The Ledger
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Flanagan: AI search optimization requires creating hundreds of micro product pages
“And so actually people could ask questions about your product in hundreds of ways. And actually what you need to do for AI search optimization is have hundreds of, like, micro versions of your product page tailored for all of these different audiences.”
Flanagan: Share of voice matters more than referral traffic in LLM search
“The big change is, and it's a change we have to get comfortable with is, share of voice is a more important metric for LLM optimization than traffic.”
Average marketers at great companies earn more than great ones elsewhere
“An average marketer at a great company makes more money than a great marketer at an average company, right? Because they can ride the gravy train to success.”
Tying all marketing initiatives to immediate revenue prevents differentiation
“If we tie everything to revenue, then we're all going to do the same stuff. Like, we really are going to do the same stuff for the most part. It's not going to differentiate that much, and it's hard to build something differentiated when we're all measuring ou…”
Flanagan: AI enables economical marketing to micro-segments under 300 people
“And the reason we do segment-level marketing is because we need a broad enough group of people to go after to make it economically feasible for us to have a certain size of marketing team to market to you, right? We can't market to, like, Very, very fine. We c…”
Flanagan: Growth experiments failing to show metrics in six weeks should be dropped
“If you can't do something in six weeks, it's not worth doing. If you're in growth, right, you actually have to have minimal viable experiment. Figure out if you can do that thing and see a success, what I call an exit metric, but see a success metric after six…”
Growth tactics and experimentation apply even before product-market fit
“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 p…”
Dedicated growth functions should only be established at Series A
“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.”
Building growth loops before product-market fit wastes resources
“A lot of the times I've talked to founders in pre-product market fit, they're obsessed over things that just are not that important right now. They don't need to worry about how do I build great onboarding flows. They don't need to worry about how do I build v…”
Growth teams in sales-led SaaS are just rebranded performance marketing
“In a marketing and sales led business where you have a demo trial, you really have the growth teams you find in those businesses sit on marketing and they just run performance marketing. So in the heyday, they were called performance marketing, but growth soun…”
Community-led growth yields few winners, but they capture exponential returns
“I think the number of winners in community led group is small, but they get exponential returns because how many community communities can someone be part of two, three. So a small amount of winners, but they get exponential returns.”
Horizontal software tools stay broad for distribution and verticalize to monetize
“I think most of the horizontal tools, they stay horizontal to get mass distribution and they verticalize to monetize.”
Flanagan: Customized AI prompts outperform off-the-shelf GTM software
“What we have found is the more that we customized a prompt for our needs and the way that we customize that for our needs, the results are much, much better.”
Flanagan: Ask AI to write its own prompts for better results
“The number one tip I can just give anyone to get better at prompting is to ask the AI to create the prompt.”
Growth teams in sales-led companies rarely touch the product
“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 paid, paid advertising, affiliate. Like they don't touch the product because it's a marketing sales-led busin…”
Startups can build an initial growth function with a single engineer
“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.”
Startups should target retention pre-PMF and revenue post-PMF
“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.”
Growth case studies should test metric prioritization and experiment design
“In growth, you can build a great case study because you can give someone a theoretical growth model. You can ask them to tell you what metric they would prioritize, how they would run a great experimentation process, give you three different examples of experi…”
Interviewers should intentionally challenge growth candidates' case study proposals
“Within the questioning, what I would do is I would actually counter and say, I think one of these experiments is much, much better. And these are the reasons to see if they actually have a strong point of view, to see if they're not scared to actually say, hey…”
Give growth candidates pre-built models to test difficult trade-offs
“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 b…”
Product managers define problems while marketers focus on solutions
“The job of a PM, great PMs crystallize problems and then present them to their engineers and their engineers are like, oh yeah, we believe in this problem. Here's how we think about this problem. And we will go and figure out how we build that solution, right?…”
Flanagan: Break AI email creation into separate prompts for each section
“I think there's a couple of tips that we have found, which is if you divide a single email into a collection of different prompts, and so you have a prompt for the subject line, you have a prompt for the intro, you have a prompt for the introduction, you have …”
Canva scaled search traffic by templatizing features and creating a marketplace
“So what Canva did was they templatize their entire, like everything you can possibly do with a product to create a template for, then they actually created a marketplace. So now people can actually create their own templates. And you can buy them, which extend…”