Relying strictly on attributable marketing causes overall growth to suffer
Des Traynor · Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom · Y Combinator · Dec 13, 2017 · at 21:04
Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, discusses marketing funnels and balancing unattributable brand awareness with performance marketing on the Y Combinator podcast.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In general, the marketing world is one where you move from like, This is really hard to attribute, and it costs a lot of money down to, like, hey, we spent seven cent and it kicked ass, right? But that whole thing is a spectrum, and you have to be willing to do the unattributable things and let them, you know, to kind of, you know, grow awareness or whatever, and then on the far side, yes, the attributable stuff, which looks really, really successful, works, but if you only do that, everything suffers.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Des Traynor
Startups building products to solve small, rare problems never succeed
“The next piece I would say to people is like, you have to find, you know, be really wary of solving a small, rare problem. You can solve a big problem. You can solve a rare problem. Sorry, you can solve a small problem, fine. A rare problem, fine. But small an…”
Template-based grading encourages computer science students to memorize without understanding
“The way, and this is true worldwide, I think, the way, like, people in universities would mark a piece of code is they say, all right, we'll give them three points if they have a for loop, and two points if they have an if statement, and people just learned th…”
Engineering-driven paid search rarely works as a deterministic growth engine
“The engineer's approach to marketing is, like, We're going to hire a marketer, and they're going to find the keywords that are CAC LTV positive. That is, the customer acquisition cost is less than the LTV, and we're going to dump all of our fifty million dolla…”
Effective content marketing helps users solve broad problems before pitching
“The advice I'd give people is usually like, think about who your actual end target user is and think of all the problems in their life that you can help them with. And then try and help them as much as you can. And then every now and then hopefully you're, if …”
Marketing organization structures lack standard playbooks and vary across companies
“I've talked to maybe 50 different VPs of marketing at this point about how their marketing org is structured, and they're all different. Like, very, like, not just different as an, ooh, you put one person in, but like, substantively different. Like, even like,…”