Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor)

23:28That's a really interesting idea and it could be where you find someone that's too busy to work with you but maybe you could just ask, hey, could you just help me vet people and it takes a lot less time? Yeah, I've never been asked that, which is, I don't know if I'll start getting asked this now, but it does seem like that's a really simple way to add a ton of value. And as a founder, I mean, even if you have to pay this person or whatever you have to do, but it's such an important hire to get right. You know, we talk about the 10x engineer and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor or 10x growth person, but the same dynamic applies.

24:02you could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact where they're either building or helping 98 or helping implement a growth loop that literally changes the company. As we know, you need a great product and you need a great growth loop and it's usually just one loop that you need to get right. Most companies have gotten to where they are just off of one really strong channel that they've just dominated. So it's important to get right. Is there an example of that sort of impact that Have you seen in your advisor ship or other people's have just an impact from one conversation or a little bit of the help?

24:38Definitely and I think what I would point to is the advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel and certainly you know people have to know their stuff they have to be Very good at their craft their growth craft But also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what does it So no matter how good somebody is, if they haven't been exposed to an environment where there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning, it's very hard for them to internalize that. So once a growth advisor has that, it takes years to learn it, but it literally can take seconds, literally, to communicate that.

25:15So I've worked with some companies that you've mentioned and certainly have had impact very quickly. One example would be a company that I worked with, now a public company at the time they weren't. On day one, walked in, they presented their strategy, their plans, their funnels, and their lighting pages. And I could see very quickly that there was something they were doing that was a little off. And I asked them, why are you doing it that way? And they said, well, we think it just looks better that way. And as well, just do it this other way. And I remember this because it was such a short conversation.

25:51And then three weeks later, we connected. and I heard they had rolled it out and it was a large impact that they had from this one change. And it's just a good example of this. This has happened many times with the companies I work with, but it's a good example that it's not actually, once you know it, it's not hard to recognize it and to, if you deeply understand it, to give advice, but it takes a long time to get the base knowledge. So I don't do these too often anymore, but when I do advise, I take them very seriously, I focus exclusively on having impact. And I think that's really important because like you say, there's a lot of advisors out there.

26:27Some of them are great. Some of them, you know, different qualities. And you really want to make sure that if you are an advisor, if you want to be in the camp of, you know, when this person comes in, they have a lot of impact. And it takes time and focus and energy and alignment. And there's a bunch of things we can talk about that that helps to drive that alignment. but having impact is the most important thing, whether you're an advisor or if you're hiring and because it's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company and you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines but this is one of them.

27:01There's that word impact again. Impact impact. The point you just made about how one conversation can have a ton of impact is a reminder of why sometimes the price of an advisor feels absurd or like for one hour it's like thousands of dollars, but it's because obviously they spend a decade learning a thing and one conversation is all that work. They put into it, crystallized for you in the moment. Exactly, and it's something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like, okay, here's the needle and the haystack, and then it's implemented and you can see hundreds of percentages, sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right.

27:38It's exhilarating, it's great. I have something I used to say, which is, you want your impact to be so big, there's a slide in the next board deck on like, try to explain what happened. And that can happen when you're advising companies because you're able to share very quickly insights. But one way to drive alignment is not everybody can do this, not all advisors do it this way, but I personally love just when I do these, which is not that frequent, just purely doing equity. and because I love the alignment in outcomes, where the founder will be successful and you will be successful. So the incentives are really good to drive the right performance and the right outcomes that you want as a founder.

28:22So if you can do it, I would definitely advise founders to bring advisors in for equity, if you can. And I think the same applies for your internal growth team. You want to make sure that the teams are incentive advised is not on activities on doing stuff, because there's a lot of stuff to be done in growth, but really driving the outcomes that you want. And that could be just a great way of saying, we're in this together, we're on the same side of the table, let's grow this company. I was actually about to ask you what kind of structure you recommend for an advisor ship, is there anything else you can share about just like what you'd recommend a founder do in terms of compensation for an advisor?

28:57There's a couple things. I'm a big fan of equity because of the alignment of incentives. You should think about without getting into too much detail of the actual structure of the deals, but think about how you vest the equity. The last thing you want is an advisor holding back on sharing knowledge. The ideal engagement would be an advisor comes in, delivers as much value as possible quickly, and then trains your team, and then maybe it's a one -year engagement, and hopefully they've learned because the advisor has been incentivized to share as much as possible and to train the team as much as possible.

29:31And then ideally you don't need them anymore after. So there's something there about structuring equity investing, big fan investing earlier rather than later. So think about it in terms of structure, your investing, commensurate with the value you want, which is very much front loaded. I'm also a big fan of three month cliffs. Something I've done, I always do actually, is listening to the first three months, you'll know both sides of its working or not, and you wanna de -risk that on both sides. Because it really should be seen as a partnership between the advisor and the founder. And if the founder thinks you're not adding value in the first few months, I think they should just tear it up and both sides move on.

30:11It's not good for the founder to continue the deal and it's not good for the advisor because they're not, for some reason, able to add value in that environment. So I love a three month cliff at the beginning where if it's not working in the first three months, you tear up the deal and both parties walk away and de -risk the entire thing. And again, drives incentives in the right way where the advisor is a hundred percent incentivized at as much value as fast as possible. So that's another thing that I tend to do and I've done it for a long time. That's a really good tip. Basically, don't do for your investing for advisors, probably not even to your, but yeah.

30:45There's a bunch of ways to do it. Honestly, it's hard enough to find growth advisors that have capacity. So you got to also say, like, what can you do that the the advisor is comfortable with. But yeah, I mean, just to be candid, I think you want this structure in a way where you're not dependent on the advisor over time. They're adding a ton of value, they're helping teach the team, they're probably bouncing around because your company's changing, your team's changing, your leaders are changing. But over time, and that can be years, but it shouldn't be indefinite. You shouldn't need an advisor forever.

31:17I've seen a scenario where there's desire to keep the advisor on almost as insurance. Like if something goes wrong, I just wanted to be able to pick up the phone. That can make sense, but I do think a good growth advisor is incentivized to share as much as possible, as fast as possible, to have the impact, to train your team. And then whether you want to keep them on or not long -term as an insurance policy or just to answer questions as things change, that should be a choice and not because if we lose the advisor, we're, you know, with people who screw it, that would be a bad place for you to be as a founder.

31:48You said it's hard to find a good advisor. 100 % agree, any advice for people to help them find an advisor that might be the right fit? Yeah, I would say there's more of them these days than there were even just five years ago, or 10 years ago. I would start with, depending on your situation, if you're a founder, I would start with your investors. I think VCs have an amazing network of advisors. I get, I don't know, a couple requests a week that I'm not taking right now, but that from my experience, and what I've seen that's probably, especially the high -end VCs, the very talented VCs will have this network.

32:24And frankly, it's a great partnership as an advisor for you to have, you can help the companies, you can help the VCs, and it helps you. So everybody wins. Just asking other founders of it had a good experience, much like hiring. The third advice I would give is to find companies that are world -class at what you're trying to grow, what channel or skill you're looking at, and then reach out and see if there's a way to to help that way. That's actually how I got started. I was a trip advisor and a prominent VC reached out. One of the companies they were working with needed some help on SEO. I was still in Canada at the time, got connected with them, had a phone call, had a significant impact through that one phone call.

33:05And rather than joining as an advisor, I essentially helped them out pro -boto in exchange for, hey, I want to get connected in the valley. So I was in Canada, I want to start another company, I want to get connected. So through that tactic where they reached out to a company that was known to be world -class at SCO, I think that was really smart on this VC's part. And then maybe some advice up and coming growth advisors would be that first one I didn't take a single shred of equity or money and just tried to have as much impact as possible and to help out this company as much as possible and then make sure that I was able to get connected to other people that I wanted to meet in the Bay Area and then kind of things snowballed from there.

33:45I definitely wanna chat about how to become a growth advisor because I think people listening here might be like, oh, that sounds pretty good. It's some day, maybe I'll become a growth advisor. But before we get to that, what are things that an advisor are best suited for versus finding someone full time versus no one? Like what are the ideal kind of problem sets for an advisor versus a full -time higher person? I would say your ideal set up is always your preference should always be to have somebody in house I'll start there because you want to have that as part of the culture There's so much more that they can do when they're in house that being said if you can't find somebody in house Then bring on advisor even if you bring on an advisor some advice to founders would be you want to surround your team or at the one person that you've identified who's just an amazing world class doer even if they don't know growth with a set of growth advisors so that they're learning that's being put through the culture of the company and that that knowledge is stays inside of the company.

34:44So I'd say you generally prefer to go internal surround these people with great advisors and then annotate it from there that would be how I approach it. Okay so two thoughts here. One is I feel like this podcast is becoming an interesting way to discover awesome growth advisors. And I think over time I'm building this directory of like who are awesome smart growth people that are open to advising. So that could be an interesting opportunity to just look at the folks on this podcast and there's some great people that have been out here definitely. It's only working my way through all the amazing least smart growth people and product leaders.

35:18The other is I've noticed that a lot of the best growth advisors have worked with the same sorts of companies. I find that a hero comes up a lot, canva comes up a lot, Pinterest, like all these people that have worked with say Pinterest, that I hear better, just awesome. Casey comes to mine, Melissa Tan, who's coming out with the podcast. I think she worked with them, Dropbox. Anyway, so maybe one idea, see who these companies work with as advisors, and that can maybe point you to people that are worth exploring. I mean, that's a good idea. The, it kind of goes back to something I mentioned earlier, which is companies that have a lot of traffic and that have a lot of users are great learning around for growth people and for advisors because no matter how smart you are you need you need the reps you gotta go to the growth gym and put in the reps which is experiments you've gotta try things things are gonna work things aren't gonna work and there's a discipline of like when something doesn't work you can learn almost as much as when something works so but you need that traffic you need that environment that's why certain companies have these great people coming out like Casey at Pinterest and other people that are in the world.

36:21have been at these companies that have the traffic, have the culture to support it, to support growth. And I think that's, I don't think it's a coincidence why some of these companies have some great people coming from them. The other tip I just thought about is you're talking is everyone's launching a sub -stack newsletter that is doing any sort of advising because there's a lot of power in building an audience creating kind of awareness of what you do. So one of another tip is search sub -stacks direct -driven newsletters for specific big things you're dealing with, like saying go to market or PLG or sales and you might find someone there.

36:52I haven't done that but that seems like a reasonable way to do it. We're all heading. I'm not saying that the people on Substek have this but as advice to the people listening is when you're vetting for a growth advisor or growth talent, don't just wait it on the public halo of somebody. That's a common mistake I've seen where maybe somebody's done presentations at a conference or somebody's done. I don't know, but their Twitter following is broad. They can be excellent. That's not a disqualifier immediately, but just make sure not to make the higher just exclusively on that. I've made that mistake a few times and it's a common one to get into.

37:29So make sure you're vetting properly even if somebody with a large following that's upstack or Twitter. That's, I think, an important thing to keep in mind. 1000 % agree. Oh, we say that the best product leader is the best growth people don't have time to sit on Twitter and to eat and write newsletters, they're doing the job, working, building, growing, and maybe eventually they get out of that and start writing, but I a thousand percent agree. There's a lot of people. What can you do? Not to disqualify all the people on Twitter. Some of them are tweeting about, but my point is just, just be, don't overpivot on the halo.

38:02Just do your, look at their past performance, what teams have they been on, what environments they have, do they really know growth. And sometimes they do, but I think it's a common mistake to, Yeah. Oh, yeah, they have a large following. Let's hire this person. 1000 % free. Yeah. Rarely does a celebrity kind of hire that seems really genius on Twitter and sub -stack end up being as amazing as you think. That does happen, but yeah. It does happen. Absolutely. One last question around this topic. People listening might want to become growth advisors. I mentioned this earlier. Is there any other advice you want to share just like if you want to become a growth advisor someday, here's what you should think about?

38:38But yeah, I think the right mental model as a growth advisor is the same one as an investor. So the most important thing an advisor can do, aside from having impacts and knowing their craft, is picking which companies to work with, especially if you're working for equity. So I'll only speak to that, but you're basically putting in your time, you're picking a likely a smaller number you only have so many hours in the day of companies to work with. and you want to make sure there's a likely exit in the future. So for me personally, I have a spreadsheet, like most big decisions that I make in my life.

39:13And over the years, I've just added criteria and questions to ask myself about the company and then reflect on, okay, is this kind of checking all the boxes for a likely outcome because you don't just need to be successful. You need to be successful and for the company to be successful and for there to be liquidity of them. So you need to put yourself in the shoes of an investor and look at it as an investment. That is the arguably the most important thing because you can go and do a great job and then wait many years and potentially not see any reward for it. And I think that's the nice thing about the equity structure and that you're tied in the same incentives with the founder, which is just great in terms of a relationship.

39:54Have the same incentives, but you wanna make sure that there's a good likelihood of a decent outcome down the road. other if I can throw another one in the other piece of advice I would give is it can take a long time for some of these companies to be successful that's okay you should expect that in fact you should just go in with that mindset when I'm deciding to work with a company I'm in there for 10 years and I know that and I say that as I'm in I'm in we're running this together if I choose to work with the company but it does mean that the structure of the deal needs to reflect that so you need to have a long tail at the end so if you're taking options or RRCs use and it's pure the equity.

40:31Make sure you have the time for that to happen. There would be nothing worse than putting in your heart and soul, having impact and then waiting a couple of years and then your equity expires. So you make sure there's a long tail. I mean, it can take, it can literally take over 10 years for these companies. And you should be okay with that. I think that's okay. You're taking some risk. They're taking some risk on you. And that's a great partnership, but you just need the time for that. So advice to growth advisors. Make sure that it's asked for a long tail so that you don't end up in a bad spot in the end, and that incentive again are perfectly aligned between the founder and the advisor.

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41:42Epo does all that and more delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discovered. Epo lets you go beyond basic clicker metrics and instead use your north star metrics like make activation, retention, subscription, and payments. Epo supports tests on the front end, on the back end, email marketing, even machine learning clients. Check out Epo at getepio .com that's getepo .com and 10X your experiment velocity. So I wanna segue to a different topic, SEO. You're kind of the, you tell me, but it feels like you're one of the earliest SEO people in tech, you helped grow trip advisor many years ago and it was mostly SEO driven.

42:27I think it innovated a lot of SEO tactics and strategies. And then you'll Pinterest, ThumbTack, other companies that are very SEO driven. You talked about how many companies grow through one channel and these are all very SEO driven companies. Imagine Shopify has a lot of SEO work that's happening right now with you there. And so I want to chat about SEO. So I guess broadly SEO is like this amazing growth channel. It's like basically free. It continues to work after you stop doing any work on it. you know, for a while, many founders think about, should we invest in SEO? How do we approach SEO?

42:58So maybe just as a first question, what are signs that your product and company is a good fit for SEO being potentially a huge channel for growth? Yeah, I've been doing SEO for a really long time. It's a lot of fun. And certainly being a supervisor was a great learning ground for that that we were able to really innovate and try new things there in terms of the playbook that we built out. I was a lot of fun those years. Couple thoughts. The first one would be, I do think there's an SEO play in any company, maybe to different extents, but Google is such a large funnel of existing demand for your product or your product area that there's usually an angle to get some SEO traffic there.

43:40So I do think it applies to most companies. I would say if you're an early product, that's never seen, but the world's never seen. It's a brand new thing. There might be some creation, some demand creation you need to do, but most of the time there's existing demand in Google. We can harvest demand or there's queries that are related to your topic that you can start ranking for to start building brand awareness. So there's always some angle and then I can divide websites or online products into two categories. There's the ones which are smaller sites, small number of pages, very targeted at your product and don't have this kind of loop of creating new pages on the website.

44:19automatically. This would be most, mostly, commerce sites actually. You would have a number of pages around the products, about us, those types of pages. That's one type of site. Let's say they have dozen pages. And then there's other ones with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages, which are either user generated content, or like TripAdvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces, like thumbtack and other types of websites like that. Those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact very quickly, because there's such a large optimization surface and ideally it's growing and generating traffic automatically.

44:53Voice thought of LinkedIn as just a great example of this, where you have this viral loop, where you would recall when it was just starting, everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn. And those come and go, you get an invite, you're registered, you don't, that happens. But the byproduct is when people join, they create this beautiful lightning page, which is your profile, that gets indexed. It's kind of like a viral loop feeding an STO loop that continues to grow. So that's a good example of use generated content, which kind of feeds on itself and grows. So those two categories, going back to the first category, if you only have a small handful of pages, the way to think about that is you certainly want to optimize those pages.

45:34Then you want to start creating content that speaks to your audience beyond that. So you need a content strategy, whether it's a blog or creating new parts of your site that address questions that your audience might have. but generally speaking, I think there's an SEO play in any company and there's just different tactics, strategies, and approaches to get there. Awesome. I never thought of it that way that there's kind of these two buckets. So the first bucket is like, you don't have a ton of pages that naturally are generated as a part of your experience. And the second is you do. And I guess in the second bucket, I think of Reddit and Glassdoor and Corea, TripAdvisor, great example of interest in the first bucket is the way to generate pages.

46:14Basically, it's like editorially like create like write content and have people write things for use that that generally it's different ways of doing it, but a good content strategy is a kind of tried and true approach. Definitely. And in that bucket, if you don't naturally have a ton of pages, can you primarily grow through SEO or is SEO is always going to be this minority channel and you have to find something out? No, you can it can be a big channel. And this is also about creating content, but but it's not your users creating the content, you have to go create the content and have some high quality answer to a question that's being asked on Google.

46:49And I think one thing to keep in mind with SEO is entire industries are based off of single keywords. I remember when I was in the travel industry that literally companies were bought and sold based on one keyword rank. So it's not like, oh, it's a little bit of traffic. And I think this is a bit unintuitive with growth. A lot of people think of growth as living a year or it's another channel or it's another thing. I mean, girls done a right is exponential. It literally is company changing. When he's talking specifically about SEO, keep in mind, the world is searching for that thing on that one, target is on that one, that one keyword, and likely you're clicking the number one search results.

47:24So getting that number one spot is not like, oh, that's a little bit of traffic, that you can literally build an entire business around that first spot. So don't think that's, well, maybe it is commonly known, I'm not sure, but it's definitely something that is non -obvious or intuitive, I think to most people. And if you have an entire COT working on one keyword, I don't think that's crazy. Because one, you know, small number of keywords can define an entire industry or a business. Is there an example of that sort of situation when keyword building a massive company? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot, I'm sure.

47:56I can speak to my own company that I sold to TripAdvisor. It was called TravelPod. It was a travel blogging website where you can think wordpress but for travel, which I started early, it was the first site to do that. And I made the mistake of not knowing a CEO or growth before I sold the company. And so that was a great learning for me when I went in. This is a story where we were looking to acquire another site. And I thought the product was pretty poor. And I remember talking to the founder and thinking, he'd asked me if we'd want to acquire it. And the product's terrible. And why would I want to acquire that?

48:29Because I have the 10 times bigger than you. So that was when I realized, okay, we've been building a great product and great engineering culture and it is important, but you really need to know this girl's stuff. That's actually the moment I shifted to. All right, we have to really know these girls' levers. And in that space, the number one keyword was trowel block. And so owning that was a big deal. And we did not own it. And I think we're ranked number two for a really long time. I think I'm not sure if we got it in the end. but that's just one example where, and there was many, many travel businesses where I always love looking at a business and trying to figure out what's their growth look.

49:08Like how did they do that? It's not like, oh it's a great business, it just grew. Most of the time it's, you know, price line, crush it at SCM. Facebook, crush it on a viral loop where you got tagged in a photo, you got an email and you had to go register because there's a photo of you somewhere you really want to see. It sure flies a great job at SCO and it's often it's just one really strong channel that propelled the company forward and in this case it can literally come down to one keyword like like we had a travel pod. So maybe a good time just to give a people a mental model of the different channels slash loops that exist.

49:40So you've talked about SEOs, one paid searches, one what are the what's like the collection for people to think about? And like usually as you said one of these is the primary source of growth for a company. Yeah there's a variety of them. I think you have to look at where the intent is right now, and it does change over time. You have social channels, like TikTok, Instagram, influencers are a great area to engage with there. You have SEO, you have search. I think ChatGPT is another upcoming one that we might want to talk about a little bit, where I do think we've never seen that kind of growth for Search before, and that's a platform that we have to start thinking about.

50:19How do we optimize for it? And Google just announced their recent changes. They're going to be putting in an AI box at the top of the search results. So how do you optimize in a world where it's not so much about optimizing for the platform, but teaching the AI what you do and why you're the best in the world at it? So that's another whole other area we could talk about. But that's a big channel. I think that's growing. Viral loops are always a powerful thing if you can get them to work. That's more about psychology and channel optimization, where you want people to be incentivized to share the product that you have with their friends and then to have their friends come back and register.

50:55So you can have one viral loop, you can have secondary viral loops, you can bolt viral loops on their existing products. There's different ways of doing this. And then just backing up, when I think about growth, I don't think about a specific, it's not growth equals SEO and Instagram. For me growth equals whatever it takes to move the needle. So I get this question all the time. How do you build a growth team? What does a growth team do? And I say, whatever it takes. And that could be zero to one building a new product. It could be M &A. It could be SEO. It could be social, it could be onboarding.

51:27And I think that's a better framework to look at. And then if you look at it through that lens, then partnerships easily folds into that. Where I've seen a lot of businesses get very big on just really clever partnerships. Either strategic or broad kind of affiliate -based partnerships. So there's a lot of channels. I definitely wouldn't restrict the scope of a growth team to just a small subset, but have a very wide funnel in terms of, or at least strategy in terms of just test a lot of different things and go after the channels that work and pivot when it does. And then really lean into the one or two or three that really work because sometimes that's all it takes for business.

52:02Well, you definitely nerds, sniped me with the chat GPTTs. So it's just spent some time there. I think this relates to just the general sense that SEO is always changing and it feels like this is NSEM, I guess in this case too, and JetGBT and Bart I guess is maybe the latest change. So what should we know there? Yeah, I think we're all still trying to figure it out. I was at Gulio last week or the week before and as soon as I saw the search result with the big box of AI answers at the top, having done this for so long, I immediately knew the impact that I think is about to come. And I've seen this play out in travel where Google acquired ITA and did flight search and hotel search.

52:41Generally, it's great for users and great for Google and the search engines, but makes it a little bit difficult for the publishers and the sites that are adding value to the ecosystem through being ranked in search results. So what we're about to see is basically Google, what they showed was a big box on top of the search results that answers the query directly. So if you think about that, that means that there's a lot of queries right now that are that users are clicking through down on the organic links and getting their answer there, which will be answered directly in the search result. We've seen this play out over the last 10 or five to 10 years where more and more answers are being shown at the top.

53:20Every time something changes, entire industries are disrupted or changed. And I think that's gonna happen again. So there's different types of keywords. There's transactional ones like e -commerce keywords and with purchase intent, there's navigational ones where you're trying to get somewhere. And there's informational keywords, which is, I have a question I'm looking for an answer. It's pretty broad. It's a big area. I think that last category of keywords is particularly a risk. So if anybody listening to this is currently getting traffic on those, you should start thinking about what does that mean when things start changing.

53:53And I think the changes will be, will probably start seeing things shift to paid. You have to pay for that free traffic. And the second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don't, don't get many clicks anymore. You might drop down to a very small number of clicks if at all because answers will get questions will get answered directly in the search results So it's a big shift We have to see how things land, but that's I think over the next 12 to 24 months of history repeats itself We'll we'll see that channel change and we've seen this play out at all the different channels They kind of evolve generally the the you can't blame the companies are doing what they have to do chat to you Pt is now 50 % of my daily searches and not Google so I think Google has to react and this is what we'll see So from a growth perspective, definitely something to start think about.

54:37Super fascinating. I think about my newsletter and now Google, suck it all up and just tell you all the answers. Great. Good news for me. Just give me public. Yeah. Now, yes. I, yeah, and change is great, you know. Things don't exciting. It's exciting. We haven't had a big, like just geeking out on growth a little bit. We haven't had a big platform change in a long time. So I'm like, all right, cool. We get to, let's go see what we can do here. How do you optimize this? How do you get listed if you can? We're not sure where the placements will be, but that will be the new game. Yeah. There's actually a Lennybot .com that is a GPT bot trained on my content that there's a newsletter post about how it was all built, so you could build your own.

55:21And so I think my new goal is going to have to be to convince people to go to Lennybot .com instead of Google. Wish me luck. Okay. That's just, you got to lean into it. Yeah, we have a shop .ai, this great AI -based shopping in general. I'll tell you, I bought so much on it. It's so good. The more you use these technologies, the more you realize how good they are and that's something biggest coming. It's not just, oh yeah, there's another change. I was summarizing the Google changes to some people and originally it was thinking, this is the biggest change in the last 10 years. And then when I reflected on the last 10 years of that, this is actually the biggest change since the inception of Google actually.

55:59I don't think we've seen something as profound as what's coming and you really need to get ready for it. Damn. Yeah. I've been using ChatGPT for helping me with interview questions actually and once in a while there's like a really good one. That's cool. So thank you, ChatGPT, bringing me good things also. Maybe one more question along these lines around kind of connecting and visorship and SEO. Would you suggest when you're starting to think about SEO, starting to invest in SEO, you might be listening to this feeling like, I got to think about SEO. Does it make sense to bring on, say, SEO advisor like you and you're not available currently, but other folks like you or our an agency that is really good at this stuff or bring on so and full time.

56:39Do you have any kind of frameworks for thinking about which direction to go? It's hard for an agency or a pure advisor without internal help to do it a really good job without internal talent at the center. So I would say I would start with just hire somebody internally and give them a mandate to incentivize them correctly to go and own this channel. If even if they don't know SEO, my advice would be hire, get an engineer, get somebody who is just a relentless doer who wants to learn this and surround them with great advisors that I've just seen that work really well. There are some good agencies out there.

57:14Agencies will be working with multiple companies, so it's a little bit harder to get the same impact from an agency. It can work sometimes, but my preference is generally, Alas Resort would be an agency, and I much rather have somebody who's internal, who knows the business, who knows the keywords, who can have the knowledge internally inside the company permanently and help grow a team around them and have succession in place in a proper team so that you're not too depended on this one person, but that would be my go -to. And then if you're really stuck, you can use agencies, but my default would be having somebody internal supplemented with agencies if you have to.

57:52SEO is very specific. I mean, it's a very tight channel that knowing certain things about it can have a big impact. And I think you do want people that have that experience that can bring that in from the outside to augment the internal team. So it's a really long time to learn it. Awesome. I was going to ask that. So you ideally want to find someone that's done it before that isn't just a relentless learner. But like, is that plus has done SEO in the past? Oh, yeah. I ideally you hire an amazing SEO person, you can read internal. Second would be somebody amazing who can get things done surround them with advisors.

58:28And then in my stack rank, it would probably be third would be agencies. Awesome. And then the other kind of common issue with SEOs, it takes a long time to show impact. Do you have just a rule of thumb of just like give them this much time to see if they can make an impact? I'd say a few things. I'd say if you already have content and pages that are pretty good and getting a decent amount of traffic, It doesn't necessarily have to take a long time. So that would be my first reaction. It can take a long time, generally takes a long time when it's to build new content. So the way to think about Google is, it is going to take your content.

59:01It's going to show it to its users, people that are searching. And it's going to determine which piece of content is the best ranked highly. It's not just about little tricks and links and keyword ratios. Those days are over. Those do matter, but it's not purely about that. And if you have a new piece of content, It takes time for Google to build enough trust to say, OK, I'm going to start showing us the users now, and then start collecting user feedback, and then rank it appropriately. That can take some time. But if you have existing pages that are ranking eight, and they're already on the first page, it doesn't always happen.

59:35But I've certainly seen it. In fact, more common than not, that you can have sometimes hundreds of percentages of lift very quickly. And it depends what you're starting with. is probably the right way to think about it. So if I'm trying to summarize it, I would say 12 months is probably like max. If you can't see impact in 12 months, it's something wrong. If you have existing content, it could happen pretty early, could happen on day one. Actually, I've seen that happen. It could happen. If you have to build new parts of the site, it can take months. I've seen that happen in companies I've worked with where I think it would be like a quarter.

1:00:11We had to wait till we saw a big lift. So it's somewhere between three to 12 months. Yeah. Awesome. That's really helpful. Okay. So final topic, slash final question. You've had a truly incredible career. You've worked with incredible companies, incredible leaders. I'm looking at your site here in a side window and you're like, here's a picture of you in Zuck. Here's a picture of you in Toby from Shopify. And there's more. And I'm curious what you believe has been key to your success and your career success. that you suggest listeners who want to have some measure of similar success. It's probably a bunch of things we can talk about here.

1:00:53This is the obvious thing is like, I think you've just got to love what you do, you've got to work hard, you have to have impact. Certainly at the end of the day in growth, that's all that will matter. If I think back to specific things that I do though, that I have to pick one thing that's been very important for me throughout my journey, is the art of self -reflection. And, and coat coaches, I've had coaches my whole career, but the macro theme is constantly iterating, experimenting, and becoming the best you can be. In your career, also as a dad and as a husband, but, and, or for your own personal health, but that reflection is so important.

1:01:33And I've leveraged many, many different coaches over the years, and now do a lot of self -reflection through a morning routine that I have, and that I've been doing it for quite some time, that has been a big unlock for me. And the biggest, most important part of that morning routine is like dedicating an hour aside to really think about what's going well, what's not going well, what am I screwing up? Well, why am I screwing it up? Which is often more important than what am I screwing up? And of course, what am I gonna do about it? But as long as you're learning and they're reading every day, then you're just making constant progress towards your goals and it's something I do that I love doing.

1:02:08I love thinking. I literally can just sit there and think for hours actually. And I have a dashboard on all the areas that I'm focusing on with the red, yellow, green and just constantly revving on what am I working on improving, what am I doing, what experiments in my writing, and where am I doing well and where am I not doing well and how can I be better as in all areas of my life, including being a leader. So if I, there's a lot of different things to it, but I think that's really important and something that I've learned over the years that is probably the most valuable to have as a skill.

1:02:44Okay, I definitely wanna spend more time on this. So you said you sit for an hour, reflecting on what's going well, what's not going well, is there more you can share about how you accomplish that? How you find time to do this for an hour? Yeah, it sounds crazy when you say it, but I do. Yeah, so I wake up at five, I work out, so I do cardio, do some exercise. This is a great book called Spark, which is all around the neuroscience of exercise and really learned a lot from that in terms of having a great morning routine. That really boots you up. I kind of call it my bootloader. It's when I start in the day.

1:03:18If I go through my bootloader, I have a much better day. So exercise, stretching, meditation, and then do a cold plunge now. So do a bunch of different things. But then Then I do some reading, but I do carve aside one hour where I go through and this is probably important and it's kind of where I've landed, but structured self -reflections. That's why I have this dashboard. I have certain areas that I think about what's going well, what's not. I track all the experience I'm writing and I'm just really passionate about, you know, if you're going to do something and try to do it as best as you can.

1:03:52and this is a habit that has allowed me to sharpen my skills in certain areas. What are some of these things you're working on if you can share like what's on this dashboard? How can people imagine what this might be? So there's a lot of personal stuff on it, but it literally is broken down between being a better friend, better husband, better dad, and then better leader. And so I'm gonna be on the personal side. I've been known to work a lot of times of, you know, balance is always hard to find. And, you know, from being a dad and then thinking about it be better there, I realized, you know, let's six months ago that I've never actually asked for feedback on how I'm doing.

1:04:38So I asked my kids six months ago, asked both of them independently, what's one thing I can do to be a better, to do more I do less of to be a better dad. And they were caught off guard by it. My son's 15 and my other son is 12. And I said, get some time to think about it. And after about a month, my son came back and said, Dad, I got one. He said, I want to spend more time with you.

1:05:09So that was very helpful for me to hear. And I'm big on routines and habits to make sure that things that you want to do are repeatable and it's not one off things. So ever since that day, I've now have a daddy date if you want to call it. But every two weeks we do one -on -one time together with each of the boys, they get to pick what we do. There's a way that consists in whether it's dinner or play basketball in the front, but it's all about feedback. That's one example on the personal side. This reminds me of a tweet I just saw where someone said that the only people that are gonna remember that you worked late for many nights is your kids.

1:05:49Wow. Wow. That's deep. Yeah, I like that a lot. As soon to be parent, that's gonna stick with me. Wow, I like that a lot. So it's tough, right? It's tough to balance it all out. It's very difficult because you want to sell it everything you're doing life. And so that reflection helps be a check in as well of like how am I doing in all these areas and that I find the color coding is helpful for that too of just doing a bit of a gut check and and asking for for that feedback. So this makes me think about I was watching Jeff Bezos interview and I asked him what his morning routine was and he said that he just likes to put her around.

1:06:26Like to just sit around, talk to his kids, read the newspaper, like he doesn't book any meetings in the morning. He just finds he just needs like a little flex time at the beginning. Totally. So I read before I became a dad I Read somewhere that the one of the most impactful things you can do as a father is just be there for dinner Everything so I have been there for 15 years every single night What is a good reminder is it's not enough? You know having dinner is important with your family But in in our case there's there's more you can do and Just getting that feedback and doing some some reprioritization is always important Speaking of dinners and maybe just as a last question and I do this really interesting thing where you have dinners with interesting people.

1:07:05You just kind of invite them to your house. I don't know if interesting is the right way to describe it, but just kind of interesting people, prominent people. Can you just talk about what what that is and what you think about and what I can the benefits of doing something like that? I think interesting is the right way to think about it. I started this when I was in Ottawa with a bunch of founders there and It's become one of my favorite things to do. Honestly, it's like the bright spot in my month that I called them guilds So the word be guild is the builders and that's how it originally started.

1:07:38So guild night is what I call it. And the idea is basically, you know, all interesting people doing interesting things actually want to spend time with each other. That's why I'm actually surprised more people don't do this, but I'll basically have interesting people come usually five or six and we'll sit around talking about specific topics. So I do one for consumer product. I do one for SEO. I do one for growth. Growth leaders. and just have really smart, interesting people come and we'll talk about different topics that are relevant. Sometimes we'll pick a topic, so we'll have a group and then we'll say, hey, we want to talk about AI.

1:08:16So one of the advantages of being in the area is you can find three or four people that likely wrote some of the core code in Google or an AI and then they'll join and people want to meet, people want to get together and have these conversations. So it's very exhilarating. I learn a ton. It's a lot of fun. and I don't know why more people don't do it. And it's a bit of work to organize, but it's also just tactically been a great way to meet fascinating people. It's helped a lot for recruiting for, if you need a back channel, and I know all these people that are in different industries, but business aside, they're very valuable, business wise, but they're just a lot of fun, and they become some of my favorite things that I do, and I'm really surprised why more people don't do it, because I think especially now that everybody's remote, And we're working from home, where most people are.

1:09:04It's more valued than ever. So it's something I'm looking for to continuing and always actually through my morning reflection thinking about what are new ones I can spin up, who are interesting people that we wanna break bread with. And I do think it's important that it's done at your house. If anybody's thinking of starting this, you can do it at a restaurant, but there's something about being in your home or being in somebody's home, five or six people, having a great conversation about a topic that's mutually interesting. and I think everybody values it. And it adds a lot of spice to life. I think it's really important.

1:09:36Any other tactical tips for making when these happen? So due to your home, you cater, do you have many people, how long, anything else you wanna share there? Yeah, so I think the most I've done is 10, that's a bit too much. Six seems to be perfect, six to eight at the max. I do get a catered, so you don't have to worry about cooking the topic, something like a topic that it's common so that everybody can rally around. I do think it's important, like I mentioned, doing it at home. Usually we start around six, go till nine or 10. And it's just been a really good thing that I've learned over time is a really good thing to do to just make for a better life, frankly, make a richer life with some great friends.

1:10:21And we say, Kater, it's just like ordering in basically rates and I think you can store dashes. So you don't have to worry about cooking. And I'm sure there's other things I've never really deeply thought about it But in terms of like what are the specific things I've evolved it over over time But I don't cook anyways, so it would be terrible if I cooked so this is much easier to do it this way And as long as you're inviting kind of interesting people everybody's gonna want to come and spend some time and break some bread Well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you.

1:10:50Are you ready? I think so I think you are Well, question one. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? So there's one that I've already mentioned, which is Spark. It's the neuroscience of exercise. And that was this a great book. And so one of these like, exercise to stay fit. They live longer. This is really about frankly, if you exercise and do it in a specific way, they have a kind of blueprint they lay out. It's good for just cognition and kind of horsepower and performance. So that's been a really important one. It has been a big part of building on my morning routine.

1:11:28The second one is when I picked up, but I think about a year or six months and I recommended it to you that I don't know, at least two hundred, a couple hundred people now because I recommended to my team. It's called Smart Brethren. You heard of this one? No, but I love the sound of it. I've always been big on writing crisply and being very tight and not having like three page memos that you're sending off, especially now that we're remote and we're all doing slack and email and different ways of messaging. How tightly you communicate, how crisp your communication is really important for frankly you getting your point across and also for the other person who's probably digesting 100 of these messages.

1:12:10So this book is, it's a book on how to do that. It breaks down how to write crisply and the different parts of it. And I've definitely seen improvements in the team since I've passed around. So that's a great book if, frankly, for anybody, work or personal because we're writing so much and communication is so key. So that's the second one. The third one is a golden oldie. It's one that I've read many, many times and I recommend from a growth perspective. of this one, I, you've likely heard of as influenced by Calvin Uney. I've got it back. My bookshelf there. Yeah, it's a great, great book. And it's because it's really the underpinning of so many different product and growth principles that you can apply.

1:12:49So that's just a classic that is good to reread at least once a year. So that's those two books. I'm going to extend this a little bit. I'm going to add two books that are building on your two books or the first two books. I guess one is Peter T. I just wrote a book called Outlive. I've got a read. That is, okay, and it's exactly the same kind of premise of just how important it exercises. And there's a whole, I think there's a quote in there, just like the only thing proven to help you live longer as exercise. And then, smart brevity, there's another book that I'd recommend if people want more on this topic called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.

1:13:20And it's by the guy that wrote the War of Art and Zachary Vance. And I forget his name off the top of my head, but it's like nobody wants to read your shit. Here's what you need to do for people to want to read anything you're writing. Yeah, we want to scan it. We want to read. Yeah, that's very anal. I'll pick that one up. Nobody wants to read the shit. Exactly. What a title. That's a great title. All right, back on track. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed? You know, I don't watch TV much and I haven't really watched any movies in a while, but I do watch a lot of podcasts on YouTube.

1:13:55And Andrew Huberman's got, of course, a great series. I watch, I think everyone who puts out, so I don't know if that counts, but that's absolutely. Okay, so I watched that. And then, of course, all of the podcasts is always fun, so I make sure to watch those when they come out as well. A lot of fun and informative. So those are my two, I would say. Great picks. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask? Teach me something about growth that I don't already know. Because, and you could apply this to engineering product, any other area, because it really gives you a sense of what this person thinks is the top of the stack in terms of the smartest thing they know, whether you know it or not is irrelevant.

1:14:35But sometimes you actually do end up learning some stuff, but it's my favorite question because you can really engage in a conversation around, okay, this is the thing you think is so unique that maybe you've come up with this learning yourself or if you've created this tactic and then you do a sense of how much they know the ground. So that's my favorite question. What is the favorite product that you've recently discovered that you just really love? I've got a cold plunge that I bought that I love. It's the, so he's called the renew cold plunge. It's cold, but super convenient and I do that every morning and I just love it.

1:15:11And you advice for cold plungeing that sounds very painful and hard? I usually start going to hot tub warm up then I go in the cold plunge and back in the hot tub. That's an easy way to get started. But I will say I jumped in yesterday and today without going out of it, it was very painful, but I felt so much better after. So I might be changing up my approach, but I'm just kind of experimenting with different things, but that would be some advice and then just go slow. Start it, you know, not too cold, and then slowly make it cold over time. But it's a pretty good, I think it's a pretty good thing, that and so far.

1:15:44How long do you spend in the cold plunge? Bari's right now, I'm doing five minutes. It's five minutes at, I think it's 53 degrees. So it's just, I started at 68, it's slowly bringing it down. So, but you do have to go slow because I brought it down even further and kind of caught me off guard and kind of a little dizzy, so you've got to find your sweet spot. Damn, very huberman inspired. I imagine this, definitely it was part of the, the source there. I know people would hear a lot about cold punches. I guess what have you seen as a benefit just while we're in this topic for people to like seriously consider doing this.

1:16:18So a couple things. Moved afterwards is so much better. You get this just great multi hour boost from doing it, especially like I mentioned not doing warm before or waiting 10 minutes and waiting 10 minutes after before you warm up after you get out. Great mood boost. It also helps a lot of sleep. So if you do it at night, which is a little bit difficult, it helps a lot with sleep. Those are probably the two biggest things and you do get to a point on there now where I kind of look forward to it because you know how good you'll feel afterwards. So when I'm thinking about it, I know it's painful.

1:16:50It doesn't make it easier, but I do look forward to it now. It's a pretty cool thing. Oh man, I've got to get one now. Okay. Two more questions. What's something relatively minor that you've changed in your product development process that has had a big impact on your team's ability to execute? One change that comes to mind is, you know, it's common to hear discussion around, you need to experiment, you need to have rigor, you need to look at results, iterate based on those results. That's pretty much common knowledge is how all good companies that execute growth do it. See, the subtleties, experiments are great, but they're also, they can be slow.

1:17:36You have to look at the results you have to analyze how things went, you have to learn what's going on, you have to build the experiment. So there's a cost to an experiment, and not everything needs to be experimented. And that's not something that I generally hear friends teams talk about. It's usually, hey, we need to experiment. So one thing that we're definitely focused more on lately is this idea of, sometimes you just need to yolo it because it's a better product experience, or you just kind of know it's gonna work. And if you're yoloing 40 things, and free of the morgue, and you can look at prepose, you can look at holdouts, there's ways of making sure you're causing major damage, but the speed cannot weigh the cost and time it takes to do experiments.

1:18:18So that's one change we've recently implemented that's been pretty impactful. Final question. So we met actually a long time ago in Montreal, or maybe it was in Ottawa and Canada somewhere. And I think it was through an organization called C100 when I was starting my company back in the day. And so my question is what is your favorite Canadian food? You know, it's funny. My favorite Canadian foods are from Ottawa and There's a lot of Shorma Lebanese Shorma everywhere. I know it's not traditionally Canadian, but Canada is so multicultural So I'll make this count. I love a good Shorma and it's so hard to find a good Shorma in the barrier So we've we've still been looking here, but my favorite Canadian food or our pseudo -Canadian is Shorma.

1:19:01If I had to pick one purely Canadian food, and this is really some a draw where we first met, it's gotta be a Montreal smoke meets sandwich. Excellent choices, you're making me very hungry, I'm gonna go get some Shorma, buy me a cold plunge. Luke, this was amazing, we talked through everything, I was hoping to talk through advisorships, SEO, hiring, building habits, cold plunches, two final questions, we're gonna focus finding online if they wanna reach out and learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me online at looklovec .com. So first name, lastname .com, and how can they be useful to me?

1:19:38Listen, we're always looking to hire the best of the best. So if you want to work, get an amazing company with an amazing team doing very impactful work and learn the craft of growth, please reach out. We're always looking to bring on amazing talent. So that would be the woodwind. Awesome. Luke, thank you again so much for being here. Thanks. Greatest chat. Bye everyone.