The Ledger
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Diao: Hire growth specialists only after proving early channel fit
“The growth teams that I see that have the most impact are the ones where there are some early signs that there's channel fit with some kind of growth channel that's working, and then you build a team customized in a way around that. So instead of saying, I wan…”
Diao: Static Meta ads convert software downloads better than video ads
“Like one example I'll share with you actually is a lot of people really want to use video content for ads these days, but it turns out that for paid social platforms like Meta, static ads still actually do a better job of converting people into downloads or pe…”
Diao: Traditional SEO automatically drives traffic from generative AI engines
“If you do the things that are good for SEO traditionally, you're going to benefit from it. From GEO. And that's already been proven by many companies who already start to get a lot of organic traffic from generative engines, even without optimizing for those m…”
Diao: Descript's web app launch unexpectedly tanked conversion and revenue
“Two years later, we have a web version of the app. I thought this is going to be our step function increase. Like we're just going to blow up user acquisition. Conversion rates are going to triple and I can just go on vacation after this because the growth tea…”
Diao: Fast-growing companies rely on one or two power-law channels
“The consistent observation I've had in being the first growth person and head of growth in multiple companies now and advising many more is observing that the fastest growing companies and those who really know where to double down experience the power law of …”
Diao: Early paid acquisition should target breakeven ROAS, not 3x returns
“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 i…”
Diao: Social algorithms give micro-creators equal reach potential as large accounts
“The way that a lot of the modern social video algorithms work is that small creators and big creators alike have equal shots at distribution based on what customers and viewers are engaging with. So micro creators, nano creators can go from, you know, zero to …”
Diao: Sponsored influencer marketing is overrated for growth teams
“So, for me, sponsored influence and marketing, definitely overrated. I don't think any team really needs to touch that unless they've, like, really kind of run out of cycles on the user-generated content side of things.”
Diao: Startup website redesigns almost always cause a short-term metrics dip
“Everything's going to shoot up until right after that. Almost never does. In fact, always creates a little bit of a dip in the short term, actually, because you're changing the gravity or the expectations of the customer.”
Diao: Horizontal products succeed when paired with targeted entry points
“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.”
Diao: Startups will increasingly recruit growth roles in their early teams
“So I think actually growth hires being part of the early teens is something we're going to see a lot more of”
Diao: Adding friction in onboarding can produce higher quality users
“Don't be scared of friction. Friction sometimes produces higher intent, higher quality users.”
Diao: Channel saturation stems from audience exhaustion, not channel failure
“The channel saturation comes less because the channel itself stops working for you, but because you've kind of exhausted one set of audiences, but naturally, as a company grows, the product grows, the markets that we serve grow over time, and our audiences bec…”
Diao: Descript's self-serve affiliate program drove over 25% of new users
“Build Out Affiliates as a channel drove over 25% of the new users that we were getting in that entire year, and it was virtually self-service, right?”
Diao: Descript needed a broad content moat to rank for core keywords
“So with Descript, for example, we wouldn't have been able to rank for some of these video editing pages and some of these use cases and topics we cared about if we hadn't built that original topical moat in content Creation more broadly earlier on, right?”
Diao: LLMs rely on the same crawling systems as traditional search engines
“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 en…”
Diao: More early-stage startups will adopt UGC whitelisting for ads
“I think it's a sort of hack, if you will, or something that I think more companies are going to be looking towards activating in the earlier stages.”
Diao: TikTok ads underperformed compared to Instagram for hardware startup Limitless
“In some of the early experiments that we did, we just found that TikTok actually wasn't as performant as channels like Instagram.”
Diao: Meta provides virtually no organic reach for brand accounts
“For meta, if you're a brand, there's virtually no, We're very, very limited organic distribution for you, so paid is naturally kind of the way to go, and they really make that engine work”
Diao: Recent YC startups under 10 people are hiring founding growth roles
“This is actually a trend I see already reflected in some of YC's latest cohort batches, where if you look at some of the roles they're hiring for, so many teams that are less than five or 10 people are already want a founding growth marketer, or a founding hea…”
Diao: User-generated content is the most underrated growth channel
“Most underrated growth channel has to be the user generated content that we were talking about, where we're essentially working with creators to create content about our products, and oftentimes we don't necessarily even need to directly compensate.”
Diao: Meta's newly launched features and acquired apps lacked product interoperability
“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.”
Diao: Customer support ticket data holds golden nuggets for growth hypotheses
“After that, I started to look at the data around the customer support tickets. What were the most common questions? What were the inquiries? Who was writing in? It was just written with golden nuggets there.”
Diao: Descript offered creators a 15% recurring commission on referred subscribers
“We want to incentivize you with a 15% recurring commission on paying subscribers that you refer to us, and you would be a lot more likely to put the link up front and center, right, because you get something positive out of it.”
Diao: Descript spent six figures on a brand narrative video
“So for example, when Descript really decided we're going to go after the video editing market, we basically worked with a video production studio that, you know, six figure video that would essentially allow for us to retell the narrative of the brand.”
Diao: Answers AI co-founder drove massive growth by becoming a TikTok persona
“One of the co-founders in the company became essentially a TikTok Instagram persona, right? Who can create these videos kind of on demand for the company as well and drive very, very similar amounts of views and traction and growth for the company.”