20Growth: How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprise, How to Assess "Bets" in Growth; Which to Take and Which to Not with Gonto, Interim CMO @ Vercel

26:28How do you provide enough value in a bottoms -up motion, but also not give away too much? There's that, how much of free meme is too much to give? On this, I do believe in data. What I've done in the past is once you start getting some users try and use your product, you'll start to see clusters of usage. So I've done like a clustering algorithm based on usage of the products, where you start to see how features clustered with each other on usage. Once you see that what I typically try to do is, each of those clusters is one of the plans. But I always remove one or two features that are very useful from one cluster and move it to the next.

27:07As an excuse for people like, okay, I start to use the product, I use this, this, this, this, now I need this extra one. Oh, for that extra one, you need to get to the next plan. Once they get to the next plan, they're like, okay, I'm paying, So let's see what are the other things. So I start using them and again, they need one extra one So we're thinking about clusters, but with everything but one could be a good way to think about how you move People from free to sell service to committed these or enter bracelets You said to me before about anti -retention patterns What is an anti -retention pattern and and how do you find them come to when I think about anti -retention patterns.

27:45I think about them as things that we try people to immediately drop of the product. Everybody that thinks about growth, they only think about one thing, which is what is the activation moment, what is retention, and how can we get them to that? What they typically never look at is what are the things that we make or break activation instantly. And I'll give you an example. At Outsyrio, one of the features we had was multifactor authentication. Now, Now everybody uses multi factor, but back then when we started 10 years ago, nobody knew what it was and it was very complicated. So what we realized was that anybody who implemented multi factor authentication in the first week stopped using out zero.

28:28Anybody who implemented multi factor authentication between month one and month one and a half was very likely that they would be retained. Why? because you were implementing outseering the first week and if in that first week you implemented multi factor and then you started to get errors things starting to happen and understand they were like oh this is not the product for me the feature was too complex for the knowledge they have of the product on those seven days we needed them to get embedded into the products for the month with other features and start how it works so they got the mental model and the mental capacity to say okay now I can understand what multi factories and implement that.

29:08That was key to not have people like lose them in activation retention. How we figured it out was we built a dashboard of people who after one year were still retained in the products and comparing them to people that after a year were not retained in the product. And we built a table that was like all of the features and when did they implement it in the first day, first first three days, first week, first month, et cetera. And we compare the path of people to starting to look exactly on what were the path that were getting people to lose the motivation at that exact time. Dasa. It has somebody.

29:47Can I ask one thing which is like, when we think about retention, I think often people like misunderstand numbers. What are like the retention figures that you really zoom in on? Like what is success for you? And maybe it's case -specific, But is it usage? Is it number of hourspan on site? What does that look like? To me, it's always about using the core value prop or what is the core value? Every week or every month depending on how what's the frequency that people use your product. But to me, retention is making sure they feel your value metric. They feel you main value prop all of the time.

30:21It's not about money because I think that if people are retained in the product, eventually they will convert. One thing they a big believer of, for example, is not just people using the product and being retained for work projects, but actually a lot more for personal projects. Because if you get the user to use you for a personal project, all the time, that means that whatever company they will go, throughout time, they will always remember you and try to use you. Thinking about that and taking that into account when you think about retention is key. A lot of consumer subscription apps have quite a lot of payables, where they really sometimes times don't let you continue in the app at all for any functionality unless you pay.

31:02To what extent do you feel that has a case today or should that not ever exist? Should you always give the user something to play with? I don't think that that should exist anymore, like the idea of a paywall without you using it. I think it's very hard to get people to experience things. I may be willing to experience. If you explain me a feature but I cannot try it out, then tell me if I like it, if I we connect with it or why. So to me, it's more about you let them use anything. And then once they are hooked, if they're over quarter, you ask them to pay or you remove the access. For example, one thing I always think about when thinking about what to give access and what not to to meet, they come access to everything.

31:45Once the trial ends, maybe you give them access read only so they can still see what they've done, but not create new things to give you a specific example. I would Ciro even though we had plans we had enterprise you could do everything all the time There was literally no way to cut features the only thing you could do is cut the entire account because most Enterprise will not use it if you don't have a contractor SLA they would still eventually pay and we were talking all the Free trial we were talking all the no access to feature but I wasn't true you could use anything and in reality what happened was that once a quarter we went and looked who were over quarter, meaning using extra features, extra things that they wouldn't pay and we will ask them to pay.

32:28And because they were already hooked on it, because they were using for six months, even though we told them they couldn't, most would eventually pay. So this is how we do bottoms up, real customer adoption at the product level. In terms of top down, not easy to do either, very few startups to top down while. Now, where does so many fuck up gums? I think that if you're doing bottom zap, if you cut product level rolls, most companies think that top down is something completely different. But it's a new silo, it's a new thing that they need to do. But in reality, you should do them combined, you should do them together.

33:06What do I mean by that? Let's say that you cover products and somebody from Coca -Cola that is a developer from Coca -Cola just signed up for your product to try it out. Instead of doing outbound to a cold company that has never known of you, why don't you do outbound to directors of engineering or directors of product or bps of engineering of Coca -Cola and you can tell them hey somebody's using the product from Coca -Cola why don't you check it out and talking about where to get what say color she before I think using biases for this is key. One example that I'll give you is again let's say a developer of Coca -Cola is using the platform.

33:43You start seeing the developer of Coca -Cola starts using more and more features and is still retained for some time. That means likely they will want eventually to buy it. So you should get that developer, convince the rest. What we do at that time is we start doing ads for directors of engineering, director of product, BPs of engineering and BPs of product. We don't do the ads to them because we want them to click them. I don't care if they click them. It's more so that they see our brand and they see the ad because of availability bias Then if the developer breaks up our company to the director of engineering They will be oh the name sounds familiar.

34:22They maybe don't remember where but because it sells familiar because of availability bias They will trust us more so thinking about how to we help them is important You could also build a how to convince your boss kids which basically gives that Coca -Cola developer a message that they can send in Slack or in teams, to their manager, to help them convince them why they should do the product. Or you can potentially give them examples of reference that they can talk to other companies, or white papers on billboards with buy, and white forester says that our product is fantastic. But Arling people, or helping them talk to others and doing outbound, combined with the bottoms -up old motion that you already have, is where you likely will.

35:03So number one, I had the founder of slice the like SMB restaurant software company on and before he raised money He parked a van with slice on it outside the VCs office for two days. So he'd say hey, I'm from size He went oh, I see you guys everywhere. I love that in terms of old school The second thing I'll just say though is like when you think about arming people with a message for their boss I go granular because people love it unless and especially in his granular What should it say in that message? It should say the benefits to them, the benefits to the company, because everyone has different goals.

35:38How do you think about the best way to sell it up? I think that for those cases, I would always start with what's the benefit for them. I'm a big believer that you come to be specific. Most marketing that exists right now, full of crap and full of shit. People like to put three objectives per noun, and they use what I call mashing words like seamless. They say nothing. So I think specificity will always will. The first part of the message should be specific, how the product helps that user. Once you talk about that and that specificity, then you can say how that help to that person can actually help the director of engineering.

36:14I think you always start with something specific. Last thing that I'll say on this is that it depends what the company size is. If you're selling to an enterprise company, I think what Gardner, Forester, say matter because they are like the analysts. So in those cases sending something like a Forester total economic impact like the ROI white paper is very useful. If you're sending to Estora they don't care what Gugner is saying. For them it's more about how can this product make me more unique? Make me ship something that the rest doesn't come. So thinking about who you target too I think also changes slightly the message.

36:53How do people do demos really well and what's important with demos. Couple of things on that is number one, I think, if you can arm the user to do a demo internally, I think those things are really, really good. Where instead of doing a demo with a sales team, sometimes what I've done is give them something that they can demo, it's already packed up and it explains one of the things to try, so a day demo it internally, then sends. If an developer shows them that they got downloaded something that already works and it shows them to their boss on why and it's them putting their Authority their respect in line and sell the product for you So if you can find a way to do that, I think it's key if not I think doing at them on showing the product of course It's very important But the most important part they are is being able to talk to the person that you sell at their same language at outsyrio, but then our competitor was Octa.

37:54One thing that we did very unique when we were selling was taking enterprise architects to our sales schools. Why? Because the enterprise architects could talk to the customers or the prospects enterprise architects talking about how each of the services and the products connected with each other, talking about the voxies, talking about strategy. And that's something that a sales engineer or even an account executive cannot do. So if you can talk the language of the prospect in a way that your competition can't that is a unique value prop We were our demos all required at white boarding sessions where we white -boarded with them How to think all this for the shit how to think about us that value no other company gave because it was doing things that Do not scale but eventually if they do work you can scale them do you create that at class playbooks then because if you're gonna do whiteboarding and you're going to help add in a e -commerce site or you're going to help fast startups.

38:52You need domain knowledge to build in a vertical. Do you vert it close or do you just read up beforehand to get good enough? You need not verticalized but it's use case based. I think typically you pick I would say the main four or five use cases and you do become very specializing those four or five use cases that you sell to everybody. If you You can see what people use you for it, so you can pick what are the four or five most use cases. And when you see new ones come up, you can eventually carry SMEs to start doing some of that. I don't think about industries because sometimes three industries have the same use case.

39:30So that's what I think grouping them by use case makes more sense than just grouping them by a specific industry. So we're doing this and we're selling well into end price. Question is, should we be selling into end price at all? I often find that actually SMBs is such a deep market. We just released a show with the founder of HubSpot. HubSpot have built a $28 billion company through SMBs alone. So the question I have is when's the right time to scale in to enterprise? When I think of enterprise and mean market, more similar to themselves that just like SMBs on the other side. When I say most self -service or prollyrolls companies, eventually become mid market or enterprise.

40:15If you look at all of the companies like Atlashans of the world, like the Twilios of the world, Otsido, or even Perseille, most of them will end up happening in these stats. 80, 85 % of the revenue comes from mid market enterprise. 15 % come from SMBs, but at 15 % is thousands and thousands and thousands of accounts, and the other one is maybe a few countries. So eventually I think it happens to all of them. What I think is important there is when to think about this, there's not specific moment for all, but it's more about when you start seeing that mid market or enterprise companies are starting to sign up to your products and they are basically starting to see interest.

40:55So when you start to see that interest, I think it's out doubling down on those so you can start building that. I do agree with you that you can potentially create a business from SMBs. I just think it's a lot harder to be honest because enterprise or mid market you don't need that many customers on one side. On the other side it's a different game because if you come up with a B and you sell to SMBs that means that at most typically each SMB will give you a small revenue per year. That means that if they give you a small revenue you can invest very little to get them. So the tactics that you can do to get them from a marketing sales perspective are very different to a mid market or enterprise, maybe it's mostly ads or you can use some type of content but you can't do a lot of high touch stuff like Michelin Stardiner, like going to a yacht, like starting to go to some of these big conferences and stuff like that.

41:46So I personally think most companies end up going to something that is mid marketer enterprise just because it's easier. It's easier to spend money to get eventually bigger companies than trying to spend very little to get a lot of them, you have to really nail a need and a use case for a big amount of people to succeed in SMBs. In enterprise, if you can hit a need on a few companies, and have a lot of money, you can maybe be equally vig as an SMB focused company. Gontar, I have a problem with some companies I'm invested in a lot that I see, where the cost base that they have to acquire customers, to look after customers, customer success, is very high enterprise level, but the revenue is absolutely SMB level.

42:34So my question to you is like, and they respond to me and say, well, they're gonna scale with time. And it's the PLG motion, they're gonna add more to it. How should I respond to this? And when is it valid and when is it not? To me that question there is how much time like if they take more than a year I would say to expand to a really big deal. It's likely never gonna expand like that's number one thing Second thing that I would ask them is what are they doing to actually get the deal to expand? You can foster them if you don't foster that it won't just happen and I'll give you an example at outsydo, a lot of times we had a very small land, like 30k land.

43:16But then we actually asked our champion to invite other people from inside the company that could potentially use us for a workshop. We then sent our dev world team there to do interviews to talk to them and to convince other champions to use us and then try to get them to acquire us. If you're not doing that, if you're not trying to generate other business in other business units, I don't think you're doing enough and even though you say they will come, they will not come. If you're selling to an enterprise, they will not come. You need to take action to get them to expand. I think that's something that is very, very important.

43:54If they just say that they will come, that's the lie. It's like saying, now the product just sells by itself. You don't need to do anything else. Sometimes taking action can lead to mistakes. Can I ask when you think about big mistakes or misunderstandings even? I think people understand the product complexity that's required to go from an SMB product to a full license enterprise product. What are the biggest misunderstandings you see startups make when thinking about scaling into enterprise? When people think about scaling to enterprise, they think it's an unenough switch. They think like, okay, we were selling to users before we were bottom -stop now we're going to send to enterprise and when you send to enterprise you forget about who your users were if you forget about who your users were which was the vase you eventually go out of business I have like one great example for this I think is new relic new relic was the king of observability for developers they targeted they go out of business And this was the day they just kept up.

44:53Now, they didn't get it got out of business, but their market cap was shit compared to the past. I think they got bought by a private equity. And they were poised to be the data log. They were data log before data log, basically. Every developer was using them. They were connected to Faroq. Everything was fantastic. But then they were like, okay, when I focused on enterprise. So then they started to get a sales team and started to sell to directors of engineering to the director of product. When you become and you start selling to an enterprise, the sales is different. When you send to a user and you do bottom -sup, you send an experience.

45:26You send how they use the product, how they feel about it, how that makes them faster, how they make them better. When you send to enterprise, you send checklists. Companies and enterprise will do like an RFQ, like okay, let's get a request for quote. These are the features that I give and they give you a checklist of 200 things that they give you. Because whoever is working in an enterprise has a very comfortable job and they do not wants to be fired, what's the easiest way to justify not being fired? They cannot justify experience, they can justify checkbox. So what they will do is look how many of my 200 checkbox are checked by each startup.

46:01And if I check the boss they will buy me. And in the beginning, that will always work. So then in the new relic case, I imagine they were setting a lot because they were building a lot of features so that it works for that checklist that they prospects. How? What they didn't realize is by adding all of those features to hit the checklist, they added a lot of bloats in the product that bloats made the experience be a lot worse. When the experience became a lot worse, developers stopped to use it. What new relic for God about was that the enterprise, they were having this checklist conversation with enterprise because a developer brought it up to that enterprise in the first place.

46:41When they focused only on bloat and checklists, they closed a lot of enterprise customers that they had in the pipeline, but they stopped getting new customers, new prospects in the pipeline because now the experience was shits, it was bloated and now the developer wanted to use it. And at that point it breaks. If you want to become enterprise, you need to add some of the checklist features, of course, but you should never forget about the experience because if you forget about the experience, the user will never bring you up again and then you go out of business. Help me out, you've sold multiple different products, top like bottoms up very successfully and then lay it on top down.

47:20What do the top down care most about? Is it security? Is it cost? Is it cost saving? What are the top priorities that you see most? I think there's two main things that somebody who is an enterprise cares about. Number one, I want to buy something and not get fired because of it. I want to keep my lovely beautiful job that is 9 to 5 and I don't need to do much more than that's it. The second one is I want to get promoted. Will I get promoted if I buy the software because it helps my team so strongly? I think that humans are mostly egocentric in the beginning. They have ego and that's the main thing to be honest with.

48:01Why do they care about security and privacy and compliance and gardening and forestry? because it's ways to prove that if the product doesn't work or if I made a mistake, at least my mistake was validated by this governor and his forester and his things. So I always see it as a push between the fear of getting fired with my desire to be promoted. My desire to be promoted will push me to try new things that other people hasn't tried. Because if I try and do the same thing as others, I will not get promoted. It will not be different. I'm doing the same as everybody else. However, if I try something new and unique, maybe it gives my company so much that I will get promoted.

48:40But at the same time I'm scared. So to me it's playing with those two things on thinking about who will take what I want so that they are promoted, who will be so scared that I will just pick the status quo. And that's the fight that you need to push when you're selling to a other price. You said there about new disruptive willing to take risk. You said to me before that you should think about the CTMO role for PLG companies, CTMO role, just for everyone listening. What is this role and how do you see it? Why should I have it? To me, CPMO, I got it like Chief Technology Marketing Officer. If you look at most companies right now, they are all grouped the same way and they have a CRO that typically has marketing, customer success and sales only in up to them.

49:28When you're doing a marketing led company or a sales led company, of course, that makes sense because if it's marketing led, then marketing starts sending you something. Eventually, they will send you to sales and then sales will close it. If you're doing a sales led company, sales is doing outbound to the people that they know and they need help with marketing to send them specific things. By having them together, it removes silos and it makes the experience better. The work we're moving to with more product growth with more bottom -sap with more people trying new things I think the links that are the most important right now are Marketing and products together not sites and marketing why because when you think about marketing What marketing is doing on their website is they are promising what your product will be about then because there's no face People will click on sign up and then they will use and try your product That means that the product's job is to prove marketing slaves.

50:25Your marketing slaves are in the websites, the products will prove them and show you the value. So then marketing and product need to be intertwined and work really, really well together. Because the promise has to be the same of the values that you deliver. Because if you over -promise and enter the river, you're fucked. Because people expect one thing and that's not what they are gonna get. So coming those two teams together is key. Can I just jump in there? So just again, categorize possible. Remove the silos between marketing and product. What does that actually mean in reality? I bring marketing into product reviews.

50:59I remove titles. What do I actually do? For example, one thing that I try to do there is I try to, instead of coming a separate growth theme, I try to come a growth theme in marketing that focuses mostly on driving activated signups. And I try to get a growth theme in product But as focus is mostly on retention and conversion, those two teams which end up expanding needs to work very well together and I think that the place where they both show in it is the onboarding and getting to activation. So at first step in the product where they get onboarded if they answer some questions and they start understanding is the most important breach the most important part.

51:39That part has to be co -owned by marketing and product where either team can make modifications but they have to get approval from the other side so they get to a better solution. Because if one team picks one then maybe they fuck up the experience. I'll give you a very simple example on this. And I would say that we wanted to get more people to contact sales. So what the marketing team wanted to do was add Indian boarding of people signing up. Something like, why don't you talk to sales now and clicking on talk to sales? Product hated that because that meant that people would not even go to the product and they would talk to sales, so they worked together on getting a better solution in the middle.

52:18What was the solution? If the person who is signing up is not a developer who was our user and is a director level, we can show the option. If not, we cannot. Unless it's from a very big company in which case we offer that option. So we got to a middle ground where most people will go through the product, but in some cases, maybe it is better to talk to sales, which is what marketing one did. That only happened because we created healthy conflicts between marketing and products and getting them to work together on that transition from one to the other. What's the hardest part of the transition?

52:56Where the people fall down and it doesn't work. I think the biggest problem is that marketing overpromises all the time and they will tell you that the product can do everything literally on the marketing website and then you go into the products and you cannot do everything in the marketing promised number one, number two, it's not that easy to understand. Number three, if it is, people don't know how to get to that. So that to me is one of the biggest problems because it's a matter of expectations. I expect the product to do something based on what marketing said, but it doesn't do that. So when my expectations are not hit, I'm unhappy, and I don't wanna use that product anymore.

53:31That's number one, number two is product. Even though product should be meeting with customers and understand a bit more about customers, I think sometimes they lose touch with reality. I work with so many companies where the product managers don't really know the user as much. Marketing has to know the user because they are in events. They are in trade shows. They are online and they need to send that information back to products and they need to work together on that. So on that you it also improves a lot more on your product building if you're closer to marketing. Because when we talk about these people, the hard thing is finding them gone too.

54:09And I think a lot of founders have no idea how to hire anyone in growth. Often this is the first time they've hired for growth. What is the right profile for a first growth hire? Should it be a big logoed person, a junior? What's the right first growth hire? I'm personally a bit believer in a term that I call it hunger for glory. I think there's people who have hunger for glory because they need to prove it to themselves that they can do it. I don't know why, sometimes because your dad has a lot of success and you want to have that success, sometimes because your life sucks when you want to kill it and you want to overcome that, sometimes because of something specific and that driver is what drives people to success.

54:50So I'm a big believer in trying to find people who have this hunger for glory. So if you are start up, in a lot of cases it's better to hire people that do not have the experience but they have the main characteristics that you need. For growth, I think you need somebody who is creative so they can think of other ideas. Ideally, if somebody understands your user persona very well, they are one of those types or something similar, so they feel related to them. If somebody who is competitive, so they want to compete and make it better, and they are scrappy, which they can just tie things around and make it work with very little time and with the least effort, so they try it out.

55:28That to me is the most important one. One thing that Dumis fascinating about DC stats, I always think about history is written by the winners. When you win, you can write about it. A lot of times you will see that Slack or even in ReForge, there's sort of frameworks. The framework is about like a growth loop. What a growth loop does, why you should care about it, Slack will have frameworks on how they implement it. But if you actually go to the companies where ReForge will tell you that still implementing that LinkedIn Implementing Rose Lips, that's LAP Implementing Rose Lips. When you go to the leaders in Slack and LinkedIn at those times, they will tell you they will not, they were not implementing Rose Lips.

56:06They didn't know what a Rose Lips was. They were trying to find creative ways to add other users and other people to come. But once they did it, they went back and they were like, oh, this is what we did. So we should write about it so others do it. So they were the winners, they get to write history. But at the moment when they did, they were not thinking all that's they were trying to come more creative more unique things that drove users and if that's the case then that's what you need to find it's those people when it comes to like ashi you mentioned in it the Playbooks the reforged case studies when you think about case studies in interview processes do you test out as skills that Creativity how do you think about that case study test in an interview process?

56:50I may be believer in doing we do we call that exercises, but it's the same as a case study I may be believer in them to be honest I think I learned more from case studies that from any other Interview I do to hire these people why do I call exercises is that you get to see people in action What I think is important about the exercises is to make them the most abstract possible if you make them abstract You're giving people a chance to reflect about them ask questions to well understand and then refocus on some to try to recreate it. If you give them something very specific because you want a very specific answer, that means that you're guiding your leading the witness.

57:29If you give something very structured to get a very structured answer, that's not what you want from growth. From growth, you want somebody who does something unique. So if you guide them to get a very structured answer, they will give if they give you that structured answer, they are clearly not the person that you want. In another case, is what I do is I do a very abstract exercise like we have this problem this is some of the interviews we've done this some of the data that we have what would you do to me it matters like we add them to our slack to do an exercise and to me it matters more what questions do they ask about that exercise what things do they want to know more of what things do they want to know less or what things have the research what things can they explain that we didn't maybe even know about before And a lot of cases, the end result does not matter.

58:15I don't care where they end on the case that you are the exercise. I care about what was their process, how do they think about it, what did they ask, and how do they arrive to that. To me growth is not just about their results, it's more about how they get there, because if the process and how they get there is good, they will eventually find a great result. Conta, have you made any hiring mistakes before? Yes, of course. Because what would you say your biggest harm mistake has been and what did you learn from them? A couple of things that I can give you is, for example, in El Ciro, we're on the company rule, because I had no experience in marketing.

58:47I thought that I had to bring a lot of people who had a lot of really good experience, good levels, good places and stuff like that. And I gave priority more to that than to what the person could do, how smart they were and why. In a sense, I ended up hiding because of the resume and what I thought we needed or what everybody else was doing And that was a big mistake Number one number two mistake is the opposites is at one point I hired all people that were exactly like me And if everybody is exactly like me then we cannot get more unique point of views or something that is different I think you need to hire on your weakness and get other people who are not your point of view one thing I always think about these, on the people that report to me.

59:34I always try to get at least one person that I don't like. Because if I don't like them, but they are smart, and they can get shit done. I will hate everything they say, but I will put my thoughts into believing them, trying to think about them, trying to think wider and coming with that. And that I think makes me a better leader and makes our team much better because we have a diverse set of opinions. Can I ask again to the point on Lee Learn from mistakes? When you think about your growth, I hate growth tactic, but growth tactic, growth whatever you want to call it. When you need my growth tactic mistakes you've made, what's been the biggest you've made could be at the sell, could be at all zero, and how did that impact your mindset?

1:00:13I have two mistakes. Number one is easier. I would say the second one was harder. The easier mistake was we spent a lot of money on ads to drive signups, and we spent 300k but what we didn't think about then was we got a lot of signups but none of them activated or very few of them activated that meant that most of them weren't retained and then eventually they didn't convert so we just spent money to have a nice number to share with the word that then didn't help us to get the pipeline on their numbers very painful because it was in the beginning and we lost a lot of money what did you learn from that?

1:00:49How did that change how you The learning was that you always have to put as a KPI something that affects the bottom line and is not a vanity metric. Getting more signups was a vanity metric. What mattered most how can I get more signups that are eventually going to pay or are eventually going to get us someone that can pay. But we cared so much about hitting the number for signups that we have as an objective that we put in the CFO plan that we just spent the money for nothing. So to me, it was more about that than anything else. One thing that was related to this, another example I can give you related to this was we were working on the emails for the onboarding and for the product.

1:01:30And we were very proud that our open rate and our click rate was going up in all of the emails. So we knew we were kicking that as we were sharing about that. However, at one point in time, we realized that maybe we should care about something more down the line like activation retention. So instead of just looking at open and click rate, what we did was to 10 % of the users we sent no emails. To learn 90 % we sent the emails and we compared which of them were more retained. What we saw is that the people who got no email were 20 % more retained. So at that immediate time, we stopped and killed all emails.

1:02:06And then we went to learn what was going on. Why was our open and click rate increasing? Because we were better at having better subjects, better titles and more people to come and click on things. The problem was that the emails were so confusing that the more people were opening and clicking on them were like what the fuck are they telling me and then they were dropping from their product because of that. That was also a very hard learning on it, sometimes speaking vanity metrics just because everybody else speaks those as well. The gamification of metrics I think is the most dangerous thing in companies because also everyone can just like as you said gamify that you want signups great I'll put money and pay that so you want retention it's a different thing.

1:02:41Listen I want to do a quick far around, I could touch you all day going to. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts, does that sound okay? Well Fred, I said what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? I think it's the increased importance of marketing ups and engineering in marketing on the future. In the past, when you were thinking about marketing, you could just have STRs reach out to people as humans. They were sending emails, they were doing outbound and stuff like that. More and more now with GPD and other things, you can actually get engineers to scrap websites to look into things or use AI to look at intent sources and why somebody can buy you.

1:03:21You can then use fine tuned models of GPD to fully personalize emails in the name of an STR without a real STR. You can even, and we've created this, you can even create deep fakes of CEOs They didn't use something on a video on an email even though it's not really the CEO. So all of that requires marketing ops and engineering and as we get more sophisticated with AI and automation, I think marketing ops and engineering are one of the so key in marketing that it's going to change the entire landscape. With the commercialization or democratization of these tools like a HGN or Synthesia, the The technical knowledge required to do the deepfakes, to do the AI automated outbound is much less and it is not, I mean, yes, commoditized, but it is really available to everyone.

1:04:13Hey, everybody, with that, the problem is that if you do the same as everybody else does, nobody's going to value. It's like content now on SEO. I don't know if it's the same, but to me, it's the more unique you can make it, the more it will work with BIPI. So, to me what will change on that is you will still think I think need engineering and ops because as more things get automated and you get more ease of access to some of those, they will start working less and less every month and you will need to switch to something that still needs some type of custom development to be the one that is shown as a difference in the pack.

1:04:50What course strategy do you think will become more and more prominent? I think it's about using intent -based data. Like the example I was telling you before on Bersel, we're going to look into how many companies, how many engineers do they have right now that are using JavaScript? How many engineers are they guiding? At least on Java, and based off of that, guess if they are actually the first stack. But it's more and more trying to guess based on what's on the web, what's in different places, where can you find information to do this intent based outbound so that they are hyper -persona nice, hyper -clear for that specific use case and to cause something at basically based off of that has an increased conversion.

1:05:33What's the biggest mistake you see first time founders making growth? The biggest mistake that I see is that they start very, very late if the PMF is very strong. I've seen enough companies that have a very strong product market fit and because of that in their beginning they just start getting a lot of revenue because companies care and care and care. Eventually they get so much revenue that is very hard for them to continue to double. And at that point now they need to start building a growth team and an ops team and engineering team for that and stuff like that and it takes them so much time that maybe they miss a year or they miss a few quarters or they are slightly fucked.

1:06:10So I see a lot of that as well as I see a lot of people focusing on growth before PMF. Thinking about the right timing of when to do growth is key for founders. I also just see people thinking of growth as like this like magic pill for whatever problem they've got. Tell me final one, what's the most recent or recent growth tactic that you've been most impressed by? One thing that we've done with Gurg, one of our customers recently that I'm very impressed about, is the power of sponsoring YouTubers for driving growth. The first thing I would do was what every other company that I know did it, which is we went to find their really known YouTuber and we paid them to do an entire video about us, a entire video about clerk.

1:06:53When we did that, that had literally no effect. That didn't work at all. One of the ideas that Nick had, the head of marketing here, was doing something different, where instead of paying one video, maybe we could pay four or five videos. And instead of paying them to highlight us as the main thing, as the main focus of the video, what they would do is they would build an app, they would build any type of app, and as they were building it, they would use Clurk without mentioning it and without talking about it. And then we would say that Clurk was puzzled in the end of the video. Because of that, that worked really, really well.

1:07:28Why? Because an influencer was talking about your products, it seemed as it was organic, because they didn't mention it, they weren't talking audio and they were just using it in that way. That created a curiosity on people on it. Why are they doing that? Let's go and learn it. And by getting people to go and learn it, they actually were more likely to try it out, mostly because they felt it wasn't supposed to, even though it was. I absolutely love that. And you know, actually, I asked this question always, and most people give really shit answers. That was a really good answer. Specifically, counter, I've loved doing this, you and G must have like the most enamored and like energetic discussions I've ever seen.

1:08:09You both are like you'd like having a 10 Lucas Aids, it's incredible the energy you bring. So thank you for joining me and I love this. Thank you so much for reminding, these were some of your fun, hopefully eventually we can do it again. I mean you have to give the man credit, the amount of energy he brought was just exceptional. If you want to watch the full video you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 2020 VC that's 20 VC on YouTube but before we leave it today, short form video has never been more important for your business. Social media managers, growth marketers, this is the single biggest opportunity you have today.

1:08:42Did you know Oli Pop took their sales from 3 ,200 ,000 million by doubling down on video? But wow, it is expensive to do well and it takes a shitload of time that was until captions came into the world. Honesty captions is one of my favourite tools, I use it here at 20bc all the time because it makes creating videos so easy and simple. They have the most incredible array of tools from advanced captioning, which I use for all the videos we do. To revolutionary dubbing tools, allowing teams to take one ad and repurpose it even into multiple languages, me and Spanish, it's a masterpiece. Those are my words, other people's probably think differently.

1:09:18You can also automatically cut out pauses, add relevant zooms, and generate custom royalty -free music and more, or with just a tap. Captions is used by over 5 million people and businesses, and it's the best! Try it out now at Captions .ai. And speaking of game -changing tools like captions, we have to talk about Canva. Canva is on a mission to empower the world to design. That is why they've introduced Magic Studio. Magic Studio brings together the best AI -powered tools for you and your team to help you redefine the way you design. Magic design creates custom designs for you in seconds. Just provide a text prompt or upload your media and magic design cross professional social posts, presentations and even videos.

1:10:03And something that I am particularly really love is magic edit. It lets you add to replace or edit your images with a single text prompt. It's incredible. Simply select where you want to see the change, write your prompt and watch as your image transforms. With Canva, you can realise your ideas with ease, start in -spired with over 500 ,000 free templates and a rich content library to help you and your team achieve their goals. Explore Magic Studio at Canva .com forward slash magic. As always I so appreciate your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode with the Trade Republic CEO and Criandum GP that led their round on Friday.