Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20Growth: How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprise, How to Assess "Bets" in Growth; Which to Take and Which to Not with Gonto, Interim CMO @ Vercel About this episode Martin Gontovnikas, a.k.a Gonto, is a software engineer at heart who moved to the “dark side” to focus on Marketing. With this career transition, he found a way to combine his 2 passions by applying his “engineering thinking” model to Marketing. He is now a B2B SaaS Advisor to Vercel and Airbyte among others and Co-Founder & GP of Hypergrowth Partners. Previously, he was SVP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0. In Today's Episode with Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto) We Discuss: 1. From No Idea to Growth Leader: How Gonto made his way into the world of growth when it was not a thing? What does Gonto know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of growth? Why does Gonto believe product and marketing is more important than sales and marketing? 2. Growth: What, When and Who: What is growth? What is it not? What do people misunderstand most with growth? When is the right time to hire your first growth person? What is the right profile for the right first growth hire? Junior? Senior? 3. Mastering PLG and Enterprise: What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into enterprise? Why does Gonto believe that all PLG companies should start with 6-8 design partners? Is it possible to do enterprise and PLG at the same time? How does one provide enough value in a PLG motion to convert enterprise buyers? 4. Data vs Intuition: Art vs Science: Is growth more art or science? Why does Gonto believe qualitative data is more important than quantitative? How does Gonto think about psychology when selling and marketing? What do so few startups? understand about the psychology of their customers? How does Gonto approach messaging and what is truly great product marketing?
Transcript 13,797 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Psychology is key to marketing. All decisions are emotional. And I actually think you can, in enough cases, use biases that we have to our advantage. Product growth company should always start with design partners. When people think about scaling to enterprise, they think it's an on and off switch. I think the links that are the most important right now are marketing and products together, not sites and marketing.
0:27 Harry Stebbings? This is 20Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20Growth is a monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss their tips, tactics and strategies on mastering growth. Today, we have Gonto. Where to start on Gonto? He was SVP of Marketing and Growth at All Zero until their $6.5 billion acquisition. Today, he's B2B advisor to Vercel and Airbyte, among others. And he's also the co-founder and GP at Hypergrowth Partners. This is a very in the weeds show. We get very technical, so much to learn here. So get the notepad out and get ready to take some notes. But before we dive into the show today, short form video has never been more important for your business. Social media managers, growth marketers, this is the single biggest opportunity you have today.
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3:02 Speaker 00 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:05 Harry Stebbings? Listen, I'm excited for this one, but I want to start because the world of growth, it's a bit of a weird world if we're honest. And so in terms of the entry point, how did you make your way into the world of growth?
3:14 Speaker 00 I would say I got into growth by chance. I wanted to become a developer advocate. So I was interviewing and joined Off Zero, which is an authentication startup, to do developer advocacy there. When I was doing that, what we realised is that most of the revenue were coming from people that were signing up to the platform and trying it out. So because of that, I was promoted to be head of self-service. I'm not a marketer, so I knew nothing about marketing. So I didn't know what the fuck to do. So based off of that, I decided I was gonna apply engineering to try to improve our numbers. And that's how I thought about growth. But when I joined doing growth, I literally did not know that I was doing growth at all.
3:57 Harry Stebbings? I love that. Sometimes the best things are accidents, as my parents always remind me of my conception. But you spent seven years at All Zero, and it's an incredible journey. What are one to two of the biggest lessons for you that you've taken with you from seeing that trajectory and being in the coalface, so to speak?
4:13 Speaker 00 Two main learnings. Number one is that being an engineer, I was always thinking like branding and psychology and all of those things made no sense. But after being at OutZero, I realized that even when you sell to developers, psychology is key to marketing. Because as Daniel Kahneman says, all decisions are emotional. And I actually think you can, in a lot of cases, use biases that we have to our advantage. I'll give you a very specific example, but in a lot of cases, in the beginning, we were using emails with a lot of data. And we actually moved them to have almost no data and just focus on making sure that the story was coherent. And those converted better.
4:54 Speaker 00 Using psychology, even with a more mathematical way of thinking on biases, system one and system two, I think was one of the biggest learnings. The second big learning is there's no exponential growth company that happens without problems and without crazy vets. I've seen that with so many companies now. So now I believe that taking big risks is absolutely important to having exponential growth. At OutZero, for example, we had a big problem where we were trying to grow from 40 mil to 80 mil in ARR. There was no way we were gonna hit those goals. So we decided that half of the marketing team and a big chunk of the product team
5:36 Speaker 00 were only gonna focus on bringing signups up and getting activation, and they would not do anything else. That was a bold move because we didn't do any product marketing, we didn't do any launches, we just focused on usage and revenue. And without that, the company would have ceased to exist. So big risks and taking big bets, very key to having exponential growth.
5:59 Harry Stebbings? Two questions. One, do you think teams are willing to take risks today? Do you think they are too frightened to take risks?
6:06 Speaker 00 Most people in general are always frightened to take risks. I'm frightened to take risks as well. But I always think that brave people are not the people who are not scared. Brave people are the people who are scared, but do it anyway. The other are just unconscious. Taking the chance and, and if you know in your mind that you have at some point take big risks because you're not gonna make it, then you're a bit more prepared to take some of them. But in general, I think it's very hard for people to do so, mostly because they are scared of what if it doesn't work? But if you don't take any big risk, it will never work.
6:42 Harry Stebbings? How do you as a leader today let your team know that they can take risks? And if it doesn't work, it's okay?
6:50 Speaker 00 Couple of things, like number one is, I think, having a budget so that people can take risks and just do it. One thing, for example, that I'm doing now is if you have an experiment and you have an idea, you wanna try it out, it's well framed, you understand, you have a gut feeling, but you have a way to measure it. As long as it's less than ten K, you can just try it and do it without approval. So then people feel a bit more encouraged. The second one, of course, is when somebody fails at something, you do not give them shit. It's more about have you learned anything? If they haven't learned anything, you can fire them. But if they learned something, that means that at least they can iterate. But this, everybody talks about the culture of failure, but to me, it's just this, it's like,
7:33 Speaker 00 do not treat people bad or poorly when they try something and failed. If everything was set up correctly and they were actually taking a big swing.
7:43 Harry Stebbings? Everyone talks about this, like, oh, we learn from our failures. And that always sounds rather nice. How do you specifically learn from failures? So we try something, it doesn't work. Do you do a post-mortem? Do you do a group meeting? What does that learning look like post-failure?
7:57 Speaker 00 To me, it's for sure, you do a post-mortem and you start talking specifically about what didn't work. I'm a big believer that qualitative information is a lot more important than quantitative information in growth. So what I think about failure is, okay, if we failed, we're gonna talk to people to understand, why didn't I do, why didn't they do what we wanted? What happened? What were the takeaways? And I think if you actually do the research and you talk to people, you have interviews, you will learn something. And then I think it's about talking about that learning all of the time with everybody and having a database that is searchable of some of those learnings. Lately, for example, one thing I've done is all of the learnings, I have them in my Google Sheets with, what did we learn, some tags and stuff like that?
8:42 Speaker 00 And I created like a GPT. So now, when I wanna do something new, I can ask it questions like, hey, I'm thinking about this. Did I fuck up on something on this in the past or can I just do it?
8:52 Harry Stebbings? You said there about qualitative over quantitative. I think a lot of people think about growth as like data scientists A B testing colors of red or green buttons in many cases. When you think about like growth today as a term, what does it actually mean to you?
9:07 Speaker 00 To me, when I think about growth as a term, like if I had to say it in just one word or one sentence, is applying the scientific method to KPIs. So it's slowly trying to improve KPIs by trying different things. But in reality, most people will tell you, you have to look at data and then data will tell you what to do. Data does not tell you what to do. That's why growth people who are creative, who thinks about unique ways to drive exponential growth, are always gonna be win and are always gonna be much better than anybody else that is out there. It's understanding your customer persona, trying to be on their shoes, doing qualitative interviews and better understand what's going on and why,
9:50 Speaker 00 and then trying to use your creative juices and creative power to think about different, unique experiences to drive your KPIs to grow.
9:57 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask though, if you're like A B testing, does that not tell you what to do? I'm purely thinking about how we run the media companies today. We'll A B test two thumbnails for an episode. One gets thirty eight percent click-throughs and one gets eighty four percent click-throughs. Great, it tells me what to do. I'll do the eighty four percent. Does that not tell you?
10:16 Speaker 00 It does give you some information. What I'm sure is I think doing A B tests is a lot easier in a B to C than in a B to B. If you're Instagram and you have hundreds of millions of users, you can test anything. Because I actually have a friend that works there. In twelve seconds, you'll have the answer on what works better. If I can try something, get a result in twelve seconds and then iterate, for sure, I'll try to do that. In a B to B, numbers are smaller and the decisions are made by team, not individuals. So what you get from an A B test is useful, but it's not always the right answer. Because of course, if I try to do something and it says eighty four percent better on B, then great, I'll implement it.
10:58 Speaker 00 But the question is, maybe there was an option, it was eight hundred percent. Better that I never even thought about that I never even tested about. So getting to some of those, I think, is where the key of trying some of these new growth experiments come from. I always think a lot about AV test in two ways. Number one is big swings. For B two B, if you wanna get results, you need to try something that is completely different. Because then you will get results a lot faster than if you do it in any other way. The other way that I use AV test is to not get my metrics down. So when I build a home, I feel the home that I'm building is much better. I will ship that and look at the AV test to make sure that the number doesn't go down.
11:42 Speaker 00 If it does, I iterate. But if it doesn't go down, and even if it doesn't go up, I still keep it because I'm a big believer in the future, it will do better.
11:51 Harry Stebbings? So two things from that, you said about like big swings. And I totally agree with you, you just get incremental growth if you try any tinkering. But how should a leader today think about budgeting for big swings? Does big swings need, I need to put big budgets to it? And how would you advise me thinking about how I should budget big swings?
12:08 Speaker 00 When I think about big bets, typically the investment is more in humans. So in that sense, it's more about what are the trade offs? What are the things that I'm not doing with the people that are focusing on the big swing? How I try to think about big swings is like bets. I like thinking about the bets. And if you think about that, you have small bets, I change the button color. I have medium bets, okay, I'm chasing one page in the onboarding. I have a big bet, I'm blowing up the onboarding and doing something completely different. The big swings will take some time to work. Maybe in the first three that I do, do nothing, and it takes me six months. So when I think about that, it's about planning on, okay, in the next quarter, I'll do six small bets, because they take me very little time.
12:52 Speaker 00 Two medium bets and one big bets. I do the small bets so that those give me an incremental increase that allows me to continue to hit my goal. While I wait for one of the big swings to hit it. Once a big swing hits, I will have a step increment, like a big step change. But I need to buy time for it. Trying some of those incremental changes until I get to that big success.
13:17 Harry Stebbings? For a big bet, do you time bound how long you're willing to wait for it to work? Or do you just hold it in perpetuity?
13:25 Speaker 00 I think you always have to time bound everything. And to be honest, you will get a gut feeling on how it's working. And again, if you start doing interviews and start talking to people, you'll understand it a bit more. I'll give you a very simple example on it. We were starting to do outbound, for example, ads at Ziro. And we're doing outbound for specific industries and for specific roles. When we were doing that outbound, it didn't work at all. Even though we were doing like good direct mails, good offers, good everything. Then all of the data didn't tell us why it wasn't working. We didn't know. So what we ended up doing is I started to contact a lot of those people by sending them a message on LinkedIn or Twitter and like, "Hey, I know we tried this outbound campaign on you. I don't know it didn't work.
14:07 Speaker 00 I will not talk to you about the campaign. I will not sell you. I just want to understand why." And by doing that research, we learned that people thought like, "Oh, Authider is interesting, but there's no initiative. There's nothing going on in the company that makes me care about changing my authentication provider." By doing that, we realized that the initiative mattered more than the industries. So for example, if a company is upgrading their technology stack, moving from JavaScript to Java, then at that point, it actually made sense for them to think about an authentication provider. So we changed our entire thinking of this to actually start scrapping LinkedIn to see what programming language they were hiding developers for.
14:50 Speaker 00 We scrapped hiding pages to see what they were hiding for. And if the people they have now were different than what they were hiding, we guessed that they were going to change their tech stack and therefore do outbound then. And when we started to do that, that started to work. We did try for some time only, for one or two months on this industry test. But really, once it started to not work, instead of just stopping, we started to talk to people to better understand why they didn't care.
15:18 Harry Stebbings? Do you ever get too big to take big bets? When you are a public company, are you too big to take big bets?
15:26 Speaker 00 I think the big companies that still succeed are the ones that take big bets. All of the others eventually get killed by a startup. Amazon did a very big bet by shipping the Kindle phone. Kindle phone was so bad that it disappeared, but they were at least willing to try it out. And if they weren't willing to try Kindle phone, they would never be willing to try AWS. And AWS is now where they guessed most of the money. Why does Amazon win? Because they still build small teams, they put walls around them, and they allow them to test and do big swings unlike any other big company.
16:03 Harry Stebbings? Tell me, growth, often held in a separate part of the company, Facebook hailed like the growth team. Do you think that growth should be held in separate parts of a company? Or should it be interspersed between all functions?
16:15 Speaker 00 It should be interspersed among all functions. And that's the reality, I think, for most startups. Sadly, when the company grows, I don't think that can happen anymore. Because if you think about it, what ends up happening is you start seeing companies that grow. For example, their product teams, let's say like a growth product team. And when the product team starts growing, that means that they need to now be built features for checklists that enterprises will do to see if they want to buy something or not. They need to start doing support, they need to do back fixing, they need to do so many things that there's now no other place for innovation. There's no place for growth. Because of that, I think they only end up creating like separate teams for innovation and growth to do that. Ideally, you instill it around the org.
16:58 Speaker 00 I have never seen a place where that is a success yet. I wish I could.
17:03 Harry Stebbings? The other question that founders have is, this all sounds great. When do I start building a growth team? When do I have my first growth hire? How do you advise me on that?
17:13 Speaker 00 When I think about doing growth in the beginning, to me, it's more about the mentality of I'm going to try to do something creative, unique that the rest are doing. I'm going to look at data to see what works and didn't, and then iterate based off of that. So I would say you have to start with that mindset in the beginning. One thing, for example, that we've done to make growth people Be competitive is build dashboards similar to what you do with account executives. Where instead of having a quota, you actually have growth person and how much pipeline they created. And you get them to compete on how they've created new pipeline and why one with each other. And you even can publish that once a month, once a quarter, similar to sales.
17:56 Speaker 00 So I think having that some of growth mentality should be there in the beginning. When I think about the growth manager, how they call the role. It's more somebody who can be creative, understands the persona and can get people to try things. But they always need a partner who better understands who you're targeting.
18:15 Harry Stebbings? I'm just always stuck when it comes to timing because I'm like, everyone's like, oh, after product market fit. Because you have data after product market fit. But sometimes you need a growth person to get enough data. How do you think about that? And should growth always then just be after product market fit?
18:31 Speaker 00 I would never hire somebody for growth before product market fit. I think that before product market fit, it's the job of the founder to get to see if there's product market fit. If the founder can't do what needs to be done to find product market fits. I think they will never succeed and you should not invest or work with those people. When I think about even for product growth companies, the idea of product growth is I open it up and everybody can sign up. I think that a product growth company should always start with design partners. You should always start close, six to eight customers that you can find through your network, your business network. Get closer to BMF at least with those six or eight.
19:13 Speaker 00 And then build a good onboarding, a good experience and then open the floodgates. Because first impressions, I think, matter a lot. And you can only get first impressions once. It's very hard to get people who tried something to come back than to get people to come back for the first time. Because of that, I do not think you open the floodgates of product growth. Until you actually get some vibes from these six to eight customers that you're building what's right. You understand what should be on the onboarding and you understand that the best experience they will get is that. First impression that they will have.
19:47 Harry Stebbings? What are the most common ways that companies make a bad first impression in a PLG motion?
19:54 Speaker 00 For example, you don't do any onboarding and you just drop them in a blank dashboard with no data, even though it should have data. That is always like a very bad impression. You can't get out of that. Another one is, for example, you get them to implement features that you want them to use, because they are the ones that are going to pay the most, but you get them to implement them too early before they really understand the product. And you have to slowly get them to first understand the basic features and then get to more advanced. If you do that, I think the first impression is broke and people will leave. When you don't understand the different use cases of your product and you try to push somebody on a use case that is not theirs,
20:36 Speaker 00 you also lose a lot of people in that first impression. So I think thinking about that first impression and first onboarding is key.
20:43 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so say we get into a product and we go into a dashboard. Often there's a product tour, you know, the little kind of clippy, here's this and here's that. And everyone's kind of like, just leave me alone, like, no one wants that. Is there a right way to do that product tour then? Because the alternative is nothing and you just get dropped in. How do you advise me on that?
21:04 Speaker 00 I don't think the alternative is nothing. Um, one of the big swings, for example, that we did at OutCider was trying two different versions of the onboarding. One was more click here, you do this, you do this, you do this. The other version was more about OutCider, this is how it works. These are the different components, these are the different things that exist. Now you go and solve it and figure it out however you want. We actually tested the two of them and they were very similar. Again, when we did a bit more qualitative interviews, what we learned was that more junior developers wanted a point and click, like, tell me here, tell me here, tell me here, so I can just get done with it. Somebody that was more senior and had more experience, that was condescending. So they wanted somebody to explain, what are the big boxes, what are the big things to do?
21:47 Speaker 00 And then based off of that, just leave me alone and let me be. So in the end, we ended up implementing different onboarding experiences depending on the Seniority of the person and depending on what they wanted. So what I say with that is for some people, product tours are a good experience. Like I always think about this with ads. I deeply hate ads and I deeply hate gated content. But people download them and people click on them and they make money. So there's people for everything. That means that the point and click sometimes work, just not for all. And you need to understand what are the other things you need to do to make it work for the others.
22:22 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, what do you do? How do you advise people with horizontal products? Notion, Airtable, where it's like dentists and data scientists both use you at the same time. It's so difficult to know who's using you for such a wide array of things. How do you advise them?
22:40 Speaker 00 Two things are useful for some of those products. For Notion, for example, what I would do, and I think they do part of this is I would have templates for all of the different use cases that are some built by the community, some built by them specifically. I will do the same with trying to have content on explaining how you use for all of them. Then when somebody signs up to the product, I would look before they signed up at what templates did they look at? At what blog post did they look at? And then based off of that, I would guess what is their use case? And try to change how the product looks like or what the options do they have or what is the order based on that. So then you fine tune the experience in the product based on what they've seen in the past.
23:23 Speaker 00 And based on what they've seen, you know what's their use case and what they care about. So that's, that's why I think building a template engine and templates library is key. Not because of the templates that the user will receive and how fast they will act on it. But because they self-service leave you a lot of information about who they are and what they care about.
23:41 Harry Stebbings? We've jumped straight into product tours there. You said something brilliant before to me before the show that combining a really good bottoms up motion with a strong top down is how you master PLG. My question to you on the back of that is breaking them in two. What are the biggest lessons it takes in doing a great bottoms up motion? It's not easy. What are the big lessons?
24:02 Speaker 00 Couple of things that I have in here is like if you do a product like And bottoms up, that means that you will get the users coming to the product. In most cases, users who are trying something out do not want to be bothered. They don't want to hear from your sales team. They don't want to hear from you. They just want to try it out and see if it's useful for them. That is the number one thing to figure out. How do I know when they are ready to talk to somebody? And then at that point, talk to them and try to convince them to to buy. That is the art that exists in bottoms up. How do you know? Exactly, there's different ways that I I think you can know of it. I'll give you a few examples that I've done in the past.
24:42 Speaker 00 Number one, one thing I've done a lot is try to guess when people are blocked by using your product. So they started, for example, to use something in the product. And then you see that they click on a section of the dashboard. They click on the documentation to see how to do it. They go back to your dashboard and then they do nothing. That means they try to understand, they understood nothing, and then configured nothing. Or they click in a section in the dashboard, then click on another one, then click again. And they're like constantly going back from one to the other, just looking at the screen for at least thirty seconds and doing nothing. If you guess when they are blocked, you can help unblock them to get to activation, which I think is the priority in the beginning.
25:24 Speaker 00 And the one thing about that is that if you help proactively unblock them, then they will feel they owe you something. So then if you're like, hey, you want to talk to sales, do you want to do something like that? That's more likely to happen. When that happens also, it's important that if somebody reached out, it's somebody that they feel related to. If you are doing a product for developers and you have an SDR reach out, it's never going to work out. The developer doesn't want to talk to that. So for example, one thing we did at Bercel was build a team that's called Product Advocates. That team of Product Advocates is literally people that are sort of technical. That when when somebody gets blocked in the dashboard, you'll contact them and help them unblock it. So you add value and then you connect them to sales.
26:09 Speaker 00 How do we find these people? For example, what we did was we hired people from Apple Genius Bar or Best Buy Tech Support. Or people who did like Lambda School or some CS bootcamps. They are slightly technical, still very junior, salary is similar to an SDR. So on margin perspective, it makes sense, but it still is somebody that they can connect and talk to.
26:28 Harry Stebbings? How do you provide enough value in a bottoms-up motion, but also not give away too much? There's that, how much of freemium is too much to give?
26:37 Speaker 00 On this, I do believe in data. What I've done in the past is, once you start getting some users try and use your product, you'll start to see clusters of usage. So I've done like a clustering algorithm based on usage of the products, where you start to see how features cluster with each other on usage. Once you see that, what I typically try to do is, each of those clusters is one of the plans. But I always remove one or two features that are very useful from one cluster and move it to the next. As an excuse for people like, okay, I start to use the product, I use this, this, this, this. Now I need this extra one. Oh, for that extra one, you need to get to the next plan. Once they get to the next plan, they're like, okay, I'm paying. So let's see what are the other things.
27:20 Speaker 00 So I start using them, and again, they need one extra one. So thinking about clusters, but with everything but one, could be a good way to think about how you move people from free to self-service to committed deals or enterprise deals.
27:34 Harry Stebbings? You said to me before about anti-retention patterns. What is an anti-retention pattern? And how do you find them, Gonto?
27:42 Speaker 00 When I think about anti-retention patterns, I think about them as things that will try people to immediately drop off the product. Everybody that thinks about growth, they only think out one thing, which is, what is the activation moment? What is retention? And how can we get them to that? What they typically never look at is, what are the things that will make or break activation instantly? And I'll give you an example. At Outserio, one of the features we had was multi-factor authentication. Now, everybody uses multi-factor. But back then, when we started 10 years ago, nobody knew what it was, and it was very complicated. So what we realized was that anybody who implemented multi-factor authentication in the first week...
28:26 Speaker 00 Stopped using OutZero. Anybody who implemented multi-factor dedication between month one and month one and a half was very likely that they would be retained. Why? Because you were implementing OutZero in the first week. And if in that first week, you implemented multi-factor and then you started to get errors, things started to happen that you didn't understand, they were like, oh, this is not the product for me. The feature was too complex for the knowledge they have of the product on those seven days. We needed them to get embedded into the product for a month with other features and understand how it works. So they got the mental model and the mental capacity to say, okay, now I can understand what multi-factor is and implement that.
29:08 Speaker 00 That was key to not have people like lose them in activation and retention. How we figured it out was we built a dashboard of people who, after one year, were still retained in the product and comparing them to people that after a year were not retained in the product. And we built a table that was like all of the features and when did they implement it, in the first day, first three days, first week, first month, etc. And we compared the path of people to starting to look exactly on what were the path that were getting people to lose activation at that exact time.
29:43 Harry Stebbings? Data. It has some value. Can I ask one thing, which is like, you know, when we think about retention, I think often people like misunderstand numbers. What are like the retention figures that you really zoom in on? Like, what is success for you? And maybe it's case specific, but is it usage? Is it number of hours spent on site? What does that look like?
30:04 Speaker 00 To me, it's always about using the core value prop or what is the core value every week or every month, depending on how, what's the frequency that people use your product. But to me, retention is making sure they feel your value metric, they feel you're main value prop all of the time. It's not about money, because I think that if people are retained in the product, eventually they will convert. One thing I'm a big believer of, for example, is not just people using the product and being retained for work projects, but actually A lot more for personal projects because if you get the user to use you for a personal project all the time, that means that whatever company they will go throughout time, they will always remember you and try to use you.
30:48 Speaker 00 Thinking about that and taking that into account when you think about retention is key.
30:52 Harry Stebbings? A lot of consumer subscription apps have quite a hard paywalls where they really sometimes don't let you continue in the app at all for any functionality unless you pay. To what extent do you feel that has a case today? Or should that not ever exist? Should you always give the users something to play with?
31:10 Speaker 00 I don't think that that should exist anymore, like the idea of a paywall without you using it. I think it's very hard to get people to experience things. I'm a big believer in experience. If you explain me a feature, but I cannot try it out, then how do I know if I like it? If I will connect with it or why? So to me, it's more about you let them use anything. And then once they are hooked, if they're over quota, you ask them to pay or you remove the access. For example, one thing I've always think about when thinking about what to give access and what not to to me, it's they have access to everything. Once the trial ends, maybe you give them access readily so they can still see what they've done, but not create new things.
31:52 Speaker 00 To give you a specific example, at OutSiri, even though we had plans, we had enterprise, you could do everything all the time. There was literally no way to cut features. The only thing you could do is cut the entire account. Because most enterprise will not use it if you don't have a contractor SLA, they would still eventually pay. And we were talking about the free trial, we were talking about no access to feature, but that wasn't true. You could use anything. And in reality, what happened was that once a quarter, we went and looked who were over quota, meaning using extra features, extra things that they wouldn't pay, and we would ask them to pay. And because they were already hooked on it, because they were using for six months, even though we told them they couldn't, most would eventually pay.
32:36 Harry Stebbings? So this is how we do bottoms up real customer adoption at the product level. In terms of top down, not easy to do either. Very few startups do top down. Down well. Where does so many fuck up, Gonto?
32:49 Speaker 00 I think that if you're doing bottoms up, if you have product led growth, most companies think that top down is something completely different. It's a new silo. It's a new thing that they need to do. But in reality, you should do them combined. You should do them together. What do I mean by that? Let's say that you have a product and somebody from Coca-Cola, that is a developer from Coca-Cola, just signed up for your product to try it out. Instead of doing outbound to a cold company that has never known of you, why don't you do outbound to directors of engineering or directors of products? Or BPs of engineering of Coca-Cola? And you can tell them, hey, somebody is using the product from Coca-Cola. Why don't you check it out?
33:33 Speaker 00 And talking about, we're talking about psychology before. I think using biases for this is key. One example that I'll give you is, again, let's say a developer of Coca-Cola is using the platform. You start seeing that the developer of Coca-Cola starts using more and more features and is still retained for some time. That means likely they will want eventually to buy it. So you should help that developer convince the rest. What we do at that time is we start doing ads for directors of engineering, director of product, BP of engineering and BP of product. We don't do the ads to them because we want them to click them. I don't care if they click them. It's more so that they see our brand and they see the ad. Because of availability bias, then if the developer brings up
34:17 Speaker 00 our company to director of engineering, they will be, oh, the name sounds familiar. They maybe don't remember where, but because it sounds familiar, because of availability bias, they will trust us more. So thinking about how to we help them is important. You could also build a how to convince your boss kit, which basically gives that Coca-Cola developer a message that they can send in Slack or in Teams to their manager to help them convince on why they should do the product. Or you can potentially give them examples of reference that they can talk to other companies, or white papers on Bill vs. Buy, and why Forrester says that our product is fantastic. But arming people or in helping them talk to others and doing outbound, combined with the bottoms up old motion
35:01 Speaker 00 that you already have is where you likely will.
35:04 Harry Stebbings? So number one, I had the founder of Slice, the SMB restaurant software company on. And before he raised money, he parked a van with Slice on it outside the VC's office for two days. So he'd say, "Hey, I'm from Slice." He went, "Oh, I see you guys everywhere." Love that in terms of old school. The second thing I'll just say, though, is like, when you think about arming people with a message for their boss, I go granular because people love it and listen, especially when it's granular. What should it say in that message? It should say the benefits to them, the benefits to the company, because everyone has different goals. How do you think about the best way to sell it up?
35:41 Speaker 00 I think for those cases, I would always start with what's the benefit for them. I'm a big believer that you have to be specific. Most marketing that exists right now is full of crap and full of shit. People like to put three adjectives per noun, and they use what I call magic words, like seamless. They say nothing. So I think specificity will always win. The first part of the message should be specific, how the product helps that user. Once you talk about that and that specificity, then you can say how that help to that person can actually help the director of engineering. But I think you always start with something specific. Last thing that I'll say on this is that it depends what the company's size is. If you're selling to an enterprise company,
36:24 Speaker 00 I think what Gardner, Forrester say matter, because they are like the analysts. So in those cases, sending something like a Forrester Total Economic Impact, like the ROI white paper, is very useful. If you're selling to a startup, they don't care about what Gardner is saying. For them, it's more about, how can this product make me more unique? Make me ship something that the rest doesn't have? So thinking about who you target to, I think also changes slightly the message.
36:52 Harry Stebbings? How do people do demos really well? And what's important with demos?
36:57 Speaker 00 Couple of things on that is, number one, I think, if you can arm the user to do a demo internally... I think those things are really, really good. Where instead of doing a demo with a sales team, sometimes what we've done is give them something that they can demo, that is already packed up and it explains one of the things to try. So they demo it internally themselves. If a developer shows them that they downloaded something that already works and it shows them to their boss on why, and it's them putting their authority, their respect in line and sell the product for you. So if you can find a way to do that, I think is key. If not, I think doing a demo and showing the product, of course, is very important.
37:42 Speaker 00 But the most important part there is being able to talk to the person that you sell at their same language. At Outzero, back then, our competitor was Okta. One thing that we did very unique when we were selling was taking enterprise architects to our sales calls. Why? Because enterprise architects could talk to the customers or the prospects, enterprise architect, talking about how each of the services and the products connected with each other, talking about the boxes, talking about strategy. And that's something that a sales engineer or even an account executive cannot do. So if you can talk the language of the prospect in a way that your competition can't, that is a unique value prop.
38:26 Speaker 00 Our demos all required the whiteboarding sessions, where we whiteboarded with them how to think of the strategy and how to think about us. That value no other company gave because it was doing things that do not scale. But eventually, if they do work, you can scale them.
38:42 Harry Stebbings? Do you create verticalized playbooks then? Because if you're going to do whiteboarding and you're going to help, I don't know, e-commerce sites or you're going to help SaaS startups, you need domain knowledge that's built in a vertical. Do you verticalize or do you just read up beforehand to get good enough?
38:59 Speaker 00 To me, it's not verticalized, but it's use case based. I think typically you pick, I would say, the main four or five use cases and you do become very specialized in those four or five use cases that you sell to everybody. If you have a product that grows... Startup, you can see what people use you for. So you can pick one of the four or five most used use cases. And when you see new ones come up, you can eventually hire SMEs to start doing some of that. I don't think about industries because sometimes three industries have the same use case. So that's where I think grouping them by use case makes more sense than just grouping them by a specific industry.
39:36 Harry Stebbings? So we're doing this and we're selling well into enterprise. Question is, should we be selling into enterprise at all? I often find that actually SMBs is such a deep market. We just released a show with the founder of HubSpot. HubSpot have built a $28 billion company through SMBs alone. So the question I have is, when's the right time to scale into enterprise?
39:59 Speaker 00 When I think about enterprise, I think about enterprise and mid-market more similar to themselves than just like SMBs on the other side. What I'll say is most self-service or product-led companies eventually become mid-market or enterprise. If you look at all of the companies like Atlassian of the world, like the Twilio of the world, Outsiro, or even Bursell. Most of them, what ends up happening is that 80, 85% of their revenue comes from mid-market and enterprise. 15% come from SMBs, but that 15% is thousands and thousands and thousands of accounts and the other one is maybe a few hundreds. So eventually I think it happens to all of them. What I think is important there is when to think about this.
40:41 Speaker 00 There's not specific moment for all, but it's more about when you start seeing that mid-market or enterprise companies are starting to sign up to your products and they are basically starting to see interest. So when you start to see that interest, I think it's about doubling down on those so you can start building that. I do agree with you that you can potentially create a business from SMBs. I just think it's a lot harder, to be honest. Because enterprise or mid-market, you don't need that many customers on one side. On the other side, it's a different game. Because if you have a B2B and you sell to SMBs, that means that at most typically each SMB will give you a small revenue per year. That means that if they give you a small revenue,
41:24 Speaker 00 you can invest very little to get them. So the tactics that you can do to get them from a marketing sales perspective are very different to a mid-market or enterprise. Maybe it's mostly ads or you can do some type of content. But you can't do a lot of high-touch stuff like Michelin star dinner, like going to a yacht, like starting to go to some of these big conferences and stuff like that. So I personally think most companies end up going to something that is mid-market or enterprise just because it's easier. It's easier to spend money to get eventually bigger companies than trying to spend very little to get a lot of them. You have to really nail a need and a use case for a big amount of people to succeed in SMBs.
42:07 Speaker 00 In enterprise, if you can hit a need on a few companies that have a lot of money, you can maybe be equally vigour as an SMB-focused company.
42:17 Harry Stebbings? Gonto, I have a problem with some companies that I'm invested in, a lot that I see where the cost base that they have to acquire customers, to look after customers, customer success, is very high enterprise level. But the revenue is absolutely SMB level. So my question to you is like... And they respond to me and say, "Well, they're gonna scale with time." And it's the PLG motion, they're gonna add more. How should I respond to this? And when is it valid and when is it not?
42:48 Speaker 00 To me, the question there is how much time? Like if they take more than a year, I would say, to expand to a really big deal, it's likely never gonna expand. Like, that's number one thing. Second thing that I would ask them is, what are they doing to actually get the deal to expand? You can foster them. If you don't foster that, it won't just happen. And I'll give you an example. At Alcero, a lot of times, we have a very small land, like 30K land. But then, we actually asked our champion to invite other people from inside the company that could potentially use us for a workshop. We then sent our DevRel team there to do interviews, to talk to them, and to convince other champions to use us and then try to get them to acquire us.
43:34 Speaker 00 If you're not doing that, if you're not trying to generate other business in other business units, I don't think you're doing enough. And even though you say they will come, they will not come. If you're sending to an enterprise, they will not come. You need to take action to get them to expand. I think that's something that is very, very important. If they just say that they will come, that's a lie. It's like saying, no, the product just sells by itself. You don't need to do anything else.
44:00 Harry Stebbings? Sometimes taking action can lead to mistakes. Can I ask, when you think about big mistakes, or misunderstandings even, I think people misunderstand the product complexity that's required to go from an SMB product to a full licensed enterprise product. What are the biggest misunderstandings you see startups make when thinking about scaling into enterprise?
44:20 Speaker 00 When people think about scaling to enterprise, they think it's an on and off switch. They think like, okay, we were sending to users before, we were bottoms up. Now we're going to send to enterprise. And when you sell to enterprise, you forget about who your users were. If you forget about who your users were, which was the base, you eventually go out of business. I have like one great example for this, I think, is Neuralink. Neuralink was the king of observability for developers. They targeted, did they go out of business or did they just get bought? No, they didn't get, got out of business, but their market cap was shit compared to the past. And I think they got bought by a private equity. And they were poised to be the Dalalov. They were Dalalov before Dalalov, basically.
45:04 Speaker 00 Every developer was using them, they were connected to Furaku. Everything was fantastic. But then they were like, okay, why not focus on enterprise? So then they started to get a sales team and started to sell to directors of engineering, to directors of product. When you become and you start selling to an enterprise, the sale is different. When you send to a user and you do bottoms up, you send an experience. You send how they use the product, how they feel about it, how that makes them faster, how they makes them better. When you sell to enterprise, you send checklist. Companies and enterprise will do like an RFQ, like, okay, let's get a request for a quote. These are the features that I need. And they give you a checklist of 200 things that they give you. Because whoever is working in an enterprise has a very comfortable job and they do not
45:48 Speaker 00 want to be fired. What's the easiest way to justify not being fired? They cannot justify experience. They can justify checkbox. So what they will do is, look, how many of my 200 checkbox are checked by each startup? And if I check the most, they will buy me. And in the beginning, that will always work. So then in the new relic case, I imagine they were selling a lot because they were building a lot of features so that it works for that checklist that the prospects have. What they didn't realize is by adding all of those features to hit the checklist, they added a lot of bloat in the product. That bloat made the experience be a lot worse. When the experience became a lot worse, developers stopped to use it.
46:30 Speaker 00 What new relic forgot about was that the enterprise, they were having this checklist conversation with enterprise because a developer brought it up to that enterprise in the first place. When they focused only on bloat and checklists, they closed a lot of enterprise customers that they had in the pipeline, but they stopped getting new customers, new prospects in the pipeline because now the experience was shit, it was bloated and no developer wanted to use it. And at that point, it breaks. If you want to become enterprise, you need to add some of the checklist features, of course, but you should never forget about the experience. Because if you forget about the experience, the user will never bring you up again and then you go out of business.
47:14 Harry Stebbings? Help me out. You've sold multiple different products, top like bottoms up very successfully and then lay it on top down. What do the top down care most about? Is it security? Is it cost? Is it cost saving? What are their top priorities that you see most?
47:29 Speaker 00 I think there's two main things that somebody who is an enterprise cares about. Number one, I wanna buy something and not get fired because of this. I wanna keep my lovely, beautiful job that is nine to five, and I don't need to do much more, and that's it. The second one is, I wanna get promoted. Will I get promoted if I buy this software because it helps my team so strongly? I think that humans are mostly egocentric in the beginning. They have ego, and that's the main thing, to be honest, that they care about. Why do they care about security and privacy and compliance and gardener and forester? Because it's ways to prove that if the product doesn't work or if I made a mistake,
48:11 Speaker 00 at least my mistake was validated by this gardener and this forester and these things. So I always see it as a push between the fear of getting fired with my desire to be promoted. My desire to be promoted will push me to try new things that other people hasn't tried. Because if I try and do the same things as others, I will not get promoted. It will not be different. I'm doing the same as everybody else. However, if I try something new and unique, maybe it helps my company so much that I will get promoted. But at the same time, I'm scared. So to me, it's playing with those two things on thinking about who will take what I want so that they are promoted? Who will be so scared that I will just pick the status quo?
48:54 Speaker 00 And that's the fight that you need to push when you're selling to enterprise.
48:57 Harry Stebbings? You said there about new disruptive, willing to take risk. You said to me before that you should think about the CTMO role for PLG companies. CTMO role, just for everyone listening. What is this role and how do you see it? Why should I have it?
49:14 Speaker 00 To me, CTMO, I call it like Chief Technology Marketing Officer. If you look at most companies right now, they are all grouped the same way. And they have a CRO that typically has marketing, customer success, and sales all linked up to them. When you're doing a marketing-led company or a sales-led company, of course, that makes sense because if it's marketing-led, then marketing starts sending you something. Eventually, they will send you to sales and then sales will close it. If you're doing a sales-led company, sales is doing outbound to the people that they know and they need help with marketing to send them specific things. By having them together, it removes silos and it makes the experience better. The work where we're moving to with more product growth,
49:57 Speaker 00 with more bottoms up, with more people trying new things. I think the links that are the most important right now are marketing and products together, not sales and marketing. Why? Because when you think about marketing, what marketing is doing on their website is they are promising what your product will be about. Then because there's no sales, people will click on signup and then they will use and try your product. That means that product's job is to prove marketing's claims. Your marketing claims are in the website. The product should prove them and show you the value. So then, marketing and product need to be intertwined and work really, really well together because the promise has to be the same of the value that you deliver. Because if you over-promise and under-deliver,
50:41 Speaker 00 you're fucked because people expect one thing and that's not what they are gonna get. So having those two teams together is key.
50:48 Harry Stebbings? Can I just jump in there? So just again, tactical as possible. Remove the silos between marketing and product. What does that actually mean in reality? I bring marketing into product reviews. I remove titles. What do I actually do?
51:02 Speaker 00 For example, one thing that I try to do there is I try to, instead of having a separate growth team, I try to have a growth team in marketing that focuses mostly on driving activated signups. And I try to get a growth team in product that focuses mostly on retention and conversion. Those two teams, which end up expanding, needs to work very well together. And I think that the place where they both shine is the onboarding and getting to activation. So that's first step in the product where they get onboarded, they answer some questions and they start understanding is the most important bridge, the most important That part has to be co-owned by marketing and product, where either team can make modifications,
51:45 Speaker 00 but they have to get approval from the other side so that they get to a better solution. Because if one team picks one, then maybe they fuck up the experience. I'll give you a very simple example on this. At OutSiro, we wanted to get more people to contact sales. So what the marketing team wanted to do was add in the onboarding of people signing up, something like, "Why don't you talk to sales now?" and clicking on "Talk to Sales." Product hated that, because that meant that people would not even go to the product and they would talk to sales. So they worked together on getting a better solution in the middle. What was the solution? If the person who is signing up is not a developer who was our user and is a director level, we can show the option. If not, we cannot. Unless it's from a very big company,
52:30 Speaker 00 in which case we offer that option. So we got to a middle ground, where most people will go through the product, but in some cases, maybe it is better to talk to sales, which is what marketing wanted. That only happened because we created healthy conflicts between marketing and products and getting them to work together on that transition from one to the other.
52:54 Harry Stebbings? What's the hardest part of the transition? Where do people fall down and it doesn't work?
52:58 Speaker 00 I think the biggest problem is that marketing over-promises all the time. And they will tell you that the product can do everything, literally, on the marketing website. And then you go into the product and you cannot do everything that marketing promised, number one. Number two, it's not that easy to understand. Number three, if it is, people don't know how to get to that. So that, to me, is one of the biggest problems, because it's a matter of expectations. I expect the product to do something based on what marketing said, but it doesn't do that. So when my expectations are not hit, I'm unhappy and I don't want to use that product anymore. That's number one. Number two is product. Even though product should be meeting with customers and understand a bit more about customers, I think sometimes they lose touch with reality. I've worked with so many companies
53:42 Speaker 00 where the product managers don't really know the user as much. Marketing has to know the user. Because they are in events, they are in trade shows, they are online and they need to send that information back to products and they need to work together on that. So on that loop, it also improves a lot more on your product building if you're closer to marketing.
54:05 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, when we talk about these people, the hard thing is finding them Gonto. And I think a lot of founders have no idea how to hire anyone in growth. Often, this is the first time they've hired for growth. What is the right profile for a first growth hire? Should it be a big logoed person, a junior? What's the right first growth hire?
54:23 Speaker 00 I'm personally a big believer in a term that I call hunger for glory. I think there's people who have hunger for glory because they need to prove it to themselves that they can do it. I don't know why. Sometimes because your dad has a lot of success and you want to have that success. Sometimes because your life sucked when you were a kid and you want to overcome that. Sometimes because of something specific and that driver is what drives people to success. So I'm a big believer in trying to find people who have this hunger for glory. So if you're a startup, in a lot of cases, it's better to hire people that do not have the experience, but they have the main characteristics that you need. For growth, I think you need somebody who is creative so they can think of other ideas.
55:07 Speaker 00 Ideally, somebody that understands your user persona very well. They are one of those types or something similar, so they feel related to them. It's somebody who is competitive, so they want to compete and make it better. And they are scrappy, which they can like just tie things around and make it work with very little time and with the least effort, so they try it out. That to me is the most important one. One thing that to me is fascinating about this is that I always think about history is written by the winners. When you win, you can write about it. A lot of times you will see that Slack or even in Reforg, there's a lot of frameworks. The framework is about like a growth loop, what a growth loop does, why you should care about it. Slack will have frameworks on how they implemented things.
55:51 Speaker 00 But if you actually go to the companies where Reforgs will tell you that CEO implemented growth loops, that LinkedIn implemented growth loops, that Slack implemented growth loops. When you go to the leaders in Slack and LinkedIn at those times, they will tell you they will not. They were not implementing growth loop. They didn't know what a growth loop was. They were trying to find creative ways to get other users and other people to come. But once they did it, they went back and they were like, oh, this is what we did. So we should write about it so others do it. So they were the winners, they get to write history. But at the moment when they did it, they were not thinking all that. They were trying to have more creative, more unique things that drove users. And if that's the case, then that's what you need to find. It's those people.
56:36 Harry Stebbings? When it comes to like, Ashi, you mentioned, you know, the playbooks, the reforgue case studies. When you think about case studies and interview processes, do you test out their skills, their creativity? How do you think about that case study test in an interview process?
56:51 Speaker 00 I'm a big believer in doing, we do, we call that exercises, but it's the same as a case study. I'm a big believer in them. To be honest, I think I learn more from case studies than from any other interview that I do to hire these people. Why do I like out exercises? It's that you get to see people in action. What I think is important about the exercises is to make them the most abstract possible. If you make them abstract, you're giving people a chance to reflect about them, ask questions to better understand, and then refocus on something to try to be creative. If you give them something very specific, because you want a very specific answer, that means that you're guiding, you're leading the witness. If you give something very structured to get a very structured answer, that's not what you want from growth. From growth, you want somebody who does something unique.
57:37 Speaker 00 So if you guide them to get a very structured answer, they will give, if they give you that structured answer, they are clearly not the person that you want. In a lot of cases, what I do is I do a very abstract exercise, like we have this problem. This is some of the interviews we've done, this is some of the data that we have, what would you do? To me, it matters, like we add them to our Slack to do an exercise. And to me, it matters more, what questions do they ask about that exercise? What things do they wanna know more of? What things do they wanna know less of? What things have they done research? What things can they explain that we didn't maybe even know about before? In a lot of cases, the end result does not matter. I don't care where they end on the case. Or the exercise, I care about what was their process, how do they think about it?
58:21 Speaker 00 What did they ask and how do they arrive to that? To me, growth is not just about their results. It's more about how do they get there? Because if their process and how they get there is good, they will eventually find a great result.
58:34 Harry Stebbings? Gonto, have you made any hiring mistakes before?
58:37 Speaker 00 Yes, of course.
58:38 Harry Stebbings? What would you say your biggest hiring mistakes have been and what did you learn from them?
58:42 Speaker 00 Couple of things that I can give you is, for example, in OZIRO, when the company grew, because I had no experience in marketing, I thought that I had to bring a lot of people who had a lot of really good experience, good logos, good places and stuff like that. And I gave priority more to that than to what the person could do, how smart they were and why. In a sense, I ended up hiding because of the resume and what I thought we needed or what everybody else was doing. And that was a big mistake, number one. Number two mistake is the opposite, is at one point I hired all people that were exactly like me. And if everybody is exactly like me, then we cannot get more unique point of views or something that is different.
59:25 Speaker 00 I think you need to hire on your weakness and get other people who are not your point of view. One thing I always think about is on the people that report to me. I always try to get at least one person that I don't like. Because if I don't like them, but they are smart and they can get shit done, I will hate everything they say, but I will put my thoughts into believing them, trying to think about them, trying to think why they're coming with that. And that, I think, makes me a better leader and makes our team much better because we have a diverse set of opinions.
59:55 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask again to the point on the learn from mistakes? When you think about just like growth, I hate growth tactic, but you know, growth tactic, growth, whatever you want to call it. When you think about growth tactic mistakes you've made, what's been the biggest you've made? It could be at Vercel, it could be at OZIRO, and how did that impact your mindset?
1:00:13 Speaker 00 I have two mistakes. Number one is Easier, I would say the second one was harder. The easier mistake was we spent a lot of money on ads to drive signups. And we spent 300K. But what we didn't think about then was we got a lot of signups, but none of them activated, or very few of them activated. That meant that most of them weren't retained and then eventually they didn't convert. So we just spent money to have a nice number to share with the board that then didn't help us to get the pipeline on the numbers. Very painful because it was in the beginning and we lost a lot of money.
1:00:47 Harry Stebbings? What did you learn from that? How did that change how you operate?
1:00:50 Speaker 00 The learning was that you always have to put as a KPI, something that affects the bottom line and is not a vanity metric. Getting more signups was a vanity metric. What mattered was how can I get more signups that are eventually gonna pay? Or are eventually gonna get us someone that can pay? But we cared so much about hitting the number for signups that we had as an objective, that we put in the CFO planner, that we just spent the money for nothing. So to me, it was more about that than anything else. One thing that was related to this, another example I can give you related to this, was we were working on the emails for the onboarding and for the products.
1:01:30 Speaker 00 And we were very proud that our open rate and our click rate was going up in all of the emails. So we knew we were kicking ass, we were sharing about that. However, at one point in time, we realized that maybe we should care about something more down the line, like activation retention. So instead of just looking at open and click rate, what we did was to 10% of the users, we sent no emails. To the other 90%, we sent the emails. And we compared which of them were more retained. What we saw is that the people who got no email were 20% more retained. So at that immediate time, we stopped and killed all emails. And then we went to learn what was going on. Why was our open and click rate increasing? Because we were better at having better subjects, better titles, and more people to come and click on things.
1:02:15 Speaker 00 The problem was that the emails were so confusing that the more people were opening and clicking on them, we're like, what the fuck are they telling me? And then they were dropping from the product because of that. That was also a very hard learning on sometimes picking vanity metrics just because everybody else picks those as well.
1:02:31 Harry Stebbings? The gamification of metrics, I think, is the most dangerous thing in companies. Because also everyone can just like, as you said, gamify them. You want signups? Great, I'll put money in paid ads. You want retention? It's a different thing. Listen, I want to do a quickfire round. I could talk to you all day, Gonto. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
1:02:48 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:02:48 Harry Stebbings? So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
1:02:52 Speaker 00 I think it's the increased importance of marketing ops and engineering in marketing on the future. In the past, when you were thinking about marketing, you could just have SDRs reach out to people as humans. They were sending emails, they were doing outbound and stuff like that. More and more now with GPT and other things, you can actually get engineers to scrap websites, to look into things or use AI to look at intent sources and why somebody can buy you. You can then use fine tuned models of GPT to fully personalize emails in the name of an SDR without a real SDR. You can even, and we've created this, you can even create deep fakes of CEOs telling you something on a video, on an email, even though it's not really the CEO.
1:03:38 Speaker 00 So all of that requires marketing ops and engineering. And as we get more sophisticated with AI and automation, I think marketing ops and engineering are going to be so key in marketing that it's going to change the entire landscape.
1:03:52 Harry Stebbings? With the commercialization or democratization of these tools like a HeyGen or Synthesia, the technical knowledge required to do the deep fakes, to do the AI automated outbound is much less. And it is not, I mean, yes, commoditized, but it is really available to everyone.
1:04:13 Speaker 00 I agree with that. The problem is that if you do the same as everybody else does, nobody's going to buy you. It's like content now on SEO. I don't know if it's the same, but to me, it's the more unique you can make it, the more it will work with people. So to me, what will change on that is you will still think, I think, need engineering and ops. Because as more things get automated and you get more ease of access to some of those, they will. Start working less and less every month and you will need to switch to something that still needs some type of custom development to be the one that is shown as a difference in the pack.
1:04:50 Harry Stebbings? What growth tactic do you think will become more and more prominent?
1:04:54 Speaker 00 I think it's about using intent-based data. Like the example I was telling you before on Bercel, on we're gonna look into how many like companies, how many engineers do they have right now that are using JavaScript? How many engineers are they hiding that is on Java? And based off of that, guess if they are average technology stack. But it's more and more trying to guess based on what's on the web, what's in different places. Where can you find information to do this intent-based outbound? So they are hyper-personalized, hyper-clear for that specific use case. And to have something that basically based off of that has an increased conversion.
1:05:33 Harry Stebbings? What's the biggest mistake you see first-time founders make in growth?
1:05:37 Speaker 00 The biggest mistake that I see is that they start very, very late if the BMF is very strong. I've seen a lot of companies that have a very strong product-market fit. And because of that, in the beginning, they just start getting a lot of revenue because big companies care and care and care. Eventually, they get so much revenue that it's very hard for them to continue to double. And at that point, now they need to start building a growth team and an ops team and engineering team for that and stuff like that. And it takes them so much time that maybe they miss a year or they miss a few quarters or they are slightly fucked. So I see a lot of that as well as I see a lot of people focusing on growth before BMF. Thinking about the right timing of when to do growth is key for founders.
1:06:20 Harry Stebbings? I also just see people thinking of growth as like this like magic pill for whatever problem they've got. Tell me, final one, what's the most recent or recent growth tactic that you've been most impressed by?
1:06:33 Speaker 00 One thing that we've done with Clerk, one of our customers recently that I'm very impressed about, is the power of sponsoring YouTubers for driving growth.
1:06:42 Speaker 00 The first thing that we did was what every other company that I know did, which is we went to find a really known YouTuber and we paid them to do an entire video about us, an entire video about Clerk. When we did that, that had literally no effect. That didn't work at all. One of the ideas that Nick had, the head of marketing here, was doing something different, where instead of paying one video, maybe we could pay four or five videos. And instead of paying them to highlight us as the main thing, as the main focus of the video, what they would do is they would build an app. They would build any type of app. And as they were building it, they would use Clerk, without mentioning it and without talking about it. And then we would say that Clerk was sponsored in the end of the video.
1:07:26 Speaker 00 Because of that, that worked really, really well. Why? Because an influencer was talking about their products. It seemed as it was organic, because they didn't mention it, they weren't talking about it, and they were just using it naturally. That created a lot of curiosity on people on it. Why are they doing that? Let's go and learn it. And by getting people to go and learn it, they actually were more likely to try it out, mostly because they felt it wasn't sponsored, even though it was.
1:07:52 Harry Stebbings? I absolutely love that. And do you know what, actually, I ask this question always, and most people give really shit answers. That was a really good answer, specifically. Gonto, I've loved doing this. You and G must have like the most enamored in like energetic discussions I've ever seen. You both are like, you like had, you know, 10 Lucozades. It's incredible the energy you bring. So thank you for joining me, and I've loved this.
1:08:16 Speaker 00 Thank you so much for inviting. This was a lot of fun. Hopefully eventually we can do it again.
1:08:21 Harry Stebbings? I mean, you have to give the man credit. The amount of energy he brought was just exceptional. If you want to watch the full video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's 20 VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, short-form video has never been more important for your business. Social media managers, growth marketers, this is the single biggest opportunity you have today. Did you know Ollipop took their sales from 3 million to 200 million by doubling down on video? But wow, it is expensive to do well, and it takes a shitload of time. That was... It wasn't until Captions came into the world. Honestly, Captions is one of my favourite tools. I use it here at 20VC all the time. Because it makes creating videos so easy and simple. They have the most incredible array of tools from advanced captioning, which I use for all the videos we do,
1:09:06 Harry Stebbings? to revolutionary dubbing tools, allowing teams to take one ad and repurpose it even into multiple languages. Me in Spanish, it's a masterpiece. Those are my words. Other people probably think differently. You can also automatically cut out pauses, add relevant zooms, and generate custom royalty-free music and more, all with just a tap. Captions is used by over 5 million people and businesses, and it's the best. Try it out now at captions.ai. And speaking of game-changing tools like Captions, we have to talk about Canva. Canva is on a mission to empower the world to design. That is why they've introduced Magic Studio. Magic Studio brings together the best AI-powered tools for you and your team to help you redefine the way you design.
1:09:51 Harry Stebbings? Magic Design creates custom designs for you in seconds. Just provide a text prompt or upload your media, and Magic Design crafts professional social posts, presentations, and even videos. And something that I in particular really love is Magic Edit. It lets you add to, replace, or edit your images with a single text prompt. It's incredible. Simply select where you want to see the change, write your prompt, and watch as your image transforms. With Canva, you can realise your ideas with ease. Start inspired with over 500,000 free templates and a rich content library to help you and your team achieve their goals. Explore Magic Studio at canva.com/magic. As always, I so appreciate your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode
1:10:36 Harry Stebbings? with the Trade Republic CEO and Creandam GP that led their round on Friday.
Previous 20VC: The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Marketplaces, Why Rule of 40 and EBITDA Optimisation is BS, How Founders & VCs Should Approach Market Sizing and Outcome Scenario Planning and Why Europe is Failing with Vinted CEO, Thomas Plantenga & Alex Taussig Next 20VC: From Selling 75% of Trade Republic for €600K to Raising $1.3BN at a $5.3BN Valuation, The Biggest Fundraising Lessons Having Raised $1.3BN From the Best in the World; Trade Republic CEO, Christian Hecker and Creandum General Partner Johan Brenner Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
