How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable)

[00:00] The only thing that's worse [00:02] then a channel or a tactic that you tried not working, [00:06] The only thing that's worse than that [00:08] is when you didn't give it [00:11] the appropriate shot. [00:13] And you prematurely or erroneously conclude it. [00:18] that it doesn't work. And it's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies. Oh, YouTube? [00:25] We tried it. It doesn't work. Okay, can I see what you've tried? And then you look at it and you're like, oh, this thing was not designed. [00:33] to even have a shock at working from the get-go. [00:40] Yuri Timmin is a full-time advisor to companies looking to figure out their growth strategy. And he's worked with companies like Canva, Airtable, Otter, Whimsical, Hymns, Flow Health, and a dozen others. [00:52] I know a number of founders who have worked with Yuri, and they all tell me that he transformed how they think about their growth. Before becoming an advisor, he spent nine years at Grammarly, where he led growth and marketing and helped turn it into the household name that it is today. In our chat, we get incredibly tactical about all of the ways that you can grow your product, including when and how to invest in virality, SEO, and paid growth, what's changing across each of those channels, and the most common failure modes for B2C startups. [01:22] is the most tactical and actionable conversation I have had yet on how to grow your product, particularly a subscription product, and I'm really excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Yuri Timmon. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers? At least 40%. And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do? Well, based on our data, about a third of people

[01:52] switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave. I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly [02:22] Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster. If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Modern Treasury. [02:52] system for moving and tracking money. They're modernizing the developer tools and financial processes for companies managing complex payment flows. Think digital wallets, fiat crypto on-ramps, ride-sharing marketplaces, instant lending, and more. They work with high-growth companies like Gusto, Pipe, ClassPass, and Marketa. Modern Treasuries' robust APIs allow engineering to build payment flows right into your product, while finance can monitor and improve everything

[03:22] Enabling real-time payments, automatic reconciliation, continuous accounting, and compliance solutions, Modern Treasury's platform is used to reconcile over $3 billion per month. They're one of the hottest young fintech startups on the market today, having raised funding from top firms like Benchmark, Altimeter, SVB Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Y Combinator. Check them out at moderntreasury.com. [03:50] Yuri, welcome to the podcast. [03:52] Thanks for having me, man. This is great. It's even better for me. All right. All right. So I'm going to give a quick bio. Let me know if I missed anything really important. You were head of growth at Grammarly. You spent nine years there kind of doing all the things that helped turn that company into the killer product that it is today. You left that, I think, a couple of years ago. Now you're advising companies, mostly full time. I think mostly on growth strategy and I think mostly consumer startups. Is that about right? [04:22] Supercritical corrections. Number one, it was only eight and a half years ago. [04:27] Usually people round those up. I'm impressed that you get accurate. I figured eight and a half is long enough. I'm not sure I want to round that up, but I'm kidding, obviously. Yeah, that's largely it. Grammarly was a hell of a run. [04:44] trying to take a step back. [04:47] from that and that [04:48] Stepping back has kind of taken on a life of its own vis-a-vis advising. How many companies have you worked with at this point, advised? And what are some examples just like companies people would know?

[05:01] It's now been about, I guess, two years and three months since my last day at Grammarly in an operating capacity. [05:09] I probably worked with [05:11] maybe 15 companies in the last, you know, [05:14] two and a little bit of years. Obviously not all at once. [05:20] It's usually 4 to 5 at any given point in time. [05:24] But some of the ones that I've been really... [05:26] that I've really lucked out with in terms of getting aligned with companies like Canva, [05:32] Hair table, hims and hers in the personal care space. There is otter, [05:39] dot AI, [05:41] Who else? Flow Health, the world's most downloaded period tracker. I use that for my wife. It's handy. Good, good. Yeah. [05:52] Yeah, I was trying to... [05:54] to get my wife to try it out, but unsuccessful. You're failing in your growth. She was like, "Are you trying to push me to having a third kid?" I was like, "No, no, I swear. It's just product testing." Clever. I've had Casey Winters on this podcast and Elena Verna. It's like the three of you [06:15] worked with the most companies as advisors. And I don't know if there's some kind of contest you all have or anything, but do you think about that at all? Is there anyone else out there that you think is in the running? Okay. I mean, first of all, just being mentioned in the same breath as those two is an accolade in and of itself. I mean,

[06:35] Thank you. [06:36] I look up to both of them. They've gone first. [06:40] Also, I credit a lot of my... [06:44] A lot of my getting started. [06:47] to both of them because they've been very generous with their time when I was just kind of considering, advising. Especially Casey, if they listen to this, huge shout out to both of them, but Casey especially, he's such a mensch when it comes to just being generous with his time. [07:01] So no, there is no competition. [07:03] But had there been one, [07:06] I suspect I'd be in lead right now. [07:09] Because I've done it in a shorter period of time. I'm much newer to advising than both of those. But no, I have a ton of admiration and respect for both of them. They're phenomenal, what they do, and I learned a ton from them. [07:39] advising. I'm curious, how many companies do you work with at once normally? [07:43] Yeah, so I played around... [07:47] with different quantities. [07:50] So a couple of things. So you mentioned, you alluded to earlier that I advise full-time, [07:56] What I'll say is that mostly the only thing that I do right now professionally is advising, but it's not quite full time. I hard count my week at about three to three and a half days a week worth of work, which is a personal choice. And so that is a hard constraint that I'm working with.

[08:26] hacks. If I try to go beyond that, [08:30] the overhead that it creates in terms of the cost of context switching just becomes overwhelming. And I feel like I'm not [08:39] showing up as best as I can with each individual company. As an early plug or anti-plug, depending on how you answer this, are you looking for more companies to work with right now? Or are you just like, don't even try, I am so at capacity right now? I'm so at capacity right now. [08:57] I've also just been very fortunate to always be at capacity. [09:01] But I think for every four to five companies that I'm working with, [09:06] Think of it as concentric circles, right? There are another maybe... [09:10] 10 to a dozen companies that [09:13] We're actively exploring if we want to work together in the future. And then there is another concentric surplus of maybe 30 plus companies that I'm just friends with. [09:21] So, [09:22] I'll take the plug. [09:24] Uh, I'm always up for a meeting, um, [09:28] Austin Falder is working on important problems. Cool. While we're in the plug, I guess, how do people find you online? What's your Twitter? I mean, honestly, probably through Lenny's podcast. That's one. But honestly, LinkedIn is really the only place. I'm pretty low-key otherwise. Okay, great. That was a lot of meta stuff. So let's get into some meat stuff here. So you talk to a lot of consumer startups. You help them figure out how to grow, how to evolve their product.

[09:58] is when you look at a consumer startup, I imagine there's a few archetypes of how they grow. And I'm curious if that's a mental model you use when you're like, oh, I see company X, they're probably gonna grow this way and here's what they should focus on. How do you see that? - Great question. I think there are a couple of ways to answer that. My sweet spot is subscription properties. [10:19] And it's not just consumer, right? I do work with a lot of B2B companies. It's just not most of them. What they all have in common is, [10:25] they lean into consumerized type of growth loops and growth motions, right? So they're very self-serving nature or have meaningful self-server engines. So if I think about subscription companies, I think [10:38] eat buckets that I see them falling into. If you were able to [10:43] Neil. [10:44] your unit economics and you have really strong consumer LTVs, think [10:50] Grammarly, think Canva. The single-player LTVs for those companies are very, very high. They're kind of like average S&P [11:00] LTVs for B2B companies. What's like a number there just for folks to have a little context? I'm not at liberty to speak to those, but we're talking like in the hundreds of dollars, right? Whereas some other, like most consumer subscription companies that are like five to seven dollars a long, their LTVs typically cap out at like 50 to 60 bucks. And so if you have really healthy LTVs,

[11:30] buyer, so they may be single player, but they're using it for work. [11:35] Right. And so maybe they're expensing it or just the perceived value so much higher that they're willing to bear that, you know, 120, 130 dollars a year. [11:43] subscription. [11:44] If I'm seeing things like that and I'm seeing that you're converting... [11:48] you know, seven, like five plus percent of your free users to a paid subscriber. [11:54] then there is a big opportunity to play paid, right, and lean into kind of paid growth loops and paid acquisition loops. There is another archetype, which is... [12:03] um you know if there are network effects for instance you don't find it as much with [12:09] kind of like single player consumer subscription companies, but obviously, you know, social media, consumer companies. There may be a strong referral angle, viral loop angle. If the utility increases, the utility of the product increases, the more users are using it. Another archetype I see are companies that can lean into SEO very heavily, especially if there is like a long tail programmatic angle. [12:35] Take Canva, for instance. Right? Their biggest... [12:40] initial growth loop, and I think this is public knowledge, was their long tail SEO strategy, where any kind of design, [12:50] project that you could think of, you would search for designing, [12:56] It's kind of like two categories of keywords, make keywords and template keywords. So if you're searching for a template of any kind,

[13:03] a wedding invitation, yada, yada, yada. They had an incredibly strong SEO and they were just capitalizing on all that long tail traffic. Not every product is going to lend itself to that, but I always look for that early on because you can build an incredible moat with that kind of strategy. That makes sense. There's kind of like these three engines that you can tap into. And I imagine the preference would be word of mouth, virality. And then if that isn't going to [13:33] Maybe just to kind of simplify it for listeners, what are kind of signals you can go after virality and invest in that and think that that could work? [13:41] Every founder would be like, "Yes, virality, that's how I'm going to grow." Yeah. Yeah. So. Well, yeah, I mean, look, honestly, the first thing you look for is that, is there inherent product network effects? It's something that it's either there or it isn't from inception, from my experience. I think it's very difficult to manufacture [14:00] I mean, you know, it's very hard to manufacture. [14:05] product network effects if they aren't there from the get-go. [14:09] Like Airbnb from your days, obviously, marketplace, very strong product network effect dynamics. You think of collaboration tools, Airtable, Monday.com, Whimsical, whom we both know, very strong inherent product network effects. Contrast that with a company like Grammar. [14:30] It just wasn't there. It's not an inherently multiplayer task, you know, constructive communication.

[14:39] Thank you. [14:39] And so you can try to [14:42] Engineer. [14:44] But from my experience, it's an uphill battle. So if you have inherent product network effects, that's when I think layering on referral loops and viral loops is, [14:55] right you think about like what dropbox has done around uh your file sharing like that's an iconic example then it's really powerful [15:03] I think that there is another case where referral and buyer loops can work even when they're aren't in here at network effects. If you have a really beloved product, beloved brand, there's a company out of Australia that I have opportunity to invest in called Leica. They do fresh dog food subscriptions. Incredibly beloved brand, a premium product, and so they're able to lean into kind of a give one, get one. [15:30] referrals even though there isn't inherent you know product network effects they're still able to kind of generate meaningful results off of uh an incentivized referral program [15:39] When you talk about network effects, what does that mean to you? How would you define that, briefly? Yeah. Honestly, I define it in, I think, [15:48] probably a pretty quintessential way, which is for every individual user, [15:54] the utility that they derive from the product increases the more [15:59] the more users there are on the platform. The expanded version of that... [16:04] is [16:06] you know, in the case of marketplaces, [16:08] It may not be the more users, broadly speaking, but the more users in the

[16:16] the markets that you care about, [16:18] In the case of collaboration tools, it's not the more users in abstract terms, it's the more users within your team, the more users within your company. [16:27] That correlates with the rise in your utility curve. Awesome. So if you have network effects, aka if the product becomes more useful with more people, or there's amazing word of mouth already, or there's collaboration, probably a good sign that you could lean into virality and maybe referrals. What about SEO? [16:50] Oh, that's a good one. It's a very timely question because I'm actually in a process of helping a couple of my companies figure out if it's the right time to invest in SEO. So I've been sort of like a... [17:04] forefront of taking like exploratory meetings with agencies and SEO consultants and things like that. [17:12] I mean, I would say... [17:14] The first thing to figure out, I mean, there are a couple of pillars. [17:18] Because obviously we all know that SEO has a different... [17:23] a different return horizon than, say, paid acquisition, right? It's longer out. It's maybe six months is the earliest you can see results. And even then, it's going to be a small trickle that compounds over time. If you're successful, right, or you may spend three to six months leaning into an SEO strategy and then realize that it's not going to back out, typically, at least in historically,

[17:48] a company probably is a series B before it starts, feeling like it has the luxury of making these medium to long-term investments. [17:58] But I think that's shifting right now, but that's maybe a topic for later or even for another pod. But a lot of the strategies that I think were reserved for like Series B are trickling down to Series A companies because they have to diversify away from paid, but maybe more on that later. So I think with SEO, it's like the first pillar I would say. [18:17] is. [18:18] Do you have a unique angle? [18:22] When you take a look at the SEO landscape today, you look at editorial landscape, which is typically like how to... [18:31] searches and who are the players there and what kind of information is being offered. Do you have something unique to contribute to that conversation? Another thing is like an audit checklist. Another thing is like, do you have a unique programmatic angle? [18:49] For instance, Canva did that with templates. Who else is programmatic? Zillow, Redfin, obviously all the real estate. That's really strong. [19:00] Zapier, right. So do you have a programmatic angle? And then understanding the competitive landscape. Or the other one is, do you have a unique data angle? [19:09] So for instance, a company I work with called Monarch Money, which is in the personal finance management space. Think of it as like,

[19:19] a new and improved version of Mint. There is a lot of users are connecting accounts, and you kind of have a sense of spending patterns and things like that. Clearly, there is a unique data, [19:33] And so it's a question of can you turn it into some kind of valuable thing? [19:36] organic search experience. [19:39] I won't go into... [19:41] into too much detail in terms of what we're thinking of there. [19:44] But that's another checkbox. If you can check two or three of those boxes, right, as like a back of the envelope framework, you may be in good shape. And then it's a question of like, how can you lower the cost of experimentation SEO as much as possible? I think as a rule of thumb, like if you can... [20:04] Time blocks it to 3 months. [20:07] Like, what can I do that at the end of three months, I know, like, is this likely to work or not? Awesome. A couple of follow-up questions. Absolutely. One is... [20:17] SEO feels like this dark art where you need some SEO wizard to come help you through this. Do you suggest companies find somebody or work with an agency or something else? What's your general feeling on agency versus some other route? [20:33] I think SEO is a pretty specialized skill set. There are some basic principles that always hold [20:42] Right? Like, [20:44] best content wins, right? And don't do shady backlinking, right? And make sure that you're on page SEO is good and your pages are easily crawlable. But I feel like,

[20:59] Everybody knows that and where the winners are determined. [21:03] R. [21:05] between the lines. Is that a sports analogy? Maybe. [21:09] Maybe between the lines. I don't know where that comes from. But anyways, what I mean is that there is a lot [21:17] a lot more nuanced [21:19] SEO developments and angles where I think the opportunity really lies to differentiate yourself. And that requires keeping up with the latest algorithm changes. It's very hard to do that unless you are specializing in the art. [21:36] or the black magic of SEO. [21:39] And so that's why I think getting an outside resource, at least for like an audit, [21:44] is really helpful. Now, whether it's a boutique agency or a solo consultant, I think that's more circumstantial. But I found, at least with the companies that I've worked with, if we wanted to quickly vet the SEO opportunity, I can do it at an amateur level, just plug things into similar web and try to figure out what opportunity is there. [22:06] But you can get these relatively inexpensive audits done, [22:10] From companies that you can then choose, do I hire them to help with my SEO or not? But I think that auditors usually have very good use of time because they have templates. So what they can turn around, you know, for... [22:22] five to ten key. [22:23] would take you many, many human hours to try to pull together yourself. Awesome. Are there agencies that you want to name that people can go check out or would you prefer just to keep it from having a favor? I'll give one plug. I think one of the

[22:39] Most innovative. [22:41] disciplined, first principles SEO, [22:45] thinkers that I've met is Ethan Smith from Graphite. It's not for everyone. It's a pretty high-end SEO shop. So I wouldn't send the Series A company there. [22:57] But Ethan also produces a lot of resources. And what they've been focusing on at Graphite lately has been actually automating a lot of their work and turning it into SaaS. So I don't know how far along they are, but you could probably already get into some of their betas, some of the tools that they're offering. [23:17] Sweet. I'm going to try to get Ethan on this podcast. I've seen his stuff and it's awesome. Yeah, he's a math scientist when it comes to SEO. We need math scientists on the show. Okay, so we've talked about virality, talked about SEO. I imagine that's pretty straightforward. If your LTVs are high enough and you can pay back ads on those, then that's where you go. I imagine everyone can try it. [23:40] It doesn't work for everyone. What if, yeah, anything you want to add there? [23:44] I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot to that. I don't know how deep you want to go down the paid rabbit hole because it's changing. It's probably the most affected growth. [23:54] in light of the market turbulence, the venture sentiment shifting, [24:03] I've seen paint acquisition strategies and budgets bear the brunt of that fallout. And so the question is, you know,

[24:14] Where do you want to go there? [24:15] That's a really good topic. I was saving that for later, but let's chat about it right now. And I imagine part of this is Apple's tracking changes too. So I guess my big question is, is paid still [24:26] lucrative and a good path for many companies is like 50% of the time less effective. How do you see that shifting recently and how should people think about paid in the consumer subscription startup? Well, I think in the short term. [24:40] Thank you. [24:41] Let's break it down into phases. I think in the short term, [24:46] peer acquisition, [24:48] and just paid media dollars are contracted. [24:50] And we're seeing it already, right, with Meta's advertising revenue, Snaps advertising revenue. [24:58] There's clearly a global contraction happening to paid media budgets. A big part of it is because all of a sudden the definition of efficient acquisition and good payback windows is shifting. [25:11] Right? So if before for a consumer subscription company, you know, 12 month payback was decent. Now it's like you better pay back your paid media in six months or less. That's the sentiment. [25:24] The obvious reaction is like anything that's north of six months or well north of six months, we're cutting at. [25:30] That's the third step. [25:31] then there is just less tolerance for ambiguity and attribution. When the sentiment is like, "Grow at all costs." If you can't attribute things perfectly, that's okay. Now it's like, [25:43] especially with venture-backed companies, you have to have two plus years of runway,

[25:47] managed to burn a lot more diligently now. And so whatever you can't attribute sales to, [25:54] Bye. [25:55] That shit's gotta go. [25:56] I don't know if we can curse on the pot or not. Fully available. Well, I've been holding back for the last 30 minutes. No, I'm kidding. Let loose. All right. Not kid-friendly, but nobody's cursed yet. So this could be a first. All right. [26:12] But anyways, yeah, so I think there was a short-term contraction. [26:18] Thank you. [26:18] However, that opens up an opportunity for smart kind of attribution investments. [26:26] So you're seeing an emergence of some interesting attribution-related products, a couple that I've [26:35] personally started exploring and looking into. And then you just see a lot more heads of growth, heads of user acquisition, thinking about attribution, building their attribution stacks. And so I think that once we settle into some kind of new normal, which is going to be a combination of [26:56] Thank you. [26:57] just better [26:59] attribution, [27:00] Uh... [27:02] attribution stack on average for companies, combined with just the level of acceptance [27:10] that attribution will never be as good as it may be. [27:14] once was... [27:16] we're going to probably get, you know, hit like,

[27:19] come out of that and you'll see paid budgets start making their way back. But even right now, during contraction, there are going to be some winners. [27:25] The companies that have strong cash positions, have strong unit economics, strong payback periods already, [27:32] Grammarly, Canva, to name two that I know personally, a couple of others, or many others probably, they're going to be winners because all of a sudden, if previously they were competing with companies who were nowhere as efficient as them, but for whatever reason had the green light to keep spending, [27:48] Now all those are going to pull back their budgets. And so those that have been disciplined have the instrumentation, [27:55] to track things. [27:57] better than average, they're going to benefit from decreased competition on app platforms, decreasing CPMs, etc. So they're going to be winners, for sure. Wow. I haven't heard this perspective. It's so interesting that the fact that it's gotten harder is creating new opportunities for companies to do it better and more intelligently. You said you mentioned a couple tools, products that you found to be potentially helpful in this. Is there anything you could mention there? Yeah. Yeah. I mentioned a couple that I've [28:25] kind of connected with in the last couple of months. So, first of all, media mix modeling is making a comeback. [28:32] which is something that got popularized in the Mad Men advertising era of the 50s, pre-digital. [28:44] That was basically the methodology. I can't speak to the specifics there. The science is a little bit, I'm out of depth there, but it was basically a way to use some data to determine a budget

[29:02] et cetera. It was leveraging data to some extent. You were doing it maybe on a quarterly basis, and then you would only update it every quarter. There was no way with media mix modeling, there was no way to adjust budget like in quarter, right? Because you weren't getting the data feedback loop that frequently. But media mix modeling is now making a comeback because there are so many offline channels that are part of folks' channel portfolio today. And then plus, a lot of the online channels are becoming less trackable, right? Meta, for instance, right? With [29:32] and so media mix modeling is going to come back, and the company that's leading the charge of bringing the media mix modeling, [29:40] methodology of like the traditional advertising era and ushering it into the digital world is a company called the recast recast recast yeah so i've heard really good things i haven't tried them with any of my companies yet but there are a couple a couple that i'm on the horizon hopefully just to double click there for a moment uh is that still useful if you're not doing tv and other forms of advertising i think it's still you're just doing yeah i think i think it's useful if you're spending a considerable amount what's considerable i'd say north of a hundred thousand [30:10] of paid media. And if you have some level of channel complexity, so you're not just on Google or Facebook, but maybe you're on three plus channels, then I think it still makes sense. The other ones in the incrementality space, they have very different methodologies. Because at the end of the day, this might be obvious to folks, but [30:32] Maybe some will find bowing.

[30:33] Click-based attribution, right, or the digital attribution we were all fawning over, cookie-based and click-based and URL parameter-based attribution, it never demonstrated a causal relationship between our media spend and business results. It was only good for correlative. [30:53] insights, right? And the only way to determine causality is through like real, you know, controlled experiments, randomized control experiments through incrementality testing, which is typically really hard to do cleanly. [31:07] And also companies have often been wary about doing it because you have to turn off a channel, potentially in a key demo. And you're like, yeah, the benefit is the learning of whether it's actually incremental, but the cost or the sales that I will lose today, [31:25] But the only way to really know, [31:27] how effective your paid media is through ongoing incrementality testing. So there are two companies that are addressing that. [31:35] two that I am excited about. [31:38] One is measured. It can be found at measured.com. [31:42] Amazing domain name. Amazing domain name. Go with that. And then the other one is incremental. But incremental, no vowels. [31:52] except the last A between the T and the L. Excellent. Great job. So many free plugs today. Yeah, I love it. It's great. This is what people need, right? They're just like, okay, what do I actually do? And so the more...

[32:07] it's clear what to actually try and how to solve these problems, the more people can actually make change. I had a couple of questions here that I wanted to follow up on. One is, founders might be listening to this and they're like, "Amazing. Okay, we're going to grow. There's three ways to grow. Let's do it all. Let's get someone on SEO. Let's get Jane on paid. Let's get Fred on virality." There we go. So, in your experience, [32:34] Is it smart to focus on one and then expand down the road or try them all, see which one works best? How do you advise companies think about these options? [32:44] I would say focus... [32:46] paired with rapid iterations. [32:49] Right. [32:51] with limited resources, [32:53] Naturally. [32:54] you have to practice some form of essentialism and ruthless prioritization. But at the same time, [33:03] the clock is always ticking. [33:06] right? You have burn, [33:08] There is a finite number of tries that you have at finding what works, right? What's going to help you unlock the next level of growth, right? Get to the next funding round, right? Extend your runway. [33:21] And so, [33:22] I think either one taking to an extreme focus or trying multiple things is not a good thing. And just in case it's not obvious, if you focus on one thing, [33:32] And if it ends up being the wrong thing, [33:34] Thank you. [33:35] you've wasted really valuable time and now you have so much less time left to find something that does work. Spreading yourself very thin, oftentimes, in the early stage companies, it's one person who's in charge of all of growth, but they also have some other kind of responsibilities like maybe ops and customer success. If you get them to try like five different things, they may not try them fully, anyone individually fully enough,

[34:03] right because i like to say the only thing that's worse [34:06] then a channel or a tactic that you tried not working, [34:11] The only thing that's worse than that is when you didn't give it [34:15] the appropriate shot. [34:17] And you prematurely or erroneously concluded. [34:22] that it doesn't work. And it's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies. Oh, YouTube? [34:30] We tried it. It doesn't work. Okay, can I see what you've tried? And then you look at it, you're like, oh, this thing was not designed to even have a shot at working from the get-go. So to answer your question, I think it's focus with some guardrails so that you know exactly when it's time to move on to the next thing. This episode is brought to you by EPPO. EPPO is a next-generation A-B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. [35:00] Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. [35:06] Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage.

[35:36] get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Epo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Epo supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out Epo at getepo.com and 10x your experiment velocity. [36:01] This might be too hard to answer in a chat like this, but... [36:04] Do you have any guidance for how to know when you've gone far enough? I imagine there's a lot of nuance and detail there. Is there anything that you could share? [36:12] Love the question. It's very thought-provoking. I think with some tactics and some channels, you can fairly objectively [36:22] create some test guardrails where it's like if it's YouTube, [36:27] we know kind of like minimum number of impressions that you got to get [36:32] Try two to three creative angles. Here's the click-through rate range that you're looking for. If you're getting within these ranges on these KPIs, [36:44] Keep going. [36:46] If you don't, [36:47] abandonment. I think it's important to also know that abandonment doesn't mean we will never revisit it again. [36:55] Right. [36:56] It just means that because every time you're evaluating, right, the concept of sunk cost, [37:01] So you have these periodic, I think, periods of revaluation where it's like, okay, did we try enough? And this is more art than science, frankly. It's like, what's the incremental lift for us as a team?

[37:14] to try to experiment with the next phase of this channel or this tactic? And what is the opportunity cost of that? [37:21] What are the other high profile things that we could be trying? [37:26] I know, yeah. [37:27] you were right and safe. This is probably too hard to answer in this format. But I would break things down maybe into two types. There are some channels or tactics where you can objectively figure out some guardrails for when you know [37:41] It's showing promise or not because you can pull benchmarks on like good click-through rates and things like that, right? [37:48] then there are other tactics where you just have to exercise more judgment outside benchmarks. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That was actually really valuable and a very challenging question to try to summarize quickly. So thank you. One more quick question along these lines. So you talked about these three broad ways companies grow. Oftentimes, a couple of them work. Something I've seen, and I'm curious if you agree, usually one is like 80% of your growth and then you layer on a couple more [38:18] Yes. I think companies that we know and admire, [38:23] And, [38:24] a reference in case studies or in podcasts such as this one. [38:30] From the outside looking in, [38:32] you oftentimes assume that [38:35] It's a high D. [38:37] diversified. [38:39] growth engine. [38:41] I have to say it's often not the case. Definitely the 8 and 20 applies. There's usually some kind of strategy that's working.

[38:50] overwhelmingly well. [38:51] And there is a scramble to. [38:54] eternally. [38:56] to minimize reliance. [38:58] and not one thing. [39:00] Thank you. [39:01] And... [39:02] on [39:04] discover slash on the log. [39:07] the next step function, the next growth horizon. [39:11] Right. [39:12] In the case of Grammarly, [39:14] it was performance marketing, kind of over-reliance on performance marketing. [39:18] during part of the company's lifecycle. [39:22] And so it was like, okay, this thing is working. It's efficient. So you don't want to stop pouring fire on it. But you're also thinking, you know, [39:31] months and years ahead, you know, what kind of risk does it open you up to? And so there's a scramble to find and I've been successful there. You know, with Canva, it was the SEO angle, right? So for them, that was working really well, which is more defensible than paid, right? That's sort of like long tail programmatic SEO angle. [39:49] But look, you're always susceptible to Google algorithm updates, right? And so how do you risk yourself from that? But to your point, yes. And I think that surprising thing to people probably is that it's also the case with some later stage companies. [40:05] It's not just early stage companies that are kind of like one trick ponies. Sometimes it's later stage companies as well. [40:11] What this makes me think about is there's kind of these three phases to growth. There's the kickstart phase where you're just doing a bunch of stuff, trying to get things moving. Then there's that you discover your first main growth engine. And then there's layer on additional engines because you want to diversify. Yep. And one interesting thing.

[40:27] what I believe is an interesting... [40:29] Period. And a lot of it is gut feel. [40:32] And I try to direct companies. I encounter sometimes early stage companies when one thing is working well, [40:38] and they're already worried about over-reliance and [40:43] And they're starting to talk about diversification. [40:46] and I come in all the time and I see showing up in their OKRs and I come in and be like, no, no, too early. [40:53] I'm glad that you're such a forward thinker. [40:56] put all of your energy [40:58] Like, sure, this one tactic is accounting for, say, 80 plus percent of your user acquisition, but your user acquisition is still small, right? So, like... [41:07] Don't get distracted with diversification. We'll get there. Lean more into this. Hit these growth rates, like stand this up. [41:14] build this into a real strategic advantage, this thing that's working. So I actually have to talk them out of focusing on diversification too early. [41:22] Contrast that with some later stage companies who are at scale, I don't know, 50+ million ARR, [41:29] 90 plus percent reliance on a single acquisition channel, which is mired with risk. [41:36] And diversification is the blind spot for them. And then with those, I have to be like, hey, y'all, here's a risk that you're carrying. [41:43] Let's start carving out bandwidth resources to try to go and explore these other channels and tactics. That's such an important point. It reminds me, Casey has this hilarious line that he uses that the money is always in the banana stand, or there's always more money in the banana stand from Arrested Development, that basically your growth is probably going to come from the same place it's already come from, and that you shouldn't take that for granted, and you should put most of your efforts into continuing to optimize that versus being distracted by, oh, let's do SEO now. I see that argument.

[42:12] For sure. So you mentioned at this point about how later stage growth strategies are starting to move earlier into growth strategy planning. I'd love to hear more on that. Yeah, let me expand on that. In the world that we lived in in the last 18 months, or let's say up until... [42:29] say, three to five months ago. [42:32] Right? [42:33] We're living in a world where [42:35] Funding was abundant and plentiful. Startups were conditioned to think that they can raise twice a year. [42:42] Right? Valiations were... [42:44] quick toppling within a year. [42:47] Right? Like you raise in January and then you raise in like November and your valuation 5X. And so... [42:53] Companies were coming off of these like [42:56] ridiculous series A's of like, you know, 15 to 25 million dollar A's. [43:03] And, [43:04] They were like, we got to grow as quickly as possible. [43:07] What can we activate to give us immediate return? And the answer is almost always paid. [43:12] That's what's going to give you, especially if you think you want to go back to raising, you know, [43:18] Less than 12 months later, [43:21] that forces you to focus on very kind of short-term tactics, short payoff tactics. And so things like SEO, [43:30] There was no room to think about that for early stage companies. Because payoff is going to come maybe in 12 months in terms of meaningful payoff. We care about getting to the next round and maximizing our valuation between now and then.

[43:45] SEO is for the grown-up companies, right? [43:50] When were that, we can think about it. [43:53] And they were getting this reinforcement from everywhere, from peers, from VCs. It's like growth, growth, growth, right? Growth at any cost. [44:01] So I think what happened now, and we'll see where things stabilize because I think we're still in the midst of a little bit of chaos. What's happening now is... [44:12] The same VCs are saying, [44:15] Okay, it's now survival. [44:17] You have to extend your runway, minimize burn, [44:21] you know, hibernate if you have to. And all of a sudden growth, whether explicitly or [44:27] you know, via inference, [44:29] becomes kind of a secondary objective, especially for all these companies that are far from being cash flow positive, right? They have to figure out how to stay alive and not have to go back to the market and be sort of a victim of, [44:40] how shitty terms. And so... [44:43] I feel this is me extrapolating because venture capitalists didn't actually tell me this, but I'm extrapolating that. [44:50] Growth is a secondary objective now. It's really focusing on sustainability, due to economics, extending the runway control of your destiny, getting to default alive. [44:58] Thank you. [44:59] Right? [45:00] And all of a sudden, it's like, okay... [45:03] Plus, paid is a lot less attractive. Now, we can't afford to be acquiring users at, like, LTVCAP one-to-one. [45:10] That's now a no-no. And so SEO is now becoming more attractive, because once you got your burn under control,

[45:20] Thank you. [45:21] and you're thinking, "Okay, we saved all this money by reducing our paid budget, we're cutting it entirely." [45:27] Like. [45:28] how do we put some of those resources back to work? [45:31] But all of a sudden, SEO starts looking a lot more lucrative because it's almost like you... [45:37] you took the urgency of like grow at any cost in the next six months, you took that out of the equation. So now it's like we're in a position where we're gonna, you know, [45:46] we don't have to go back to raising, you know, 18, 24 months. We have, you know, 18, 24 months worth of runway. And now companies are starting to think more in terms of, you know, [45:57] building more sort of sustainable and defensible growth initiatives. Fascinating. And as much as people may want to do SEO, like we talked about earlier, it doesn't mean they will be able to pull it off, right? Because there's these things that have to be true for your type of company. Going back to a point you made earlier about paid being a really interesting opportunity right now because it's become harder. Would you say generally you're kind of like pro, try paid, go paid in this time? Because I'm finding a lot of startups are like, [46:27] approaches to grow. Is that like alpha right now? Start thinking about paid in a creative way and maybe this is going to be a huge advantage. [46:35] So they're too resistant to paint. I mean, I'm oversimplifying, but I think... [46:39] people will hopefully appreciate the oversimplification. Number one, because it actually drives returns... [46:48] add efficient unit economics, whatever that may mean for your company, your business, your industry.

[46:52] The other way to do it is because it's a very quick way to get learnings. [46:57] on messaging and positioning, on designs, on features you're thinking of launching, etc. It's hard to get... [47:05] faster learnings at scale. [47:08] Then like AP testing headlines, Google search or whatever. I think the problem that I find is when a company can't tell me which camp they're in, [47:16] or would he try to say that they're in both? [47:19] But really, it's like, okay, you're funneling 100K a month. [47:24] It's like super inefficient and they're not even like running experiments to actually get the learnings. [47:30] Thank you. [47:31] I can assess a company, even if I don't know the industry as well, based on just seeing their funnel performance, their conversion rates, their retention curves, their LTVs, understanding their churn. I could say whether they stand the chance. [47:46] at making paid work as a former strategy, right? So not just a learning mechanism, not just kind of a feedback engine, but actually a profitable at delivering acquisition channel. [47:59] or strategy. And if I see that they're not there, right, because the funnel doesn't convert well, the users don't retain, the LTVs are too low, [48:08] then I say, hey, it's not time for paint. [48:12] Maybe carve out a little bit of budget if you want to quickly test positioning and things like that. [48:18] But it's just too soon. [48:20] But if instead I account for a company that has really healthy conversion rates, strong LTVs,

[48:25] I do a little bit of competitor research. [48:27] and I can see where the opportunities are, which channels are less saturated than others, then I may say, hey, it's worth a go. And also just seeing the bigger picture of their financial health. How much runway do you have, right? What is your monthly burn look like? [48:41] Right? Because paid is like cash going out the door and it will return hopefully at some point, might be six months, might be a year. And so that's a real constraint. You mentioned onboarding and funnel conversion. Two questions there. One, do you have kind of a heuristic of like, here's good for conversion rates? Is there something that you think about there that you could share or is it very case dependent? I think it's case dependent, but it's not even case dependent, it's category [49:11] is the talk. [49:12] case but it's like we got to know about what buckets we're talking about right i will say that let's say we talk about prosumer [49:20] Freemium Saps. [49:23] a la grammarly, a la Canva, whimsical, video, things like that. Yeah, I can probably, I can confidently say that like a healthy, [49:33] website visits, [49:35] to a free user, a free account creation conversion rate, it's probably like in that 20 to 35% range. From landing on the site to signing up. From landing on the site to like a free user. At scale. [49:48] Earlier stage, if you have really strong product market fit with some kind of small audience segment, that conversion can be 40 to 50%. But as you go broader,

[49:57] and we'll probably asymptote. [49:59] at like 25-30%. [50:03] What about like a conversion, you know, from if you're a freemium from like a freemuser to a premium account or a paying account? [50:14] I think anything under 5%, [50:16] It's not gonna... [50:19] it's not going to work long term. [50:22] regardless of how big your top of funnel is. Like you may get the soft one, but like for you to remain an independent company, continuously growing, um, [50:31] you know, pre-IPO, like I don't think it's going to happen. It's got to be north of 5%, ideally like north of 7%. Wow, super handy. On the onboarding point, what's your thoughts on investing in onboarding and that part of the flow? Like how often is that a fruitful area of investment? Almost always. A lot of my work is in that sort of a, [50:56] rosumer space so the products tend to be [51:00] more complex. [51:02] right air table whimsical canva video right there's like [51:08] They're very robust products. [51:10] And so... [51:12] It's very easy to get lost in their editors. [51:16] And I think what all of those companies are trying to do for their respective verticals and use cases... [51:24] is they're trying to democratize access.

[51:28] to... [51:30] you know, [51:31] things that previously you had to rely on, [51:35] on. [51:36] professional sport. [51:38] Maybe in the case of Airtable, it's your engineers, right? [51:43] In the case of Canva, it is... [51:46] you know, professional graphic designers. In the case of NVIDIA, it's professional video editors. So when they're trying to democratize access, but they're also trying to make the products robust enough to be comparable to a professional grade quality. [52:03] And it's a very difficult place to play it, right? It's like, how do you make it simple enough where, you know, a non-public, [52:09] professional can use it, but robust enough where they go and say, "Oh yeah, this is as good as if I would have hired a professional [52:17] Fill in the blank. [52:18] And that's where onboarding, sorry for the long-winded answer, that's where onboarding, [52:24] is really, really important because there's such a huge difference between landing someone on that initial editor page. [52:31] Be it, Airtable, Canva. [52:34] you know, left to their own devices. [52:36] Thank you. [52:37] versus getting as much relevant information upfront. [52:42] and then customizing that landing experience for them. [52:46] So that if they're there to do X... [52:48] and we know XYZ about them. [52:52] We're able to guide them. [52:53] and not expose them to the robustness of the product all at once. So the short answer is

[53:01] Almost all the time, onboarding is a big opportunity. [53:03] Awesome. That's what I was expecting to hear. To give folks some context, what's kind of an order magnitude that you've seen improvement on onboarding and maybe impact on a company? [53:13] improving onboarding. [53:15] earlier stage companies where you still haven't really approached the local maximum, you haven't experimented with a lot of things. I mean, you can [53:24] 2 to 4x activation rates easily. [53:28] through onboarding, [53:29] I think later stage companies like [53:32] You know, maybe... [53:33] Series B and beyond. I think you can still probably get to 20 to 30% lift and activations. It depends on how many low-hanging fruit [53:44] are left to tackle. [53:46] That makes sense. Yeah. TLDR, onboarding. There's always money in the onboarding banana stand. On that kind of same idea, do you have a general feeling of investments in this stuff often pays off and helps you grow and is often higher ROI and investments in bucket B are rarely successful? What would those two buckets be? So thinking of investments wrongly, right? Not just [54:16] getting to know your customer, [54:19] always pays off. So it's user interviews and getting to know your market, right? Your customers and your prospects always pays off. Customer research, insights, surveying,

[54:33] interviewing. [54:34] you know, panels, incredibly useful. And I found it to be very, especially early stages. The amount of clarity and momentum that it can create inside of a, you know, seed series A up to series B company, when you first do some proper research push, [54:53] the way it can galvanize the team, [54:56] and give them focus and clarity and purpose. [54:59] is remarkable. So that always pays off. What doesn't pay off? I think over-reliance on paint, [55:06] it comes to bite you in the real end. I think what I think about tracking and attribution, [55:14] I think it's a question of the right level of investment at the right stage. [55:19] Rarely do companies get it right. They usually fall into one of two buckets. [55:23] where they underinvest, [55:26] in attribution. [55:27] And they are now, you know, their budgets are high. [55:30] They have a broad channel portfolio. [55:34] and they have a hard time figuring out what's working, what isn't, and they just get into this inertia. It's like, well, overall, the company has been growing. [55:43] And it's been growing roughly over the same time that we've been increasing our spend. [55:48] We're scared to break it, so we're just going to keep standing. [55:51] Or companies that read horror stories about other companies overspending, [55:57] They sometimes try to invest in attribution. [56:00] too much. [56:02] Believe it or not, where?

[56:04] They're trying to get everything perfect and scientifically pure. [56:08] Thank you. [56:09] but what they don't realize is that the payoff may not always be there and so [56:16] How do I fit this into your question of, [56:18] I think attribution tracking, attribution incrementality, [56:23] It's definitely a worthwhile investment arena, but it could both be... [56:28] a good or a bad thing depending on the level. So you got to make sure the level of investment is appropriate for your stage. [56:34] and what you stand to gain from it. Awesome. You're such a good interviewee that you come back to the question. No practice, I promise. That's great. Okay, one last question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. I'd love you to get your thoughts on advertising on TikTok and YouTube and broadly, is there any other tactics, avenues that you think are kind of underutilized or emerging that folks should be thinking about? Yeah. So TikTok, [57:00] Like definitely one thing I'll say about TikTok is I'm seeing it come up more and more as a channel that works well. And sometimes even the most efficient channel, most efficient digital channel for some brands. But I think that the thing about TikTok that oftentimes I was surprised about is you often hear, oh, TikTok. [57:18] That's for the 15 to 22-year-olds, right? I'm done with my gents, Gen Z, right? And, oh, my audience is different, so I'm just going to ignore the channel. [57:32] Yeah. [57:33] TikTok has so many users.

[57:36] And it's still so relatively unsaturated with advertisers. [57:40] you [57:41] that like your audience is on there, on there, like you'd be surprised, like, you know, [57:46] I've worked with brands that their core demo is like 40+ married. [57:52] you know, [57:53] making 200k plus in household income. [57:56] And you wouldn't think that that demo is on TikTok. [57:59] And it is. That's what we'll put about TikTok. Other channels. I mean, I think [58:05] Out at home. [58:07] is still not getting enough love. [58:09] podcasts okay uh yeah yeah sponsor this one there we go you heard it from your direct direct mail [58:18] What has happened? [58:20] They've gotten better with attribution. [58:23] Because before a lot of them, a lot of those channels were written off. [58:27] as sort of like, look, actually, this is just too hard on there. [58:30] and attribution is so good and reliable on digital. [58:35] So that gap, that canyon that existed in actual mission capabilities of online and offline, deterred a lot of people from offline. Today, offline has gotten better. [58:46] Thank you. [58:46] at attribution and at positioning themselves as being able to do attribution. But also online attribution has deteriorated. [58:53] So all of a sudden, that argument... [58:56] kind of slimmed out a little bit. [58:57] And I'm seeing offline get a lot more traction and podcasts especially are actually very, very performant. [59:05] for a lot of brands. Yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind. Those are great. Happy to hear the podcast piece. Excellent. And then I actually, I'm an investor in a startup that did a big at-home campaign.

[59:19] and they [59:20] just told me that it was like a 10 to 1 positive ROI on the deals that they got out of it. So I've been seeing that too. And that's such a good point that the measurement and attribution online has come down where it maybe makes more sense to try stuff like that. Amazing. All right. Are you ready for our very exciting lightning round? I'm going to ask you five questions, I think, and then just, yeah, let's go through it quick. Let's do it. Okay. What are two or three books that you recommend [59:50] Ooh, that's something that I think is very wrong to recency bias. [59:56] Right. It's like, what are some of the books you've read recently that you've enjoyed? But I would say there are a couple of books that stuck with me over the years. I think on the business side, on the business side, productivity side, it's a book called Essentialism. [1:00:11] I forget the author's name. I think his last name is McCown or something. [1:00:15] And it's basically the book about... [1:00:17] Thank you. [1:00:18] Cutting out the noise and finding a singular focus and doing that really well. [1:00:24] It's a book that was a game changer for me at Grammarly, being sort of new in my career, having really aggressive goals, not being scared to say no, taking on a lot, just thinking like, well, I'm only working 12 hours a day. There's 12 more left. I can just, you know, like I can do it.

[1:00:54] That book was incredible and I used it a lot. I pretty much got copies for everybody on the team, like 40 plus people. And that is a book I swear by. I read a lot outside of work and business. I don't know if it's appropriate, but I'll say that. If the Freckles, A Man's Search for Meaning. [1:01:14] It's just a remarkable memoir on perseverance. And I think the biggest takeaway is... [1:01:21] You can't control what's happening around you, but you can control your reaction to it. And then I'd say that a book that I read recently... [1:01:28] because I was very, you know, [1:01:30] affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I'm originally from Ukraine. I believe you are as well. [1:01:38] It hit very close to home, and there have been a lot of references drawn between President Zelensky, [1:01:47] And his response in this war and Winston Churchill's response in 1941 [1:01:53] when Italy started marching. [1:01:55] through Europe. [1:01:56] And so I read a book called, I think, The Splendid and the Vile. [1:02:00] by Eric Larson. - Yeah, I read that. I read that. - Did you also read it since the invasion? - No, it was before that, but I totally get that now. - Reading it right now, because I've been following the conflict very closely, but for people who haven't followed the conflict or maybe have only followed the war in a cursory way, you can put what's happening into historical context.

[1:02:25] remarkably well. So I feel like that book accomplishes two things. Number one, it's like, [1:02:30] you learn something about not so distant history that maybe you didn't know, which was about Great Britain's and Winston Churchill's kind of [1:02:37] courageous response in the face of Hitler's invasion of Europe. But you also can draw so many parallels to what's happening today. And hopefully, hopefully, that helps us [1:02:50] understand what's at stake. Not to end on too grandiose of a note. We'll go less grandiose quickly, but I will add one thing that stood out in that book that is also true in the Ukraine is how during the firebombing of Britain, people are just like going out every day, going to clubs, still living their life. And same thing in Ukraine. And not just Kiev, but it's very life. [1:03:20] Yeah. Less serious stuff, maybe. What a transition to what's your favorite other podcast? Honestly, there's only one other podcast that I listen to right now. [1:03:30] because I've just been so consumed. Like I listen to a lot of like live streams and read a lot about the conflict, which has taken me, which has taken up so much of my like headspace. That's not work related, but I would say that the all in pod, [1:03:43] It's a cool way for me to just catch up on everything that's going on through their unique filter. That's probably the whole thing. Cool. Yeah, I learned a lot. I learned a lot from that one. There's so much drama on that show. Okay, great. Favorite recent movie or TV show?

[1:03:58] Anything stand out? So that's another thing. I've been like since February. [1:04:03] Right? Like, I've watched like nothing. Like my Netflix queue just keeps growing because they keep emailing me saying, "This new season is out." I'm like, "Oh yeah, I used to like that show. Let me add it to the queue." I mean, recently I had some downtime. The kids were with grandma, so I watched them hustle. [1:04:20] with Adam Sandler. - Love that. So good. - Yeah, it was good. It's very light. [1:04:25] It's not like a movie that's going to make you think a lot. [1:04:28] but it was like just good old entertainment. Yeah, I like that. I like that summary. Yeah, so delightful. Maybe one more question. [1:04:35] Who else in the industry do you [1:04:37] most respect as a thought leader? Maybe someone people may not know, or if anyone else comes to mind. Yeah, that's a very good question. So I would say, [1:04:45] You know, first off, I do believe that [1:04:49] some of the brightest minds, [1:04:52] Honestly, in any craft, [1:04:55] are people that you never hear because it takes a certain personality, energy, [1:05:02] and probably a lot of other circumstances, right, to... [1:05:06] Invest in your personal brand, right? And also, it's very hard to do that while still staying relevant as a practitioner. [1:05:14] I mean, if I think about myself two years ago, before, you know, [1:05:19] starting advising, [1:05:21] I was just kind of living in my Grammarly cave. And I felt like I was probably at the top of my craft, but [1:05:27] I didn't have time to pick my head up or maybe not even just tie, but I didn't know where to start.

[1:05:33] to pick my head up and do something like this. I would say some people that I mentioned, Ethan, [1:05:39] In terms of SEO, SEO and just organic growth loops and content as a growth engine, he is best in class. Who else? Okay, so Mark Fisk, he shows up in the Reforge chats a lot. He was leading growth and marketing at Credit Karma for a while. [1:06:09] performance marketing attribution, you know, and just kind of paid acquisition at large. Those are two people that I make sure I, and there are others, of course, but those are two who I make sure I stay in touch with at least on a quarterly basis because any casual catch up just yields so many nuggets. [1:06:25] Amazing. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you? Honestly, I don't have a very strong... [1:06:33] online presence. I would say LinkedIn is probably the only place where I take things. The recent, [1:06:42] So folks can find me there. They can also find me inside of Lenny's newsletter. [1:06:47] I do many good appearances there once in a while and on this pod. [1:06:53] How can folks be helpful to me? [1:06:57] promote the shit out of Lenny's newsletter and Lenny's FOD. And if you're building awesome things, come talk to me. I always carve out some amount of time in my life just for non-commercial things, just to have conversations with founders and spend 30 minutes with them on the phone, expecting nothing in return, and maybe save them some time for making some of the mistakes that I've made and help direct them on a more optimal path. So,

[1:07:25] So it's kind of, it's about it. Amazing. Yuri, you are awesome. Thank you so much for making the time to do this. I learned a ton. I can't wait to get this episode out. There's just so much meat to this thing. Dude, this was good. I feel like my nervousness was unfounded. This was super organic. You are just as welcoming as you are outside of the pod. So yeah, thanks for having me. [1:07:50] Thanks, Yuri.