20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane

25:40But in growth, if you have something where you're able to like take a look at human psychology, just the right way, it's likely to work again. And the next company, because they're still the same humans. I gave you an example. I heard recently one company sent verification emails, but the product is not need verification emails. You don't need to click to verify your email, but they just tried. Hey, what if we ask people to verify the email? Does that bring the people back into the product? What if we do it regardless, rather than the product? And what if we sell it twice? We're going to have to verify the first time.

26:10It works. It works great. It's interesting to find that that is an example of something that is very replicable in almost any SaaS business. It's very easy to implement and it will drive your user retention up. What are the biggest mistakes you see companies make or do when it comes to activation? Generally, the take -y work -in -go for tactic like that one. and they tone it down a bit. I'll give you an example. You often see emails where they have this like almost toning cheek personal, like the CS person or like a sales engineer, making it look like the text is personal. It's wrapped in the HTML layer, which makes it very clear it's not personal.

26:51And I tell them like, you got to pick folks. Either this is a corporate email and it's corporate looking or this is a text based email that's made sent through Gmail, Now, which behavior are you trying to get your users to do? What do you want them to believe? Is this coming from a human? This is not going to be a human. They haven't put themselves in the shoes of the recipient. They don't think what's feeling it might try to create. So the biggest mistake is they don't think of the humans on the other side. They don't think of the psychology enough. Okay, so they don't think of the psychology enough.

27:23It brings me to my biggest challenge, so actually with growth and growth marketing, which is when you have horizontal SaaS products, it could be air table, it could be drop box, it could be any of these, it can be used by dentists, they can be used by product managers. And the use cases are so different, so to get messaging that resonates across that spectrum is so tough, how do you think about that horizontal product marketing being done well and resonating and getting a Ness like, or does she? You know what's fantastic? And so we live in 2023. And now you have AI products, you name it, all the ones you like love, and you can build personalized content with a scale you never dreamed of before, which is at a quality that was other achievable before.

28:03What people care, especially in horizontal products, is that you talk about them, their problems, their challenges. Actually, I might go back when I said just earlier, you asked me what was the biggest mistake. Actually, it's probably because that company's marketers talk of them and their product first. They don't talk about you, the audience and your problems. They say, hey, here's my product, here's what we do, here's our customers, here's why we are great. I know what, as a recipient, I don't care. I really don't care. I've got other things to care about in my day than like a random company I never heard about.

28:39But if you reach out to Harry and you have contacts in his business, what he does, what he loves and care, what challenges you have a really good assumption that he's facing right now, Now it's much more likely that you can peak his interest. So these days, with large language models and injected data about his is a dentist, what's the size of the dentistry? Well, they're based all day in the mission in SF. You can start being extremely specific and relevant. And relevance creates reciprocity. Respiracy gets you responses. Can you do some part of that for me? Relevance creates reciprocity. Respiracy gets you responses.

29:18Yeah, I'm straight that down. There are two things that work when you try to reach out to someone that you don't know, a prospect, whether it's by email, whatever the communication channel. True value, your communication, let's call it an email, contains something really helpful, I can give you an example. And the second is reciprocity for humanness. They truly believe it comes from a human and thus they will feel compelled to respond because somebody else has spent some time. Let's unpack those two here. Okay, true value. Give it an example, gorgeous again, right? A support platform for merchants.

29:49Emergence sell, you know, these days a lot, of course, on TikTok, but also on Instagram. In certain, it's a major platform for merchants. And what we found out is that sometimes some customers, potential customers of the merchant of the bread posted negative comments on a brand's post. And nobody took care of that. We said, hey, that's a mess from the brand, but wait, can we scrape that? Can we automate that? We found out that we could. I guess we started scraping and automating the detection of negative comments on brand post and Instagram, sending it to the brand order, to the company order, to the marketing leader.

30:24This is hey Harry, love your products, but just let you know there's a couple of negative comments here on your posts and it's been 40 hours, you haven't responded and really you should. That's it. Don't talk about gorgeous, don't talk about the product. This works super -wide. When it's public, I'm not doing anything like, you know, it's easy, it's easy, it's like everyone can see it. True? It's true. You can see it in verify and click on the post, you'll find the negative comments, you know it's not me. And second, like it's helpful. Absolutely, you should take care about it. You should respond if you haven't.

30:54Right? You see those three things, the response you can have is thanks. Thanks for catching it. Thanks. That's it. Of course, I'll follow up to that email with an ask for demo. And of course, it will be compelled to give me your time. Because you would really be a douchebag, not give me some of your time, given that I found some mistakes that you made in your brand. All right, so super high response rates there. That's value. I have a million examples of that. If you can drive value about mistakes, problems of the business, you have discovered that you all just does not know, you will get engagement guaranteed.

31:28Did that scale? Absolutely. The challenge is finding those opportunities, those pockets of opportunity and scaling those. That's a challenge. But that does actually scale. I mean, that's much more scalable than say, like, paid. Think of the cack of that. That's where I love growth. There is an upfront cost to finding that. Testing it? Of course, we don't automate anything before we test it manually. We had like some gym people like send a couple hundred manually to see if it works. And once we knew the response rates were huge, we then invested in doing it with our own chinels. But once you've built it and you've amortized the upfront cost, the marginal cost of that email is zero.

32:04You're just running a few scripts. Yeah, acquisition costs are doing that is zero. So if you're competitive and not doing it, you have this green ocean in front of you with no competition. Zero dollar cake. That's competitive mode. What was the response rate? Just so I like 50%. No, it's more like 10, 12%, 10, 12%, which is about 5x the standard response rate of a good, cold email reciprocity. You want to go to a reciprocity? Yeah. What the other thing equates to responses? Here's the thought experiment I want you in the audience we have. At home, you have a mailbox, physical mailbox. And then mailbox, you receive junk mail, right?

32:38Most of it is junk mail. You take that junk mail, you throw it away. You don't even think about it. You don't care. You have no personal feelings. They have no emotions for that junk mail. You feel maybe even lighter about it away. Now let's say you go through that junk mail as you throw it away. There's this one letter. That's seal letter. That's obviously written by a human, obviously, by an old person. And there's your name Harry on it. Harry's having something written on it. And there's the return address behind it. They even maybe like lick the stamp and put it on the envelope. You're very convinced as a human.

33:06How like you are you hairy to dig that envelope and throw it in the trash without opening it? No way, right? You would be a psychopath if you did that. I tested that thought experiment at Saster in front of hundreds of people, not one person raised their head, not one. Which makes sense. Why? We have a restposting. But how do you do that with email? Because with physical, you can do the nice stamp, the nice textured lacer, whatever it is. How do you do that with email? Give an example. Ramp targeting financial platform targeting CFOs. Notoriously difficult audience to engage with. Almost nothing can scrape about a company or a CFO is useful.

33:42They're not posting about their financial issues on Twitter. It doesn't happen. What we did is we scraped that. We didn't. Oh, we've got so much data that we just don't know where it is. We're really missing our payments right now. Oh, this is so much better than we did. And you were supposed to. Yeah. So what we did is that we scraped. Very typical, they are linked in profile, their colleges. And here's the trick. The trick is we thought about what's the commonality between CFOs. They all are well -educated. They all went to college, about 100%. I'd went to college. Okay? In the US, very specific about the US, you and people who went to US college tend to be very passionate about that college sports team.

34:23Very passionate, right? So what we did is that we matched 2D assets. that's the college where each CFO went and the upcoming games of their college against the opponent team. We then built a very simplified betting algorithm to see is the CFO's team likely to win or lose. And we send that in an email and say, Hey Harry, your team, the sharks or the boys going against like the bison's or whatever next week. And I'm ready to bet 50 bucks that your team is about to lose. If you win up on top, I give you 50 bucks. I'm a question to ask. If you lose, I'll just ask for a 20 minute call. Now, that is a typical $50 for a call email.

35:01But, and here's the but, the sophistication of the email with this upcoming game that you know about, the ability to be able to bet for free, what looks for free, on sports, which people love, makes it feel so human. Nobody believes this is automated. But it is. Nobody believes it's automated. People are like, hey, somebody actually researched. Somebody knows the upcoming names. Let me tell you something I care about too, this is fun. The response rate here is 12 to 15%. About the same, there was no one so gorgeous. Again, for you, very, very small cast and something that no one in the right mind would think of doing manually.

35:37That is resposting. You see that. You immediately believe, hey, there's a human that cares, like, at least I have to respond. At the minimum, I have to respond. Does AI make this much, much harder? Because cold outbound, done well like you've done there. People think that it's actually a human that's not. Kind of the wrapper of AI makes people just inherently more cynical that everyone's so robot. Does it make it harder? It will. I have a conviction that there are two possibilities and I think two things will happen that will be true at the same time. Some part of the population will start rejecting communication and coming from anonymous people because they won't know if it's a human or not and thus they will, by default, think that it's a robot and does that there is no reciprocity that should be expense.

36:24And some other part of the population, maybe the more text I people will not care. And say, here is this information valuable. The problem is that because the marginal cost is so low, high quality text, high quality communication about you will become huge. It's going to be all the time everywhere. And you just won't have the time for it. It's very likely that we'll start ignoring messages from real humans at the much higher rate because the quality of AI will be better than the quality of humans. Does that mean cold out bounds dying? It's not cold out bounds communications diet. Personal communications diet.

36:58It's not just cold out means the same is true on phone calls. Phone calls, text calls, like block posts. Anything that is a human written content is soon likely to be better if done by an AI. So then what do we do? What replace it? The existing channels and tactics just get bigger in terms of portion of sales. Is that net new? Well, if that's a total pie, then net new, what is it? I love the worry on your face about the future, have you? Yeah, I'm good with that. I think there's a few things. One is if you are on the cutting edge of tools and platforms, you will win regardless of what happens.

37:36All right, you will, because the others, like anyone who's not doing the things that they said, is already losing right now. Second, this negative pessimistic view of communication is a few years in the future. It's not a bright now issue. Do you have a couple of years to like handle it? Third, if you ask like a wild bet, I think it will be more about social proof, community, and relationships. I've seen a product which instead of a chatbot on your SaaS home page or pricing page, connects to your LinkedIn, your email connections, relationships, and says, hey, Jake, how easy is using this software?

38:10You want to ask him about it? And I thought that's really smart. I can still look like doing random social proof about other companies that the people I don't know. It's like, hey, this connection of yours, this person you know and trust, use this stuff to right now daily, just ask him about it. And because I have I trust Harry, I know Harry, I'm like, yeah, Harry's a good guy, I know him. Just give him a call, Harry says, yeah, this is legit. I'm like, okay, cool. Done. That, you can see, has the immediate opportunity of solving the problem we just created. Can I ask you, when we think about different channels and getting to say 50 million in an hour, I was thinking to keep a HubSpot who told me that it takes one child to get to 50 million an hour and two to get to 100.

38:52From your experience here, you've been a segment, you've been a drift. It's not the case, it's a much broader diversification. How do you think about that when you hear it? I'm a big fan of HubSpot and when they've been able to build in the past couple of years, almost in what is HubSpot. And they have one of the biggest addressable markets in the world. It's almost any business. These are so M, that's one. Second, their market is almost an oligopoly. There's Salesforce, there's HubSpot, maybe there's like fresh desk, so that's about it. There's like less than five companies that are like decent when you look at the entire suite, okay?

39:27Which is extremely rare, given the size of the market, that there's so few players on that market. And you need to have one. It's not like you can say no, I'm good. Like I don't need a share RAM, I don't need a market option. You need to. So you will buy one of those. Which is why it's a great company. It's a great dream. So well, almost no one has the combination of those market attributes. And I have never seen companies I've worked with, neither at segment or at the drift, or GSO, and not in one of the companies I engage with, we were able to get to 50 million on one channel, not one. The question I have from founders is like, Hey, this channel's working, it's working well.

40:06How do I think about the other channels? And I'm normally saying, hey, don't get too cute. Facebook ads is working. Just pummel it. Keep going, keep going, until it doesn't work. Obviously you want to transition quickly. Don't be too cute too early. Do you agree with that? Or do you think actually diversification is important early? I'm in between. I'm in business. I don't like to be surprised. And what that means is, if I'm going to raise a series A or B, whatever your stage is, I want to know, like, can actually spend that money? Do I have, like, more than, like, hypothesis that I know how to spend that money?

40:38And so I recommend, increasingly, as you go through the stages, to test the cack and the depth of those channels. Like, if you want an example, let's take, like, paid on Facebook. Do you really know what's the depth of that channel? No. How do you do it? I recommend companies to 2X the budget every week until it's that line. Just do it for like four weeks, six weeks. It's not gonna like burn your budget, your entire like capital, but just two X on a week two. Two X on a week three. Two X on a week four. Very quickly, you're gonna find out where the cap is. All right, you're gonna find out you're not getting more, like engagement, more clicks, more revenue.

41:15And then you can scale back and can tell your board, hey board, we've pressure tested the depth of that channel. And we know how much we can spend on that channel. And you then go and do the same on every other channel. I did the same for me on emails. What's the number maximum of emails somebody can receive before there's like negative outcomes? Is it like once a year, once a quarter, once a month? Let's just take a small sample and let's go down. Obviously, like this is like dinner shift effects, but you should test it. Test the same with every channel and they go back to you once a day. We know the depth of email We know the depth of like paid.

41:48We know that if every other channel. This is why we need to raise money This is how we can spend it. How do you know when you've truly had it? Is it that obvious? Yes, is that grey? Do you know what I mean? If we're doing Facebook and it's like, yeah, we're a couple of percent less effective. Is that the depth? To exit again, and you'll find it. Eventually, you won't be able to spend more money. There's a point where you can't spend more money or you're spending more and not getting more engaged. If you're not sure, to exit again. I think people worry about destroying a channel too quickly. Think they could randomize a symbol of the audience.

42:19If you can't do that, it means your target market is too small and you should be doing ABM. If you have like, let's take gorgeous again, like if you have like 200 ,000 companies, can't you take 5 ,000 companies, 2 ,000 companies? The smallest audience Facebook will let you have like 2 ,000 and like really increase the budget there. If you burn those 2 ,000 out of 200 ,000, burn 1 % and you've learned the outcome of the channel, is it not worth it? I hate you here and I'm like, okay, so we think about the debt and the returns driven and that converts to sales. The question that I have is, yeah, I spoke to Fabrizia before the show and he said that you're the master of aligning marketing KPIs to dollars.

42:58Can you just help me understand how do you approach marketing KPIs to dollars and just take me through it, imagine I'm a founder trying to understand. Reject any KPIs that is vanity. You don't care about traffic, you don't care about any of those KPIs. The only thing you care about is weight adjusted pipeline dollars. So, all those KPIs, engagement KPIs, your growth in your marketing team needs to convert them based on lead score based on company size and stage your close rate. Every single logo that engages with your brand at any stage needs to be converted into a dollar figure. We then sum those and you have a pipeline by stage that is not just for your sales team, that is also for your marketing team.

43:42Your marketing name has a funnel, tam, to mqls, going down to sqls, then over to your sales team, they should have a pipeline figure per stage. And based on your conversion rate, you should give them goals at every stage of that pipeline. The key learning is what has worked for sales also works for marketers. If a marketing candidate that you're looking to hire does not own a pipeline figure, that is the wrong candidate, my friend. Can I ask you a pipeline figure? I can give you bullshit, I can feed your pipe with a lot of low quality leads. And then you don't have a good lead score. Then your lead score is bad.

44:17If your lead score is good and your pipeline is adjusted with lead score, that should not happen. Talk to me about that relationship between lead score and pipeline and how founders can and should use it. If that's like your ACV is 10k and your lead score predicts a likelihood to close of 30%. So the value of that company of pipe is 3000 bucks. It's not 10, it's 3. If the lead score is shit, maybe it's 1. You don't count the 10, you count the 3. And if you can't make that prediction, then you should be working on the lead score. How many people have this in place do you think? All the ones who are winning.

44:51It's fairly easy to build a lead score. You could like, outsource it to a company like Matt could do. You could build it on a modern A out of that form like Akeo. Like there's like even Hopspawn has like simplified models for that. If you haven't think of like the lead score, it means you haven't thought of your ICP. If you haven't thought of who's a good customer for you. You just stop everything and just go define who are the good customers and what are their attributes? We're not earth to these people sitting our company G. These growth -minded people who are working on activation experiments Who are working on testing new channels?

45:23Are they marketing or they in product? Well they answered them growth, but so it should be a standalone function in your mind I love for that to be true I have although that I'm wrong and that is barely the case. The local effects of the world are the exception truly. It generally rolls into like either product or marketing. I would love for that abuse talent function. The elites quite self generally is within like ops. When do we hire the first person? When's like you know what we've got enough day to hear? That's test. Let's start this process. After a couple of minutes of interview, once you've handled the other adopters, you've scaled at least one channel that works well and you've started to think of optimization, testing, aggressively building a growth team, then you should have enough data for the topic.

46:10But let's flip the question the other way. If you don't have enough data, then your growth team can't learn. If the growth team can't learn, you should not hire a growth team. Well, sometimes you need a growth team to get data. Well, if you think about actually like understanding whether a funnel works and is efficient, you need to drive people to that funnel. I'm playing Devils advocate here, but... Yeah, I don't think that's a good case for a golf team because kind of like you said earlier you can drive terrible pipeline to a funnel. I can drive terrible leads to your product. If you hire a golf team too early, will they get you using engagement?

46:46Absolutely. Is that going to be the right users? I your bet is as good as mine. People respond to incentives. If the incentive of the team is to drive signups and engagements, the problem is they will optimize for that, not for the long term viability of the business. That's a huge risk. I'm French. I know how to cheat 10 times out of 10. You give me anything as a goal that is not revenue and you incentivize me strongly for that. You're gonna get that KPI but you're not gonna get the revenue. Okay, it's in it, isn't I agree? So it's this kind of couple of million there are we've got enough data.

47:18We've got a couple of channels maybe working. Cheat your name, chew your advisor to my business. I'm the founder. We're in that stage. Should I hire a senior person who's got years of experience? Should I hire a guy? God, no, stay away from that. Uh, who's that? A former founder. You know what the good thing about Swaps? Most don't make it out. Like nine out of ten. Die. That doesn't mean it's a bad founder. There's a million reasons for the sort of doubt they'd have to have survived. And most of the founders are amazing individuals. They know how to bounce back. They know how to pivot. They are focused on long -term outcomes on revenue.

47:55All of those things that are said are exactly the key attributes which you want for somebody you'd be eating your growth team. If you don't have it from a founder, go for somebody from like a consulting background with a big five, somebody who's really focused on like data on precision on the running hypothesis and on running a process. Growth is about running a process, not about like being super smart. It's running a process. We hire a former founder, probably one that hasn't worked out in the earlier stages. Is that it? Do we just hire one at a time? You want for a growth team to work out. First, it exists after your product team, obviously, otherwise you don't have a product.

48:32Generally, after your first few marketers, who are doing the traditional campaigns, the core campaigns, and you're gonna create this startup and the startup, this team within the team, and they're gonna take risks as we talk as a VC. What do they need to be able to do that? They need to be able to build and to ship. That means you have this one of founder who's like the head of growth slash PM, running the process. You're gonna have at least one engineer. You know, maybe data analysts, if the founder can do it, but you're the pedagog, is the analyst in the other days? So you have like, kind of growth engineer and one marketers that's copywriter.

49:05That's your team. That's the team. Now we know that as a structure. If you're advising me on hiring for that team, how on earth do I structure the hiring process for that first growth hire? You want to ensure that they can look at your data, which means you need to give them a take home that has some of your data. I would recommend hiding a few Easter eggs in there. Some outliers. Do you see, have they, look at the data? Have they found the Easter eggs? And the question that the data set and those lines, that's the first thing. Just so we're clear, when you say like Easter eggs, this is like an anomalous number that is outside of the path.

49:39Yes, absolutely. I will put a couple of people, a couple of like logos that have like very weird, no retention, revenue, acquisition, stuff like that, right? Behavior, things like that. Do they see that? All right. If they don't see it, It's like, you can't really eyeball it in a data set. That's the first thing. And then what's their approach to risk, to making bets and coming out on top? How do they win? When they face interesting challenge, what's their approach? One of the key questions I always ask that is really how the people don't expect it. I asked them, like, have you played video games?

50:11I used to be a gamer before I had kids. And they were like, yeah, actually, most of you will have played games at one point in their life, right? I'm like, cool. Tell me about it. What's the platform, what's the game? What's your strategy? How you win? Teach me and tell me about the rules. what makes a really good player in that game. To understand the rules, and can they think outside the box? Because that is growth. Is understanding the rules, thinking outside the box, and making interesting, valuable bets. Risk -adjusted bets. Again, as we said, the risk -adjusted works for your pipeline, works for the growth, and experiments works as a VC.

50:44It's the same logic that I'm looking to find are they reasonable risk takers? How many of the candidates do you find can actually do that? I'm thinking of mine now and I'm saying like, you know, I played FIFA a lot when I was younger with my brother I didn't know like what makes me win Particularly and like there's very different styles. It's not like chess or can inform you like a game Where maybe it's more black and white on what makes someone win do you see what I mean? So I'm like that's hard Have you played a board game like Starcraft? I've been monopoly what makes you win your monopolies survival Longer than anyone else.

51:17Okay. Good. So how do you do that? Like what's your approach of surviving? How do you ensure you can survive? I stay at the table when everyone else goes for dinner. Yes, you can start drilling down to understand what is one person's approach. Obviously it's easier when it's like a boy game, like a starcraft or something like that. And it's also because it gives me, I know better, but even in modern games, I try to understand that. And maybe you're not a mistake or a harry. And when you harry, another ripe candidate for that. That's my point. Do you find that a bad hire is very obvious in growth or do you need time to know whether they're a bad hire?

51:52You mean somebody that I have hired and eventually comes out as a bad hire? Yeah, exactly. It's fairly obvious, really fast. They won't try aggressive things. It's all about being very aggressive. Let's go back to the things I talked to you about today. I saw your face, like you think like, well that's crazy, that's out there, that's out of the box, like where's the box? That is just aggressively thinking of like, what can I do that stands out? But it's really different. People will question, this has to be a human. This is really valuable. This is not like, can that person, can that continue to do that?

52:22Or are they gonna say, hey, we're gonna run some ads, we're gonna talk about product. Maybe that's a great marketer. That's a dimension person. But it's a combo of being very thoughtful about the odds and the bets and running the experiment in the scientific way and being aggressively creative. How do you think about the sizing of that, I'm thinking now in venture, but like if you have a budget it and we're thinking about that. Is 10 % too big a bet to make on budget? Or is that no? My budget is my head count. It's the time allocation of my head count. My constraint is how many experiments can my small team ship?

52:58And if you look at your team like CWAP, these days with like 10, 15 people on the growth team, they ship about 200 experiments per quarter. Now, you go back to the individual. It's not crazy 10 experiments per person per quarter so like you know roughly a bit less than one per week So it's not crazy at the rate of 200 or quarter some stuff has to work or you're very unlucky But some stuff has to work and you're getting like a good you know 10 -15 solid wins So my constraint is headcount and velocity. That's why you optimize for those things So we have the budget because I'm not competing on budget What are the biggest hiring mistakes you've made?

53:37What the fuck? Jay, can't believe you did that. Hi, I'm Chris Senior. Being like having stars in the eyes because somebody has had a huge track record and is very senior and believing what they tell me. And they tell me, yes, I'm excited by going back around the stage and getting my hands dirty that has never came out to be true. Not once have I hired a senior person in a position where there's no one else to empower them and they told me they would get the hands dirty, have they gotten the hands dirty. not once, they lost it. It's almost like going back to your soccer, like FIFA game. There's an age, and once you're past the age of playing soccer, you become a coach.

54:16Do you ever become a player again? Absolutely not. It never happens. You can't do that. Same thing here. This one thing we can talk about here. So why does it happen in marketing and not in engineering? It's very unique. As an engineer, you can be an L -8 engineer. individual I .C. right? Very experienced. You're the best engineer at this code base. You know, in an out and you will be respected and nobody will question it. As a marketer, do you know anyone who has done like five, six, seven years of the same world without becoming a madger and you'd say yeah that person's awesome other way they do their best?

54:50Hell no. Everybody in marketing is forced to become a madger pretty fast. Why? Because there is no respect for deep knowledge of one channel. I know exceptions like for example Rex at HubSpot on Paydads is like even him he's a major now. Actually I don't think I can name one person who's still an IC. There's not much people is getting their hands dirty on a daily basis and has like plus five years of experience. I don't think anyone. So you got your higher early because in don't hire senior. They won't get the shit done. Do you think marketing gets the respect it deserves? Sometimes absolutely.

55:27When this is like very great and with this good campaign it depends where like if you're talking about engineering companies, engineering companies, engineering products, like second -hand, is it harder? Absolutely. For sure, it's harder. But the place is like obviously I start to make a red apple. Apple is a marketing company. Do people respect apples brand and marketing? Absolutely. But that's more like the exception than the rule. Final one and then we'll do a quick fire. Now you're an advisor in many amazing companies. When should companies hire an advisor? When should they hire full -time?

55:56You should always hire full -time when you can. Like always tell people like if you can hire the person you want that's a right fit for you go for it I'm not a good replacement for that the whole that I plug the problem that I fix is generally you can't make that hire The experienced growth person or that founder that you care about that is amazing Did they want to take the risk with you at the series a no the one who got their own company? And so who you gonna hire you gonna hire a more younger? higher on the execution skill, but they don't have the expertise. They don't have the experience. I'm the fix for that.

56:31But if you get higher, though guy who has experience, the skills, the knowledge, and can like ship higher that person, absolutely 10 times out of 10. But it's ironic because they have to be that intermediary. Given what we just said about the seniority, they have to be three years in. Absolutely. That middle ground. It's a tight overlap. Which is why I have a business. I have a business because the people like me, like I know all people at like my level of experience in the US. There's less than 200, there's 120 people. Dude, it's so funny. Like, you know, we have 20 growth funds now, which is Casey Winters, it's Darius, it's Lut Le Vask, it's Elena Werner.

57:09What's one of those can you hire in a CVSA company? None. You think you're laughing? None. Zero. Okay. Zero of those people are available on the market. Not one of the 120 or third is like semi -retired in VC and other things. A third is in like, great walls, like Luke, and you're not going to poach Luke from like Shopify. And there's a third like me who's like doing like, consultancy and I could advise you and like other things. You can hire those people. Not at the Series A at least, I mean, sure if you're like, Shopify, like everything's possible. But like, you're a Series A, Series B. You're not getting those people.

57:40I want to be honest, like, it's just not happening. I want to go into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. That sound okay. It's cool. What's your craziest experiment? Coffee, hot coffee, cappuccino, and segments are homepage. It worked when you came to the website instead of asking on the chat how can we help you which is lame and not unique We said like how did I get coffee and because it was like a reverse IP running pre -COVID We knew what the HQ was the company the rain and knew the city and we would just ship coffee to you We just asked for your first name.

58:12We knew you were Harry boom ship a caption to you Why are you awaiting for the capuchino that was run by postmates? We would say hey, do you have 20 minutes for a demo? Of course you'd say yes And then it came to the end. Of course, $20. $20 .00 for a demo? Good cack. It worked well. Yeah, it worked well. That's smart. What tactics have not died a death over the last five years? What is strong as ever? Email? People have called the death of Abla email every year. It's still going strong. What tactics have totally died a death? One's back, I don't know what you'll have died to death, but the Phoenix of tactics is called called.

58:46Code call was dead from like 2012, 2013 to 2022. And with LLMs now and tools like O 'Rum, Code call is back big time. What would you advise a new growth leader starting a new role today? I have strong connections to learn what others are succeeding. The key to success in growth is testing and learning. And so if you can outsource the cost of learning to other teams either through advisory, like I did in the early days or through like good relationships, You are saving a ton of effort and capital and you can just deploy those learnings to your business and look like a fucking genius What's the worst strategy you've done a worst growth experiment you've done which did not work it sucked Generally building bundles like bundles are a terrible idea when you start Bundling different features different products together into one the size of the ideas that counts about the entire bundle is smaller and smaller as the bundle increases.

59:45What would you most like to change about the world of growth? The fact that it's not independent, growth is not an independent function. It has to wall up to marketing or product or another that creates conflicts, which eventually leads into death of growth teams at late stage. There's almost no company at a late stage with a growth team. So you'll feel like Facebook, Shopify, and a couple others. Final one for you. We've spoken about Rambly to a Mac Gorgeous. What growth strategy have you been most impressed by another company. One thing I've never had to put here to do myself, it always like an admirer, is the typical of virality.

1:00:19I think of the draw box of the world as a pro -sumer. Think of Zapier. I know those companies, I know the leaders, I know how they pull it off, and the combination of a huge market, a very viral product, a very sticky, viral product, good product, creates opportunities unlike no other. The ability to have people, customers bring other customers to no cost to you I just want to like sit back and relax and see the customers sign up And I want to be in that in the in my beach chair and see that and for me it's always been like hard work And I always imagine like derayos, you know at at drop box and other places thinking like Million people just invited themselves as month.

1:01:00How cool is that? Gee, this has been so much fun Thank you so much for putting up the show. I'm yandering and I've absolutely loved this. Harry, it's been great for me too. Let's talk again sooner than six shows next time. As I said, shows like that are why I started 20 growth. Actionable granular advice that you can use today in your startup. If you want to see more from us, you can of course check us out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC, where you can watch the full episode in video. But before we leave you today, I'm refreshing the 20vc Miro Boardnud, love your input again, it's really easy just head on over to Miro .com ford slash 20vc and leave your guest suggestions for future shows and you can do it with a digital sticky note or a comment and head over to Miro .com ford slash 20vc and Miro actually sponsored this episode.

1:01:49If you haven't already tried it, I think you'll love it. Miro is the online workspace for innovation, it's packed with the right capabilities to be your dream products home base that you can visualize content, data and research findings all in one space with no problem. It means this space is where you map customer journeys with the whole product team, create user behavior dashboards and map process diagrams and finally it's where you'll run productive team sprints using integrations with tools you already love and use like Giro for developers, a sauna for project managers, Figma for designers and so on.

1:02:22We use Mirror and love it to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests, and leave feedback for the rest of the team in our own time. And right now I'm using it to hear from you. Leave your thoughts on the board at myro .com -20VC, that's myro .com -20VC, and 20 growth is obviously focused on building the best growth teams and great growth teams are obsessed with making data -driven decisions. But getting good data is hard and growth in product teams have to spend hours each week configuring metrics, setting up experiments and writing custom queries, or what if your growth team could get this time back?

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