20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @

Kieran Flanagan is SVP Marketing at HubSpot, where he has helped the business grow internationally, move to a product-led business, quadrupled its marketing demand, and built out its media team, including the acquisition of 'The Hustle.' He is also an advisor and investor in early-stage companies. In Today's Episode with Kieran Flanagan We Discuss: 1.) Entry into Growth and Marketing: How did Kieran make his way into the world of growth and marketing? What has been 1-2 of Kieran's biggest lessons from seeing firsthand the hyper-scaling of Hubspot? On reflection, how would Kieran summarise both Hubspot's community building attempts and also their product messaging? 2.) Why You Need Growth Hires Pre Product Market Fit: What does "growth" mean to Kieran? Where do so many get it wrong? Why does Kieran believe that you should have a growth team/people before product market fit? What specifically do they do and work on during this stage? Pre PMF, what is the core metric that all startups should focus on? How does it change with time? 3.) Building Your Growth Team: What does Kieran believe are the 3 key stages to hiring for growth? How should founders determine whether to have external standalone growth teams or integrate them into existing functions? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring for growth? 4.) The Future is Content: Why does Kieran believe every great tech brand will have to become a media brand? Why is Elon Musk an example of the perfect brand? What has he done right? Why does Kieran say that data is the best and worst thing that has happened to marketing? 5.) WTF Really is Community: How does Kieran define "community"? What is it? What is it not? What makes the best communities? Why do some work and others not? Should every company have a community approach? Who does it make sense for? Have Hubspot done a good job at community building? On reflection, is there anything that Kieran would have done differently?

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome to 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 Growth is a monthly episode where we interview world leading experts from the world of growth. And today's discussion is a total mind meld between two content creators who really love their craft. Totally off script and totally unplanned, it is a fantastic discussion. And so with that, I'm so excited to welcome Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, where he's helped the business grow internationally, moved to a product-led business, quadrupled its marketing demand and built out its media team, including the acquisition of The Hustle. He's also an advisor and investor in many incredible early-stage companies. And I want to say a huge thank you to HubSpot's CMO, Kit Bodnar, and Darma Shah. Some amazing questions, suggestions today, really did make such a difference.

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:25Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  It never works, it never works. You've got some weird elusive error and companies of all sizes struggle with this issue. They don't realise there is a solution out there. Well, that's where Flatfile come in. Flatfile is the data onboarding platform built to take the acute pain out of importing customer data into your product. With Flatfile, your product's experience is world-class on day one. It's built to handle everything from data mapping, field validation, and it's meticulously designed to blend right into your platform. Flatfile turns a really frustrating process for everyone into a delightful first-touch experience for your customers. Really importantly, Flatfile is also SOC 2 Type 1 compliant and 2 certified. It's GDPR compliant and even HIPAA compliant,

• 3:37Harry Stebbings?

  ensuring your customer, no matter where they are in the world, is sharing their data securely and in compliance every step of the way. No more emailing files back and forth, no more help articles that just don't help. Just clean data on day one when it matters most. If you're ready to onboard millions of rows of data, head over to flatfile.com to do it in minutes. But that is enough from me. So now I'm so excited to hand over to the one and only Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 4:13Harry Stebbings?

  Kieran, this is such a joy to do. I so appreciate you taking the time. I heard great, great things and great stories, by the way, from your colleague Kip. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me on, Harry. I'm a fan. I'm excited to be on and excited to speak to a fellow European.

• 4:27Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, it is rather lovely to have another European on the show, but I do want to start. You run and work in some of the most impressive growth orgs now, obviously, at HubSpot. How did you make your way into the world of growth and what was that entry for you?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that I'm a computer engineer by background, went into marketing, have done a lot of different things in marketing. And at some point was asked to build out a product-led motion for HubSpot. I was very fortunate that pre-me, there was a guy called Brian Balfour, who set up a lot of the templates and the ways that HubSpot could do this. And had the opportunity to do something quite unique at HubSpot when we were an established company to build a PLG motion and built out the marketing and growth and kind of learnt on the job. Because I was a marketer going in to learn about growth and do growth. I've kind of just always tried to do the thing that I think is the next thing that's important. That's what I actually get excited by, like the new thing.

• 5:19Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned obviously kind of PLG, but this is PLG before PLG was such a term and so popular. How do you think PLG has changed as a go-to-market in the short time that it has been so popularized and used?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's three stages companies go through and then I'll talk about how that's changed in the market. So the companies generally, even back then, they go through the phase where they're like, hey, we should do growth. Without really knowing what growth is, but they want to move a metric in a meaningful way. And so they try to do that. They do it in a way where team design and all of that is an afterthought. So it creates chaos. But out of the chaos, there is something good and they're like, wow, growth actually works. Let's get serious. And they try to create then we go from chaos to centralized, like we create a centralized team. We build a growth function. We decide where that lives within the org. The founder sponsors that. And that starts to work really, really well. I think the next iteration of that, what to me is we have central growth teams and they do growth principles. And they work with a product team to instill those principles in how you create product, how you do onboarding.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  I think at some point you can see growth being much more decentralized into just how PMs create the product itself. We build in mechanisms to promote the product through virality or these other things. We build onboard and flows, we build upgrade flows to get people to buy our product. And so I think you go chaos centralized and decentralized. In the market, growth is becoming much more well-defined. You have brands like Reforge, which I think has for the most part been a trailblazer and set the standard, helping the market themselves realize what growth is, how I should think about growth, how I should structure that team, how it should work within companies. So I think it's becoming more defined. Like I've seen that from founders that I've talked with two years ago today. It's a much more understood concept.

• 6:56Harry Stebbings?

  The roots to it are still confused, though, in a couple of different ways. Actually, fuck it, before we start about the roots to it, just so we actually understand on a definition. What is growth, Kieran, is thrown around? What does growth mean to you and how do you define it?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  I define growth in the PLG way where it actually helps to power your go-to-market. Growth to me is how do I acquire onboard and upgrade people and then retain them? Growth means something different, dependent upon the go-to-market motion you have, right? Let's talk about two different go-to-market motions. If you're in a marketing or sales-led business, you do have growth teams, but they predominantly look after performance marketing channels like paid advertising affiliate. They don't touch the product because it's a marketing and sales-led business. And then in a PLG motion, which I think growth is much more prevalent, you have a growth team that owns the performance marketing part of it, like how do I get users in here? Then the onboard and touchless and retention. Growth is a way that you can build models, iteration and experiments to actually power your go-to-market.

• 7:49Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of the roots that we said that are still confused, though, I think a couple that are most striking for me is when we realize that we want to have a growth function within the organization. As a founder and you're advising me as my hypothetical advisor, do I hire a growth leader who builds the team? Or do I start with growth engineers, growth designers, whatever role that is, but more junior? How do you advise start with leader or start with junior?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  That is a great question. I've talked to great companies who have started growth with a single engineer. If you really define a core metric that you want that engineer to move. And so I talked to some founders who were trying To move retention and they had a single engineer obsess over how do I get people to retain better within my product? I think when you need a leader is when you need the bandwidth because for the most part when you have engineers or you have these kind of dotted group people, they're reporting up to the founder or maybe they're reporting up to someone else and then over time that team grows and you actually need a core leader to start to manage that function. And when you have a meaningful amount of work for them to do. And so we can actually discuss what that means because I think growth could be applicable pre-product market fit, right?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  When you actually are trying to figure out how do I instill these mechanisms within my product to better acquire people, to better onboard people, to better retain people, it's built into your product roadmap. That kind of comes back to centralized, decentralized. If it's decentralized, it's just how the PMs work. If it's centralized, there's a single engineer who obsesses over that.

• 9:13Harry Stebbings?

  I wanted to ask, I've done now seven growth shows and every single person has said about growth post-product market fit. There has not been one discussion about growth in any form pre-product market fit, almost that it doesn't exist. How would you think about actually, is there a role for growth pre-product market fit? And what does that look like in terms of tasks and activities?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think this is an interesting place. I'm not surprised when I was actually thinking about this, I had like, oh, like proper growth function is series A and beyond, right? And that's like typically the advice you would give, like series A beyond, you have things that you want to start to actually grow. Why would you want to do that pre-product market fit? Well, actually, growth can be instilled in your product roadmap. Rather than being an afterthought, I can build my product in such a way where I can think about how does this product going to acquire users? One of my favorite examples is genius.com, right? It used to be rap genius back in the day when there were large lyric sites. Now, when you were building another lyric site, there was already well-established lyric sites. Like, how do you differentiate in that? But they built inbuilt this really creative feature that allowed you to annotate the rap lyrics. Why was that so ingenious?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Well, now it made their pages much more rich in content and so they just outranked everyone else. Everyone else had lyrics, they had lyrics plus annotations. That's an example of a feature that you could build pre-product market fit to say, hey, we're going to build in this feature because we believe that's how we're going to outcompete all these other brands. So I think that's an interesting way to think about growth and why there's something there in the pre-product market fit stage. But again, it could Just be built into the way engineers and PMs think about build under tools.

• 10:41Harry Stebbings?

  I think one thing that's important is to know what metric we're looking to move, whether it's pre or post-product market fit. How do you advise founders on knowing the right metric to choose as the North Star metric to focus on?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  I think pre-product market fit is retention. You're looking for a cohort of users that use your product in a meaningful way. And post-product market fit, it's revenue. I think revenue is the combination of all those different things. How do I acquire users? How do I get more of them to upgrade? How do I get more of them to retain and actually pay me money? So pre-product market fit, even though like I'm giving you examples of how you acquire users, ultimately what you're trying to do is find retention and you could find that I'm acquiring wrong users. I'm doing the wrong stuff. But I do think growth, the mentality of growth for me, I just think it's going to be instilled in the way we create products. I've talked to founders who are pre-product market fit and just want to shoot the breeze. And what they really want to understand is like, how should I start to build in this stuff in my product now? I don't want to wait until I start to acquire users and do these things.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I want to actually start to think about how I build these mechanisms into my product from day one. I think that's actually a really smart thing to do. Start to build traction, spin the flywheel much, much sooner.

• 11:46Harry Stebbings?

  What are the biggest mistakes that you see those founders doing when you're having those conversations?

• 11:51Speaker 02

  When they're actually bringing growth into pre-product market fit?

• 11:53Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, when they're bringing growth into pre-product market fit, when they're trying to think early about creating that flywheel, when they're having that chat with you, there are commonalities where you're like, oh, not again.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  I think a lot of the times, the things that they're thinking about don't matter. A lot of the times they're trying to think about how do I acquire users at scale? How do I do all of these things at scale? One of the things I talk to founders is you should try to grow into the problems you have, right? Don't try to take on other people's problems. So their problem is like, how do I build a great product obsessed over customer feedback? And find a use case that actually fits within a group of customers who will use me on an ongoing basis. Now, there's some times where to do that, there's some growth mechanisms you can build that will be really interesting for you to build at an early stage. But a lot of the times I've talked to founders in pre-product market fit, they're obsessed over things that just are not that important right now. They don't need to worry about how do I build great onboarding flows? They don't need to worry about how do I build virality loops, which everyone wants to do. And so you have to grow into the problems you want.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  I think most of them, even though I've said there's reasons to do growth pre-product market fit, but nearly sometimes a waste of energy and a waste of resources.

• 12:55Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, do I have growth in this isolated unit in the corner in the growth team, the hailed Facebook that fell from heaven? Or do we have them integrated into products, into engineering? And as part of the core org, how do you advise founders on that decentralized versus centralized or kind of collective?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  If I think about our biggest learnings, when then the PLG wrote and one of my biggest learnings, I learned a lot about myself, but I learned also that we really underestimated the change in team structure, going from a traditional SaaS B2B company to like a PLG company. Because we went from a company where sales and marketing were in the go-to-market team, and now we had sales, marketing, customer success, engineering and product. How do all these teams actually work together? Let's kind of go through that question in terms of different go-to-market type companies. If you're an Airbnb, a Fiverr, a Tomtac, your product is basically your entire go-to-market. The product is the way that you acquire onboard upgrade people. The perfect split there is you have a central growth team that lives in product. They own all the go-to-market metrics. And then those kind of companies, marketing is really how do I build a great brand? How do I build great product positioning?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Then you have product-led companies like Calendly, Miro, Figma. And what they do is they have a marketing team that help acquire the demand, and then a product team that sits within the product team that's centralized, that does the onboard and monetization and retention. It's very rare, I think, you will find a company that has that kind of model, that also has like the SEO and the paid search in growth that usually belongs in marketing. And I think that's actually the right structure. What you need to do is build great relationships between marketing and product. And then again, in a marketing and sales-led business where you have a demo trial, the growth teams you find in those businesses sit on marketing and they just run performance marketing. So in the heyday, they were called performance marketing, but growth sounds like cooler. So they've just changed their name to the growth, but it's like the same, it's the same stuff.

• 14:38Harry Stebbings?

  So we now have discovered those two big questions and we want to hire. We want to hire for our growth team within this hypothetical startup that I'm running. How do I structure the hiring for growth talent? What does the interview process look like? If you could break it down for me, I've never done it before, I'm starting from zero.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  I think all great hiring processes. Processes have three sections. It depends how big you are, how these like if you're Google, maybe they last a year. If you're a smaller company, you want to get them done within a day. But when I think about great interview processes, one of the things I love to do is just like reach out and say, can we catch up and just talk normally? Get to know each other. What are the things you enjoy doing? What are the things you're passionate about? What are the things you want to do in the future and start to see, I think there's something here that this person is going to find really interesting. I think that's the first part. Then there's the formal part where you actually have your team and the people you think are really important to dig in their experience and to dig into the way they think and solve problems to give you perspective on like, oh, actually, we do think that this person is a great company fit, great problem fit, like they're a fit for the problems we're trying to solve and a great team fit.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  And then I think it's debatable if you want to do the case study or not. I think case studies in growth hires, you can build a great case study because you can give someone a theoretical growth model. You can ask them to tell you what metric they would prioritize, how they would run a great experimentation process, give you three different examples of experiments and how they would think about running those and why they would pick one over the other. And so to me, it's the informal, formal and case study. That to me is the pretty good process to run if you're trying to hire a growth manager leader for your team.

• 16:06Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you bring into the process and at what stage? How do you think about bringing the team with you with the hire?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  I would do an initial conversation, again, that informal conversation. I try to do an informal conversation and make sure that there is a good match. And what you're trying to match is the people who do best in roles will enjoy the thing they're doing. Getting the informal chat, you can just get a sense of like, is the problem you're trying to solve something they are going to find interesting? And the controversial part about that is what most people try to do is find someone who's solved the exact problem before. And I think that's a great thing to do it. But there's a great quote, he's the kind of like godfather of mindfulness. And he has a great quote, in the beginner's mind, there is endless possibilities. In the expert mind, there are very few. And so when you bring in someone who has experience, but also has something new to learn, something is new. Actually, all your senses become much, much more aware. So I think in the informal conversation, you're making sure that it's something that they have the experience to do,

• 16:57Speaker 02

  but also something that will stretch them as you bring them towards that beginner's mindset. I think if that goes well, then we bring them into a scenario where we have the team and some other people. Who we think would be able to dig in on certain aspects of their experience of the way they think to give us like a three sixty view of the candidate. And then in the case study, we have a small group of people who will like look at the case study, quiz the person on that case study and make sure that we've got the full perspective of all of the things that we need that person to be good at to excel on that role.

• 17:26Harry Stebbings?

  So the formal and the informal I can do. The case study, I haven't done this before. What do I actually do? Do I just give them access to our Google Analytics? What do I give them? And then also, what should I be asking and what should I be looking for in the case study?

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think on the case study, one of the case studies I would like to do is a theoretical model. And within the theoretical model, there's a theoretical goal for the company. Hey, we want growth to help us grow to ten customers per month. Here is the model today across my entire go to market, like all the different metrics that matter across that go to market. Based on that model, ask them to tell us what are the most important metric to focus on? Because one of the things of your pre-seed, seed, series A founder, you're going to need someone who focuses on the most important things in a given point in time because you don't have the resources to do every single metric and every single experiment. So I would say, here's my theoretical growth model. Here is my theoretical thing that I'm trying to get to over the next six to twelve months. Here's what I think is really important.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Please come back to me and tell me how you would prioritize a metric, how you would build a team to actually be successful in that metric. Give me some examples of experiments. Tell me why you think those experiments are right. Within the question, and what I would do is I would actually counter and say, I think one of these experiments is much, much better. And these are the reasons to see if they actually have a strong point of view, to see if they're not scared to actually say, hey, I actually disagree with you for these kind of reasons, right? You want someone with a strong point of view, not just someone who's going to be swayed because you told them you think that they're wrong.

• 18:53Harry Stebbings?

  Do I, the founder, need to have the growth model already in place when I'm hiring them? You said there, the first question is like, here's the growth model. Do I have the growth model already or can I say, hey, it's yours to construct?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  I think that's actually pretty interesting. I think you could do one of three ways. You could actually already have growth within the company and actually have a model you can give them. You can build a theoretical model and give them that just as a case study. It doesn't need to be anything that complex. Or you could Actually have them build a hypothetical growth model for your business. The only thing with that is the reason I like to give them the data beforehand. And the reason I tell founders that it's cool to give them the model beforehand. Because if they were just doing the model themselves, then they can't really challenge themselves. Like being on the treadmill, like you could basically decide to get off it. Whenever you want to get off it. And so if you give them a growth model with some complexity in it that you want them to see if they can isolate it and spot it. It just makes that, I think, a little bit better.

• 19:43Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask specifically, what are the biggest mistakes that you see founders make in the hiring and recruitment process for growth teams?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  I don't know if I see commonalities mistake more so founders are unsure, even when they're hiring for growth. And when they're hiring growth people, I don't think they're still sure what they want the growth team to do. They know that they want a team to come in and iterate and work on their go to market metrics. But I don't think they've like really defined what they want that growth team to excel at in the next 12 months. And the other thing that I think is really pivotal when you bring in a growth team is the founder has to be the sponsor of that team. In particular, for the first year, because the team can cause some friction, especially if it's not in the product team and it needs to touch product. Or if it's touching these other things that are owned traditionally by other teams. You have to have a CEO and a founder sponsor the growth team and say, hey, we're structuring this team for this specific mission.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  And what we need is great collaboration from other teams and support from other teams to make sure they're a success.

• 20:37Harry Stebbings?

  We're going to talk about cross functional communication because this was a core strength of yours. Couple of things from Kip before we dive in to the post hire. First is like Kip told me about your insane ability to scale with company and transition from playbook to playbook. Which I think is a sign of a true unicorn person. What are the signs that someone, a candidate, can move with playbook and scale from phase to phase very efficiently?

• 21:02Speaker 02

  So yes, everything can be distilled down into a simplistic framework. And that framework has like a couple of inputs that matter. Because when you actually ask someone like, oh, how is this team working? How does it be successful? It's like long-winded presentation, they're doing all these things. Like, what are the couple of things that truly matter? And if you can always obsess about the couple of things that truly matter and try to continue to build systems around to scale those inputs until there's just nothing left. That's how you actually build true scalable playbook. The other thing of a sign of a great leader who can scale with company is the job of any leader is to make themselves redundant. They actually want to have a team that is good enough to take away their work. Because if they don't take away their work, as the company grows, you get more work. But you actually haven't relieved yourself of the work you already have. And so now you're in a real pinch, right?

• 21:44Speaker 02

  You actually just have too much stuff, you're spread too thin and you can't actually think about the big things you need to pick. Every great leader to me actually figures out, how do I make myself redundant? So I can actually build green space and build available time to take on new things.

• 21:56Harry Stebbings?

  What are you trying to make yourself redundant for now?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, that's a good question. I will tell you that there's a couple of areas. I built at the media org within HubSpot. It's about eighty people now, we acquired the hustle. And so I put all of that together and I hired someone recently who is incredible. And so I think that's one of the areas. And then I have an incredible person who's actually happened to make me much more redundant on the customer demand generation model that I built on HubSpot. So you want to have people that you think are going to be much better and brighter at you in those spots. And I think that's what I've constantly tried to do. And if you look, my career in HubSpot, as every two to two and a half years, I get new missions. And I can do that because the stuff I used to do, I have people who are better than me at doing that anyway.

• 22:38Harry Stebbings?

  This one was from Kip too. He asked, what were your biggest hiring fuckups?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Did he tell you to say that?

• 22:45Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  I'll give you a great one. I'm not going to mention any, so I'll tell you a great one that actually is prevalent within marketing. Is hiring people based upon how good their personal brand is. Their personal brand is always much better than their skill set. Some of the truly great people are doing work, right? And so like, if it's not your full-time job to be a content creator, it's really hard to do both those things. To be in a company doing great work and also be a chronic creator. I know lots of people who can do that. I know a lot of people who do have great personal brands and they truly are great. But I think every mistake I've made is because I do gravitate towards people who can create truly great personal brands as well. Because they create a lot of thought leadership content, it's easy to see how they think. There's been some times where that work they do is much better than actually what the true extent of the work is.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Now, there's counterpoints to that, but a lot of times founders especially get really swayed by people who have like really big personal brands.

• 23:33Harry Stebbings?

  I think the other thing, talking about mistakes in hiring growth, I think one thing that I consistently see Is people who mistake company brand where the person works. They're in Google's growth team, they're in Facebook's growth team. And the truth is, you're kind of on a gravy train anyway, if you're at the right time in the right team. And actually, moving to a 10-person startup is very, very different. And I think that's the biggest mistake and fuck-up I see founders make. I'm totally with you on personal brand also not being an indicator for success.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've said before, and I got really negative comments for saying this, but I've said before, like, an average marketer at a great company makes more money than a great marketer at an average company, right? Because they can ride the gravy train to success. And so you have to try to figure out what that person's done versus what the collective we have done. And I think that's an important thing for founders to try to figure out.

• 24:18Harry Stebbings?

  And a great personal brand will make more than both combined.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Yes, man, the creator life is a good life. Again, that part of the hustle, we got some really great creators. And I've never been more appreciative of how hard it is to be a great creator and how amazingly talented great creators are.

• 24:33Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know, I'm totally going off tangent here, but fuck it, I have to, and I'm very passionate about this. I think so much product marketing and messaging is just shit. It's bland, it doesn't speak to anyone, it's neutral. And I think actually, I said tweeted the other day, if you want someone who gets product messaging, hire people who specialize in memes and gifs. Because they know what resonates. How do you feel about what I just said?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Brands don't want to have points of view. They want to sit in the middle with everyone else because it's safe, it's comfortable. I think we are increasingly moving to a world where everything is pop culture. If you actually look at fintech, 10 years ago, if someone said, hey, you know what's going to be one of the best content spaces online? Financial. Like, you're like, what? Like, that's boring. No, like fintech is like moved totally pop culture. You're seeing it in business. We're moving much more pop culture. Like, you're a great creator, you're creating content on places like TikTok that stuff that gets thousands of views. We're going to continue to see that. Brands who don't get with that and don't know how to plug into the culture of today and sit in the middle saying boring things and being boring in terms of their product position and the brand, I think they're going to struggle.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  And I think there are people with points of view, meme creators, gif creators, creators themselves, that are going to be much more important for companies to enable, to create. environments, they will wanna work with those companies and help them actually plug into the culture.

• 25:52Harry Stebbings?

  I always say the best brands make armies. You are either for or you are against, but the worst thing is sitting in the middle.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 26:00Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think that is HubSpot today, if we're being analytical?

• 26:03Speaker 02

  So I think that's a great question. I think we build our tribe around inbound marketing. What's interesting to me is a transformational company will always move towards at some point, just a message that is not transformational anymore. If you're a transformational company and you have a transformational message, so like ours was inbound marketing. Hey, like either in the inbound camp or you were doing all this outbound stuff that people hate, like people hate those kind of marketers. At some point, if you win that conversation, then that just becomes the ad hoc way of the way that people think about marketing. Like inbound is not new now. We kind of won that war. People agree that that is the best form of marketing. And so your transformational messaging just becomes best practice. And so it's hard to keep that passionate for or against when you've actually won the conversation and people agree and implement that and it becomes best practice.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And so that's something I think a lot about is like you build your tribe at the start, but eventually I think your tribe becomes a much bigger cohort of people.

• 26:57Harry Stebbings?

  How do you push brand to the edge at scale when you're a public company, when you have corporate brand as well as investor brand and many different types of brands that you need to hit? Can you really be as edgy and adventurous as you would like to be? It's challenging with scale.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's really challenging. For me, even though I said like companies shouldn't sit in the middle, I don't disagree with why it happens because you have a large market that you were trying to market to. And you don't want to alienate them with such point of views that are like, half of my audience agree and disagree with that. But I think you can do it in a way where it's not alienating to your audience, but it is engaging to your audience. For me, every tech brand in the future becomes a media brand because we have something to say. If you think about content in most companies, we've traditionally leveraged education to build an audience for our product or services. And why have we done that? Well, when the internet became popular, two thousand and six, and continued to grow, educational needs become more niche and brands were able to fill those educational needs by serving a smaller.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Set of the market, but that service actually helped to onboard those people to their products or services. I think in the future, brands are going to have to think much more about inspiration. Like, how do I create inspirational content to say something to my audience? How do I create educational content to get them to engage with me each day, every week? To me, that's the whole kind of discussion around why are you seeing all of these tech companies moving much more into media? It's because we want to be ever-present within our consumers' life.

• 28:22Harry Stebbings?

  It's astonishing. I ask pretty much every founder that I meet, obviously, on the investing side. You have a billboard in Times Square. What do you put on it? It's about 10 words or less. What do you want your audience to see? I'd say 5% can articulate what their company does in 10 words or less and tell a story with it. I think that's astounding.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Elon Musk, for all the things he's done, he's also probably one of the better examples of a brand who is willing to do edgy things in a way that does not alienate his tribe, actually makes his tribe want to embrace him even more. They're fanatical fans of everything he does.

• 28:55Harry Stebbings?

  For or against, do you have a feeling on Elon Musk? And actually, you know what? He is the best when it comes to understanding what does and what does not resonate with consumers. Like, he is the ultimate A B testing machine.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you look at his reach compared to any traditional media org's reach, like, he has much more reach. And he does that because he plugs into the culture. He knows how to instill emotions, whether they are positive or negative, on mass scale. And I think that's what brands are trying to do, is trying to create some sort of emotional connection to their audience. You want it to be positive for the people you're trying to reach and not care too much, but not get swayed by the negative. Like, sometimes the negative is not something to actually not stop doing things.

• 29:36Harry Stebbings?

  We will get back on to the schedule. The very difficult thing, though, is for, actually, I think, for companies hiring these day, and I don't mean this badly. The people who are genuinely brilliant at content, news of the world, either are too expensive or do their own thing.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:48Harry Stebbings?

  You know, you could never hire other amazing people. You're Andrew Chen's Andreessen. He's made millions by Andreessen. Like, you're never going to get him to join a content team, do you know what I mean?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think that is a great point. That is a great point, because we under-invest in content. Like, mentioned this before, is that we'll spend a million dollars on Facebook campaigns and then Source articles for $10 and expect like, why is this content not working? And the Facebook thing is working really well. Well, you're spending $10 an article. So it's first of all, we think in how we think about media, building an environment where creators actually want to work. There's interesting ways that you can build environments that you want creators to work. One of those is like paid well, freedom. I think long term, you can talk about things where you have upside on the things that they create. I mean, that's hard to do, but I think that's something you can do. The other thing you can do, which is something we launched recently is a creator program. So you're right, all of these people will not want to work within a company because they want to do their own thing.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Cool. Well, how do we create a creator program so we can actually have them be part of our network? But they actually get paid on the content they create, they get total editorial freedom. And you start to make yourself a interesting place for both internal people to work because you get to work with these creators or external people to work because you have a program that supports their growth, but also incentivizes them to grow because you are paying them on the upside.

• 31:04Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know what I find amazing though? How many companies and funds and startups produce content? They spend hours and hours, even if they do what you say there, which is spend more money on the creation side. They spend more money on it and they produce great content and then they take publish.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  And forget about it.

• 31:19Harry Stebbings?

  Why is no one coming? No distribution is thought to it. People don't understand distribution today. I think this is why you've been successful, but I think we both get distribution. It astounds me how people create for so long and distribute not a ton.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  I think great distribution starts with great ideas. The thing that I have learned from the people who I have been immensely impressed with in the hustle is they have great ideas. They are able to find things that are interesting that is not widely covered. And then they are able to have their own spin on things. And so they have their own kind of brand in terms of how they create content around those things. And so they're not just stuck in the middle, doing the same thing as everyone else. But then to your point, they also know how to get distribution on their content. Like they think, how do I actually get people to see this? So much great content goes to waste because to your point, we just publish and then we think, hey, like my job is done. Someone will find it and good things will happen.

• 32:11Harry Stebbings?

  Does it have to tie back to revenue? Do we have to see X piece of content led to X amount of? Leaves that led to X amount of converted dollars? Or can we be a little bit more elastic in terms of how we think about it?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  I think data has been the best and worst thing to happen to marketing. Why best? Well, marketers used to stop doing crap stuff because no one wanted to give them anything good to do because they couldn't figure out if it actually created any real revenue. Like, marketing wanted a seat at the revenue table, be taken seriously, but hey, how do we actually show the value of the things I do? Over time, we got better data, but then we've become so focused on that that we just try to iterate away to marginal gains. Oh, I have to show every single piece of content, every single thing I do has to actually result in some sort of revenue for the business. And so now everyone is coming into the middle because if we do that, we all end up doing the same stuff. I think creativity and brand is how you build a big company in the future.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Founders who can truly see that they want to invest in something that will make me differentiated, that will make me stand out, that will create a larger audience around my brand, and I know that that thing is not going to be unmeasurable. I know that thing is going to be really hard to quantify. We did the hustle deal. We did not do the hustle deal based upon metrics. We did not pitch the board and say, oh, these are all the kind of cool metrics. It's a bet on how we want to be seen within the future, how we want to build our audience in the future. So I think there is, but I think that is a real struggle for most brands. I think most brands are baked in, how does every single action you take get me some amount of pennies, dollars and customers?

• 33:38Harry Stebbings?

  One word that's thrown around so much in the brand, content, new gen, marketing that we talk about now is community. We're both here the whole time. And I kind of laugh to myself because I'm like, what the fuck does that mean?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Yes, what does it mean?

• 33:53Harry Stebbings?

  What does it mean to you? And in this excitement of like, oh, I see so many community startups. I'm like, oh, what do they do?

• 33:59Speaker 02

  I think it's a product led growth used to be the thing that I think was really hard to define when you went to certain companies. I think it's actually much more defined now. Community led growth, even just speaking to companies or advising companies, even just having commonalities of what's included in community does not exist. To me, when I think about community, for the most part, I think about, oh, like I go create an account, connect with other people and I discuss things with them. Then you go to another company and it's like, well, it's anyone who's in our email list, anyone who's on our Twitter following, and you're like, okay, so it's just everything. And I think Community is your tribe. It is like the group of people who believe in the things that you do. And they are engaged with you in some meaningful way. We're gonna have to define that over time. Because at the moment, to me, that is like, well, I've created an account and I'm starting to interact with people.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  But they believe in the things that you believe in, and they are starting to engage with you in a meaningful way. But that definition does not, I don't think, clearly exist.

• 34:48Harry Stebbings?

  Does it? And does it scale? With scale, you have community denigration.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  It's a great conversation. I'm so glad we wanted to have this conversation.

• 34:56Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think communities can scale? If you are gonna build an IPO-able massive company, having community led at the beginning is capped, no?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  So first of all, I think it's how you define community. So we're defining community by like, if we include our media mediums in that, it depends what you include in community. If I just include my Slack channel, can I grow my Slack channel to like a million users? That could be a meaningful way of how I grow my business, then that's pretty hard to do. But if it includes like your events and your media and then all the people who are in Slack and Discord and stuff. So I think first of all, it depends how you define it. But I do think you said something important, right? So community to me is like, how do I master breadth and depth? And so depth is, how do I get a small group of people who want to interact with each other and achieve something? And become better in something together, right? The best communities to me are the smaller communities who truly have a passion for something.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Who are truly trying to learn something and they can connect with each other and learn from each other and do those things. And so community-led growth, which is like, oh, well, community is gonna be the way we grow our business in the future. So we'll grow our community and then we'll have people from our community to go and use our products and services. Intrinsicly, the opposite of how you would want to grow a community, because it actually, you need to care about breadth. I need to get thousands or hundreds of thousands of people into my community to be able to actually grow my business in a meaningful way. And so how do I create depth if I have breadth? I think in the future, we're gonna get better tooling to really help us figure out how we can segment our community into different cohorts of depth. Like, the tooling is not good. And then we will be able to build breadth with better incentives.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  And I think the cliche is, the incentives are coming from the Web3 industry. And it's really about ownership, right? And today, community gets you maybe Better knowledge, it gets you information around the product, it gets you people who are shared interests and hobbies. In the future, it should get you ownership and a stake in that company. And to me, that's how you can start to really build the breadth and it can be a meaningful part of your go to market. But I think the number of winners in community like group is small, but they get exponential returns. Because how many communities can someone be part of? Two, three? So a small amount of winners, but they get exponential returns.

• 37:00Harry Stebbings?

  What will cause the winners to be winners, do you think?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  I think it's understanding the value you can deliver and you have to understand the value you can deliver at scale. And so first of all, you have something intrinsic, your brand is associated with something that person wants to learn. So the best example I can give you is if you think about the three pillars of community. For the most part, communities are built around personal growth. Like I myself want to get better by joining this community. Then they are around the connections you create. I actually can connect with peers and they make me a better version of myself. And then the third part, which actually is an untalked about way you can build a motor on your company, is the reputation. Like by doing those things, I actually can achieve something, but I can show people that in a visible way and get some sort of payback from that. I think the companies who win in the future are excel at those three things, which is breadth, personal knowledge.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Like how do I create a mass amount of people who can learn things from me, be a better version of themselves? Depth, which is the connections, like how do I get them into smaller groups and make sure that they are connected with people they can learn from and engage with? And then the big thing is how do I take all of the things that they have built in that community and give them something back through the reputation? But I think in web three, that's through ownership and web two is reputation and web three, that's ownership. I'm actually creating value in the community, but now I have ownership in this company, so I'm actually getting something back.

• 38:16Harry Stebbings?

  I have to touch on the breadth and depth. I think there's the biggest challenge with product messaging and product marketing that I see today. When you look at horizontal tools, in many ways, like say a notion is a brilliant example. It could be used by dentists and it can be used by software developers. When we go back to that breadth and depth, it's very similar. How do you market and message such a horizontal product without alienating the depth? Without alienating the verticals?

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:44Harry Stebbings?

  But then also not just stick in the middle? How do you describe? Collaborative work docs. Well, that doesn't speak to anyone, actually.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think most of the horizontal tools, they stay horizontal to get mass distribution and they they verticalize to monetize. You have a Calendly, which is applicable to anyone, right? What a great tool, what a great company. They monetize through sales teams or they monetize through different verticals. And so you're getting at their messaging. Like when I go to their website, how do I know this tool is for me? I don't know if that's how those tools grow. They grow like through virality, word of mouth, right? You have a small group of people who use that and they start spreading it to other people. I don't know how much they're positioning. I'm sure it matters, but I don't know how it much it truly matters that I go there and I see that this product is for me because I probably onboarded to the product through a referral, through someone sharing a notion with me, through someone doing word of mouth because it has such

• 39:34Speaker 02

  broad sets of use cases. But the way they monetize, when you actually need to go vertical and monetize and you do need to start to figure out like, what are the teams that would truly want to use this? Whether that's, hey, this is truly great for engineering teams. I think that's when it becomes really important.

• 39:48Harry Stebbings?

  Can I take it back to community on something I did forget? Do you think HubSpot's done community well? With the benefit of what you know now, is there anything you'd do differently looking back?

• 39:58Speaker 02

  This is a great question. So again, how you define community, I would tell you, most people would say HubSpot has built a really large vibrant community through our content. But I'll give you like an honest answer. I think we've built a tremendous community, but we have a lot more to build. If you think about community as like our community at hubspot.com, like the connections part, where do I go to get connected to others? We've primarily focused on building a community of products, like how do we build a community around our customers, the people using our tool? I think the thing that we could do better is we have all of these people, millions of people consuming our educational content. We've never tried to build a community of practice, which is how do we build a community around knowledge and connect those people to each other and connect those people, do cohort learning and

• 40:41Speaker 02

  live workshops and live classes. We're doing that much more. So we haven't blended the community, like the connections part with the personal achievement part as well as we could have. So I think that's where we could improve, that community of practice around education and connections.

• 40:54Harry Stebbings?

  It's really tough though, because you could be very And allocate a lot of dollars to really being proactive in making those connections and finding those synergies. That said, for a business leader looking at budgets, there is really no payback period. There is no correlation to revenue and it's very difficult. I feel sorry for people who own the budget lines because they're looking at these very intangible things going, there's a big spend for a very questionable return and I'm a public company.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  This comes back to how do you build a portfolio across the things at a short term that I can measure and the things that are long term that I can't measure because predominantly like that's what we're kind of discussing in the long term, unmeasurable bucket to do something like that, you have to have very deep conviction. I talked to a founder recently, I won't give the company or the name. They are building something for three to five years. They don't accept to measure in terms of like how much revenue this is generating for the business. They just have truly deep conviction that if they pull this off, they will actually win within their market. Some of the things that we've talked about, like community media, all of these kinds of things. And so you have to have a founder that has deep conviction in terms of how they see the future and not try to kill something because it doesn't immediately show direct attribution to revenue.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Because again, if we tie everything to revenue, then we're all going to do the same stuff. It's not going to differentiate that much and it's hard to build something differentiated when we're all measuring ourselves in the same way.

• 42:15Harry Stebbings?

  I've also absolutely fucking loved this discussion.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 42:20Harry Stebbings?

  You know, when you have a schedule and you're like, yeah, fuck it, whatever. I do want to dive into a couple of elements though, before we move into a quick five. And these were just elements specifically that I was told I had to ask you about. One is cross-functional communications with growth. How do you think about making sure growth and other areas of the org are synergistic and aligned? How do you nail cross-functional comms?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  I'll give you a couple of my learnings. So if you ask someone, oh, like what's Kieran like? One of the things they'll tell you is, oh, well, like he was very black and white. This is the right thing, this is the wrong thing, this is how things are, this is how they shouldn't be. And actually in cross-team comms, it's not black or white, it's really black and white, right? You actually have to be able to understand both sides of the story. And actually there's most of the things live in between in the gray. Most of the things live in the fog. And so I never used to dive into the fog. I used to say, wow, you're doing this thing. It's dumb. And then you didn't know all of the reasons that those things existed. That happens across teams. And because you speak different languages, if you're all black and white, then everyone seems like they're doing kind of dumb stuff. The first thing is like, you have to live in the gray. You have to have the context for why things are the way they are.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  The second thing is marketing and product speak somewhat different languages. The job of a great PMs crystallize problems and then present them to their engineers. And their engineers are like, oh yeah, we believe in this problem. Here's how we think about this problem and we will go and figure out how we build that solution. Marketers are very solution orientated. Marketers could do a lot better if we ground ourselves in the problem and some do, some don't. But I think we're much more solution. Here's the solution. Here's a solution. Here's a solution. And so when you go and start working with growth teams who sit in product or product and engineering teams, marketer are like, here's the five things I need you to do. Oh, well, I've just told the PM, I need you to do these five things. PM has to go to the engineer team, do these five things. That's not how engineering teams want to work. And so you have to start to figure out, how do we all speak the same language? Like, how should we work together? How do we make sure that we are aligned around the problems?

• 44:11Harry Stebbings?

  How do you actually do that? I'm the CEO. Do I say, right, product team, right, growth team, come in and we are going to sit down and discuss the dictionary of how we speak? How do I actually do that?

• 44:21Speaker 02

  You know, I'm going to be honest with you. Like, the way we got there is like through lots of friction and fighting and falling out with each other and getting back on side with each other. I would be lying if I said, oh, well, we had this like really amazing playbook. That was the hardest part, I think, of the PLG motion for us is we just miss, really underestimated how hard it would be for all these teams to start working together. And I think we got there through grinding it out. The way I think about how you get to be a great presenter, you just have to grind it out. And I think that's how we got there. We got there as like, we trusted each other, we're okay with falling out with each other. And over time, we got to a place where things were much, much better.

• 44:59Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask a final one before the quickfire? I think onboarding is just universally done terribly badly. When you think about onboarding for new growth and marketing hires, what does good look like to you? And what standard do you hold yourself accountable to as this is what we need to do to make them successful?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  I think one of the things we do that It's really good. It's our people ops team. It's not me is we build 100 day plans for people. Cause when you come into a new role, you're like, oh wow, what do I do? Right? And especially in remote, actually remote onboarding is a whole other topic, like remote work onboarding. So we do a 100 day plan. We're like, here's all the different people you should meet. And we make sure that we get them into your calendar. Here's what we would love for you to do on month one. Here's what we would love for you to do month two. Every two weeks, we check in and ask how you're doing across that 100 day plan. Ask how the meetings went. Ask, is there other questions you have? So we compare you with other people. And that 100 day plan isn't actually about at the end of this, we need you to have achieved A, B and C. It's at the end of this, we hope that you understand your role, understand your team, understand the kind of path to success.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  So it's just making sure that you feel set up for success versus like you have to have achieved these things within a hundred days. Like there are things like we want you to do along the way, but it's much more set up for you to be successful. And make sure that we are setting you up to be successful within your role.

• 46:14Harry Stebbings?

  As a leader today, I listen to you and it just seems very natural and it seems like you have your shit all in place. When you think about your own weaknesses as a leader today, where do you think your weakest?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Operations. When I mean operations, I mean like building the project management tool and all of that kind of stuff. I don't enjoy doing it. I don't enjoy doing operations. I don't enjoy doing all of the admin work that comes with managing lots of people. It's part and parcel of the role, but that's not where I'm like, oh, how do I build a great operating model for my team today? I have to force myself to do it.

• 46:43Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, I promise before the quick fire. You angel investors well today. How has angel investing impacted your mindset to growth in company building?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Growing a company is really fucking hard. Founders are amazing people. It really has just home how hard it is to build a company because like when you've been in HubSpot and I joined when we were 300 people, like we're thousands and thousands of people now, you're kind of like, oh, well, like this is what it's like in a startup. Like they just grow and they become like really successful. And angel investor has really grounded me in that, wow, it's just really hard to build a company. Like it's really hard to build something that's truly successful. And the founders that do it are inspiring. Like they actually will put all things on the line to actually try to make this company a success. Mostly grounded me in how hard it is, like grounded me in the things you, all of the decisions you. Have to get right and all of the things that have to go your way.

• 47:29Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I was also thinking it's about kind of speed and velocity of decision making. I think the speed of execution is just everything and I really see that the more I invest. I do want to do a quick fire though, Karen, because I could talk to you all day. Tell me, and it's focused around growth. What growth tactics have not changed over the last five years?

• 47:46Speaker 02

  I think like email automation. I think they have remained constant, still important, but have not changed that much.

• 47:51Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics have died to death on the other hand?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if anything dies, right? I think it just kind of becomes less effective. You look at paid advertising, I think that's going to become less effective over time because of privacy, because of Verizon CPMs. So you look at search, one of my favorite channels, but how that holds up over time with Google decreasing the amount of traffic you can actually get from them. I think if anything died in the last couple of years that came to mind for me, it was like anyone who was trying to market on Clubhouse. But I think for most tactics, plateau versus die.

• 48:18Harry Stebbings?

  What would you say is the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  I think how you set them up for success, right? What their structure is, how you make sure you align them with the business and other teams and how you can be a sponsor of their success.

• 48:30Harry Stebbings?

  What one piece of advice would you give to a growth leader starting a new role today?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Customers, data and team. Like if you're close to all three things, you're going to be successful. Know your customers better than anyone else, know your data better than anyone else and be an advocate for your team better than anyone else.

• 48:45Harry Stebbings?

  How is onboarding different in a remote versus an in-person world?

• 48:49Speaker 02

  The meetings matter. Making sure that the person, being proactive about getting that person set up to talk to other people. Everything in remote work is on schedule time. We all have to schedule time and put the zoom link in and actually interact with each other through these kind of video chats. Whereas when you're doing it organically within an office, it's much easier to have these organic conversations with people. So you really have to be proactive about making sure that that person gets time with people and gets to spend time and start to meet people.

• 49:14Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about the world of growth?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  I think the more defined it comes, the easier it is for founders to figure out how to leverage it and when to leverage it. So I think what the team is, the structure of the team, goals of the team and how it should be aligned with other teams. I think that is the best thing that could happen for it.

• 49:29Harry Stebbings?

  How many domains have you bought and which one have you been closest to pursuing?

• 49:34Speaker 02

  I have bought, let's say a hundred. I had a bit of a. Issue with buying domains at some point. You know, the one I nearly was like, oh, this could be a good idea was I bought a remotecal.com. I think it's dropped, so I don't think I have it anymore. And what I was going to create was remote workers, because like, if you think about it, your community has moved online to some respect. So you don't get the same kind of ability to network with people who are in your industry. So remote workers could have a calendar, they could put in times that they actually want to get matched with people, put in interests, and they will get matched every month with other people who have the same schedule as them, because one of the hard things is scheduling, but I never did it.

• 50:09Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's worth a billion dollars.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you want to invest?

• 50:11Harry Stebbings?

  No, I would happily if you would like to do it. I would love to, but it actually exists in the US. In the US, it's called Lunchbox.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Oh, Lunchbox, that is.

• 50:21Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, Andreessen backed it, I think.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:23Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's worth about a billion now. It was a very good idea.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  There you go. I should have done it.

• 50:27Harry Stebbings?

  Fuck.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Damn it, kept the domain name and tried to sell it to them.

• 50:29Harry Stebbings?

  That is brilliant. Final one. What one company growth strategy have you most been impressed by recently?

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Web 2, Canva, Web 3, Steppen. They're my.

• 50:38Harry Stebbings?

  Why on those?

• 50:40Speaker 02

  One of the things when I talk to founders in B2B, every founder now tells me who are doing product like growth, oh, the thing we really want to do is replicate the Canva template model. So what Canva did was they templatized their entire, like, everything you can possibly do with a product, they created a template for. Then they actually created a marketplace, so now people can actually create their own templates. And you can buy them, which extends the amount of traffic that they can acquire from search. Like, they just execute really, really well in terms of how they built an amazing distribution engine. And then I think Steppen, which is a kind of play the move app. I think their game mechanics are really interesting in terms of how they've grown.

• 51:13Harry Stebbings?

  But Kieran, as you can tell, it was such a natural conversation. I've loved this. Thank you so much, and this has been such a joy.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm a huge fan of the podcast, and I appreciate you asking me.

• 51:25Harry Stebbings?

  That was so much fun to do with Kieran. As you could tell, we had a schedule. We completely left the schedule in the theme of loving content creation and distribution, both as creators ourselves. Want to say a huge thank you to Kieran for being so accommodating and flexible with the schedule that. Absolutely loved it. But before we leave each day, do you really think you should be spending your time on building and maintaining your data infrastructure? Absolutely not. Your time is better spent on data analysis and Mozart Data helps you achieve this with their out-of-the-box modern data stack for startups. Set up your data stack in under an hour with no engineering. Companies like Rippling, Tempo and Modern Treasury have used Mozart Data to delay hiring data engineers and empower teams

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