahead of myself a little bit of context on your career, if you could just give us a snapshot of your career so far, where you've been, where you're going, and where you are, how you got to where you are now.

Basically.

Yeah, absolutely. So, coming out of college, I very much so had that entrepreneurial spirit where, I was inspired by startups. I was inspired by tech companies. and I started, I tried starting a company that was essentially a messaging unification platform that brought all your text messages, your emails, your social media DMS into one place.

and it really gave me that startup feeling that startup hustle and kind of grounded me on what it takes to get a company off the ground. So did that for about a year. didn't end up getting the traction that I wanted. but I used that time and experience. owning a project and trying to build a company to, make my way into the tech world.

So ever since then been at a couple of tech startups, which has brought me to my current role at Oana where I'm heading up growth. And essentially what we do at Oana is where the central information layer for most tech companies. So if you think about the average tech worker and how many different enterprise applications they use on a daily basis, there's just.

Tons of data getting created, especially at this time as we work from home. All this data that lives in Slack, Microsoft teams are emails, a sauna. It's just data getting created everywhere. So Ono helps you bring all that data together, right? and do a couple of different things. We help people do, like eat discovery compliance.

So that's like GDPR, CCPA, enterprise search, knowledge management. So just really taking control and understanding your data. .

What would you consider to be your professional super power yourself?

Yeah, so am I professional superpower, at least to this point in my career, has been. Building and standing up and moving on to the next, repeatable, growth engine that companies, so just going into new channels, building repeatable processes that's driving leads, driving pipeline, driving repeatable revenue, and just moving on to the next thing.

And I think that's very much. A growth mindset that a lot of growth marketers and people who work in marketing should have is everything needs to be built up to be repeatable and scalable. and then after you work on one thing, and it's very much like a testing. Framework that you should have with everything that you're standing up, but come into it with a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, and also have a definition of done.

So, in most experiments, actually, every experiment you need, like what that definition of done is to be able to say, Hey, this works. we should. Double down on it, or Hey, this didn't work, we should quit and move on to the next thing. So, that's where I've spent the majority of my career. That's where I continue to work and grow.

The team at Oana is just building up those repeatable engines.

I love it. So let, let's dive into it then. I like to usually start with the foundation first and then build on that. So let's get really basic here. When you say growth model, what are you referencing? What does that entail?

Yeah. As I mentioned, you need, you need hypothesis to be able to test, to be able to grow these engines.

So you need a plan, right? You look out at the year when we're going into 2020 the year right now. Like, where do you want to test? What do you want to try? What's the timeline look like? What are the resources you have? So you have to take a holistic view at your company, the resources you have and the goals that you have in place.

And you have to create this. Timeline to get there. what does it look for most early stage companies, most scrappy entrepreneurs? It's, it's this big ugly spreadsheet. and you know, your business the best, you know, the data that you have, but you're just really mapping out. And I like to start at the highest level, highest level goal.

What's your goal for your business like, and then from a marketing perspective, like. I mean, the goal for your business is almost always revenue. Then from a marketing perspective, how much pipeline do you need to, attain that revenue goal? And then really you're just reversing the funnel. How many, opportunities do you have to meet that pipeline goal based on how many opportunities you have?

How many meetings do you need to book based on how many meetings you need to book? How many leads do you have to drive? so it's really building out that typical funnel that you hear most people talking about. Based on that, you look at the resources you have and you're able to apply your resources to different stages of the funnel.

So obviously salespeople go further towards the bottom of the funnel. They're the ones who are taking the meetings, taking it through the funnel to close the deal. Your marketing team, your SDRs, they're the ones driving that demand at the top of the funnel. and making sure you're driving those leads and booking those meetings.

And so it's really a whole team effort, but really what a growth model. It's just holistically taking a look at everything that your company has, to be able to, you know, go to market with, with the product and the people that you have, to reach your overarching goals. And, that's me explaining it the best I can without looking at it.

But just, it's, it's your, it's your go to market plan essentially.

And I'm curious, before we even dive further into that, what parts of that go to market plan or your marketing strategy should be established before you even mentioned a plan for growth.

Okay. Yeah. You need to know what you do best and where you need to look at is like.

What have you done to succeed to this point? Where have you seen the most success like that? That's the place that you start in. That's the place you need to continue to double, you know, 10 X down until you're not seeing results anymore. Because if something's working like that's, that's the Genesis of growth.

Define things that are working to grow your business. So if something's already working, like that's where you start. That's where you need to allocate your marketing efforts. That's where you need to allocate your team is like onto the things that are really working. As for how you think about marketing and growth, you know, I think, I think they're the same thing, like marketing growth.

It should all really be aligned because what marketing's job is, is to drive demand, to drive demand to grow the business. So, That doesn't mean that marketers have to do social media. If it's not fruitful and it doesn't work for them, that doesn't mean that marketers need to push a newsletter every week if they're not seeing any results like it is marketing's job to drive demand and drive growth to the business.

and, and so I think that they go hand in hand. And marketing always should have that growth mindset because. That's essentially their job. It's not like we hire marketing departments to do this template in, you know, routine of marketing activities that everyone does. no, like marketers are there to drive the business forward from our revenue perspective.

and I think that's where a lot of marketers get it wrong. And so it's really just having that growth mindset will really differentiate you as a marketer. And it's my hope that soon it won't. It's my hope that people that just start to think about growth and marketing hand in hand. but I think we're getting there.

I guess from the perspective of an entrepreneur or a side hustler or even somebody just building out there, their personal brand, these people we love, we love to set lofty growth goals, and at the beginning we usually don't actually have a realistic perspective or, or any reference point as to what our goal should be.

Have. Have you found any. Right. Got already framework to set realistic growth goals. Do not have any reference point on. You're totally starting from zero.

Yeah. I think that there's like there's benchmarks, industry standards experience that that can replace like lack of data. I think that you should always aim to have like a data driven approac...