May 7, 2023 · 1h 34m · lennys-podcast
Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital)
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Thrive Digital founder Jonathan Becker joins Lenny Rachitsky for an in-depth masterclass on modern paid growth, detailing rigorous creative testing frameworks, post-privacy attribution modeling, AI-powered agency workflows, and strategic hiring.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 20.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 4.3 Guest disagreement 0.7 Lenny pushing back 0.1
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:10:04 Scribes and the printing press reframe
Jonathan directly rejects the premise that AI destroys creative craft, citing how the printing press eliminated scribes but unlocked vastly more writing and ideas.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 1:09:16 Lenny pushes on creative job satisfaction under AILenny challenges Jonathan on whether relegating creative directors to prompt engineering takes away the joy and artistry of their profession.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:02:42 Dispelling the single source of truth mythJonathan firmly educates the audience and host that any vendor claiming a single source of truth in attribution is wrong, reframing attribution as an ongoing forensic investigation.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 42:04 Airbnb hero photo conversion findingsLenny demonstrates deep empirical growth knowledge by citing Airbnb's surprising discovery that omitting humans from listing hero photos drove superior conversion rates.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preview: How AI Is Reshaping Performance Marketing | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Opening preview quote from Jonathan on AI in performance marketing, followed by Lenny's solo host introduction and sponsor reads for Braintrust and Assembly AI. | |
| Jonathan Becker's Journey from SEO to Paid Acquisition | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Lenny opens the discussion by inviting Jonathan to share his background transitioning from web development and SEO into scaling paid search and Thrive Digital. | |
| Landing Uber: The Taxi Ride and Arbitrage Hack | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan narrates how an accidental taxi ride with Garrett Camp and an opportunistic paid search arbitrage loophole on Uber referral codes led to landing Uber as a foundational client. | |
| Evaluating Performance Marketing: Channel vs. Investment Portfolio | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Lenny asks whether paid growth is an addictive trap startups should avoid; Jonathan reframes paid acquisition using a fund management analogy advocating for channel diversification. | |
| Assessing Company Readiness and Scalability for Paid Growth | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Jonathan details the operational prerequisites for performance marketing scalability across early and late company stages, emphasizing product-market fit and internal creative buy-in. | |
| Payback Periods, Unit Economics, and Predictive Lead Modeling | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny queries whether fast payback periods are strictly required; Jonathan explains how sophisticated predictive lead scoring and LTV modeling allow longer-cycle B2B businesses to scale paid acquisition. | |
| Scaling Exclusively Through Paid Growth and Navigating Privacy Storms | 4 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Lenny brings a question from Twitter on whether startups can still scale exclusively via paid channels; Jonathan dispels 2010s survivorship bias while citing modern profitable examples like Grammarly and Athletic Greens. | |
| The Modern Performance Marketing Playbook | 5 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Jonathan outlines the modern paid playbook focused on unit economics and creative testing, explaining why paid acquisition provides more direct causality and attribution than SEO's black-box algorithm. | |
| The Shift to Creative Strategy and Funnel Architecture | 5 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny asks why creative strategy has become the dominant lever in performance marketing; Jonathan explains that algorithmic platform automation has commoditized media buying, making funnel-specific creative iteration the primary differentiator. | |
| Methodology for Rigorous In-Platform Creative Testing | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan outlines a practical framework for isolating single variables in ad set creative tests and using leveling metrics like impressions-until-conversion when ad delivery is uneven. | |
| Authentic UGC and Minute Creative Levers Driving Performance | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan illustrates the superiority of authentic UGC and subtle visual changes like dogs on furniture; Lenny provides a corroborating high-level example from Airbnb where removing people from listing photos raised conversions. | |
| Evaluating In-Platform Testing vs. Third-Party Creative Tools | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Jonathan explains that native in-platform testing tools on Meta and Google suffice for most teams and evaluates challenger platforms like TikTok, Amazon, and Snap. | |
| The Opportunities and Creative Demands of TikTok Advertising | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Jonathan breaks down the intensive creative velocity needed for TikTok advertising, before explaining why B2B marketers must flip their mindset from minimizing cost-per-lead to optimizing cohort revenue quality. | |
| Sponsor Message: Miro | 5 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Following a Miro sponsorship read, Lenny accurately guesses John Wanamaker's famous advertising quote; Jonathan explains historical attribution models and the shock of Apple's iOS 14.5 IDFA deprecation. | |
| The Privacy Revolution: IDFA Loss and Media Mix Modeling | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan explains how IDFA removal pushed the industry toward triangulated measurement methods, including modern regression-based media mix modeling (MMM). | |
| Attribution as Continuous Investigation Without a Single Source of Truth | 5 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Jonathan emphasizes that no single source of truth exists in attribution and frames it as continuous scientific investigation; Lenny notes his angel investment in MMM platform Recast. | |
| Generative Visual AI for Creative Concepting and Client Pitches | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan discusses real-time agency applications of Midjourney and DALL-E, showing how generative imagery compresses concept mockups and live client iteration from days into minutes. | |
| Philosophical Perspectives on AI Displacement and Creative Evolution | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Lenny asks if generative AI removes the enjoyable craft of creative work; Jonathan counters using historical analogies of scribes and looms to argue technology democratizes creative execution. | |
| Navigating In-House Marketing vs. Agency Partnerships | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Jonathan explains why internal marketing generalists and specialized external agencies are complementary rather than mutually exclusive across growth stages. | |
| Key Competencies and Interview Tactics for Performance Marketers | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan shares key traits he looks for when hiring growth talent—such as technical backgrounds in STEM—and reveals his Fermi estimation interview question regarding windows in NYC. | |
| Determining Experience Levels and Titles for Growth Hires | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Jonathan emphasizes that platform competency matters more than chronological years of experience and surveys common industry titles across growth marketing and paid acquisition. | |
| The High-Stakes Snap RFP Pitch Story in Los Angeles | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan recounts the story of pitching Snap's complex RFP by boldly refusing to answer their question list, instead presenting an opinionated roadmap that won the contract. | |
| Lightning Round: Essential Books for Marketers and Founders | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Jonathan answers lightning round questions, recommending Storyworthy, Shoe Dog, and American Kingpin, praising The Big Short, and spotlighting Thrive's internal data tool ThriveStack. | |
| Conclusion and Contact Details for Jonathan Becker and Thrive Digital | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Lenny wraps up the episode; Jonathan shares contact info for Thrive Digital and invites growth practitioners to connect. |
Statements from this episode (29)
Thrive Digital manages $500M in annual ad spend with 130 staff members
“What started off as this freelancer consultancy that I started running in a walk-in closet in my old apartment became A 130 people, and we manage about five hundred million dollars a year in ad spend for small and large companies, including Uber, Asana, Tempur…”
Becker siphoned tens of thousands from Uber's referral loop via paid search
“Essentially I was using paid search to camp out on their branded keywords. And as people would sign up with my confusingly similar snippet to Uber's organic snippet, I was essentially siphoning off, you know referral credits. So I would get 20 dollars every si…”
Startups relying solely on platform loopholes will fail when conditions change
“What they fail to see is that those loopholes come and go. And so if they scale massively and their entire, you know, businesses predicated on the performance of this one loophole that they found, or like, you know, investing everything in a single channel, an…”
Lifetime value is a misnomer for early-stage companies lacking operating history
“These abstract concepts like lifetime value, which is difficult because like that's, you know, most businesses are relatively new that we work with. And so the idea of lifetime value is kind of a misnomer. Like they don't know what that is yet, but we have to …”
Paid acquisition is highly likely to succeed if other marketing channels work
“If other things work, it is highly likely that paid acquisition will work.”
Paid channel data has never provided full end-to-end attribution understanding
“The issue for most companies is in this incorrect assumption that The data that is provided through paid channels allows you to have full end to end understanding of like attribution, which is wrong. It's never been that way.”
Every unicorn from the 2010s era scaled using performance marketing
“Every unicorn from like the, you know, 20 tens era that that scale did performance marketing, but not everyone during that time who did performance marketing scaled.”
Grammarly scaled to massive success almost exclusively through paid acquisition
“And I think there's some really great examples Of companies that have scaled, you know, in relatively recent times, almost exclusively through paid, like Grammarly is a really good example of this.”
Google's search algorithm uses 200 signals but only 20-30 are public
“Google still has to crawl it. They run it through their analysis algorithm, which is comprised of 200 different signals of which maybe like 20 to 30 have been publicly disclosed.”
Google and Facebook automated most technical performance marketing levers over a decade
“So a lot of the levers, so to speak, around performance have been automated by Google and Facebook over the last, you know, seven to 10 years.”
Use ratio metrics like click-through rate when algorithms serve unequal ad impressions
“Sometimes like the ad serving algorithms, even when we set up a test structurally in that way, we'll serve one ad, you know, a different number of impressions than the other ad, in which case we then have to say, What is a leveling factor that allows us to loo…”
Unpolished mobile user-generated video ads massively outperform highly produced brand creatives
“What we found is that they would always underperform next to user generated assets. So a brand that essentially, you know, has an influencer in front of it that says, I tried this product. I love it. I'm filming this ad for my iPhone. Like, look, check it out.…”
Adding dogs to furniture photos doubled or tripled social ad ROAS
“And one of the art directors was like, put the dog on the couch and let's take some photos of, you know, dogs on, on furniture, which made it more playful and approachable. That one change resulted in a total unlock of their performance on paid social channels…”
Airbnb listing photos achieved significantly higher conversion rates without people in them
“That reminds me at Airbnb, the photography team found, and actually the photography team was initially including people in the photos of listings. And that was like the hero images of listing photos. And it turns out when there's no people in the listing photo…”
Becker predicts WhatsApp will likely launch advertisements later in 2023
“Instagram and probably eventually WhatsApp, which I think will probably launch ads later this year.”
TikTok's ad platform resembles Facebook six years ago, offering cheap CPCs
“Their ads platform kind of reminds me of where Facebook ads was like six, seven years ago. It's not super sophisticated and attribution is not great yet, but you can get cheap CPCs. Because there's just fewer, you know, organizations advertising there.”
Someone will unlock TikTok B2B SaaS advertising and build a $1B business
“And just because the innovation hasn't happened for B to B SaaS yet on TikTok doesn't mean it won't. TikTok wants that to happen. And so the question becomes how, and so someone will unlock that and they'll make, you know, a billion dollars because of it.”
Scaling TikTok ad spend to $1M monthly requires massive ongoing creative volume
“You can't really get to like a million dollars a month on TikTok without having like a huge amount of creative being pushed to that channel.”
Over-optimizing for cost per lead ruins downstream B2B and B2C acquisition ROI
“The common mistake that we see as people build out a funnel, so to speak, for, you know, B to B lead gen projects or B to C lead gen projects is they'll be overly reliant on the first of a sequence of metrics that ultimately yields a sale.”
Marketing attribution remains a subjective art rather than a permanently solved science
“Attribution as it stands in our industry is still an incredibly subjective art and somewhat of a science. It doesn't mean that it's impossible and it doesn't mean that there aren't varying degrees of sophistication as it relates to attribution, but we're still…”
The choice of marketing attribution model directly dictates growth versus profitability outcomes
“It's important to determine whether an organization, a company, a client is focused on profitability or growth. Whether I use one attribution lens or another, Will drive those outcomes.”
AI shifted agency roles toward strategy without reducing overall headcount
“And so the effect ultimately that we've seen from a human capital point of view is displacement. So we're actually, we have more people now than we've ever had. But the nature of the work that they do is more strategic.”
ChatGPT cuts agency RFP drafting time from one week to ten hours
“So we can feed, you know, ChatGPT a hundred, you know, previous RFP responses that we've done and have it spit out, you know, net new responses to net new questions in a net new RFP. And it's like 80% good and still requires like 10 hours of work to, like, mas…”
Generative AI cuts campaign mockup time from a week to an afternoon
“On our creative group, we can come up with, like, mockups in, in, like, literally, like, one percent of the time that it took, so you no longer have to, like, draw the initial mockups for art. Suddenly, you know, what might have taken one person a week of work…”
Verbally describing visual concepts is inefficient and hinders effective creative leadership
“These concepts often live inside of someone's head, and we do this thing as humans where we verbally discuss it, and I try and put the image in my mind's eye, in your mind's eye, which is an inherently inefficient process and actually hurts our ability to be c…”
Companies pursuing performance marketing should hire in-house expertise before engaging an agency
“The reality is you're going to need expertise and you probably should start in-house and then hire an agency.”
Technical and math backgrounds strongly indicate aptitude for performance marketing roles
“So if you're making your first hire, you probably want them to be, to have the ingenuity and capability to solve a lot of the problems that you're going to run into within the context of tracking, attribution, data visualization, and then campaign management. …”
Thrive uses surprise estimation questions to test agency candidate composure under pressure
“I actually borrowed a Jeff Bezos question from early stage Amazon, where I asked people, You know, without much warning in an interview, I'll ask them whether it's okay to do a bit of a thought experiment together and whether they are comfortable, you know, as…”
Years of experience is an unreliable indicator when hiring performance marketing practitioners
“I've seen people who have, like, 10 years of experience in the industry not be that great, and then I've seen people who have, like, one year of experience be absolutely phenomenal, so I would say that, like, again, like, you know, the years of service under t…”