The Exchanges

Q Palta is this kind of weird beast in, in a respectful way. It's amazing. But like, what is Palta for those that don't know? And then we can dive into the machinery of how you build incredibly successful.

A So Palta is a builder. We are a venture builder. It sits in the intersection of current company and venture capital. We create the ideas, and then we partner with founders to make those ideas happen. And we give them everything from the very beginning To make it scale really fast. So we give them growth, analytics, data infrastructure, finance, legal support. We build such category leaders as Flow, Simple, Lave, and Zing. Palt is going to hit five hundred fifty million this year in revenues. We grow each year 50% and even more. We raised around two hundred million from top tier investors. One of them is VNV Global. And palta is avocado in Spanish, so we are building health tech B to C mobile subscription.

AI assessment note: “So Palta is a builder. We are a venture builder.”

Q Why the hundred million? That feels like a bit of an arbitrary number. If you can get it to ten million, and it's super efficient and profitable, why is that bad?

A Because each business gonna be compared to flow, and when you have flow in the portfolio, which is a more than seventy-five million more, six million active subscribers, Second year retention of 80% and more than 65% organic traffic, the numbers that companies can just dream about. You need to match those numbers with the new kids that you are raising, right? We have Simple. Simple is a weight loss management tool. They're going to hit two hundred million in ARR. We have Zing, which is a powered fitness coach with hyper personalized and super engaging workouts. They're gonna hit around fifty million in RR. They grew four times since last year. And we have Lavi. Lavi is an AI cosmetologist making face care accessible. They're gonna hit around twenty million in RR this year. They're growing 30% month over month.

AI assessment note: “Because each business gonna be compared to flow”

Q Palta is this kind of weird beast in, in a respectful way. It's amazing. But like, what is Palta for those that don't know? And then we can dive into the machinery of how you build incredibly successful.

A So Palta is a builder. We are a venture builder. It sits in the intersection of current company and venture capital. We create the ideas, and then we partner with founders to make those ideas happen. And we give them everything from the very beginning To make it scale really fast. So we give them growth, analytics, data infrastructure, finance, legal support. We build such category leaders as Flow, Simple, Lave, and Zing. Palt is going to hit five hundred fifty million this year in revenues. We grow each year 50% and even more. We raised around two hundred million from top tier investors. One of them is VNV Global. And palta is avocado in Spanish, so we are building health tech B to C mobile subscription.

AI assessment note: “So Palta is a builder. We are a venture builder.”

Q These are actually really interesting products and really interesting stories. Zing, for example, again, sorry for, like, going off schedule. I'm just too interested. It's such a crowded market. And I'm always pushed all of these different products, and you know, I'm pushed ladder to the extreme and 50 others. How do you succeed in a market where there's seemingly complete commoditization and no differentiation?

A So it comes to the way how we basically launch products and how we run the whole play. The way we operate. First, we're gonna UXR the area and see, like, if there is something there worth our attention. Then we're gonna do some fake door tests. We're gonna sense CAC willingness to pay. How the unit economics might look like at scale. If it's there, we green light. We bring a tiny team of two founders, commonly a tech founder and business or product founder, We're gonna put a lean crew behind them. We're gonna launch an MVP and build the core use case. This is where Palta growth comes in. We're gonna literally scale very fast the first use case. How we do that? We start with paid user acquisition. Commonly one channel. It's gonna be meta. We scale to three, five K daily. This is where the algorithms start to optimize, and this is where you see true Unit economics. Once it's there, and we nailed it, then we're going to expand to the next use cases. We commonly start with web onboardings, because you avoid 30% fee. There is attribution there, which makes user acquisition more efficient, but there are things that people commonly don't talk about. The nature of credit card payments drive higher retention, and on web, you can charge more. This is how consumers perceive pricing on web versus mobile. Now there is a catch around funnels. If you over invest into the funnels and start obs…

AI assessment note: “So it comes to the way how we basically launch products and how we run”

Q Why the hundred million? That feels like a bit of an arbitrary number. If you can get it to ten million, and it's super efficient and profitable, why is that bad?

A Because each business gonna be compared to flow, and when you have flow in the portfolio, which is a more than seventy-five million more, six million active subscribers, Second year retention of 80% and more than 65% organic traffic, the numbers that companies can just dream about. You need to match those numbers with the new kids that you are raising, right? We have Simple. Simple is a weight loss management tool. They're going to hit two hundred million in ARR. We have Zing, which is a powered fitness coach with hyper personalized and super engaging workouts. They're gonna hit around fifty million in RR. They grew four times since last year. And we have Lavi. Lavi is an AI cosmetologist making face care accessible. They're gonna hit around twenty million in RR this year. They're growing 30% month over month.

AI assessment note: “Because each business gonna be compared to flow, and when you have flow in the portfolio”

Q We were talking before about growth being kind of this weird discipline. I just want to start with, like, when did you realize you were in growth, and what was that? Ah, I'm actually a growth leader, and I love it.

A I started marketing, switched to product-led growth before they even called it product-led growth. It was called a conversion optimization, like, 15 years ago. Then I did monetization. Then I did some co-product roles, and at some point, I started to go wide and broad. This is where one growth guru gave me an advice. You can do marketing and product. You should fit to one of them, like. And luckily, I didn't take that advice, and I said, I'm gonna do just wide and broad roles. So I started to take user acquisition, product analytics, product growth as like one big discipline, And I called it growth, and I don't care how other people call it, but I call it growth. You can grow through product, you can go through marketing, you need data, you know, to get all those insights to grow through both, and this is what I call growth.

AI assessment note: “I started to take user acquisition, product analytics, product growth as like one big discipline”

Q Help me out. Growth advisors. I always want internal. I just think it's better to have things internally done. How should founders think about the decision to have a growth advisor versus I should hire a growth team that's internal and 24 hours a day?

A I think the way you think about it is you need an internal growth team fully integrated, and then you hire, like, a couple of hands-on people who can run the show, and as we said, like, Young, hungry, head of growth, who can manage the show by still being hands-on. You will miss that big strategic perspective and experience and knowledge from the industry that the growth advisor can bring. But then it's probably a matter of how you integrate them and how you work with them. They can give you everything, and they can give you nothing. It really depends on, what is your ask? How do we work together? How do you set the whole processing and mentoring thing around that? For example, the way I work, I commonly mentor the head of growth. We solve weekly challenges. I'm being fully integrated into the team. I learn the founder. I learn how they think, how they create, so I can, like, be fully integrated and support the growth and understand their product and their challenges. As opposed to, you know, just come in, tell a couple of fluffy, smart sentences, let them break their heads around the execution, and go away.

AI assessment note: “You will miss that big strategic perspective and experience”

Q We were talking before about growth being kind of this weird discipline. I just want to start with, like, when did you realize you were in growth, and what was that? Ah, I'm actually a growth leader, and I love it.

A I started marketing, switched to product-led growth before they even called it product-led growth. It was called a conversion optimization, like, 15 years ago. Then I did monetization. Then I did some co-product roles, and at some point, I started to go wide and broad. This is where one growth guru gave me an advice. You can do marketing and product. You should fit to one of them, like. And luckily, I didn't take that advice, and I said, I'm gonna do just wide and broad roles. So I started to take user acquisition, product analytics, product growth as like one big discipline, And I called it growth, and I don't care how other people call it, but I call it growth. You can grow through product, you can go through marketing, you need data, you know, to get all those insights to grow through both, and this is what I call growth.

AI assessment note: “I started to take user acquisition, product analytics, product growth as like one big discipline”

Q They pay, they come in, and the trouble with most AI apps today is if they do get there, they just churn within like seven days. Is there anything that you've learned in terms of onboarding and retention in those first user actions that people don't think enough about?

A I think it comes to the nature of the product. You need really to solve the need to do that in a fascinating way where you nail the first use case. You build the whole onboarding and activation around that use case and not something fluffy and broad, and only after that you expand to more use cases. The second one gonna be the whole activation, what most of the teams many times forget, I just sell premium. And then what I care about is how to improve cancellations and churn, but what happens in between? You need to activate your users on the subscription. Users don't remember what they really managed to buy. They don't remember your features. You know, we run a super interesting survey at Flow where we asked our paying customers if they use feature X or they use feature Y, if they engage with that feature, if they enjoy that feature. And you know, the answers were around, I don't really distinguish between the doctor's report and this and that insight. Oh, I couldn't find it. Oh, I didn't know it really exists. So if you don't do a good job around taking the user and really explaining them why you should be enjoying your premium and what you paid for, then don't be surprised why the users churn. And now let's do like something truly amazing to get them back when they just are pissed off. Of your product, right?

AI assessment note: “You build the whole onboarding and activation around that use case and not something fluffy”

Q These are actually really interesting products and really interesting stories. Zing, for example, again, sorry for, like, going off schedule. I'm just too interested. It's such a crowded market. And I'm always pushed all of these different products, and you know, I'm pushed ladder to the extreme and 50 others. How do you succeed in a market where there's seemingly complete commoditization and no differentiation?

A So it comes to the way how we basically launch products and how we run the whole play. The way we operate. First, we're gonna UXR the area and see, like, if there is something there worth our attention. Then we're gonna do some fake door tests. We're gonna sense CAC willingness to pay. How the unit economics might look like at scale. If it's there, we green light. We bring a tiny team of two founders, commonly a tech founder and business or product founder, We're gonna put a lean crew behind them. We're gonna launch an MVP and build the core use case. This is where Palta growth comes in. We're gonna literally scale very fast the first use case. How we do that? We start with paid user acquisition. Commonly one channel. It's gonna be meta. We scale to three, five K daily. This is where the algorithms start to optimize, and this is where you see true Unit economics. Once it's there, and we nailed it, then we're going to expand to the next use cases. We commonly start with web onboardings, because you avoid 30% fee. There is attribution there, which makes user acquisition more efficient, but there are things that people commonly don't talk about. The nature of credit card payments drive higher retention, and on web, you can charge more. This is how consumers perceive pricing on web versus mobile. Now there is a catch around funnels. If you over invest into the funnels and start obs…

AI assessment note: “So it comes to the way how we basically launch products and how we run”

Q They pay, they come in, and the trouble with most AI apps today is if they do get there, they just churn within like seven days. Is there anything that you've learned in terms of onboarding and retention in those first user actions that people don't think enough about?

A I think it comes to the nature of the product. You need really to solve the need to do that in a fascinating way where you nail the first use case. You build the whole onboarding and activation around that use case and not something fluffy and broad, and only after that you expand to more use cases. The second one gonna be the whole activation, what most of the teams many times forget, I just sell premium. And then what I care about is how to improve cancellations and churn, but what happens in between? You need to activate your users on the subscription. Users don't remember what they really managed to buy. They don't remember your features. You know, we run a super interesting survey at Flow where we asked our paying customers if they use feature X or they use feature Y, if they engage with that feature, if they enjoy that feature. And you know, the answers were around, I don't really distinguish between the doctor's report and this and that insight. Oh, I couldn't find it. Oh, I didn't know it really exists. So if you don't do a good job around taking the user and really explaining them why you should be enjoying your premium and what you paid for, then don't be surprised why the users churn. And now let's do like something truly amazing to get them back when they just are pissed off. Of your product, right?

AI assessment note: “You need to activate your users on the subscription. Users don't remember what they really managed to buy.”

Q When you build a UA engine that can scale, most for the last few years, or 20 years, uh, has been SEO. We're seeing that really move and change. Given the dominance of web for you, How do you think about the transition away from SEO and how that changes your strategy?

A Part of what we don't do is SEO. First of all, the best organic you can get is word of the mouth, and this is where you should aim. It's like building the great product that solves the problem and brings other users in. This is what Plo does. With the rest, I believe the current opportunities lie within communities. Building those communities where the users are. Discord, Reddit, YouTube following. I'm not a fan of talking about like, you know, SEO, AO. If one gonna replace another, probably yes, probably no. Not all the companies are built for SEO and for good SEO. You need to be in a specific niche probably to build some programmatic SEO. For B to B SEO or AO can work. In our niche for health tech, This is not a strategic goal.

AI assessment note: “Part of what we don't do is SEO.”

Q What's the biggest BS that you hear from growth leaders on podcasts?

A What best frameworks look like and how a different heads of growth share their best failures and best wins, which is commonly fluff and very, very, very far from the reality and how you run the operation in the reality. The metrics and the benchmarks, which are average and average commonly, absolutely misleading. Or the, the benchmarks that you need to at least be looking at. But then, like, your product is different. How you even look at those metrics and benchmarks? You know that Flow doesn't have real competition. So we look at Duolingo metrics and benchmarks. Is it really comparable? Not really. And when others compare to Flow or to best players in the market, I'm playing the same game. You don't have your own value and leverage, but then, like, how are you comparing to that median?

AI assessment note: “commonly fluff and very, very, very far from the reality”