The Exchanges

Q So then I guess the first logical step is what is growth hacking?

A It's all about like high tempo experimentation across the entire customer journey. But what I tried to make out of it is that you really want to understand what works and what doesn't. So you can double down on the things that work and you can learn from the things that don't work. So it's all about running a lot of experiments, testing different channels, different strategies, but all to really understand how do we get customers in? How do we make sure that they buy for the first time, but also how do they come back? And at the end, what's the most important thing is how are we able to monetize them? And by connecting all those dots, I think that's the best way of describing growth hacking. And extreme revenue growth and these type of things.

AI assessment note: “It's all about like high tempo experimentation across the entire customer journey.”

Q can see the beginning of the funnel, unless you start to pretend that you're actually going to be a customer of theirs and talk to their team. Like, so is that how you learn from them? Like just pretend that you're going to be a customer and learn everything you can and be quiet about your intentions. Like how, how would you do that? Cause it's not everything is public.

A No, that's true. Not everything is public, but what you can see is like, as you're saying, like everything that's happening on the outside. So how are they doing their social media posting? How are their funnels? Like what are the conversations that they're putting out online? I'm not a big fan of like pretending that you want to buy from somebody like in a one-to-one conversation. I think you should definitely download all their white papers and see how they follow up and do these type of things. Uh, but it's also important that you go to places where the customers of those Companies that you want to get are congregating and figuring out like, what are they saying? Like, which questions do they post on for, uh, or in, in groups on Slack or, or, or different places, because that's where you get the information. So it's all about like coming in from different angles that you also get like some kind of gut feeling on what's working and what they are doing, what's successful and what's not successful.

AI assessment note: “I'm not a big fan of like pretending that you want to buy from somebody”

Q So let's switch focus slightly and talk about developing a marketing department. For a startup. At what point should the founder of a company think about developing the marketing team?

A Depends on a couple of things. So how aggressive are your growth goals? So do you want to like three X or 10 X your business every year, or are you more comfortable with like slow and steady growth? I think that's an important thing. It also depends on the marketing knowledge that a CEO or CMO or like founder already has. So what I, a strong believer in is that if You're already knowledgeable that you set up the channels, you set up the basic foundations of the mechanisms, and then you hire out certain type of things that you want people to do. So I know if I look at my own website right now, like from an analytics perspective, from an SEO perspective, there are a lot of things that can be improved, but I'm not hiring that team right now. I will do that like later this year, because then I have more budget and to go all in, and then I know I can really leverage it. So it's really a step-by-step process by thinking, okay, like, What's breaking right now, or where should I put my money in that within a short amount of time, I will actually generate a return out of that. And there's always a difference between exploitation and exploration. So by exploitation, I mean like what are things that you're currently doing that you need to do better. And at some point you need to move from generalists to specialists with that. And of course you need to always be exploring new channels, new…

AI assessment note: “Depends on a couple of things. So how aggressive are your growth goals?”

Q Should you be hiring bottom up in a marketing department or top down?

A I believe that in a bootstrap startup, you should be hiring bottom up and looking for really eager young people who have already shown that they got some knowledge, but they're also willing to learn. Well, if you are like more like in a, uh, venture capital or private equity, or like you've got the resources, then it's the combination of making sure that you get the people in who know the strategy, but also people who are able to do the execution, because at the end, What will drive leads and sales is that we got things live and the big risk. If you hire too soon, really senior people, a lot of them are really good at talking about it, but not, they're not good at executing. And I believe that good marketing and sales comes out of executions, comes out of campaigns, out of experiments that are run. And that's really the driving force of company growth.

AI assessment note: “in a bootstrap startup, you should be hiring bottom up”

Q happen to be changing the numbers around. Or maybe they're not inputting the information incorrectly. How can you catch them? How can you prevent any potential problems? Because if they say, oh, the lifetime value is 3000 dollars and it only costs us a thousand to get that. But what if it actually costs 2000 dollars and there's a thousand dollars, like how do you figure out those potential problems?

A I'm a big fan of just randomly deep diving into things what they're doing and just asking questions and see if it makes sense. And I think as a CEO, you should be smart enough to be able to ask The question and to figure out if it makes sense and if they are connecting dots and you have access to your bank account, and if they say that the customer is worth 3000 dollars, uh, but there has never been a customer that spent more than 1500 with you, then you might be seeing that they're bullshitting. In terms of basics, they should be able to show you that if they spend a dollar that you get more in return for that. And it could be the case that you don't earn it back within one week, but they should be able to show you how it's gonna evolve over six months or over 12 months or over two years. Uh, and somebody who is good at that will be able to tell you that. And if you don't understand it by basically asking simple questions, well then, you know, that's probably that isn't the best person for your company at that stage.

AI assessment note: “randomly deep diving into things what they're doing and just asking questions”

Q that's not who I am. So let's say you're that kind of a founder or you're maybe a technical founder. Like what, at what point in the development of the company should you be thinking about marketing and hiring that first person? Like, is it before the product is finished? Is it before the product is started? Like where in, in the cycle of your company should you be starting?

A So I think if you get it back until the basics, like it's product development and distribution start at day zero, because as a founder, you're developing a product, but you're also creating awareness and you're trying to get those first customers in. So what you want to do with marketing is you want to make sure that you get more leads in that you can talk to and if you can actually sell to. So I'm a big believer that when founders start out, they reach out one on one to potential customers to make sure that they, uh, that they can connect with them and learn more about it while also setting up one channel, which could either be like a blog or email marketing or SEO, uh, the channel that resonates the most with you or to flip it around the Channel that you least hate. But I think if you set that up, and if you see that that works, uh, then you should hire a team to do that when there's a business case for you to work on other stuff. So it's really depending on the skills of the founder, but also what's the business case. Because if you can get a new client in that's worth 10 K, then you have a different hiring decision compared to if you're getting a new client in that's worth like 100 dollars. So these are all the nuances that you need to take into consideration to really make the best decision on when you should hire who.

AI assessment note: “product development and distribution start at day zero”

Q So let's go a little bit deeper into growth hacking related to the person who's in charge of marketing, right? So what would you expect of them in order to see that they're paying for their salary?

A I'm a big fan of cohort based analyzing, uh, which means that if you look at what was the type of marketing we did six months ago and what were the results out of that? And do we see every month The results becoming better and better and better. So do we have an indication that things are improving? Because with some marketing tactics, you can get a quick bump, and then that's just this, you've hit a local maximum. So I'm always curious to see how are people continually able to move the needle to a higher level of generating more revenue, generating more leads, and showing that if something works, that they were able to automate What works so they could actually focusing on exploring new stuff, new types of experiments, new type of channels, because if you just stack a lot of these channels at the end, that will result in more leads and more revenue. So really triggering them on that is an important thing.

AI assessment note: “continually able to move the needle to a higher level of generating more revenue”

Q How would they grab this data in order to be able to analyze it?

A You need to have a CRM in place. So how many leads you got in, how many prospects, how many clients you have, but also like, how are these clients? Retaining and how you're increasing that lifetime value, but also like channel specific. So how many leads did you get from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from email? So I think these are all like from a quantitative perspective, but it's also important that you have the qualitative perspective where you actually see the voice of customers. Why are they choosing you? What is blocking them from almost buying from you and why are they staying? Because, and if you combine those qualitative and quantitative pieces, uh, and showing that it results in more leads and more prospects, And eventually in more, uh, AR or MR or depending on the type of business you're in, uh, you need to see an upward trajectory. That's the important one.

AI assessment note: “You need to have a CRM in place.”

Q How should someone approach growth hacking as a newbie? Let's say as a CEO, maybe they don't have a CMO or a marketing person yet, and they want to try experimentation. How do they create ideas for experimentation and how do they know if the experiments work or not?

A I'm a big fan of being functionally lazy. So I first always try to reverse engineer what works. So what I would do is go to the last five or 10 customers that bought from you and try to reverse engineer How did they come onto that path? So where did they saw you for the first time? What triggered them to buy? What triggered them almost to not to buy and really understand like which channels they use, where they got information about you, because that will give a lot of clues on things that are working, but also things that you're trying to do right now that are not working. And what I always try to do in the first phase is to double down on the things where you know that they are working, but you haven't doubled down on it. So in a lot of businesses, you see that there's a certain typology of customers that buy Five or 10 times more spend way more with you. They come in very easy, but companies aren't doubling down on them because they just are forgetting it. So I was trying to figure out, okay, what's working and how can we double down on the best type of customers that we have in place?

AI assessment note: “go to the last five or 10 customers that bought from you and try to reverse engineer”

Q Do these CRMs tell you the, the details of like this person's paying you 500 a month? Like how do you view the data? Like, do you, do you have a spreadsheet or is there a specific software outside of the CRM or is it a plug into the CRM?

A I think what you should know as a CEO is what the lifetime value is of a customer. Uh, because if you know that you can also tell them, you know what you're allowed to You have spent this amount of money per customer. So let's say your average lifetime value is 3000 dollars and you're willing to spend 1000 dollars to get a customer in and the payback period of that first 1000 dollar is like six months. Well, then you have giving them benchmarks on what they need to work on and what you need to see in your, in your dashboard of your CRM or in your Google sheets. And there are a lot of plugins and CRMs available. I think, especially for software as a service, which you can connect To the things that you have built. Like I always try to put it into another context, like, can they show you that it's a money machine that if you put a dollar in, you get more than one dollar and one cent back. And that's the base of a dashboard or a Google sheet should be able to tell you that. And if you don't understand it or you can't see it and they aren't able to articulate that it's happening. Well, I think then you have a big problem.

AI assessment note: “there are a lot of plugins and CRMs available”