20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Raman Malik is the Head of Growth at Perplexity where he is responsible for growth marketing, onboarding, activation, retention, and monetisation. Prior to Perplexity, Raman, was an early member of the growth team at Lyft and joined Perplexity earlier this year after his own startup journey. In Today’s Episode with Perplexity’s Head of Growth: 1. Inside the Perplexity Growth Machine: What have been the single biggest needle movers in the growth of Perplexity? What has not worked? What have they learned from that? How have partnerships driven growth? Lessons on what makes a good vs bad partnership? Why does Raman think paid acquisition is a drug and Perplexity do not do it? How does Raman advise other founders when it comes to paid acquisition? 2. Acquisition, Retention, Churn: Mastering the Basics: Why does Raman think that brand marketing is BS? When does it become more important? What are the simplest things startups and product teams can do to drive retention up? How do Perplexity count an “engaged user”? What metric suggests they have a retained user? What is the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to A/B tests? 3. How Perplexity Built a Growth Machine: Why does Raman advise all founders to hire more former founders? How does the way you manage founders turned employees differ from employees who have never been founders? What is the must under appreciated growth channel today that has worked for Perplexity? What growth channel has been the biggest flop for Perplexity? What did Raman learn from losing money on the channel?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You need someone to hear about your product three to seven times before they're going to give it an honest trial. If I can get a user on perplexity specifically to three queries in that first session, now I know I'm really on to something. There's no middle ground if you're not first. It literally just means your only other option is to just be a lot better than everyone.

• 0:18Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 Growth is the show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss their tips, tactics and strategies when it comes both to growth and to scaling growth teams. And today we sit down with the head of growth for one of the fastest growing consumer companies in history. They are the Google killer and they are crushing it. I'm so excited to welcome Ramon Malik, head of growth at perplexity where he's responsible for growth, marketing, onboarding, activation, retention and monetization. And prior to perplexity, Ramon was an early member of the growth team at Lyft and joined perplexity earlier this year, having founded his own startup previously. But before we dive into the show today, when I spoke to Canva co-founder Cliff Oberakt on the podcast last year,

• 1:01Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:46Harry Stebbings?

  And talking about growth, let's dive into how Voyantis is transforming customer acquisition. As this is my growth podcast, I'm so excited to share with you the amazing story of the fastest growing company in my portfolio, voyantis.ai, who isn't being asked by their board to improve unit economics. The Voyantis is the first and only company I've seen that has found the way for you to crack this nut by not only leverage Using your first party data to predict customers lifetime value, but truly coupling these predictions with a prescriptive layer, integrating with and influencing each and every step of your customers' growth journey. Voyantis helps you acquire the right customers in Google and in Meta, allocate incentives to the right customers via your sales force and braze,

• 2:31Harry Stebbings?

  and trigger the right upsell option at the right time for each of your customers. Oh, and check this out, the best part, Voyantis are not only increasing ROI by 20 to 40%, but they're also improving the quality of your customers. Their solution has already improved unit economics for leading companies like Miro, Rappi, Moneyline, and many, many more. So if you want to improve your LTV to CAC ratio before your next board meeting, which I recommend, start by heading over to voyantis.ai/20vc. That's V O Y A N T I S dot A I slash two zero V C to get a free value assessment. You have now arrived at your destination. Ramon, it is so lovely to finally do this. Thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. This will be so much fun.

• 3:18Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I want to start with, you mentioned before you brought up in Alabama. How the fuck does a kid from Alabama get to being head of growth at perplexity?

• 3:28Speaker 00

  I have no clue. I have no clue. I had a great family that really pushed all of us to get out of Alabama, to go do cool stuff. And, you know, here I am in San Francisco, working at a really, really fun company.

• 3:39Harry Stebbings?

  But you were at an MBA program. A lot of people are at MBA programs who want to move into startups. You founded a startup. What happened there? What's your advice to others in MBA programs wanting to get into startups?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, MBAs have such an interesting reputation in tech. Most people just absolutely hate them. I personally, even though I left a year early in the MBA, I had a great experience. I got there, I came to tinker with ideas. I never took an interview, started playing around with all my different ideas. You can get funding from this school. So it's essentially like a pre-precise and you're just tinkering full time. And investors start conversations, start flowing, and it became very clear like, I'm going to learn a lot more. Have such a better experience if I just go full steam ahead on this idea and and that was it. I mean, it was amazing.

• 4:26Harry Stebbings?

  Would you recommend MBAs to others?

• 4:28Speaker 00

  I think MBAs make a lot of sense for people who are trying to break into a specific industry. If you are trying to break into private equity or you want to be a PM at Amazon or go into McKinsey, then MBAs have like your preset path and you just follow your guidelines. You have a community to work with and prep for and you'll hopefully get in. So it's a very like expensive bridge to breaking into one of those fields. But for many people, that's an incredibly valuable valuable journey.

• 4:56Harry Stebbings?

  The other kind of difficult journey that you make is from founder to perplexity. That's a different thing when you run your own shop to when you join a team. How did that happen? Does Arvin come and say, hey, like, we need a head of growth. You want to come? Just take me to that.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I go to business school. I go take a swing for three years and just grinding up against startup life. And there's nothing easy about it, right? Like when you're when you're a founder that, you know, month after month pivot after pivot, nothing is moving. There is nothing more demoralizing than those moments. And you know, when we when it came down to the final straw, we end up shutting down. I'm chatting with different companies. I'm chatting with Arvin, Dennis, Johnny, Dimitri, everyone. It became very clear like this is a company that is moving crazy fast, is having so much fun. I'm going to go do that. But it's different going from the founder's seat, right? You know, you one, you are now well aware of how freaking hard startups are. Your ego is bruised, right? You just got your ass kicked.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  So it's a total adjustment in terms of framing. And then you're basically de-scoping yourself. I'm brought on to just drive growth. So founders enjoy the variety of I got to go work on a hundred things and I get to steer the ship. But now you're hyper focused on, okay, I'm here to drive growth. I am de-scoping myself just to go do an excellent job at this. And that's an adjustment as well.

• 6:16Harry Stebbings?

  So you're here just to drive growth. Head of growth, it kind of means so many different things. It's a very ambiguous term. How do you specifically define head of growth?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  I see growth as an independent function that bridges product and marketing. So there's growth product and there's growth marketing. Growth product, let's start there, is a product team, engineering, design, data science, all working together. But your core product, the product you're obsessing over, is the user funnel. So acquisition, activation, retention, monetization. So growth is not just about, let me fill the top of the funnel with new users. It's about getting those users to become retained, to develop into power users, so that you can eventually monetize them. So you just obsess over that journey that facilitates that user lifecycle. That's growth product.

• 7:09Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, that's growth product, and then we've got growth marketing.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Growth marketing, your goal's the exact same as the growth product team, right? Drive that user funnel from acquisition down to monetization. But your tools are just different. You're not approaching it from a engineering, design, or data science angle. Your tools are marketing channels, they're lifecycle communications, it's community, it's marketing campaigns. All of these things need to live closely together, right? I can't work on an onboarding experience without a product team iterating on every flow and without the marketing team thinking about copy, thinking about email drip campaigns. Everything comes in as one cohesive unit to bring this funnel to life.

• 7:47Harry Stebbings?

  My question to you there is, these are quite built-out teams. Like, that is full resources and a lot of resource allocation. When is the right time to build out a growth-independent function?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  The easy thing to say is post-product-market fit, but like, what does that even mean?

• 8:04Harry Stebbings?

  Not really, dude, because that team costs millions, growth product and growth marketing. And then what they're gonna need on top of that? If you're at like 2-3 million in ARR and got product-market fit, doth butter no fucking parsnips. You need 25 million in ARR for that team.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean, I think as soon as you see that you have early signs in retention, like we're seeing like, you know, if you see 30% retention in month three or four, you have the kindling in your fire where it is now worth it to go put gasoline on it, go make that investment. And it doesn't have to be, we're going to go turn on marketing channels and spend a bunch of money. It could just be, okay, can we get that 30% retention to go to 40%? Can we make it really easy for, to convert all these users through a funnel?

• 8:51Harry Stebbings?

  So when you were brought in, did you have this team built out or did they say, hey, we want you to build it out yourself?

• 8:58Speaker 00

  It's a very flat organization. So there was nothing built out, but there were resources to pull from, right? You know, there are engineers that are ready to jump in on, okay, let's go hack onboarding, or let's go really iterate on deeper retention or, or anything like that. And it depends on when you are starting, but a lot of times it's, well, what even exists today? And your first few weeks stepping into growth is you're just turning over stones. You're trying to build the map of the world. Okay, what's happening in acquisition? What's happening in engagement? What's happening in monetization? And usually when you ask those questions, you don't get any answers and you just get 100 more questions that you have to now go figure out. So then your job becomes, let me build the right infrastructure so we can actually measure and understand the world. And that's where

• 9:42Speaker 00

  you start getting into engineering, logging, attribution, do we have first party cookies? All of that.

• 9:48Harry Stebbings?

  Is growth a game of micro optimizations where you are moving from 30 to 35% retention on D90? Or is it big swings on a new product that could change the game?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yep. I think micro optimizations are seriously underrated. I think anyone that has like built a growth model for their company, imagine you, you open up an Excel sheet, you have new users, you've retained users, you have resurrections and you've churned users, right? New users plus retained users plus resurrections minus churned users, that's your weekly actives or monthly actives, right? And then if you assume like a new user growth rate or a retention curve, you can now play around with, well, if I increase retention by 10%. What happens to my weekly actives? What happens to my monthly actives? That 10% small change in retention or in new user activation, you see the entire water level of your active user base just increase.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  That small micro-optimization just raised the entire water level of the company. And so that's huge. Like, I'm going to go after that if the opportunity is there. To hedge that, though, micro-optimizations have diminishing returns. At some point, I'm not going to get to be able to squeeze out an incremental 10, 15% without a lot of wasted experimentation time. And that's why, like, my rule of thumb is, once a quarter, we have to be taking at least a couple massive swings, right? A big new feature, a big marketing campaign. It has to be high risk. It has to be high reward. I have to be able to stand in front of the company and say, I'm going to do something and be willing to fail.

• 11:22Harry Stebbings?

  What should your success rate be on those big swings?

• 11:26Speaker 00

  I'd say 25% would be pretty great on these big swings. Maybe like one, once a year, we have just a banger campaign or banger new feature that is now really driving growth or really opened up a new audience for us. That is huge.

• 11:41Harry Stebbings?

  We said about optimizations, about kind of squeezing as much value out as we could. A cool way to do that is in A/B testing, determining what works, what doesn't, and then doubling down. What is the role of A/B tests today in your mind in growth? How do you think about that?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  There's a good, a bad, and an ugly. The good is we, we are using A/B tests to understand impact, to understand how every metric changes. Are we accidentally bringing down certain metrics? Do we really understand what is incremental and what is not incremental? That is like a well-scoped A/B test teaches you what you should work on next. It adjusts your direction. It adjusts your cadence. A bad A/B test is poorly scoped. You're not going to get any information out of it. It's a messy thing with a low minimum detectable effect. And you're going to run it and you're not going to get anything out of it. You just wasted a week of your time. And then the ugly, the ugly is I'm running an A/B test so that I can put something in my performance review about a number I moved.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Or I can like say something to my manager. And you see that as companies get bigger, right? We're running A/B tests just to like be able to say, oh, I increased activations by 12%.

• 12:48Harry Stebbings?

  I had the head of growth from Revolut, that one of the fastest growing fintechs in the world on. And he said, "A good PM does not need A/B test. You know if it's working or if it's not working."

• 13:03Harry Stebbings?

  If he listens to the show, which he does, I'm fucked. My question to you is, is that fair? And do you think actually good PMs need A B tests? Because it is very clear when it's working and when it's not.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think your goal as a PM is to optimize direction. Are we working on the right thing? Are we poking at the right part of this product that can drive impact? And A B tests give you a quick response to it. And I think that is like core to understanding, are we working on the right thing? Are we moving fast enough? Are we really moving the needle on this? That being said, you should go into an A B test with a pretty strong confidence of what's going to happen. And this is where like intuition comes in of like, we're running this and here's what I think is going to happen. I think we're really going to move this metric, but we might see that other metric go down a bit. And that's what we need to watch out for. If you don't have that intuition, then you're just flying blind.

• 13:50Harry Stebbings?

  Have you ever had an A B test mislead you?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Who? A lot of times you see A B tests with mixed results. And that those are the trickiest ones to navigate. So let's say we're working on, okay, I want to get a user to hit their, you know, fifth query in the session. Then I'm going to show them a sign in opportunity. Well, I'm showing them a sign on opportunity. I'm now juicing activations. Great. But a lot of people saw that sign in gate and they hated it. They're like, screw this, I'm out of here. And now I'm hurting query volume, hurting searches happening in perplexity. So now I have two different metrics to to hold on to. How do I value those two things down the road? That is where it gets really, really fun for some of us, where it's like, okay, well, how do we value this? Will that activated user retain?

• 14:36Speaker 00

  And over time, those retained metrics, if I think about this on a 30 day timeframe or a 60 day timeframe, will make up for that initial loss in query volume. I'm not going to go run that A B test for 60 days and then come back and tell the team, okay, we finally made a decision. You kind of have to make a decision right there or figure out how to optimize and like protect that downside.

• 14:57Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about getting to your fifth query. I always think to Facebook in this case where they really wanted you to get to like, I think it was five friends and then you had a much higher likelihood of retention. Do you have a metric internally that is designated as like a, hey, post this, we have a much higher likelihood of retention?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I call these milestone metrics. So can we go take anyone who's retaining at thirty, sixty days? And then look back into their first couple of sessions and say, okay, what did they do differently? What is unique about their experience? From that, can we establish a working metric? It's not perfect, right? Because it's not deep retention. If I can get a user from perplexity specifically to three queries in that first session, now I know I'm really on to something because that is what a lot of great people did. It's enough time in product where that user now understands the value of perplexity. And they're going to more like, there's a high likelihood that they're going to come back and retain.

• 15:51Harry Stebbings?

  You said that two to three in the first session. I had Alex Schultz, one of the OGs of growth on the show from Meta. And he said that the biggest problem of growth is that every goal or metric goal can be gamed. And if you want that one, we can put in a load of recommended searches that you click, which technically get there, but doesn't actually mean you got what you wanted. How do you think about setting the right goal if every metric can be gained?

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yep. One is monitoring, does this still correlate down the road? Once we're done with gaming it, once we're down with tinkering with it. And if we're seeing that correlation start to break, well, okay, I'm not being honest with myself around if we're actually helping retention here. The other thing is to take a rounded approach. You can't just stare down one metric. I need to stare down number of queries, but also time in first session. Did that first session timing hit that 10 minute period and not just?

• 16:44Harry Stebbings?

  Why would you want that? Don't you want shorter time in because it means time to value is super high?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Or you had so much great value early on that you're now rabbit holing into perplexity. Harry, you mentioned a query you and your family were putting in last night. What if like, if that can lead to a bunch of follow up questions, that's awesome. You're now deep in the perplexity experience, learning and exploring, and it's great for us.

• 17:07Harry Stebbings?

  I'm not sure I want to explore that query much more.

• 17:11Harry Stebbings?

  For everyone listening, it was the query of how many times does a human fart in a day? And so your recommended searches were not that attractive to me at dinner, but I appreciate the sentiment in time.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Thank God that AI exists so we can answer that.

• 17:25Harry Stebbings?

  Thank God. My question to you is, when we think about acquisition, what have been your single biggest lessons on effective acquisition since joining Perplexity? And what does Perplexity's acquisition makeup look like?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, AI companies have a ton of curiosity traffic, which is awesome. Anyone who launches something that shows a little bit of magic or has a magical demo, they are going to get traffic, they're going to get quick usage. All of our growth, most of our growth has been organic word of mouth. Two years in and we're still riding this incredible wave of organic traffic. That's the best channel you can ever have. So the question for us is, how do we keep nurturing that? How do we keep this organic magic still happening?

• 18:06Harry Stebbings?

  What does the acquisition makeup look like now? Word of mouth is like 80%?

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Word of mouth, yeah, about 80%. It's going to depend on priority countries or international. We do a lot of big partnerships to drive distribution.

• 18:18Harry Stebbings?

  That was gonna, so we have 20 growth, which is a WhatsApp group with like the biggest growth leaders in the world. I'd love to have you in it after this, we'll chat about it. But I said like, hey, I, you know, I've got you coming on the show. The most popular question was aggressive partner deal strategy. LinkedIn, Xfinity, Lenny's podcast, all give away a year for free to paid members. What have been your biggest lessons from those partner programs?

• 18:43Speaker 00

  They are incredibly effective at driving distribution. We can go out and scream from the mountaintops about perplexity, but it is a lot better when someone else is telling you to use it or it is being bundled into an existing product of yours. That's going to drive a lot more trial. We have a phenomenal partnerships team. They are absolute sharks.

• 19:05Harry Stebbings?

  Does that change the unit economics quite a lot, though?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  To a certain extent, but that's acquisition cost. We're willing to trade off a month of Pro because if you don't use Pro, it's pretty variable, right? If you're not using Pro, we're not losing money. But if you are using it, well, now we're capturing you as a user. You're really starting to understand why perplexity is magical. And then the game becomes, can we convert you to that paying user after?

• 19:27Harry Stebbings?

  What partnership do you not have that you'd most like to have?

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Cool. I think about more audiences. So what audiences do I want to reach and what partnerships can we get to there? So I think a lot about the student audience. And so there's some partnerships in that student world that I really want to break into to help drive distribution within students at scale.

• 19:45Harry Stebbings?

  What have been your biggest mistakes in acquisition that you've learnt from as a result?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  There's so many for not making mistakes, for not learning fast enough. I think I came in really interested in influencer marketing and then really wanting to test this channel. Creators, how do we work with creators to share perplexity? And I totally underestimated the amount of effort it is to work individually with creators on specific content and making sure they get the right messaging. And perplexity is not a simple concept to explain. Like me saying AI search engine means nothing. And so to manage a bunch of these creators creating content, long tail creators, it ended up A, falling flat and B, taking up a ton of time, ton of time. And so I think we're moving very quickly as we'd rather work with fewer creators

• 20:35Speaker 00

  and just develop a really good relationship with them.

• 20:38Harry Stebbings?

  When you came into perplexity, I spoke to Aravind before the show and he said that actually you very quickly diagnosed this is not an acquisition problem. This is a retention problem. Can you just take me to what you saw and set the landscape there?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  So if you come in, you turn over all the stones. You're trying to get a sense of through this end to end funnel, from acquisition down to monetization, like where should I spend my time? Where is there the biggest opportunity to drive growth? And, you know, we had Dimitri and the business team running these big partnerships. We had tons of traffic coming in from the top of the funnel. My eyes went straight to that early activation rate, week one, week two retention. None of it was bad. It was actually like pretty Healthy consumer retention, but that was where if we can move that number early on at the top of the funnel, we're increasing the water level of all activated users and weekly actives. That's where I need to hang out. That's where I need to spend.

• 21:30Harry Stebbings?

  What's a good activation rate?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Very, very dependent on the company. So keep in mind perplexity, you don't have to sign up to start using it. That's amazing, right? It's, it gives us the opportunity to have quick trials. People can just put in their, a question and immediately see the value of it. But that logged out visitor to logged in activation rate is tricky to navigate. And so like from that logged out experience, I'd love to push that into like the 30% of users are hitting my milestone metrics. And we're converting them to, to signed in users.

• 22:01Harry Stebbings?

  On the retention side, I think it's a bit murky. I think a lot of people don't know. Can you provide some clarity on what good retention is?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Consumers hard, man. Consumers really hard. And so what you want to see is that, that retention curve stabilize. I think it was like by month six, you want 45% is really, really, really good. That's the target, right? That's where we want to push to, especially when you're not a social product. That has more of like that smile retention curve. You really need to figure out how can we drive retained value and increase frequency to get to that 45 plus percent.

• 22:35Harry Stebbings?

  So 45 plus percent on the seven, the.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Oh no, month, month six.

• 22:42Harry Stebbings?

  Month six, you want 45%?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. Are you blown away by the drop off amount?

• 22:47Harry Stebbings?

  No, I think that's, that's pretty good. I mean, that's high.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. But I mean, that's how you know you're providing value.

• 22:53Harry Stebbings?

  I think Duolingo is 365, they're 50%.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  That's 12 month retention at 50% is world class. And the, the engine they have built is incredible. It's, it's a world-class way of retaining users.

• 23:05Harry Stebbings?

  So we identify that retention is the problem then. We've got amazing acquisition. We've got these partnership teams that's driving top of funnel. What do we do then when we know retention is the problem?

• 23:16Speaker 00

  So there are finite ways to move retention. One, you are setting up your milestone metrics. What correlates with deeper retention earlier in the funnel, right? So that three queries in your first session and. Now, how am I really trying to move that? But at a higher level, you're constantly playing with mix shift, right? So, one, you can optimize channel distribution. So, organic and referrals is always going to have higher retention than paid acquisition and partnerships. That's because of so much of our growth is word of mouth and partnerships led. Like, we don't have much channel distribution optimization to make. Two is you can target different audiences. Perplexity is incredibly horizontal. My grandmother uses it, my doctor uses it, everyone uses it.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  So, can I find different segments, different audience segments that have really high retention? And then can I specifically go after them? So, I'm changing the mix shift of new cohorts to that new audience, which increases that retention for those cohorts.

• 24:11Harry Stebbings?

  Which cohort has the highest retention and which has the lowest?

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Well, you see a lot of trial users that are coming in from curiosity traffic, like the weekenders that are putting in, you know, how many times does someone fart in a day? That's a little bit lower retention. If I'm here to solve a knowledge gap, like I'm using perplexity for work specifically, or I'm a student using perplexity to find sources for a paper, that is really, really sticky retention because we are solving knowledge gaps for you. It's not just curiosity that we're bringing you.

• 24:43Harry Stebbings?

  I saw Aravind on TV the other day, I can't remember what channel it was. You have so many CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, they're fucking, all these letters, ridiculous. But on one of these channels, and he was like, actually, the amazing thing about perplexity is the length of query is much longer than on Google. It's like nine words, I think was the average. What does that tell you? And does that influence how you think about targeting acquisition retention?

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you're getting more information from the user around what they're looking for, which means we can provide better responses. We can reformulate that query to give you broader search results and then use that to drive our answer. The more information we have in that query, the better of a result we can provide.

• 25:28Harry Stebbings?

  What has been the single biggest needle mover? Aaron said that you drove the numbers up by 10 to 15%. What has been the single biggest needle mover in doing that?

• 25:37Speaker 00

  I think that there've been a couple. We've worked on a lot of different things. One is, can you mix shift audience? So we've done a lot of audience targeting around specific high-quality cohorts. Two is, can you mix shift platform? I don't want you just on the web app, or I don't want you just on the mobile app. Can I get you across multiple devices? And that cross-device conversion is really, really strong for retention because now you're using it on weekends, you're using it during the day, we're everywhere, we're integrating into your life. Those are the two really big ones. And then you never can just underestimate, driving product improvements is always going to drive retention.

• 26:11Harry Stebbings?

  What retention strategy did you think would have a big difference and didn't?

• 26:15Speaker 00

  And this is something we're going to never stop banging our head against, but how we tinker with the messaging, as soon as you land on perplexity, it's critical for us that people understand that perplexity has up-to-date data that we show sources, and that is the inherent value. And so you're going to see a lot of experimentation on how can we drive the messaging so people understand what they landed on and can figure out how it can drive value for them.

• 26:39Harry Stebbings?

  I quite like doing this game, which is, I did this with Glenn Coats, a VP of product at Shopify, and I basically went on Shopify's website when we were doing the show, and then I tore it apart, literally, very embarrassingly, how rude of me. And he was like, oh, this is awkward, it's live in a show. And then he tweeted like a year later, following Harry's ridicule, he was right. And so I've changed the whole Shopify page. And I was like, yes. But perplexity is a free AI-powered answer engine that provides

• 27:17Harry Stebbings?

  Oh dear, this fucking hell, this fellow thesaurus, that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question. What would you score that out of 10?

• 27:28Speaker 00

  I give it a six right now, because

• 27:31Harry Stebbings?

  It's a bit wordy, isn't it?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  It's a bit wordy. Is that our Google description, though? Well, I mean, there's some SEO optimization happening there as well.

• 27:38Harry Stebbings?

  But when I go on to perplexity.com or AI, it just comes up with like, ask anything, discover anything.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Where knowledge begins. Yeah, that's the fine balance. How much information do we need to slap in your face? How functional should it be? How brand oriented should it be? This is where we spend all of our time tinkering in terms of what does someone need to hear to understand how perplexity can help them? And what are the key differentiation points for us that we need to highlight?

• 28:03Harry Stebbings?

  So you can have it be anything. It's yours to own. Just you are the one who decides, what would you have?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  I mean, I think where we're moving to is really simple language around ask anything, or what do you want to know? And search like never before. I think it's really important to get across that perplexity has live search. We are searching the internet in real time. We're giving you up to date answers. And that is really critical to make sure everyone understands.

• 28:29Harry Stebbings?

  I do like perplexity. We focus on search, not self-driving cars.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 28:37Harry Stebbings?

  Take a lesson from like Anthropic's like, fuck you to your competitors.

• 28:44Harry Stebbings?

  Maybe not. I mean, maybe that's a bad idea. You know, I'm a VC for a reason. Arvind also said, usual growth PMs would ask for marketing budgets that slam ads on TikTok and Instagram. He said that you first wanted to ensure that you had good cat to LTVs before throwing money at acquiring users. What did you want to see in the cat to LTVs that was important to you?

• 29:08Speaker 00

  A couple of pieces here. One is like, should we even be focusing on monetization? Do we want to think about paid acquisition as a lever that that needs to bring in users? And then we see that payback happen immediately. And my answer early on was no, I think we just need to go focus on top of funnel, new user growth and getting incredible sticky retention. And if we do that, guess what? We're going to be able to figure out how to monetize these users, whether it's through a consumer subscription, whether it's through ads, whatever it is, we're going to be able to figure out that monetization. So let's put down Cacti LTV for now and let's, the only metric I'm going to just yell about all day is our activation rate and our retention rate and hold me to moving that.

• 29:48Harry Stebbings?

  When did you decide that you were going to have cat to LTV as a more important metric?

• 29:54Speaker 00

  I think that's happening a little bit now. Like you look at perplexity and it's completely unoptimized for driving subscriptions.

• 30:01Harry Stebbings?

  How could it be more optimized?

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Well, we could add more gates. We could add more usage gates where you run into, okay, I really want to use Pro Search or File Upload more often. And well, you know, you as a free user, you only have three per day, but we know you love this. So why don't you consider upgrading to our Pro Plan where you get basically unlimited of both? Those are the optimizations where we can tinker with the limits. We can tinker with how we are showing you upsells in that moment.

• 30:28Harry Stebbings?

  Cacks in LTVs are very variable. The cats change so significantly over time with maturation of cohorts. LTVs, you need quite a lot of data for to understand true LTV. If you're advising a founder, how do you advise founders on how to think about cat to LTV in your importance metric stack?

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it depends on stage, right? Do they have, are they at the scaling period where it is now turn on these channels and drive growth because we feel really good about where we are in terms of retention? Or any incremental work we're going to do on trying to move activation or move early retention is hitting diminishing returns? Then it's okay, let's now go move our focus to attacking these channels and maximizing the efficiency of them, maximizing these cactyl TV ratios. That's when I think, okay, we're seeing diminishing returns on retention. Now it's time to move to cactyl TV optimization.

• 31:21Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you do any paid? I know you do adverts and you do some paid, but you just have such a good acquisition flywheel. Jensen says you're like his favorite search tool. Like, why bother doing adverts?

• 31:35Speaker 00

  We barely touch paid. Paid acquisition is a total drug. It makes everyone feel good because top of funnel numbers move up. And once you see those, you know, weekly activation rates, well, no one wants to see that go down, but it's going to underperform on retention. And maybe most importantly, it's most likely not going to be incremental. I basically started my career on the paid acquisition team at Lyft, right? Millions and millions of dollars on these channels. And I'll never forget this, our head of growth at the time was basically just like, go turn off every single paid channel for new passengers. And like, we're spending, like, paid acquisition was driving a good amount of passenger acquisition. And so the growth marketing team turns off every single paid channel and installs and signups barely move.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  They go down by like, maybe five, 10%, I don't remember what it was. What did go down, it was all low quality. Every marketing dollar that was being spent to acquire these new passengers was just cannibalizing organic traffic. None of it was incremental. So maybe it pulled those users forward by a few weeks. But overall, it was just Lyft had enough organic word of mouth traction, where once you factored in the incrementality of the channel, it wasn't efficient. It made no sense.

• 32:46Harry Stebbings?

  Why do paid period? Why do people do paid?

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Let's flip that Lyft scenario. So then you have the passenger side not incremental at all. The supply side, it's really hard to get drivers in a ride sharing network. And guess what? You're a marketplace. You need to balance supply and demand. You need to acquire the drivers. And so I think this is where we did run a lot of paid at Lyft to acquire the supply side. And part of that is, well, if we acquire the supply side, we can balance the marketplace. Balance marketplace is gonna be much more efficient. Lyft will grow because of it. And that spend will pay back much faster. So I think it makes sense as like a very intense balancing lever for marketplaces. And then if your unit economics support it, I do think there are advantages to using paid acquisition

• 33:34Speaker 00

  to go after audiences that you're under indexed in. So right now, like, the only paid acquisition we've ever touched on, it's so lightweight, are some just like simple TikTok ads, testing different value propositions with 18 to 24 year olds. Very specific marketing.

• 33:50Harry Stebbings?

  What have you learned from them?

• 33:52Speaker 00

  It's hard and TikTok's a crazy beast of a place. My God.

• 33:56Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you say TikTok's a crazy beast of a place? I agree with you. I can share thoughts around that, but why do you say that?

• 34:02Speaker 00

  You know, the the algorithm is so different than how we think about traditional algorithms where it's built for virality. So if you're trying to do organic TikToks, you're comfortable with, you know, 10 failing, but one hitting seven million views. And like, that's almost like it's it's such a crazy power law. On the on the TikTok ad side, like, I think we are learning a lot around how AI companies need to be positioning themselves with new audiences that don't care about AI. Like, you can't walk up and be like, well, we're an AI search engine. And people, people are gonna be like, oh, my God, that's what I've been waiting for my entire life. You need to abstract away this whole AI piece and just go straight to the value prop of get answers immediately backed by sources.

• 34:43Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, 100%. I think we've got to the stage now in product marketing where like AI has become almost a negative. Like, toothbrush is now AI powered. It really is. It says on the box, AI powered. I have no idea how. Thanks, Oral B. My point there is just like bluntly, I think it loses value from having the AI sticker on it at some points.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it worked really well early on, right? It was kind of like a magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat of like, look at this magic. But now it's

• 35:10Harry Stebbings?

  Find conversion shit on TikTok.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Conversion is pretty good. We're still very early in testing this. Conversion is solid, like, top of funnel campaigns do well. I'm still waiting for some of this retention to bake.

• 35:23Harry Stebbings?

  How much are you willing to spend on tests today?

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Not much at all. You don't need to spend much to really understand what that retention is gonna look like.

• 35:31Harry Stebbings?

  10K, 20K, 50K?

• 35:33Speaker 00

  10K a week. And the amount we can learn is pretty great in terms of what messaging is working, what messaging is not working, or what use cases really, really resonate with people, whether it's travel planning, studying, solving something at work. There are a lot of different things we can test because we're so horizontal.

• 35:49Harry Stebbings?

  Do you like brand marketing?

• 35:50Speaker 00

  You need someone to hear about your product three to seven times before they're going to give it an honest trial. I really do believe in that. And I think it's incredibly hard to measure the value of it. And just because we can't measure it does not mean that it's useless.

• 36:05Harry Stebbings?

  What brand marketing thing do you not do today that you'd love to do? Sponsor a stadium, be on a shirt for a football team, be on an F1 car?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  I get a lot of these emails. You know, I mean, we're doing a lot. What's cool about perplexity is we don't have a marketing department. So we're doing so many cool things. And all of these are just someone on the team had a passionate, was really passionate about an idea that we believe has viral potential. If so, like go execute and make it happen. And the metric that matters in brand marketing for me is there's an expected number of impressions that anyone will tell you are going to see if you go run a TV campaign or sponsor a jersey. And what really matters is what is the incremental impressions you're getting from that? Can that moment go viral where, okay, we may be paid for X amount of impressions, but we're getting a lot more on top of it because people are reposting

• 36:56Speaker 00

  about it, because it has gone viral across social. That is where brand marketing can be really interesting.

• 37:01Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. One of my friends and a portfolio founder of ours started like recruitment platform years ago, taking people out of like big banks like Goldman Sachs and putting them into startups.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:11Harry Stebbings?

  And they basically took out a billboard right outside of Goldman Sachs's headquarters in London and said, Goldman, really? I bet your parents would be proud, dot, dot, dot. And every newspaper in London wrote about the startup that was basically sticking the middle finger to the big banks. And the incremental, to your point there, was enormous.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And especially when you're hitting net new audiences. So we ran a TV ad with Jim Harbaugh, great football coach, American football in the US. And the commercial goes live and we have tons of influencers, reporters in sports, retweeting it, commenting on it. And this is a new audience, right? For all the sports fans sitting at a bar, watching the game, who have all their niche questions about what's happening in the game, like who won this game 12 years ago. Perplexity is perfect for that. And we are now introducing them to this net new audience that we're not really reaching right now. That's very effective.

• 38:11Harry Stebbings?

  What's been the hardest thing about doing paid for you at Puplex?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  There's so many different channels to test. I don't want to lose my focus spending on channels where I'm not going to learn much. And I think I got burned. Like a good example of another area I got burned was newsletter sponsorships. It's like, okay, like there, there's some interesting audiences here. I want to try this out, but it's really hard unless you have a really crisp product that you can put into a really simple ad placement that is like two sentences of text and that's it, right? Newsletter placements are really hard. And so like, again, that's another one where we came up flat and I don't know how many learnings I walked away with there. So I kind of just spun my wheels for no reason.

• 38:49Harry Stebbings?

  So you're happy to spend if you get learnings?

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely.

• 38:52Harry Stebbings?

  Even if it doesn't work, you're fine with that?

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, growth, growth is a game of intuition. All we have to do is just keep learning to figure out the right direction and then just work on cadence to just keep driving in that specific direction as we learn.

• 39:05Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, when we spoke before, you said to me, be first to a growth channel or just be better.

• 39:11Harry Stebbings?

  Which I like to lot as a hedging strategy, to be honest, because it's not like, you know, first always wins. But can you just unpack that for me?

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's no middle ground. So everyone, everyone in growth is looking for alpha, right? Find the untapped channel, beat everyone to it, right? Dropbox, like with the referral program, Groupon and email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo and just like a totally unhinged social media, right? All of them were kind of first to this concept and it really, really worked. And so as a growth person, you're constantly looking for like, where is this opportunity? What are the channels right now that are kind of green field? Now, the problem right now is like, channels are a little bit quiet right now. Facebook and Instagram are really expensive. Apple updates have made paid hard, organic social is really, really hard. Notifications are so crowded.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Everything feels really crowded right now. There's no middle ground if you're not first. It literally just means your only other option is to just be a lot better than everyone else. And that's like where we need to hold ourselves to.

• 40:12Harry Stebbings?

  What channel do you think the world doesn't appreciate that should be appreciated more?

• 40:17Speaker 00

  This is a conscious version one. I think community and how you can unlock your power users to share the value of your product to their own miniature communities is incredibly powerful.

• 40:29Harry Stebbings?

  How do you do that?

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Let's take students. There are students using perplexity and getting tons and tons of value, but we under index in awareness with students relative to chat GPT. So then the question is, well, how do we take our best students and give them everything they need, marketing budget, swag, whatever they want, so that they can go be on the ground on these campuses and drive growth for perplexity and build density on that campus? Let's arm our troops, our power users with everything they need to grow for us. It's an incredible strategy because they're on the campus and these are not big campuses. You can build density very, very quickly. And as soon as you have that initial density, then you see word of mouth start to come alive.

• 41:11Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you consider your biggest competitor?

• 41:13Speaker 00

  The obvious ones, Google and chat GPT.

• 41:15Harry Stebbings?

  Which one?

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Both. I mean, I think, I think search is a massive market. And so if there's somewhere we want to live, it's, it's going up against a big guy.

• 41:24Harry Stebbings?

  Where could you be better? What channel are you on now where you're like, mm, but we could be better?

• 41:30Speaker 00

  I mean, luckily for us, we aren't on many channels. We, we are still so organic, growth driven, partnerships driven. I do want to really, really try and figure out how we can unlock creators and tastemakers in a more efficient way. And that again is building relationships with fewer of them and working with them, not where we're just, you know, throwing a sponsorship placement on their newsletter or in their podcast, but like finding really creative ways to bring it to life.

• 41:59Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you there. I always say like a piece of content has to do one of two things. It has to educate or it has to entertain. And if it doesn't do that, then doesn't have any place in any of our things. So many people, social postings like thrilled to announce perplexity's new product.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you don't learn anything from that. Like I would rather try and entertain and come up short because okay, like that one didn't work. But if we're just trying to like go in the middle and say, here's perplexity, like that's not never going to work.

• 42:26Harry Stebbings?

  Before we discuss this team, I have to ask, what growth tactic have you done that you wish you hadn't done?

• 42:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I think I'm still kicking myself for those newsletter sponsorships.

• 42:36Harry Stebbings?

  What did you not do that you wish you had done?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  This is an in-product one. I don't think sharing is inherent to the perplexity user journey or user flow. Like, I don't think that we have an inherent viral loop where someone does some research and then shares a thread or screenshot to another person. But there's a lot of sharing happening on perplexity right now. Take an answer and put it on Twitter or send it to Harry. Whatever it is, we see a lot of traffic come in through sharing. The more I really, really want to get my hands on that experience and just drive sharing and find creative ways to promote sharing of this knowledge that you are curating as a user.

• 43:15Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, dude, I want to discuss like building the team before we do a quick fire. It's really hard by hiring for growth. What is the right first hire in a growth team?

• 43:25Speaker 00

  It depends what you need. Do you want a marketer that can juice the top of the funnel, but can still get in the weeds, run experiments, think about onboarding flows? Or do you want a product person that can run marketing campaigns? I obviously fall into more of the latter, right? I want to like spend time in the data. I want to be turning over stones. I want to be holding on to that data. It depends on the makeup of the current team and the founders. If you're feeling good from a top of funnel perspective and you have a complex funnel that is cross-device, go for the product person that has built these funnels before.

• 43:58Harry Stebbings?

  Do founders make good hires? You obviously were a founder before. Rippling, another obviously very successful company, has a huge amount of founder hires. Do founders make good hires? And what are your lessons from that?

• 44:10Speaker 00

  We have a lot of founders here. And I think the best part about hiring founders is that they are much more comfortable at taking very big swings and being willing to fail. Like, it is by nature, if you're going down the founder path, you have to be a little bit more comfortable in that world than the average. And the average person is not willing to fail. They're not willing to go stand up in front of the company and be like, we're going to try this out and it might not work. And so the more people you can get like that, you know, Mike Maples. Flegge has this incredible analogy that early startup teams need to be like a jazz band, right? Like, throw out the sheet music. This is not what it's about. It's like, no, you are here to just riff off of each other and make it work. And that's where founders,

• 44:51Speaker 00

  I think, are great. It can go sour, I guess, as things scale and you start to need that sheet music. You start to need a lot more coordination as the company grows. And some founders just don't want to, they miss the jazz band and they're going to jump quick to the next jazz band.

• 45:07Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have to manage them in a different way? Maybe they're a little bit more larger egos. They like to feel like they're in control. Is there any different elements in how you manage them?

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think you have to let them cook. I mean, you want to give them enough. If you if you hired them and you trust them and they can execute, get out of their way. Let them go experiment, right? I mean, you don't want to put guardrails over their ability to experiment and try different things. Guardrails is going to hurt everyone. It's going to make everyone think a little bit smaller. You remove those guardrails, everyone's thinking big. One person at the company goes, takes a big swings, runs a TV ad with Jim Harbaugh. Everyone's now thinking at that level of, okay, how do I, how do we go bigger? And that's the kind of culture you want to create.

• 45:47Harry Stebbings?

  As a European, I know guardrails very well. I specialize in them. Cookies allow. What do you mean when you say about hiring for taste? What are you looking for? What are you not looking for?

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, taste is the ability to understand what good looks like. I'm convinced that I don't, I'm not actually that good at anything. But what I can do is go look at what's happening in the world, understand what good looks like, and then try and reverse engineer it. So that's all, that's the game.

• 46:14Harry Stebbings?

  How do I know if someone knows what good is? Do I put different product in front of them and ask them to analyze it? How do I know?

• 46:21Speaker 00

  I mean, I think it comes down to like, what are the questions they are asking that shows the depth at which they are thinking, right? I mean, I'm a pretty open book when I'm interviewing about what our challenges are. And we kind of just jam on them. And you can tell very quickly how deep someone is thinking about your challenges and their experience with it, that, okay, they they're asking the right questions. They're trying to reverse engineer how to make this good very, very efficiently.

• 46:47Harry Stebbings?

  What questions do you always ask in an interview? I always have some similar ones.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I mean, I love to trade war stories, especially for people with a little bit more experience of, okay, you were at Lyft, tell me like, tell me about the war stories around when times are really hard. What didn't work? Tell me about your biggest, you know, just total flop and let's go laugh about this flop together.

• 47:08Harry Stebbings?

  How was it continuously getting shit on by Uber?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  No comment.

• 47:13Harry Stebbings?

  I always ask about like, what was your first entrepreneurial endeavor? Great entrepreneurs always start young. High correlation between the amount of activity you have in early entrepreneurship and how successful you'll be later on.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it's almost a personality trait and you're trying to evaluate that personality trait. Because that's something you probably had early on.

• 47:32Harry Stebbings?

  Do you do take home assignments for candidates in growth?

• 47:35Speaker 00

  I do for every, every role. It's a big ask, so I am cognizant of trying to keep it well scoped.

• 47:41Harry Stebbings?

  What, what is an example of a take home assignment and how do you run it?

• 47:44Speaker 00

  We, we give, we give different scenarios, usually two or three different scenarios. They're all fairly open ended, so you can go into as much depth or, but the goal is to walk us through your thinking of how you would approach it and all the different areas that you need to consider along the way. It is really hard.

• 48:02Harry Stebbings?

  Do you do it for perplexity or it's a different company?

• 48:05Speaker 00

  For perplexity.

• 48:06Harry Stebbings?

  So like you'll give them an actual talk because some people say it's unfair because you have asymmetric knowledge and they don't know it and you know it, so it's going to be hard.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  I think that's fine, like that's a, that's a fair argument. In the end, like we give them a hypothetical about perplexity, like we're considering launching X. Now walk us through your thinking of how you would approach this launch or something like that. So it's not, you know, something that we have done. We're all in the room brainstorming together and you can kind of get a sense and feel of like, what is it like to jam with this person and brainstorm with them when it's that hypothetical, but still related to perplexity? How quickly are they going to ramp up and fit in?

• 48:40Harry Stebbings?

  How quickly do you know when you've made a mistake on a hire?

• 48:43Speaker 00

  I think fairly quickly. My rule of thumb is if they truly need an onboarding doc, we're in trouble. Because if they need me to say, here are the 20 things that you're going to do over the next 30 days, and like, this is your checklist. I want someone who can come in, turn over stones and build their own onboarding doc very quickly. Like, I am very high trust in the amount of rope I want to give someone to go in here and start working on the area of ownership that you have and go make it really, really great. I'm going to have perspectives on how we should be implementing it or what we should be working on, but I want to see them come in and very quickly be able to figure out and have the motivation or the drive to say, this is what we need to work on and here's why.

• 49:27Harry Stebbings?

  I do get you. I always find the best employees start before their day one. Do you know what I mean? They come in and they're like, I've done all these things. You're like, whoa.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I got my laptop on Friday and was going to start on Monday. Like, I was in every single dashboard we have, and part of it was just pure excitement. You want someone that is just like obsessing about the problem at day one.

• 49:46Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for you. What are your biggest hiring mistakes? And how did that change how you approach hiring?

• 49:51Speaker 00

  This is something I'm still working on. I'm slow to hire, and I'm trying to get faster at it.

• 49:56Harry Stebbings?

  Why are you slow to hire?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  I care a lot about team. People say that, you know, they quit the manager, not the company. Like, I think people quit the team. And if you have an incredible team that is just like well old machine, mutual respect, and everyone loves working with each other, it's really hard to quit that. You're just having too much fun. And that's what I want to try and create. I want everyone at the company to be like, man, I wish I could like work on the growth team for a couple of months. Like, that's the thing, like, that's the goal to have. And to find someone that can fit into that, that I believe is going to jump right into this and play an amazing part and have the mutual respect of everyone and be a great teammate, it's hard to find. And you can overthink it sometimes. So I'm trying to be a little bit quicker to the punch on evaluating and taking risks with hires.

• 50:38Harry Stebbings?

  The only thing I will say to you is the biggest mistake that most people say on the show is they've hired too fast and they wish that they could let fires burn, so to speak. And so I'm not sure. I think sometimes it's Better to wait for the perfect person.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's trade offs.

• 50:53Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, that's hard. Dude, I've loved doing this. I want to do a quick fire. So I'm going to say a short statement. You're going to give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Sounds great.

• 51:02Harry Stebbings?

  First, most common expansive irreversible mistake you see founders make when it comes to growth.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Oh, assuming the user's pain points when they're just straight up faults. Really, really not understanding what does someone actually need to learn in that first session? It it's the most common that you end up running up the wrong wall.

• 51:26Harry Stebbings?

  What's the most polluted growth channel today?

• 51:29Speaker 00

  I mean, I think especially with all the latest Apple changes. I don't know how anyone is going to make Instagram or Facebook ads efficiently work at scale as like a core growth channel. It's a very classic answer.

• 51:40Harry Stebbings?

  No, I completely agree, though. You've got a friend and they've just been given a head of growth role and they start tomorrow. What advice do you have for them pre their starting this new role?

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Obsess about every single number in the dashboard. Get your hands in on as much data as possible. You know, when I started at Lyft, I was literally like entry level, nobody role. But like my one thing is like, I'm just going to know the numbers better than everyone else. And like you start to learn how the machine works when you see how all these numbers start to correlate with each other. And then when you start knowing the numbers better than everyone else, you get pulled into all these incredible meetings because you're just the numbers guy. Like, we have to have him in the meeting because he knows these numbers better than anyone. And I think that is the ultimate way to just build intuition of how your growth machine works. Where are the friction points in it? And that is what's going to help you make the better decisions in terms of what you should be working on.

• 52:31Harry Stebbings?

  What is the single biggest lesson that you took from Lyft that was successful first?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Don't need to run paid ads, focus on retention, focus on iterating on product.

• 52:42Harry Stebbings?

  What did Lyft do terribly that you vowed never to do?

• 52:46Speaker 00

  We overestimated how much better we could make the ride sharing product. Like, when you look at ride sharing four or five years ago versus today, how much has the product changed? Not that much. So if you believe that you can keep making the product better and better and better, and that's going to unlock new markets, well, that's one thing. But if you're wrong about that, well, then you should be pivoting to meal delivery and stuff like that, because you've hit your diminishing returns. And I think we underestimated how quickly we hit the ride sharing diminishing returns on the product side.

• 53:18Harry Stebbings?

  So the takeaway there is understand where the moment of diminishing returns is.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. And it's tough in AI right now, because the world is changing every second. But it's critical to be honest with yourself of what is the true TAM of this? Are we still seeing unbelievable growth in product iteration?

• 53:36Harry Stebbings?

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

• 53:39Speaker 00

  Just clarity of what the hell it is. You put 10 growth people in a room and everyone has a slightly different answer of what we're working on. But it's growth product and growth marketing. And I think the more people that understand that, the better.

• 53:50Harry Stebbings?

  What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 53:53Speaker 00

  When I joined Perplexity and was writing out my pro con list, I think the one that was like up there was like, can the application layer capture and monetize value? Or is it all just, you know, one big pass through cost? And now, you know, fast forward not that long, I love being at the application layer. Like, this is awesome. I think that's really changed my mind, where I think the application layer is an amazing place to be. I think that's where so much of the value is going to emerge.

• 54:18Harry Stebbings?

  It's so funny how the whole ecosystem re-centers and re-shifts their mindset around where value accrues. I remember doing this show where I would literally, everyone was just saying, how does any value accrue on top of these models? It's just wrappers.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  And I mean, it's crazy that eight, nine months ago, that was a big question. It wasn't clear where there would be value. And today, we're getting a little more insight into people who crush at the application layer, who go really, really specific on high TAM areas can make a lot of money.

• 54:48Harry Stebbings?

  What's Aravind's biggest strength?

• 54:50Speaker 00

  He can go from a very high level company strategy of what direction do we need to go? Very quickly, two seconds later, down into incredibly specific weeds of like what a user funnel should be. He can jump at these layers like no one I've ever seen, and this is all in one meeting.

• 55:10Harry Stebbings?

  What's his biggest weakness?

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Perplexity is his first big swing at a company. And so there's a lot of intuition that he's picking up on the fly. And it's awesome to see how quickly he is to pick up on whether it's growth intuition, whether it's partnerships, whatever it is, but he's learning on the fly because he is a first time founder.

• 55:29Harry Stebbings?

  Totally, one hundred percent. Final one, what's the best growth strategy outside of perplexity? That you've been like, wow, that is really amazing in the last 12 months.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  I'm a huge fan of products or features that are built that can drive viral sharing with users. I think like Spotify wrapped, right? It was like the first one to just like, oh my God, this is going, everyone's sharing this. And I think that strategy is now adopted by so many AI startups, whether it's image generation, whatever it is, but create something that is very, very shareable or very unique. And people want to put out into the world and now everyone knows who you are. It is the fastest way to grow by letting your users do it for you.

• 56:13Harry Stebbings?

  Why don't perplexity do a perplexity wrapped? How many searches, favorite topics you searched on biggest person you shared to be quite cool?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Who says we're not doing that?

• 56:24Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, spoiler, spoiler, boom, mic drop to finish the show. And I'm here for a job anytime, dude, just anytime. Ventures, you know, tough business. Dude, thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I've loved having you on and you've been a fantastic guest.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

• 56:45Harry Stebbings?

  We are the biggest users of perplexity here. That was such a special opportunity to have Ramon on the show there. If you'd like to hear more from us, you can find us on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's two zero VC. But before we leave you today, many founders I've talked to touch on this idea of if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. Canva helps your team go far together with their collaboration tools. Your team can work together in real time on the same presentation doc, whiteboard and more, with name labeled cursors, tag teammates in comments and assign tasks. Canva supercharges teamwork and simplifies.

• 57:22Harry Stebbings?

  Workflows with Canva you can go far together and fast thanks to canvas AI tools you can generate text slides in seconds it's a serious time saver and because of AI it's built right into Canva your team can stay on task with no app switching it's incredible you can also save costs by aggregating your visual communication tools with Canva so save costs save time make workflow Jesus this is an easy sell start designing today at canva.com designed for work and talking about growth let's dive into how Voyantis is transforming customer acquisition as this is my growth podcast I'm so excited to share with you the amazing story of the fastest growing company in my portfolio voyantis.ai who isn't being asked by their board to improve unit economics the voyantis is the first and only company I've seen that has found the way for you to crack this nut by not only leveraging your first party data to predict customers lifetime value but truly coupling these predictions with a prescriptive layer integrating with and influencing each and every step of your customers growth journey voyantis helps you acquire the right customers in Google and in meta allocate incentives to the right customers via your sales force and braze and trigger the right upsell option at the right time for each of your customers oh and check this out the best part voyantis are not only increasing ROI by 20 to 40% but they're also improving the quality of your customers their solution has already improved unity economics for leading companies like Miro Rappi Moneyline and many many more so if you want to improve your LTV to CAC ratio before your next board meeting which I recommend start by heading over to voyantis.ai forward slash 20 VC that's V O Y A N T I S dot AI slash 20 VC to get a free value assessment as always I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday