20Growth: How to Master PR and Comms, How to Get Your Startup Written About; Press Releases, Fundraising Announcements, Embargos etc & Lessons Scaling Duolingo from 3-200M Users with Gina Gotthilf, Co-Founder @ Latitud

22:54So what I advise founders to do is basically come up with every name or number that might be impressive about their startup or in their background and condense it into one line. So for example, if I introduce myself to someone, I'll say, hi, Harry, I led growth at Duolingo from three to 100 million users before working for the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign that are not co -authored in neuroscience study. Like, I don't know if that's what I would do, but like, these are three moments and three signifiers that Harry would say, I don't know who Gina is or what she did. She just had three things that make me think this is important and I should pay attention.

23:25So you need to find those signifiers and if you don't have them yet. It's okay you can find proxies like for example I went to this university or so and so has used my product or I have money from this angel investor. So you need to find the things that are going to matter to a journalist. What we did with Duolingo and what teller but especially with Duolingo over and over again was just that. So for example I would have Lisbon on fly to a country and then I would make sure to schedule a talk by Lisbon on not just in one place that had like a major name like for example top university, but two.

23:56And so it would be normally like a top university in that country. And then a top tech conference. And I would try to make it so that it all happened within one week or 10 days max. Then I would reach out to journalists on Twitter or on LinkedIn. And I would have this one liner. And then I would say, Luis has been invited by and then I would use the two things that they would go, wow, this matters. Like imagine, you've never heard of Harry's settings, but he was just invited by Harvard and tech crunch to speak at blah blah blah. And you know, he has no time. So I'd create a scarcity. He has no time right now.

24:25You know, like he's super important even though knowing It's heard of this if you would like 10 minutes to speak with him I could potentially make that happen you generate scarcity and you generate those levers and points of significance Even when you don't have them by thinking what matters to people So for example in Colombia, we did that with the Colombian government the mean Tick which is the Ministry of Technology there It's again tooling one to public schools. You would think wow, do you know that's amazing? I'm doing it to public schools. You've got the whole population. No, it actually worked really badly Actually, the Minkke and Columbia was probably the better one of the governments.

24:54I don't want to say anything bad about them, but other governments in general are very slow. And they are unable to make these things happen at the rate that it started up requires for it to be considered a success. None of that mattered because we could use that for PR. Because now I could reach out to journalists and say, Duelingo is officially being used alongside the Ministry of Technology or the Ministry of Education of your country in public schools. And I have proof because as part of my little contract, I said they had to have a little landing page where they put the Duelingo logo on it.

25:20So then it could like hyperlink so the journalist could go and see it. Wow, it's true. The doing logo is on the government website and settling all the journalist things. Dualing was really important and really matters. The government is putting their name behind it. So even though this partnership isn't really going anywhere and it's not quite working, I have now signaled to the journalist that they should know about something and they don't and they need to catch up. What did the journalist respond? Like, how did that go? Look, I did a lot of PR in my career to learn, especially in doing because every opportunity we got then we would just milk it and we would come up with a feature and then we would come up with a feature in order to get the press.

25:53I mean, like, make press out of something that wasn't that interesting. So I did a lot of it and you have to be really resilient because you get a lot of notes. Even when you're able to tell a great story, here's one big difference about being the person at your startup, those PR yourself versus hiring a PR agency and why I'm a big advocate for doing it yourself if you can. When you are at a startup, you have nothing to lose by spraying and praying, which means like I really want to get featured on whatever newspaper, whatever site, or whatever blog, or whatever influencers account. You can then go and find out all of the people who are writing about it or who are journalists at this organization, and you can pitch 10 of them.

26:28And that is a huge full pot in PR. You're not supposed to pitch 10 people at the same organization. It actually can backfire tremendously, and if you are an agency, you are burning all of your bridges and people won't listen to you anymore. But if you are the founder of a startup and your life depends on the startup working out. You don't care that much and you can always play that Oh man God, I'm so sorry. I'm never done PR card, which is fine because that's not supposed to be your main job. So of course, I would recommend messaging many people within the same organization with a couple of caveats.

26:55First, if you message multiple people in an organization and one of them says yes, I would immediately react and say, Hey, just so you know, I also wrote to so and so like I can let them know that you're taking this or whatever. So you make sure that you give them information that they wouldn't have to find out at the water cooler and feel really awkward about at their organization. So that's one. Two, I would not recommend that you now make a list of all of the New York Times journalists and try to pitch all of them. Because from a tactical perspective, here's another thing that I've learned.

27:19And it also works for start -ups pitching VCs, honestly, which is make a list of all of the PR sources that you might want to be featured on and start with the least important ones when you're pitching. Because as you pitch, you need to learn what's working and what's not working. as we said earlier, if I pitch something and I keep getting nose, you have to modify that pitch. It's not working. Do you send them the press release? Do you say, hey, Gina, would love to hop on a cool and then before the cool, or after the cool you send it, do you have to do it to get their attention? How do you think about using docs or press release to get attention?

27:50There's no recipe and people do it differently, and especially agencies do it differently. The way that has worked out for me in the past is generating formal. I don't send all of the information up front, which is annoying to journalists. I'm sorry for the journalists who are listening to this. I'm sure it's annoying, but it peaks their interest and human beings react to things that peak their interest. And you want the person to react. I would write to these journalists because on LinkedIn, you only get a release, links just small messages that you can send and on Twitter, there's like 140 characters.

28:16So I got really good at just sending that short message. But the short message has to be interesting enough that the person would reply with one word. Like, what'd you like to hear more? Sure. I got a lot of that. Now, the way I read into this, like psychology of it, if the person is responded to you once, now they have a relationship with you. Even if it's very marginal relationship but before they had zero relationship to you. So it's very easy to ignore an email that you've never responded to before but if you've responded to someone once, you're much more compelible to respond the second time.

28:41So now you already have a foot in the door and you're in a much better place and they will at least tell you know, whereas it's much easier to just ignore otherwise. So I would keep it super short and like a cliffhanger, if the person responded with interest then I would give them a lot more information because of course I don't want to make a journalist life tough. Do you put the release date in that? Do you give it exclusives and how do you manage? So it depends on your shadow. Now we're going really, really tactical on the PR side of things. This is one of my favorite topics. No one knows how to do it.

29:07So I'm thrilled about it. Okay. I love PR too. I think it's awesome. So it really depends on what strategy you choose. And there are two main strategies in PR. One is you decide to do an exclusive, which means that you're only going to allow one publication to share the news that you want to share. That's advantageous when you want to go with a major organization, especially when you don't have a relationship with them. like a really big new source because for example if tech crunch publishes something over the the New York time publishes something or the economist back in already be enough for you don't even need anyone else because everyone else would want to take pick up that story anyway and so then you get the distribution that way but there are downsides to that as well because then you just have that one and then maybe other main new sources that you care about will then say this isn't news so we're not going to cover it anymore and so it's about death versus breath in which one you decide to go with at the time depends on what your strategy is who you're trying to reach and also what your leverages are in terms of your connections and how often you've done this before.

29:59What did you have for? Most startups, I would say, choose the exclusive because then you develop a relationship with that one journalist and it feels more doable. We went spray and pray most of the time, just like breast, which is not what you're supposed to do when I hired my first PR person actually at Dooling, where they like, recommended me very heavily, but I said, I don't care because it's worked and I will continue to do it because I worked. So I don't care what that fear is, which is instead of giving someone an exclusive, trying to get it published in as many places as possible at once.

30:26And so then unless you have a relationship with that journalist, you don't give them that much of a heads up. If you decide to go with that approach, you would do an embargo. So there's an exclusive versus like the embargo. Embargo means that you tell journalists they can only publish something at a specific time on a specific day. And if you're able to do that, then you can get all of the new sources to publish something at the same time. And that's magical because you create a surround sound effect. Whereas if someone reads the story and they see a notification about it later, they think that it's much bigger than that is because of their bias.

30:54And so you just create this like image that like whatever is happening is huge. And so that is really like the bottom goal that you can go for it. How early before a release, do you go? Is it two weeks a week, two days? How long do journalists need to not feel like it's too long, but not too short? You want to give the journalists enough time to work on this story, because most journalists have a lot of work and they're overwhelmed and they also have their own schedules. And so if you're too close to the date, you really risk the journalist just not covering it even if they were interested, which is a really big mess.

31:24So I've had to move artificial dates because the journalist was like, great, but I don't have time for this and I go, give him a, what if that was like week later? And you know, like, I'm like, trying to make that work. Of course, you don't want to do it too early that it's like irrelevant. So here's the thing. I would say sending the release or sending the information with journalists two weeks before probably works. What I would say is you start earlier because you need to redevelop relationship with that journalist, even if it is just getting the journalists to respond to you once, or like accepting your invite on LinkedIn or like seeing your tweet to them.

31:52You need to give that stuff lead time. So you want to start earlier, but then in terms of actually sending them the information that they need, I would try to give them more than one week of time maybe too. For me, gross, NPR and humanity, a lot of the time just comes down to understanding how you make people feel. And if you're able to make people feel anything, then they remember you. And if they remember you, then you're much more likely to get what you want. So if you like someone's tweet regularly, They'll remember who you are and they'll think this person cares and hopefully you care. But normally if I like someone's tweet is because I actually care either about what they said or about them that I want them to feel good about or I want to For example if I see someone I know and they tweet about something like Eric Torrenberg He tweeted it ultimately recently and then he played on LinkedIn as well I liked and commented on both because I know that that's going to impact his chances of like growing and I care So I'm gonna do that right and so if you develop or relationship with people whether it be like remembering something you said that was personal or making them laugh or whatever, then you're able to and that really works for girl cooks as well.

32:47It's thinking about how that made people feel. When you look at journalists tweets, often they don't get many likes, I don't mean that horribly or disparaging, but sometimes it's like 8 to 10 to 12 to 15. I always say hey create a list when you start your company of the journalists that are relevant to you. And honestly just go to it once every other day, like a couple of their tweets which will be relevant to you. You know people who like your tweets consistently. I noticed 100 % and so like you instantly have that recognition. I wrote two things on my arm. One is paywall. There are publications which have paywalls but their names are great.

33:22How do you think about that? The only was a B2C product. It can be relevant to most of the population. There are very few people in the world who would not benefit from learning a second language. It could be kids, teenagers, young adults or even grandparents trying to connect with like their granddaughters new husbands or whatever. And so we were really going wide and we wanted to go wide and that's why the spray and free approach worked and that's also why we did not give exclusive this especially to publications that had a paywall because I would really limit our breadth and we were going for breadth.

33:52However, there are other cases where those publications matter a lot more than the breadth. For example, like in B2B cases or in cases where you're working with FinTech or LegalTech or industries where you really need to build trust with the right people. Then having some of those publications like the Wall Street Journal for example, right about you is really meaningful. It's a signifier that goes beyond the reach. It just now you can link to it whenever you email anyone or when you write up and people think this is an important thing. This matters. It has a lot of data behind it because the Wall Street Journal wouldn't cover something if it didn't.

34:23Even if people can't read this story, they read the headline which honestly is how new people do anyway. And so that already means a lot. I think the biggest thing that people don't do is they don't ask What's the core objective and who are we going for? If you are going for new investors ahead of the funding round, tax crunch might be the right publication to go after. If you're going for new customers to Wall Street Journal or shipping weekly, or I don't know whatever random vertical you're going for, but tax crunch is not going to get you more customers if you're in shipping or heavy logistics.

34:50What's the objective and who are we going for and let that trickle down into a publication list? You know that's absolutely true. One thing to think into consideration is that if you're able to get something on tax crunch, even if it wasn't your core consumer, possibly then very quickly tell other publications that she will more insecure than tech -runched like editors and journalists and linked to tech -runched discovered it. They're much more likely to cover it as well. So you might be able to have your cake it needed to. But one thing that I see a lot is exactly that it's not understanding the motivation behind what you're doing and behind what the people who are reading that publication.

35:20So I see a lot of startups say, oh we got a funding round and we did this big announcement and we didn't get that many new users from it. Well yeah, because people who are reading about funding rounds and who reading about like the monetization of a startup are not necessarily the people whose problems you're solving with that startup. And so that's the people you want to reach, which might be like L magazine, because like women are going to be interested in learning a language too. And, you know, so you don't think about that. How much control do you want over the content? Journalists can be challenging, but in terms of what they produce, I've had journalists write snippets of like what I've said and turned it into the main piece.

35:53And it's in not what I wanted. How much control do you give? How do you think about ensuring the peace that you get is the peace that you wanted? You don't get control. Like, if you're working with real journalists, they think and they write. And that's the best thing about journalism, but it can also be the worst thing, a more journalism. So there is a couple of layers here. First of all, when you write your release because you know exactly what you want to say, write it exactly as you would like it to be published. With all the hyperlinks there that really matters, really matters if you have hyperlinks, like you're not emphasized this enough, then you can send it out.

36:24I would say that most journalists, not at the top publications, but you would be surprised that most journalists tend to be fairly lazy and I don't fall journalists. They have way too many things to do. They're trying to get clicks. They are under immense pressure and so a lot of them will copy paste and so that helps a lot. If you're able to just have exactly what you wanted in there in the first place and then it's like, I'd be patient and then you get the story. That's not you having control that's you gaming with system. But then you can't have control and tell a journalist I want you to write this or that because actually will rub them incredibly the wrong way much like when you're working in an engineer and you tell them like here is the solution you need to build versus here is the problem and we need to solve.

36:57You need to understand those nuances. So you need to be okay with that and you need to give this journalist all of the information that you possibly can to prevent something bad from happening, which is like you said, like something being taken completely out of context. You over time practice what you say and how you say it really well, so that you're not going to say things that then get taken out of context. And again, it's about developing a relationship with that journalist, because then if something happens and you email them and you say, hey, like, well, you just said this and I realize that I said it, but that's not how I meant it or whatever.

37:26They're much more likely to listen to you if they care. Harry is saying no. Is that not the case? No, I'm totally with you. I'm thinking about times when I've said, hey, I know I said this, but I didn't mean that. And it's like, I don't. I've had multiple situations and it comes down to a lot of things to culture, to how much power you have, frankly. So if you are the owner of a PR agency that like channels all of the major news from the top tech startups that anyone ever wants to know about and I'm a journalist, I want to maintain a good relationship with you. So if you told me, hey, this needs to be modified, I'm not gonna say no to you because I still want you to send me news before you send to the other publications.

38:00So you understand that. There's also cultural nuances. If you're doing press in Brazil or Latin America, things tend to be a little bit more lenient because people are much more like relationships driven. So they're like, okay, it's fine. We'll make a change. And there have been cases where I emailed journalists who are kindly and maybe I didn't have the relationship or maybe they just disagreed with me, which is totally fair because they have a job to do and they're trying to tell the truth. And they didn't want to make changes. And I wreaked havoc and probably lost some years of my life in the process.

38:27We had one case where we were doing a global launch with Duolingwant. I was doing all of our PR myself, which meant that I had like a little like spreadsheet that had like 20 tabs, one for each country. Like we were doing global. So I had like journalists and editors, all these different countries that I was managing. They did not know that CRM's existing like online with this already. And so then we're doing this massive global launch. I had to manage so many different pieces and then some random journalism were completely random broken bargo I remember one case where someone in Pittsburgh broken bargo and another case where someone in India broken bargo What do you do when they break in barrage?

38:57You just say fuck it. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, what do you charm? I would try to rate renegade back in as kindly as possible and then as Firmly as possible and in some case it you're just gonna have to really hope that the journalists You really care about are not gonna see that embargo was broken and move on So I have two questions for you. One is, okay, you're on my team and you're doing this amazing work and I'm super happy. Do you know, I need to measure some form of success from your work. You know, we've got links to tech crunch and to Forbes and to whatever publication. How do we measure success of PR and actually align it back to the core business?

39:33It's really hard. And that's not a cop -out answer. And you have to, especially if you're early stage. So for duolingo, it was DAU's. Like, if we were actually able to get new users that became active users, that was our success metric because then we knew that we were reaching the right audience and that, you know, the story that was told was the story that we needed to tell in order to get people to download and try dueling. So that's what really mattered, but it depends, right? So if you're trying to raise funding, then it's like, you're able to raise funding, or if you got people who are referencing the stories on a regular basis, like I heard about you through this, or I heard about you through that, like you could measure that if you had like a landing page for something like how did you hear about it?

40:08It's like, that could be helpful, but someone that is going to be intangible because you grow your brand equity over time. And that can have a huge impact on your business. But when you're a startup, you don't have the luxury to just be like, oh, I'm just building this brand equity and we'll see where it goes. In terms of, like, old people saw it. When you are published in TechCrunch or anywhere I'd like we discussed, what did you do then? What did you get? You know, the Juelingo founders, you know, the founders of Tumblr. Do you like, hey, we're in this tweet it, LinkedIn it, Instagram it, like, how do you help with that distribution?

40:37That's such a great point. Because it's so important. I think that this is so relevant because if you're trying to build a brand which you shouldn't be because again, it's about how you make people feel. Not about whether the thing that you're making is useful only. If you're writing social media copy to get people to do something like, for example, to share the story that was published on TechCrunch, if you just say, hey, please share this, you can with your friends, but with people who don't care, they won't. So first, those relationships matter. But then second, if you're able to write copy in a way that makes people care.

41:02And then it's always about the mission. Like, do we want to get behind this mission? Then you would share this. and that's easier to get buy -in than just like to ask to get someone to share something. I think another thing is removing friction from the share. Most people don't share something because it's painful to share. Say, what's your hand or what's the link that you want me to share? I think you're absolutely right. If you're trying to get someone to share a message, you make it as easy as possible for them. And so what that means is, first of all, you're going to write a really nice message asking them to share.

41:28And then you're going to write exactly the message that you want them to share. That is personalized. Yes, and is personalized. And you need to be really smart about how you write that message because you need to remember that this person is posting that on their personal profile. So they are sending a message to the world about who they are based on what they're sharing. And so you need to think about the words that you use and the image that you use in as much as it affects them there. So with latitude, one of our biggest growth levers was when we started admitting, started founder. So we work with early stage started founders in Latin America.

41:58I started admitting them. We created this token that said like I was selected to be in latitude. And then I I wrote the copy and I almost feel bad, but I tell our latitudeers that this was our tactic. It feels manipulative, but I wrote the copy in a way that makes them seem amazing to their audience. Like, wow, you are so impressive and also really humble. So it's like a really perfect humble brag that makes us look even better. Because then we had like all these amazing sort of founders because we had our friends join originally say, I got into latitude. And suddenly people are reading their things saying what's latitude?

42:27And if this person got into latitude and they're proud of it, then it must be really great. And now they're checking out what latitude is and then they're signing up. And so making that easy with the personalized image of them, like I just got into that too, it helped us a ton. I think YC have done this the best. Every Twitter handle has YC W21. YC W, it is the value or sign of accreditation. Also, make it super short. I get some that are super long. I get high random and then they're too long, terrible. Also, like for me, I don't know about you. I put Hygiene, hope you're well, and enjoying the sun in Miami.

43:02personalized you're like, oh wow, how are you remembered? I live in Miami. And then I paced. And then by the way, I always do a PS and then I put hope to Play football with your husband next time. And you're like, oh wow top. I like he's really I've actually not is taking about 30 seconds to do the top and tail But you're like, wow, that that Harry is such a nice guy 100 % and like when I was doing press for dueling on who were doing these global launches I was personally writing over a hundred emails at a time and it had to be within a window of time because this launch was coming up And so that's exactly what I would do at Hamzaqqa with like the links, all like perfect there, et cetera.

43:36And then the other thing I think you don't have to do this anymore, but it depends on your email client. Like select all, remove formatting and like redo formatting. I would do that one by one because otherwise you said an email and you can see that there was like copy -pasted stuff and then you've already lost credibility. That is terrible. The minute I see that, I might done out. I also never do this. It gets probably 50 press releases a week with like embalgoed news, just cold. The subject -wide embargoed news? They'll send me the press release and like an embargo and I'm like I never agreed to your embargo I've never spoken to you before and this is PR firms to do it.

44:11Yeah, it's like spam well my question She then is I get 50 PR firms a week in my inbox at least They are generally crap and I actually just 99 % dislike PR firms. I'm going out there and saying this one should found As what would PR firms will have an internal? I'm with you. I 99 % hate PR firms. If you can do it yourself do it yourself But I also work with founders who just don't have the time bandwidth or knowledge or relationships Then I would say hire someone who does who can do that those things for you and also by bonding even if you get a cheap PR firm There'll still be at best three four grand a month at best you can hire a 23 24 year old who's hungry as hell Chasing journalist on twitter DM 24 hours a day for the same amount.

44:55Yes That's a lot of what I was doing. Yeah, the advantages like you know the PR firms They already have the relationships if you don't know because you obviously have a nap for this like I had a nap for this Like Louise went on had a nap for this sometimes you don't during an engineer and well the best founders I know our engineers engineers just are gonna have a lot more trouble understanding how to make that happen So maybe then at that point it's it's worthwhile I would say hiring a firm But then hiring someone who can learn from the firm as quickly as possible. Is there any other massive mistakes?

45:21You see founders made with PR that we should touch on before we do a quick fire I think the biggest mistake is not understanding that what matters to you doesn't matter to the other person. Again, this goes back to everything we've been talking about, like in growth, PR, relationships, some just so court to human nature. You know, you write something that like matters to you. So if I am a founder and I'll write something that like is almost like so obvious to me because I've been entrenched in it for so long that I understand the problem so deeply and I'm already like talking about the solution.

45:45And I think that it's really impressive that I hired hairy stemmings or whatever and I put it in there. I'm like none of this matters to the person who I'm writing too. So you need to understand like how to communicate things in a way that really matters to people and that is not obvious even though it should be and you need to understand who you're speaking to specifically. So if you're writing to someone from like a science background or a tech background is very different and if you're writing someone from like a beauty or fashion background and you need to understand what's the angle that's going to peak their personal interest and if you take the time and you like actually make a list of the top obligations you care about and you understand what that journalist might care about they're much more likely to respond.

46:19Should PR be an ongoing effort or something that you actually do in static stages? Fun raising announcement, expansion into Brazil, new product? Is it continuous or quite static? You wanted to be a steady drumbeat if you can, because you want to stay top of my took consumers and then you can grow your equity that way. It's a lot harder to do, but it's super important, and then the more relevant you become, the more relevant you are, and that sort of feeds on itself. I'd love this chat. As soon as you show us like this, my favorites, because it's like, and she, your natural passions just go where the conversation goes and this is one of my favorites.

46:51And so I was just thrilled. I totally went for that one. I mean, I didn't even talk about growth, China. Like, there were so many things. But to be said, this is actually something that every single founder that I meet actually deals with. So I'm actually pleased because it's more applicable than the other topic. I think when people think about PR, they think about journalists and they think about like big media. But to me, PR is reaching anyone who has a big audience and getting them to share that with their big audience. And that shifts how you think about media and PR and news. Because especially with the world today where people are becoming their own media brands, you know, we're changing that.

47:24If you're able to identify how to reach that one person who can reach a lot people for free, that is PR. And so that means like influencers, micro influencers, or anyone with an audience like a school professor could be your influencer, a doctor. I totally agree with you. I'm in a set of short statement. You're going to give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yes. What tactics and growth have not changed over the last five years? Maybe a cop -out? I don't think it's about the tactic. It's about the framework of thinking. It's understanding what makes people take and what's the highest level of things you can impact.

47:53That is still the same. What tactics have died a death? This one died a death from the one, but people don't realize it is paid marketing and especially paid ads on Facebook. Unless you're really smart about how you're doing it and you know exactly like, you know, how you're going to scale this over time. It's a very palliative tactic because as you scale it becomes harder, they're less low hanging fruit It's super expensive and it's hard to depend on because once you're depending on getting users that way Then you can't stop and you sort of become addicted to it and then you're kind of stuck and again You're not focusing on retention, which is like really making something that really matters to people It makes sense in the beginning when you're getting people in the door so they can test understand like what messages work and don't and then also Getting to statistical significance But the second thing I was gonna say is again, it's more conceptual I think that every growth tactic, so quote unquote, dies when it becomes saturated.

48:39So at first, a growth tactic is really interesting because you've discovered something that other people haven't discovered and then you're able to max out. So like a really simple example is like those D to C brands that discover that you can put ads in the subway. It's so done, but like that was a growth tactic. They're like, oh my god, people are writing the subway and now we're putting ads in the subway. This happened like 10 years ago with like Warwick Barker, you know, and like Casper. Now it's no longer a growth tab because everyone's using the ads in the subway. And that's the same thing with notifications.

49:04People love to like talk about how notifications, there's too many notifications. No, it continues to be a girl's tactic, but it's not as innovative as it was before, but it will continue to be because with AI, we don't even know what's going to happen, and like things are changing all the time. And so you just need to continue iterating, just finding areas that are less explored allows you to reach results for cheaper. I always say to my team, if Mr. Beast to a running event you fund, what would he do? Just push your mind to that. He'll probably go around London and give $10 ,000 as to every single person he sees and then film them for a week.

49:34I'm sure there would be some interesting shit happens. The thing is, and Elif's as part of the podcast are not, I think that we're so obsessed with frameworks and learning from each other and developing things into a science, and that's amazing. And it's almost one of my weaknesses that I just don't have. That, I am a philosophy major with no master's degree who never actually studied marketing, who has only my experience in growth, but because I didn't know how to do PR, because I didn't know how to do growth, I was just coming up with things that made sense to me, and that has worked really well.

50:00What's the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams? Definitely hiring before product market fit. People are so excited by eb testing that they want to jump right in and I feel guilty about that because I do a talk for early stage founders about how Dueling or a b -testing and how we grew from 300 million users and then everyone was to jump into a b -testing But what you don't realize is that it's really hard to do that if you are not able to reach the physical significance And then founders start getting into the trap of Directionally statistical significance, which is no longer math or science and so then that doesn't make any sense So I think that's number one.

50:30The number two I would say especially for early stage and it's something I will disagree with some other guests you've had on your podcast is hiring a leader too soon because when you hire a leader they might be a little bit too removed to actually want to roll up their sleeves and try the crazy stuff that like might not make a lot of sense but could work because you're trying to get like creative. So as an example, Dueling will actually hired someone amazing who had a great experience in marketing who then hired me and they ended up keeping me and promoting me to head of gross because this person was great at coming up with ideas and then asking other people to do those ideas I was as crazy 26 year old who was just like throwing myself at whatever and trying different things and thinking You know what I can make us grow in Japan and I can message people on LinkedIn and they're gonna respond because I don't even know The limits that I have and so you need to find that great balance between someone who is super scrappy and willing to do whatever it takes But also has some baggage so that they can have a starting point that isn't completely random when they're trying to use things Let's do a final one.

51:28Let's do when you think about companies and these recently, they've been really successful. Which one has stuck with you and really impressed you? This is a really out -grout opportunity to plug my friend Mike Krieger, co -founder and CTO of Instagram. Mike and Devon are working on a new app called Artifact and it's disrupting the way that you consume news, which I'm really interested in, by just their lessons and scaling Instagram will be applied to this and I'm excited about it because I think that we don't know how to discuss news as a society and that's a really big problem because we never evolve.

51:56If we only talk to people who believe what we believe, it's very hard to change your mind and to understand why there are other points of you in the world, so that's a huge problem that we can solve to make humanity better. I had Kevin and Mike on the shows to discuss ourselves, fat and they were fantastic. Gina, I love this. As I said, shows like this where we just follow our passions is really why I do this, so thank you so much for being so amazing. I mean, one incredible and granular discussion, Now as I always love it when you really get into the weeds of the tactics, I so hope you're enjoyed.

52:24If you want to see more from us of course you can on YouTube by searching for 2 -0 VC, but before we leave you today, the single most important thing for 99 % of founders today is making sure that your runway will last. But to make your runway last, you'll really need control and visibility over your spend across your entire business. Latis, Zapier, and Notion all use Zip. Zip's modern intake to pay platform allows your employees to have one front door for all purchase requests. You get early spend visibility so that you can negotiate and manage your spend while handling approvals across finance, legal, IT and security from net new purchases to renewals.

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55:13Visit Jasper .ai -4 -2 -0 -VC for a demo. Your burnt out team will thank you. As always, I so appreciate your support and I can't wait for you in an incredible show with Rob Go and next view on Friday.