The Exchanges

Q last few months, actually, is like sponsored UGC, which is like these UGC platforms, often at universities or around young communities, where they say, hey, give us a 25,000 dollar spend, and they literally get like a thousand people at university to post a review of your Chipotle Dinner. I'm just making it up. And they give them 25 bucks. How do you feel about sponsored influencer elements like that?

A I think they're great, and I, the UGC example is a really good one we should dive into, because UGC itself, one of the goals is distribution. But we also have to think about the other byproduct that you get out of UGC, which is that you now have a video asset that you can use for other types of surfaces. Think about all the places that you could Add that to on your homepage, on your website overall. One of the most powerful UGC strategies actually that I've seen and has worked well for a lot of the companies that I work with recently is turning UGC into a whitelisting ad strategy. So for those who maybe aren't familiar with the concept of whitelisting, it's essentially where you work with a third party who's not necessarily directly employed by your company, and you can actually promote your content directly through their account. There's a lot of benefits to doing that. Firstly, that It feels less salesy when it's not you that's talking about the product that's at hand, but instead basically promoted through the name or the persona of somebody else who seems to be a customer of the product itself. So whitelisting actually has great effects for essentially paid social ads where now instead of let's say that you're Descript and you have to promote all of your content through the Descript account, now the Creator that you're working with, um, let's say, you know, podcaster Pat Fl…

AI assessment note: “I think they're great, and I, the UGC example is a really good one”

Q of channels, sometimes it's not always about getting three X straight away and sometimes break even or a little bit better is good enough. Do good channels Channels that ultimately perform, do they always break even? Have you ever had periods where you have to go through a trough to get to the good, and actually be worse than break even, or do good channels always at least break even?

A It's a good question. I think breakeven is worth shooting for because it, in the short term, gives you the flexibility to be able to invest in it more. But there are certainly channels, especially at, you know, more of the mature and growing stages of a company, that you're gonna see a loss in your investment in the short term. Um, I'll point to two examples here. I mean, one of them is the traditional way of doing SEO. Not, not as much in the modern day, but in a lot of the traditional investments you make in SEO, particularly editorial SEO, where you're targeting more top funnel intent, You know, informational intent, like for example, Descript, we would create guides on how to become a content creator, or how best to create a story for your podcast, things of that sort, right? Stuff that doesn't really necessarily resonate with someone who's exactly looking for a video or audio editing tool in their podcasting workflows, but eventually we'll get there, and we just kind of want them in the fold of our ecosystem. So for a lot of SEO strategies in the early days, if you want to kind of build that topical authority, get the traffic For these types of keywords, you would invest in these editorial SEO pieces. At the time, you know, maybe we'll say three to four years ago, when you start to invest in these SEO strategies, a lot of costs associated with hiring writers, getting desig…

AI assessment note: “there are certainly channels... that you're gonna see a loss in your investment in the short term”

Q That's fascinating. Again, so many things I want to unpack there. You said ROAS, return on ad spend. I'm a founder that is navigating kind of the early days of growth, and I need your advice. What is a good ROAS and what is a bad ROAS and is there a slight guide measuring stick for how I should think about how well we're doing?

A It's a great question and one that there's a lot of information out there for. If you look at any piece that's written about return on ad spend, people generally say to be efficient with your capital, you want to land somewhere between three X to five X of your return on your investment. Now, here's the interesting thing that I find about ROAS and pretty much every growth scenario that I've been in. I don't think ROAS is necessarily the best target to start with. I think the best target to start with when you're investing in some of these paid channels, or channels with cash or financial investment up front, is to actually figure out whether or not this is a viable channel that, firstly, you can actually get up and running and working, and there I think breakeven or better is, is actually pretty good. And then you start to optimize from there. There are very few Zero shot or few shot attempts at running a channel like paid social, where as soon as you launch right out of the gate, you're like, wow, that hit close to three X. Like, this is amazing. Let's just keep going from here. No, it always takes this process and the, and the process is figuring out the right combination of the audiences. Are you targeting based on interests? Are you targeting more based on more granular customer level data, like lookalikes or retargeting? It's a combination of the creative that you're throw…

AI assessment note: “land somewhere between three X to five X of your return on your investment”

Q a case of like how much do you put in and double down? How do you advise me as a founder on that? Because if I have a three X channel or plus and it looks great, do I put all the chips in or do I Tentatively increase it over time, fearful that if I just put in way too much too soon, it'll destroy the channel very quickly.

A I think it depends on the size and stage of where the company is at. If you're in the early days and your main goal is to basically pre-route product market fit, really channel market fit, and really accelerate your month-over-month growth to get to the next place where you can continue to raise money and get to the next stage in your company, I don't think there's actually any downside to going all in. Obviously you want to figure out what the future holds as well, but when you find a channel that's actually very cost efficient, And there's scale there. You want to make sure that you're basically figuring out where the cap and the maximum capacity on that channel looks like. An example I'll share with you is one of the companies that I advise, they're called Answers AI. They basically are a co-pilot for you when you're studying and when you're trying to tutor yourself. So you can use their app, mobile app, or you can use their Chrome extension, take a screenshot of a problem that you're working on, and it will essentially guide you to the answer or help You quiz yourself, right? So very, very useful functional tool for anyone that's studying, but for this team in the early days, you know, they tried a lot of different channels, but one of the channels that really worked well for them was user generated content, which is that they would reach out to these nano micro creators wh…

AI assessment note: “I don't think there's actually any downside to going all in.”

Q Do most channels not get worse over time? If we look at all performance marketing channels, they generally always get worse over time as you saturate audience and then costs go up. Do they not all get worse over time? I'm trying to think of what gets better as a channel over time.

A I would share these observations. The first one is that channels get worse, but not necessarily because the channel is going to stop working for you, but because the audience that you're trying to tap into at the time is going to essentially run out, if you will. So, like, let's go back to the Descript example. If we're trying to hit the total TAM of podcasting, which you can essentially do by maximizing your, your overall reach, or you've cycled through the audiences, and you have impression capping, and, and all of that to make sure that you're not hitting the same audience over and over again, and You know that they're not going to convert over time. I mean, at some point you're going to see that channel saturation happening and you're going to see your overall cost spike and the efficacy on the channel go down. But let's assume that, you know, Descript as a company wants to continue to grow. We're going to start to reach out to short form content creators, long form content creators. Now you expanded the total addressable audience on that platform. You can actually overcome that saturation cap in a particular channel, like for example, paid social. By expanding your audiences over time. I find that this is true with other channels as well. If you think about that methodology, even like SEO, right? When you're targeting specific topics or groups of keywords, let's say Descri…

AI assessment note: “channels get worse, but not necessarily because the channel is going to stop working”

Q That's fascinating. Again, so many things I want to unpack there. You said ROAS, return on ad spend. I'm a founder that is navigating kind of the early days of growth, and I need your advice. What is a good ROAS and what is a bad ROAS and is there a slight guide measuring stick for how I should think about how well we're doing?

A It's a great question and one that there's a lot of information out there for. If you look at any piece that's written about return on ad spend, people generally say to be efficient with your capital, you want to land somewhere between three X to five X of your return on your investment. Now, here's the interesting thing that I find about ROAS and pretty much every growth scenario that I've been in. I don't think ROAS is necessarily the best target to start with. I think the best target to start with when you're investing in some of these paid channels, or channels with cash or financial investment up front, is to actually figure out whether or not this is a viable channel that, firstly, you can actually get up and running and working, and there I think breakeven or better is, is actually pretty good. And then you start to optimize from there. There are very few Zero shot or few shot attempts at running a channel like paid social, where as soon as you launch right out of the gate, you're like, wow, that hit close to three X. Like, this is amazing. Let's just keep going from here. No, it always takes this process and the, and the process is figuring out the right combination of the audiences. Are you targeting based on interests? Are you targeting more based on more granular customer level data, like lookalikes or retargeting? It's a combination of the creative that you're throw…

AI assessment note: “people generally say to be efficient with your capital, you want to land somewhere between three X to five X”

Q a case of like how much do you put in and double down? How do you advise me as a founder on that? Because if I have a three X channel or plus and it looks great, do I put all the chips in or do I Tentatively increase it over time, fearful that if I just put in way too much too soon, it'll destroy the channel very quickly.

A I think it depends on the size and stage of where the company is at. If you're in the early days and your main goal is to basically pre-route product market fit, really channel market fit, and really accelerate your month-over-month growth to get to the next place where you can continue to raise money and get to the next stage in your company, I don't think there's actually any downside to going all in. Obviously you want to figure out what the future holds as well, but when you find a channel that's actually very cost efficient, And there's scale there. You want to make sure that you're basically figuring out where the cap and the maximum capacity on that channel looks like. An example I'll share with you is one of the companies that I advise, they're called Answers AI. They basically are a co-pilot for you when you're studying and when you're trying to tutor yourself. So you can use their app, mobile app, or you can use their Chrome extension, take a screenshot of a problem that you're working on, and it will essentially guide you to the answer or help You quiz yourself, right? So very, very useful functional tool for anyone that's studying, but for this team in the early days, you know, they tried a lot of different channels, but one of the channels that really worked well for them was user generated content, which is that they would reach out to these nano micro creators wh…

AI assessment note: “I don't think there's actually any downside to going all in.”

Q You said SEO, you said future. We're seeing the world change quite seismically in terms of how people discover and learn about products. If you were to advise me again, a founder or a growth leader, how do you think about, and how would you advise that I should think about SEO in a changing world of growth and AI?

A SEO is going to be increasingly unignorable. You probably have actually heard or read or seen, if you've spent any time on the internet or LinkedIn at all, there are a lot of people who come out with predictions that SEO is dead, or that, you know, we've moved on to this new world called GEO, or generative engine, or answers engine optimization. So there's a lot of predictions, I think, on how this overall channel distribution is changing, but I, there's a few observations on how companies are growing today that I think make SEO completely unignorable. The first one is that, as boring as it sounds, SEO foundations are unchanged. And what I mean by that is some of the same systems that we rely on to get our websites indexed, our content seen, visible, crawled by Googlebot, and the rest of the internet are still the same systems that LLMs and generative engines are relying upon to treat the worldwide web as a knowledge base or a RAG system, if you will, so that it can get Answers to some of these questions that we're using LLMs for. When we're talking about generative engine optimization or generative engines more broadly, they're like search in some ways, but they're actually also quite different. Search engines are still essentially in the game of trying to surface your own first-party content, your own direct links. Generative engines are all about citations and mentions. Gene…

AI assessment note: “SEO is going to be increasingly unignorable. The first one is that, as boring as it sounds, SEO foundations are unchanged.”

Q last few months, actually, is like sponsored UGC, which is like these UGC platforms, often at universities or around young communities, where they say, hey, give us a 25,000 dollar spend, and they literally get like a thousand people at university to post a review of your Chipotle Dinner. I'm just making it up. And they give them 25 bucks. How do you feel about sponsored influencer elements like that?

A I think they're great, and I, the UGC example is a really good one we should dive into, because UGC itself, one of the goals is distribution. But we also have to think about the other byproduct that you get out of UGC, which is that you now have a video asset that you can use for other types of surfaces. Think about all the places that you could Add that to on your homepage, on your website overall. One of the most powerful UGC strategies actually that I've seen and has worked well for a lot of the companies that I work with recently is turning UGC into a whitelisting ad strategy. So for those who maybe aren't familiar with the concept of whitelisting, it's essentially where you work with a third party who's not necessarily directly employed by your company, and you can actually promote your content directly through their account. There's a lot of benefits to doing that. Firstly, that It feels less salesy when it's not you that's talking about the product that's at hand, but instead basically promoted through the name or the persona of somebody else who seems to be a customer of the product itself. So whitelisting actually has great effects for essentially paid social ads where now instead of let's say that you're Descript and you have to promote all of your content through the Descript account, now the Creator that you're working with, um, let's say, you know, podcaster Pat Fl…

AI assessment note: “I think they're great, and I, the UGC example is a really good one”

Q of conflicted on this. I'd love your thoughts. How important is a launch? In one side of my head, I'm like, it's such a meaningful moment, take advantage, it can catalyze everything, but then in others, I'm like, in the scheme of life, it is a momentary hit that actually won't correlate to long-term success, and great product wins out, and I oscillate between the two. How do you think?

A I think it depends on what is being launched. To draw on some anecdotes from Descript, there are launches that drove nothing, where The launch moment was we announced something, we celebrate ourselves, we have a webinar and announce things, and you know, back to business as usual. Nothing is really dramatically shifted in terms of the gravity of the audience or ability to convert customers. There are also other launches that do things like expand, for example, the use case of the product. In the case of Descript, really leaning into the user experience of video editing and launching features that are really focused on video editing, dramatically increases the You would expect essentially the business to take a step function increase thereafter, and putting the right energy around letting people know about that launch is worth it, because you're essentially able to serve a market that may have traditionally looked at the product, were hopeful about it solving their problems, but maybe it didn't come back because it didn't really fulfill their needs or the problems that they were solving at the time. Those are some of the examples. There are also launches that I think sometimes that can feel a little bit boring that Actually can really change the trajectory of growth for a company. So at Descript, one of the features that we were working on was enabling multilingual transcription…

AI assessment note: “I think it depends on what is being launched.”

Q I do want to go into like how to build a growth team, but you mentioned the channel fit there. How do you know when you have channel fit number one?

A Channel fit is an interesting one. There's kind of a quantitative way to go about it where you look at the numbers and you say the conversion rates are here. The scale is here. Conversion rates is kind of the first piece you look at. You basically say, these are the customers that we intend to bring into the fold of our product. And when you look at how well they convert, how well they retain, how well they monetize, You basically see that you have the customers that you intended to go after, so they're essentially performing at benchmark relative to what you're desiring. The second piece is actually looking at whether or not your incremental investments are going to drive proportionate returns. So there are some channels that tend to be these one-off blasts. Examples here include things like PR, for instance. You get a lot of media coverage, or maybe you go viral with like one influencer, and then you try to figure out, is this replicable? And you realize very quickly that a lot of those things aren't necessarily replicable. It just happened that there was this one outlet or this one influencer that had a really strong overall fit with who you're going after, but it's very hard to replicate at scale. So when you find that those incremental investments aren't generating proportional outcomes, you basically say, this is not necessarily a channel that has scalable fit for us, so …

AI assessment note: “There's kind of a quantitative way to go about it where you look at the numbers”

Q of channels, sometimes it's not always about getting three X straight away and sometimes break even or a little bit better is good enough. Do good channels Channels that ultimately perform, do they always break even? Have you ever had periods where you have to go through a trough to get to the good, and actually be worse than break even, or do good channels always at least break even?

A It's a good question. I think breakeven is worth shooting for because it, in the short term, gives you the flexibility to be able to invest in it more. But there are certainly channels, especially at, you know, more of the mature and growing stages of a company, that you're gonna see a loss in your investment in the short term. Um, I'll point to two examples here. I mean, one of them is the traditional way of doing SEO. Not, not as much in the modern day, but in a lot of the traditional investments you make in SEO, particularly editorial SEO, where you're targeting more top funnel intent, You know, informational intent, like for example, Descript, we would create guides on how to become a content creator, or how best to create a story for your podcast, things of that sort, right? Stuff that doesn't really necessarily resonate with someone who's exactly looking for a video or audio editing tool in their podcasting workflows, but eventually we'll get there, and we just kind of want them in the fold of our ecosystem. So for a lot of SEO strategies in the early days, if you want to kind of build that topical authority, get the traffic For these types of keywords, you would invest in these editorial SEO pieces. At the time, you know, maybe we'll say three to four years ago, when you start to invest in these SEO strategies, a lot of costs associated with hiring writers, getting desig…

AI assessment note: “there are certainly channels... you're gonna see a loss in your investment in the short term.”

Q On paid marketing, I want to stay here before we move to brand marketing. We touched on so many different channels. I'm thrilled also to hear that you say that in terms of the backbone of what GEO has become is SEO. What paid marketing channel do you think is overrated today?

A I want to talk about one particular strain of influencer marketing. So influencer marketing is a very broad category. Actually, it encompasses the paid sponsorships and encompasses some of the affiliate marketing that we talked about where you have more revenue share type of arrangements. It also encompasses the user generated content strategies. The one that I think is overrated is the first bucket, which is sponsored content. So for a period of time now, I would say really over the last four to five years, influencer marketing has become a little bit more structured. And how companies go about it. It tends to be brands who have a little bit more brand marketing budget, and then they basically go out to creators and they say, let's work with mega creators, right? Let's find someone with 500,000 to, you know, one million plus followers, because that's where all the influence in these audiences are. And then you have these traditional CPM deals where you're saying, I'm going to basically pay to reach their premium audiences, and it's going to cost me, you know, upwards of 20,000 plus dollars for single placements. And it's sort of this gamble, if you will, where you're looking at recent average view counts, you're estimating engagement. It's sort of this, like, whole manual media buying placement process. A lot of companies still do that today, and I'm sure that there are wins a…

AI assessment note: “The one that I think is overrated is the first bucket, which is sponsored content.”

Q We chatted a little bit beforehand and you said when you hit the website, you know, you have, like, transcription, you can have, like, video editing, you can have podcast editing. How do you create messaging that works well for everyone without isolating users, but also means something to people? Does that make sense?

A Such an important question. I have a particular take on this that may be different from what some of your other experts and guests have advised. I would say that there's some common convention or understanding out there that for positioning and messaging a product, you have to be very granular and specific, right? And that's not bad advice. You want to figure out who you're selling to, be very clear about who this is for, and not try to sell to the entire universe, because that never, that never works well for anyone. But I find that with these, I'll call them prosumer product or self-service products, you can actually get away with being relatively horizontal with the functionality of the product. So long as you're tailored with the entry points. And let me explain what I mean by this. Earlier, Harry, we were also talking about the strengths of point solutions. And you and I both actually agreed in that conversation that point solutions are very valuable because sometimes you just need a specific tool to get the job done for a specific area. And I think consumers and people who are in that moment of trying to solve something couldn't agree more, right? That's why point solutions are so prolific and everybody wants to use them. With Descript and how we figured out this broader, very horizontal messaging of all-in-one audio and video editor, which in theory should sell no one be…

AI assessment note: “horizontal with the functionality of the product. So long as you're tailored with the entry points.”

Q Push notifications. Are they dead because they've been so overused? How do you think about that?

A Push notifications are a point of friction as well, actually. It's a strategy of friction, and it's, the best strategy of friction is figuring out when and how we show up in front of customers. They can work really well when you place them in those really important moments of value. For example, if you're building a mobile game, if you get a push notification when you've lost the game, or just as you've finished your Duolingo lesson, or forgot a streak, and it reminds you to come back, I think those are really, Important moments of value that the customer wants to be notified about. So I don't think they're dead. I think they just have to be used more strategically, and we shouldn't just treat them as these blast everybody messaging channels.

AI assessment note: “So I don't think they're dead. I think they just have to be used”

Q I do want to go into like how to build a growth team, but you mentioned the channel fit there. How do you know when you have channel fit number one?

A Channel fit is an interesting one. There's kind of a quantitative way to go about it where you look at the numbers and you say the conversion rates are here. The scale is here. Conversion rates is kind of the first piece you look at. You basically say, these are the customers that we intend to bring into the fold of our product. And when you look at how well they convert, how well they retain, how well they monetize, You basically see that you have the customers that you intended to go after, so they're essentially performing at benchmark relative to what you're desiring. The second piece is actually looking at whether or not your incremental investments are going to drive proportionate returns. So there are some channels that tend to be these one-off blasts. Examples here include things like PR, for instance. You get a lot of media coverage, or maybe you go viral with like one influencer, and then you try to figure out, is this replicable? And you realize very quickly that a lot of those things aren't necessarily replicable. It just happened that there was this one outlet or this one influencer that had a really strong overall fit with who you're going after, but it's very hard to replicate at scale. So when you find that those incremental investments aren't generating proportional outcomes, you basically say, this is not necessarily a channel that has scalable fit for us, so …

AI assessment note: “These are two of the early signs that I, I tend to look at.”

Q When you look across the landscape, final one, at who has nailed growth strategy in their respective field, who do you think comes to mind first?

A It's tough to say because I don't know their actual strategy, and it's hard to know if a company's intentional about growing quickly or not, but I would definitely point to ChatGBT and some of the ways in which they roll out products and features. Just yesterday, as of this recording, they released the Atlas browser, and it's just really incredible how unified some of these experiences are. That's something I wish we had at Meta when we rolled out new features or when we brought Apps into the fold of the company. They weren't very interoperable, meaning that you had these very separate surfaces. You had very different intentions. With ChadGBT, everything they roll out from, you know, originally the GPT's marketplace to then agents to now Atlas just are so seamlessly integrated. It just, it doesn't feel like you're using another product within their suite. It just feels like you're naturally extending the usage of their main products. And so I really admire the product growth thinking that goes on In how they are continuing to release and innovate new features.

AI assessment note: “I would definitely point to ChatGBT and some of the ways in which they roll out”

Q there and the jobs to be done. It did make me think though, gosh, this is quite a sophisticated growth engine. So my subsequent question to you was, if I'm in this, gosh, I'm an early stage founder listening to you going, this sounds incredible, but quite sophisticated. How do I know when is the right time to make my first growth hire if we go to that people element?

A Yes. So building growth orgs, hiring for growth. I also may have a bit of a different take on this just because of my own personal experience here. I don't think there is necessarily a stage where it's too early to bring in somebody to focus on growth. I think the standard advice out there is wait until you're post PMF and have something that isn't just a high turn engine. You're, you know, wasting your cycles on growth. But my definition of growth is a lot more full stack. It's a little bit more comprehensive. I think every founder in the early stages is saving a part of their brain and probably spending half or more of their time figuring out growth. That's why you see such a big focus on founder-led brand, founder-led sales, founder-led marketing, right? It's literally, you know, first person who is the CEO, the executive, maybe even somebody on the founding team, they are ahead of growth essentially. So to say that there isn't more Time or energy and investment that we could be making in the early stages. I don't think that's necessarily true. The other problem I see is if you wait to hire for growth, you have a bit of a chicken and egg problem. A lot of founding growth hires I see on the job descriptions. That's, you know, we want experience with all of these acquisition channels, and I want you to like fix our decelerating month over month growth. And the chicken and egg …

AI assessment note: “I don't think there is necessarily a stage where it's too early to bring in somebody”

Q at the beginning, growth hypothesis. Now, the joy of this show is that so many founders listen with notebooks, and they're like, I'm learning from the best in the world, because this is exactly what I'm going through. And so I quite like to get granular, and I also learn from this too, by the way, Sandy. What is a good growth hypothesis, and what is a bad growth hypothesis?

A That is a great question. In my view, a good growth hypothesis has two components to it. The first component is an insight. And the insight has to be data inspired or backed by some kind of context. And then the second part of a good growth hypothesis is they have some kind of story around the customer and your understanding of what that data point means. Actually, I'll give you a great example here of something that I learned in my time at Descript. Descript was not a data driven company. It was a very data inspired company. And a lot of our hypotheses, our growth hypotheses came from a combination of these two. The reason that we weren't data driven is that One of the mistakes, or one of the common things that we see with a lot of growth teams, including orgs I was a part of, is looking at data blindly, seeing charts, mapping out funnels, you see a drop-off point, and you're like, wow, that's below benchmark, or that's below the average of our competitors. We should probably go and do something about it. It's not always true, and the reason it's not always true is that every product is uniquely serving a different market. There are certain types of customers depending on If you're serving the spectrum of consumers versus prosumers versus businesses versus you're in healthcare versus you're in creator economy, et cetera. I mean, there's just so many different variables. You lo…

AI assessment note: “In my view, a good growth hypothesis has two components to it.”

Q of conflicted on this. I'd love your thoughts. How important is a launch? In one side of my head, I'm like, it's such a meaningful moment, take advantage, it can catalyze everything, but then in others, I'm like, in the scheme of life, it is a momentary hit that actually won't correlate to long-term success, and great product wins out, and I oscillate between the two. How do you think?

A I think it depends on what is being launched. To draw on some anecdotes from Descript, there are launches that drove nothing, where The launch moment was we announced something, we celebrate ourselves, we have a webinar and announce things, and you know, back to business as usual. Nothing is really dramatically shifted in terms of the gravity of the audience or ability to convert customers. There are also other launches that do things like expand, for example, the use case of the product. In the case of Descript, really leaning into the user experience of video editing and launching features that are really focused on video editing, dramatically increases the You would expect essentially the business to take a step function increase thereafter, and putting the right energy around letting people know about that launch is worth it, because you're essentially able to serve a market that may have traditionally looked at the product, were hopeful about it solving their problems, but maybe it didn't come back because it didn't really fulfill their needs or the problems that they were solving at the time. Those are some of the examples. There are also launches that I think sometimes that can feel a little bit boring that Actually can really change the trajectory of growth for a company. So at Descript, one of the features that we were working on was enabling multilingual transcription…

AI assessment note: “I think it depends on what is being launched.”

Q On paid marketing, I want to stay here before we move to brand marketing. We touched on so many different channels. I'm thrilled also to hear that you say that in terms of the backbone of what GEO has become is SEO. What paid marketing channel do you think is overrated today?

A I want to talk about one particular strain of influencer marketing. So influencer marketing is a very broad category. Actually, it encompasses the paid sponsorships and encompasses some of the affiliate marketing that we talked about where you have more revenue share type of arrangements. It also encompasses the user generated content strategies. The one that I think is overrated is the first bucket, which is sponsored content. So for a period of time now, I would say really over the last four to five years, influencer marketing has become a little bit more structured. And how companies go about it. It tends to be brands who have a little bit more brand marketing budget, and then they basically go out to creators and they say, let's work with mega creators, right? Let's find someone with 500,000 to, you know, one million plus followers, because that's where all the influence in these audiences are. And then you have these traditional CPM deals where you're saying, I'm going to basically pay to reach their premium audiences, and it's going to cost me, you know, upwards of 20,000 plus dollars for single placements. And it's sort of this gamble, if you will, where you're looking at recent average view counts, you're estimating engagement. It's sort of this, like, whole manual media buying placement process. A lot of companies still do that today, and I'm sure that there are wins a…

AI assessment note: “The one that I think is overrated is the first bucket, which is sponsored content.”

Q at the beginning, growth hypothesis. Now, the joy of this show is that so many founders listen with notebooks, and they're like, I'm learning from the best in the world, because this is exactly what I'm going through. And so I quite like to get granular, and I also learn from this too, by the way, Sandy. What is a good growth hypothesis, and what is a bad growth hypothesis?

A That is a great question. In my view, a good growth hypothesis has two components to it. The first component is an insight. And the insight has to be data inspired or backed by some kind of context. And then the second part of a good growth hypothesis is they have some kind of story around the customer and your understanding of what that data point means. Actually, I'll give you a great example here of something that I learned in my time at Descript. Descript was not a data driven company. It was a very data inspired company. And a lot of our hypotheses, our growth hypotheses came from a combination of these two. The reason that we weren't data driven is that One of the mistakes, or one of the common things that we see with a lot of growth teams, including orgs I was a part of, is looking at data blindly, seeing charts, mapping out funnels, you see a drop-off point, and you're like, wow, that's below benchmark, or that's below the average of our competitors. We should probably go and do something about it. It's not always true, and the reason it's not always true is that every product is uniquely serving a different market. There are certain types of customers depending on If you're serving the spectrum of consumers versus prosumers versus businesses versus you're in healthcare versus you're in creator economy, et cetera. I mean, there's just so many different variables. You lo…

AI assessment note: “In my view, a good growth hypothesis has two components to it.”

Q Should the first growth hire be a jack-of-all-trades, young, hungry hustler, Or should it be a Casey Winters, Elena Verner, Reforge style, pedigreed gross leader? If you can get them with a magazine draft.

A It's such a great question. Here's an interesting observation I'll share with you. I think it could potentially be both. The interesting thing about the Reforged community and some of the more experienced growth hires is that I see this insatiable thirst, hunger, and desire to continue to be hands-on, even though they're very senior and they know a lot, right? I think the commonality in the hungry growth hire and the more experienced growth operator and executive who comes from From all these, you know, sort of season runs of growth is the willingness to continue to be hands-on, continue to kind of adapt and learn. That's probably the trade I would index on, so I don't think that either hire is necessarily bad or the worst option, so long as that person, that individual, is still willing to be hands-on and try these things. If we were trying to figure out GEO today, you have to be hands-on. You kind of have to go through the motions yourself. You have to You have to figure out what works, what doesn't. You can't just really trust what I say, what you hear on other podcasts, what you read on LinkedIn, because the reality is that those channels are constantly changing. The biases that ChatGPT may have for mentions from Reddit or Quora, they could be changing every other day. You optimizing for GPT mentions is very different than you optimizing for perplexity mentions, etc. You're…

AI assessment note: “I don't think that either hire is necessarily bad or the worst option”

Q good stuff that you say. It's a brilliant business, really. I want to start, I think we're shaped a lot by the experiences that we have. You've worked at Pinterest, you've worked at Meta slash Instagram, you've worked at Descript, what we use to edit and love. When you think about those experiences, which most meaningfully shaped your approach to growth, do you think? And what did you learn there?

A The experience that most meaningfully shaped my experience and overall focus on growth, I think, has to be Pinterest. It was really formative for me. In school, I actually studied finance, and I was on this path and trajectory of essentially becoming an investment banker, because I thought all the smart people who make a lot of money around me are becoming investment bankers. So I studied really hard for that, took all the right classes. In one fateful encounter with Some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Sand Hill Road, which was one of the perks that I got for winning a student leadership scholarship on campus. I completely changed my mind on that. I did a complete one 80. I thought, wow, this is such an incredibly creative world. Here are some of the investors who've been put the first dollar into companies like Apple and Facebook. And now these companies are serving hundreds of millions of customers and users. And the impact was just, you know, mind blowing for me. So much so that when I went back to my room that day, I pulled open a website that I just recently come across, www.pinterest.com, and Pinterest was a product that I personally resonated with a ton, because I was a person who had this really scattered desktop with a bunch of images. I would sometimes organize them into folders, zip them up, email them to friends, and Pinterest solved exactly the problem th…

AI assessment note: “The experience that most meaningfully shaped my experience and overall focus on growth... has to be Pinterest.”

Q good stuff that you say. It's a brilliant business, really. I want to start, I think we're shaped a lot by the experiences that we have. You've worked at Pinterest, you've worked at Meta slash Instagram, you've worked at Descript, what we use to edit and love. When you think about those experiences, which most meaningfully shaped your approach to growth, do you think? And what did you learn there?

A The experience that most meaningfully shaped my experience and overall focus on growth, I think, has to be Pinterest. It was really formative for me. In school, I actually studied finance, and I was on this path and trajectory of essentially becoming an investment banker, because I thought all the smart people who make a lot of money around me are becoming investment bankers. So I studied really hard for that, took all the right classes. In one fateful encounter with Some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Sand Hill Road, which was one of the perks that I got for winning a student leadership scholarship on campus. I completely changed my mind on that. I did a complete one 80. I thought, wow, this is such an incredibly creative world. Here are some of the investors who've been put the first dollar into companies like Apple and Facebook. And now these companies are serving hundreds of millions of customers and users. And the impact was just, you know, mind blowing for me. So much so that when I went back to my room that day, I pulled open a website that I just recently come across, www.pinterest.com, and Pinterest was a product that I personally resonated with a ton, because I was a person who had this really scattered desktop with a bunch of images. I would sometimes organize them into folders, zip them up, email them to friends, and Pinterest solved exactly the problem th…

AI assessment note: “The experience that most meaningfully shaped my experience and overall focus on growth... has to be Pinterest.”

Q If we take a flip, I've so enjoyed that on, on paid. If we take a flip to brand, it's a really hard element that you, you do have to consider as well. How do you think about brand marketing, given the lack of attribution and lack of data that surrounds most of it? And how do you advise me as a founder or a growth leader?

A The first thing I'll say about brand is basically figuring out like what that means at the company. And for Descript in the early days, the brand was essentially an extension of the product experience itself. The way that we built the product, the principles that drove the product design, things like simple yet powerful, things like not wanting to be disruptive to the workflows of our customers became the brand ultimately. And we knew that when we heard some of these reviews and testimonials being created about the product, People just describe and articulate the Descript brand as being these keywords and these terms without us ever having mentioned it on the website anywhere. So I think the first piece is for a lot of early stage products, especially if you're self-service or product-led, the brand is going to be the product identity itself, and you don't really have to artificially create brand marketing that essentially tells users what it is. It will just, it will just live in the, in the minds of users. I think the second piece I would, I would add on top of that is, The brand itself can be very shaped by some of these bigger launch moments that I was talking about. I mentioned the creation of this brand launch video that we had when Descript launched video editing. Before that, we actually had another version of the video produced by a company called Sandwich Video, the p…

AI assessment note: “for a lot of early stage products... the brand is going to be the product identity itself”

Q so fascinated. I obviously know the Descript products. I would like to say back to front, really, I live a lot of my life in it. In product growth for Descript seems tough. At best, it's small number multiplayer. At worst, it's solo player. Which it often is like for me. How did you think about, okay, I'm in product, growth, how? Like, how does that, what did you think?

A It's such a good point. Descript definitely, if you've been in the product before, audio, video editing, through text itself, the experience itself, firstly from a brand principles perspective, we try to keep it pretty pristine, and I hope this was your experience as well. You don't get distracted by endless notifications, you're not bombarded by house ads, we're not trying to upsell you at every, you know, corner and turn. If you're on a paid plan, we don't try to get you to buy the more expensive plan. Probably should have done a little bit more of that to be honest with you, but Part of our brand principles was, you know, we don't want to disrupt the workflow. We want you to get the most value as a, as a creator. But one of the challenges here is that the product is such a prime surface for enabling more of these collaborative flows. And we know that broadly speaking, content creation, media creation is a team sport, right? There's multiple touch points. There's a review process. There's collaboration baked into it. That should have been one of our natural advantages. But in the early days of Descript, actually, it turns out one of our strongest advantages was actually social sharing. We came across this accidentally when oftentimes in the early days of Descript, we had these customers who loved us so much that they would actually publish a full length tutorial and review vi…

AI assessment note: “one of our strongest advantages was actually social sharing”

Q How quickly do you think you know if a growth hire is not going to work out?

A In my experience, it does take a bit of time. I think that has to do with my own personal management style, where I see a lot of potential in individuals, and I kind of try to lean into the strengths of individuals. One thing that I like to do that companies don't love to do is hire a generalist pool of growth talent, but that becomes very hard sometimes if, let's say, the specific thing that we need right now is a notifications or a lifecycle manager. We obviously need someone who's well-versed in some of these tools and systems like Braze or have experience being very data-driven or pulling their own data, etc. So you kind of want to index on that, but I also like to hire folks who have a broader mix of backgrounds. And the reason there is because the generalist is going to be able to adapt from problem to problem. Let's say that we built out the notification system and, you know, we have capacity for testing new channels. Across, you know, affiliates or other types of things. We want to be able to kind of have that individual touch multiple aspects of growth. And for me, that has always been the more performant way, at least in smaller teams, of being able to accelerate the impact and the results of a growth organization. I think that the more mature a company becomes, you need specialization because you need people to consistently stay up to date on, make sure that they hav…

AI assessment note: “In my experience, it does take a bit of time.”