20Growth: How to Master PR and Comms, How to Get Your Startup Written About; Press Releases, Fundraising Announcements, Embargos etc & Lessons Scaling Duolingo from 3-200M Users with Gina Gotthilf, Co-Founder @ Latitud

Gina Gotthilf is a Co-Founder and COO at Latitud, an a16z-backed platform supporting the next generation of iconic tech startups in Latin America through digital products, a community and fund. Previously, Gina led growth and marketing at Duolingo from 3 to 200 million users via organic strategies and was part of the executive team. She also worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign, helping oversee the creation of digital ad campaigns at a historical budget, and led growth and community for Tumblr in Latin America. In Today's Discussion with Gina Gotthilf We Discuss: Entry into the World of Growth: How Gina went from working on a farm to leading growth for Tumblr in LATAM? What are 1-2 of Gina's biggest takeaways from her time leading growth for Duolingo? What does Gina know now that she wishes she had known when she entered the world of growth? 15 Top Tips and Secrets to Being Featured in the Best Publications: What is the best way to get in touch with journalists? What mistakes do founders have when they reach out to journalists? Should founders get in touch with more than one journalist at a publication? Should founders be explicit about the embargos they have on a story? Should they stick to them? Should founders be more wary of being published in a publication with a paywall? What materials should they send to journalists to get their attention? Should founders send press releases in early messages to journalists? How can founders control in some way what the journalist will ultimately publish? How long before the company wants the piece to come out, should they reach out to journalists? How can founders create FOMO when trying to get journalists to write their story? How can founders create social validity with journalists, when they are a small company? Once published, what should the distribution strategy look like? How can you get people you know to like and share content you are featured in? What are the top tips and tricks to get people to share content with you in? Should PR and Comms be an ongoing effort or static projects with news stories? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make in getting their company in the press?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Make a list of all of the PR sources that you might want to be featured on and start with the least important ones when you're pitching. You need to have a story to tell. A lot of the time it just comes down to understanding how you make people feel.

• 0:10Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings, and PR and comms is one of the most underrated growth hacks in startups. Today, we deep dive into the very granular tactical version of how to do it right with one of the best, Gina Gottil. Gina is the co-founder and CEO of Latitude. Prior to Latitude, Gina led growth and marketing at Duolingo from three to 200 million users. And she also worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign and led growth and community for Tumblr in Latin America. This episode is a true masterclass. As I said, it's very granular, so get out the pen and paper. This is a masterclass on getting featured for your startup in the best publications. But before we dive into the show today, the single most important thing for 99% of founders today is making sure that your runway will last.

• 0:54Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:37Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:19Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:03Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:42Speaker 00

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:45Harry Stebbings?

  Gina, I am so excited for this. I've heard so many great things from your partner, Brian, for a long time. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Hi, it's my pleasure, Harry, but you're you always say you're excited for your guest. So.

• 3:56Harry Stebbings?

  But I actually heard that this intro in particular was more interesting than any other. Brian actually kind of left a dangling carrot. He said that you had some very early, more turbulent years to your career, but he didn't actually go into them. What were these more turbulent early career years?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  That's totally true. I like talking about this because I think people think they need to know exactly what they're going to do from the get go. And I'm a great example of someone who. Like fumbled about a lot in my early twenties and it's still okay. I majored in philosophy, which is arguably one of the most useless majors you can have. I say that in a self-deprecating way. Of course, you learn how to think, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not very useful. I didn't know how to use Excel when I graduated. And all I wanted was to live in New York because my dad had lived in New York and I grew up with like New York pictures all over Brazil. And I just wanted that experience, but I applied to a hundred jobs and didn't get any of them. And then finally I got an internship and I was the only intern who had already graduated. So I was like the loser older intern at the company and things didn't go quite swimmingly.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  So for starters, my boss was a heroin addict at the time, but we became great friends and I knew there was something off. And one day I confronted her, so she finally admitted it to me. And then we ended up going to Narcotics Anonymous together and they asked me to take over for her responsibilities while she was out. And so that was one way in which I grew because I had to do the job of my boss very quickly. Then my new boss there had just been promoted from head of HR to head of social media, as is very normal. So this person didn't quite know what was going on. It was just really tough. I cried in the bathroom a lot. And then I had a couple of other experiences that just didn't quite work out. And I kept losing my right to be in the United States because I'm Brazilian and I needed a visa. And I just decided, you know what, having a career is not for me.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  I think that this whole like climbing a ladder thing is really stupid. I studied philosophy. I want like meaning in life. And I'm just not going to do this anymore. So I left New York when I was twenty four. Flash like had to leave New York when I was twenty four. And I went back home to Brazil and thought like, okay, well, I'm going to sign up for Woof. The World Organization of Organic Farms. Where you go and you live in farms all over the world and you get to sleep and eat there. And in exchange, they, in exchange, you, you work for them. And so I was like, I'm going to work with animals and out in the land and this is now my life. And I bought a round the world ticket with the money that I had and bought all of this stuff. And things really changed when Tumblr hired me. Now, when I talk about my career, I'm like, yes, yes, I helped Tumblr grow and then I helped Duolingo grow and I worked for them.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  My Bloomberg Presidential campaign and now I started a company that's backed by Andreessen Horowitz. And it sounds really impressive, but most people sort of cut out these like B sides to their history. And I kind of had fun highlighting them.

• 6:32Harry Stebbings?

  You, you said you go and, you know, work and live on farms and then Tumblr hired you. I don't imagine that's the normal sourcing strategy for Tumblr. How did that happen?

• 6:42Speaker 00

  So I really believe that a lot of the big decisions are made because people don't know any better or they don't have other choices. One thing that I did that was really good throughout my whole career is that I love meeting people. And some people call that networking, but I really truly love meeting people. And when I was in New York and I had kind of these crappy jobs at digital marketing agencies and I had to leave, I decided I wanted to meet all the people who I had spoke to on the phone or emailed that I thought sounded interesting. And I reached out to them and said, like, I'm leaving the country. I would love to have the opportunity to have a coffee with you. And one of the people I met was Mark Cotney. And Mark Cotney had just been hired at Tumblr as their head of media. And he talked to me and said, I think that Tumblr wants to grow in Brazil soon. And I said, well, good luck to Tumblr. I am no longer doing this. I'm not doing the career thing anymore, but you know, I hope you guys have a great time.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  And I went back to Brazil and they reached out to me six months later saying, hey, we're now at the point where we want to grow in Brazil and we remember you. And he was like, and we would love your help. And I remember saying, that is so great, but no, I turned it down. I was like, I'm not, I just don't want to do this anymore. I'm tired of falling on my face and I just want a really simple life where I don't try this anymore. And he was like, okay, well, I'm gonna convince you because if you're gonna go eat, pray, love. I think this was pre eat, pray, love. So he might have just said like travel, then you're gonna need some money, right? So how about we hire you for one month and you help us figure out like what it is that we're gonna do in Brazil? Like maybe you help us hire the right person or you just help us figure out the first steps. They hired me for a month and I helped them organize press interviews and do a big community meetup

• 8:09Speaker 00

  and then source talent for this role that they were hiring for that was country manager. And at the end of that, they were like, we don't like anybody, can you do it? And it was a really tough moment for me because I didn't want to. I thought I was gonna fall on my face again, but it felt like a really pivotal moment in my career. And they were very desperate. So they were like, you can make your own title, you can make your job description, you have no manager. You're just gonna be in Brazil by yourself and you can figure it out. And I was like, okay, this sounds fun.

• 8:33Harry Stebbings?

  Tumblr is a very iconic early internet name. When you think about how that time shaped your mindset today and any big lessons, are there any that you would really think to you straight away from that time with Tumblr?

• 8:44Speaker 00

  One of the things I learned at Tumblr that I think a lot of people in early stage startups that succeed learn is that no one knows what they're doing at most points in time. Life and in business. Tumblr was an amazing product. David Karp is brilliant. The team was awesome. But a lot of the stuff we were doing, we were fumbling about trying to figure it out. And one anecdote I have to tell about that is just the memory of standing at a cash register in Sao Paulo, trying to take all the money I had in my account in Brazil to pay our contractors, because Tumblr couldn't figure out how to wire money from the US to Brazil. And then I ended up borrowing money from family members and I borrowed money from a well-known startup founder today in order to pay those contractors, because we were doing this big launch event and the money just hadn't shown up. And if the money didn't make it, we wouldn't have the launch event that I'd been working on for so long.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  And I wasn't paid at Tumblr for six months because they couldn't figure that out. And I was living in my parents', like in my childhood bedroom at the time when I was 25 and like working out of like my childhood bed, literally. So it was okay, I could eat and sleep, but I realized everyone's figuring every step of the way out. And if they can do it, then maybe one day so can I.

• 9:47Harry Stebbings?

  Your parents are going, why are you working for this company that's not paying?

• 9:53Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we have that Tumblr journey and then we have Duolingo. I think people always learn actually from like actually tangible things that worked or didn't work. When you think about growth experiments, can you take me to one? This feels like a job interview, a terrible way of phrasing this, but fuck it. Take me to one which worked and one which didn't and how you changed as a leader and a thinker because of those two experiences.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Well, one thing I'll say is that when I started out at Duolingo, I was not a head of growth and I had no idea what I was doing. And so growth at the time wasn't quite like a product-led growth experiment phase, A/B testing thing. For me, I was just like figuring out how to make Duolingo become as well-known as possible all over the world. When they put me in charge of growth, I remember this conversation very clearly because Louise and Severin, co-founders of Duolingo, came to me and said, our investors are telling us that we need someone to be head of growth. You're helping us grow so much, maybe you should be the head of growth. And I was like, yeah, of course I'll do it. And then I went back to my desk and Googled, what is growth? Like, what is growth and then startup? And I found Andrew Chen's blog. But it was just me and one engineer. That's all they gave me. And so you can't do much when it's just you and one backend engineer. So we started thinking like, what can we do that doesn't require any designs?

• 10:58Speaker 00

  My first lesson was we decided to test notifications and Louise and Severn were both like, "No, you should not test with notifications because we have already tested with notifications a lot and we have optimized them. Go do something else." And we were like, "But almost everyone who uses Duolingo gets notifications, so we're still going to see if we can do something about it." And I'm a really good writer, so let's do this multiple times. And it actually was extremely high ROI. Even though they had already optimized a lot, we were able to derive great results. And so the lesson that I would highlight there, there's two. One, it's always, when you're prioritizing growth experiments, it's always about ROI. And for me is investment of time and R is potential returns. And so investment of time means how, you know, how much time are you going to take to do this? And for us, I could write copy in like 30 minutes, I could write like 20 iterations.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  And Sven, the engineer at the time, could, you know, do two lines of code that do a notification very quickly as well. So the investment was very low and the potential return was very high because the number of users who were seeing that was so high already at the time. So even if we could marginally improve that, then we could see great returns. And the second thing is that when you find an inflection point and something that you know has an effect on the growth of your startup, it's worth doubling down on that versus just trying to figure out what else. And that works not just for things that worked, but also for things that worked really negatively. So if you do an experiment and like it really harms you, that means that you found an inflection point and you might as well keep testing.

• 12:18Harry Stebbings?

  What does that mean? So if it doesn't work, you found an inflection point, keep testing, double down? Help me understand that. Why would you want to dig deeper into the pain of something that doesn't work?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Well, it's not pain if you're learning, is how I view it. And an experiment fails if you were not able to reach any results. If you're not able to get to statistical significance or if you did and you actually saw no meaningful results. That's a huge failure. You learned very little and now you have to go and start again. But if you run an experiment with statistical significance and it harmed your product, that means that you found a moment that really matters to users. And if you found a moment that really matters to users, you can manipulate it in multiple ways for positive and for negative.

• 12:53Harry Stebbings?

  If that's one with notifications that worked, we saw like incredibly low investment for great returns. If we think about the flip side, was there one that maybe didn't work or took longer to work?

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is one particular experiment that we did and that really didn't work. And I'm almost cheating because it ended up being our most successful. Successful experiment of all time in the growth team. What happened was the team really wanted to implement badges on Duolingo. One thing that we did as a team that ended up being really effective was that we would have different members of the team go and intentionally play different games that were very popular at the time and then identify what they thought were growth levers on those games. And then talk about how we could implement those on to Duolingo in our growth meetings. We would do that about once a month. And this is exciting and cool because most people building an education app would think like, oh, what's working for education apps? Maybe I'll go copy that. But we always thought, what's working for retention? And games get retention, right? And education apps do not get retention, right? And why?

• 13:46Speaker 00

  And so we always looked at games for our frameworks. And everyone was convinced that badges was going to be huge because all of the top games have badges. You do something, you gain a badge, and then you do something else and you get another badge. Now you're collecting badges and they're exciting. And then you can show off how many badges you have. And that somehow really gets people to stick around long. So everyone was convinced and the team kept trying to convince me, the head of the team, to do it. And I kept saying, nope, it's low ROI because it's too much investment. We're not going to do it. Finally, they convinced me, Gina, this is really silly. Like, we know this is going to work. So I was like, okay, let's do it. Let's finally do it. But you know what? Let's find a minimum viable product, like an MVP version of this test. So instead of doing the whole test, let's figure out what the minimum version of this experiment that we think will give us the results that we need in order to determine whether this is a good or a non-lever.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  So we decided to create one badge from very close to the moment when the person signs up or tries Duolingo out for the first time, because that's when you have the most number of users. And so we decided to give people a badge for signing up. It was like you sign up and then you would get like this like really gamified girl with balloons. I would say like, you got your first badge. And we were like, if we can see results from that, then we know that people would are reacting positively to badges. And then we can start implementing other badges. The reason why we did that is because creating badges isn't just an experiment because you need multiple badges in order for badges to even mean anything. And you need a place to show off your badges. So now you need to think about the logistics of how you're going to implement that badge. At what point they get triggered? Where do they get displayed inside a very simple app where we're trying not to have a hamburger menu with like multiple tabs?

• 15:14Speaker 00

  So it was quite complex, but we decided this was the way to know. And what happened was no one reacted to the girl with the balloons. Like it did, it did nothing. And so we concluded this is silly. It's actually not a good use of our time. Let's table it. And we didn't work on badges again for about another year. When we had an aha moment as a team, and I can't quite explain to you when that happened, that actually what we had tried was a minimum viable product, like an MVP of the experiment, but it wasn't viable. That's how I would put it. Basically, it was so minimal, but it didn't actually elicit the emotions. It didn't actually do the thing that badges would if implemented in its full extent. Because first of all, you get a badge for something that you did and that you're proud of. No one's proud of signing up. That's such a lame moment.

• 15:57Harry Stebbings?

  So that was my exact thought, which is like, I totally agree that like you need the album of badges for it to be meaningful and you need more. But I think actually, when I hear that, it's just like, you know, as a user, signing up is not anything to be proud of. And so it's not actually the fact that you need the album. It's the fact that the action doesn't correlate to value.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Yes, that's one main thing. And I think that when you're so into it and in your team and you're looking at the moments that really make a difference in the user's journey, it's easy to sort of lose track of what actually matters and what doesn't matter from a user perspective. And what we weren't doing at the time was dog fooding our own experiments. We never thought that we should just like sit at a table and actually try out the thing that we had just built to see how that makes us feel and whether it works or doesn't work. So that's something we started doing in the growth team at that point, which I know sounds silly because Duolingo knows what they're doing. But like at every step of the way, we were figuring out how to make things better. A year later, we decided to finally do that again and actually do it right. We, we invested a lot more time at the time. At that point, we had much less low hanging fruit to tackle. And so we're like, okay, let's invest time in this.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  We actually spent, I think about a month because like designing the different badges, figuring out where they all go, et cetera. And then of course, it ended up being the most effective thing that we did in a collection of experiments where we could impact not just growth numbers, but every single metric across the company, like monetization, et cetera.

• 17:12Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned pausing it there. How long do you give an experiment or a project before you pause it? Because you need enough data, but you don't want to keep it going for too long. What's that right balance?

• 17:23Speaker 00

  So there is a science for this. It's called statistical significance and you can find calculators online. Here's an example. Harry, what's your favorite color?

• 17:31Harry Stebbings?

  Blue.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Wow, mine too. So probably a hundred percent of the human race prefers blue as a color, right? No, definitely not. Why? Because we're too small of a sample size. So that doesn't actually give us information. It's just random. Statistical significance tells you whether something that you tested and the result that you got is likely to repeat itself over time, over and over and over and over and over. And there's math to figure out whether that's the case or not. And it depends on two things. One, the size of the impact of the experiment that you're trying to make. So for example, like if you do a notification that's slightly better than the other one, it improves click through rate by two percent. That's very different from like if you do something that's so major that actually like eighty percent of people are now clicking on this one versus the control. Eighty percent and two percent are very different.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  And so you need less people when you have a bigger change, when you see like a bigger result and you need more people in order to prove that something so tiny is actually repeatable. There's a way to test for that. It's really hard really early on in early stage startups, which is where I'm focusing my time now because you don't have enough people for statistical significance. So you would need to have a lot of money to invest in ads, for example, to get people to try your thing. And so that's really hard to do.

• 18:39Harry Stebbings?

  One, and picking up, you said about retention there being the focus. I had Alex Schultz, the CMO at Meta on the show. And he said basically retention's king. What was your North Star metric at Duolingo when you think back to it? Is it the number of sessions per week? Is it the number of levels completed? How did you define success as a user?

• 18:56Speaker 00

  The North Star metric for Duolingo at all times was daily active users, DAU. And so of course we had some metrics that helped us understand how we were impacting daily active users. But we cared about daily active users from the beginning, even before we were doing growth experiments with my team and we were just looking at PR. So I was told like PR only matters if we're able to increase the number of daily active users. And if you talk to a PR agency, they would say that's impossible. I don't want to do that. But it is possible because if you're Able to get this product in front of a lot of people who are your target users, then they will actually use what you're showing them. Whereas a lot of people focus on metrics closer to acquisition. And growth gets correlated with acquisition a lot of the time, but it doesn't matter how many people you get.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  If your retention isn't there, then it doesn't quite matter. So spending a lot of time on retention upfront, if you can, really helps make sure that every second and every dollar you spend on acquisition goes a lot further.

• 19:51Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned that in the retention and we discussed that. Acquisition, getting them through the door is PR as well as one funnel and aspect of doing so. Now, we agreed before when we were chatting that it's actually kind of heavily underutilized and underrated, I think, by founders. Actually, I think it's often denigrated, if we're being totally honest, fluffy PR, marketing, whatever stuff. And it's handed to like the intern and it's really just not the right way to do it. So my question to you is, how should founders think about PR at the most tactical level?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  PR is so not sexy. It's considered really old school. It's like, oh, no, I want to do product led growth. I'm going to be doing A B tests. I ended up doing PR before I knew what PR was. I just thought, you know what? If I get these big newspapers to write about Tumblr, then I think that like we're going to get a lot of users. And then I was like, how do I get these big papers to write about Tumblr? Maybe I should just find who the journalists are. And then I should figure out like what interests them. And that, I guess, was PR. And it honestly was the most important lever that helped Tumblr grow in Latin America and that helped Duolingo grow in the first two years, which is crazy. And so from a very tactical perspective, here's how I think about PR, looking back. And I have a playbook, but at the time, just to really highlight my ignorance, I didn't have a playbook. I was just really trying things out and they worked.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  So here's what you need to do. First, you need to have a story to tell. If you don't have a story to tell, it doesn't mean that it's not there. It might mean that you just don't know what the story is. And often when you are the person who built the thing, you're not the person who can actually tell the story about why it's important. And so you explore that, you know? If you're really solving a problem, you probably have a great story there about why this matters to people. And then you might have stories of individuals who have actually had their problems solved with what you built. And that's also a really interesting story. So what I would recommend Is you just tell the story of what you think is meaningful about your app or what you're building over and over and over and over and you watch very carefully for how people react to things. And then you learn what actually matters to people and what doesn't matter to people.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  If you have a startup or a product, when I go, Harry, let me tell you about my, the thing I'm building. And I like tell you, and at first you're going to pretend that you're interested because you're like really nice and I'm your friend or whatever. And I'll say a lot of things during the course of like, well, I'm telling you about my product. And you're going to ask a question about something in particular, or you're going to react to something in particular. That's when you know you have a hook about something that matters to people. And you can actually write that down if that's going to make it easier to you. And I would actually write all of those moments down and understand how that backtracks into a story.

• 22:12Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree and get you there. Okay. And so you have that hook. And then we write it down on a Google Doc. How long is that?

• 22:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, with Duolingo, we never wrote it down on a Google Doc. It was like shared knowledge. I worked very closely with Luis Vanan, the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo in the early days. And so I just heard him tell the story over and over and I memorized it. And then we would just like play off of each other and build on it with time.

• 22:31Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. So we have that story. Why did PR care? Everyone has a story today. Everyone thinks their story is unique. How do we take it one step further?

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Yes. So the first thing I would say is not just write your story, but you need to condense that story down into one liner. One line really matters because when you're messaging someone for the first time, they really don't care who you are. They don't care about what you're writing about. So their attention needs to be piqued immediately. So what I advise founders to do is basically come up with every name or number that might be impressive about their startup or in their background and condense it into one line. So for example, if I introduce myself to someone, I'll say, hi, Harry. I led growth at Duolingo from three to 200 million users before working for the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign. Da, da, da, da, co-authored a neuroscience study. Like, I don't know if that's what I would do, but like, these are three moments and three signifiers that Harry would say, I don't know who Gina is and what she did. But she just said three things that make me think this is important and I should pay attention.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  So you need to find those signifiers. And if you don't have them yet, it's okay. You can find proxies. Like, for example, I went to this university or so and so has used my product. Or I have money from this angel investor. So you need to find the things that are good, are going to matter to a journalist. What we did with Duolingo, I'm with Tumblr, but especially with Duolingo, over and over again. Was just that. So for example, I would have Luis Fano fly to a country and then I would make sure to schedule a talk by Luis Fano, not just in one place that had like a major name, like for example, a top university, but two. And so it would be normally like a top university in that country and then a top tech conference. And I would try to make it so that it all happened within one week or 10 days max. Then I would reach out to journalists on Twitter or on LinkedIn and I would have this one liner and then I would say,

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Luis has been invited by, and then I would use the two things that they would go, wow, this matters. Like imagine, you've never heard of Harry Stebbings, but he was just invited by Harvard and TechCrunch to speak at blah, blah, blah. And you know, he has no time. So I'd create a scarcity. He has no time right now. You know, like he's super important, even though no one's heard of this. If you would like 10 minutes to speak with him, I could potentially make that happen. You generate scarcity and you generate those levers and points of significance, even when you don't have them by thinking, what matters to people? So for example, in Colombia, we did that with the Colombian government, the Minthi, which is the Ministry of Technology there, to get Duolingo into public schools. You would think, wow, Gina, that's amazing. You've got Duolingo to public schools. You've got the whole population. No, it actually worked really badly. Actually, the Minthi in Colombia was probably the better one of the governments. I don't want to say anything bad about them,

• 24:55Speaker 00

  but other governments in general are very slow and they are unable to make these things happen at the rate that a startup requires for it to be considered a success. None of that mattered because we could use that for PR, because now I could reach out to journalists and say, Duolingo is officially being used alongside the Ministry of Technology or the Ministry of Education of your country in public schools. And I have proof because as part of my little contract, I said they had to have a little landing page where they put the Duolingo logo on it. So then I could like hyperlink, so the journalist could go and see, wow, it's true. The Duolingo logo is on the government website. And suddenly now the journalist thinks Duolingo is really important and really matters. The government is putting their name behind it. So even though this partnership isn't really going anywhere and it's not quite working, I have now signaled to the journalist that they should know about something and they don't, and they need to catch up.

• 25:40Harry Stebbings?

  What did the journalists respond? Like, how did that go?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Look, I did a lot of PR in my career to learn especially at Duolingo, because every opportunity we got then, we would just milk it. And we would come up with a feature and then we would come up with a feature in order. To get the press, I mean, like make press out of something that wasn't that interesting. So I did a lot of it and you have to be really resilient because you get a lot of no's. Even when you're able to tell a great story. Here's one big difference about being the person at your startup who does PR yourself versus hiring a PR agency. And why I'm a big advocate for doing it yourself if you can. When you are at a startup, you have nothing to lose by spraying and praying. Which means like, I really wanna get featured on whatever newspaper or whatever site or whatever blog or whatever influencers account. You can then go and find out all of the people who are writing about it or who are, you know, journalists at this organization. And you can pitch 10 of them.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  And that is a huge faux pas in PR. You're not supposed to pitch 10 people at the same organization. It actually can backfire tremendously. And if you are an agency, you are burning all of your bridges and people won't listen to you anymore. But if you are the founder of a startup and your life depends on the startup working out, you don't care that much. And you can always play that, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I've never done PR card, which is fine, because that's not supposed to be your main job. So of course, I would recommend messaging many people within the same organization with a couple of caveats. First, if you message multiple people in an organization and one of them says yes, I would immediately react and say, hey, just so you know, I also wrote to so and so, like, I can let them know that you're taking this or whatever. So you make sure that you give them information that they wouldn't have to find out at the water cooler and feel really awkward about at their organization. So that's one.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Two, I would not recommend that you now make a list of all of the New York Times journalists and try to pitch all of them. Because from a tactical perspective, here's another thing that I've learned. And it also works for startups pitching VCs, honestly, which is make a list of all of the PR sources that you might wanna be featured on. And start with the least important ones when you're pitching, because as you pitch, you need to learn what's working and what's not working. As we said earlier, if I pitch something and I keep getting no's, you have to modify that pitch, it's not working.

• 27:37Harry Stebbings?

  Do you send them the press release? Do you say, hey Gina, would love to hop on a call? And then before the call or after the call, you send it? Do you have to do it to get their attention? How do you think about using docs or a press release to get attention?

• 27:50Speaker 00

  There's no recipe and people do it differently and especially agencies do it differently. The way that has worked out for me in the past is generating FOMO. I don't send all of the information upfront, which is annoying to journalists. I'm sorry for the journalists who are listening to this, I'm sure it's annoying, but it piques their interest and human beings react to things that pique their interest and you want the person to react. I would write to these journalists because on LinkedIn, you only get a release, like just small messages that you can send and on Twitter, there's like 140 characters. So I got really good at just sending that short message, but the short message has to be interesting enough that the person would reply with one word, like, would you like to hear more? Sure, I got a lot of that. Now, the way I read into this, like psychology of it, if the person has responded to you once, now they have a relationship with you, even if it's a very marginal relationship.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  But before, they had zero relationship to you. So it's very easy to ignore an email that you've never responded to before, but if you've responded to someone once, you're much more compelled to respond the second time. So now you already have a foot in the door and in a much better place. And they will at least tell you no, whereas it's much easier to just ignore otherwise. So I would keep it super short and like a cliffhanger. If the person responded with interest, then I would give them a lot more information because of course I don't want to make a journalist life tough.

• 28:55Harry Stebbings?

  Do you put the release date in there? Do you give exclusives and how do you manage that?

• 29:00Speaker 00

  So it depends on your shot. Now we're going really, really tactical on the PR side of things.

• 29:04Harry Stebbings?

  This is one of my favorite topics and no one knows how to do it. So I'm thrilled about it.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Okay, I love PR too. I think it's awesome. So it really depends on what strategy you choose and there are two main strategies in PR. One is you decide to do an exclusive, which means that you're only going to allow one publication to share the news that you want to share. That's advantageous when you want to go with a major organization, especially when you don't have a relationship with them, like a really big news source. Because for example, if TechCrunch publishes something or the New York Times publishes something or The Economist, that can already be enough for you. You don't even need anyone else because everyone else would want to take, pick up that story anyway. And so then you get the distribution that way. But there are downsides to that as well, because then you just have that one and then maybe other main news sources that you care about will then say,

• 29:46Speaker 00

  this isn't news, so we're not going to cover it anymore. And so it's about death versus breath and which one you decide to go with at the time. Depends on what your strategy is, who you're trying to reach and also what your leverages are in terms of your connections and how often you've done this before.

• 29:59Harry Stebbings?

  What did you go for?

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Most startups, I would say, choose the exclusive because then you develop a relationship with that one journalist and it feels more doable. We went spray and pray most of the time, just like breath, which is not what you're supposed to do. When I hired my first PR person actually at Duolingo, they reprimanded me very heavily, but I said, I don't care because it's worked. And I will continue to do it because it worked. So I don't care what the theory is, which is instead of giving someone an exclusive, trying to get it published in as many places as possible at once. And so then unless you have a relationship with a journalist, you don't give them that much of a heads up. If you decide to go with that approach, you would do an embargo. So there's an exclusive versus like the embargo. Embargo means that you tell journalists they can only publish something at a specific time on a specific date. And if you're able to do that, then you can get all of the news sources to publish something at the same time.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And that's magical because you create a surround sound effect. Whereas if someone reads the story and they see a notification about it later, they think that it's much bigger than it is because of their bias. And so you just create this like image that like whatever is happening is huge. And so that is really like the pot of gold if you can go for it.

• 31:00Harry Stebbings?

  How early before a release do you go? Is it two weeks, a week, two days? How long do journalists need to not feel like it's too long but not too short?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  You want to give the journalist enough time to work on this story because most journalists have a lot of work. And they're overwhelmed and they also have their own schedules. And so if you're too close to the date, you really risk the journalist just not covering it, even if they were interested, which is a really big miss. So I've had to move artificial dates because the journalist was like, great, but I don't have time for this. And I go, yeah, what if that was a week later, you know, like I'm like trying to make that work. Of course, you don't want to do it too early that it's like irrelevant. So here's the thing, I would say sending the release or sending the information with journalists two weeks before probably works. What I would say is you start earlier because you need to develop a relationship with that journalist, even if it is just getting the journalist to respond to you once or like accepting your invite on LinkedIn or like seeing your tweet to them. You need to give that stuff lead time. So you want to start earlier.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  But then in terms of actually sending them the information that they need, I would try to give them more than one week of time, maybe two. For me, growth and PR and humanity, a lot of the time it just comes down to understanding how you make people feel. And if you're able to make people feel anything, then they remember you. And if they remember you, then you're much more likely to get what you want. So if you like someone's tweet regularly, they'll remember who you are and they'll think this person cares. And hopefully you care, but normally if I like someone's tweet, it's because I actually care either about what they said or about them that I want them to feel good about. Or I want to, for example, if I see someone I know and they tweet about something like Eric Torreberg, he tweeted about something recently and then he put it on LinkedIn as well. I liked and commented on both because I know that that's going to impact his chances of like growing and I care. So I'm going to do that, right?

• 32:37Speaker 00

  And so if you develop a relationship with people, whether it be like them remembering something you said that was personal or making them laugh or whatever, then you're able to. And that really works for growth hooks as well. It's thinking about how that made people feel.

• 32:49Harry Stebbings?

  When you look at journalists tweets, often they don't get many likes. And I don't mean that horribly or disparagingly, but sometimes it's like eight to 10 to 12 to 15. I always say, hey, create a list when you start your company of the journalists that are relevant to you. And honestly, just go to it once every other day, like a couple of their tweets, which will be relevant to you. You know, people who like your tweets consistently. I noticed a hundred percent. And so like you instantly you have that recognition. I wrote down two things on my arm. One is paywall. There are publications which have paywalls, but their names are great. How do you think about that?

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Duolingo is a B to C product. It can be relevant to most of the population. There are very few people in the world who would not benefit from learning a second language. It could be kids, teenagers, young adults, or even grandparents trying to connect with like their granddaughter's new husband or whatever. And so we were really going wide and we wanted to go wide. And that's why the spring and pre approach worked. And that's also why we did not give exclusiveness, especially to publications that had a paywall. Because that would really limit our breadth and we were going for breadth. However, there are other cases where those publications matter a lot more than the breadth. For example, like in B to B cases or in cases where you're working with fintech or legal tech or industries where you really need to build trust with the right people.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Then having some of those publications like the Wall Street Journal, for example, write about you is really meaningful. It's a signifier that goes beyond the reach. It just now you can link to it whenever you email anyone or when you write up. And people think this is an important thing. This matters is how. Has a lot of data behind it because the Wall Street Journal wouldn't cover something if it didn't. Even if people can't read the story, they'll read the headline, which honestly is what most people do anyway. And so that already means a lot.

• 34:28Harry Stebbings?

  I think the biggest thing that people don't do is they don't ask, what's the core objective? And who are we going for? If you are going for new investors ahead of a funding round, TechCrunch might be the right publication to go after. If you're going for new customers to Wall Street Journal or Shipping Weekly, or I don't know whatever random vertical you're going for, but TechCrunch is not going to get you more customers if you're in shipping or heavy logistics. What's the objective and who are we going for? And let that trickle down into your publication list.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  No, that's absolutely true. And one thing to take into consideration is that if you're able to get something on TechCrunch, even if it wasn't your core consumer possibility, then very quickly tell other publications that feel more insecure than TechCrunch, like editors and journalists, and link to TechCrunch just covered it. They're much more likely to cover it as well, so you might be able to have your cake and eat it too. But one thing that I see a lot is exactly that. It's not understanding the motivation behind what you're doing and behind what the people who are reading that publication. So I see a lot of startups say, oh, we got a funding round and we did this big announcement and we didn't get that many new users from it. Well, yeah, because people who are reading about funding rounds and who are reading about like the monetization of a startup are not necessarily the people whose problems you're solving with that startup. And so that's the people you want to reach, which might be like Elle magazine,

• 35:38Speaker 00

  because like women are going to be interested in learning a language too. And, you know, so you don't think about that.

• 35:42Harry Stebbings?

  How much control do you want over the content? Journalists can be challenging, but in terms of what they produce. I've had journalists write snippets of like what I've said and turned it into the main piece. And it's been not what I wanted. How much control do you give? How do you think about ensuring the piece that you get is the piece that you wanted?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  You don't get control. Like if you're working with real journalists, they think and they write. And that's the best thing about journalism, but it can also be the worst thing about journalism. So there is a couple of layers here. First of all, when you write your release, because you know exactly what you want to say, write it exactly as you would like it to be published with all the hyperlinks there. That really matters, really matters if you have hyperlinks, I cannot emphasize this enough. Then you can send it out. I would say that most journalists, not at the top publications, but you would be surprised with most journalists. Tend to be fairly lazy and I don't fault journalists. They have way too many things to do. They're trying to get clicks. They are under immense amount of pressure. And so a lot of them will copy paste. And so that helps a lot. If you're able to just have exactly what you wanted in there in the first place and then it's just like copy paste it and then you get the story. That's not you having control. That's you gaming the system.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  But then you can't have control and tell a journalist, I want you to write this or that, because I actually will rub them incredibly the wrong way. Much like when you're working with an engineer and you tell them like, here is the solution I want you to build versus here's the problem I want you to solve. And you just need to understand those nuances. So you need to be okay with that. And you need to give this journalist all of the information that you possibly can to prevent something bad from happening, which is like you said, like something being taken completely out of context. You over time practice what you say and how you say it really well, so that you're not gonna say things and then get taken out of context. And again, it's about developing a relationship with that journalist. Because then if something happens and you email them and you say, hey, like you just said this and I realize that I said it, but that's not how I meant it or whatever. They're much more likely to listen to you if they care. Harry is saying no. Is that not the case?

• 37:30Harry Stebbings?

  No, I'm totally with you. I'm thinking back to times when I've said, hey, I know I said this, but I didn't mean that. And it's like,

• 37:37Speaker 00

  And I might not.

• 37:37Harry Stebbings?

  I don't.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  I've had multiple situations and it comes down to a lot of things, to culture, to how much power you have, frankly. So if you are the owner of a PR agency that like channels all of the major news from the top tech startups that anyone ever wants to know about, and I'm a journalist, I want to maintain a good relationship with you. So if you told me it's like, you know, hey, like this needs to be modified, I'm not gonna say no to you because I still want you to send me news before you send to the other publications. So you understand that. There's also cultural nuances. Like if you're doing press in Brazil or Latin America, things are tend to be a little bit more lenient because people are much more like relationships driven. So they're like, okay, like it's fine. Like we'll make a change. And there have been cases where I emailed a journalist very kindly and maybe I didn't have the relationship or maybe they just disagreed with me, which is totally fair because they have a job to do and they're trying to tell the truth.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  And they didn't wanna make changes and I wreak havoc and probably lost some years of my life in the process. We had one case where we were doing a global launch with Duolingo and I was doing all of our PR myself, which meant that I had like a little like spreadsheet that had like twenty tabs, one for each country. Like we were doing global. So I had like journalists and editors.

• 38:39Harry Stebbings?

  All these different countries that I was managing.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  To not know that CRM's existed like online with this already. And so then we're doing this massive global launch. I had to manage so many different pieces. And then some random journalists, somewhere completely random, broke embargo. I remember one case where someone in Pittsburgh broke embargo. And another case where someone in India broke embargo.

• 38:56Harry Stebbings?

  What do you do when they break embargo? Do you just say, fuck it, let's go?

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:59Harry Stebbings?

  Or do you try and bring it back?

• 39:01Speaker 00

  I would try to re- bring it back in as kindly as possible. And then as firmly as possible. And in some cases, you're just going to have to really hope that the journalists you really care about are not going to see that embargo was broken and move on.

• 39:14Harry Stebbings?

  So I have two questions for you. One is, okay, you're on my team and you're doing this amazing work and I'm super happy. Gina, I need to measure some form of success from your work. You know, we've got links to TechCrunch and to Forbes and to whatever publication. How do we measure success of PR and actually align it back to the core business?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  It's really hard and that's not a cop out answer. And you have to, especially if you're early stage. So for Duolingo, it was DAUs. Like if we were actually able to get new users that became active users, that was our success metric. Because then we knew that we were reaching the right audience. And that, you know, the story that was told was the story that we needed to tell in order to get people to download and try Duolingo. So that's what really mattered, but it depends, right? So if you're trying to raise funding, then it's like, if you're able to raise funding or if you got people who are referencing the stories on a regular basis, like I heard about you through this. Or I heard about you through that. Like you could measure that if you had like a landing page or something like, how did you hear about this? Like that could be helpful, but some of that is going to be intangible because you grow your brand equity over time and that can have a huge impact on your business.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  But when you're a startup, you don't have the luxury to just be like, well, I'm just building this brand equity and then we'll see where it goes.

• 40:21Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of like, oh, people saw it. When you are published in TechCrunch or anywhere like we discussed, what do you do then? What did you get, you know, the Duolingo founders, you know, the fans of Tumblr? Do you like, hey, we're in this, tweet it, LinkedIn it, Instagram it? Like, how do you help with that distribution?

• 40:37Speaker 00

  That's such a great point because it's so important. I think that this is so relevant because if you're trying to build a brand, which you should be, because again, it's about how you make people feel, not about whether the thing that you're making is useful only. If you're writing to Social media copy to get people to do something like, for example, to share the story that was published on TechCrunch. If you just say, hey, please share this, you can with your friends, but with people who don't care, they won't. So first, those relationships matter. But then second, if you're able to write copy in a way that makes people care. And then it's always about the mission, like, do you want to get behind this mission? Then you would share this and that's easier to get buy in than just like to ask like to get someone to share something.

• 41:11Harry Stebbings?

  I think another thing is removing friction from the share. Most people go and share something because it's quite painful to share. Say, what's your at handle? What's the link that you want me to share?

• 41:19Speaker 00

  I think you're absolutely right. And if you're trying to get someone to share a message, you make it as easy as possible for them. And so what that means is first of all, you're going to write a really nice message asking them to share. And then you're going to write exactly the message that you want them to share.

• 41:30Harry Stebbings?

  That is personalized.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yes, and it's personalized. And you need to be really smart about how you write that message because you need to remember that this person is posting that on their personal profile. So they are sending a message to the world about what it, who they are, based on what they're sharing. And so you need to think about the words that you use and the image that you use in as much as it affects them there. So with Latitude, one of our biggest growth levers was when we started admitting startup founders. So we work with early stage startup founders in Latin America and we started admitting them. We created this token that said, like, I was selected to be in Latitude. And then I wrote the copy and I almost feel bad, but I tell our Latituteers that this was our tactic. It feels manipulative, but I wrote the copy in a way that makes them seem amazing to their audience, like, wow, you are so impressive.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  And also really humble. So it's like a really perfect humble brag that makes us look even better. Because then we had like all these amazing startup founders, because we had our friends join originally, say, I got into Latitude. And suddenly people are reading their thing, saying, what's Latitude? And if this person got into Latitude and they're proud of it, then it must be really great. And now they're checking out what Latitude is and then they're signing up. And so making that easy with the personalized like image of them, like I just got into Latitude helped us a ton.

• 42:39Harry Stebbings?

  I think Y C have done this the best. Every Twitter handle has Y C W twenty one, Y C W. It is the value or sign of accreditation. Also, make it super short. I get some that are super long. I get high, random, and then they're too long, terrible. Also, like for me, I don't know about you. I put, hi Gina, hope you're well and enjoying the sun in Miami. Personalized, you're like, oh, wow, Harry remembered I live in Miami. And then I paste. And then, by the way, I always do a P S. And then I put, hope to play football with your husband next time. And you're like, oh, wow, top, like, he's really, I've actually not. It's taken about thirty seconds to do the top and tail. But you're like, wow, that, that Harry is such a nice guy.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. And like when I was doing press for Duolingo and we were doing these global launches, I was personally writing over a hundred emails at a time. And it had to be within a window of time because this launch was coming up. And so that's exactly what I would do. I'd have the copy with like the links, all like perfect there, et cetera. And then the other thing, I think you don't have to do this anymore, but it depends on your email client, like select all, remove formatting and like redo formatting. I would do that one by one because like otherwise you send an email and you can see that there was like copy paste and stuff. And then you've already lost credibility.

• 43:50Harry Stebbings?

  That looks terrible. The minute I see that, I'm like done, out. Also, never do this, that gets probably fifty like press releases a week with like embargoed news, just cold.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  The subject line embargoed news?

• 44:01Harry Stebbings?

  They'll send me the press release and like an embargo. And I'm like, I never agreed to your embargo. I've never spoken to you before. And this is P R firms that do it.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:12Harry Stebbings?

  They just like spam that out. My question to you then is, I get fifty P R firms a week in my inbox at least. They are generally crap and I actually just ninety nine percent dislike P R firms. I'm going out there and saying this one. Should founders work with P R firms or have it internal?

• 44:26Speaker 00

  I'm with you. I ninety nine percent hate P R firms. If you can, do it yourself, do it yourself. But I also work with founders who just don't have the time, bandwidth or knowledge or relationships. Then I would say hire someone who does, who can do that, those things for you.

• 44:40Harry Stebbings?

  And also by branding, even if you get a cheap PR firm, they'll still be at best three, four grand a month at best. You can hire a twenty-three, twenty-four-year-old who's hungry as hell, chasing journalists on Twitter DM twenty-four hours a day for the same amount.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Yes, that's a lot of what I was doing. Yeah, the advantage is like, you know, the PR firms, they already have the relationships. If you don't know, because you obviously have a knack for this, like I had a knack for this, like Louise Vanon had a knack for this. Sometimes you don't, you're an engineer. And some of the best founders I know are engineers. Engineers just are gonna have a lot more trouble understanding how to make that happen. So maybe then at that point, it's worthwhile, I would say, hiring a firm, but then hiring someone who can learn from the firm as quickly as possible.

• 45:19Harry Stebbings?

  Is there any other massive mistakes that you see founders make with PR that we should touch on before we do a quick fire?

• 45:24Speaker 00

  I think the biggest mistake is not understanding that what matters to you doesn't matter to the other person. Again, this goes back to everything we've been talking about, like in growth, PR, relationships, some just so core to human nature, you know? You write something that like matters to you. So if I'm a founder and I'll write something that like is almost like so obvious to me, because I've been entrenched in it for so long that I understand the problem so deeply and I'm already like talking about the solution. And I think that it's really impressive that I hired Harry Stebbings or whatever, and I put it in there. And like, none of this matters to the person who I'm writing to. So you need to understand like how to communicate things in a way that really matters to people. And that is not obvious, even though it should be. And you need to understand who you're speaking to specifically. So if you're writing to someone from like a science background or a tech background, it's very different.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  If you're writing with someone from like a beauty or fashion background, then you need to understand what's the angle that's going to pique their personal interest. And if you take the time and you like actually make a list of the top obligations you care about and you understand what that journalist might care about, they're much more likely to respond.

• 46:19Harry Stebbings?

  Should PR be an ongoing effort or something that you actually do in static stages? Fundraising announcement, expansion into Brazil, new product. Is it continuous or quite static?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  You want it to be a steady drumbeat if you can, because you want to stay top of mind to consumers and then you can grow your equity that way. It's a lot harder to do, but it's super important. And then the more relevant you become, the more relevant you are, and that sort of feeds on itself.

• 46:41Harry Stebbings?

  I love this chat. Seriously, shows like this are like my favorites, because it's like, actually, your natural passions just go where the conversation goes. This is one of my favorites. And so I was just thrilled. I totally went for that one.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  We didn't even talk about growth, China, like there were so many things.

• 46:58Harry Stebbings?

  But to be fair, this is actually something that every single founder that I meet actually deals with. So I'm actually pleased because it's more applicable than the other topic.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  I think when people think about PR, they think about journalists and they think about like big media. But to me, PR is reaching anyone who has a big audience and getting them to share that with their big audience. And that shifts how you think about media and PR and news. Especially with the world today where people are becoming their own media brands. You know, we're changing that. If you're able to identify how to reach that one person who can reach a lot of people for free. That is PR. And so that means like influencers, micro influencers, or anyone with an audience like a school professor could be your influencer, a doctor.

• 47:37Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. I'm going to say a short statement. You're going to give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:42Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics in growth have not changed over the last five years?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Maybe a cop out. I don't think it's about the tactic. It's about the framework of thinking. It's understanding what makes people tick and what's the highest lever thing you can impact. That is still the same.

• 47:54Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics have died a death?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  This one died a death from day one, but people don't realize it. It's paid marketing and especially like paid ads on Facebook. Unless you're really smart about how you're doing it and you know exactly like, you know, how you're going to scale this over time. It's a very palliative tactic because as you scale, it becomes harder. They're less low hanging fruit. It's super expensive and it's hard to depend on because once you're depending on getting users that way, then you can't stop. And you sort of become addicted to it and then you're kind of stuck. And again, you're not focusing on retention, which is like really making something that really matters to people. It makes sense in the beginning when you're getting people in the door so that you can test, understand like what messages work and don't. And then also getting to statistical significance. But the second thing I was going to say is, again, it's more conceptual. I think that every growth tactic sort of quote unquote dies when it becomes saturated.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  So at first, a growth tactic is really interesting because you've discovered something that other people haven't discovered and then you're able to max out. So like a really simple example is like those D to C brands that discover that you can put ads in the subway. It's so dumb, but like that was a growth tactic. They're like, oh my God, people are riding the subway and now we're putting ads in the subway. This happened like 10 years ago with like Warby Parker, you know, and like Casper. Now it's no longer. Growth hat because everyone's using the ads in the subway. And that's the same thing with notifications. People love to like talk about how notifications, there's too many notifications. No, it continues to be a growth tactic, but it's not as innovative as it was before, but it will continue to be because with AI, we don't even know what's gonna happen and like things are changing all the time. And so you just need to continue iterating, just finding areas that are less explored, allows you to reach results for cheaper.

• 49:23Harry Stebbings?

  I always say to my team, if Mr. Beast were running a venture fund, what would he do? Just push your mind to that. He'd probably go around London, give $10,000 to every single person he sees and then film them for a week. I'm sure there would be some interesting shit that happens.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  The thing is, and I don't know if this is part of the podcast or not, I think that like we're so obsessed with frameworks and learning from each other and like developing things into a science and that's amazing. And it's almost one of my weaknesses that I just don't have that. Like I am a philosophy major with no master's degree, who never actually studied marketing, who has only my experience in growth. But like because I didn't know how to do PR, because I didn't know how to do growth, I was just like coming up with things that made sense to me and that has worked really well.

• 50:00Harry Stebbings?

  What's the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams?

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Definitely hiring before product market fit. People are so excited by A B testing that they want to jump right in. And I feel guilty about that because I do a talk for early stage founders about how Duolingo A B tested and how we grew from three to 200 million users. And then everyone wants to jump into A B testing. But what you don't realize is that it's really hard to do that if you are not able to reach statistical significance. And then founders start getting into the trap of directionally statistical significance, which is no longer math or science. And so then that doesn't make any sense. So I think that's number one. But number two, I would say especially for early stage, and it's something I will disagree with some other guests you've had on your podcast, is hiring a leader too soon because when you hire a leader, they might be a little bit too removed to actually want to roll up their sleeves and try the crazy stuff that like might not make a lot of sense, but could work because you're trying to get like creative.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  So as an example, Duolingo actually hired someone amazing, who had a great experience in marketing, who then hired me. And they ended up keeping me and promoting me to head of growth because this person was great at coming up with ideas and then asking other people to do those ideas. I was this crazy 26 year old who was just like throwing myself at whatever and trying different things and thinking, you know what? I can make us grow in Japan. And I can message people on LinkedIn and they're going to respond because I don't even know the limits that I have. And so you need to find that great balance between someone who is super scrappy and willing to do whatever it takes, but also has some baggage so that they can have a starting point that isn't completely random when they're trying new things.

• 51:26Harry Stebbings?

  Let's do a final one. Let's do, when you think about companies that have been recently, they've been really successful. Which one has stuck with you and really impressed you?

• 51:35Speaker 00

  This is a really good opportunity to plug my friend Mike Krieger, co-founder and CTO of Instagram. Mike and Kevin are working on a new app called Artifact and it's disrupting the way that you consume news, which I'm really interested by just their lessons and scaling Instagram will be applied to this. And I'm excited about it because I think that we don't know how to discuss news as a society. And that's a really big problem because we never evolve. If we only talk to people who believe what we believe, it's very hard to change your mind and to understand why there are other points of view in the world. So that's a huge problem that we can solve to make humanity better.

• 52:05Harry Stebbings?

  I had Kevin and Mike on the show to discuss Artifact and they were fantastic. Gina, I love this. As I said, shows like this where we just follow our passions is really why I do this. So thank you so much for being so amazing.

• 52:18Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what an incredible and granular discussion that was. I always love it when you really get into the weeds of the tactics. I so hope you enjoyed it. If you want to see more from us, of course you can on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. But before we leave you today, the single most important thing for 99% of founders today is making sure that your runway will last. But to make your runway last, you'll really need control and visibility over your spend across your entire business. Lattice, Zapier and Notion all use Zip. Zip's modern intake to pay platform allows your employees to have one front door for all purchase requests. You get early spend visibility so that you can negotiate and manage your spend while handling approvals across finance,

• 53:00Harry Stebbings?

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• 53:20Harry Stebbings?

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• 54:02Harry Stebbings?

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• 54:47Harry Stebbings?

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