20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

22:49Matt Swulinski:I think there's a place for it, maybe 5 % of your account. It's kind of just like a weird AI videos that just like are diverse. But I think that's the secret sauce is being able to create variety. In no way, shape or form is anything in creative to the point where you can replace real people. I also don't buy that the algos don't denigrate AI content versus human content. I agree. I just don't. Yeah, you're 100 % right. Okay, so we've got this 100K and we've got this UGC network. It's not really working. What does not really working look like? It's not doing the one-to-one. How long should I give it?

23:24Should we do this for three months straight? Should we do it for six months?

23:28Matt Swulinski:Yeah, I mean, you'll usually be able to say that, like, if you just get started, the campaigns have to warm up. There are, like, certain things you have to have already in place. So, like we said, you have your analytics, you have your conversion tracking. Let it just run. And, of course, you already have to have customers coming in the door. And ideally, that's why, like, PLG and product excellence is still the beginning step, right? Like have a product that people genuinely love and they want to tell their friends about. If that's already happening, then your conversion tracking is working on your website or your app or whatever.

23:58Matt Swulinski:And you get to 50 conversions. Then you can start paid because that's like the minimum line of whatever your conversion action is that the algorithm is going to say, OK, I have enough data to understand who your target best customer is. And then I'd say within two to three weeks, if you launch a campaign and go through a couple, like you'll do two or three iteration cycles of we launched some creative this worked this didn't why okay let's throw some diverse stuff let's do some variations you probably want to give it a full three months but you'll be able to say yes i can start printing money today in like two to three weeks or i have to go to the drawing board on all of these things because there are a lot of moving pieces right it's the ad creative the ad copy what is the landing experience what is your messaging on that landing experience is your page speed good are your screenshots in the app store actually sensible right like all of those things are micro levers that compound so like you also you need to be refining everything along the way as you spend otherwise also things will plateau said a couple of things there which i just need a bit of help on the landing experience what what do you mean there and what should i know as a founder yeah so i mean like a lot of people have really poor like ui ux or website designer branding like absolutely awful right and like i don't want to throw shade but have you seen post talk i go on this site and i'm like i have no idea what's going on this is like this is like beijing's version of ui the thing is is that's like a pattern disrupt thing for them and they know who their target audience is and the target audience appreciates the weirdness oh yeah james is amazing and it works and it's a brilliant company and like phenomenal but i just look at it go no yeah i mean like on the flip side it's just like okay like do you know what your traffic mix is is your site mobile optimized the sheer amount of sites i see that the main CTA is like a scroll and a half away, come on, like that's the first thing that you start with that like a basic audit will show you, right?

25:52Matt Swulinski:And that's what I mean by the landing experience. If I read nothing else but your headline, do I know what you do? Like it's hard sometimes to explain what this, you know, crazy AI SaaS niche product does. Focus on your messaging. Actually have something that tells the user if they didn't move their thumb, they didn't do anything, I want to try that out, right? Like go through that proxy. Same thing with the creative, same thing with the copy. That's a frame that you want to take throughout the entire kind of funnel. Page speed really matters. So page speed matters because it depends, obviously, who and where your target customers are, right?

26:22Matt Swulinski:So like US, UK, we have good data and it'll be fine. But where page speed really starts to matter is both AEO and SEO. It is one of the core elements in what gets your site to rank in, let's say, a top 10 position on Google. And then same thing if, for example, a bot caller goes to your website and it's a cheap call to say how long did your page come to load. And if you're on a low, essentially, ranking from like A to F, the average person in the world will probably not load your site immediately. So like any second improvement is a drastic jump in conversion. And just the numbers show that, right?

26:57Matt Swulinski:And even though it seems like, oh, yeah, like it loads in half a second versus 200 milliseconds, it does make a difference. Okay. So we have this 100K. We've done three months. I'm really enjoying this because, as I said, for me, it's nice to follow the chronology. You have 100K. It's going well, I think. How do I know whether to pour fuel on the fire, keep the budget as it is, and just keep testing but in a more measured fashion? Or, uh-uh, this is not fucking working. You want to chart your total spend to your acquisition and how elastic it is. There's always going to be a lag where, like, I spend today and then I convert to paid in 14 days.

27:33Matt Swulinski:let's say, right? And that's like, we're looking at two main things. Like revenue is the most important thing from an ARR standpoint because we're in SaaS. As I spend up, does that ARR also spike, right? And how elastic that relationship is will immediately tell you oil on the fire or let's pump the brakes because as we spend up, this is a very common thing that you'll hear, how incremental is your spend? It's a question you should ask relatively early because once things are working, it's really easy just to like dial it up to 13 on a scale of 10. And what ends up happening, if you're not very diligent, all that additive spend could have not been there and you would have gotten the same results.

28:08Matt Swulinski:And then you're just giving money to meta and Google, right? And there's that fine line. And that's why I'd say like true people that understand this and growth are on the rare side because like there's usually like I am a expert in meta or I'm an expert in some other channel. But being able to sit above the whole thing and say, OK, here's how the interrelationship of this much spend here, this many sponsorships, this many, you know, podcast features, this is how, you know, how much PR we're pushing. All of that interrelationship is how you essentially ensure the most elastic spend to revenue impact.

28:42Matt Swulinski:And that's like further down the 100k. But that's like the that's the end state. You're everywhere all at once at the right moments. Why did superhumans growth asymptote then? At the end of the day, it was very much a, you know, premium product, immediate paywall. And the core ICP is founders, right? And we also experienced this at Whisper, right? Like the early adopter tech founder is not an infinite audience. I think today it's an ever growing audience because everyone can be a founder, right? But if you look back even two, three years ago, the TAM of that is finite, right? And that was the first asymptote.

29:16Matt Swulinski:So essentially, you know, going after additional ICPs like sales and how do we turn superhuman to be more of a sales engine for people? Looking at the recent opens on the right, that's my favorite feature, right? I can and see who's creeping on my emails and send them a reply. So stuff like that, like adapting the product to more ICPs is where you get those additional step changes. But the asymptote is because it was hyper-focused on one ICP and if you don't proactively open up the layers of the onion, you're gonna hit some kind of level. But if you look at revenue scaling and you see Fixer scale faster than Superhuman in the top buying revenue number, do you not just go, we fucked up paid?

29:50Matt Swulinski:Well, so yes, right? Like Fixer followed the e-com playbook. UGC, tons of ads, strong on meta. The thing is, is slightly different value proposition in that - Different market. Different market, different consumer, right? This is someone that wants a simple tool that adds labels to their Gmail. Would you say Fixer should continue to just spend the hell out of this market then? Well, from what I know, their scale was both on the B2C side through meta, but also they made big revenue jumps through the Outlook consumer that was hyper frustrated and big enterprise deals, right? And that's also where Superhuman Mail did the same thing, where going after big logos and ensuring that you can essentially have sales-led growth alongside PLG, I think Fixer did that also super well.

30:36Matt Swulinski:They pushed hard on the sales side because that was also their background relationships they had from the email space. And that's why, same thing for Whisper. It was really interesting to see that we were B2C, PLG, but a very large component of our ARR was enterprise before we had a single AE. Because it was self-service, enterprise adoption, team licenses and that kind of stuff. So you also want your product to be like adoptable easily by enterprise. I think that's a nice unlock as well. We mentioned the three channels, Meta, Google, Lifecycle. What are your lessons on how to do YouTube well?

31:10We hear about YouTube being the acquisition engine and machine that it is. Any lessons that I should know as a young founder?

31:16Matt Swulinski:So, I mean, it's a totally different type of creative. So if you look at Meta and YouTube, they have similar but slightly different hook curves where the hook happens slightly later on Instagram and Facebook. You want that immediate validation while on YouTube, you're kind of there to spend the time, digest the video. So you have a little bit more of a longer attention span. And a lot of people actually are terrified of YouTube because the best performing YouTube ads are 16 by 9. So they're landscape. And most people are like, well, I have a UGC program. I just have story placements. What am I supposed to do?

31:48Matt Swulinski:So we did a really cool thing at Victor. We had Victor build an app for us that takes any story video and adds it into a static template that has like logos that use us, G2 rating, and then a CTA. And the video is the replaceable asset. And we turned all of our story ads into YouTube ads. Every single one ended up on YouTube. Not all of them worked the same. We had to edit them a little bit to fit the format. But that's usually people are like terrified to get started with YouTube because of that reason. but just like go into Figma, make a template that's a static asset, throw your video in that and just export that.

32:22Matt Swulinski:Welcome to YouTube, right? Like you can run ads that way. And there's also just like a different storytelling where you want it to feel like a organic YouTube video. So like someone talking about a hack or use case of like, yo, I just started using this and it absolutely changed my life. I'm going to show you how, right? Like you're not going to say that in a meta ad, right? It's a very different script and framing and filming. So we have a separate team that does the scripts, films, the YouTube videos. It's an entirely separate program from our UGC. We use some things from UGC in YouTube, but it deserves its own focus.

32:53We're going to go into the kind of team composition later. I want to stay on channels. We now have a working program. How do we determine how much fuel to pour on the fire?

33:04Matt Swulinski:Yeah, I mean, I think it's all dependent on that elasticity that we defined. So like at Whisper did what I think everyone should do is go as hard as you absolutely can and then see it blow up and then understand where and how it blew up, pull back and use that as information of now we know what is incremental. We know where our ceilings are. We know that we hit audience saturation or we need more creative. So we did that last year at Whisper, right? Like we like 5X the budget from one month to another and where do the pieces fall through, right? But the thing is, the reason why we did that instead of trying to figure it out over time is like you don't have six months to say, okay, we need to be growing 30%, 40 % month over month over month.

33:47Matt Swulinski:And the only way that we can do that is, okay, let's see where our ceiling is. Because maybe we would have been surprised that we would have been scaling infinitely, which didn't happen, right? But we then knew, okay, meta needs to be second to Google. Here's why. Here's how all these things worked together. These newsletters were shit. This podcast doesn't work. How do the pieces fit together? So, I mean, in my opinion, go hard to understand what doesn't work and where your mix needs to be adjusted, then bring things down and then scale back up with those learnings. And then you can get a repeatable ramp.

34:18If something doesn't work today, do you just turn it off or do you wait to give it time?

34:23Matt Swulinski:I would say it depends on how poor the metrics are. If there's no world that this is ever going to make sense, turn it off immediately. Let's say some leading indicators are saying, it's pretty crap, but let's give it a little time to see if there are other things that are impacting this because like i said there's there's a million dials like from the ad from the ad to the conversion there's a million things that you can tinker along the way and that's why you want to give it time right like this asset is going to the home page what if we had a hyper personalized landing page that says the exact same thing that is being said in the ad and even includes the creator's face on the page it's a random idea right does that move the needle and test some things to give it some time and then scratch it off.

35:03Matt Swulinski:What single channel worked best at Whisper and what did you learn from that? Definitely Google in terms of traditional SEO? Google Ads. Yeah, Google Ads. Google Ads is still the main driver just and it was surprising across literally everything. Non-branded search, Pmax, YouTube ads, everything prints there. The reason why it's like it's the middle of the funnel but you have essentially all top to bottom right in one platform and if you have like all the right conversion tracking, Google is a big marketplace with a lot of surfaces and just optimizing for app download because it's a freemium product.

35:39Matt Swulinski:We have a lot more fine-tuned control than we do in meta when it comes to like CAC and how much we want to spend in India versus in the US because a different price in those markets. We don't have as much fine-tuned control in meta because like I said, it's like they've removed all the manual settings. Creative is your targeting. Either works in a geo or it doesn't. You just iterate on creative. It's a completely different job than And you have a pretty structured beast to essentially understand how to scale there. So it was Google. And that's also because longer form video for a pretty difficult product to explain.

36:12Matt Swulinski:Like, OK, I talk. It turns to text. But where? And text boxes? Explain that to the average Joe that's walking on the street. It's going to be like, they're going to look at you weird. Like, yeah, voice notes. Like, what do you mean? I send them in WhatsApp, right? Like, there's that education that needs to happen. So like the 30 second to one minute videos in YouTube that educated the base, ran for a while, got millions, hundreds of millions of impressions, then fed into non-branded search, Pmax, different placements and display. And then eventually those people converted. Right. All those pieces work together.

36:42Is performance always best at the start of a channel or does it get better over time?

36:47Matt Swulinski:It gets better over time. But again, it has its own scaling laws where like there's a point where you have to diversify into other platforms before you see an additional unlock. when you hit like some kind of audience fatigue of like whatever you're targeting. But in the beginning, it's always shit because you're waiting for the conversions. When you hit audience fatigue, do you keep spending waiting for a next unlock? Would you just go, I've tapped out this channel? Well, you want to unlock the next audience, right? So like, you know, for example, when we're looking at Victor, when we launched, we purposely had the, you know, the AI employee for everyone.

37:22Matt Swulinski:And we did this to see who came in the door. and we had agencies, econ brands, and SMBs that first showed up. And essentially what we did is we went through in order. We went, okay, we have evergreen stuff. We'll continue that running. But now let's go agencies. Can we acquire them? What does the funnel look like? What does the creative look like? And then once we unlocked one audience and it seems like the economics work, now there's a repeatable process to refine it. Then we can go on to the next audience. So you essentially want to, you'll hit audience fatigue in what you're currently targeting.

37:51Matt Swulinski:The marketing now is very ICP specific. we have all the latest and greatest tools that can tell you in a prompt whether using victor or whatever tool simulate this person like what do they read what do they think about decision making run that prompt and then you have like the richest icp research you possibly can have create it for that person create an experience from a landing onboarding and product experience for that person you you can continue scaling by just going down to the niche audience by audience because i don't think as an investor in the company i don't think that was a good tagline and you may hate me for that but the ai employee for everyone i don't know what the fuck that means i if you were to say the ai video editor great amazing if you were to say the ai copywriter amazing the ai employee you're doing my tasks you're doing my creative but my point is are you able to do horizontal taglines and then verticalize and that's the right approach so i mean i think because the category is so wide and i wouldn't say we're the first but we're the first to like say AI employee and actually like deliver on that promise where like work is being given and it's like the usage is actually ROI like positive, actually valuable.

38:57Matt Swulinski:And we started with that because it's, it's, it's again, like how else are you going to frame it as being different than Claude or ChadGPT and these other players where like you have to like, for us, it's the positioning around knowledge work. Like there was nothing other than AI coworker and AI employee, like there's no other positioning that like really makes sense. And because it hasn't been used a lot, I think it's confusing. But now that there are more use cases and stories to back it up, then we can shift the framing to be a, I hired Victor and here's what he did. And then it's a, oh, it's a guy's name.

39:28Matt Swulinski:It's an employee. Oh, it's an AI tool, right? You can invert the process now, but we had to start with something to essentially build those use cases. One of the things that is supposed to be a growth engine is referrals and referrals programs. Any lessons from Whisper, from Superhuman that are really important for me and founders to know on how to build great referrals engines? I think it's one of the core things, like we talked about MetaGoogle lifecycle. When you think about PLG, have that referral program set up and it be very front and center and easy to discover in the product to make it effortless for someone to share the product and get something for doing that, right?

40:04Matt Swulinski:And at Superhuman, it was give one month, get one month. And, you know, we had people that had hundreds of referrals, hundreds of months. They were never going to pay for the rest of their lives. And because it was delightful and it was easy to discover, but it was very tactile where like I'm getting something right for doing this. So it was a similar thing with Whisper. When you hit your, let's say, 2000 word limit. So now that we're changing a little bit of how that trial works, but essentially finding the right moment to show the referral program and make it tangible. So you're right about to hit your word limit.

40:41Matt Swulinski:Hey, did you know that if you share this with your friend, you can get the next month free? Okay, I'm going to take five seconds and go and do that. And I'll tell one friend, hey, sign up for this. And if they sign up, I get that one month. And now I have another person that can spread the word. And that K factor is what makes or breaks that. So align referral program to usage limits. If that is your product, right? Like what is the thing that if you have more of won't frustrate you, right? So like for Victor, right, the referral program that we have, so it's all token based. You get credits to essentially use in Victor.

41:13Matt Swulinski:Whenever you're near the limit, we give you essentially a decision tree, depending on who you are, of what you could do to earn free credits. We have a creator program. So if you just post on LinkedIn about Victor, we give you a payout via CPM directly to your account in credits to any user. And that gives us social and virality that we can essentially push forward on. Or you can be a part of the actual referral program where you can invite companies and you get a percentage revenue share of the referred company's paying plan in credits every month. So if I'm a company and I know another cool company that should be using Victor, and I know that Victor is expensive.

41:51Matt Swulinski:We have like eight person teams that are spending$15 ,000,$20 ,000 a month to use Victor. And it replaced all their hiring. We can go into that later. But like, for example, that's a cost item. And I know that if I can bring, I have another friend that has an agency. They'll probably spend$5 ,000. And I'll get 20 % of that as rev share. And that lowers my cost. But to us, that makes sense from a CAC basis. You know, we're willing to spend$1 ,000,$2 ,000, depending on the cohort, to acquire a customer. We'd rather have our customers finding those best customers for us. Yeah, fuck. If I'm a startup founder and I've got a load of founder friends in non-competitive markets, great.

42:22Game on. Yeah. I totally get that. Any ways that founders fuck up referral programs that they should avoid?

42:28Matt Swulinski:I mean, it's either not making them tangible, where it's just like a, hey, refer your friends. And it's a, but what am I getting for it? Or it's just like some like you get swag or just things that don't really matter. Or they create these like hyper complicated 20 tiers, like do these actions and like gamifying the referral program. And then no one wants to use it because it's just like it's a pain. So I think like it's somewhere in that spectrum of like you're either doing that or that. Like you need to hit the sweet spot of what that looks like. Unless it's Palantir swag, in which case that's really quite cool.

43:02Matt Swulinski:And I would love that. We mentioned that like the timing of which you put that referral in front of people. The paywall is a difficult one. And it is also like it's like where to put it, whether it needs to be hard and immediate, whether you need to show value. How do you think about lessons, advice to founders on the immediacy of the paywall and where it sits best? I think even before the paywall analysis, the main thing you want to adjust for is like when that magical aha moment happens. and you want that magical moment happen as soon as possible. But you also don't want, like, you want the paywall near that moment where, like, that moment is either your first discovery of, wow, this is amazing, but you want to kind of continue that over time.

43:43Matt Swulinski:So, like, you have that magical aha moment and then you stay in that kind of, like, honeymoon phase of, like, this is just amazing. And then within that phase, paywall, right? And that's, like, whether it's words per week or how many credits you get in Victor. This is a big game that we're trying to hyper refine now is how many free credits should we give you? And how do we nudge Victor to show you really useful workflows? Because the moment you have one that goes, this is game changing, paywall. Because then you want to open up your pocketbook because you've felt something magical that you haven't felt before.

44:17Matt Swulinski:And because there's so many products, there's true unique magic. This product is insane moments. And this happened at Whisper for when we had that first rocket ship moment. when LinkedIn was going absolutely nuts of like, there's this thing, Whisper, and I'm not typing anymore. And a lot of that was organic, right? But that's because people hit that magical moment. And that's similar with the amount of posts that are happening about Victor. A lot of, I'd say half of them are organic, half of them are like the creator program that I said you post and you can get credits. But it's all genuine, right?

44:46Matt Swulinski:But it's that magic moment that matters. Should credits go in marketing budgets? So we call this fully loaded CAC. So our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. And if you're not doing that, then you're not really calculating your acquisition cost. So yeah, trial credits or like anything free that you're giving away is cost. And it goes under, it is a marketing cost item. We mentioned another one that was very interesting. You said AEO, which is obviously kind of on the surround engine optimization, we invest in Peak, which essentially optimizes this. How do you think about that as a new channel?

45:17How do we embrace it? What should we know?

45:19Matt Swulinski:AEO in general followed the core tenets of SEO in general, where what like you said, to be old school SEO, like pumping out thousands of pages came back again. Because like Google, because they own the SEO algorithm, essentially penalized people that were just pumping out pages for SEO. So like over the last couple of years, people stopped doing that. But the sheer amount of pages that you have in AEO, that is also changing a little bit. But like, you know, if you look at, you can ask any agent to analyze the sitemap and essentially do like crons. So we do this with Victor. We look at every competitor and we look at their sitemap.

45:50Matt Swulinski:We see how many pages they're making. All these companies are doing like 100 to 200 pages a week. It's like a lot of it is just like generated AI slop. So that's also what you don't want to do at scale. You actually like want valuable content that says valuable things because the AI crawler essentially ingests that. And then what you're saying there is what gets written about you when like, what is the best tool for this? Or like, I'm trying to do this and it's doing these citations. So the things that I'll say that are the most important AEO now, it's like, yes, have an engine that you send content through your website on specific things.

46:22Matt Swulinski:But the most important thing is YouTube, Reddit, and the social narrative. So one of the early levers that every founder should do when they're first starting with scaling is investing in good YouTube reviews. Because YouTube reviews, because they're long form, they rank long tail. They're one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. So you'll have your website, PR, external sources talking about you. And one of the biggest, best external sources are how many reviews and videos do you have on YouTube? They're a really high citation on ChatGPT. And that's like one of the early, I'd say, strong things that every founder should focus on.

46:59Dude, it's traditional PR and news dead. And what I mean by that, it's like, you know, being in TechCrunch used to matter.

47:06Matt Swulinski:I still think it matters in the sense that, like, I have the opinion that, you know, when you launch, do a product hunt. Get featured in TechCrunch. Like, that's just like, it's like founder initiation. Short table stakes almost. Yeah, I'd say it builds a level of credibility and trust that you are on the map in the same way that everyone went through the process. But the reason why it's important, the PR is less of a PR blows up and there's a traffic wave. Really, that PR is made for citations around AEO. How many external credible sources are writing about you? then you'll see your AAO traffic significantly increase because the more of a not owned narrative is being talked about positively about you the better off the product is.

47:48Matt Swulinski:Should I bother doing TikTok? I think there's a time and place for it it depends on you know are you more B2C than anything else like. I've never met a CMO or a head of growth who's been able to crack it. I've never. I think there's a time and place to like do some audience diversification but yeah to be honest in any of the three kind of core companies that I've been at so far. It hasn't worked yet, but maybe I'll get a chance to change that at Victor. Totally get that. Final one, again, before we move to team competition, but what happens if when we turn off paid as much, so we're spending really aggressively and it's working, it's working, and we get to 30, 40, 50 million in revenue, and we're like, we've got a bit of a paid engine now that we're a bit hooked on.

48:33Turn off the paid, dial it really right back,

48:36Matt Swulinski:and growth down. That means you have other problems, right? Like I think the sweet spot for organic mix should be around like 35 to 45 % of acquisition is word of mouth, organic, and like truly people just discovering it based on everything else that you've built. In the beginning, because you just started and there's not a lot of stuff out there about you, it is entirely tied to paid. But in the later stage, if you turn everything off, that means you have forgotten about the other half of the job, which is the SEO, the AO, the reviews, everything being written. So like you sometimes want to dial down and see how elastic it is again to the previous part that we were saying, because that's like, you definitely want a strong MMM model and incrementality when you're like, the moment you start spending north of a million dollars a month, definitely have a model that says this channel is incremental, this is not.

49:27Matt Swulinski:And like the model in the beginning, always be wrong, make some changes, dial things down, do holdouts, whatever, and then see if the model proves true. Model gets better over time. And then you have, you're less in the dark, right? You actually understand what levers go up and down and where you can actually spend a lot. So I think spending down to understand how much drop-off you have is actually a good, very strong learning moment. How many good growth leaders do you actually think there are? Not a lot. Yeah. If I'm going to be honest. Really not a lot. There's a lot of founders who'll be listening to this and going, wow, I'm thinking through like three companies in particular, I'm like, shit, I wish I could put Matt in there.

50:03Matt Swulinski:Yeah, I mean, I think I've had like, I've had an interesting kind of like grow up through marketing is because I started, I started in corporate consulting, which was an absolute livestock, I hated it. And that got me to found my first agency where I had to learn how to do everything myself from zero. Right, and because I had to do that, and I did that in both Ecom, SaaS and Edirise B2B, my agency is still around today and not involved in the day to day. But like, because I had to do that, I understand how to launch a meta ad. I'm not a head of growth or a CMO that has no idea how to do execution.

50:33Matt Swulinski:This is why also as head of growth at Whisper, up until December of this past last year, I was the only person doing execution on a$3,$4,$5 million budget. I was doing everything myself. But this is what I say to all university students and young people say, which is it's never been more important to be full stack. You need to be writing the creative, shooting the video, editing the video, putting the video on meta whatever it is instagram youtube you name it full barrel like the whole oh i just do creative and copywriting fuck that i think a lot of people have been saying this and i definitely echo that like hyper specialists are dying a slow death like you you need to be like i i've always seen myself as a specialized generalist and like the way that you know you have to pick something that you are better than the rest at but like get your hands dirty and learn how to do a little bit of everything.

51:25Matt Swulinski:And that's like a lot of growth leaders actually get lost in the marketing analytics, the conversion tracking. Like that stuff is usually where they don't really understand how that works. And if you don't understand the fundamentals, you actually don't know what makes the system tick. We also live in a world where like ChadGPT, Claude, Victor, right? Like they are the best learning vehicles ever in the history of humanity. If you don't know how to do something, goddamn ask it. Have it tell you. Give me everything step-by-step that I need to do and go and do it. and then see where things break see what you don't understand like there's there's agency if you are hungry and a learner those are the best people that win are the people that are that are nerds that are that are curious right like that that's that's the line for me if we go to the team itself the requirements for talent changes how has what you look for in talent changed in the last year or two yeah i mean i think it's complete 180 i'd say now a year ago i'd be looking for someone that has 10 years of experience in, let's say, meta ads.

52:25Matt Swulinski:They've scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars and they're, let's say, the best in the world as a meta ads media buyer. And that would be the main thing I'd be looking for. Let's say that's the person I'm hiring. Now I'm looking for that, but they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will outcompete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native. And that's like, I'm seeing that happen where like, I'm going to have a hot take here. I think a lot of teams are trying to make their teams AI native and they're failing.

53:02Matt Swulinski:Why are they failing? The people that are in those roles are not systems thinkers. Like if you're in a marketing or let's say ops role and you're not a systems thinker, you don't know, you actually don't know. How do you think about that? What does a systems thinker mean? To me, that's being able to step back from, let's say, a task that is a part of my job, being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say, in my role, what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day-to-day basis? What are the interrelationships? Where's the boring admin? Where's the reporting?

53:32Matt Swulinski:What's all of that? And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works. Because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part. and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job. A lot of people go and go to ChatGPT and ask it a question and then they go on still doing their job the manual way. If you take a step back and say, what would it take for me to fully automate, let's say all of my job? Of course, it's not gonna work. Things are gonna break apart. But run yourself through that thought experiment. And the thing is, is if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don't really understand their job because they're not systems thinkers.

54:08Matt Swulinski:They don't actually know what are all the inputs and the outputs. So that's the line for me. So like when I interview people to fill in the team, it's like partially like an engineering interview where like systems thinking is the bar. So what do you ask them to do? Well, I want a job with you. Okay. You're clearly fucking brilliant. And I'm a podcaster. What are you going to put me through? How are you going to test me? Yeah. Core question is more of like, how do you use AI as a workflow in work? But I'm actually more curious, how do you use AI workflows in your personal life? Like, do you have any systems that you feed through AI that make you a better person outside of work?

54:44Matt Swulinski:And like maybe the line blurs of like what you do is also work is personal, whatever. And so a good answer versus a bad answer would be? I mean, a bad answer would be, you know, I have a skill or like a chat thread that's like a project in ChatGPT that I talk to and it has like some context. Because it's like, yes, that's factually correct. That's how you should use, let's say, a memory layer and a context layer. and you have one proactive chat conversation, so it works. Chatting with the thing is not a workflow, right? Where if there's no feedback loop, like one of the core things that I always test for is, let's say an AI gives you slop.

55:18Matt Swulinski:What do you do with it? So a lot of people, what they'll do is they'll take the slop and then say, this is slop. Maybe it changes and they get frustrated. Then they take the doc and start writing it themselves. And if you don't go through the pain of giving it feedback, like that's the first kind of feedback loop that I test for. But the next thing is, is from, let's say you have a loop. And I used this example before of I built a sponsorship system at Whisper, but essentially the workflow is a self-improving loop where if a newsletter sponsor emails me, my agent essentially knows that this is a newsletter request.

55:50Matt Swulinski:It asks them for their rates. It does research on what their audience is. It does the first part of negotiation for me. I step in to approve the, yes, we want to work with them. We get a contract, and that's where my manual step in newsletter ends. I throw the contract into the agentic system. it ingests all the cost data into the file system it does copywriting it does all of the email sending it creates all the links creates all the conversion tracking it sends everything out to the partner because like a newsletter is like a boring antiquated email i will email you and you will tell me the performance and then based on the copywriting and based on the cost it will essentially also know what performance looks like and then say do we continue on with the partner that's also an an agentic decision because I have CPM should be this, conversion should be this, let the run fizzle out if it didn't work out, right?

56:35Matt Swulinski:And again, that's a workflow, right? Like I have a couple human touch points, but the things that I know that if it analyzes the data and the same thing, if it generated a copy, it knows all of every link's performance and can say this copy works, this doesn't. So the next time it generates copy, it's based on all historic data. It's not a, and that's like a self-improving. What do you use for this? So this was first the marketing OS I built at Whisper. So it was like Cloud Code on a computer. That's just the folder system and skill and.md files. That was the beginning of that system. So it would essentially be that, right, where I have Cloud plugged into my email with cron set up to essentially check at 9, check at noon, check at 6.

57:18Matt Swulinski:Are there any new newsletter requests? Do a workflow to respond to those things and then bubble up to me a message in Slack being like, hey, these need your decisions. Here's some contracts that got sent over. And then that system evolved. So that was like my own OS. I had to then get control that folder to share that with the team so other people can use the workflow. So then for essentially a year and a half, I was the one person at Whisper doing all execution. So imagine a million a month on Google, hundreds of thousands of keywords, ads, experiments, landing pages. I owned every KPI from eyeball to download and then product took it over, right?

57:54Matt Swulinski:Onboarding. But then add meta, add newsletters. So at a given point, I was working with between 70 and 120 unique newsletter providers that would send me emails, ask for copy approval. I needed to create unique images. So I said, why are newsletters still in the stone ages? There's no platform. It's all through email, and you're negotiating and haggling with these people trying to get you on a CPM, right? So that was one of the first things that I created a workflow around. I don't code, right? I learned how to do this by doing it. I want to automate this. Cloud Code, how would you do this? And I started by, I built the OS asking how to build an OS, right?

58:30Matt Swulinski:And then every single day, I would say 90 to 95 % of my work through the entire day was fed through the AI. So like, I want to optimize the ads. Can you pull the reporting? What are the keywords? And I would make all the changes, see all the copy through Cloud Code in the terminal, because that allowed me to give feedback, do the feedback loop. So every day got a little better got a little better and there came a point where i could like the models also got good enough like i was an early adopter of cloud code so like december of 25 was when you know the cloud code moment i i adopted it in september before it was good and immediately you saw that insane ramp like it was wrong a lot like there was like the the copy was poor like things broke it was early days but like i was curious like i'm a tinkerer and like i used that to essentially learn how to do the whole thing and like i know we deviated from the team question but But that as me having to learn how to do the workflow, essentially because I had to do it not knowing how to make that work, going from A to Z, that's what I test for.

59:28Matt Swulinski:Is can you take a hard problem and build a system around it that you have solved? How many candidates do you actually meet who have that level of depth? Less than 1%. Exactly. Yeah. Can you even build a team on that? But that's the thing, right? I think the team composition of today and tomorrow is way leaner than it was before. So we likely will, for Grammarly, let's say a bigger startup in SaaS, startup is air quotes there, big corporate SaaS, they have a influencer marketing team, right? They have like three, four, five people. Today and tomorrow, that is one really good person with an amazing suite of agents that will only ever touch, like imagine you scale to 100 ,000 influencers that are posting on you in a month.

1:00:15Matt Swulinski:If you have an agentic system and you know how to weed through the data, understand where you need to be plugged in, you could do that. And that's why even though it's 1 % of candidates, it's fine. If I find that one person that is going to be able to fully own that, build the systems, and like right now, and this is like my bet for the next three, five years, you know, 80 % of our work is still manual, 20 % is agents. Hence why my bet into Victor, it's essentially solving all of knowledge work. I think in three years, companies will essentially be like board of directors where 20 % of the work is the strategy and the thinking, and then agents just do 80 % of the execution.

1:00:50Matt Swulinski:Right now, we're still editing as manual, sending an email is still manual, even though we have the tools. There's still a human layer into that. I think that will change as quality gets better, usage and actual adoption towards an ROI basis gets there. That's my bet. and that's also why this stuff is so important, right? Because if you can't understand how the systems work, you're never going to be able to see your agents. So less than 1%, B2B CMOs today, are they fucked? I don't mean that too bluntly, but I don't know any B2B CMO in a scaled company that has any fucking clue what you're talking about.

1:01:24Matt Swulinski:They hire those people around themselves, which I think like there's - Do they really? They try to. I'm not going to name companies that don't want to shit on people, But if you look at some of the big providers, are you seriously saying in your Anaplans and your Coopers that anyone has a fucking clue what you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, that's also why I think the companies that do will quickly gain market share against those that don't. And that's why I think we live in very interesting times in terms of competitive environment where the incumbents that don't adopt this at the senior level will essentially their growth rates will stand still while the hyper growers that are doing exactly this framing will essentially gain that market share and outcompete them.

1:02:09Matt Swulinski:So I think you're right. I think leadership needs to change. And like I said, I think a lot of teams, and my hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team that is not a systems thinker. Stop brute forcing people in. Hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed. The JD is no longer the same what it was a year ago. And people are still brute forcing people into these new JDs. I think there needs to be a bit of a shakeup. Okay, I'm a founder. I'm looking at my marketing team today. There's 10 people. I'm like a series A, B firm, whatever. Who should I fire? How do I test it?

1:02:41Matt Swulinski:When you're not looking and you come back and they're in suddenly now systems and that one person has 10x themselves, you're not going to fire that person. But then you will very clearly see who hasn't done that. And that difference is being felt where the A players are becoming S tier players and the people that were B players are becoming D players. And that rift is created. The other thing I just think is like consumer marketing is not consumer marketing and B2B marketing is not B2B marketing. It's just marketing. At the end of the day, there's a consumer who has a buying decision at a big enterprise or as a person.

1:03:15Matt Swulinski:100%. I mean, that is also why people were questioning our initial marketing strategy at Victor, because we're like, like I said, super high-cock B2B SaaS, right? Like you are hiring an employee into your team and you're paying thousands of dollars for this thing, right? That's a B2B SaaS tool, but we approach the marketing like a prosumer app, right? There is a 19, 20-year-old at Polymarket. It's called Tobin. Maybe he doesn't mind me saying this. I mean, he was at Whisper, right? He was originally at Whisper. He was at Whisper? Yeah. He built the original UGC viral program at Whisper before he went to Polymarket.

1:03:48Matt Swulinski:So I know Tobin. Oh, wow. Well, this is perfect then. Yes. Where I'm like, you would pay through the nose for talent like Tobin, who just gets it, who is 10x what anyone else will be in that position. Do you not agree? Yeah. And I think in each lane, there are those people. And that's also why, like, you know, from like an ML researcher standpoint, you'll pay millions of dollars for a person that's going to move a model forward. I think we're coming to the place that like people in these marketing roles, they're unicorns, they're rare, and you want them in your company. And I think that same like ML crazy moment is maybe going to happen over the next year in the marketing acquisition side.

1:04:26Matt Swulinski:Dude, are you ready for a quick fire? I've loved this. What is the most underappreciated growth channel today? It's a channel we haven't mentioned. And I think a lot of people do this poorly. And it actually compounds if you do it well. And that's affiliate, where you're paying, let's say, a percentage of revenue or some kind of CAC to people that are not your customers. And they go out of their way to create content and reviews and all of that. And so like at Whisper and Victor, it is the highest ROI channel. and if you set up a strong affiliate program and you bring people into the door and they feel like they can earn money even before they're your customers, they will become your customers and it's one that like, it's a little bit outside of the referral program because it's not through the product.

1:05:10Matt Swulinski:It's how can you make this sexy external program that someone that is just an affiliate wants to, like they have a surface area, they have a website, they have some audience that they have and they want to sell your thing to that audience, acquire them that way And like, that's one of the highest early ROI channels that if you start doing in the beginning, it ramps, right? Like, so like for Victor, a good 10 to 15 % of our acquisition on a monthly basis comes through our affiliate program. People that want to earn money because we give them between 10 and 15 % revenue share. So if you're, you know, if that affiliate gets a company that pays 10K a month, they're making$1 ,500 a month from one sale as an affiliate.

1:05:50Matt Swulinski:that's also like create a program that wants people to earn money and this is the other thing that we said can I do this create a program I swear I would send my 10 companies to Fred mom I'm retiring yeah I mean we have we have some affiliates that are making 20-30k a month what's the most polluted channel what's the ugh this is just shit pit ugh I'm gonna say X in the sense of just the launch videos are boring that's that's exactly what I mean right where everyone is trying to do exactly the same launch viral thing. And it's also polluted in the sense that X ads don't work. And that to me just means the platform is still...

1:06:33Matt Swulinski:They don't work? I have yet to meet a SaaS head of growth or performance marketer that says that X ads print. So if someone has gotten X ads to print, please tell me because I would love to be challenged on that. That's fascinating. Okay, so X, I'm with you. I'm just so bored of this. I don't know if you saw, there was one video yesterday, and we're talking about it, so it obviously worked. But it's this company, I can't remember, Weave, I think it's called, where they jumped out of a plane and did the, like, copy of jumping out of a plane. And it's like, have we got to that stage? Like, is it that mature a market that you, like, have to jump out of a plane and read it while doing that?

1:07:09Matt Swulinski:The formula of, like, shock and awe launch videos, to be honest, and then, like, specifically those are the ones that, like, well, we don't really have a product. I'm not saying maybe in their example, but the sheer amount of we launched this for that and we spent way more time into our launch video than actually any time in our product. I see so much of that, and that's why I say polluted. What would you most like to change about the world of growth? Have more good growth leaders. But in honesty, I think... My request for startups would be, I don't know why we don't have a school which basically says, hey, I completely understand you need to be AI pilled.

1:07:47Great. What the fuck does that mean? Come to our school and for six weeks we will teach you how to get jacked up on every system, process, model for six weeks. Nine to five, this is your job and you pay 10 ,000 bucks. I would say that's more valuable than universities say for teenagers.

1:08:04Matt Swulinski:I'll go start another company. No, no. I mean, you're 100 % right now. I would fund that company today with millions of dollars. I'm being serious. Well, if you're J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs and you put that at the bottom of Canary Wharf, would you not send every single employee there? Because then you built the hyperscalers of tomorrow. I mean, super interesting. So like I went to NYU for college. And what's interesting, I did not take a single, I mean, zero marketing classes. And I learned everything via doing. And I think what's interesting is like the education around marketing, I think is also like still.

1:08:35Matt Swulinski:And again, I haven't been into a college today. I mean, maybe that has changed, but like, are they teaching you how to install a Facebook pixel? And no, right? Like the framing of how it works comes after you start doing the execution, right? Like you can do and then understand versus understand and sit in a room and learn and then go and try to do the thing. You're going to learn so much faster just by doing. So I agree with you. I've yet to see like true A to Z bootcamp of what it means to be a growth leader. And I mean, like Reforge and Brian Balfour, they've tried to do this, but like it's still - I'm actually not even saying a growth leader.

1:09:06I'm just saying how to get knowledgeable to the extent where you can build processes, systems, start replacing yourself with Claude, you name the provider, where you can start doing expenses, copy, design. You're 100 % right.

1:09:22Matt Swulinski:In that frame, I agree as well. I'm applying it to do that in marketing, but the grounding is people don't know how to do the beginning step. You're 100 % right. The very beginning step, how do I simply set up my Claude to be efficient with integrations so it gets access to all my files in the right way with the right permissions? You said 9, 12, and 6, where it does the check-in. Dude, I think you forget where people are. Yeah, and I mean, to me, what I think is table stakes, I always forget is people don't set up things this way. So I, for example, and this is when I was using Cloud Code. Now I'd say 80 % of my work is Victor.

1:09:58Matt Swulinski:But for the people that are not using Victor, if you're using Cloud Code and you do one thing, is set up what I call the session end skill. If you set up one skill that's going to let your work compound, it's what I call session end. So I have a terminal or a cloud code session, and I'm doing some realm of work. And it's almost done, or I want to end the session. So what is inside of that skill is essentially I have connected to my cloud code a Obsidian vault that is every day log of everything that I put through the terminal, all decisions, all open tasks, all learnings, essential notes and atoms, and all of everything that I'm doing in every session is being stored in clawed memory, but then you don't have access to that.

1:10:43Matt Swulinski:So what session end does is it analyzes the session, distills what we worked on, what was the frame, did we accomplish this thing, what are the outstanding items, and it moves that over into Obsidian, which is like a node-based system, which lets me go back to any day and understand, what did I work on that day? And you can see this web grow over time. And that's like one massive hack to essentially turn every session to be compounding because then that connects the node-based system of Obsidian says, a week ago you worked on this and then you hit a wall here. You worked on it again today. You solved it.

1:11:18Matt Swulinski:And because the agent also can analyze everything, it creates those interrelationships for you where you worked on meta ads with this creative type here in two places. And normally you'll forget that, right? And so will the system. And if you have a place where your work, your memory, that to me is also probably the most valuable resource for people, is if you can document every little thing that you're building, tweaking, and refining. That is how social capital was the big thing. I think what do you have on your computer that is saved in your AI output? That, I think, as we walk into the next couple of years, is the treasure trove for a lot of people.

1:11:55Matt Swulinski:Do you want to hear something wild? Every single week, we enter the IC Investment Committee for the fund and we now have all of our calls graded by an ai call grader which measures every single call we've ever done we have this obviously feedback loop oh yeah it collects every single call and it simply just stack ranks out of 10 and ranks them across five different variables like founder market fit product market fit deal a load of other things quality of product and then we just go down the ai rankings in terms of priority and we actually fully delegate trust of prioritization to the AI ranking system.

1:12:28Matt Swulinski:But if you put the thought into, here's the decision tree of prioritization, and you put the thought into that, then you can trust the system, right? Because it's based on your framing. Do you know, it's never been wrong in its ranking. I can believe that. We've only done it for 12 weeks, but 12 times. I mean. It's pretty good. Yeah, it's over a thousand companies. And like, same thing, like I do this. So I use a botless meeting recorder that records all of my meetings. And at the end of the day, it ingests all of them and says, what did I promise to do on calls that didn't end up in a to-do software somewhere?

1:13:00Matt Swulinski:And then it drops all of that. It says, did you do any of these? And then I have my to-do list for tomorrow. Oh God, no, I have a girlfriend for that. And that's challenging enough. Final one for you, which company growth strategy that you're not tied to do you most respect and what do you learn from it? I think the craft of product and like the hypotheses, the deep experimentation and like building true user experience excellence, that to me is just like sexy. Because I think if you look at like the sheer volume of products that are coming out every single day, very few of them have product excellence.

1:13:37Matt Swulinski:And the people that steer that craft are like true product leaders. I learn so much from them and apply those things into my world. But seeing the way their brains work and the way that they're analyzing the data and how they understand the customers is really inspiring. and I think a lot of people can learn how to do that. Because I'd say this is less maybe across the company, more like the people in companies. But I think, to be honest, I think in terms of companies, I'm more impressed by the net new things that are starting from zero and even at step one, they're doing pretty well in the sense of we thought through the branding, we launched into this marketing thing.

1:14:15Matt Swulinski:That's what I appreciate that. Give me a company. i mean again this is more like tooting my horn a bit but like just seeing like what the original launch was for for whisper like that was a you know like see it's like seeing that product correlation with marketing even though i had a part in that like that was truly like it entered the map because of that and then same thing like yes i was a part of the ride there but like the adoption and the fact that a polish startup that of course raised a big series a became came massively seen on the map and was very quickly loved like those are the kinds of things that like make me want to get up in the morning we did a thing we put a lot of thought into it and there was pickup around it and i think that that's like that's what fascinates me is like what are all the moving pieces that like you go and finally launch the thing and it goddamn works right and that's like i think that's that's the beauty of you know why i do what i do because those are some special moments man i've so enjoyed this i can't thank you enough for agreeing to share all of your secrets and for letting me drill down into all the strategies.

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