‍Nima Gardideh: It's actually super rare to find people like Scott. I think I talk a lot about this internally in our companies. We want artists that understand data. And it's not that obviously artists are very much capable of looking at data. It's just not something they invest a lot of time in learning. our creative director is like an ex finance person and she keeps talking about this and how hard it is to find designers that understand data a lot and especially in the world of paid.

Cool. Why don't we get started with, you know, this is something that I think everyone should, should think a lot more about which is the titles that people give to their, their employees are out around growth and marketing. what do you guys think of the difference between VP marketing and VP growth?

Is, are they the same thing? Is there really a difference? I know, Michael, care a lot about us. I know a couple of our mutual friends have been asking you about this recenetly.

Michael Kuznetsov: Yeah, I think it's such an interesting thing because this isn't really consistent. Right. And in many ways it's a generational thing and it, right.

You can always get a little touchy when you started talking about generations in the workforce. I'm like, is that PC or is that not? But I think for the generation, which is maybe starting to leave the workforce over the next 20 years or the next 10 years growth is a subset of marketing, which they think of as performance marketing.

And then for the flip side for the generation, which is sort of rising in the professional world for them, growth is encompassing, marketing, and product, and the ability to really go down the funnel and think about conversion and return. what I'm seeing more and more is that some of the rising stars that I know say I don't ever want a CMO title.

I don't want to be the Chief Marketing Officer. That sounds like a stodgy old thing. Right. But for somebody that can't do data, somebody that can't think about conversion what they say is, you know, if I have a C-suite title, I want it to be a Chief Growth Officer, or lots of times, they're just happy with level me, however you want, if I'm Head or VP or whatever else.

But like growth is really important to me. And there's also a little bit of a east coast, west coast difference, right? I think on the east coast growth can sometimes be a marketer that actually isn't as product. As in the Bay Area where if you have somebody that's doing growth, sometimes that means that, like some of our mutual friends, there are Airbnb and they have a thing that works and they're just like optimizing the heck out of it and are really, really deep in product.

But the sort of flow of traffic is ready, established. And so I think that's a big distinction. 

Scott McLeod: I think it's interesting you say east coast versus west coast. Cause I, I was in the Bay Area for seven years and I moved to New York two years ago. We built the headquarters here. We hired a lot of people in the New York office and you can see the difference in talent from that same perspective is, and I think as you were talking, it really came to me that the data side of growth marketers came from like the democratization of data from all these new tools.

And I think part of it's like the incumbents are coming in younger, willing to learn more things. And a lot of the tools though that we're using today didn't exist three years ago or four years ago, let alone like 10 years ago. And how much was Silicon Valley like hacker culture influencing this. And I think the early days of being called a growth hacker, it's like, you're an engineer who is shipping product experiments at Airbnb or Facebook, right?

Like that's the growth hacker. That was the introduction to me. It's like, oh, you gotta be a full-stack engineer. And like, you kind of do your own stuff. Your metrics are here. And I think it spun out of these like high traffic technology company. That started to be really, data-driven probably from like the OKR and all these kinds of ways in which we break up tasks and measure them.

And I think tech particularly was like, forefront of all that, and then cascades into SaaS and you kind of see growth marketers. I think the first ones out there were not consumer businesses. They were SaaS and B2B companies and technology businesses and mobile apps. And like it started there, then it trickles and permeates that like common, I guess, that common approach to solving business problems and is ingrained. Yeah. 

Nima Gardideh: Yeah there's this like kind of middle ground thing that happened where growth hacking came about for me because, oh yeah. I saw Airbnb do this thing where they automatically post this stuff into Craigslist for instance. And that was like a huge game changer because for marketers, they weren't thinking about, oh, how do I basically use the product in a way that enables growth?

And I actually think that's become less and less of a thing because the platforms have gotten way smarter and not letting you hack them. And specifically I think the social networks like Facebook and Twitter and these players have made us organic sort of reach is not as possible. You can go viral with, with a, with a post that's maybe sent from from an app.

I don't know if you guys remember like the early days of Spotify, where every time you were listening to a song, it would post on your Facebook wall. Those things are not as big of a deal anymore. So I think that's what the distinction of growth hacking has gone away. This is in my mind where growth hacking was around sort of like, okay, there is all these platforms that could potentially get your growth.

And then now I'm going to sort of fit a product feature, such that I'm going to take advantage of those platforms. Like, you know, think of yourself as like the farmers, the farmers in the world where we're really taking advantage of the social graph, where now that's less and less possible.

Growth marketing is coming about where you still think to think about, okay, there's, there's my product. How do I finesse it in a way that I'm getting the most advantage out of the traffic? And then what is the behavior of this traffic that's coming in? So then I can use that to my advantage as a, as in my products, and then I can convert people better and sort of keep them longer.

Right. Which is like... 

Michael Kuznetsov: One differentiation there I think you said it's like growth is about building sustainable, reliable systems. Now, before it was like hacks, like you're doing one-offs that can acquire you customers. How do you create systems that are reliable? Self-serving like flywheels are good things where you set it up and it grows on its own and marketing, traditional VP of Marketing.

It's very campaign driven. It's like, we're going to start our initiative. It's going to run for six weeks. And it ends, I like there was no campaigns that our company, other than when they're sales, everything's like always on, it's a system you're trying to get a system that behaves in a healthy way, not a campaign mindset and east coast to west coast.

I found a lot of that in the east coast. That's they work at big agencies. They have a campaign mindset, it start and stop. It's not like an always on system. Right. And I think good growth marketers are trying to build systems that are sustainable. And in an ideal world, they're highly scalable in their time because they're building a system, right.

Versus a marketer, a traditional marketer start stop campaigns. They're onto the next campaign. Their work is less reusable as opposed to a growth marker and a VP of growth. It's like thinking of reusable systems or reusable tools.

Nima Gardideh: How much is that help? How much of this? I totally agree. How much does process building?

More than actually coming up with these ideas, because a lot of what we do, at least when we're trying to do growth is building processes in a way such that you'll find some of these systemic growth, growth, growth wheels, or flyways as he called them. How much of that work did you do for instance, when you were building these teams, like just setting process or you're kind of giving the GMs that you hire from the brand, the problem and say, Hey, can you grow this company?

Or are you saying those...

Scott McLeod: Like top KPIs? And I think that's where you're kind of talking before the start of what is that process and is there a different approaches to growth and it's, it's an experimentation mindset. You have a portfolio of bets and you're trying to, your bets are really trying to find these systems of growth.

Right. And I think the big one is you don't know which ones work. You don't know like what ideas you have for growth are going to work. So it's less about your specific ideas and more about yeah. The process and methodology. I think it's like, I always like to notion you're like a mad scientist, you're mixing in a beaker of like all your different variables.

You want to keep some constraints. You want to keep some variables in the same, a little bit more of this, and you want to see how it reacts. Right. And I think you're building this portfolio of bets. So for our businesses and our brands, you know, we set high level KPIs by quarters in the year and then unpacking those.

How are we going to get the growth we're expecting. And it usually comes from this portfolio of bets. Right. And I think you just chomping through them and in an ideal world, you're finding wins or at least you're learning. Right. And at the very least you're going to learn what didn't work. Right. I think not going to try that bet again.

Right. And particularly as a process, it's how much do you invest into something to understand the upside? And I think that becomes the risky thing for a growth marker of how do you invest the least from a resource perspective to learn the most and get the most out of it. It's like a sprint cycles and how you're approaching like a lean in, lean and agile methodology, which is very similar back to like how you build software.

You don't want to spend six weeks building a feature that no one uses and same thing as a growth marketer. You don't want to spend seven weeks coming up with this idea when you could have tested it in two weeks. 

Nima Gardideh: Yeah, that's a, that's a good, good area to get, get into, which is essentially how you prioritize these experiments because I think there is like, we were talking about this earlier that there was like a legacy in the growth world of when these sort of roles were created for the first time that were created and the Twitters and the Facebooks and the Airbnbs of the world, where they had a couple of things going for them, one, they had extreme product market fit. 

And second, they had basically unlimited traffic. It had millions of people visiting their sites and they were able to sort of use, use that to run actual AB tests. Like I think everyone's read the 200 shades of blue and blog posts that Marissa Meyer wrote at some point. Right. So how do you guys think about priority in a way that you're actually making a difference versus just moving buttons around? Maybe Michael, you can go first. 

Michael Kuznetsov: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really good example of the difference between people that have actually run a growth process versus people that have read about a growth process. Right. if you're able to, and to sort of bring it back a little bit to the question of, you know, how you hire and build teams, the folks that have that skillset, if you're able to bring in somebody that has actually done it before, I think there's going to be some markers of that.

And one is just like Scott was saying, they're not going to be thinking about these large like campaign structured approaches to having growth to, as they're going to be pretty humble about the stuff that didn't, didn't work in the past. And they should be able to just as easily recall tons of experiments that they did, that didn't work out and why they thought they would work out and talk about what they learned from that.

Because ultimately, you know, at least what I've learned from, from growing a couple of different businesses, Yes, there are lots of tactics and lots of strategies that map from business to business, to business. But you have to still try lots and lots of stuff against every single funnel and every single product and every single offer that you have out there because things sometimes work in unexpected ways.

And you know, especially when you start talking about paid marketing, for example, these ad marketplaces are very dynamic. Other competitors are coming in and out. There's, you know, the CPMs are shifting on them as there's more or less spend or, you know, on Facebook. For example, one thing that happens sometimes is that the newsfeed will break as an acquisition mechanism because there's some sort of social unrest or some sort of topic, which is fully consuming people's attention.

And now all of a sudden guess what, nobody wants to click on your ad. All of that pushes me towards looking for people that have that flexibility and have that willingness to like quickly try stuff and quickly adapt. 

Nima Gardideh: Yeah. I think that's an interesting segue to trying to figure out how to, and this is a question I actually asked in the chat, as well as, how do you think about hiring for growth in general?

Because I think Scott, you were an interesting position because you were one of the co-founders and you're extremely growth mindset. So that's not always the case where maybe the founders of the company are extremely technical or very good product. People love not necessarily the best growth people out there.

Let's start with maybe stage one is basically the first hire because I think that's like the hardest one. And then we can walk through maybe some of the different roles you can eventually hire for after being the first. 

Scott McLeod: for the early stage there, I'm, I'm a big proponent of just, I think generalists are powerful mostly because I think 80 20 sometimes gets you a long way.

And I think if you're a founder and the companies I invest in and advise, I think generally they aren't growth minded and coming to help them with what's your first hires and how do you make sure your bets are, are the right ones, particularly if your runway is short, you don't want to make the wrong hire or make the wrong bets.

And I think that's the reason it's risky to make really [00:18:00] strong, dedicated hires early in growth, because. You haven't proven Facebook works. It's such a shame to hire an amazing growth marketer who only does Facebook. Right? And I think if you hire these generalists, their job is to kind of search and discover what works for you as the founder, or you as the executive leader, it's like, your job and I have like a, you know, you're more like pirates than anything you're out searching. Right? And you have no idea where the treasure is at and your generalist has no idea. No one knows their jobs to go find where the treasure is. And then you go hire experts to help you on that. Right. And I think the earlier stage, like I just, can't 80 20 is like the best thing.

And 80, 20, you know, 80% of of the output for 20% of the effort and having someone just search and like, they're really trying to search for you. What systems, what channels, what audiences, what value propositions the earlier you are in a business or a product it's like, you still don't really know what you're providing for who and why they like it.

I think a growth marketer helps you figure this out faster, right? They're acquiring new people from lots of places. They're testing ads and value propositions. They're really trying to. How do you find the [00:19:00] people out there who want your product? And most importantly, like how do you talk to them, communicate to them..

What's the creative? And this is where I think you want early stage, your first one or two hires, very generalist, because they're trying to help you as the leader search for really, who's going to be the next hire, right? If you go find out that direct mail works, maybe your second hire someone who's great at direct mail, or you find out Facebook works, your next hire is a Facebook marketer.

Right? So I think...

Nima Gardideh: This is like a weird area. Right? Cause I completely agree with you that this is sort of like, but the job is to search for the channel because as, as you probably know, right? Like growth growth is basically a power law game where usually the companies that are billion plus dollars in revenue turn to have like 70% of our growth coming from one of the channels and the rest is coming from everywhere else.

Right. but the problem is that that only can happen post product market fit. There's this like weird sort of area where you don't really know if you have. And, but then you have to kind of grow a little bit to just test it. So how do you, how do you think about that, that field? Like, cause [00:20:00] do you even want to hire someone that's in charge of really driving traffic in the beginning because you don't even have anyone that's using the product yet to figure out if you have product market fit or do you think part of finding PMF is which channel?

Scott McLeod: Yeah. That's almost half their job description early, right? It's like we don't know like product market fit and then channel fit, right? Like that's back to reliable systems. If you find a channel that works, you're going to find product market fit because we send a hundred people who are qualified and you have this funnel that works.

You really want to have something that's predictable. And I think it's a product market fit and finding what channels work for you. In my opinion, in my experience, those are almost one in the same, in some relations, of course, like certain markets, that's not true, but most of them it's like, if you can't convert people who are qualified for your thing, there's something wrong with your product or the market you're going after.

The growth marketer helps you find this and discover this.

Michael Kuznetsov: Tactically like in the really early days. I think it's really interesting to also think about the mistakes that people make. Right? So day one, we see this all the time [00:21:00] at Redesign Health. Day one CEO has an idea pretty much has their product figured out.

Maybe they're starting to build their marketing team question, you know, that they bring to their recruiter, whoever else they say, you know, I want somebody that can be great on brand and great on growth. And that's usually a mistake. Why? Not because that isn't the right hire. Actually, if you can find that person, that's probably a great person for you to bring into your business.

The reason it's a mistake is it's going to take you eight to nine months to hire that person. And in those eight to nine months, if you just brought in a growth person and started them hacking away at the system, it's going to push you towards product market fit every single day. Second mistake that people make is that.

When they hire one of their first marketers, they're like, oh, like, I don't really know how to manage marketing and, you know, bringing somebody really senior, that's going to be able to build out the team and market are number one shows up and they're non execution [00:22:00] oriented CMO. Somebody that doesn't know how to get into tools that doesn't know how to write a line of copy that doesn't know how to think about product market fit or whatever else.

Right. And that's a killer too, because by the time you got them onboarded, right? So first of all, it's going to take you a while to hire them. Then by the time you get them onboarded, it's going to be three or four months. By the time you realize that they suck, it's going to be a couple more months. And now you're six months behind on your business.

And that's killer. Like if you're a startup, you just don't have that kind of time. I couldn't agree more that like early on getting somebody who can put their hands in a whole bunch of different channels, a whole bunch of different experiments and start generating some site sort of learnings using their generalist capability is really, really important.

And then it almost goes with your funding stages, right? So you prove out enough to raise your A and now all of a sudden, one of the things you can say is, you know, we have a feeling that direct mail works just like you were saying. And so we're going to spend some of that money to go really, really hard on [00:23:00] direct mail.

And in order to do that, we need to bring in this specialist on direct mail. And also we know that we have no CRM or lifecycle comms going on at all. Right? So then you start building together your CRM and retention marketing. Then you start saying, you know, we don't have much of a social or content presence, or we're driving enough traffic to our landing pages that we need to start doing CRO on them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But all of those things are stage gated by the work of that first growth marketer that figured out what the top two or three investments that you need to do with your A. 

Nima Gardideh: In your head is like product model fit. Part of the growth job description in a way to like discover that?

Michael Kuznetsov: I'm not sure what you mean by model? I'm not sure what you mean.

Nima Gardideh: So a good example is like booking.com versus like booking.com for instance, is very heavily paid search play. They're doing a great job doing that, right. We're in TripAdvisor is more of an SEO play. The models are fundamentally different in how they acquire customers, right? So [00:24:00] they figured out TripAdvisor at some point that their play is going to be SEO.

And that's the model that they've landed on. Whereas booking.com is clearly a paid search play. Right? 

Michael Kuznetsov: That's so important as you're hiring, right? Because that tells you to do, I need to bring in a marketer that knows how to do search or that knows how to do social or that knows how to do anything else.

Right. And that goes back to this idea of sort of marketer channel business fit which is as you start raising a little bit more money and as you start specializing in some channels that lets you get the leverage later on of somebody that's really, really good at a specific channel, but if you bring them in and you're not sure if that channel is relevant yet, you're either asking them to flex away out of their professional capability, which maybe they can, or maybe they can't.

But like, why are you asking them to do that? Unless you have a really good reason or they're going to come in and they're going to get really upset with you because they're going to be like, Hey, like SEO really worked at my last job. Like, why aren't you giving me more money to spend on SEO? It would totally [00:25:00] work here if I could just have the time and the money to do it.

And the answer is like, well, we haven't shown at all that it makes any sense to go try that. And we shouldn't have hired you and asked you to do that.

Yeah. So 

Nima Gardideh: what's interesting about this problem is I think you were right about, you know, someone that is both brand minded and performance mind at the same time. It's super hard to find those people.

I honestly know a handful in the world that are good at it, then I would trust to run a company. Right. How do you think about interviewing these types of folks in the beginning? I think Scott, you and I had a conversation last time we chatted about how it's so hard to find like the GM types, like the growth manager folks that are generalists in a way.

But you almost want them to be like, T-shaped where maybe they've seen success in one area before as a marketer. And then now you want to kind of bring them on and trust that they will have the right process. 

Scott McLeod: Yeah, that's it. I'm glad you bring up t-shirt but I think I have some thing about, you know, particularly stage of business.

I think there's a lot there of like [00:26:00] the earlier you are like the comb shape. That's actually like there are generalists and they're good at like two to three things. And as let's say, you raise your series a, now you take T shapes. They're kind of generalists, but they're really good at one thing. And then by the time you get to a larger organization, series C something, maybe you're a public organization, you're at the point where everyone can have a specific role and function.

You don't need any generalists. That's like the earlier or the more likely you need general skillsets. And we haven't talked much about like pods, but a lot of this goes back to the general notion of people working in a collaborative environment, a growth marketer, one of the best roles is they know enough to be deadly in enough areas that they can be a valuable contributor to when people are coming up with what's the product roadmap, what's the marketing roadmap.

What are we doing with the customer? Kind of bringing this all together. I think it's. An interesting challenge to say, at least I totally digressed from your question there. 

Michael Kuznetsov: I think, I think, I think he was asking about sort of hiring the different folks too, and maybe would it be fun to and push back and the guys that this is dumb, but like [00:27:00] we can just go through some of these roles and talk about what we look for in them?

Nima Gardideh: Yeah. I think it's a good idea. Why don't we start with the initial firstly, and then move then? 

Scott McLeod: Yeah, those growth generalists. I've tried to hire a lot of them because each one of our brands has GMs. In general, I think they're poached people. You have to poach usually, or they're already consultants or contractors or founders, right?

These generalists are usually because they can do a lot they're tinkerers. They like almost everyone I've had had failed startups or mildly successful startups. They did something always extracurricular to work. That was work-related right. And if that's like trying to hack on a side project and usually one of the best indicators to me, all of our usual, GM's had some tinkering, this of being a founder or some startup mentality.

Right. And I think we're hiring early that's what we're looking for. It's you want someone who, frankly, the common is they're kind of lonely being that lone Wolf right now, and they want to come join an organization with smart people. I think these people that's part of the value because today they can get a [00:28:00] lot done on their own.

A good growth marketer can just go start their own company. Right. They're really good at building lifestyle businesses. You see a lot of these, like one to three person online businesses, dropshipping, SaaS, eBooks, like these are growth marketers who don't need anyone. They can make good money on their own just doing their skillsets.

So I think that's the hard part is these people don't need jobs. You need to convince them on your business is a good opportunity for them to grow, to work with other smart people and then money, right? Like you have to be competitive with these people's salaries, either from a cash perspective or equity, but like they're expensive and hard to find.

And the reasons they join your organization are often not the exact same because they're kind of a generalist and based on their comb or T-shaped skills, they may want to join you for a different reason. Right. And a lot of them join our organization because we're data-driven and we try and cultivate great people.

And that makes work fun. 

Michael Kuznetsov: Yeah. I think buried inside of that, and this is maybe this is so obvious that it's not worth saying, but like they need to be numerate. Right. And a lot of [00:29:00] times there are folks that. Hang out in marketing circles, but it turns out that they can like barely add. And I'm not saying that, you know, we're asking people to do crazy long division in their head, but that analytical side of their brain like needs to be there.

And it needs to be very, very uh, but it needs to be balanced with all their other skill sets, because one of the mistakes that happen sometimes, and sometimes this happens with these early growth people and it also sometimes happens with like paid channel managers. Like if you bring in somebody to run in Facebook or run Google is that some people's analytical mind is so powerful.

It's so powerful to how they view the world that they cannot approximate a solution. So like, you know, if you were to imagine somebody like trying to land a rocket on the moon, they could never. Take one shot that misses and then take another shot that misses and like overshoot it and like slowly correct on their way.

There they're the type of [00:30:00] people that can only very, very precisely land in the exact same in the exact spot that they chose before they went. And I think it's really, really important actually to have people that are, are analytically minded, but that can just keep pushing the ball forward, even if it's sometimes going off track a little bit.

the reason you want to watch out for that is that if you get one of those people that is super, super, super precise, It actually inhibits their ability to do growth experiments because they get frustrated when stuff doesn't work perfectly. And then they kind of give up or they get upset.

We deal with most of your stuff's failures, right? I mean, that's like, naturally you should be failing more than you're succeeding if you're a good growth marketer, because you're taking big bets and big bets result in big upside. Right. And if you're just trying to cultivate a bunch of wins, probably not taking big risks, therefore you're not getting big upside.

Right. And it's like data has to be defined thread through everything they do and how they think. Right. And that's kind of where it's like, it's not just a normal marketer. It's ingrained in how they view the world in some way. 

Nima Gardideh: It's so [00:31:00] interesting. Cause we, we deal with this a lot where a part of my job, I think as, as a partner at, at terminal is. These like sort of VPs to be a little bit okay. With vagueness and ambiguity on some of this stuff, because you know, you can do all that you can and trying to estimate the potential success of, of one of these, but it's really hard to always be sure. Right. it's an interesting way to think about it because just teaching people that ambiguity is okay, when they're sort of extremely data-driven is hard.

I think I spent, I've spent many hours trying to tell them, listen, we just don't know what's going to happen. Like, I don't have the information about the auctions on Facebook. So we have to do is like test them out. This is how you're doing it. Right. And it's interesting. So going into more of these roles, so let's say now you have you found a growth marketer it's opened you up.

You've raised a series A. Facebook was one of the right channels for you. Do you go for the actually first question we can ask is that you want to go out outside and get an agency, or should you [00:32:00] just get a channel manager to come in and own that part of the business?

Scott McLeod: I think naturally if let's say Facebook succeeded, I think you're still either, you're looking for someone to continue to explore paid social would be my first thought, right? Like it's a marketer who knows Facebook and Instagram and they could probably be fine now expanding your tests and Instagram or Twitter, for example.

So like a paid social marketer who has great experience with Facebook. you can find someone to run this for you at an agency. If you've figured out it works, you need to keep growing. But I think you're still looking for someone now who is a little bit less generalist, but they're really good at Facebook.

Right. And they may know some peripheral stuff, right? Yeah. I would, this person should know Facebook. They should also know how to do creative. They should understand email, CRM. Like they're a little less of a growth marketer, but they still know how like their Facebook ad influences on page behavior and the emails that get captured and what emails get sent to the traffic they send.

Right. So there, they're still thinking full funnel. But again, it's, these people are hard to find an agencies generally can come fill holes. So I think it's like And it's hard sometimes for [00:33:00] agencies to do that. There's a lot of great agencies that can do that. I think finding someone who would still be a partner for an agency, right? So like, if you're looking for the hire, it'd be someone to manage the agency eventually, but they're helping look in totality.

What's the emails, what's the landing page. What's the Facebook app. How does this all connect? 

Michael Kuznetsov: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, agencies can be incredible and agencies can also suck I think this was one of the things that. People ask this question and I'm like, well, that's like saying, should I hire a marketer?

Like, well it depends. Should you hire a shitty marketer? No. Should you hire a great one? Yes. Do you need to manage them and have good communication and a good relationship with that person or with that agency in their way? Yes. And so an agency can be an incredible force multiplier. Why? Because if you're in a position where you don't know what a good Facebook marketer looks like, or you can't hire one because the market is tight or because there are some aspects of your business that are still kind of not that polished.

And it's hard for you to recruit [00:34:00] great talent. An agency might be able to come in and not make a whole bunch of mistakes that you will have made by either trying to do it yourself or by hiring somebody that doesn't know how to do it. They're going to be pretty flexible in terms of being able to pull in a couple more resources that maybe you don't have the ability to hire.

They're going to make sure hopefully if they're good that you're measuring stuff correctly and whatever else. And so that can be incredibly powerful, but the mistake you cannot make is saying, we hired an agency, that's all taken care of. We're good. I'm going to lean back, you know, whatever else. And, and that's, that's one that I see.

Right. And I call it sort of it's, it's almost like being in denial, that marketing is important to your business. you've fully given it away and now you're like, oh, I really love working on product. Or I really like fundraising, or I really like uh, holding town halls for my staff or whatever else it's like, yes, but let's focus on the core revenue driver of your business and whether that's an agency or somebody else might need to be involved.

Nima Gardideh: [00:35:00] One of the things I actually suggest to a lot of founders who we work with is you should just hire multiple. Yeah. And I just do bake-offs every six months or something like that, because then you you're doing is basically creating a dynamic, such that both of these teams are going to do their best at all times.

We hate being in those situations for obvious reasons, but it is the best thing to do for, for, for the client. So I've suggested them a lot. And one of the things that I think has come up a lot is I think there is like a resource constraint problem as well. And I think like, I remember starting in the early days, you were like a master at solving this problem where you had found someone in like Pakistan that was producing creative or something like that.

But it is expensive to like have a full creative team for Facebook these days. Right? You need motion, graphic designers, you need illustrators. You need cinematographers, you need a copywriter, right? Like, so I think filling out those resources, that's where the agencies can actually be helpful in the, in the early days.

And then maybe if they have like some interesting technology that is changing the way that [00:36:00] they do work and then. After you've scaled up, maybe beyond series A, series B, which is sort of what we do. Right. But it's a resourcing problem, really. And you should think of it as a hirer it's just that they specialize the hell out of the teams are, or for this thing that you're trying to do.

Scott McLeod: Right? Yeah. And we still like agencies, especially if we've soft, figured something out worked, but we're not ready to commit to a full-time hire. And I think someone had a question about contract to hire. It's pretty related is it's an easy way to test your toes. So like podcast, for example, if that's working well for your business, you've done some tests.

Well, you're not ready to commit to a full-time hire, but an agency would be a great way to double down on the strategy. And I think we've tried agencies for usually most new channels. We work with great agencies for awhile and we in-house those capabilities. Right. Some things should be in-house than some don't need to ever be.

In-house I think touching on creative as a really important part of like the modern day growth marketer, I think Facebook and these platforms as they mature, they're kind of taking away the quant side, the targeting side, there's like less for the marketer to do. And I started Facebook marketing when the earliest [00:37:00] days there was a lot more bells and whistles of levels that I could hack Facebook.

And now it's like, there's not a lot of that. Literally every month that's going away right now, what it is is who could produce the best creative. And that's, what's like your marketer now doesn't need to, like four years ago, I'd say they need to be more quant. And now I'm like actually to be a qualitative person who is creative, they should be able to write headlines.

They know how to like go and Canva and make ads. Like the person should be able to do it all themselves. Right. They shouldn't have to require like someone in Pakistan. I think that's that next step of like, I can do it all myself, but what if I found someone who's $600 a month, right. And the good growth marketer is going to be good at outsourcing the things they're bad at and particularly being mindful of their.

But creative is increasingly becoming the like unique lever. I'd say iis good creative wins. It's not polling. There's no hacking left on Facebook particulary. 

Michael Kuznetsov: One of my like personal fascinations is old copywriting books from like the twenties and the fifties and the sixties and these old, like Madison Avenue copywriters in New York.

And like Claude Hopkins and [00:38:00] sort of that, the beginning of what was AB testing and split testing and all, and coupon code redemptions in catalogs, things that like now are so much part of our vocabulary, but that were being invented and tried for the first time. And that's actually my number one piece of advice for anybody that has been doing Facebook for a while, because if they're been doing Facebook for awhile, they probably got good at being.

They probably got good at being the day trader effect effectively. Right. And I remember back, like when I was at Talkspace and we were spending ungodly amounts of money on Facebook every single day. When you looked over at the screen of the guy who was running Facebook, his screen was functionally identical to the screen of a day trader.

Right. He had three monitors basically say, I remember those days and whatever else. And that is going, that is going away just like Scott said. And I think it's kind of nice, cause it's [00:39:00] a return to humanity and it's returned to the things that should not, or in the world, which is how do we communicate and how, how do we connect to people and how do we talk about our product and our offering and urgency and everything else.

But just like anything else, these things oscillate and you don't want to be at either extreme. You want to find the sweet spot in between. 

Scott McLeod: Well, cause probably here, you know, there's some new channels where they're hackable today, right. And creative matters way less. It's like, how do I get the cheapest CPM over here?

So it's like as a channel matures and I think early days ad-words it was hackable. And as the channel matures, it kind of gets rid of this hackability thing. But I think all of the platforms are getting smarter. So therefore there's less bells and whistles and yeah, there was one other piece that has shown up because the reason this is happening right, is because of their machine learning models.

Right. They're getting way better. So they're getting rid of all these targeting optionality and then relying on the creative. But then there is this other piece that's come around and it's just kind of what I think, Scott, you guys do a lot of interesting stuff here is the data that you pass back to the [00:40:00] networks becomes like one of the major levers you can pull is kind of teaching them what successful.

Has become, I feel like it's becoming a new field on how to lead score and how to like judge the traffic that's coming in and then teach Facebook, Hey, I want more of this. Instead of this other thing that you've been getting me, this, this all along and extremely, incredibly hard in healthcare, right?

Because, and this is something we run into all the time, which is like, you look at a great mattress brand and they might be able to lead score based on add to cart or dwell time or zip code or whatever else. And it turns out that like, you know, in certain fields and, and FinTech and healthcare uh, you can get really, really stuck there.

And that doesn't mean that people aren't doing it and interesting creative ways usually hand-in-hand with their lawyer and like what their hands shaking from fear. But I totally agree. That can be something. 

Nima Gardideh: Yeah, I think it changes. I mean, if we do it for. You to be a lot. And a [00:41:00] lot of times we just ask the people like we have questionnaires, you walk in, you're like, Hey, can you tell us who you are?

But there is other ways, you know, we use Clearbit reveal and all these sorts of other products to pull in the data of like who you are sort of IP reversal. And you used that. But yeah, the more harder sort of industries like healthcare and FinTech becomes definitely questionable if we can even do any of that work.

Right. 

Michael Kuznetsov: How about CRM? When's the right time to bring in that first email marketers start building out the drips. Start really being diligent about that. What do you guys thing? 

Scott McLeod: I feel like it's something that's like, particularly the roles and responsibilities of that day. One growth generalist to like help build out the basics.

I think because again, the right growth generalist is thinking through the full funnel. Almost always email and CRM is like post acquisition there, you got their lead or they became a customer and now the CRM marketer starts. So I think the basic scaffolding early days, and then back to like, well, it depends on your business and market, [00:42:00] right?

So some businesses, I think you can imagine something with long sales cycles, something that's focused on repeat purchase. These are going to need to lean way more into email and CRM mattresses. For example, it's been important to us, but email matters a lot less after we've already acquired you. And we're like a one-time purchase business.

If you're selling socks and it's based on repeat CRM better be a really early piece of your strategy. And to us CRM. Both customer relationship management, communication, relationship management, it's kind of a blur of like, who are our customers? How do we have information on them? And then where and how, and when do we communicate, right?

Like what are the triggers and how do we think about personalization? And this starts to become its own web of complexity. But I think in general, it's based on the business. You want them really early, but I think without a doubt in the first beginnings, I'm surprised still many companies don't have like post-purchase flows or abandoned flows or these really simple things that are like 80 20 in the finest.

Like just getting some of these basic flows up.

Michael Kuznetsov: I think. And what you said, which is really interesting, sorry, Nima. [00:43:00] Is there's like a difference between CRM marketing for high consideration and low consideration products as like one really important dimension for evaluating a CRM marketer. And then the other is actually similar to what we were just talking about for paid, which has a cool thing, which is like, how creative are they versus how technical they are. Right. And so really, really low consideration high frequency purchases, like whatever selling t-shirts at J Crew is going to be a certain type of person.

And they're either going to be coming up with a clever new way of like pitching that t-shirt or they're going to be really, really deep in the system, coding the HTML, like making sure that the whole email service like machine is working properly. And then at the flip side, you know, a really high consideration purchase, like a bathroom remodel or, or something in the healthcare space is going to be a one-time sale.

Just like you're saying. And then again, you, you sort of have the flip between the more creative or the more technical. [00:44:00]

Nima Gardideh: Yeah. It doesn't matter. Cause I think like the good example of this is. Let's say you're a referral based product like Airbnb. I know there's a whole team that focuses on the email that goes out when I invited a friend.

Right. And then it can literally walk you through exactly where they made the choices in between every single part of the email, like why the name shows up in the way that it does, you know, the buttons position and the words that they've used and all the sort of stuff had been run as tests. Right. So I think it depends on the dynamics of your product as well.

Right? So like, if you have a product where inviting friends is a flow that you should care about, like Zoom is a good example, the fact that we are, I'm inviting you as panelists, the experience of inviting a panelist and then inviting attendees, then I'm going to care a lot about that because then that's potential for growth because these people, they could become hosts of webinars in the future themselves.

Right. And one of my favorite stories is of how the growth team at Survey Monkey became a thing. Because there were more traditional sort of [00:45:00] marketing organization type of company, but they had hired some growth marketers and they discovered that the sort of success page after you finish a survey as a normal survey survey survey, they can begin to experiment on that and try to attempt to get you to create your own surveys, because you just could be anybody, right.

You could be a marketer filling out a survey for another marketer. Well, all they know, right? So, and then using that cause there's millions of people going on that page, they started growing the company so much faster and then eventually sort of realize, oh, this is what we should be doing. We should be running experiments across all the parts of the products.

So then we can change the dynamics of the company, which actually brings us to another, another sort of topic I wanted to tap into because we have all sorts of people in the, and the attendees today at different stages is you know, maybe, maybe one of the problems that you face. That you're not, you might not have no resources to work on the ideas that you have, or maybe you are the first [00:46:00] growth marketer, but the founders are maybe more product thinkers and they don't understand what you're talking about.

How do you guys think about building sort of political capital in the organization such that you can actually do the things that you think are the best experiments to be running right now? 

Michael Kuznetsov: Yeah. I have a pretty straightforward one, which is I find more and more that the great marketers can get aligned with the CTO.

Because there's a common language there, right? It's like, Hey, you guys are running sprints. So are we and we're S we sort of have an interface here on the product where like, we have a lot of opinions about how products should be built and you have a lot of opinions about how downstream products should be built.

And so we need to figure out where those lines are. And so it's, it's funny because I think in the past, Those two departments or those two areas were ones that were rarely aligned. But you know, at Talkspace my experience was with Gil, the CTO there, like day one, we [00:47:00] just realized like we get each other in a really profound way.

And that doesn't mean I didn't drive him crazy. That doesn't mean he didn't drive me crazy, but it can be a unexpected source of sort of leverage and influence in an organization. Because what that means is that the CEO is hearing a unified voice from two very different parts of the org. 

Scott McLeod: I think it makes sense. I think particularly if you don't get lucky or someone, you know, you can gravitate towards someone who sees your thinking. I think already for good, for someone to want to hire a growth marketer. Hopefully there's someone in the C-suite like sees this as an opportunity and bringing these worlds together and whoever the champion is, and they either that's the founder themselves, a co-founder or the first person, their job is not to convince others why they should resource against stuff.

And in my experience, it's a lot of like, how do you use data to help you tell a story? It's like showing people the opportunity of, Hey, if we invest in these bets, I feel confident we're going to get these types of returns. And that's kind of where back to a generalist, like your job early is [00:48:00] discovering, but while you're discovering and searching for solutions, you're trying to make a case to go back, like, you know, back to being a pirate, right.

Or you're out searching for this. Once you find something, you need to bring it back to the mothership and convince everyone why it's worth investing in. Right. And I think a lot of that is, Hey, we spent a thousand dollars on this little. And we learned this and we feel confident. We spent 10,000, we learned this and we generate this much revenue.

Right. And I think a lot of it is how do you extrapolate data from early tests and then use that to build capital that's one. And then the other just constantly building capital is showing people what the work you're doing is affecting the rest of the business. Right? You want people to go, oh, Hey, the growth people have got this one idea, the last six ideas they had worked out.

Right. And I think there's a little bit of as the organization gets bigger, there's a lot more of this in the growth person's role. It's communicating out, right? It's like, what was our hypothesis? What was our like, approach to solving it? And how did it turn out? I bet a lot of luck with this in some organizations, including ours.

How do you democratize the, like the idea spreading, [00:49:00] if you involve a lot of people in the ideas now, they feel like the ideas you guys are choosing are everyone's or their idea, even if it's not true, you may already know as a growth marketer, what you're going to do, but by involving more people. Hey, the projects you're working on are like a holistic anyways.

So you need lots of people's buy in usually for growth, right? You need the CTO, you need the product person, any of the head of brand. And these people all need to kind of agree with you. So. You got to make that case. I think data helps a lot in terms of like explaining the upside and opportunity as one.

And then constantly, almost sometimes tiring. You do remind people like this work you're doing right. And I think when I was at Facebook, I was solo growth marker on a project. I needed to convince people to give me time and energy, but I had to go figure out how to get the data. I need to show them that like, Hey, listen to me and I think this will happen. And the first two or three times I was taking like sticking my neck out. Right. I really thought they were the right bets. I got lucky. And then it became easier. The next times I go back to that engineer, like, Hey man, I've got this thing again. They're going to respect you.

But I think it takes a constant communication of like what the growth team's doing. How's [00:50:00] it creating upside. And then this results in more resources and more hires. Right. 

Michael Kuznetsov: What I love about that is that it is marketing fundamentals. How do we change people's minds, frequency and recency, right? Which is like, how many times have they seen our ad?

And when is the last time that they saw it? The perfect example is, imagine you go. After this horrible pandemic is over and you go and you sit down in a movie theater, what is the first ad you see? We all know it's going to be a Coca-Cola ad. And why does that Coca-Cola ad work so well it's because we've seen a million Coca-Cola ads and we know what a Coca-Cola ad is, and it triggers us to want the product.

And then also. It's recent to when we're making a decision purchase about whether or not we want to buy a soda. Right. And it's so funny that like, as marketers, we think about how to do this externally in the org all the time. It's second nature to us, but it's so important to remember that inside of your organization, you need to do the same thing.

You need to figure out how to keep telling the story of [00:51:00] growth marketing. You need to figure out how to get your successful tests out there so that people understand that they're working so that you get more trust and more resources. And you need to make sure that you put that all up in front of people before important decision points, because that's the recency side of it.

Right. Which is it's really, really good to make sure that people have seen a, a log of all your successful tests, right before they're deciding how many growth people are going to hiring the coming year. 

Nima Gardideh: I'm such a huge fan of this. I think basically I call it like open process a lot. We're just talking about how you're thinking about things and how you're prioritizing, and then showing everyone here is the ideas that we're running and exposing the.

Is hugely hugely useful. And we do this with our company around how we run our own company. I have an open process with that. We're an email, a whole team around. Here's the things that we're thinking about changing, to sort of get buy in from everyone in the company around how we're changing things and how the pot structure is going to make, maybe change.

The profit sharing that we do might change is, is basically marketing. It's a [00:52:00] form of marketing, but the other way I think about it, Building the community that cares about it. Right. And especially with growth and maybe, maybe you have incredible growth marketers and they know exactly what they're doing and they have the best ideas.

But the reality is that sometimes there's people that come around from random parts of the organization with amazing ideas that you should be testing out. So this kind of enables that a lot where we have like this sort of open concept, open process of how you're running the growth experiments, invites all these people who say email, email back to that, maybe email, you're sending to everyone saying, Hey, I've been thinking about this idea and you can put that in your priority. Right. 

Scott McLeod: That makes sense. I think like going back to thinking about hiring and building teams, a lot of this is like, as. Organization gets more mature and more sophisticated. You need to hire and start adding people to the team that are better at this type of communication. It's really, really easy when there are five people at your company.

And one of them is a generalist [00:53:00] growth marketer for everybody to be on board with everything and for all those conversations to happen organically. But now let's fast forward. A couple of years, you've raised your series C you've raised your series D all of a sudden like the professional competency is just as much around internal communication as it is, and that scrappiness and that willingness to sort of get stuff done.

And that's really important. I think it's like hiring the right stage appropriate people is a big thing. We learned scaling our organization. Making sure you're getting the person at the right stage, both from, they came from a too mature of an organization and they're coming here and they don't know how to execute and the reverse, they're like a hacker and you're throwing them into where they have to manage stakeholders.

These are really different skill sets, at least in my experience. It's like, and that's what we have a group of generalists who are on new business and they're hackers. And then we have generalists and GM's who are a little bit more mature from a organizational perspective. It's very hard to find someone who can grow that trajectory.

At least in our experience. It's almost always two people, right? It's like someone who's going to help you in the earliest stages, doesn't necessarily have the [00:54:00] aptitude desire or willingness to like form into the leader. Who's spending a lot of time managing stakeholders and making sure people are on the same page.

Some of my growth hackers, they just want to get back to hacking on the team of, for the second. And there's 14 or 15 people and you're managing stakeholders. It's not fun anymore for those hacker type people. Right. And I think can be very mindful of hiring stage appropriate people who have late stage experience too early, as bad as early stage people too late.

I think. 

Michael Kuznetsov: Yeah, there's a really good question from Marlo. When is the right time to start investing in SEO for the first marketing hire session, realist of the seed stage startup on track for series a, would you recommend laying the foundation for SEO and content marketing early on or holding off on it?

And I think that's so interesting, especially like, as you start thinking about those channels that take a little bit longer to pay off, right? Like SEO isn't necessarily going to deliver something huge for you on day one, but it also may be too late to start thinking about a day three. How do you get, or sorry, year three.

How do you guys think about that? 

Scott McLeod: Can I [00:55:00] put that quick of like it's an email or a little bit goes a long way and even more an SEO, like whatever your site's getting indexed for today is going to help you a year from now. SEO is one that's like almost the hardest of all channels to play, catch up in my experience.

Right? Like you just, can't all of a sudden a mass, a lot of organic visitors, it takes consistency. It takes a lot of content. It takes thinking through. All of this, but I think in the earliest days, your marketer should know like what keywords matter for your niche? What, like three to five are the most important target keywords.

And then at least your website's optimized around this, right? And I'm like, page speed and choose your five to 10 target keywords. That's going to carry you for a while. Right? It's like be mindful of page speed, but be mindful that you're weaving in these keywords. But some businesses, SEO is an important part of their business and you should start earlier.

But I think a lot of them it's like a little bit goes a super long way. And I see a lot of companies wait way too late to now try and figure it out. And time is the most valuable thing with SEO. Doing some good stuff now pays off in six months. 

Nima Gardideh: So like one thing around SEO, I think is [00:56:00] basically if your business model isn't around it, then I feel like, I feel, I feel like it's a hard thing to say.

You should focus on it deeply. Yeah, the way I would care about it, especially I think Marla runs a B2B. I'm an example because I think a lot of people won't know exactly what you mean when you say, let's say, let's say your, your, your, your product is structured in a way that people are creating content almost for you.

So then you can actually play in the SEO world where you'll get like a Yelp or Airbnb or TripAdvisor, or your product is designed in a way that people are creating content for you. Right. It's very hard to be producing so much content by yourself to win. And I think the only real like outlier here is probably HubSpot and they were playing in a totally different market, before they started.

So I think it's going to be harder and harder to create another HubSpot where SEO is sort of one of your main, main plays in B2B. But the caveat to all this [00:57:00] is that I think Scott has a good point here where you could probably figure out your like top 20 keywords by running ads on them. Seeing what the sort of dynamics are, or are these like real good customers that we're bringing in from these keywords and then make it make a deliberate call saying actually this keyboard is not very competitive on SEO, so it is worth the investment on us, maybe producing like five articles to maybe capture 20% of the traffic from SEO.

Even though we're going to continue doing paid search on that keyword. you can basically systematize this and slowly do this, instead of trying to say, okay, I'm going to invest like six months of work into SEO. You can basically do. I paid strategy and then slowly leak it into. 

Scott McLeod: Use it, the decrease, your cost of paid search, ideally, right? It's like you're paying for placements. And now you're trying to decrease the amount of paid by getting first page for a lot of stuff. I think just knowing those keywords early is helpful because like what goes into your press release? You better make sure the title of your press release includes one of your keywords, right?

Like these little things I think pay off [00:58:00] a year later, you're going to start ranking all of a sudden for one of your main keywords, not cause he spent 10 hours a week focusing, but because you kept that thread through everything you kept using whatever your main keyword is for your product or service in your press release in your social posts, in like every little thing that it starts to really come through.

And I think it's just like keeping that small thread. I think I've seen go a long way. You'll be three years into a domain and all of a sudden your first page and now actually becomes something sustainable. And you were lucky that you sat on that keyword for three years and you continue to produce content around it.

Right. And I think. For most businesses, that's the hard thing to go crack right now, particularly you've got affiliates and content sites. There's a lot of people are going to be competing and that's their job today because they don't have a product or service to sell stuff. I think it's a hard channel to crack.

Nima Gardideh: So I think this is where we can draw a line in the sand and say, this is it because we did over an hour and I don't want to keep people around, but thank you so much for spending your time. I think there's been some questions that we couldn't answer. I'm sorry about that. But it's just the reality of running.

Michael Kuznetsov: Can we just maybe plug our Twitters or LinkedIns or something into the chat here, [00:59:00] just so that if people want to follow up on any tweet

Scott McLeod: Yeah tweet us some questions. Definitely. 

Nima Gardideh: If you want to face then your Twitter's into the chat and I'll do the same. I'm looking for more folks to have these types of conversations with. So if anyone here wants to be on the panel next time, Please tweet at me or email me and I'm happy to chat and hopefully everyone got some value out of this. [MUSIC FADES IN] And I appreciate the few of you that messaged me during the webinars saying this is good. So that made me feel great. Thanks everyone.

Michael Kuznetsov: Thanks guys. 

Scott McLeod: Thanks guys. Appreciate it. Have a good night everyone. 

Nima Gardideh: Thanks for listening to our show. Get our episodes. As soon as they're released, just tap that follow or subscribe button, wherever you get your podcasts. Plus if you want to join our live discussions where you can ask us questions, as we record, sign up at parallel.com/hypergrowth-podcast, We'll see you on the next episode, on "The Hypergrowth Experience". [MUSIC FADES OUT]

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