20Growth: How to Use Influencers to Scale Growth Insanely Fast | How to Optimise User Onboaring for Growth | How the Best Growth Teams Create Organic Growth and Community | Why LTV/CAC Models are BS with Ketty Slonimsky

0:00This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, in 20 Growth, we analyze how the best growth leaders build growth teams, run growth experiments, and execute at the highest levels when it comes to growth. Today, we have one of the best joining us in the form of Ketty Slanimsky, Chief Growth Officer at Palter, the platform behind apps like Flow, the number one female health app with 77 million MAU, Simple, and Zing AI, where she leads a centralized growth function across the portfolio. Before that, she was the first VP of product and growth at Helios X, a£900 million ARR bootstrap D2C health tech business.

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2:07Everyone wins. Start for free today at pendo.io forward slash 20 product. You have now arrived at your destination. Ketty, I am so excited for this. I've heard so many great things. I'm also an incredible fan of some of the apps that you've been a part of building. So thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. We were talking before about growth being kind of this weird discipline. I just want to start with like, when did you realize you were in growth? And what was that? Ah, I'm actually a growth leader and I love it. I started marketing, switched to product-led growth before they even called it product-led growth.

2:43It was called a conversion optimization like 15 years ago. Then I did monetization. Then I did some core product roles. And at some point, I started to go wide and broad. This is where one growth guru gave me an advice. You can do marketing and product. You should fit to one of them. And luckily, I didn't take that advice. And I said, I'm going to do just wide and broad roles. So I started to take user acquisition, product analytics, product growth as like one big discipline. And I called it growth. And I don't care how other people call it, but I call it growth. You can grow through product. You can go through marketing.

3:22You need data in order to get all those insights to grow through both. And this is what I call growth. Because before we were just chatting and you said a lot of people say they're in growth, but actually they're kind of in marketing. So for you, just so I understand, growth is an user acquisition. It's monetization. I'll call that product-led growth, which consists of activation, onboarding, monetization, pricing, packaging, paywalls, all that stuff around. Seria, which is like a part of marketing and product engagement could be easily a part of growth. In my previous job at HelloSex, I owned product as well.

3:58My question when I hear that in terms of the onboarding, the paywalls and everything that you mentioned there, is growth a game of incrementality, moving one to two percent in each of these different levers? Or is it a game of we should try something totally crazy and totally move the ball out of the park? I think it really depends on the stage. At the very beginning, you need to nail your core use case and build a growth machine around the core use case. Then you start the optimization phase, and those small optimizations, they're going to compound, and you need to make it really at speed. At some point, when you feel you nailed that core use case, you need to build defensibility, and defensibility you cannot build through those small moves.

4:41You really need to make a moat of this defensibility. Built a great product with clearly defined broad need that can expand into multiple use cases. Do you think anyone has defensibility on day one? A lot of VCs are like, oh, I'm worried that, you know, X could do this or Y could do that. Yeah, of course, Google could do it on day one. Do you think anyone actually has defensibility? And is it built through process? I think it's built through process. Like think about current companies in AI space, right? They build much of the defensibility through data loops. They sharpen that within communities, within their product.

5:18Users make prompts. They create things. They sharpen the mechanism of how this whole AI thing works. And if you nail that use case, you're going to become defensible because other companies need to run after you and after that data. And if you make it at speed and at scale, you can win the game. When we go back to this conversion and optimization, and you said data multiple times already, I think very much of science being in the weeds and being a very technical mind. When we chatted there just now, and I was like, no, no, we need to actually just like go to the show because I don't want to have this chat outside of the show.

5:57You said something really interesting about the profiles of people that can succeed in growth. Who do you think can succeed in growth, given what we just said? I believe in people who are hungry, smart, proactive. They want to win. They're self-reflecting because you can miss lots of opportunities if you don't do that. Smart people can figure it out. I think growth is about being analytical and salesy at the same moment. Why salesy? That's interesting. Think about onboardings and web onboardings that Palter nailed years before this space got overcrowded. it's basically a long funnel where I warm you up to purchase a product that you have never seen and only after that you download the app and start playing with that right so what is it it's a long salesy process up to 100 landing pages right you need to nail sales in order to warm up those cold leads to make them purchase what do you think most people get wrong when they think about that process?

7:03Most of the people, they just copy what exists and think that works for them. That's probably going to work for us as well. They don't think about the value and the uniqueness of their specific audience and product. It's so interesting. I hear so many times, we chatted about this again before, like first principles and frameworks in quite a mature, a well-articulated industry like consumer subs and growth both are in different respects people think that you can take frameworks off the shelf and just apply it to what extent is that true versus not true good luck with applying frameworks to mature products it won't work the web palter operates for example we're commonly going to take something that works for one of our companies apply that in like just the company we're incubating currently but then we're going to test the hell out of that to make it work.

7:59Palta is this kind of weird beast in a respectful way. It's amazing. But what is Palta for those that don't know? And then we can dive into the machinery of how you build incredibly successful. So Palta is a builder. We are a venture builder. It sits in the intersection of parent company and venture capital. We create the ideas and then we partner with founders to make those ideas happen. And we give them everything from the very beginning to make it scale really fast. So we give them growth, analytics, data infrastructure, finance, legal support. We build such category leaders as Flow, Simple, Lave, and Zing.

8:39Palt is going to hit 550 million this year in revenues. We grow each year 50 % and even more. We raised around 200 million from top tier investors. One of them is VNV Global and Palte is avocado in Spanish. So we are building health tech B2C mobile subscription. Got you. Okay, fantastic. And so when we think about that, I'd love to know, you go through lots of different ideas when you're creating new ones. How do you know, and you said about testing really incessantly, how do you know when to really go all in versus discard and let's move on to another idea. So the way Pelt operates, we look at red ocean categories where there are already players that are doing more than 100 million in RR and then figure out how to outplay them and to outbuild them.

9:32So we're going to create great products and scale really fast, put lots of capital so they can become the leaders in the space. Each company that cannot hit less than 100 million were not interested. So at the peak, we had nine apps. And at some point, we killed some of them. They either didn't nail the product market fit, or they were too narrow and couldn't hit 100 million. So now we stayed with four leaders. Can we go with one that didn't hit product market fit? And what did you learn? Let's go into a different example. Let's do the example that hit product market fit. It was super narrow. Let's do it.

10:11So one of them was called Weatherwell. It's a product that could basically foresee how you're going to feel based on the weather around you. It can be mood swings, headaches, everything. So we had terrific long-term retention, but we nailed just a very narrow segment of those who suffer from really tough migraines and cannot get out of the house for three days because of the weather. We couldn't scale it ever to 100 million. It had the border market fit. We were frustrated of killing something with rather high retention, but we needed to do that. Okay, so many things to unpack there. Number one, respectfully, why do that business?

10:56That doesn't feel like there's many categories. You said Red Ocean, people making 100 million. I don't know anyone making 100 million telling you about kind of emotions tied to weather. We said weather is huge, health is huge. Let's blend. Why the 100 million? That feels like a bit of an arbitrary number. If you can get it to 10 million and it's super efficient and profitable, why is that bad? Because each business is going to be compared to flow. And when you have flow in the portfolio, which is more than 75 million more, 6 million active subscribers, second year retention of 80 % and more than 65 % organic traffic, the numbers that companies can just dream about.

11:39You need to match those numbers with the new kids that you are raising, right? We have Simple. Simple is a weight loss management tool. They're going to hit 200 million in ARR. We have Zing, which is an AI-powered fitness coach with hyper-personalized and super-engaging workouts. They're going to hit around 50 million in an hour. They grew four times since last year. And we have Lavi. Lavi is an AI cosmetologist making face care accessible. They're going to hit around 20 million in an hour this year. They're growing 30 % month over month. These are actually really interesting products and really interesting stories.

12:20Zing, for example, again, sorry for like going off schedule. I'm just too interested. It's such a crowded market. And I'm always pushed all of these different products. And, you know, I'm pushed ladder to the extreme and 50 others. How do you succeed in a market where there's seemingly complete commoditization and no differentiation? So it comes to the way how we basically launch products and how we run the whole play. The way we operate. First, we're going to UXR. the area and see like if there is something there worth our attention. Then we're going to do some fake door tests. We're going to sense CAC willingness to pay.

12:59How the unit economics might look like at scale. If it's there, we green light. We bring a tiny team of two founders, commonly a tech founder and business or product founder. We're going to put a lean crew behind them, we're going to launch an MVP and build the core use case. This is where Palter Growth comes in. We're going to literally scale very fast the first use case. How we do that? We start with paid user acquisition. Commonly one channel is going to be meta. We scale to 3, 5k daily. This is where the algorithms start to optimize. And this is where you see true unit economics. Once it's there and we nailed it, then we're going to expand to the next use cases.

13:44We commonly start with web onboardings because you avoid 30 % fee. There is attribution there, which makes user acquisition more efficient. But there are things that people commonly don't talk about. The nature of credit card payments drive higher attention. And on web, you can charge more. This is how consumers receive pricing on web versus mobile. Now there is a catch around funnels. If you overinvest into the funnels and start obsessing about that instead of over obsessing about product, it gets you to the funnel business. And that's fine, but most VCs won't back that business. It's probably not a business that's going to go to IPO and build a multi-billion valuation, right?

14:29Though if you're really great at that you can run killer ua machines and funnels at scale and get to tens even hundreds of million in error how do you think if we go back to the start of that where you said hey we like to go to one channel we like to do paid and we like to see what works there and that just test out that unit econ in that first testing phase i'm always taught that actually if you need to grow your product early through paid it's not good it's not a good product it should be word of mouth it should be viral to what extent is that complete bullshit i think the times have changed so when flow was born they ran on purely organic we do just product we don't do monetization monetization ua came years after within the current products in the red ocean market i don't think you can live just with organic and organic is very hard to get so you need to start with paid bring users in see how the whole unit economics look like and if you may even scale that use case and if you have pmf and then see how you grow that business further what is good unit economics i know that's a really hard question to ask but like you know is a two to one ltv to cac ratio good does it need to be five to one what impresses you versus doesn't again it comes to like do you need to match flow numbers.

15:52Oh, we're talking about standalone businesses. So if we were talking about standalone businesses. If you imagine me being like an early stage founder, thinking through this, needing your help, that's how I think about it. I think when you just run paid, you need to think about payback around three months. And you can run with 140, 180 % for us. This is probably what I would be looking for. If you just do paid. at some point and very early, you need to get to organic. And this is what we start to discuss. You better build that and anchor into shareable loops. Well, for example, why Flow Partner Mode exists?

16:35Because women want to share their insights with their partners, right? Why running app might be super successful as they basically built around the habit of running marathons in communities. If you thrive into tribes and communities, you amplify organic far more than with single-use apps. Think about natural retention. So Flow has that natural retention where users come back month after month since being teenagers to like peri and post-menopause. And this is huge. This is how you become billion business. It's also unique though. and again i'm kind of going all script but in the way of like the use case is enduring for obvious reasons dating on the other hand sucks absolutely do you agree then that there are just inherently shit categories like dating where you go in out you get married now i mean you're gone you want to outsmart think about categories and product first and then think where and how you built your products instead of just, you know, fantasizing of building a business where there is no natural retention.

17:51What are other categories that have this enduring retentive feature that people don't think about? I think currently it's coming to workflows. If you're embedded into the workflow and each piece of your workflow, think about ChatGPT, think about other companies in the space, This is what builds your defensibility and that really tremendous retention. You are becoming very hard to replace. Think about work or something, right? And if you see it like in your email and search and other different tasks that you are performing during the day, and you use just that one tool, which is hugely embedded, knows everything about you and sits deep inside your data, this is what's going to bring your retention and defensibility.

18:41How do you think about the painkiller versus vitamin when we think about those? You know, you said there about kind of weight loss management app. What's simple? Simple. Simple. People don't like losing weight. It generally is like diet, exercise, change of habit. It's much easier to sell chocolate than it is carrots in many respects. It's much easier to sell GLP-1s. You know, I'm board advisor at HelloSex, which is GLP-1 company. And when you compare GLP-1s to habit management, it's unbeatable. People are lazy. People want to sit on their couches to eat junk and to become lean. It's a hard business of trying people to work out and to eat healthy.

19:29You need to have this inner motivation that most of the people don't have. So we were talking about the pain in the early stages there and actually the payback and the ROAS. fantastically helpful. I'm a founder listening to this and I'm going, okay, but I'm in a red ocean category and I'm competing against a simple or a flow or one of these apps. You don't have a chance. Yeah. We built unfair advantage. We built growth 100 million hour plus machines from day zero. The age of Palta is cross-pollination synergy between the apps. For example, simple playbook will double flows conversion the shared acquisition strategies that we use help us to scale new ventures with the same roi we get fantastic terms with all ad networks brace paypal it's something that small size and mid-size players cannot even dream about so you have cross referral networks between the apps so basically you get cheaper customer acquisition because a flow member will become a simple member and a simple no it doesn't work like that The way it works, so basically we can take tactics and playbooks from one app to another.

20:41Think that Flow is running thousands of experiments per year. We're going to learn out of that 1 ,000 experiments and apply them to other apps. Flow is rather big and they don't take big risks. So we can do something more risky in a small company, take those findings and roll out in the apps in the group. Is there an example that comes to mind of one where it was a risky experiment and it worked and you took it to another one? We introduced upsells, second subscriptions and third subscriptions, and we rolled all of that in the whole group. By the way, second subscription and third subscription, I don't mean here tiering.

21:22In the world where CPMs are very high and user acquisition is super expensive, you don't make a living from one subscription. you introduce additional revenue streams embedded into the product like extra value that you sell a second subscription and third subscription we do lots of upselling as well and we use all that those strategies in all the apps in our portfolio so just so i understand that i'm a venture capitalist so we're inherently naive and ignorant which is why we do what we do first subscription is like okay i'm a premium flow member okay and then a second subscription is adding my partner to it adding insights what is it so for example you're subscribed to get personalized workouts right zing but we also sell a body scanner and you can get a subscription for a body scanner in addition to various upsells of workouts of recipes and other stuff that you're going to purchase from us at the very first minute you open the wallet got you got you so basically your first subscription does the payback and makes me neutral in terms of spend and then your second and third is basically profit absolutely got you how much of revenue do you want to be from second and third not sure i can answer that but let's say let's put it in a different way all the upsells gonna add around 20 to the ltb and you don't worry about like i feel a little bit pissed off when this happens sorry katie but it's like you know i've paid to come it's like private members clubs i've paid to come in some ridiculous amount and now you're charging me a ridiculous amount just to eat there the restaurant's free to go in do you know what i mean it's like but i'm doing that after a long web onboarding where i warmed you up and you're ready to open the wallet and you're already there and just a small another feature that i want you to purchase in order to be successful.

23:20Do you think people are doing the second and third subscriptions well today? No. Why? Palta has nailed all those tactics around web onboardings, payment infrastructure, and the whole sales piece of paywalls. Interpricing. We almost don't do free trial. We do interpricing, which is different. Upselling bundles and second and third tier subscription. Not many players in the industry are doing that. Some players that are, Noom, they nailed that as well. But for me, and Voltech. Sorry, you said you don't do free trials. Why not? With free trials, you bring free trialists, which is a very weak signal.

24:07You want to bring payers, people who have high willingness to pay. And this is how you want to optimize your algorithms. But I'm really put off by the, like, enter app, paywall. And I'm like, well, yeah. It's not an app. We do web onboardings. How much of net new subscribers is web onboardings? So 80 % will be coming through web in all our companies, apart from Floor, where it splits 50-50. That's amazing, though. Well done. Because the cut is just brutal. I mean, the Apple cut is insane. Absolutely. We invested in a company that does, like, rooting away from Apple. just as like it's and it will be a great company there are some pros and cons to do web onboarding think about web onboarding and if you don't have a free tier you might never grow to become a flaw so it's like a game with pros and cons it's a game of you can bring pairs with high willingness to pay and nail this whole unit economics and user acquisition but you won't get mail you won't have that word of the mouth so better to blend both tactics in both worlds by the way floy's still doing the free trial floy's different product i'm so interested you don't do free trials because it brings like lower quality people who don't have the willingness to pay when we see the paywall there's many different options for paywalls do you have like a strong opinion around it's good to give people four options just give people one option highlight one option and put most recommended on it any lessons around paywall optimization or preference the best lesson gonna be put a pm nails monetization from day one and test the hell out of that you need to test probably to run like 1000 experiments on the paywall to get what's right for you so you use paid to get a shitload of traffic in see what the traffic does we apply best practices from Paltor portfolio and then we test the hell out of it.

26:05They pay, they come in and the trouble with most AI apps today is if they do get there they just churn within like seven days. Is there anything that you've learned in terms of onboarding and retention in those first user actions that people don't think enough about? I think it comes to the nature of the product. You need really to solve the need to do that in a fascinating way where you nail the first use case. You build the whole onboarding and activation around that use case and not something fluffy and broad. And only after that, you expand to more use cases. The second one going to be the whole activation, what most of the teams many times forget.

26:49I just sell premium. And then what I care about is how do improve cancellations and churn, but what happens in between? You need to activate your users on the subscription. Users don't remember what they really managed to buy. They don't remember your features. You know, we run a super interesting survey at Flow, where we asked our paying customers if they use feature X or they use feature Y, if they engage with that feature, if they enjoy that feature. And you know, the answers were around, I don't really distinguish between the doctor's report and this and that insight oh i couldn't find it oh i didn't know it really exists so if you don't do a good job around taking the user and really explaining them why you should be enjoying your premium and what you paid for then don't be surprised why the users churn and now let's do like something truly amazing to get them back when they just are pissed off of your product right i I think it's one of those ones where it's a bit like email newsletters where people often don't send them very much because they're afraid that when they do, they're going to churn.

27:56And it's like people don't like to actually show you the depths of the product because they're afraid the more that they hassle you and go, hey, look how amazing it is. The more they remind you of the subscription that you have. Do you know what I mean? And that's the worst thing ever, I find. When it's like, oh, I don't want to remind them of the subscription. It's like, ah, that's not a good thing. You want to remind them that they have a problem and we are the best solution for that problem. This is what you want to do, really. I totally agree with that. when we think about going back to this kind of hey we test and we iterate and we use performance marketing to get a lot of people in and then you said it's about that ability to transition to shareable loops organic shareable loops how do you know when it's the right time to go from paid let's smash meta with three to five i'm not smashing meta to be honest with three to five grand a day but you're spending on meta with three to five grand a day to hang on a minute We need to do shareable loops and it needs to be more organic.

28:48It needs to run parallel. Once you nail your first use case, you'll have that like unit economics. You start to scale. You need to start working on your product and those shareable mechanics within the product. But you cannot get any mechanics if the product is weak and if it's not built on the natural loop. Otherwise, it's just the road to nowhere. What do you think about growth loops? everyone talks about a growth loop and i'm like is this just another silicon valleyism of frameworks and what does it actually mean to you and if i'm a founder trying to build a growth loop what does that actually mean you know i'm a big fan of that theory when i work with founders and i work with founders for like more than 20 years and with different founders i find it very hard to explain and I find myself very much talking about funnels and creatives tailored to the use case.

29:46And this is what easy and simple, basically, to deliver the message that I managed to deliver. And at the end, it doesn't matter how you call that. It's like building that UA engine that can scale. When you build a UA engine that can scale, most for the last few years or 20 years has been SEO. We're seeing that really move and change. Given the dominance of web for you, how do you think about the transition away from SEO and how that changes your strategy? Part of it on to SEO. First of all, the best organic you can get is word of the mouth. And this is where you should aim. It's like building the great product that solves the problem and brings other users in.

30:30This is what Plo does. With the rest, I believe the current opportunities lie within communities. building those communities where the users are. Discord, Reddit, YouTube following. I'm not a fan of talking about like, you know, SEO, AO. If one going to replace another, probably yes, probably no. Not all the companies are built for SEO and for good SEO. You need to be in a specific niche probably to build some programmatic SEO. For B2B SEO or AO can work. In our niche for health tech, This is not a strategy to go. Word of math does wonders for your unit econ. When we go back to LTV and try to understand that unit econ, the hard thing is we're an early stage company, as you said, we're testing one channel, three to 5K.

31:19I don't have LTV. Like, how do I figure out unit econ when I'm really early? And when you're testing new ideas, you don't have 12-month cohorts. What do you do then? We use the cohorts we have, apply Paltos LTV models, and try to figure it out. But we keep that space, meaning I know that if currently I'm looking at, let's say, Roles 140, tomorrow when the real numbers come up, it can become 110 or even 90%. You need to think how you make it really smart and don't try just to be at the surface of 100 because tomorrow it can be much lower. Can you take me to a time when you use Palter models, but way overestimated where it would be?

32:08And what did you not see? So we did it with one of our companies. We thought that we are someone in the area of 114. The real data start to come. We realized very quickly we're around 110. We start to bring different channels in and different channels can change a lot your LTV. For example, TikTok that brings like very different type of users. Then we realized in a few weeks can go under 100. And we start to rethink how we make this whole thing work. You said TikTok brings in very different users. We find this too, just for our core shows. Given they bring in, to translate it, a lower quality, much more high churning user.

32:54And actually often have zero impact at all. We have videos with 25 million plays. And they bring in like 12 subs. I mean like, and we have videos with 2 ,000 plays that bring in 50. I mean, is it not worth then doing this kind of junk food short form of low quality? I think it's worth. Palta commonly works with Meta, Google and TikTok. Those are three channels we try to nail within each company. Sometimes it takes us a while to nail that. For example, with Flow, it took us a year to unlock TikTok, which we scaled tremendously this year. What did you do to scale it and why did it take long? TikTok is a game of creatives.

33:37With TikTok, you need to launch around a thousand of creatives per week to make it successful. Well, pause. A thousand creatives a week. What do you mean by that? We are playing a very different game in order to scale the way Palter scales and Palter spends hundreds of millions as a group on user acquisition. so as a centralized growth function we build the creative factory where we launch around hundreds of creatives per week and with ai it becomes thousands can you talk what does actually hundreds of creatives a week mean does that mean hundreds of short form videos we're probably going to split it into 70 30 where 70 gonna be like the permutations of the old concepts that work 30 are new form creatives fascinating it can be videos it can be static don't underestimate static for example floor is 50 i think static what do you mean so what do you mean static creatives like static ads not videos wow and it's much easier to produce those much cheaper as well and you can produce that with ai that's so smart that you do the permutations on what worked before of course yeah i've done this on linkedin a lot we basically have like my top 20 linkedin posts and then you can just do i mean obviously put it in chat gpt and say hey give me three variations and then schedule 60 days worth and it's basically guaranteed viral ish bangers so basically the creative and the ad is the hook the body and the cta right and you can play with the hooks so you can just take the body and think about 30 hooks for the same body and then like 30 permutations of the cta and this is how you get to that crazy number then you get like all dimensions possible and this is how you win so on tiktok you need to have three times more creatives than on meta wow and you need to work really with like tttc or their creators marketplace do creatives in-house blend them and this is how you win how do you use ai to take a hundred creatives and use to get a thousand so basically we work with like you know me journey vr and it changes a lot it does of course like you know on a weekly basis you can replace the tools basically the idea is to have a very strong team that amplifies those tools someone here who is like on it someone who is saying, cool, so now let's test this.