The Exchanges

Q So you don't then today, when you look at this, you don't say at HubSpot, shit, we should not do as much organic content. Or how does it change the organic content strategy?

A You should still have an SEO strategy. There's still like value in transactional search. It has not disappeared. It has decreased, but it does not disappear. So we split out search into informational, which is like, I used to create content to teach you something. And if I taught you that thing, you would come to my website and I could convince you to buy something. Then you have transactional, which is you're already looking for a product that solves a problem and we can appear in Google for that kind of problem. Now informational content. I just don't see value in it long-term anymore because people's consumer habits are going to change to just get all of that from AI. And that is a challenge for most businesses. There is opportunity to like still appear in the AI search assistance for that content and for transactional, which we'll spend a little more time on, which is, Hey, I have a product. And yeah, people are still going to Google, but now a lot of them are going to these AI assistants. How do I make sure that when ChatGPT recommends products, I'm in that recommended list? I think there's a lot of value in that, right? Like ChatGPT has over a billion users are growing much faster. They're going to add a freemium paid product, which I think is going to help us market within ChatGPT. So the thing is, if you have a single product, let's say I have a product that did a, you …

AI assessment note: “Now informational content. I just don't see value in it long-term anymore”

Q I, I, I totally agree it's a much more understood concept. I think the roots to it are still confused, though, in a couple of different ways. Number one way is, actually, fuck it, before we start about the roots to it, just so we actually understand on a definition, what is growth, Kieran? It's thrown around. What does growth mean to you, and how do you define it?

A I define growth in the PLG way where it actually, um, helps to power your go-to-market, right? Growth to me is how do I acquire onboard and upgrade people and then retain them? I think growth means something different dependent upon the go-to-market motion you have, right? Let's talk about two different go-to-market motions. If you're in a marketing or sales-led business, you do have growth teams, but they predominantly look after performance marketing channels like search, uh, paid, paid advertising, affiliate. Like they don't touch the product because it's a marketing sales-led business. And then in a PLG motion, which I think growth is much more prevalent, you have a growth team that owns the performance marketing part of it. Like, how do I get users in here? Then they own the onboard and touchless and retention. And so to me, growth is a way that you can build models, iteration, and experiments to actually power your, um, your kind of go to market. Uh, but I think it definitely means different things within different companies.

AI assessment note: “Growth to me is how do I acquire onboard and upgrade people and then retain”

Q know, Bluntie, I've done now seven growth shows, and every single person has said about growth post-product market fit. There has not been one discussion about growth in any form pre-product market fit, almost that it doesn't exist. Can you help me understand? How would you think about actually Is there a role for growth pre-product market fit, and what does that look like in terms of tasks and activities?

A Yeah, it's really, so I think this is an interesting place. I'm not surprised. I, when I was actually thinking about this, I had like, oh, like proper growth function is series A and beyond, right? And that's like typically the advice you would give, like series A beyond, you have users, you have things that you want to start to actually grow. Uh, why would you want to do that pre-product market fit? Well, actually, growth can be instilled in your product roadmap, right? Rather than being an afterthought, I can build my product in such a way where I can think about how does this product go into require users? Like, is it I'll give you a really great example. One of my favorite examples is, uh, Genius.com, right? Used to be Rap Genius back in the day when there were large lyric sites. Now, when you were building another lyric site, you, there was already well-established lyric sites. Like, how do you differentiate in that? Well, they beat, they built, inbuilt this really creative feature that allowed you to annotate the rap lyrics. Like, I'm into hip hop. I love to know what, you know, the different lyrics meant. So you could actually annotate them and say, oh, well, they meant this, this, this. Why was that so ingenious? Well, now it made their pages much more rich in content. And so they just outranked everyone else, right? Because everyone else had lyrics, they had lyrics plu…

AI assessment note: “growth can be instilled in your product roadmap, right? Rather than being an afterthought”

Q So then the next question is, okay, do I have growth in this isolated unit in the corner in the growth team, the hailed Facebook, you know, that fell from heaven, um, or do we have them integrated into products, into engineering as part of the core org? How do you advise founders on that decentralized versus centralized or kind of collective?

A Yeah, this is actually the, if I think about our biggest learnings when we went down the PLG road, and just my big, one of my biggest learnings, I learned a lot about myself, but I learned also that, um, the, we really underestimated the change in team structure going from a traditional SaaS BDB company to like a PLG company, because we went from a company where sales and marketing were in the go-to-market team, and now we had sales, marketing, customer success, engineering, and product, and like, how do all these teams actually work together? If you kind of And let's, let's kind of go through that question in terms of different go-to-market type companies. So if you're like an, if you're an Airbnb, a Fiverr, a Thumbtack, where you're a large, you have, your product is basically your entire go-to-market, right? The product is the, the way that you acquire onboard, uh, upgrade people. For me, the, the perfect split there is you have a central growth team that lives in product. They own all the go-to-market metrics and for the, And in those kind of companies, marketing is really, how do I build a great brand? How do I build great product positioning? Then you have product-led companies like Calendly, Miro, Figma, and what they do is they have a marketing team that help acquire the demand, and then a product team that sits within the product team that's centralized, that does the …

AI assessment note: “the perfect split there is you have a central growth team that lives in product.”

Q Um, what are you, what are you trying to make yourself redundant for now?

A Oh, wow. That's a good question. Um, I will tell you that there's a couple of areas, and so, um, I built at the kind of like media org within HubSpot. It's about 80 people now. We acquired the hustle, and so I kind of put all of that together, and I hired someone recently who is incredible, Jordan, who is, uh, used to be the chief growth officer at Motley Fool, which is one of my favorite publications, and so I think he's gonna be better at me in that role. He has Better, um, knowledge around media. And I think over time he can make me almost redundant in that, in that role. And so I think that's one of the areas. And then I have an incredible person who's actually helping to make me much more redundant on the customer demand generation model that I built on HubSpot. So, you know, you want to have people that you think are going to be much better and brighter at you in those spots. And I think that's what I've constantly tried to do. And if you look My career in HubSpot is every two to two and a half years, I get new missions, and I can do that because the stuff I used to do, I have people who are better at me at doing that anyway.

AI assessment note: “I built at the kind of like media org within HubSpot... customer demand generation”

Q So you don't then today, when you look at this, you don't say at HubSpot, shit, we should not do as much organic content. Or how does it change the organic content strategy?

A You should still have an SEO strategy. There's still like value in transactional search. It has not disappeared. It has decreased, but it does not disappear. So we split out search into informational, which is like, I used to create content to teach you something. And if I taught you that thing, you would come to my website and I could convince you to buy something. Then you have transactional, which is you're already looking for a product that solves a problem and we can appear in Google for that kind of problem. Now informational content. I just don't see value in it long-term anymore because people's consumer habits are going to change to just get all of that from AI. And that is a challenge for most businesses. There is opportunity to like still appear in the AI search assistance for that content and for transactional, which we'll spend a little more time on, which is, Hey, I have a product. And yeah, people are still going to Google, but now a lot of them are going to these AI assistants. How do I make sure that when ChatGPT recommends products, I'm in that recommended list? I think there's a lot of value in that, right? Like ChatGPT has over a billion users are growing much faster. They're going to add a freemium paid product, which I think is going to help us market within ChatGPT. So the thing is, if you have a single product, let's say I have a product that did a, you …

AI assessment note: “informational content. I just don't see value in it long-term anymore”

Q Are the qualities of what made a great growth hire in the past very different to what makes a great growth hire in the future?

A When I hire growth people, you want curiosity, you want experimentation, you want someone who's going to go after an icon and be relentless and persistent. Then the only thing changes is that that person, if you were in a larger company, you hire a growth person to do onboard and you hire a growth person to do monetization, you hire a growth person to do something else. I think now you can have one person enabled by AI to do all parts of that role. And so I just think that that person can do much more, but the core characteristics should be the same. I actually think AI is a boom for people who are growth orientated. Like it is a, just a, an avalanche of momentum for people who are deeply curious and persistent. The best growth professionals I've worked with, they have those characteristics.

AI assessment note: “the core characteristics should be the same.”

Q Are the qualities of what made a great growth hire in the past very different to what makes a great growth hire in the future?

A When I hire growth people, you want curiosity, you want experimentation, you want someone who's going to go after an icon and be relentless and persistent. Then the only thing changes is that that person, if you were in a larger company, you hire a growth person to do onboard and you hire a growth person to do monetization, you hire a growth person to do something else. I think now you can have one person enabled by AI to do all parts of that role. And so I just think that that person can do much more, but the core characteristics should be the same. I actually think AI is a boom for people who are growth orientated. Like it is a, just a, an avalanche of momentum for people who are deeply curious and persistent. The best growth professionals I've worked with, they have those characteristics.

AI assessment note: “that person can do much more, but the core characteristics should be the same.”

Q How many domains have you bought, and how close, and which one have you been closest to pursuing?

A Uh, I have bought, let's say, a hundred. Uh, I had a bit of a issue with buying domains at some point. The one, you know, the one I nearly was like, oh, this could be a good idea, was I bought a remote, remotecal.com. I think it's back, I think it dropped, so I don't think I have it anymore, and what I was going to create was, um, remote workers, because, like, if you think about it, Your community has moved online in some respects, so you don't get the same kind of ability to network with people who are in your industry. So remote workers could have a calendar. They could put in times that they actually want to get matched with people, put in interests, and, and they will get matched every month with other people who have the same schedule as them, because one of the hard things is scheduling. But I never did it.

AI assessment note: “I have bought, let's say, a hundred... the one I nearly was... remotecal.com”

Q I, I, I totally agree it's a much more understood concept. I think the roots to it are still confused, though, in a couple of different ways. Number one way is, actually, fuck it, before we start about the roots to it, just so we actually understand on a definition, what is growth, Kieran? It's thrown around. What does growth mean to you, and how do you define it?

A I define growth in the PLG way where it actually, um, helps to power your go-to-market, right? Growth to me is how do I acquire onboard and upgrade people and then retain them? I think growth means something different dependent upon the go-to-market motion you have, right? Let's talk about two different go-to-market motions. If you're in a marketing or sales-led business, you do have growth teams, but they predominantly look after performance marketing channels like search, uh, paid, paid advertising, affiliate. Like they don't touch the product because it's a marketing sales-led business. And then in a PLG motion, which I think growth is much more prevalent, you have a growth team that owns the performance marketing part of it. Like, how do I get users in here? Then they own the onboard and touchless and retention. And so to me, growth is a way that you can build models, iteration, and experiments to actually power your, um, your kind of go to market. Uh, but I think it definitely means different things within different companies.

AI assessment note: “Growth to me is how do I acquire onboard and upgrade people and then retain them?”

Q know, Bluntie, I've done now seven growth shows, and every single person has said about growth post-product market fit. There has not been one discussion about growth in any form pre-product market fit, almost that it doesn't exist. Can you help me understand? How would you think about actually Is there a role for growth pre-product market fit, and what does that look like in terms of tasks and activities?

A Yeah, it's really, so I think this is an interesting place. I'm not surprised. I, when I was actually thinking about this, I had like, oh, like proper growth function is series A and beyond, right? And that's like typically the advice you would give, like series A beyond, you have users, you have things that you want to start to actually grow. Uh, why would you want to do that pre-product market fit? Well, actually, growth can be instilled in your product roadmap, right? Rather than being an afterthought, I can build my product in such a way where I can think about how does this product go into require users? Like, is it I'll give you a really great example. One of my favorite examples is, uh, Genius.com, right? Used to be Rap Genius back in the day when there were large lyric sites. Now, when you were building another lyric site, you, there was already well-established lyric sites. Like, how do you differentiate in that? Well, they beat, they built, inbuilt this really creative feature that allowed you to annotate the rap lyrics. Like, I'm into hip hop. I love to know what, you know, the different lyrics meant. So you could actually annotate them and say, oh, well, they meant this, this, this. Why was that so ingenious? Well, now it made their pages much more rich in content. And so they just outranked everyone else, right? Because everyone else had lyrics, they had lyrics plu…

AI assessment note: “growth can be instilled in your product roadmap, rather than being an afterthought”

Q The case study, again, I haven't done this before. What do I actually do? Do I just give them access to our Google Analytics? Like, what do I give them? And then also, what questions should I be asking? Again, I don't know what I'm looking for, so it's very hard hire for me. What should I be asking and what should I be looking for in the case study?

A Yeah. I think on the case study, I, one of the case studies that I would like to do is give someone a theoretical, again, it's different per role. So I've done a lot of these in terms of like media growth, different per role. But if we're thinking about growth, a theoretical model, and within the theoretical model, there's a theoretical goal for the company. Hey, we want to grow to, uh, we want growth to help us grow to 10 customers per month. Here is the model. Today, across my entire go-to-market, like all the different metrics that matter across that go-to-market, and ask them to, based on that model, ask them to tell us what are the most important metrics to focus on, because one of the things, if you're a pre-seed, seed, series eight, uh, founder, you are going to need someone who focuses on the most important things in a given point of time, because you don't have the resources to do every single metric and every single experiment. So I would say, here's my theoretical growth model. Here's my theoretical thing that I'm trying to get to over the next six to 12 months. Here's what I think is really important. Please come back to me and tell me how you would prioritize a metric, how you would build a team to actually help you be successful in that metric. Give me some examples of experiments. Tell me why you think those experiments are right. Within the questioning, what I w…

AI assessment note: “Give me some examples of experiments. Tell me why you think those experiments are right.”

Q have to, and I'm very passionate about this. I, I think so much product marketing and messaging is just shit. It's bland. It doesn't speak to anyone. It's neutral. And I, I think actually I said tweeted the other day, if you want someone who gets product messaging, Hire people who specialize in memes and gifs, because they know what resonates. How do you feel about what I just said?

A Brands don't want to have points of view, right? They want to sit in the middle with everyone else because it's safe, it's comfortable, I don't have to worry about getting tweets and my employees seeing the tweets and saying, oh, you're, this is like, we don't agree with this. I think you, we are increasingly moving to a world where everything is pop culture, right? If you actually look at fintech, 10 years ago, if someone said, hey, you know what's going to be one of the best content spaces online? Financial. Like, you're like, what? Like, that's boring. No, like, fintech is, like, moved totally pop culture. You're seeing it in business. Like, we're moving much more pop culture. Like, you're a great creator. You're creating content on places like TikTok to stuff that gets thousands of views, but we're, we're gonna continue to see that. Brands who don't get with that and don't know how to plug into the culture of today and sit in the middle saying boring things and being boring, uh, in terms of their product position and brand, I, I think they will They're, they're going to struggle. And I think there are people with points of views, mem creators, gift creators, creators themselves that are going to be much more important for companies to enable, to, uh, to create environments that will, they will want to work with those companies and help them actually plug into the, into the …

AI assessment note: “mem creators, gift creators, creators themselves that are going to be much more important”

Q What will cause the winners to be winners? Do you think?

A I think it's how you, I think it's understanding the value you can deliver and you have to understand the value you can deliver at scale. Um, and so, first of all, you have something intrinsic. You, your brand is associated with something that person wants to learn. Like they, there's, there's some sort of achievement. So the best example I can give you is if you think about the three pillars of community, for the most part, communities are built around personal growth, right? Like I myself want to get better by joining this community. Then they are around the connections you create. Right. I actually can connect with peers and they make me a better version of myself. And then the third part, which actually is an untalked about way you can build a motor on your company is the reputation. Like by doing those things, I actually, I actually can achieve something, but I can show people that in a visible way and get some sort of payback from that. So jobs is like the best example of that. I get credentialed. I get some sort of, um, qualifications and I get matched with jobs who want people like me. Now there's other ways you can do that if we go into, to web three. I think the companies who win in the future excel at those three things, which is breadth, personal knowledge, like how do I create a mass amounts of people who can learn things from me, be a better version of themselves.…

AI assessment note: “I think the companies who win in the future excel at those three things”

Q Do you think HubSpot's done community well, and with the benefit of what you know now, is there anything you'd do differently looking back?

A Yep, um, This is a great question. So I think we, again, how you define community, I would tell you, most people would say HubSpot has built a really large, vibrant community through our content, right? That's how they think of it. Like our academy, if you actually go to Gitu Craig, you'll see that our academy is probably the best rated online education platform, and we're not an online education company, right? That is part of our community. But I'll give you, I'll give you like an honest answer. So I think we've built a tremendous community, but we have a lot more to build. If you think about community as like our community.hub.com, like the connections part, where do I go? Where do I go to get connected to others? We've primarily focused on building a community of products. Like how do we build a community around our customers, the people using our tool? I think the thing that we could do better is we have all of these people, millions of people consuming our educational content. We have hundreds of thousands of people who are all credentialed. Uh, through our academy and taking our software courses. We've never tried to build a community of practice, which is how do we build a community around knowledge and connect those people to each other and connect those people, like do cohort learning and live work workshops and live classes. We're doing that much more. So we haven't …

AI assessment note: “I think we've built a tremendous community, but we have a lot more to build.”

Q The case study, again, I haven't done this before. What do I actually do? Do I just give them access to our Google Analytics? Like, what do I give them? And then also, what questions should I be asking? Again, I don't know what I'm looking for, so it's very hard hire for me. What should I be asking and what should I be looking for in the case study?

A Yeah. I think on the case study, I, one of the case studies that I would like to do is give someone a theoretical, again, it's different per role. So I've done a lot of these in terms of like media growth, different per role. But if we're thinking about growth, a theoretical model, and within the theoretical model, there's a theoretical goal for the company. Hey, we want to grow to, uh, we want growth to help us grow to 10 customers per month. Here is the model. Today, across my entire go-to-market, like all the different metrics that matter across that go-to-market, and ask them to, based on that model, ask them to tell us what are the most important metrics to focus on, because one of the things, if you're a pre-seed, seed, series eight, uh, founder, you are going to need someone who focuses on the most important things in a given point of time, because you don't have the resources to do every single metric and every single experiment. So I would say, here's my theoretical growth model. Here's my theoretical thing that I'm trying to get to over the next six to 12 months. Here's what I think is really important. Please come back to me and tell me how you would prioritize a metric, how you would build a team to actually help you be successful in that metric. Give me some examples of experiments. Tell me why you think those experiments are right. Within the questioning, what I w…

AI assessment note: “ask them to, based on that model, ask them to tell us what are the most important metrics”

Q Do I, the founder, need to have the growth model already in place when I'm hiring them? You said that the first question is like, here's the growth model. Do I have the growth model already, or can I say, hey, It's yours to construct.

A You could, uh, I think that's actually pretty interesting. I think you could do one or two ways, or one or three ways. You could actually already have growth within the company and actually have a model you can give them. You can build a theoretical model. I think it's pretty easy to build a theoretical model and give them that just as a case study. It doesn't need to be anything that complex, or you could actually have them build a hypothetical growth model for your business. Um, the only thing with that is The reason I like to give them the data beforehand, and the reason I tell founders that it's cool to give them the model beforehand, because if they were just picking, doing the model themselves, that they can't really challenge themselves. It's kind of like being on the treadmill, like you can only, you can basically decide to get off it whenever you want to get off it. And so if you give them a growth model with real, you know, with some complexity in it that you want them to see if they can isolate it and spot it, it just makes that I think a little bit better.

AI assessment note: “I think you could do one or two ways, or one or three ways.”

Q Can I ask specifically, what are the biggest mistakes that you see founders make in the hiring and recruitment process for growth teams?

A Uh, that is a really great question. Um, I, I don't know if I see commonalities mistake. More so, founders are unsure, even when they're hiring for growth, and when they're hiring growth people, I don't think they're still sure what they want the growth team to do. Like, they, they, they, they know that they want a team to come in and iterate and work on their go-to-market metrics, but I don't think they've, like, really defined what they want that growth team to excel at in the next 12 months. And the other thing that I think Is really pivotal when you bring in a growth team and it's the first time you're doing this is the founder has to be the sponsor of that team in particular for the first year, because the team can cause some friction, especially if it's not in the product team and it needs to touch product or if it's touching these other things that are owned traditionally by other teams, you have to have a CEO and a founder sponsor the growth team and say, Hey, we're structuring this team for this specific mission. And what we need is great collaboration from other teams and support from other teams to make sure they're a success.

AI assessment note: “I don't think they're still sure what they want the growth team to do.”

Q have to, and I'm very passionate about this. I, I think so much product marketing and messaging is just shit. It's bland. It doesn't speak to anyone. It's neutral. And I, I think actually I said tweeted the other day, if you want someone who gets product messaging, Hire people who specialize in memes and gifs, because they know what resonates. How do you feel about what I just said?

A Brands don't want to have points of view, right? They want to sit in the middle with everyone else because it's safe, it's comfortable, I don't have to worry about getting tweets and my employees seeing the tweets and saying, oh, you're, this is like, we don't agree with this. I think you, we are increasingly moving to a world where everything is pop culture, right? If you actually look at fintech, 10 years ago, if someone said, hey, you know what's going to be one of the best content spaces online? Financial. Like, you're like, what? Like, that's boring. No, like, fintech is, like, moved totally pop culture. You're seeing it in business. Like, we're moving much more pop culture. Like, you're a great creator. You're creating content on places like TikTok to stuff that gets thousands of views, but we're, we're gonna continue to see that. Brands who don't get with that and don't know how to plug into the culture of today and sit in the middle saying boring things and being boring, uh, in terms of their product position and brand, I, I think they will They're, they're going to struggle. And I think there are people with points of views, mem creators, gift creators, creators themselves that are going to be much more important for companies to enable, to, uh, to create environments that will, they will want to work with those companies and help them actually plug into the, into the …

AI assessment note: “mem creators, gift creators, creators themselves that are going to be much more important”

Q Does it have to tie back to revenue? Do we have to see X piece of content led to X amount of leads that led to X amount of converted dollars? Or can we be a little bit more elastic in terms of how we think about it?

A I think data has been the best and worst thing to happen to marketing, right? Why best? Well, marketers used to be stuck doing crap stuff because no one wanted to give them anything good to do because they couldn't, they couldn't figure out if it actually created any real revenue. Like marketing wanted a seat at the revenue table, be taken seriously, but hey, how do we actually show the value of the things I do? Over time, we got better data. We could actually say, oh, well, we can do these things and we can generate this amount of revenue. But then we become so focused on that, that we just try to iterate, iterate away to marginal gains. Oh, I have to show every single piece of content. Every single thing I do has to actually result in some sort of revenue for the business. And so now I'm, everyone is like stuck in the coming into the middle, because if we do that, we all end up doing the same stuff. I think creativity and brand is how you build a big company in the future. Like, I think founders who can truly see that they want to invest in something that will make me differentiated, that will make me stand out, that will be Create a larger audience around my brand, and I know that that thing is not going to be unmeasurable. I know that thing is going to be really hard to quantify. We did the hustle deal. We did not do the hustle deal based upon metrics, right? We did not pit…

AI assessment note: “I know that that thing is going to be really hard to quantify.”

Q What will cause the winners to be winners? Do you think?

A I think it's how you, I think it's understanding the value you can deliver and you have to understand the value you can deliver at scale. Um, and so, first of all, you have something intrinsic. You, your brand is associated with something that person wants to learn. Like they, there's, there's some sort of achievement. So the best example I can give you is if you think about the three pillars of community, for the most part, communities are built around personal growth, right? Like I myself want to get better by joining this community. Then they are around the connections you create. Right. I actually can connect with peers and they make me a better version of myself. And then the third part, which actually is an untalked about way you can build a motor on your company is the reputation. Like by doing those things, I actually, I actually can achieve something, but I can show people that in a visible way and get some sort of payback from that. So jobs is like the best example of that. I get credentialed. I get some sort of, um, qualifications and I get matched with jobs who want people like me. Now there's other ways you can do that if we go into, to web three. I think the companies who win in the future excel at those three things, which is breadth, personal knowledge, like how do I create a mass amounts of people who can learn things from me, be a better version of themselves.…

AI assessment note: “I think the companies who win in the future excel at those three things”

Q Can I ask final one for, uh, before the quick fire? I think onboarding is just universally done terribly badly. When you think about like onboarding for new growth and marketing hires, what does good look like to you? And what are you, what standard do you hold yourself accountable to us? This is what we need to do to make them successful.

A Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think one of the things we do that is really good. Um, and it's our people ops team. It's not me is, uh, we build a hundred day plans for people. Because when you come into a new role, you're like, oh, wow, what do I do, right? Um, and especially in remote, actually remote onboarding is a whole other topic, like remote work onboarding, so we do a hundred-day plan. We're like, here's all the different people you should meet, and we make sure that we get them into your calendar. Here's what we would love for you to do in month one. Here's what we would love for you to do in month two. Every two weeks, we check in and ask how you're doing across that hundred-day plan. Ask how the meetings went. Ask, is there other questions you have so we can pair you with other people. And that hundred day plan isn't actually about at the end of this, we need you to have achieved A, B and C. It's at the end of this, we hope that you, um, understand your role, understand your team and understand the kind of path to success. So it's just making sure that you feel set up for success versus like you have to have achieved these things within a hundred days. Like there are things that we want you to do along the way, but it's much more set up for you to be successful and make sure that we are setting you up to be successful within your role.

AI assessment note: “we build a hundred day plans for people”

Q And now we're hearing a hot take, a contrarian take from Kieran Flanagan, SVP of marketing at HubSpot, on when is the right time to hire your first growth hire?

A That is a great question. I've talked to great companies who have started growth with a single engineer. If you really define a core metric that you want that engineer to move, and so I talked to some founders who were trying to move retention, and they had a single engineer obsess over how do I get people to retain better Within my product. I think when you need a leader is when you need the bandwidth, because for the most part, when you have engineers or you have these kind of dotted group people, they're reporting up to the founder, or maybe they're reporting up to someone else. And then over time that team grows and you actually need a core leader to start to manage that function. And when you have a meaningful amount of work for them to do. And so we can actually discuss what that means, because I think growth could be applicable pre-product market fit, right? When you actually are trying to figure out how do I instill these mechanisms within my product To better acquire people, to better onboard people, to better retain people. It's built into your product roadmap. That kind of comes back to centralized, decentralized. If it's decentralized, it's just how the PMs work. If it's centralized, there's a single engineer who obsesses over that.

AI assessment note: “I think when you need a leader is when you need the bandwidth”

Q I mean, it is rather lovely to have another European on the show, but I do want to start, you know, you run and work in some of the most impressive growth orgs, ah, now obviously at HubSpot. How did you make your way into the world of growth, and what was that entry for you?

A Uh, yeah, I think that I'm a computer engineer by background, uh, went into marketing, have done a lot of different things in marketing, and at some point, kind of, was asked to build out a product-led motion for HubSpot. Um, I was very fortunate that pre-me, there was a guy called Brian Balfour who set up a lot of the templates and the ways that HubSpot could do this, and Brian is, uh, someone I look up to in that industry. And, uh, had the opportunity to do something quite unique at HubSpot when we were an established company to build a PLG motion, a product led motion, and build out the marketing and growth and kind of learn on the job because I was a marketer going in to learn about growth and do growth. And so my career, I've kind of just always tried to do the thing that I think is the next thing that's important. That's what I actually get excited by, like the new thing.

AI assessment note: “was asked to build out a product-led motion for HubSpot”

Q have so many questions. You can tell, like, no wonder, you know, no one can do a 20 minute meeting with me. Um, my first question to you is, you mentioned obviously kind of PLG, but this is PLG before PLG was such a term and so popular. How do you think PLG has changed as a go-to-market in the short time that it has been so popularized and used?

A Yeah, I think there's three, so there's three stages companies go through, and then I'll talk about how that's changing in the market. So the companies generally, even back then, and maybe today, like I'd spend a lot of time with founders, they go through the phase where they're like, Hey, we should do growth without really knowing what growth is, but they want to move a metric in a meaningful way. And so they try to do that. They do it in a way where team design and all of that is an afterthought. So it kind of creates chaos, but out of the chaos, there is something good. And they're like, wow, growth actually works. Let's get serious. And they try to create. Then we go from chaos to centralized. Like we create a centralized team. We build a growth function. We decide where that lives within the org. We sponsor that. Uh, the founder sponsors that, and that starts to work really, really well. I think the next iteration of that to me is like really, uh, curious is we have central growth teams and they do growth principles and they work with the product team to instill those principles in how you create product, how you do onboarding. I think at some point you can see growth being much more decentralized into just how PMs create the product itself. We build in, uh, mechanisms to promote the product through virality or these other things. We build onboarding flows. We build upgrad…

AI assessment note: “in the market growth has become much more well-defined.”

Q couple that are most striking for me is when we realize that we want to have a growth function within the organization, as a founder, and you're advising me as my hypothetical advisor, do I hire a growth leader who builds the team, or do I start with growth engineers, growth designers, whatever role that is, but more junior? How do you advise? Start with leader or start with junior?

A Uh, that is a great question. Um, I think you can start with engine. Like I, I've talked to great companies who have started growth with a single engineer. If you really define a core. Metric that you want that engineer to move. And so I talked to some founders who were trying to move retention and they had a single engineer obsess over how do I get people to retain better within my product? I think when you need a leader is when you need the bandwidth, because for the most part, when you have engineers or you have these kind of dotted Growth people. They're reporting up to the founder, or maybe they're reporting up to someone else, and then over time that team grows, and you actually need a core leader to start to manage that function. And when you have a meaningful amount of work for them to do, and so we can actually discuss what that means, because I think growth could be applicable pre-product market fit, right? When you actually are trying to figure out how do I instill these mechanisms within my product to better acquire people, to better onboard people, to better retain people, it's built into your product roadmap. That kind of, that kind of comes back to centralized, decentralized, right? Well, if it's decentralized, it's just how the PMs work. If it's centralized, there's a single engineer who obsesses over that. I want to let you get in, Ari, because I saw her.

AI assessment note: “I think you can start with engine. Like I, I've talked to great companies who have started growth with a single engineer.”

Q Totally get you. Can I ask, I think one thing that's important is to know what metric we're looking to move, whether it's pre or post product market fit. How do you advise founders on knowing the right metric to choose as the North Star metric to focus on?

A I think pre-product market fit is retention. You're looking for a cohort of users that, you know, will use your product in a meaningful way and post-product market fit, it's revenue. And I think revenue is the combination of all those different things. Like how do I acquire users? How do I get more of them to upgrade? How do I get more of them to retain and actually pay me money? So pre-product market fit, even though like I'm giving you examples of how you acquire users, ultimately you're, what you're trying to do is find retention and you could find that I'm acquiring the wrong users. I'm doing the wrong stuff. But I do think growth, the mentality of growth for me again, coming back to the fact that I just think it's going to be instilled in the way we create products. I've talked to founders who are pre-product market fit and just want to shoot the breeze. And what they really want to understand is like, how should I start to build in this stuff in my product now? Like, I don't want to wait until I start to acquire users and do these things. I want to actually start to think about how I build these mechanisms into my product from day one. I think that's actually a really smart thing to do because it starts to build traction, spin the flywheel, uh, much, much sooner.

AI assessment note: “I think pre-product market fit is retention... and post-product market fit, it's revenue.”

Q brilliant at content, I didn't mean this really, but I think, you know, me's and news of the world, like either are too expensive or do their own thing. I would never do a content role. Um, there are other amazing people, you know, you're Andrew Chen's Andreessen. He's paid millions by Andreessen. Like, you're never gonna get him to join a content team. Do you know what I mean?

A Yeah, but I think there's, I think, I think that is a great point, right? That is a great point, because we under-invest in content. Like, I mentioned this before, is that we'll spend, you know, a million dollars on Facebook campaigns, and then outsource our articles for 10 dollars, and expect, like, why is this content not working, and the Facebook thing is working really well? Well, you're spending 10 dollars an article. So it's, first of all, rethinking how we think about media. Media should be, A place, we think in how we think about media, building an environment where creators actually want to work, and so there's interesting ways that you can build environments that you want creators to work. One of those is like paid well, freedom. I think long term you can talk about things where you have upside on the things that they create. I mean, that's hard to do, but I think that's something you can do. The other thing you can do, which is something we launched recently, is a creator program. So you're right, like all of these people Will not want to work within a company because they want to do their own thing. Cool. Well, how do we create a creator program so we can actually have them be part of our network, but they actually get paid on the content they create. They get total editorial freedom within reason. And we can talk about that. And you start to make yourself a interes…

AI assessment note: “how do we create a creator program so we can actually have them be part”

Q Do you think HubSpot's done community well, and with the benefit of what you know now, is there anything you'd do differently looking back?

A Yep, um, This is a great question. So I think we, again, how you define community, I would tell you, most people would say HubSpot has built a really large, vibrant community through our content, right? That's how they think of it. Like our academy, if you actually go to Gitu Craig, you'll see that our academy is probably the best rated online education platform, and we're not an online education company, right? That is part of our community. But I'll give you, I'll give you like an honest answer. So I think we've built a tremendous community, but we have a lot more to build. If you think about community as like our community.hub.com, like the connections part, where do I go? Where do I go to get connected to others? We've primarily focused on building a community of products. Like how do we build a community around our customers, the people using our tool? I think the thing that we could do better is we have all of these people, millions of people consuming our educational content. We have hundreds of thousands of people who are all credentialed. Uh, through our academy and taking our software courses. We've never tried to build a community of practice, which is how do we build a community around knowledge and connect those people to each other and connect those people, like do cohort learning and live work workshops and live classes. We're doing that much more. So we haven't …

AI assessment note: “I think that's where we could improve like that community of practice”

Q So then the next question is, okay, do I have growth in this isolated unit in the corner in the growth team, the hailed Facebook, you know, that fell from heaven, um, or do we have them integrated into products, into engineering as part of the core org? How do you advise founders on that decentralized versus centralized or kind of collective?

A Yeah, this is actually the, if I think about our biggest learnings when we went down the PLG road, and just my big, one of my biggest learnings, I learned a lot about myself, but I learned also that, um, the, we really underestimated the change in team structure going from a traditional SaaS BDB company to like a PLG company, because we went from a company where sales and marketing were in the go-to-market team, and now we had sales, marketing, customer success, engineering, and product, and like, how do all these teams actually work together? If you kind of And let's, let's kind of go through that question in terms of different go-to-market type companies. So if you're like an, if you're an Airbnb, a Fiverr, a Thumbtack, where you're a large, you have, your product is basically your entire go-to-market, right? The product is the, the way that you acquire onboard, uh, upgrade people. For me, the, the perfect split there is you have a central growth team that lives in product. They own all the go-to-market metrics and for the, And in those kind of companies, marketing is really, how do I build a great brand? How do I build great product positioning? Then you have product-led companies like Calendly, Miro, Figma, and what they do is they have a marketing team that help acquire the demand, and then a product team that sits within the product team that's centralized, that does the …

AI assessment note: “you have a central growth team that lives in product”