184 - Two Seed Startup CEOs Talk Marketing Bets In 2024 (Merci Grace and Derek Osgood)

i did this once before where i had a couple of startup founders join me on the show check out episode 168 i super love the dynamic then so i did it again so couple of seed startups couple of really smart ceos you'll notice that i picked a couple of companies that At first glance, they look and sound similar. They've got similar size teams. They both talk about growth or go-to-market, which are seemingly similar concepts. But after digging deeper, they've got a bunch of differences. Who they're for, what they do for their target buyer, and pricing structures. So one of the big takeaways from this episode is I ask a lot of clarifying questions. This is a very helpful process. To bring in someone that doesn't live and breathe your startup, Tell them who you're for and what you've built and see if they understand. I guarantee you'll find some things you can improve on. We also cover what marketing big bets are they taking in 2024 and why. On the pricing side, why did they decide to go freemium or self-serve right from the start? And why aren't prospects inspired to take action? How do you get people to care about what you're building? This is Modern Startup Marketing. I am your host, Anna Furmanov, and we are in season four, where I'm asking a lot of why questions to help bring more clarity to the messy world of early stage startup marketing. If you're at an early stage startup, you're in the right place. Every startup begins bootstrapped, pre-seed, or seed, and that's such an exciting time, but also a really challenging time. 50 to 90% of early stage startups don't make it. We should be able to get our startups over the hump and without guessing or throwing spaghetti. Marketing is an important part of your go-to-market strategy, but you need to understand the why behind the what in order to get clarity, make the right decisions, and get results. Welcome to Season 4, where I'll be asking why in order to help bring more clarity to the messy world of early-stage startup marketing. I really enjoy these types of episodes where I invite on founders, co-founders, but not just one, a couple. Who knows? Maybe I'll have several at some point, but I think that there's a nice dynamic that happens when I have a couple of folks from a couple of different startups instead of just one. So thank you for joining me. I've got Mercy Grace. She's the CEO at Panobi. Mercy, you served as a head of growth at Slack. So welcome to the show. And Derek Osgood, you're the founder and CEO at Ignition. You're also the first director of product marketing at Rippling, which I believe is a Series E startup right now, if I'm not mistaken. Is that right? Yep. Okay, cool. Well, wonderful. And you guys are both building companies that, we'll get into this. I want to understand sort of like where the similarities are, where the differences, there's some things going on. I mean, clearly you're both founded 2021, both seed funding. Let's start with Penobi. Quick description. So the platform for growth, metrics, experiments, and reports in one place. So that's Penobi. And then let's just quickly hit on Ignition. Not updating positioning. I mean, we're constantly updating positioning and there's a couple of different ways that we describe ourselves. There's so much scope to what we do. So I think I just pulled the latest from our most recent messaging docs to swap it in there. Yeah, because I'm taking it straight from the website. So whatever I put in here is coming direct from the website. But sometimes I think you actually got like a 10 minute window where it was actually because we updated the website and then I think you saw that and then we actually swapped it to a different header right after right after you. That sounds so, so typical of early stage startups like things are changing and I just caught you in that 10 minute window where you didn't change it yet. That's hilarious. OK, wonderful. So now I kind of explained where you guys are at and a quick description and we'll get into some of the details here. But let me first start with like can you help me understand more about the problem that you're solving and who you're solving it for because what i want to get to is sort of like the difference between the two products you guys are living and breathing your companies and i'm on the outside kind of you know quickly glancing at the website and reading up on what you do the platform for growth and also the the go to market ops platform like growth and go to market there's a lot of similarities there right so help me understand the problem you're solving and for who how about we'll start with mercy you want to go first yeah you know i get this question a lot like is growth marketing is growth just growth product is you know and so i was the first head of growth at slack and i was about the 50th full-time person to join When I started, I came in with a remit to rebuild onboarding. And so I walk into the company. I'm a product manager. I have no engineers or designers on a team yet. And I start to ask around, hey, what's the funnel conversion like? What are our base rates? And they're like, what now? With the who? And so I was like, all right, great. Let's pop in Mixpanel on the landing page and get started. And then almost three years later... my growth team was 50 people and we were going from, you know, performance in demand gen all the way down to paid conversion on a single team. I think about growth, especially in terms of Penobi as, you know, growth is the rectangle and marketing or growth marketing is like the square where it's also growth, but growth as a whole is really the point of capitalism and the point of these venture backed companies. When we were transitioning into being a larger company at Slack, Stuart Butterfield, the founder, and I had a lot of conversations about like, should we call this a growth team? And we ended up doing that because that's the thing that's, you know, really easy for people to understand. But it is, you know, it's a very broad category. And Penobi is very much the tool I wish I had been running a hyper cross-functional team that is, you know, the tip of the sphere for growth. We own sort of data governance. We determine what these metrics are. We set the bar for those metrics for the rest of the company. And we're constantly iterating and experimenting. Having that under a single team was incredible for us because we were able to say, hey, you know, on the marketing side, what we care about are driving new activated teams and not just, you know, sort of cutting our initiatives into the smaller sort of sub goals that feed into those larger goals. landing page conversion and things like that. And so what we do at Penobi is we integrate with a huge variety of tools, feature flag and experiment frameworks, data warehouses, tools like, you know, Google Sheets, and you can upload a CSV of data as well to help you really get everything in one place. When Index led our seed in 2022, we're actually a 2022 company. Sorry, I forgot to mark that on the sheet, but yeah. When Index led our seed, part of the reason that they were able to really build a lot of conviction around it is that they saw us as similar to Gong or Figma in that really owning and being the source of truth and the collaboration and reporting and work platform for a pretty central function at a company that's responsible for a lot of handoffs. And so that's our mission at Penobi is to just help growth teams win. We save our customers an incredible amount of time. And really our goal is to help a lead PM who's running growth initiatives get promoted to head of growth and a head of growth get promoted to VP growth and so on. Wonderful. Okay. That definitely helps. When you say, I think of growth as a point of capitalism, I was like, well, yeah, of course. Companies want to grow. But then as you dove deeper into it. it's not just the what i think about is growth marketing and growth marketing is different from growth and we're talking about like product-led growth companies self-service right they need the to activate users this is kind of the the area that you play in so makes sense not just uh plg companies but consumer companies as well plg you know b2b plg-led companies product-led growth companies are Probably actually a smaller subset of all of the types of companies that have growth teams and we serve all types of software companies. Oh, nice. Okay. Got it. So B to C as well? Yeah. Is that what you said? Okay. What are some example clients there? Can you name some? We're not sharing that yet. Oh, you're not sharing that. Okay. Got it. Okay. Perfect. So how about Derek from your side? Can you share a little bit more about what problem you're solving and for who you're solving it for? Yeah, for sure. I think it's funny. I think Mercy and I are both playing in spaces with poorly defined terms at the core of what we do. So I think GoToMarket is another one that is constantly co-opted by different orgs and different teams. And it means different things to different people. We generally view GoToMarket as basically the connection between product teams and the market itself. We've historically seen there's just ever widening gap between product teams and their sales and marketing counterparts who are much more market facing. I think part of that has emerged because the tools that they're using are generally pretty siloed. If you think about the existing product tools today, most of them are focused on collaborating with engineering and development teams to actually build the thing. They don't really do anything to help you actually collaborate with all the other stakeholders who form the other half of this role which is you know all the sales marketing success folks who need to be enabled in order to be able to actually bring that thing to market and make it successful and ultimately you know like the role that ends up kind of filling that void in a lot of companies ends up being product marketing teams and so you know the breakdown between product and product marketing is typically what causes this like poor collaboration around go to market So what we're doing is we're basically, you know, making it much easier for product and product marketing teams to work together to bring new things to market. So, you know, we kind of like the new headline that we got on the website that you missed by 10 minutes is like, you know, build what sells and sell what you built. So ultimately what we're doing is, you know, we're giving product teams the tools to ingest a bunch of research. So we have a bunch of different voice of customer analysis tools, competitive analysis tools, where we're pulling in data from both your systems as well as external sources. We're giving you visibility into what customers want, surfacing that onto a prioritizable roadmap that can be actually prioritized around revenue as opposed to just gut feel and value and effort based on the way that product teams often do this today. And then we're creating really, really simple handoffs into a go to market planning motion. So then we have a full suite of planning tools for the product marketing teams or whoever's actually driving go to market to research, build and communicate all of their go to market plans internally. So that includes setting OKRs, documenting all your briefing, creating all your briefing documentation. from that briefing documentation actually generating all the core marketing collateral that feeds your campaigns and then you know eventually pushing that outwards to all the different teams internally so i think there's a lot of like similarities actually between us and penobi in the sense that we're both kind of like building sources of truth for teams that are like ultra cross-functional at their core but i think we're solving for a slightly different part of the problem and less the kind of ongoing experimentation that companies are doing and more the process for introducing like net new things into market i love that thank you do you compete with that with product force i mean we didn't before we recently started uh i mean like i i wouldn't categorize as like a direct competitor with them you know like we do all of our same road mapping stuff but the core of our the meat of our product is like more on kind of the go-to-market tooling that we've built but very much there's like a lot of overlap between us and kind of like the tools like product board and ultimately like our views that those tools are only solving for half of the pm problem so because these terms are so confusing like growth what are you talking about when you like growth is everything all companies want to grow and go to market what does that mean and for who you know the whole company should care about go to market but oftentimes it's being used as you know only in the marketing departments um so do you guys think ever have you thought about creating categories creating new terms to get away from the confusion yeah i mean i think like the goal of many you know early stage companies is to eventually create a category and meet that category or be part of a nascent category that you then become the leader in but typically the best categories are things really that your customers end up defining for you so bell you know in that incredible process that you know we're both deep in right now finding product market fit and growing and expanding our businesses you end up honestly getting a bunch of your best taglines and a lot of your best positioning from your customers because you're saying hey you know we're narrowly focused on this problem doing xyz and then they're coming to it with their perspective on the world and their lens on their business And our best quotes and our sort of like best taglines that we've been playing with have been actually just from the customers directly. Yeah. And I think on our end, I mean, we've changed our category name probably 15 different times over the course of the of the company's life already. And part of that is like what we're building. I experienced this at Rippling as well. When you build a big bundled product the way that we are, where it's kind of a platform that spans multiple different categories, you're almost kind of forced to create a category because it doesn't neatly fit into those buckets. I mean, Mercy was just asking, you know, like, do we compete with product board? Yes, we do. But we do more than just compete with product board. And so, you know, I think we have since day one, when we've shown customers what we're building, you know, like they have started bucketing us into kind of a created category. the labeling of that and naming of categories is always really hard if you are actually trying to define that category. We're still playing around with naming. Today, the naming is a good market ops platform, but I think creating a category is a very long journey and it's something like Mercy said, I think it's best defined by your customers. Let that evolve over time and you just keep trying to make sure that you are seen as a new thing as opposed to falling too deeply into an existing category along the way. Yeah. The thing that really hits home for me where I truly understand more about what you guys are building is actually where you said that you're, Mercy, you had said like, oh, we got investment because investors see that we're similar to Gong, we're similar to Figma. the source of truth right the central function at the company so and derek you had mentioned that like you're both building sources of truth for teams that are really cross-functional so that really made me understand a lot better but it's not like you can really necessarily put that communicate that for example on your home page like top header banner but that's the aha for me like what your vision is where you're going yeah you need to be product or company needs to be uniquely good at something and have incredible product market fit with a certain function or type of customer before you can really expand to being a lot bigger than that. Totally. You have to sort of fit into what's the value that you bring to your target buyer today. You have a vision of where you want to be, but today, yeah, we talk about that a lot on this show and just with folks outside of the show as well. can you speak to who's on I want to learn more about your team who's on your go to market team or whatever you want to call it growth team go to market team marketing team sales team like who's on that team to help grow the company mercy you can go first if you want okay yeah so we are we're 13 people and on go to market it's really myself and a single marketer who we just brought on so I'm doing you know the enterprise sales we have a self-service function as well as a enterprise sales function we sell into you know growth product teams and growth marketing teams and those are folks that are very accustomed to just being able to pick up a tool on their own and the like the ic sort of pm pm data scientist growth engineer needs to be comfortable and happy using that tool and so we're like well you know startups are already business on hard mode so let's do startups on hard mode and try to get both of these motions right at the same time and uh it's been really incredible to bring on a marketer who both would be you know a customer of the product and bringing in like that entire function uh with her has been has been awesome and then i am just you know like every other ceo trying to fill in the gaps and doing you know Sales and offsite planning and HR. All the things. Yeah. Yeah. And I think our team looks similar. I mean, we're 15 people. We have one marketer who is a former product marketer. He's kind of more generalist and covers growth and product marketing as well. But we actually went down the product marketer first route, partly to walk our own talk and the fact that... We primarily do work with product marketing teams, and so we wanted to make sure that that's just core to our DNA. But also because so much of when you're talking about category creation is just effectively storytelling around that category and educating customers around it. We wanted to make sure that product marketing was really... highly represented in our early team and then we've also got uh str who's kind of doing a lot of our sales outreach and also helping with kind of like our sales process itself and then i'm doing a lot of like mercy said you know a little bit of a little bit of everything you know i was our our solo marketer solo salesperson until just recently so still still probably gonna carry on for a while Well, congratulations. I know like just getting the one more person or the one SDR or the one like that really just makes such a huge difference. So congrats on on growing in that way. Mercy, did you say you have one marketer you just brought on? What are they in charge of? How would you kind of categorize them? Like, are they product marketing? Are they growth marketing? Like, what are they focused on? Yeah, her her probably like deepest expertise is in SEO and content. marketing, which we think is a unique channel for growth teams who are constantly trading tips and training each other on what that full cycle of growth looks like. That's also part of how we came up with the product is just insight that growth teams at gaming companies, growth teams at D2C companies, growth teams at B2B software companies are all really running their teams in exactly the same way as using all the same tools and workflows. And everyone is just like, being crushed under the like the manual weight of like okay i have this on in an ocean and here in an air table and then we're using amplitude over here and mode for this and this pm likes paper and this pm likes google docs um and it's a real sort of tooling nightmare right now but everyone is actually doing all the same things together and then um i mean she's just a really brilliant talented and creative person and she has you know come in and just like switch hitting on product feedback, which has been really cool. And then trying to help me always get better at sales and marketing and really like everything go to market. That's part of what's so great about these early team members is that we've really opted to hire really senior people. Everyone at our company has 10 plus years of experience in their function. And once you get to that point in marketing or product or engineering, you can do a little bit of everything. and pretty much at a like very high quality level and quite a velocity too yep i love this advice so much oftentimes like on the marketing side seed startups sort of hire junior marketing person and you know i'm talking to i feel like you guys are very much in lockstep with like marketing is important, marketing is an important part of your go to market strategy. So I don't have to convince you, but there are folks that don't necessarily run that way. And usually it's sales led company versus here, you know, with the self service and all that, and acquiring users, and you have to kind of figure out the on the marketing front how to do that, and on the growth front. So I feel like this is definitely like we're on the same page here good amount of experience somebody somebody that has a good experience somebody that can do a little bit of everything high quality like that is really important when you're hiring senior people of course not just marketing but sort of across the board when you're early stage it's really important but it's also up to the founders i've heard it kind of go both ways right they're trying to save money so they're hiring more junior people i think it ends up hurting you though in the long term because then you end up spending more time mentoring that person checking what they're doing you really just gotta like get somebody to own the thing that they're working on so you can go off in your other directions because you're wearing multiple hats right so i'm sure that's helpful to get somebody that's more senior and can do a little bit of everything and the bands honestly for people who are up for early stage startups and just like early you know like seed series a series b too until you get into like okay we have you know five years of runway, we're over 10 million in ARR and things like that until you like start to really sort of like dig your roots in. The startup bands are so tight that it really like, you know, if you are hiring an engineer, it's kind of like 150 to 200 has been the comp band at seed stage companies. You have to pay someone with three years of experience, 150K. you can pay someone with 13 years of experience 200k which one would you rather have and it's like dude that 50k is like totally worth it in terms of like time saved and it's incredible that you know hire younger people and they of course bring a unique lens each new generation has totally different experiences expectations and and ways of working but i think for a really early team it's awesome to have people who it's like no one's you know any disruption surprise good or bad is no one's first radio yeah that's right that's so so helpful cool all right the product marketing makes sense on your side derek the one thing i i don't know if you guys have seen from market one or have heard of market one but there's a newsletter that the co-founders run and they have a really nice article about who to hire as your first marketing leader in an early stage startup and the recommendation which i super agree with is you kind of want somebody that's really good at like there's three main areas for a marketer And you can't be amazing at all three, usually, if you find that rock star good for you. But if you can find somebody that's really good at a couple of those three things. So the three things are growth marketing, product marketing, content marketing. And when I say growth marketing, that's like the paid ads type of person that knows that track. And also tying in on the analytics side, how are our efforts impacting growth? So getting the two skills set in one person is great. So if you could find somebody that's really great at growth marketing and product marketing, or if you could find somebody that's really great at product marketing and content marketing, then you kind of kill two birds with one stone. I think from the reading of that article, and I can include a link since we're talking so much about hiring your first marketing person, it's hard to find somebody that's really skilled at growth marketing and content marketing for whatever reason, that usually just is not as common. So any thoughts on that? We can jump to the next thing. We've been talking a lot about hiring, but I think it's really important. The fact that like you hire senior people, you don't think about it in that way. Not everybody thinks about hiring senior people when you're early stage because you want to kind of like find somebody and sales is different, right? You're going to hire the SDR. The SDR just needs to know how to do the reps and sets, get on the phone, send out the emails, follow the structure that you've already built out like when you're doing founder led sales. But it's different on the marketing side. So, yeah, I think you end up with like one of the things that I've always found when hiring early marketers is I tend to bias towards finding people who have worked in bigger like I 100 percent agree with hiring more senior people because the quality bar is. is critical and it's really hard to find that if you don't hire some more senior folks um and so i tend to like to hire folks who come who originally early in their career were at bigger companies because they saw kind of what good looked like but then have been solo marketers in startups because it's kind of the only way that you actually get exposed to the breadth of things that you actually need to work on and think about when you're an early startup marketer like There's so many things. You can find somebody who's great at content. I mean, I think those are very big buckets. You can find somebody who's great at content and great at product marketing and great at, I forget what the third one was, product marketing. Yeah, product marketing, that's important. I think you can find people who are good at all three of those things, but then the thing that they will be bad at is the marketing ops portion of things underneath all of that, which is, are they actually setting up attribution properly? Are they actually thinking about the way that they are architecting systems in order to be able to support all of this. And so I think it's really hard to find somebody who can cover all of that. The only way that you can is if that person has actually had to do that job of being that first solo marketer at a company, or they've just been very close to the iron on that shortly thereafter. So I generally bias towards hiring product marketers early because I think a lot of the problems that seed stage companies face when you're trying to find product market fit, especially if you don't have a marketer as a founder, which most companies don't. I think Mercy and I are probably in the minority here as folks who come from marketing backgrounds and marketing growth backgrounds here. But I think when you're talking about technical founders who generally are not as good at messaging and positioning. understanding audiences segmentation like that kind of stuff you just need somebody who understands it and product marketing is where you're mostly going to find that skill set so i tend to like bias for and they can also they're also pretty like jack of all tradesy and they can kind of cover a lot of those different areas and if they don't understand the channel they can figure it out pretty fast so i tend to bias towards hiring folks early that are that come from a product marketing background or at least have it in their toolkit and then you know lean into the like special a constellation of specialists through consultants and whatnot for the other functions. I also think what Derek is saying about someone who has been at a company that has really been performant, they know what good looks like. But then, and I think so critically, is after that, they were hungry for the pain of being that only marketer on a team. That's huge because that mindset is like, you looked at Google and you're like, all right, I can climb your rings at Google. And that's a totally different skill set versus the sometimes terrifying, you know, autonomy and responsibility that you have at startups. And it's like you need someone who has that mindset who would rather say, OK, I'm going to learn how to do, you know, these five things over the next six months. And that's what's really important to me is like that velocity of learning, personal growth and like risk taking. It's definitely a failure mode for startups to really pursue and try to pull someone, spend a lot of time and energy trying to pull someone out of and convince them to do a startup. It's like, I don't know, like there's so many existential risks to early stage companies. Don't spend your time trying to get some like cheap whatever. Don't do it. Don't try to convince someone because, you know, you might end up with. someone that didn't really want to be there in the first place. Because you said the right thing. I mean, it's tough. It's hard. I'm sure that the person listening agrees with this. It's all about hiring somebody that's okay with learning quickly, taking risks. You're also taking a risk on that person. It is hard to hire the first marketing leader, right? From your perspective, is there anything that you could do to ensure that you're hiring the right person that will succeed? Is it just looking back and seeing that they were they have product marketing background or they did this solo marketing role before they have a bunch of years of experience? Like that's enough, you think? Or is there anything else that you look for? I mean, nothing is 100%, you know, like there's there's nothing that either of us could tell anyone to be like surefire, like, you know, this will happen because also there's all kinds of things that that happen to your company or to individual people that suddenly something happens in their life and they can't do a startup anymore. It's just like, there's all kinds of things. I think the key to building a great team is making sure that they're a really good fit for your size, for your stage, for the tools that you even have the ability to use and the infrastructure set up to be great with. They have the right mindset. And then, you know, people don't like to talk about this, but as a leader, you need to be willing to fire people. And that's like kind of the thing that I, you know, have told many people that I've worked with, including like the folks at my company is like, don't worry. Like if someone comes in and they're just not a fit or they're not performing, I will fire them quickly. That is my promise to you because we have a team of entirely high performers and there's nothing that bums out a high performer more than trying to like drag someone behind them. Penobi's hiring. No, I'm just kidding. That was a joke. I mean, I want to repel people who are afraid of getting fired. I do. Like if you're afraid of failure, you are not a good fit for an early stage startup. And so we should get that out of the way. Absolutely. All right. We've definitely talked a lot about this topic of hiring. So let's move on to some why questions. So in season four, I really like to dig into some why questions because I think a lot of stuff focuses on the what. And yes, I bring what questions, like what's your team size, what kind of marketing plays are you running, stuff like that. But I really want to talk about some why questions because I don't think that people are always sure why they're doing the things that they're doing. You said it yourself, like, Mercy, that people are using across all different types of company types they're using similar approaches to managing their work right and it isn't a very good fit in in a lot of those cases so when you ask why questions i think that it really does help you understand and get that clarity to make the right decisions and to actually get the results that you're looking for so i developed this approach it's called marketing as a system It's not a new category. It's mass because it rhymes with SaaS. So I kind of liked it in that way. And it's a systematic approach that I built. And I work with early stage startups and founders tell me that the value that they get is that I give them this process and help them understand the why behind it, not just like the what, the tactics. So let's go into some why questions. Let's start like kind of narrower from your pricing. i noticed that you guys both have free trial or the ability to use the product for free some companies tack on freemium later on like they start out with the enterprise right and now they're trying to bring in okay well maybe you can just have a little snack of our product and we'll let you try it for free or let you try it for cheap but you started from this free trial and we'll talk about penobi you're a little bit different but kind of the freemium from the start because of course it's self-service right so let's talk about penobi first because penobi mercy you've got the reverse free trial model and i want to talk about that a little bit what does reverse free trial model mean can you help the listener understand that yeah a reverse free trial is when you start off your new users in your paid plan And then after a time trial period, you downgrade them to the free plan. So it's not the slow building of trust and acclimation until you hit a usage limit and then convert to paid. The idea is that you get some exposure, you get used to using and form a habit around the paid features. And then hopefully at the time that you downgrade, the idea is that for customers who are sort of like in the likely to convert bucket. that they would be past those limits and therefore feel like, oh dang, I have these things taken away from me or I lost access to X, Y, Z. I will go ahead and pay for this. We ended up doing this because it is, before you ask me why we did it, we did this because data is a significant part of our product and it takes a little time and energy to set up metrics and connect with. your um otherwise like expensive tool sets you know like a snowflake or something like that and so we wanted folks to feel you know comfortable and really like get a lot of usage right away without us having to like really sort of like nickel and dime them around the usage of those like data tools that's really yeah our thinking there and uh and growth leaders like elena verna who if you're not following linkedin you should she is Brilliant and also hilarious after like two incredible characteristics in one person. And she has posted many times that they have higher conversion rates. Okay. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So that makes a lot of sense. Somebody that's paying and then you take the features away and they're like, oh, but I love it. And then they're going to continue paying for it. What about Derek for you guys? We talked about how pricing isn't really available because you kind of. It is per person per month, but there's some variables so it becomes custom, but you do offer a free plan if somebody wants. Yeah. We have a premium model. Folks can come in and use pretty much all of the product. Nothing's gated and everything's just usage gated. We basically allow folks to. start to populate in all their integrations, most of their data and, you know, essentially like with specific features, we're just getting at different points. And so, for example, like when you're talking about our voice of customer analysis, we allow for analyzing up to like 10 customer insights. And then, you know, once you want to start going beyond that, we start asking you to pay. But, you know, I think like we went down the freemium route, mostly because I as a marketer, you know, believe that freemium forces you to be better at product because it forces you to actually invest in onboarding. It forces you to invest in quality user experience because you're not just selling people upfront. expecting them to figure it out after they're onboarded with the hand-holding of a salesperson. I think we wanted to build this DNA early in the company. I will say I actually regret going freemium as early as we did because I think in the earliest days of the company, our onboarding was not optimized very well and the experience just wasn't great. We had a ton of people come into our funnel that ended up just peeling out because we had not really set them up for success in the product. And so I think if I were rebuilding the company from scratch, I would probably actually not go freemium right out of the gate like we did. And I would have probably delayed that a little bit, but with the eye towards moving to freemium as quickly as possible, because I do think it generally lends itself well to more efficient acquisition. You get people in your funnel and you can actually go retarget them in all sorts of different ways once they're actually live. And then on top of that, it just, again, forces your product to be better. It also sounds like your end user, and I think we have this in common, your end user is not the buyer. And I feel like for those companies, right? Very much so. I mean, our end user and like we've kind of shifted who we sell to, you know, over the course of the company's life a bit. And but, you know, our end user is oftentimes not the person who's plunking down the credit card, which is very much it makes freemium tougher. It also kind of in some respects, like ones that sell well to freemium because you're able to actually get that end user to develop a habit and then, you know, they're much more likely to go champion you kind of up the chain to whoever actually needs to pay for it. But yeah, we definitely have that same characteristic. That makes sense. All right. Well, thanks for talking through like, you know, and also thank you for sharing that you kind of would have changed it up a little bit, Derek, in the beginning if you were rebuilding. That's what it's all about. You're making some decisions here and there. You're finding out that like, oh, we should have done it a little differently, but that's okay. As long as you're able to kind of look back and then move forward. and learn from that experience so i wanted to ask you guys what marketing bets are you taking in 2024 and why and maybe we can start mercy with you yeah you know betting on content i think is is the big thing and increasingly we're betting on video in part because you know like the sort of trail we're in this like wild time for for marketing for product for engineering with like the you know um the bursting out of the chest of humanity of these LLMs are just like eating everything. And so both it's been, we've really sort of like cheapened the written word online and it's hell of easy to create like okay things that are like full of keywords or whatever in order to, you know, like to use the algorithm. But then things like this, right, voice and video are a lot harder to quickly generate. And so therefore I think like both we're seeing that Lineals and Gen Z as they get into the workforce are very likely to be AirPods in, you know, sound on, prefer to look at video than to read something. But also it's a more sort of like enticing and it feels like a higher quality content experience because kind of everyone knows like it takes more energy to make. It's harder to be good at it and you can't sort of like farm it out. It's like you have to do it. It's more, it feels more genuine. Yeah, what channels are you going to put that content out? I think I saw when I looked at the footer, you guys are on maybe four or five. Am I right on that? Yeah, you know, we went for kind of a bunch of the socials. You got to get that username before someone else gets it and tries to sell it back to you. But then also it's just, you know, trying to figure out which of those things are working. I, it turns out, wasted 16 years of my life getting really good at Twitter and building a following there. RIP Twitter. Twitter used to be amazing for early stage startups. It's like sort of like where buzz really got generated. And now to the shock of everyone, I'm sure up to and including every single person who works at LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the new Twitter. So both people are like popping off on LinkedIn in ways that you're like, you know, this is like on your resume now. Like people see it as your real name, your photo and where you work, but whatever. But also because that's where. it's kind of safe to have a conversation about work and not feel like you're, you know, you're going to be promoting your company next to some actually truly horrific content. And so, you know, LinkedIn is, I think in a content renaissance that they're really happy to have. And thankfully they spent the last, it looks like a few years, heavily investing in like creator tools, courting creators and like. making things like video support and image and all of their kind of like posts really good so they actually i think handle media a lot better than twitter does as a platform now are you also on youtube and tick tock or any of the other video first platforms oh tick tock not on tick tock No, I'm like, wow, I'm, yeah, legit, I think too old to be on or get good at TikTok. We're on YouTube. We sort of like cross post there. But the place that we're seeing, you know, people sort of like really leaned in the most heavily is on LinkedIn these days. very cool yeah linkedin gosh i have a love hate relationship it's just like so good it works but then those weeks where i'm like where did my impressions go like what are you trying to do linkedin you want me to pay for impressions now or something i'm starting to like wonder what you know after months and years of being on the platform you get this like high of oh my gosh all these people see my content and then i think they pull the rug from under you and they're like you like that You like that? Well, now you got to pay, target people and pay for more impressions and engagements. But anyways, I agree with you though. There's definitely a lot of good that comes from the LinkedIn platform. Derek, what about you? The social version of reverse trials, right? yeah so we're i mean our bets are probably pretty much the same i think you know we're leaning really heavily into content we are just starting to kind of dip our toe into a little bit of video um and i think like part of why we're doing videos actually i totally agree with like it ends up coming across more authentic and higher fidelity you know in a world where like written word is becoming pretty commoditized but derek i think it froze oh you're back okay the most ironic possible point actually that was amazing as i was saying that video is becoming important that's where it stopped go ahead um yeah so i think you know like i totally agree with all the all of what mercy said about around you know video becoming more important in a world where kind of written word is more and more commoditized but it's also like in our case it feels like it's an easier more scalable content production path, like despite the fact that video is hard to do, there are a couple of platforms out there where you can do, you know, something like this, where you bring on a couple of folks and, you know, chat with experts and then that. quickly just gets chopped up into a bunch of different assets that you can use across a variety of different channels. And so it just ends up being a pretty quick and dirty way to be able to create a pretty meaningful amount of content, which is obviously the biggest challenge for startups at our stage is you have limited time and resources to actually go generate things. we're leaning really heavily into the same kind of stuff um i think you know channel wise linkedin is our bread and butter as well you know i'm pretty heavy on there and then you know we're starting to scale up you know publishing all our content there we haven't really dipped our toe into you know places like youtube or tick tock um it's on our roadmap to eventually start dabbling there a little bit but you know we just want to make sure that we're doing one channel really really well first and you know get that engine humming and move out to some to the other ones Derek, good for you. It's really hard for early stage startups to just like focus and prioritize and get really good and do their best with content marketing. But I love that your thoughts are going in that direction. So content, video, I'm hearing that. By the way, I just want to say today, it's not hard to make video. My kids make video. If my seven-year-old can make a video and I don't give them access to YouTube or anything, right? Because like, why would I? if i showed them how to do it once he would be able to do it so it's not hard to create video today i just wanna i wanna kind of like call that out because it's hard for bots and it's hard for uh like farms content farms that have been gotten really good at writing hellas blog posts yeah it's hard for them to make video But for real human beings, you know what they're talking about. It's not hard. It's not hard to make video, but in part because of all of these incredible tools that are out here now. That's right. That's right. I was using TikTok not because I was on TikTok, but just because of their video, the ability to create the three-minute video snippet just with my phone talking into it. It's about what you're saying. But it's really easy to record video. And with Riverside now, the AI creates magic clips for me. I click a button. I don't have to do anything. I just have to go in there and make sure that I know what the content should be about, right? That will resonate with my target audience. But that's the human behind the tool. And that's the thing that took, you know, you've trained your LLM for like, what, 15, 20 years doing that? So don't discount sort of like the reps that you've put in that makes like video good and easy for you. That's right. Yep. All right. So before I ask you what question you have for me, I want to ask you one more thing. What's been the hardest thing about marketing for you and why do you think it's been hard? Just love this question. Mercy, you can go first. Oh, let's do Derek first this time. Let's do Derek. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. I've just been following the format. But yeah, the hardest thing for Mark, I mean, with our product, like with any platform, you know, the most challenging thing ends up being, you know, positioning and being able to get at, you know, kind of a sound biteable version of what we do that is, you know, really, really tight when, you know, there's a lot that we do. And, you know, like, I can take any subset of our product and create a really, really tight. well positioned version of what we do. But, you know, when you talk about like covering multiple different categories, it's just a messy message. And so I think, you know, positioning messaging has consistently, you know, despite the fact that like I'm a former product marketer, my background is like, I consider myself to be really good at that. It's still really hard. And, you know, this was like the same challenge that we ran into when I was working at Rippling as well. So it's just a challenging. story to tell when you cover that much ground and being able to turn it into something that like people easily understand at your core what you do. Yep. I hear you. Go ahead. Mercy, what were you going to say? Yeah, no, I think that's right. It's really that's the challenge of the stage that like, you know, P zero go to market challenge for any startup is getting that. anyone to give a shit that you're out there, that it exists. And so there's understanding and then inspiring action. And for anyone who's also in this stage, if you feel like the patient is breathing, if you're constantly doing CPR, that's okay. That's what we're all doing is just pressing hard on that chest and hoping that eventually it sits up and starts walking around on its own. I've never heard of that analogy before. How do you get someone to care? I don't like to swear on my show, but because like sometimes people put on the show and their kids in the background, I'm like, but it's okay that you did it. It's fine. How do you get someone to care? Like just thinking about, is it the positioning is on point? Like what needs to happen? And I know this is the part where you're supposed to ask me the question, but how do you do that? I think that's like the ultimate question. How do you get people to care about you and what you're building? Showing them that you care, that you know what it is, you know, you know what their life is like. And this is where, you know, Derek and I have an incredible advantage is that we did this job that our end users have. That's how we knew, you know, what to build. That's how we knew that there was an opportunity here. But that's also means that when we speak to our champions or end users and our buyers, we speak to them sort of like not, you know, face to face across the table, but sitting next to them and understanding like, oh my gosh, yes, like. It is so hard to work with XYZ and get this thing right. It's hard to tell the story up. I went from being a head of growth and I had been a venture back founder very early in my career as well. And then I was a venture capital investor at the firm Lightspeed and now I'm a CEO. And so I have lived the life of a board member, the CEO, the head of growth, the ICPM, who's just sort of like getting started. And I remember what it's like. And so the same way in which... you might get asked sometimes like how do you get engineers to like respect you the only appropriate answer is to treat them with respect people give and get like we're a very reciprocal social species and yeah i think that's kind of what it is and it's easy i think to create content that's not really respectful that's like oh you're trying to sell me right so a lot of it is also about how you show up where you feel like the emotion is there. The videos that you're creating have that emotion where, yeah, I feel like they are sitting next to me and they are respecting me. And so it's less about the logic, I think, too, to get people to care about what you're building for them. It's about the emotion of like, they like talking to a therapist or something. They get me, they're listening to me, they get me, they're sitting next to me. And so I think that's sometimes hard to find, especially with B2B. marketing so yeah i always joke like i feel like all of our sales calls feel like therapy sessions and it's um you know i think that ends up resonating like you know many of the sales calls that we've had because you know i've been in this job and i'm able to like empathize really deeply and like speak directly to the problems that these people have you know like even if it's not a fit at that point because the product like you know look back a year and a half ago, our product sucked and there was a lot of things missing. There were a lot of things that just could not truly solve the problem for people. But because I was able to speak so directly to their real pain points, those people hung around and they kept paying attention to us. years and then they come back around when the product actually is at a point where it can solve those problems for them. And so I think being empathetic to their problems and really understanding who you're speaking to is the core. I think the other big thing to get to make people give a shit is just being willing to take risks in terms of both. the punchiness of your messaging i mean that so many startups are so watered down and you know every you know their their messaging just looks like every other company out there and there's just no way that anybody they're ever going to stand out and anybody's going to give them the time of day because they're just clearly not confident enough in what they're doing to be able to actually stand on you know their own two feet about it yeah you know shout from rooftops in an interesting way totally um This is the part where usually I ask, what question do you have for me? But we have one minute left, so I don't want to take up too much time. But I do want to ask you, why don't I do this? Ask me your question. And then I will do a follow up quick bonus episode answering that question. So what's your question? Go. What are you seeing work these days for all of your clients that you're working with in marketing? What am I seeing that's working well with my clients with marketing? That's the question, right? Yeah. okay awesome and mercy what about you yeah i have a semi follow-up you know which which channel like method etc do you think people are under investing and now are overlooking that they shouldn't be awesome okay i made a note i'll do a bonus episode and answer these questions and let you know when i do and you guys thank you so much this was like the second time i did this i think that it's really nice to have both of you again the dynamic with like two founders get on the show and talk to me about what you're building and how it's going this has been great so if anybody wants to find mercy you can go on linkedin because she likes linkedin more than twitter it's just mercy which is awesome m-e-r-c-i and you can learn more about penobi by going to penobi.com and if you want to find derek he's also on linkedin derek osgood3 You're not the first Derek Osgood, apparently. And you can learn more about Ignition by going to haveignition.com. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks for listening to this weekly episode of Modern Startup Marketing. New episodes are dropping weekly, so make sure you're following wherever you get your podcasts. You can find me on LinkedIn. Search for Anna Firminov. Visit my website to learn more about how I help early stage startups. Go to firminovmarketing.com. Don't forget to leave a review if you're loving the show.

Happy MLK Day!








So I did this once before where I had a couple of startup founders join me on the show (check out Ep. 168) and I super loved the dynamic (listeners did too!) so I did it again. 








These are a couple of companies that, at first glance, look and seem similar. They’ve got similar sized teams. They both talk about Growth or GTM which are seemingly similar concepts. But after digging deeper, I realize that they’ve got a bunch of differences. Who they’re for, what they do for their target buyer, pricing structures, etc.








So one of the big takeaways from this episode is I ask a lot of clarifying questions. This is a helpful process, to bring in someone that doesn’t live and breathe your startup, tell them who you’re for and what you’ve built, and then see how much they understand.








We also cover:



Who's on their GTM team and hiring their first marketer;



Why did they decide to go Freemium or Self-Serve right from the start; 



What marketing big bets are they taking in 2024 and why;



What's been the hardest thing about marketing;



Why aren’t prospects inspired to take action, how do you get people to care about what you’re building;



Merci and Derek ask me their burning questions and I'll answer them in this week's BONUS episode.








About Panobi:


     
      
  •  Founded: 2022
     
      
  •  Funding: Seed
     
      
  •  Description: The platform for growth. Metrics, experiments and reports in one place.
     
     







About Ignition:


     
      
  •  Founded: 2021
     
       
  •  Funding: Seed
     
       
  •  Description: The GTM Ops platform. AI-powered Research, Roadmapping, and GTM Enablement.
     
     







You can find Merci on LinkedIn: ⁠ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-marcotullio/) www.linkedin.com/in/merci (https://www.linkedin.com/in/merci/) 



Learn more about Panobi: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (https://fireflies.ai/) ⁠⁠⁠ (https://getlumen.com/) ⁠ (https://www.navattic.com/) www.panobi.com⁠ (http://www.panobi.com) 



You can find Derek on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/derekosgood3 (https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekosgood3/) 



Learn more about Ignition: www.haveignition.com (https://www.haveignition.com/) 



Link to MKT1 marketing org hiring article that I talk about: https://newsletter.mkt1.co/p/marketing-org-chart 








For more content, subscribe to Modern Startup Marketing on Apple or Spotify or wherever you like to listen, and don't forget to leave a review if you're lovin' the show!








And whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:



1. fractional head of marketing for early stage startups ＞＞ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.furmanovmarketing.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (https://furmanovmarketing.com/) 








2. sponsor my Top 5% podcast and get startup founders, marketers and VCs hearing about your brand ＞＞ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcast.furmanovmarketing.com (https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/anna-furmanov) ⁠⁠








3. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up to get my monthly early stage startup marketing newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (https://share.hsforms.com/1cP1V40x7RGes5gHk1XNgNw47lba)  where I’m sharing playbooks and insights and cracking some jokes








You can also find me hanging out on LinkedIn, definitely say hello and tell me what you're building ＞＞ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov (https://www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov)