How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

probably fire most of your marketing team. My philosophy is that the ecom playbook is the right playbook for SAS. Every single scent needs to equal a purchase or an add to cart. Matt Winsky, he's worked at Superhum. He's worked at Whisperflow and now he's just joined Excelbacked Victor.com and he's looking to make it third time. I wouldn't say lucky cuz he is a master of growth.

Look at Superhuman and Whisper. These are two of the fastest growing product like growth products and this is a masterclass in how you grow really freaking fast in a world of AI. Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG. I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You have metagoole and life cycle. You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month.

We have kids that are like 17, 18, 19 that are making 20, 30k a month just making a couple ads for us. >> Ready to go. Matt, it is so good to have you on the show. So, thank you so much for joining me, Matt. >> Yeah, thanks for being here. >> Now, you've worked with some of the best companies from Superhum to Whisper now with Victor and we've seen these companies and a huge amount of SAS companies rise with the product leg growth PLG motion.

And now we're entering a world of agents. What changes in the growth world when we shift from humans to agents with product like growth? >> That's a great question. I think uh I mean all of the the startups I've worked with uh have been PLG, right? And I think in a world of agents uh there's definitely a layer where PLG still matters because PLG assumes you have a perfect self-s serve funnel to the human.

And in the same way, you're definitely going to want to optimize it for how is an agent doing research? How is it picking the tools and the APIs that it's actually using? And I think it just takes the same framing and diligence to why the product already worked from the human end and just understand how are agents making decision-making. So the the the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned in my opinion for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop

when tools are being selected for certain tasks. When you look back at say superhuman if we go back in time chronologically it grew very kind of craftsmanlike with founder referrals. What's your reflections or lessons from that experience on Superhumans's growth that you've taken with you? >> The the tastem of what it means to create a strong product.

Uh like that for me was born while I was at at Superhum. Uh because at the end of the day, no matter whether you know, if you've used Superhum, you've likely stayed using Superhum just because every little element of that product is is hyperrefined to make you want to continue using it. Um but I think the the difference of what was the early scale of superhuman where it was super founderled word of mouth referral uh there was essentially a asimtope that you know the the product hit where they had it they had to follow

a different playbook and uh there was a like this was you know 3 years ago roughly uh and uh back then you know what was SAS now we call AI SAS uh everyone was running more of the uh you know just PLG motion referral word of mouth without doing paid and they were laughing like you know ecom's been doing you know the the UGC programs hundreds of thousands of ads like paid ad spend is the way to drive performance and the resistance was definitely there while I was at superhuman uh but you know seeing what you know I've

been able to do alongside a great team at whisper and now victor uh my philosophy is that the ecom playbook is the right playbook for SAS because uh if you look at ecom you have Every single scent needs to equal a purchase or an add toart. You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of channels that you're essentially balancing to showcase the entirety of the brand.

And that's the model that I took and applied at the end before the the Grammarly acquisition at Superhum to to scale paid and then follow that exact same motion for whisperflow. Uh, and I think that's that's really what put it on the map and got it to where it is. Because like we were talking about before, uh, distribution to me is the only moat. And you have to have that strong of a playbook when it comes to marketing.

Cuz like in today's world, that's the only way to succeed. >> Dude, I'm going to love this show because most people say the same thing. And what everyone tells me is that no, no, you should wait to do paid. You should wait to do paid. it's a dangerous drug that you can get hooked on. When is the right time do you think then? >> Right away. Right. So like at the end of the day uh paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape or form, right?

Like there there's a ton of narrative that like focus on brand go uh organic content build all that base. That just takes too much time. And uh yes, do that motion while also doing all of paid because you can refine messaging, do creative testing, test your funnels, test your positioning all within a week on paid. How long is that going to take you if you do some content writing, you talk about it on a podcast, you see if it sticks, you're going to do some user interviews, great.

Do all of that, but then you have a much faster engine of validation on the other side on the paid amplification end. When we actually break that down, if I'm an early stage founder, what should I actually do? How much money should I take to spend on page? Should I do it on one channel versus 10 channels? If I'm an early stage company, I don't have mega budget.

What do I actually do? >> Yeah. So, I mean, I would say it's it's definitely start with what I say is the the core two. Uh, so like I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You have met Google and life cycle. And obviously like your site and all the rest is is in the middle. uh because you have your uh strong video intent platforms both in meta and like YouTube ads.

You have the search intent of like people not knowing your product exists but they're searching for something right via the keywords. And then uh I add in life cycle as well because if you don't have a net to like nudge people and show up in the right place, email, SMS, whatever it is, push if you have an app, um you want those three three things spun up because you can scale to your first million 10 million ARR just off of those three things.

Um, and then obviously, you know, you're you're you're investing into the site, you're investing into founderled content. There's like the other things in there, but in paid, just focus on meta and Google and you'll totally be fine. Everyone's like, "Oh, we have to do TikTok and Reddit." Like there comes a time and place to add in a million things because in the same way that like uh a lot of people get lost with agents is they like start doing a million things with agents and they do them all poorly.

It's the same thing here, right? If you do a million channels and you do them all poorly, it's not going to help you out. >> Okay. So, we have Ma, we have Google, we have Life Cycle, and we start spending, I don't know, let's just put a hundred grand down there. Let's say we've raised a if we raised a $3 million seed round, is 100 grand fair. >> Yeah.

I mean, I I think it depends on like your average revenue per user in the unit economics, right? Because it depends how long is your funnel, what what is that 100K going to give you, right? I think that's uh but usually I'd say like yeah if you raise let's say 3 to 5 million that's like a good start budget to essentially validate that we put money people are going to actually want my product.

>> What should we be looking for then? We have 100k and we put it across matter and Google I should say those two. What is a sign that it is working versus not working? >> Yeah. So uh I I'll also frame I think a a massive gap in the SAS space where like I'm waiting for for startups to be made that fill this gap. So I'll zoom out and and if you look at ecom uh there are companies like triple whale and elevar that have existed for many years and what those tools do is triple whale is essentially a mutual exclusivity

platform that tells you okay you add a pixel to your website it's out of the box you plug in all your ad spend and then it tells you because there's usually overlap right if you run meta ads in Google they're double counting right and then life cycle is also triple counting at that point so what a tool like that does for ecom is say great I plugged in all my variables tell me exactly what is driving revenue from a new customer basis and you have that out of the box.

You don't have to set anything up. And the other side is conversion tracking which is like add to cart, purchase, server side. There's like a ton of technical stuff on on tracking. That's just like a massive headache. But it's there's a solution in ecom that is out of the box. Takes 15 minutes to set up and it's done. You don't have to think about it.

For SAS, completely different world cuz you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch. Right? When it comes to analytics, there's a DB, there's a BI layer. So maybe you're using click house and hex uh last click you know first click attribution all of this is homegrown at every single startup there is no out of the box SAS that fills that and that that's why all of the companies that struggle don't do that first that you have the right martekch stack to understand if we're spending what is actually

moving the needle because the platforms won't tell you because you have the wrong setup for conversion tracking you don't have measurement and you're spending into the air. And I'd say 90% of companies don't do that as a first step. Before you spend your first scent, have everything set up. >> How do I set that up if we don't have it in SAS? How do I set it up as a founder?

>> This is what I essentially did both at Superhum and at Whisper Flow, now at Victor, uh is essentially coming in and defining what that looks like, right? Right. And and it comes uh to have a strong analytics leader uh as well as like a strong uh analytics dev that can essentially set up all of that on your website, set up all of that inside of your product to make sure that you are cuz most people stop at the we have analytics to track our product.

Are all the marketing platforms getting the same signals? There's like there's a thing called match rate on like meta and then there's like a enrichment score on on Google. If you're not maxing that out, you're you're like missing 50%. Like you're it's just ghost people. Meta doesn't see them. It's not attributing conversions. And the way that the platforms work in today's environment is each platform's algorithm does what you tell it.

So let's say we we have poor conversion tracking uh that doesn't track when someone subscribes to our product and it's like a 50/50 match, right? And if I optimize for that subscription, the higher volume amount of events I have, the more data it has of what a subscriber looks like. And when I optimize for that, Meta will give me more of those people.

But if you have poor conversion tracking, Meta doesn't know who those people are. And it just randomly targets people and you you'll have a super high CAC. You'll say, "Uh, paid doesn't work for me." I'd say most of the time people haven't done the actual setup correctly before they can say paid doesn't work for me. >> So, we get that analytics leader.

We get that set up in place. What are we looking for then? What is good metrics? And what metrics should we be optimizing for? Is it acquisition? Is it retention? Is it spend when you're first getting started? Uh the main thing that you optimize for is like it's the most important event to you as a business. So SAS, it's it's the subscription or let's say the the start trial or in Whisper Flow's example, it was, you know, the download, right?

Super upperfunnel event. Um because we had a desktop client and an iOS app made it super hard to track. But you know pick what that event is and essentially validate that okay we spend 100k what is traffic cost what is our acquisition cost per user right and and just focus on acquisition cost because PLG and the product team are going to focus on retention as long as you bring in the quality user right and that's why over time you'll probably change the conversion action to be what the most important event is right so

for example at Victor uh we have it's like a pretty hard funnel to go through. You either be an admin in Slack or let's say you're a smaller team and anyone can add apps or you need to be a tenant in Microsoft Teams. You go through onboarding and then you add Victor into Slack or Microsoft Teams. That's our conversion action. Super downfunnel, but we know that if you optimize for that and like because we we're super high arpoo, we can have a couple thousand dollars in CAC and the unit economics still work.

Uh but you need to like take the time to find that out, right? like what what does success look like at at the channel level? Uh but it's just just acquisition in the beginning. >> Okay. So in the beginning it's like cost per download. >> Exactly. >> Okay. Cost per download. And so if we're thinking about good ratios, so we hear like 5:1 C to LTV or LTV to CA and obviously um in the early days is one one okay?

What is okay? What is good? What is great? What is worrying? I >> I think it depends how much you've raised to be honest. If you've raised a lot, you just burn a shitload doing one to one and that's okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean like like like we were saying, right, distribution is everything in today's market. There's, you know, you you open up uh X every day and there's like 100 new products, five that are in your category, two that have absolutely just cloned your website, right?

This happens every single day. Uh and the only way you out compete them is is distribution, right? And um essentially you want to run one to one to essentially get as many users using your product and believing in you as soon as possible. You don't want to do it below that because then then you are burning money. Uh and then you have to analyze the website, the funnel and try and get it to that 1:1 and then I think there comes a a a room of scale where you have enough other channels, sponsorships, you're you're pumping

on AEO and all this other stuff starts to lift your your LCV to CAC ratio. I think everyone um in terms of economics is trying to shoot for like a 3:1 um and it also changes depending on what kind of SAS you are right like LTV to CAC is usually not enough you want to uh probably look at like LTV gross profit specifically if you're you have token cost uh because you're the biggest cost item is is usage at the end of the day.

So the economics are a little different depending like a whisper and a victor. How does that change then with a whisper and a Victor where you do have a token cost being much more significant than you had in a SAS world where there were no token costs. The biggest differences are first in that like Meta and Google are not optimized for like B2B SAS usage based products.

Like they go absolutely nuts with a So you're telling me there's a predictive revenue of a one person could be a 50,000 you know annual contract while another person will be 50, right? There's just like huge variance depending on single person can be a high user and like the the algorithm has no idea what to do with that. Um but but the other side of it is um we obviously have way higher average revenue per user but you know average cost per user is also higher right so you essentially want to make sure that you

actually have a good grapple on what cost is uh and a lot of people were like oh well that's my anthropic bill but what about modal what about inference cost what about all the other things that is allowing you to service your product and like have a good finance leader that's going to be able to essentially gut check yeah you've been missing these cost items this is what you should be optimizing for so we don't burn money and that's a lot I A mistake a lot of people make is not doing that analysis at first.

>> How much should I spend on creative for these paid channels? Like if we're going to do Instagram marketing, we should do we need we need a video. We need you creative. We need to How much should I spend on that? Cuz that can't be an afterthought. >> Yeah. Uh I mean I I would say you probably want to be spending not at scale but in the beginning as much in ad spend on creative because creative is everything in today's environment where uh and like people have you know heard this buzzword thrown around.

There's an update in meta that was called Andromeda that essentially changed the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting. So what meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are. we're going to analyze the creative and based on who we know you're trying to target, we will find those people for you. So essentially that removed like all the media buyers that were like tinkering campaigns and had strategies of how to do it that went out the door and their whole job had to

be creative strategy. So, in the beginning, and that's like you you'll see this for for for Victor as well as Whisper. Um, we have hundreds of creators that are doing, you know, different demos, different use cases to different audiences. And that's the only way you can scale spend. Like, if you, let's say you have 100K meta budget, you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month.

Otherwise, you're going to plateau. You're going to get outco competed. >> How do you do 400 to 500 new creatives a month? Uh you have a creator program where like uh at at you know at Victor we have uh we work we have our own creator program where we give a percentage of ad spend to people to essentially create ads for us. We obviously you know have some storytelling and they use the product.

So it takes you know a little bit to to acquire them but once they do that they create three to four videos a week and we have a couple hundred of them. We work with five agencies. We also have our in-house creative team. Uh so again ecom model ecom has been doing this for over a decade. That's that is how the entirety of ecom has functioned. UC creator programs hundreds of thousands of variations of creative and they've been doing that and that's like in their DNA.

SAS had to grow up to this and like because I come from that world that was the the instilling factor that I always brought in. >> Again I'm a startup founder. You're my adviser and angel investor. Well done. Um it's going to be a very unprofitable investment for you. uh how do I create a UGC network? I'm a startup. I need three to 400 creatives or do I just go and ask my my my daughter's friends at school to go and do it?

>> There's so I mean there there are a million agencies now, right? Like in all of these gaps and opportunities, the the sheer amount of like aggregation service based businesses. There's there's hundreds of thousands of UGC agencies, >> but most of them are shared. We get a lot of people every single day I get 100 plus messages being like, I can create clips for you.

What should I do as a startup founder to know which agency or marketplace to work with versus not? >> Yeah, I think it comes from like asking peers who do you use and that that's the nice thing about creating UGC. It doesn't actually go on their page. So they can represent every brand, right? And they can they can do ads for every competitor as long as you know >> Ah, okay.

Okay. So in this case, I'm creating it for you and then you use it. >> Yeah. I I I pump a million dollars on that ad. ah >> and it never shows up on your on your channel, right? It's just pumping creative videos and then yeah, you can also run partnership ads. Those work really well. Like you should have probably 30% roughly of your spend going to someone posts in collaboration with put spend behind that.

But yeah, like it could be someone that has no experience. Like the kids are making bank nowadays doing UGC for brands that will pay them a percentage of ad spend. Like we have uh we have kids that are like 17, 18, 19 that are making 20 30k a month just making a couple ads for us. And like the nice thing is if we keep spending on it and it's a great ad, they don't have to make another one for a while.

>> Have you found that 80% of the ad revenue comes from 20% of the creator? >> Yeah. 100%. Right. And that's also just how the algorithm also works is that it it finds the best ad and it pumps all the spend at it. Have you found there's commonalities in those eight 20% best performing? >> Uh I mean >> be be it a girl versus a boy, be it direct camera versus not, be it I don't know if you've seen this, but the trend of like cutting things in a kitchen whilst talking about something, making a coffee whilst talking about

something, it's a hook. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I I I think that uh pattern disruption as well as like getting you to stop cuz like the sheer amount of content that we digest in a day, like if it all looks the same, then you're going to get drowned out. So, the best creative essentially is like a rough shake of the camera that like seems like it's a mistake, but it got your attention, right?

And stuff like that works really well where it's just like a messy start and like, "Hey, yeah, like what's up?" Like, uh, and then talk about the product. Uh but at the end of the day um the the key thing around creative is not the one creative. It's the package of all of your assets together. They have to be different. They have to to the algorithm.

They have to look and feel different. So different ages, different genders, different settings, different hooks. If you only focus on this is what works and you pump just that performance will crater. You need to constantly be creating net new completely wild weird ideas otherwise your acquisition costs will start to rise. To what extent will that be replaced by AI creative?

We had Cliff Whitesman who's the founder of Speechly on the show and he spoke about how essentially he did it once and then they use AI to change background, change his clothing and actually one turned into thousands of variations. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that that is where AI creative, that's the superpower of AI in creative is spinning up variations.

But if you look at the like full videos that are AI, they're slop. Like you can tell immediately that it's an AI video. I think there's a place for it. Maybe 5% of your account is kind of just like a weird AI videos that just like are diverse. Um, but I think that's that's the secret sauce is being able to create variety. in no way, shape, or form is anything in creative to the point where you can replace real people.

>> I also don't buy that the algos don't denigrate AI content versus human content. >> I just don't. Yeah, you're 100% right. >> Um, okay. So, we've got this 100K and we've got this UGC network. >> It's not really working. What does not really working look like? It's not doing the one to one. How long should I give it? Should we do this for 3 months straight?

Should we do it for 6 months? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you you'll usually be able to say that like if you just get started, the campaigns have to warm up. There are like certain things you have to have already in place. So, like we said, you have your analytics, you have your conversion tracking, let it just run. And of course, you you already have to have customers coming in the door.

And ideally, that's why like PLG and product excellence is still the beginning step, right? Like have a product that people genuinely love and they want to tell their friends about. If that's already happening, then your conversion tracking is is working on your website or your app or whatever and you get to 50 conversions, right? Then you can start paid because that's like the the minimum line of whatever your conversion action is that the algorithm is going to say, okay, I have enough data to understand who your

target, you know, best customer is. Uh, and then I'd say within two to three weeks, if you launch a campaign and go through a couple like you you'll do two or three iteration cycles of we launched some creative, this worked, this didn't. Why? Okay, let's throw some diverse stuff. Let's do some variations. You probably want to give it a full 3 months, but you'll you'll be able to say, yes, I can start printing money today in like 2 to 3 weeks, or I have to go to the drawing board on all of these things, cuz there there

are a lot of moving pieces, right? the the ad creative, the ad copy, what is the landing experience, what is your messaging on that landing experience, is your page speed uh good, you know, is your are your screenshots in the app store actually sensible, right? Like all of those things are micro levers that compound. So like you also you need to be refining everything along the way as you spend otherwise also things will plateau.

You said a couple of things there which I just need a little bit help on the landing experience. What what do you mean there and what should I know as a founder? >> Yeah. So I mean like uh a lot of people have really poor like UIUX or website designer branding like absolutely awful right and like >> I don't want to throw shade but have you seen Post Talk?

I go on their side and I'm like I have no idea what's going on. This is like this is like Beijing's version of UI. The thing is is that's like a pattern disrupt thing for them and they know who their target audience is and the target audience appreciates the weirdness. >> Oh yeah, James is amazing and it works and it's a brilliant company and like phenomenal but I just look at it and go >> I mean like on on the flip side it's just like okay like do you know what your traffic mix is?

Is your site mobile optimized? The sheer amount of sites I see that the main CTA is like a scroll and a half away. Come on. And like that's the that's the first thing that you start with that like a basic audit will show you, right? And that's what I mean by the landing experience. If I read nothing else but your headline, do I know what you do? And like it's hard sometimes to explain what this, you know, crazy AI SAS niche product does.

Focus on your messaging. Actually have something that tells a user if they didn't move their thumb, they didn't do anything, I want to try that out, right? Like go through that proxy. Same thing with the creative. Same thing with the copy. That's a that's a frame that you want to take throughout the entire kind of funnel. >> Page speed really matters.

>> So page speed matters because uh it depends obviously who and where your target customers are, right? Like so like USK like you know we have good data and it'll be fine but like where page speed really starts to matter is both AEO and SEO. Um it is one of the core elements in what gets your site to rank in let's say a top 10 position on on Google.

And then same thing if you're if you're if for example a bot crawler uh goes to your website and it's it's a cheap call to say how long did your page come to load and if you're on a low essentially ranking from like a to f that the average person in the world will probably not load your site immediately. So like any like any second improvement is is a is a is a drastic jump in conversion and just the numbers show that right and even though it's like a it seems like oh yeah like it loads in half a second verse 200

milliseconds it does make a difference. Okay, so we have this 100K. We've done three months. I I I'm really enjoying this because as I said, for me, it's nice to follow the chronology. You have 100K. It's going well. I think how do I know whether to pour fuel on the fire, keep the budget as it is, and just keep testing, but in a more measured fashion, or uh this is not [ __ ] working.

>> You want to chart your total spend to your acquisition and how elastic it is, right? There's always going to be a lag where like I spend today and then I convert to paid in 14 days, right? Let's say, right? And that's like we're looking at two main things like revenue is the most important thing from an AR standpoint because we're in SAS. Um, as I spend up, does that ARR also spike, right?

And how elastic that relationship is? We'll immediately tell you oil on the fire or let's pump the brakes because as we spend up the, you know, this is a a very common thing that you'll hear, how incremental is your spend? It's a it's it's a question you should ask relatively early because it's once things are working, it's really easy just to like dial it up to 13 on a scale of 10.

Sure. And what ends up happening if you're not very diligent, all of that additive spend could have not been there and you would have gotten the same results and then you're just giving money to Meta and Google, right? And there's that fine line and that's why I'd say like true people that understand this in growth are on the rarer side because like there's usually like I am a expert in meta or I'm an expert in some other channel but being able to sit above the whole thing and say okay here's how the inter relationship

of this much spend here this many sponsorships this many you know podcast features this is how you know how much PR we're pushing all of that interreationship is how how you essentially ensure the most elastic right spend to revenue impact uh and that's like further down the 100k but that's like the that's the end state you are everywhere all at once at the right moments >> why did superhumans growth asmmptote then >> at the end of the day it was it was very much a you know premium product immediate payw wall and the

the core ICP was founders right and and we also experienced this at whisper right like the uh early adop opter tech founder is not an infinite audience. I think today it's an ever growing audience because everyone can be a founder. Everyone can have that frame of like what is my tech sack to be an army of one right but if you look back even two three years ago the tam of that is is is finite right and and and that's that was the first asmtote so essentially you know going after additional ICPS like sales and how do we

turn superhuman to be more of a sales engine for people looking at the recent opens on the right which is my favorite feature right I can see who's creeping on my emails and send them a reply so like stuff like that like adapting the product to more ICPS is where you get those additional stop changes but the asmtote is because it was hyperfocused on one ICP and if you don't proactively like open up the layers of the onion you're going to hit you know some kind of level >> but if you look at revenue scaling and you see

fixers scale faster than superhuman in top revenue number do you not just go we [ __ ] up paid >> well so yes right like fixer followed the ecom playbook right they UGC tons of ads strong on meta the thing is is uh slightly different uh value proposition uh in that >> different market, >> different market, different consumer, right? This is this is someone that like wants a simple tool that adds labels to their Gmail.

Uh so like >> would you say fixer should continue to just spend the hell out of this market then? Well, I mean like from from what I know, right? Like their scale was both on the B TOC side through Meta, but also like they they made big revenue jumps through the Outlook consumer that was hyper frustrated and big enterprise deals, right? And and that's like and that's also where, you know, superhuman you now Superhuman Mail did the same thing where going after big logos and ensuring that you can essentially have

salesled growth alongside PLG. I think Fixer did that also super well, right? they they pushed hard on the sales side cuz that that was also their background relationships they had from the email space. Um and that's why like same thing for for Whisper, right? Like uh it was really interesting to see that you know we were B TOC PLG but like a very large component of our AR was enterprise before we had a single AE cuz it was self-service enterprise adoption team licenses and that kind of stuff.

So you also want your product to be like adoptable easily by enterprise. I think that's a nice unlock as well. >> We mentioned the three channels, Meta, Google, life cycle. What are your lessons on how to do YouTube? Well, we hear about YouTube being the acquisition engine and machine that it is. Any lessons that I should know as a young founder? >> So, I mean, it's a totally different type of creative, right?

the uh so if you look at uh Meta and YouTube, they have like similar but slightly different like hook curves where like the the hook happens slightly later uh than like cuz on Instagram and Facebook you you want that immediate validation while on YouTube you're kind of there to spend the time digest the video so you have a little bit more of a longer attention span.

Um, and uh, a lot of people actually are terrified of YouTube because, you know, the best performing YouTube ads are 16 by9, so they're landscape. And most people are like, well, I have a UGC program. I just have story placements. What am I supposed to do? Um, so we did a really cool thing at Victor. Uh, we had Victor build an app for us that takes any story video and adds it into a static uh, template that has like logos that use us, G2 rating, and then a CTA.

and the video is the replaceable asset. And we turned all of our story ads into YouTube ads. So, every single one ended up on YouTube. Not all of them worked the same. We had to edit them a little bit to to to fit the format. Uh, but that's usually people are like terrified to get started with YouTube because of that reason. But just like go into go into Figma, make a template that's a static asset, throw your video in that, and just export that.

Welcome to YouTube, right? Like you can run ads that way. Um, and there's also um just like a different storytelling where uh you want it to feel like a organic YouTube video. So like someone talking about a a hack or use case of like, yo, I just started using this and it absolutely changed my life. I'm going to show you how, right? Like you're not going to say that in a meta ad, right?

It's it's a very different script in framing and filming. Um so uh we have a separate team that does the scripts, films the YouTube videos. is an entirely separate program from our UGC. We use some things from UGC in YouTube, but it deserves its own focus. >> We're going to go into the kind of team composition later. I want it to stay on channels. So, we now have a working program.

>> How do we determine how much fire to fuel to pour on the fire? >> Yeah. I mean, I I think it's it's all dependent on right elasticity that we define. So like uh we uh at Whisper did uh what I think everyone should do is go as hard as you absolutely can and then see it blow up and then understand where and how it blew up. Pull back and use that as information of now we know what is incremental.

We know where our ceilings are. We know that we hit audience saturation or we need more creative. So we did that last year at Whisper, right? We we like 5xed the budget from one month to another and where did the pieces fall through? Right? But the thing is the reason why we did that instead of uh trying to figure it out over time is like you don't have 6 months to say okay we need to be growing 30% 40% month over month over month.

And the only way that we can do that is okay, let's see where our ceiling is cuz maybe we would have been surprised that we would have been scaling infinitely, which didn't happen, right? But we then knew, okay, meta needs to be second to Google. Here's why. Here's how all these things worked together. These newsletters were [ __ ] This, you know, podcast doesn't work.

How are how how do the pieces fit together? Um, so I mean, in my opinion, go hard to understand what doesn't work and where your mix needs to be adjusted. then bring things down and then scale back up with those learnings and then you can get a repeatable ramp. >> If something doesn't work today, do you just turn it off or do you wait to give it time?

>> I would say like it depends on how poor the metrics are, right? Like if there's like there's no world that this is ever going to make sense, turn it off immediately. Let's say like some leading indicators are saying like it's it's it's pretty crap, but like let's give it a little bit of time to see if there are other things that are impacting this cuz like like I said, there's there's a million dials like from the from the ad to the conversion.

There's a million things that you can tinker along the way and that's why you want to give it time, right? Like this asset is going to the homepage. What if we had a hyperpersonalized landing page that says the exact same thing that is being said in the ad and even includes the creator's face on the page? It's a random idea, right? Does that move the needle and test some things to give it some time and then scratch it off?

>> What single channel worked best at Whisper and what did you learn from that? >> Uh definitely Google um in terms of >> that is in traditional SEO. >> Uh Google ads. >> Yeah, Google ads. Uh Google ads was is still the the main driver just uh and what's surprising across literally everything, right? >> Non-branded search, PMAX, YouTube ads, everything prints there.

Um, and the reason why it's like it's it's the middle of the funnel, but you have essentially all top to bottom right in one platform. And if you have like all the right conversion tracking, Google's a big marketplace with all a lot of services. and uh just optimizing for app download because it's a premium product uh we can we have a lot more fine-tune control uh than we do in meta when it comes to like uh CAC and how much we want to spend in India versus in the US cuz a different price in those markets uh we don't

have as much fine-tune control in meta cuz like I said it's like they've removed all the manual settings creative is your targeting and it either works in a geo or it doesn't so like there's like you just iterate on creative it's a completely different job than like you have a pretty like structured beast to essentially understand how to scale there.

So it was Google and that's uh it's also because longer form video for like a pretty difficult product to explain like okay I talk it turns to text but where in like text boxes like explain that to like the the average Joe that's walking down the street is going to be they're going to look at you weird like yeah voice notes like what do you mean I send them in WhatsApp right like and there's there's that education that needs to happen.

So like the 30 secondond to one minute videos in YouTube that educated the base ran for a while got millions hundreds of millions of impressions then fed into non-branded search pmax different placements and display and then eventually those people converted right those all those pieces worked together. Is performance always best at the start of a channel or does it get better over time?

It gets better over time, I think. But again, it hits, you know, it has its own scaling laws where like there's a point where you have to diversify into other platforms before you see an an additional unlock. Um, when you hit like some kind of audience fatigue of like whatever you're you're targeting. Uh but in the beginning it's always [ __ ] because you're waiting for uh the conversions to uh >> when you hit when you hit audience fatigue do you keep spending waiting for a next unlock or do you just go I've tapped out

this channel? Well, you want to unlock the next audience, right? So, it's uh who is so like, you know, for example, uh when when we were looking at at Victor, uh we uh when we when we launched, we we purposely had the, you know, the AI employee for everyone. And we did this to see who came in the door and we had, you know, agencies, ecom brands, and SMBs that first showed up.

Uh and essentially what we did is we went through in order, right? We went, okay, we have evergreen stuff. We'll continue that running, but now let's go agencies. Can we acquire them? What does the funnel look like? what does the creative look like? And then once we've let that like once we unlocked one audience and it seems like the economics work, we can then now there's a repeatable process to refine it, then we can go on to the next audience.

So you you essentially want to you'll hit audience fatigue in what you're currently targeting. you like marketing now is very ICP specific like you we we have all of the latest and greatest tools that can tell you simulate as a pro like in a prompt whether you're using Victor or whatever tool simulate this person like what did they read what do they think about decision-m run that prompt and then you have like the richest ICP research you possibly can have create it for that person create an experience from a landing

onboarding and product experience for that person and you you can continue scaling by just going down to the niche audience by audience >> because I don't think that as an investor in the company I don't think that was a good tagline and you may hate me for that but the AI employee for everyone I don't know what the [ __ ] that means if you were to say the AI video editor great amazing if you were to say the AI copyriter amazing AI employee you doing my tax are you doing my creative >> I mean I think the reason >> but

my point is are you able to do horizontal taglines and then verticalize and that's the right approach. >> So I mean I think because the category is so wide right where it's like uh and I wouldn't say we're the first but we're the first to like say AI employee and actually like deliver on that promise where like work is being given and and it's at like the usage is actually ROI like positive actually valuable and we started with that because it's it's it's again how do you like how else are you going to frame it as

being different than Claude or Chad GBT and these other players where like you have to like for us it's the positioning around knowledge work. Uh, so it like there was nothing other than AI co-orker and AI employee like there's no other positioning that like really makes sense. And because it hasn't been used a lot, I think it's confusing. But now that there are more use cases and stories to back it up, then we can shift the framing to be a I hired Victor and here's what he did and then it's a oh it's a you know a

guy's name, it's an employee, oh it's an AI tool, right? There's you can invert the process now. But we had to start with something to essentially build those use cases. One of the things that is supposed to be a growth engine as well is referrals and referrals programs. Any lessons from whisper from superhum that really important for me and founders to know on how to build great referrals engines.

I think it's one of the like core things like we talked about metagoole life cycle when you think about PLG like have that referral program set up and it be very front and center and easy to discover in the product to make it effortless for someone to share the product and get something you know for doing that right and uh at superhuman it was you know give one month get one month and you know we had uh we had people that had hundreds of referrals hundreds of months they were never going to pay for the rest of their

lives Um, and because it was it was delightful and it was easy to discover, but it was it was very tactile where like I'm getting something right for for doing this. Uh, so it was a similar thing with uh with Whisper where uh when you hit your uh let's say 2,00 word limit. So now that you know we're changing a little bit of of how that trial works, but uh essentially finding the right moment to show the referral program and make it tangible.

So, like you're right about you're like you're right about to hit your your word limit. Hey, did you know that if you share this with your friend, you can get the next month free? Okay, I'm going to take 5 seconds and go and do that. And I'll tell one friend, hey, sign up for this. And if they sign up, I get that one month. And now I have another person that can spread the word and and that K factor is is what makes or breaks that.

>> So align referral program to usage limits >> if that is your product, right? like like what is the thing that if you have more of won't frustrate you right so like for a Victor right the the referral program that we have so it's it's all token based you get credits to essentially use in Victor um whenever you're near the limit we give you uh essentially a decision tree depending on who you are of what you could do to earn free credits we have a creator program so if you just post on LinkedIn about Victor we give you

a payout via CPM directly to your account in credits to any user And that gives us social and virality that we can essentially push forward on. Uh or uh you can uh be a part of the the actual referral program where you can invite companies and you get a percentage revenue share of the referred companies paying plan in credits every month. So, if I'm a company and I know another cool company that should be using Victor and I know that Victor's expensive, you know, we have we have like eight person teams that are

spending $15$20,000 a month to use Victor. Uh, and it replaced all their hiring. We can go into that later. Um, but like for example, that's a cost item and I know that if I can bring I have another friend that has an agency, they'll probably spend 5K and I'll get 20% of that as revshare and that lowers my cost. But to us that makes sense from a CAC basis.

You know, we're willing to spend,000 2,000 depending on the the the cohort to acquire a customer. We'd rather have our customers finding those best customers for us. >> Yeah. [ __ ] If I'm a startup founder, I've got a load of founder friends in non-competitive markets. Great. Game on. >> Yeah. Uh I totally get that. Okay. Any ways that founders [ __ ] up referral programs that they should avoid?

Uh, I mean it's it's either not making them tangible where it's just like a hey, refer your friends and it's a what am I getting for it, right? Or it's just like some like you get swag or just like things that don't really matter. Uh, or they create these like hyper complicated 20 tiers like do these actions and like uh gamifying the referral program and then no one wants to use it cuz it's just like it's a pain.

So I think like it's somewhere in that spectrum of like you're either doing that or that like you need to hit the the sweet spot of what that looks like >> unless it's palunteer swag in which case that's really quite cool and I would love that. Um we mentioned there like the timing of which you put that referral in front of people. The pay wall is a difficult one and it is oscillates like where to put it whether it needs to be hard and immediate whether you need to show value.

How do you think about lessons advice to founders on the immediiacy of the pay wall and where it sits best? So uh I think even before the payw wall analysis the the main thing you want to uh adjust for is like when that magical aha moment happens and uh you want that magical moment happen as soon as possible but you also don't want like you want the payw wall near that moment where like uh you that moment is either your first discovery of wow this is amazing um but you want to kind of continue that over time.

So like you have that magical aha moment and then you're you're kind of you stay in that kind of like honeymoon phase of like this is just amazing and then within that phase pay wall right uh and then that's like whether it's words uh words per week or how many credits you get in Victor uh this is like a game this is a big game that we're we're trying to hyper refine now is how many free credits should we give you and how do we nudge Victor to show you really useful workflows Because the moment you have one that goes,

"This is gamechanging." Pay wall, right? Because then then then you you want to open up your pocketbook because you've you've felt something magical that you haven't felt before. And because there's so many products, those true unique magic this is this product is insane moments. And like this happened at Whisper for like when we had that first rocket ship moment when like LinkedIn was going absolutely nuts of like there's this thing Whisper and I'm not typing anymore.

And a lot of that was organic, right? But that's because people hit that magical moment. Uh, and that's like similar like with the amount of posts that are happening uh about Victor. A lot of like I'd say half of them are organic, half of them are like the creator program that I said you post and you can get credits, but it's still genuine, right? But it's the that magic moment that matters.

>> Should credits go in marketing budgets? >> We call this fully loaded CAC. So, our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. If you're not doing that, then you're not really calculating your acquisition cost. So yeah, trial credits uh or like anything free that you're giving away is cost and it goes under it is a marketing cost item. >> We mentioned another one that was very interesting.

You said AEO which is obviously kind of um kind of answer engine optimization. We invest in peak which essentially optimizes this. Um how do you think about that as a new channel? How do we embrace it? What should we know? AEO in general followed the like the core tenants of SEO in general where uh what like used to be old school SEO like pumping out thousands of pages came back again cuz like Google because they own the the SEO algorithm essentially penalized people that were just pumping out pages for SEO.

So like over the last couple years people stopped doing that. But the sheer amount of pages that you have in AO that is also changing a little bit. But like you know if you look at um you can you can ask any uh agent uh to analyze the site map and essentially do like crrons. So we do this with Victor. We look at every competitor and we look at their site map and we look at uh what and like we see how many pages they're making and all these companies are doing like 100 to 200 pages a week and it's all like a lot of it

is just like generated AI slop. Um so that's also what you don't want to do at scale. you actually like want valuable content that says valuable things because the the AI crawler essentially ingests that and then what you're saying there is what gets written about you when like what is the best tool for this or like I'm trying to do this and it's it's doing these citations.

So the things that I'll say that are the most important AO now it's like yes have an engine that you send content through your website on specific things but the most important thing is YouTube Reddit and like the the social narrative. So like uh one of the early levers that every founder should should do when they're first when they're first starting uh with um you know scaling is investing in good YouTube reviews because YouTube reviews because they're long form and they they they rank longtail.

They'll essentially um be they're one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. Um, so you'll have your website PR external sources talking about you and one of the biggest best external sources are how many reviews and videos do you have on YouTube? There are really high citation on Chad GBT. Um, and that's like one of the early I'd say strong things that every founder should focus on.

>> Dude, is traditional PR and news [ __ ] dead? And what I mean by that it's like you know bringing in tech crunch used to matter. I I still think it matters in the sense that like um like uh I I have the opinion that you know when you launch do a product hunt get featured in Techrunch like that's just like it's like founder initiation >> short table stakes almost.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean I'd say like it it builds a level of credibility and trust that like you are on the map in the same way that everyone went through the process. But like the reason why it's important the PR is less of a like PR blows up and there's like a traffic wave really that PR is made for citations right around AEO like how many external credible sources are writing about you then you'll see your AEO traffic significantly increase because the more of a notowned narrative is being talked about positively

about you the better off the product is. >> Should I bother doing Tik Tok? Uh I I think there's a time and place for it and it it depends on you know are you more B to C than anything else like >> I've never met a CMO or a head of growth he's been able to crack it. I've never >> Yeah. I mean it ju just like in the way that the content gets digested.

Like I think there's a time and place to like do some audience uh diversification. But yeah, to be honest in any of the the three kind of core companies that I've been at so far, it hasn't worked yet. But maybe I'll I'll get a chance to change that. Add Victor. >> Totally get that. Final one again before we move to team competition. But what happens if when we turn off paid as much?

So we're spending really aggressively and it's working. It's working. And we get to 30, 40, 50 million in revenue and we're like, but we got a bit of a paid engine now that we're a bit hooked on. Turn off the paid. Dial it really right back and growth down. that means you have other problems, right? Like I think um the sweet spot for organic mix should be around like 35 to 45% of acquisition is word of mouth organic and like truly people just discovering it based on everything else that you've built.

Uh in the beginning because you just started and there's not a lot of stuff out there about you, it is entirely tied to paid. But in the later stage if you turn everything off that means you have forgotten about the other half of the job which is the SEO the AEO the reviews everything being written. So like you sometimes want to dial down and see how elastic it is again to the the previous part that we were saying cuz that's like uh you definitely want a strong MM model and incrementality when you're like the moment

you start spending north of a million dollars a month. Uh definitely have a model that says this channel is incremental, this is not. And like the model will in the beginning always be wrong. Make some changes, dial things down, do hold outs, whatever. And then see if the model proves true. Model gets better over time. And then you have you're less in the dark, right?

Like you you actually understand what levers go up and down and where you can actually spend a lot. So I think spending down to understand how much drop off you have is actually a good very strong learning moment. How many good growth leaders do you actually think there are? >> Not a lot. >> Yeah, >> if I'm going to be honest. Um, >> really not a lot.

There's a lot of founders who'll be listening to this and going, "Wow." Like I I I'm thinking through like three companies in particular where I'm like, "Shit, I wish I could put M." >> Yeah. I mean, I I think I've had like I've had an interesting kind of like grow up through marketing is because I started I started in corporate consulting, which was an absolute life suck.

I hated it. And that got me to found my first agency where I had to learn how to do everything myself from zero, right? And because I had to do that and I did that in both ecom, SAS, and enterprise B2B. My agency is still around today. Uh, and not involved in the day-to-day. Um, but like because I had to do that, I understand how to launch a meta ad.

I'm not a, you know, head of growth or CMO that like has no idea how to do execution, which is also like this is why also as head of growth at Whisper, uh, up until December of this past last year, I was the only person doing execution on a 3, four, $5 million budget, I was doing everything myself. >> This is what I say to all like university students and young people say, which is like it's never been more important to be full stack.

that you need to be riding the creative, shooting the video, editing the video, putting the video on meta, whatever it is, Instagram, YouTube, you name it, full barrel. Like the whole, oh, I just do creative and copyrightiting. [ __ ] that. I mean, I think a lot of people have been saying this and and I definitely uh echo that like hyper specialists are dying a slow death.

like you you need to be like I I've always seen myself as a specialized generalist and like the way that you know you have to pick something that you are better than the rest at. But like get your hands dirty and learn how to do a little bit of everything. Uh and that's like a lot of growth leaders actually get lost in the the marketing analytics, the conversion tracking.

Like that stuff is usually where like they don't really understand how that works and they if you don't understand the fundamentals, uh you actually don't know what makes the the system tick. We also live in a world where like Chad Gibbt, Claude, Victor, right? Like they're the best learning vehicles ever in the history of humanity. If you don't know how to do something, goddamn ask it.

Have it tell you. Give me everything step by step that I need to do and go and do it. And then see where things break. See what you don't understand. Like there's there's agency and like if you are hungry and and and a learner, those are the best people that win are the people that are that are nerds that are that are curious, right? Like that that's that's the line for me.

Dude, I have to say I totally agree with you. You could take like landing experience. Give me three examples of the best landing experience in PLG in the last year. Uh I I completely agree with you. Um if we go to the team itself, the requirements for talent changes. How has what you look for in talent changed in the last year or two? >> Yeah, I I mean I think it's it's a complete 180, right?

like uh I'd say uh now a year ago, I'd be looking for someone that has 10 years of experience in let's say meta ads. They've scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars and they're, let's say, the best in the world as a meta ads media buyer. And that would be the main thing I'd be looking for. Let's say that's the person I'm hiring. Now, I'm looking for that.

But they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will out compete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native. And it's like I'm seeing that happen where like I'm going to have a hot take here. I think um a lot of teams are trying to make their teams AI native and they're failing.

>> Why are they failing? the people that are in those roles are not systems thinkers where like if you're in a marketing or let's say ops role and you're not a systems thinker you don't know you actually don't know >> how do you think about like what does a systems thinker mean >> so to me that's being able to step back from let's say a task that is a part of my job being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say in my role what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a

day-to-day basis what are the inter relationships, where's the boring admin, where's the reporting, what's all of that. And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works, because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job, right?

And a lot of people go and go to chat GPT and ask it a question and then they go on still doing their job the manual way, right? And if you take a step back and say, "What would it take for me to fully automate, let's say, all of my job, and of course it's not going to work. Things are going to break apart." But run yourself through that thought experiment.

And the thing is is if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don't really understand their job. And because they're not systems thinkers, they they don't actually know what are all the inputs and the outputs. Uh so that that's the line for me. So like when I when I interview people to fill in the team, uh it's it's like partially like an engineering interview where like systems thinking is the bar.

>> So what do you ask them to do? Well, I I want a job with you. Okay. You're clearly [ __ ] brilliant and I'm a podcaster. Um what are you going to put me through? How are you going to test me? >> Yeah. So like core question is more of like how do you use AI as a workflow in work? But I'm actually more curious, how do you use AI workflows in your personal life?

Like do you have any systems that you feed through AI that make you a better better person outside of work? And like maybe the line blurs of like what you do is also work is personal whatever. >> And so a good answer versus a bad answer would be >> yeah a good I mean a bad answer would be uh you know I I I have a a skill or like a a chat thread that's like a a project in chat GPT that I talk to and it has like some context cuz it's like that's yes that's factually correct.

that's how you should use let's say a memory layer and a context layer and you you have one proactive chat conversation so it works chatting with the thing is not a workflow right where uh if there's no feedback loop where uh like one of the core things that I always test for is uh let's say an AI gives you slop what do you do with it a lot of people what they'll do is they'll take the slop and then say this is slop changes and they get frustrated then they take the doc and start writing it themselves and if you don't

go through the pain of giving it feedback like that's the first kind of feedback loop that I test for. But the next thing is is from let's say you have uh a loop and like I used this example before of like uh I built like a sponsorship system at Whisper, but essentially the the workflow is a self-improving loop where like uh if a you know a newsletter sponsor emails me uh my agent essentially knows that this is a newsletter request.

Um it asks them for their rates. It does research on what their audience is. does that first part of negotiation for me. I step in to approve the like yes we want to work with them. We get a contract and that's where my manual step in newsletter ends. I throw the contract into the aentic system. It uh ingests all of the cost data into uh the the file system.

Uh it does copywriting. It does all of the email sending. It send it creates all the links. It creates all the conversion tracking. It sends everything out to the partner because like a newsletter is like a boring antiquated email. I will email you and you will tell me the performance. Uh and then based on the copyrightiting and based on the cost, it will essentially also know what performance looked like and then say do we continue on with the partner?

That's also an an agentic decision because I have CPM should be this, conversion should be this, let the run fizzle out if it didn't work out, right? And again, that's that's a workflow, right? Like I I have I have a couple human touch points but the things that I know that if it analyzes the data and same thing if it generated a copy we it knows all of every link's performance and can say this copy works this doesn't.

So the next time it generates copy it's based on all historic data. It's not a and that's like an a self-improvement. >> What do you use for this? >> So this was first uh the like marketing OS uh I built uh at Whisper. So it was like cloud code on a computer. Uh that's just the the folder system and like skill and MD files. Uh that was the beginning of of that system.

So it would essentially be that right where I have Claude plugged into my email with you know cron set up to essentially check at 9, check at noon, check at 6. Are there any new newsletter requests? Do a workflow to to respond to those things and then bubble up to me a message in Slack being like, "Hey, these need your decisions. Here's some contracts that got that got sent over."

uh and then uh that system uh evolved. So that was like my own OS. I had to then get control that folder to share that with the team so other people can use the workflow. So then for essentially a year and a half, I was the one person at Whisper doing all execution. So imagine a million a month on Google, hundreds of thousands of keywords, ads, experiments, landing pages.

I owned every KPI from eyeball to download and then product took it over right on boarding. Uh but then add meta ad newsletters. So at at a given point I was working with between 70 and 120 unique newsletter providers that would send me emails ask for copy approval. I needed to create unique images. So I said why are newsletters still in like the stone ages that there's no platform like it's all through email and you're negotiating and haggling with these people trying to get you on a CPM.

Right? So that was the one of the first things that I created a workflow around uh and like the way that like I I don't code right like I learned how to do this by doing it. I want to automate this cloud of code. How would you do this? And I started by I I built the OS asking how to build an OS, right? Like and then every single day like I would say 90 to 95% of my work through the entire day was fed through the AI.

So like I want to optimize the ads. Can you pull the reporting? Right? What are the keywords? And I I would make all the changes, see all the copy through cloud code in the terminal because that allowed me to give feedback, do the feedback loop. So every day got a little better, got a little better. And there came a point where I could like the the models also got good enough like I was an early adopter of cloud code.

So like December of 25 was when you know the cloud code moment happened. I I adopted it in September before it was good. >> And immediately you saw that insane ramp. >> It it was wrong a lot. like there was like the the copy was poor, like the things broke. It was early days, but like I was curious like I'm a tinkerer and like I used that to essentially learn how to do the whole thing.

And like I know we deviated from the team question, but the that as me having to learn how to do the workflow essentially because I had to do it not knowing how to make that work going from A to Z. That's what I test for is can you take a hard problem and build a system around it that you have solved. How many candidates do you actually meet who have that level of depth?

>> Less than 1%. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. Uh >> can can you even build a team on that? But so but that's the thing, right? Like um I think the team composition of of today and tomorrow is way leaner than it was before. So like we likely will like for you know at Grammarly you know let's say you know bigger startup in SAS startup is air quotes there uh big corporate uh SAS uh they have a influencer marketing team right they have like three four five people today and tomorrow that is one really good person with an amazing

suite of agents that will only ever touch like imagine you scale to a 100,000 influencers that are posting on you in a month if you have an agentic system and you know how to weed through the data, understand where you need to be plugged in, you can do that. And that's why even though it's 1% of candidates, it's fine. If I find that one person that is going to be able to fully own that, build the systems and like right now uh and this is like my bet for the next, you know, 3 5 years, you know, 80% of our work is still

manual, 20% is agents. Hence why like my bet into Victor to like essentially solving all of knowledge work. I think in 3 years companies will essentially be like board of directors where 20% of the work is the strategy and the thinking and then agents just do 80% of the execution right like right now it's still like we're still you know editing is manual sending an email is still manual even though we have the tools like there's still a human layer into that I think that will change as quality gets better usage and

like actual adoption towards an ROI basis gets there that's my bet and that's that's also why this stuff is so important right because if you can't understand how the systems work, you're never going to be able to see your agents. >> So, less than 1% B2B CMOS today, are they [ __ ] I don't mean that too bluntly, but I don't know any B2B CMO in a traditional company, in a in a scaled company that has any [ __ ] clue what you're talking about.

They hire those people around themselves which I think like there's there's so >> do they do they really >> they try to I mean >> I'm not going to name companies they don't want to [ __ ] on people but like if you look at some of the big providers are you seriously saying in your Anna plans and your Koopers and your that anyone has a [ __ ] clue what you're talking about.

>> No no no I mean yeah I mean that that's that's also why I think the companies that do will quickly gain market share against those that don't. Right. And and that's why I think we live in very interesting times in terms of competitive environment where the incumbents that don't adopt this at the senior level will essentially their growth rates will will stand still while the hyper growers that are doing exactly this framing will essentially gain that market share and out compete them.

Right? So I think you're right like I think leadership needs to change but and like I said I think a lot of teams and and my hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team that is not a systems thinker like stop brute forcing people in hire the right people into the roles cuz the role has changed the JD is no longer the same what it was a year ago right and and and people are still brute forcing people into these new JDs I think there needs to be a bit of a shakeup >> okay I'm a founder I'm looking at my

marketing team today there's 10 people I'm like a series AB firm whatever uh 10 people who should I fire how do I test it when you're not looking and you come back and there suddenly now systems and that one person has 10x themselves you're not going to fire that person but then you will very clearly see who hasn't done that and that like that difference is being felt where like the A players are becoming S tier players and the people that were B players are becoming D players and that that like that rift is created.

The other thing I just think is like consumer marketing is not consumer marketing and B2B marketing is not B2B marketing. It's just marketing. Yeah. At the end of the day, there's a consumer who has a buying decision at a big enterprise or as a person 100%. I mean that is also why people were questioning our initial marketing strategy at Victor because we're like like I said super high CAC B2B SAS, right?

like you are hiring an employee into your team and you're paying thousands of dollars for this thing, right? That's that's a B2B SAS tool, but we approach the marketing like a proumer app, >> right? >> There there is a there's a 1920-year-old at Poly Markets called Tobin. Um hope he doesn't mind me saying this. Um >> I mean he was at Whisper, right?

He was originally at Whisper. >> He was at Whisper. >> Yeah, he was he built the original UGC viral program at Whisper before he went to Poly Market. So I know Tobin. >> Oh wow. Well, this is perfect then. Yes. where I'm like, you would pay through the nose for talent like Tobin who just gets it, who is 10x what anyone else will be in that position.

Do you not agree? >> Yeah. And and I think in each lane there are those people. And that's that's also why like, you know, from like an ML researcher standpoint, they'll you'll pay millions of dollars for a person that's going to move a model forward. I think we're coming to the place that like people in these marketing roles also are are they're they're unicorns.

They're rare and you want them in your company. And I think that same like ML crazy moment is maybe going to happen over the next year in in the marketing acquisition side. >> That's so fascinating. Dude, are you ready for a quickfire? I've loved this. Um what is the most underappreciated growth channel today? is a channel we haven't mentioned and I think a lot of uh people do this poorly and it it actually compounds if you do it well and that's affiliate where you're you're paying let's say a percentage of revenue or

some kind of uh CAC to people that are not your customers and they go out of their way to create content and reviews and and all of that and it you so like at Whisper and and Victor um it is the highest ROI channel and if you set up a strong affiliate program and you bring people into the door and they feel like they can earn money uh even before they're your customers, they will become your customers.

Uh and it's one that like it's a little bit outside of the referral program cuz you're not it's not through the product. It's how can you make this, you know, sexy external program that someone that is just an affiliate wants to like they have a surface area, they have a website, they have they have some audience that they have and they want to sell your thing to that audience.

Acquire them that way. And like that's that's one of the highest early ROI channels that if you start doing in the beginning, it ramps, right? Like so like for for for Victor, uh a good 10 to 15% of our acquisition on a monthly basis comes through our affiliate program. Uh and that's, you know, people that want to earn money because we give them uh between 10 and 15% revenue share.

So if you're, you know, you if that affiliate gets a company that pays 10K a month, they're making 1,500 bucks a month from one sale as an affiliate. That's also like give create a program that wants people to earn money. And this is the other thing we said like, >> can I do this? Create a program. Swear I've sent like 10 companies to Fred. Mom, I'm retiring.

>> Yeah. I mean, we we have we have some affiliates that are making 20 30k a month. >> What's the most polluted channel? What's the gh? This is just shipping. H I mean, I'm going to say X in the sense of just the launch videos are boring. >> That that's that's exactly what I mean, right? Where like everyone is trying to do exactly the same launch viral thing and like it's also polluted in the sense that like X ads don't work.

No m and like that that to me just means the platform is still >> work give me I have yet to meet a SAS head of growth or performance marketer that says that X ads print. So if someone someone someone has gotten X ads to print please tell me because I would love to be challenged on that. >> That's fascinating. Okay so X I'm with you. I'm just so bored of this.

I don't know if you saw there was one video yesterday and we're talking about it so it obviously worked but it's this company I can't weave I think it's called where they jumped out of a plane and did the like copy jumping out of a plane and you're it's like have we got to that stage like is it that mature a market that you like have to jump out of a plane and read it while doing that?

I mean, yeah. I mean, because like the the formula of like shock and awe launch videos because to be honest, and then like specifically those are the ones that like, well, we really don't really have a product. I'm I'm not saying maybe in their example, but like the the sheer amount of like we launched this for that and we spent way more time into our launch video than actually any time in our product.

Like I see so much of that and that's why I say polluted. >> What would you most like to change about the world of growth? have more good growth leaders. Uh I mean but but in in honesty I think my request for startups would be I don't know why we don't have a school which basically says hey I completely understand you need to be AI pilled great what the [ __ ] does that mean come to our school and for 6 weeks we will teach you how to get jacked up on every system process model for six weeks 9 to5 this is your job and

you pay 10,000 bucks I would say that's more valuable than university say for teenagers. I >> I'll go start another company. No, no. I mean, you're 100% right now cuz I mean >> I would fund that company today with millions of dollars. >> I'm being serious. Well, if you're JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs and you put that at the bottom of Canary Warf, would you not send every single employee there?

>> Cuz then you you built the hyperscalers of tomorrow. I mean, what's I mean, super interesting. Uh so like I I went to NYU uh for for college and what's interesting I did not take a single I mean zero marketing classes and I learned everything via doing and uh I think what's interesting is like the the education around marketing I think is also like stood still and again I I haven't been into a college today maybe that has changed but like are they teaching you how to install a Facebook pixel and no right like the

the application the the like the the framing of how it works comes after you start doing the execution. right? Like you can do and then understand versus understand and sit in a room and learn and then go and try to do the thing. You're going to you're going to learn so much faster just by doing. So I I agree with you. I I've yet to see like true a toz boot camp of what it means to be a growth leader.

And I mean like Reforge and Brian Balfur, they've tried to do this, but like it's still >> I'm actually not even saying a growth leader. I'm just saying how to get knowledgeable to the extent where you can build processes systems start replacing yourself in with Claude with you name the provider where you can start doing expenses copy uh design >> 100% right and in that frame I I agree as well right like I'm applying it to like do that in marketing that that that's all like but the grounding is people don't know how to

do the beginning step the very beginning step how do I simply set up my clawude to be efficient with integrations. So it gets access to all my files in the right way with the right permissions to you said you know 9 12 and six where it does the checkin dude I think you forget where people are. >> Yeah and I mean like like to me what I think is like table stakes I always forget is like people don't set up things this way.

Okay. So like I I for example um and this is when uh I was using cloud code. Now I'd say like 80% of my my work is is is Victor. But for the people that are not using Victor, if you you're using cloud code uh and you do one thing um is set up what I call is the uh session end skill. If you set up one skill that's going to like let your work compound, uh it's what I call session end.

So I have a terminal or a cloud code session uh and I'm doing some realm of work and it's almost done or like I want to end the session. So what is inside of that skill is essentially uh I have connected to my cloud code a obsidian vault that is every day a log of everything that I put through the terminal all decisions all open tasks all learnings you know essential notes and atoms and all of the like all of everything that I'm doing in every session is being stored in clawed memory but then you don't have access to

that right so what session N does is it analy izes the session, distills what we worked on, what was the frame, you know, did we accomplish this thing, what are the outstanding items, and it moves that over into Obsidian, which is like a node-based system, which lets me go back to any day and understand what did I work on that day, and you can see this web grow over time.

And that's like one massive hack to essentially turn every session to be compounding because then that connects the the nodebased system of obsidian says a week ago you worked on this and then you you hit a wall here you worked on it again today you solved it and because the agent also can analyze everything it creates those inter relationships for you where like you worked on meta ads with this creative type here in two places and normally you'll forget that right and like so will the system and if you have a place

where like your work your memory is like that to me is also probably the most valuable resource for people is if you can document every little thing that you're building tweaking and refining like that is like how social capital was the big thing I think like what do you have on your computer that is saved in your AI output that I think as we walk into the next like couple years is the treasure trove for for a lot of people.

Do >> you want to hear something wild? Every single week we enter the IC investment committee for the fund and we now have all of our calls graded by an AI call grader which measures every single call that we've ever done. We have this obviously feedback loop. Oh yeah. It collects every single call and it simply just stack ranks out of 10 and ranks them across five different variables like founder market fit, product market fit, deal, uh a load of other things, quality of product, blah blah blah.

uh and then we just go down the AI rankings in terms of priority and we actually fully delegate trust of prioritization to the AI ranking system. >> I mean, but if you put the the thought into here's the decision tree of prioritization and you put the thought into that, then you can trust the system, right? Because it's it's based on your framing. >> Do you know it's never been wrong in its ranking?

We've only done it for 12 weeks, but 12 pretty good. Yeah, it's over a thousand companies >> and and like same thing like I do this. So I use a you know a botless uh meeting recorder that records all of my meetings and at the end of the day it ingests all of them and says what did I promise to do on calls that didn't end up in a to-do software somewhere and then it drops all of that.

It says did did you do any of these and then I have my to-do list for tomorrow. >> Final one for you. Which company growth strategy that you're not tied to do you most respect and what do you learn from it? >> The craft of product and like the hypothesis, the deep experimentation and like building true user experience excellence. Uh like that to me is just like sexy.

Uh and like uh cuz I think if you look at like the sheer volume of products that are coming out every single day, very few of them have product excellence and the people that steer that craft or like true product leaders. I have I I learned so much from them and apply those things into my world. uh but seeing the way their brains work and the way that they're analyzing the data and how they understand the customer is is really inspiring and I think you know a lot of people can learn how to do that.

I'd say this is less maybe across the company more like the people in companies. Um, but I think to be honest like I I think in terms of companies I'm more impressed by the net new things that like are starting from zero and like even at step one they're doing pretty well in the sense of like we thought through the branding, we launched into this marketing thing.

That's like that's what I I like I appreciate that. >> Give me a company. >> Fair. Um, I mean, again, this is more like tooting my horn a bit, but like, uh, just just seeing like what the original launch was for for Whisper, like that was a, you know, like see it's like seeing that product correlation with marketing, even though I had a part in that, like that was truly like it it entered the map because of that.

And then same thing like yes I was a part of the ride there but like the adoption and the fact that ace Polish startup that of course raised a big series A became massively seen on the map and was very quickly loved. Like th those are the kinds of things that like make me want to get up in the morning that like you know we did a thing we put a lot of thought into it and there was pickup around it.

And I think that that's like that's what fascinates me is like what are all the moving pieces that like you go and finally launch the thing and it goddamn works, right? And that's like I think that's that's the beauty of you know why I do what I do because uh those are some special moments. >> Man, I've so enjoyed this. I can't thank you enough for agreeing to share all of your secrets and for letting me drill down into all the strategies. >> This was an absolute blast to to the next one to to more nugs next time.