Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

00:00 Louis Grenier Bonjour Bonjour and welcome to another episode of Everyone Hates Marketers.com, the no fluff actionable marketing podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In today's episode, you will learn how a four-year-old company grew four times each year to reach 30 million dollars with just 450 customers, which is quite impressive to see. And they're using something that a lot of startups and companies have seemed to have forgotten, which is marketing, which is quite fun. Anyway, my guest today has been at that company since day one. She has almost two decades of experience. Sorry. Oh my god, it makes me sound old. I know. She even knows how to deal with sales as a marketer, which is even a bigger skill in and of itself. And she's also the host of the Gather and Grow show that covers topics around design and growth. So I'm Amrita Mathur. Welcome. Thank you for having me. This is going to be fun. Oh, yes. So in the intro, I didn't say what we talked about before. So for people listening, I have a questionnaire and people and guests can answer some questions. And you mentioned a term called you mentioned marketing late growth, right? As a, you know, so product growth, sales growth, community growth, marketing growth, customer growth.

01:29 Amrita Mathur I mean, it just to be honest, it's endless. Yeah, it's endless. So where do you stand on that debate and why are you using that term? Yeah, you know what? It's maybe, you know what, I hate to add more terminology to an already confusing landscape, but really what I mean by that is our a big part of our company success, what I would say is kind of because we invested in marketing very, very early in an extremely big way. I think in B2B, there tends to be this like idea that, hey, to figure out product market fit, let's invest in sales and sell a couple of deals. And then when it's proven itself, then we'll bring in marketing. And I think we did it the other way around, which is part of how we rev the engine from day one. And that's what I'm calling marketing led growth, which is weirdly uncommon at B2B. I don't understand it, but it's so uncommon. And I can tell them more of that story if you'd like. Yeah. So why do you feel it's uncommon in general in that space? I think it might be something to do with how companies think about efficiency. And I think it might be to do with companies not necessarily having a well-defined product, which is often the case with startups. You don't really know what the product is and you don't really know how you're going to achieve product market fit and who your ideal customer even is. But if you have a good hypothesis and you've run some experiments back in the day, and we did, before even I was brought on, there was some experiments run before me that gave us a degree of confidence that, ah, there's something here. Let's build this puppy out. And I think one of the other ingredients that was helpful in our case was that not only did we invest in marketing very early from day one, we threw a lot of money at it, which, you know, in theory could go to having a lot of sales bodies and doing like the brute force style go from company to company to try to figure out if that's something that they would need. But we said, you know what? Like I remember to this day, the CEO said to me, he used this line. He said, I don't care about revenue. And this is crazy for a CEO to say, I don't care about revenue, but I care about your rate of learning. And he was like, I want us to learn really fast. And what is the best way for us to learn really fast? And that was like mass sort of marketing. We just, you know, blasted a bunch of stuff out there, invested a lot in performance marketing. I literally threw up like two landing pages and I just saw like who was coming through the door, who was actually booking demos with us. What were the talk tracks? What were the calls like? We just learned so quickly in four months and then we knew what this thing was going to be when we

04:09 Louis Grenier grew up. Great. Okay. Well, I think it's a good intro to everything I wanted to ask you, which is basically I want to make you come back to those days where you were hired or even before, because sometimes most of the time you talk to the company in depth before joining, especially at your role. And like, let's tell that story and let's try to tell that story from, I would say, vulnerable slash authentic way. It's way too fucking easy, especially marketing, to have like this brilliant case study of we've done everything so well and all of that. So I really want to, like, even though it's painful, even though you might have forgotten some part, even though you might not want to share everything, I will challenge you to try to share as much as when it comes to the bad stuff, the stuff that you failed, the stuff where you nearly got fired or that you were very anxious and all that. So I was nearly fired so many times. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's just VP of marketing. Like, that's just what happens. Okay. So take me back to when you got hired at that stage, SuperSide, which is a company you work for. And actually,

05:20 Amrita Mathur let me pause here. Let's define what SuperSide does briefly so people understand the context. Sure. Yeah. We're essentially a design services and tech company that helps large teams, large marketing teams get design done. That's basically it. And the place that we've chosen to play in is in this area of like full service design. So we're not like a niche boutique shop. So it's like anything under the sun you need from a design and creative purpose, could be videos for your TikTok all the way to iconography, all the way to a rebrand and the artifacts that come from that, all of that under the sun. And we've also chosen to kind of play in the, let's just call it campaign execution space. So we're not going to help you brainstorm and figure out, ooh, how to launch Coca-Cola in Brazil. And you know what? That's not us. But if you know how to launch that and you're like, okay, I need this much for my Instagram Reels and this is what I need for my billboards and whatever those campaign artifacts are, we can help you execute that. And we've done it in a way that where like efficiency is at its core. And we've built like

06:26 Louis Grenier our own design ops platform to help enable all of that stuff. I have a feeling you're going to sell that design ops platform on this day. As a software, I'm sure it's one of the game plan. Sorry to share the secret out, but it sounds like it. Yeah. Anyway, so I wish I could afford it. It's definitely not for like, you know, folks like me. It's like for bigger brands, but fuck, I wish there was something like that where I could just do this because I'm design wise, I'm shit. Anyway, so going back to the days when you started to talk about the founders, let's go to that place. So why did you join in the first place? Like what was the discussion like?

07:03 Amrita Mathur Yeah, it was, it was very, so I had already, I was like super burnt out from my last job and I had already decided to leave. Why? What happened? Oh man, like hard to unpack everything. And like, I think my body will start reacting to that. So you might see me shiver, but no, it was just, it was definitely like a boot camp. Like I appreciate that part of it. It was like a hardcore boot startup boot camp. But I think as a company, the DNA did not love, respect or value marketing. So I think the entire team was always in this mode of trying to prove its value and everything was an uphill battle. So that was one. And then there was other parts, you know, I think a number of people, perhaps our CMO was poorly managed and sometimes, you know, people pass that shit down and that shit can like affect you. Anyway, we went through so many transitions and after like two and a half, three years of working there, I was just like totally done. I had developed insomnia. I wasn't sleeping. It was like really bad. So I was just like, this is like, I could literally die. So this is not worth it. I don't have that much equity to like make it worth it. So I literally like decide, I woke up one morning and I was like, that's it. I'm done. And I went into the office that day and I was like, peace out, I'm done. Like I'm leaving. I gave my like three weeks notice or four weeks notice or whatever that was and that's it. And so then I went on this like long vacation to Europe with my family because my nephew was turning one and like my mom was like, let's do a road trip. And like it was like me, my husband, my mom, all of us in this like car together going through countries. And I was like, you know what? I mean, I just met so many Europeans and I was just like, there's a whole ecosystem here. Like why have I never considered working for like, like a European ass company? And it was so serendipitous and weird, but I got this like email from a recruiter in my inbox. And at that point, I was just saying yes to every call. And this recruiter just was so frigging prepared. He like sent me a deck about the company. He told me about the investors, the vision. It was fucking built out. I was like, damn, these guys are prepared. So I was like, yes, I will absolutely take that call. And the first call was all of the founders together. And I was in a hotel room in Prague. I was late for that call because I couldn't find parking in Prague. It was, I felt so bad. I sent them an email and my internet wasn't working. Anyway, we got on this call and the call was booked for like 45 minutes. And I think we talked for like two hours. And like, my mind was just like blown by like how big they were thinking and like the space that they wanted to tackle and how they weren't like getting sucked into the usual, like I'm an agency or whatever, right? Like they had this vision. I was like, I've never done this super early state startup before. And I knew that I would have a lot of input into product strategy, which is somewhere that I wanted to go. So I was like, you know what? I already don't have a job, so fuck it. Like, let's just do this. Like, what's the worst that'll

09:57 Louis Grenier happen? I'll get fired in four or five months. Fine. Whatever. Yeah. And in Europe, it's funny, we have electricity, we have internet, like there's a lot, we have food, we have cars. It's

10:08 Amrita Mathur quite advanced civilization. Not like Canada. Free healthcare in France. Well, yeah, free healthcare, but the retirement thing is under question now. Yeah. Don't start. Okay. So what stage are we talking about? So you said early stage. So where were they when you joined? There was nothing. There was like a sort of half-assed design ops platform, which we didn't even acknowledge as a design ops platform. It was really just a way for us to funnel projects around and make sure like the right people were picking it up. So it was this very, very nascent. And it was a very sort of, kind of like what you were describing earlier, like almost like what I call like a pay-as-you-go style service. You're whoever, Joe Schmo, you could be at a big company, you could have your own podcast, you could be whoever off the street. And you wanted some design thing done, you could just go to, you know, before SuperCity, we were called Consus. You could go to Consus.com, punch in what you need and like, you could say, oh my God, the deadline is I need this for my keynote, which is happening at 3 p.m. tomorrow. And literally in 12 hours, we were turned something around, right? So it was like this like really fast execution oriented design service that we had kind of tested with some companies, but it was mostly individual people just coming through the door. It wasn't that different than a classic freelancer marketplace. Like at the time, we would be

11:32 Louis Grenier more of a competitor for a fiber. Love it. That's great because actually, that's great. And there's so many questions now. So let's start. Just before for context, because I'm curious, I didn't check that out actually. The founders, they obviously had

11:49 Amrita Mathur experience before, right? In the startup world, right? Well, yeah, sort of. Yeah, I'd say so. Yeah, so they all went through Y Combinator, right? Like right before I joined. Before that, the CEO had co-founded a actually fashion startup, weirdly in Indonesia, which apparently did really well. And he got like a whole insight into like e-commerce. And this actually came from his need. He was just like, I need so much creative and design. And it's virtually impossible to get good quality, high, you know, high quality, but fast turnaround design. Like that there's like something about the quality, price and you know, that triangle of like, you can't get all three, you can only get two. That's the thing that was bugging him. And he was like, I'm going to build this. He was like, I'm going to fucking build this. Okay, that makes sense. But you're not cheap. So there's two out of the three. Yeah, we're not cheap, but we're cheaper than the typical options available. We're actually like, we've settled at around 60 to $80 an hour if you want to break it

12:51 Louis Grenier down into an hour. Yeah, which is, and then if you take into consideration the time spent and the worry and all of that, there's other costs than just money, monetary. So I get you. Cool. Okay. So that makes sense. So that came from a need, which is always one of the best way to start something. So at the start, you were targeting pretty much everyone, right? Which is,

13:12 Amrita Mathur Yeah, it was like, it was like all the search play, someone searching, whatever, I, you know, 24 hour turnaround for whatever, whatever keyword, you know, deck video, what have you. So it was mainly a search play and was like a very immediate need kind of thing. And the traffic that we were capitalizing on was like someone like, it's like urgent, like I need this right, like right now. That was very much. Sorry to cut you. Go ahead. No, no, no problem. So that was it. And of course, like the, as you can imagine, the recurring nature of that and the repeat customer nature wasn't really there. Like sometimes people would come back to us because they used us, they had a good experience and they were like, oh, six months from now, if I have need, I'll go back to them. But there wasn't like really like this recurring thing. So it was just like a leaky bucket, like right. That that's what happens with all of these like services. Like people come in, they use you, you operationalize that process. Maybe you're super freaking efficient, have great margins. And then it's like, you never see them again. And it's like done. So when, when we were chatting, this is what they were, the founders were explaining and saying, like, we think there's something here for businesses, not just like random individuals on the internet. And we want to launch that. We want to pivot the service into something like that. And ideally it would be some kind of subscription. Those were the guardrails they gave me. They were like, that's it. That's what we think. And by the way, we've proven that the subscription thing has led because there's actually one customer, we had one customer who was like a big enterprise who had started to kind of almost use us in a subscription way. Okay. Very interesting. So, so, so let's break that down. So when you say it was a search play, was it SEO? Was it AdWords? It was both search SEO and AdWords. I'd say mostly AdWords, extremely high, like 90% or maybe more was from AdWords. And then of course we had written some

15:04 Louis Grenier shitty blog posts that weirdly got ranked. You can control the volume with AdWords. Like if you have money to play with, it's quite easy, quote unquote, easy to get people in. Okay. So at this stage, their hunch was we have this one major enterprise client that is like almost paying a subscription to us. We feel like there's something that's as much data as they had, right? That's all they had. Yeah. So that intuition then you got hired, you're probably quite scared about like, shit, like I'm

15:35 Amrita Mathur going to have to figure everything out. No, it was fun. I wasn't scared. I just felt like it would be fun to figure this out. And one way or another, we would make money. Like what's the worst that would happen? We would just go back to like this like weird pay as you go model, right? That's the absolute worst. And we made that work. But I knew, I knew from a, cause like in some ways, like I am a buyer persona for SuperSide, right? Like I run a marketing team and I know how much creative and design we do today. And even if I was a much, much smaller team with much less revenue, like I would still need creative and design. So I just had a very good hypothesis for what the need was. And I think I knew very early that our main buyer would actually be a marketing persona or two, not a creative persona, which is historically who we thought would actually buy us. And I was just like, no, actually the main pain points and problems are with marketing. They're in the creative team's

16:26 Louis Grenier internal customer. That was actually very early insight that we, that we proved out. Okay. So, so let's break that down. Obviously it's been almost four years and obviously the story kind of gets changed in people's minds. And like, you know, we kind of round off the edges and all of that. But as far as you can recollect that hypothesis of maybe it's, it's actually marketing people in bigger organization. How did you validate it? Did you interview customers? Did you just use

16:56 Amrita Mathur your own intuition? What did you do specifically? Yeah, no, we had this intuition. We did a workshop where we just like threw on a board every possible persona that we could imagine that could use SuperSight. And we tried to classify them as would they be allies and influencers or would they be the decision makers and actual buyers or hey, could they actually be blockers? Like we had this one persona that everybody was rallying around called designer Dan, kind of like the Figma model where they were like designer Dan, you know, it's going to be like a bottoms up model. If designer Dan loves us, then everyone else will love us. And I was just like, no, I think designer Dan is going to be a blocker. I think that they're going to be fearful of their role on the team and their job. And they'll come around eventually. But I think in the initial stages, they might be a blocker, which also actually got proven out. So we don't sell to designer Dan today at all. So that's that workshop that you organized, who was involved in that? So it was the founders. We had hired a creative director, our first creative director on the company who joined around the same time as I did, like shortly after. So it was her, me, the three founders. We had a VP of product at the time also who had just joined shortly after me. So it was him. Yeah, it was like a very small group. And we took the work that came out of that, the output from that. And then I validated it with real life people. So everyone in my network that I could find that fit one of those profiles. So it could be my friends who were like VP of marketing. It could be like random creative directors that I was somehow connected to on LinkedIn. I literally emailed everybody. I literally linked in everybody. And I was like, can I talk to you for 20 minutes? I just have a series of questions. And I think I can't remember exactly, but I think we sent out a survey to all of our paying customer, whoever had done a project with us in the last year, we had sent out some kind of survey to just gather data as well. I don't think that was actually very useful, but anyone that was like, mid-market enterprise person that fit those biopersonas, I talked to. I think I talked to over 50 people and I gathered all that data to validate if our assumptions were right. I learned a lot of stuff along the way. So in some cases, we actually learned, we were like, oh, we were thinking about it this way, but actually it's more like this, which was also

19:12 Louis Grenier interesting. So let's break that down. I'm just going to go back to the workshop. How long did

19:15 Amrita Mathur it take you? I think we were in that workshop for maybe like three hours max. How many personas did you come up with? Oh my God, that was like the longest list, which was like a shit show. Obviously those are not personas. Those are just like random titles. So then we did the work of coming up with what the personas are. I even distinctly remember naming all of them on a ferry to an island because I was in Oslo to meet the team and hang out. And we were just all on a ferry together and this ride was like, whatever, half an hour long. We had nothing to do. So we were just like, oh, you know, we're going to call this persona this and like, and they

19:52 Louis Grenier just started to come together. It was actually a really productive ferry ride. Oh, that would drive me insane. I'm actually allergic. I'm not allergic to anything. I'm not allergic to peanuts, not allergic to dogs or cats. I'm allergic to fake shitty personas that companies come up with in boardrooms. But I'm so glad that actually you didn't stop there because most people stop there. They use their fucking intuition and that's it. And then they fail. So you came up with those, you know, cringy persona if you look four years after, right? This massive list. And you started to validate. So you reach out to your network, which is a smart move because it's easier to get people to talk to, but they might be slightly biased. So how did you make sure not to bring too many of your assumptions into the deal when you were talking to people?

20:44 Amrita Mathur Yeah, I know. I think that happened. I think like there's also an art to interviewing, right? And I don't think that I knew how to quite do that properly at the time. So there was a little bit of the leading of the witness. I think that had happened, but I was aware of it. I was aware that in some cases I led the witness. So I took everything that we learned with a grain of salt with the assumption that, hey, now we're going to work on our website, throw up some homepage and some basic landing pages, and we're just going to learn rapidly. Right? So this was just to get us to the place where our website could act as a lead capture engine. That's really all it was at the time. So what, if you can recall, maybe if there's one question you ask all the time, or you learned a lot, what was it? Oh, it was something around, I wanted to uncover like what their pains were. And I can't remember how I phrased the question. Take your time. Instead of like, you know, it's hard to kind of ask somebody, hey, tell me about your process or what your pains were. Like, so I kind of, I think you did it like a stepping stone approach. And I think I'm, I think I asked something like, hey, so what, what, what do you do? So like, now you have this great idea, you want to launch this new, you know, whatever content marketing program or something, right? You're a marketer, you're, you're like, you guys have decided, oh my God, we should do this thing. We want to launch a podcast, whatever. Um, tell me, walk me through how that process would work. And as they would do that, then I would poke holes. And it's like, how would you do this? And then who would you go to for that? And what if the creative team says this? And it was easy for me to do that because I'd been in those shoes most of the time. Like I was a buyer myself, so I could like poke a lot of holes. And then they'd be like, oh yeah, that's a bitch. And like, oh my God, they always say no, or, oh my God, everything takes like four weeks. And like, I have to like get the request in there. Like, you know, into their roadmap, like they started like saying these things where I was just like furiously like writing shit down. It was like, oh my God, like, okay, five out of the 10 people I just talked to all complained about, they have to like, you know, conform to this like ticketing like process. And that's how the creative team works. And I was like, that's an insight that we can capitalize on that. Right. So there was like these little takeaways and patterns that started to develop. Not everybody said the same thing, but at least we validated it's a pain and marketers feel it the most. And they would love actually, the biggest insight was we realized that many of them would love to bypass the creative team entirely.

23:18 Louis Grenier So that's actually very interesting. So your intuition earlier on was those blockers,

23:24 Amrita Mathur the creative team is going to be blocking because they will be threatened, they feel threatened by. Or some people on the design team, not necessarily the head of creative. I think there was like two personas that we still sell to a lot that we knew would be allies, which we call like the design ops professional. If a team is large enough, like Airbnb has an entire department of design ops people, they would be allies because we're solving their pain, their acute pain very well. Right. So we knew that. And then we knew that the head of creative and head of design or whatever their title is, that they can think about the larger scope and the larger company. And so they wouldn't be blockers, but the individual designers could be. That was our hunch, which has somewhat proven to be true.

24:05 Louis Grenier So did you find that out in the interviews? Like that, you know, some people said, how did you find that out? Like the blocker, the designers?

24:14 Amrita Mathur That was an intuition from the workshop. You know, I think I was like the only person that thought that they would be blockers. And I actually didn't interview any individual designers. I didn't prioritize interviewing that group. And I think it just got proven out as we did business over time. And the people you talked to, most of them said, yeah, they love to bypass the creative team because they are either slow. So I didn't ask that question point blank. Right. So I was trying to see if I would ask questions like if you could do whatever, you know, let's say there was no, like you had your own budget and whatever. How would you, what's your ideal scenario look like? And a lot of them kind of said, oh, I just go find my own contractor or my own agency, or I'd love to have someone on the creative team that's dedicated and assigned to me, things like that. So then we were like, oh, wait a second, we can actually sell to performance marketing teams because they need fast turnaround and ad creative. They need 57 versions of the same winning Facebook ad. Right. Oh, we can sell to content marketing because content marketing often owns social media and they're always trying to crack new channels and like they're always under the gun because they can't prove attribution. So there's like a whole host of issues there. So they're like, they probably would love that. So we just developed like all of these like ideas for like what the main use cases and pain points would be. And that's how the buyer personas came to be. Like we refined them after the workshop and the interviews and kept refining them. And I don't think we actually rolled it out to the whole company until we had earned our first $4 million because they were all hunches. So until we had earned that, we were like, okay, now we know for real. Now let's dissect the

25:56 Louis Grenier data. Let's see who we've actually sold to, who these people are. So, um, that's really interesting. I love hearing those stories. And I like the fact in particular that you knew there were hunches and you wanted to validate them before starting to communicate and say, hey, this is our strategy. This is the people we're after and this is where we should go about it. I was laughing when you were explaining the performance marketing stuff because I used to work for Hotjar. And this is like spot on. I remember the struggle it was to just get anything done design wise. It either took a while or it wasn't really aligned with what we wanted and stuff. Always been a struggle. So I completely get it. It's fun, but it's one of those things. It's one of those problems in retrospect, it sounds so fucking obvious, right? It's one of like, it's usually the good ideas are like that. It in retrospect, it sounds really fucking obvious. Everyone listening would be like, duh, that makes sense. But then no one really did that before, right? At the scale you did. So what do you think that is?

27:01 Amrita Mathur That's such a good question. I've actually never thought about that. I'm guessing the really smart companies solved the problem for themselves, you know, somehow. I've looked at there's like a McKinsey report that came out earlier this year that was just kind of showing the investment that certain fast growing companies make in design and creative and like Nike, Netflix, like all the usuals, Airbnb, they're on the list. So I think those kinds of companies recognize that this is a problem area and they figured out their own internal solutions. So they don't need external solution. And then there's like a whole host of other companies that just deal with the bullshit and bureaucracy that it comes with. And, you know, maybe they've still done good business and maybe they've still grown really fast, but I think it's probably been painful for their marketing teams. And maybe they use a combination of agencies to accomplish the same. But it takes a lot of overhead and management. Like I did a win-loss call with a customer. They've turned since they called Auth0, which actually got acquired by Okta, huge, huge, huge in tech. And they had a huge internal team. They had a bunch of design ops professionals. They use two agencies and they use Superside. So the, I can't even imagine the volume of stuff that was coming down the pike for them. But I can, I can also see like all of this takes management, right? You know, like you got all of these agencies, you've got this internal team, you've got like blah, blah, blah. Like it's, it's complicated. And they might've come to some formula for thinking like, oh, if it's like campaign oriented, I'm going to send it to this agency. If it's execution oriented, I'm going to send it to Superside, whatever. They came to some consensus around that. But that, that's, that takes a lot of effort and overhead and some level of bureaucracy and not everyone's up for that. And, you know, look at, look at the environment now. Like everyone's like laying people off and cutting down. Where do you think the cuts would happen? It would, it would happen in the operational aspects of it, which again, kind of like makes the marketing team, it puts the marketing team in this like weird position where you kind of have to execute, but with your hands tied behind your

29:20 Louis Grenier back, which is like really sad. Yeah. And, and, and we didn't see him every night and being anxious about your job, which is not easy. Definitely not. So why, why do you think there was no competitor or anyone who did it that well? Like my, my intuition, my hypothesis here is that it's actually very difficult to do what you're doing to actually get the talent, to be able to turn things out so fast in good quality. So you need to have like such a tight process and all of that. Um, any other ideas?

29:55 Amrita Mathur Um, I think people have gone, gone at it with a different aspect. So the way I see the landscape is there's like two, two buckets of, let's call them competitors for the lack of a better word. There's like the fiber style marketplace, right? So the way they've solved it is, okay, we're just going to be the middle man. We're just going to match up these people that have these like requirements and, and match them up as best as possible with these like really smart creatives. But we're not, we're not going to manage that process. You guys find each other, you figure out your shit, right? That's basically their approach to solving it. But it's not going to the deep problem that an entire team might have. It's more like, I think they, I think they can solve the individual need, but I don't know if they can solve a team need or a company wide need. Then the second type of crop of companies that have come up is more in our space where they do sell to businesses and teams, but their approach has been more like, hey, I'm going to come up with a flat fee model, which is unlike the agency model. So I'm going to charge you some flat fee, whatever, a thousand bucks a month. And I'm going to give you quote unquote unlimited design. And I'm always like, in reality, how does that actually work? Like how would unlimited design actually work for a thousand bucks or two thousand or whatever the number is, 10,000 bucks a month, how could it be unlimited? And so the brand promise there is you can get all your shit done for a flat fee, which is very predictable. But I think when shit hits the fan and you need like 10 things done at the same time, that's actually not possible because those things are not happening in parallel. So I think there are companies that are trying to solve this problem, but they're just coming at it from very different angles. And maybe there are companies similar to SuperSide that we just haven't come across, but I think we've chosen to go deep in one area. We know who we're not going after. I think that's as important as saying who we are going after. We know exactly who we're

31:50 Louis Grenier not going after and who we are not a fit for. Yeah. So that's a lesson in and on itself. So before we go into that, the present, where you have so much insight and you've learned so much throughout the last three years and a half, going back to that workshop, so you've done those persona, this list of persona, and then you started to create, you said you created two landing pages,

32:13 Amrita Mathur right? I think it was just two, like a home page. We had a pricing page and we had two landing pages. Most of the traffic to those landing pages came from paid social, which is what a new channel that we launched to just try to learn rapidly. So, okay, so to learn rapidly, you've decided to actually go to Facebook ads, Instagram ads. Instagram ads, yeah. Instagram in particular worked really well for us. Okay. So why did you do that? Why did you go with that channel? We didn't want to do the slow burn thing. We wanted really good traffic, really fast. And even if they weren't good long-term customers, we just wanted to know who the hell actually needs this and have those conversations. And it was a very simple landing page. It was just form above the fold, which is standard practice, particularly on mobile, if you want to capture them. It had some very basic details of addressing their pain points. And it showed three things that we were different and better at. And that's all it was. We didn't talk about pricing or nothing. We just wanted them to book the demo. And then we wanted to have the call to see, hey, what are they asking about? What kind of titles these people are? Can we sell them? What is our win rate typically? And then eventually, are they going to be happy with our service?

33:30 Louis Grenier How did you figure out the three things that you were different from the rest?

33:35 Amrita Mathur Yeah, that was again, a lot of it based. The messaging was mainly based on all the interviews that we did. And like I said, we were very clear on who we're not going after and who we didn't want to be bundled with. So part of the appeal was we didn't want to say, oh my God, agencies suck or anything like that. But we wanted to make sure that people understood we weren't an agency. So there was some subtle messaging in there that helped differentiate us. And actually, to this day, we get so many people, so many prospects that say, oh my God, I've been burned by this agency. I had them on my payroll for whatever, two years and blah, blah, blah. So we get a lot of disgruntled agency people that want to try a different model or a new model, which we proved again in the first four months.

34:21 Louis Grenier And you said subtle messaging, like subtle words to imply stuff. Do you remember what they were?

34:30 Amrita Mathur I think I have mock-ups somewhere which I can send after and you can… So it was on your homepage, was it? It was a little bit on the homepage, but I'd say the landing pages were a lot shorter and very particular because we know the attention span is very little. Plus you're opening up the page in platform, so it has to be very skimmable. So it was a very stripped down, dumbed down version of everything that we said on the homepage. But I even remember the graphics we came up with. There was this one graphic where a guy is just floating in a pool, in a floaty, and he's just relaxed. That was the illustration that we came up with because the message was around being hassle-free and convenient and simple. And the story I always told my friends was, you remember those times when we used to do blah, blah, blah, and I'd wake up at three in the morning and be like, holy shit, I need this thing for tomorrow morning. And I was like, you can use SuperSide for that. If you're on a subscription plan with SuperSide, you could literally from your phone punch in blah, blah, blah, do the brief quickly. And by the time you wake up in the morning, it's in your inbox. I was like, that is the power of SuperSide. And people would be like, holy fuck, I need this now. That was the reaction we used to get. That's really what we were selling. So the iconography and the illustrations that we came up with always wanted to match what we were saying there. So there was this guy chilling, floating in the pool because he had extra time because he had SuperSide to help him. So we tried to round it out in that way. So I'm actually going through what you were explaining, the wayback machine. Nice. So smart. Yeah.

36:09 Louis Grenier I know. That's my job.

36:13 Amrita Mathur Are you able to share your screen? Let's see what it looked like from 2019.

36:16 Louis Grenier I don't think I can. That's a good question. Hold on. Yeah, I can actually. The problem is the problem is what? The problem is. So if you're listening to the podcast right now, I'm going to start. I'm going to describe things. Oh my God, this is so old school. Oh, see how cute it was. So Hustle Free Design for Growing Teams was the headline of the homepage. And then I can see that there's. Oh, there's a floaty guy. Oh, there he is. There he is. There he is. So there's a floaty guy on a massive flamingo. It's actually green, an inflatable flamingo. So you have three main points that you're making. There is dedicated teams stacked with top design. You have improved velocity and reduced surprises. So like the 12 to 24 hours turnarounds and build specifically for fast growing companies.

37:15 Amrita Mathur And then we had this objection handling statement, which was a lot of people would say, but I can just hire. And it's like, yeah, go ahead. But like we're 20X faster. How long are you going to take? Three months for you to hire like four designers. And then you have to onboard them. And then you have to worry about career tracking and blah, blah, blah. I was like, go ahead,

37:32 Louis Grenier please, if you want to do that. So, okay, great. Okay. And then you have the form, but I feel like it's already that's already way too advanced. But anyway, I think that's enough for now in terms of looking at it. Cool. Yeah. So that makes sense. So you did this Instagram ads,

37:52 Amrita Mathur how much budget roughly did you put into them, if you can recall? It was quite a bit. I think we spent like something like 50K a month total in advertising. And at the bulk of it ended up going to Instagram. And we still did like AdWords and whatnot. Eventually we shut it off because it just wasn't it was just bringing like mom and pop shops and like not the audience that we had decided to go after. So we eventually shut that down. But in the beginning, we were still pumping money in there. So it was something like maybe 20, 25K would be Instagram. Another 20K would be Facebook and the rest. So what did you learn? So you brought a lot of traffic there. What did you learn? Yeah, we just learned like generally we had a baseline for how people were converting. We would sometimes do messaging experiments to see if that actually changes the conversion on the page. We would run these in a very controlled environment. We obviously learned a ton from the actual conversations after they had booked the demo. So that was like all recorded, the sales team, which we had just newly assembled at the time to field some of these calls. They would like share their insights back. We had a weekly meeting where we would talk about this very openly. And then that would like loop back into like homepage messaging and elsewhere. And obviously the ad

39:05 Louis Grenier creative itself, like the kinds of things we were seeing on the ad creative. Okay. So like, if you can recall, what was the number one insight that you learned from all of this? And maybe from your sales team as well, or maybe if you have more than one.

39:21 Amrita Mathur Yeah, like hard to kind of remember all the details, but I think it was that there was a bunch of things. I think we knew that, and this is also kind of obvious in retrospect, but like we knew that we need, we couldn't have one size fits all messaging and that we really just needed to think about, there was like these two factions that were developing, which is like the marketing faction and the creative faction. And sometimes creative teams reported into marketing teams, but not always. Sometimes they'd have a centralized design team for the whole company, right? And they acted more like a service provider to all of these different teams. And the dysfunctions between these teams and the pain points were starting to emerge. So, we just started to learn about the language to use with them. What are their typical pains? Oh, how do we want to talk about, if we're talking to somebody in a centralized model versus a decentralized model, like how do we want to talk to them? Those were the kind of insights that we mostly gathered. Like the more tactical stuff we were implementing literally on a weekly basis. What did you do next? Yeah. So, then we said, okay, great. Performance engine is working. We're learning a lot, tons of people coming through the door. I couldn't do all of that myself. I'm not a deep performance expert. Like I've done it, but I'm not like a super expert. So, we were like, okay, let's hire somebody who's like super expert and let's build this like crack team, because this is a channel that's going to work well for us. And to this day, it's like our number one channel overall, and it has a lot of lift from all the brand and content marketing work that we do, obviously. So, our payback period is like well under 12 months, so on and so forth. And a lot of that's the efficiency from performance. So, that was the first thing. The second thing we decided to do is really invest a lot in organic. We were like, we want organic traffic. What is the best, greatest way to do that? Instead of just doing all the classic SEO stuff, we said, let's actually build a proper content marketing engine. So, those were the next few hires. And then that was also extremely experimental. We were just like, should we do the traditional blog thing? Should we do some gated, extremely high value, highly researched content? There was all these different, should we invest in YouTube? TikTok was still kind of like coming into the US back then. This is like four years ago, so we were just like, should we do invest there? There was all these conversations happening. So, we just started tackling everything one by one. We were like, okay, we're going to do a blog, but it's going to be from a search lens and almost entirely from a search point of view. Okay, great. We're going to start doing some lightly gated content, but it has to be extremely high value because if someone's going to give us their email address and identify who they are, it has to be really amazing. It has to land well, and that should have high conversion to demo booked. So, we just put all these programs in place and started investing in them alongside that. So, then we had two machines, right? We had the performance marketing machine, then we had built this content marketing machine that was great for top of funnel and great for sales enablement. And then third, a year or two later in 2020, we started experimenting with the quote unquote ABM or ABX machine, which is start thinking about accounts, like at the account level and saying, are they showing intent signals? Is it worth our company going after them in a big way? And if yes, what is the playbook for that? And so, that's the third machine we built. Really, everything we do is in these three areas.

42:51 Louis Grenier Okay. So, you learn from those landing page and early Instagram ads who you kind of don't want to go after, right? Which is as important, if not more important, as you said before. Then you started to scale that a bit. But I'm curious about the transition from that point where you learn all of this to the point you are today. So, how did you start dabbling down on larger enterprise type companies?

43:26 Amrita Mathur Yeah. It actually kind of became an interesting forcing function. We started looking at retention curves and it was kind of, again, so obvious, but we didn't know for sure. But the retention on enterprise customers was just way, way, way better. The LTV is 36 months or more. And then we also realized that the expansion, which we weren't thinking about in the first couple of years, the expansion opportunity between those enterprise accounts was a lot more. One of our early… I think we signed Facebook in or Meta now in… I think it was our first big enterprise customer. When was it? I think it was in 20… Yeah, it was in 2020. I remember we launched this guide in Jan or Feb. This person, this creative director from Facebook downloaded it. We just did a light touch email drop and a sales rep just tried to reach out and said, hey, what's up? That's it. No sales. We were just like, hey, what's up? Did you find value from this guide? It was a very chill conversation. They actually ended up getting on the phone. I'm not sure why. I think she was just curious. Nothing happened for three months. Three months later, Facebook is launching all new design for those event modules that they have inside Facebook. You can create a birthday party event or whatever. They were launching whatever, 10,000 of them. And they were like, we need to think about this as a provider needs to make all of these event banners and creative around it. And she just thought of us as a point solution for that specific project. She called up this… She wrote us back and then we were like, yep, we can help you with that. And that got our foot in the door. And then they became a subscription for various other things. But it came from this very innocent conversation from a guide about… I don't even remember what. I think it was some ad design guide or something. Is this how you got your first big clients through that? Like inbound first? Yeah, I'd say we were like 100% inbound. So the way that we'd set up the process just for context is like marketing was like the awareness and prospecting machine. And then when someone actually raised their hand and said, I want a demo, then we would hand off to sales with some qualification criteria. And of course, if that didn't become an opportunity, we'd get recycled back to marketing. So we had that nice little system built. And it was a very small number of sales reps, like four or something. So we had extremely tight feedback loops with each of those reps. So that was helpful. But yeah, like our first few enterprise customers, other than the one that was with us from the conscious days, came through these like various… Just like more like classic top of funnel brand awareness and content marketing. And that just told us that, hey, they can be acquired. Hey, there are specific needs that we can actually solve for and keep them, you know, actually provide value to the customer, not just sell them, but actually provide value to the customer. And that, oh my god, we can expand within these accounts because they're gigantic. So like, I don't know, five teams inside Meta use us now, right? Not that original team, but like five other teams. So every year you just like expand, you spread. And we're making changes in our platform right now. So some of that's automated. So we're taking a very PLG approach to that. But yeah, in the early days, it was like all brute

46:43 Louis Grenier forced. Yeah. How did it feel for you to have after like that burnout experience before on the shitty company you worked for before? I mean, I'm saying that you didn't say shitty, I said it. To like go to a place where you got those massive wins, because like I'm sure you were absolutely

47:02 Amrita Mathur fucking delighted to get that big account coming through. Yeah. Yeah. I think while it was happening, I didn't, I personally didn't think about it that much. I, yeah, I, you know, I think I'm an optimistic person generally, but, you know, I also know that things just fade very quickly, right? Like no marketing hack lasts a long time just because it happened once and Facebook came through. It's not going to be like necessarily repeatable motion. Like I just know that that may not be the case. So you just kind of keep planning for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So it's just like this like experimental mindset and like a bit of like a realist mindset, you know, sometimes just, just knowing that it, not everything's going to work out the way you imagine. But listen, I will say I think what Supersight ultimately did without trying, but what it did for my confidence and mental health was really remarkable because I felt like here is a company that not only likes and loves and has invested in marketing, but we are bringing the bacon home. We are actually doing that. And it's unquestionable. Like the data shows it, the numbers show it. Like it's just like not never even been a question. And in fact, in 2022 last year, we had just raised around in December, 2021, like our first proper funding round. We didn't even need the money, but we raised it because money was so cheap. Like our CEO said to us, he was just like, just plan for growth. Like you really need to plan for hyper growth and just like go higher like crazy. He pushed me a lot like to hire and invest in stuff that was like extremely long term, which is not usually how I personally operate because I'm always like skeptical and always like trying to like watch everything and like trying to keep the payback period like, you know, under like eight, 10 months and stuff like that. He was like, he was like, go just like, you need to go, you need to go faster. So it was liberating, you know, it was liberating. And the layer, the, you know, the layers of the cake, you know, they eventually stack up. And like one of the other layers at this company is that it's just generally extremely, there's no good word for it, but kind of like transparent and kind, you know, like even hard decisions are made with like a level of kindness and, and it's also this very transparent. So they're all like, the founder is all Norwegian. So like that Scandi style of working has trickled down the whole company. So they call a spade a spade. You know, for some people that's borderline rude, right? Like some people are like, whoa, like, oh my God. But it's like, it's like, you know, you know exactly where you stand. You know, exactly if you're doing a good job, you know, if you're doing a bad job, you fucking know, like, you know. So I appreciate that. I mean,

49:57 Louis Grenier I hope that every company I ever worked for is going to be like that. Yeah. For Europe. Do you have a hard stop in two minutes? I don't. Okay. So do you mind if we go over for five? Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. So thanks so much, by the way, for being so transparent about the process. I think that's really interesting for people listening and not necessarily just people who want to be like you, meaning like, you know, startups want to grow fast and whatever. But I think what you shared, especially at the beginning, about the market and the assumptions and testing them also is very valid for even freelancers, agencies, like small agencies, because it's really about like, as you said, who you shouldn't focus on learning as you go. And yeah, having like this tight idea of who you're going after. I guess the learning I have, from what you shared so far, is that the success of SuperSides and the way you were able to grow that fast is because the founders got marketing. They understand marketing. Clearly, they really understand what it is, right? And a lot of times, folks like you really struggle in companies because they don't get it. They think it's like promotion and they forget that marketing should and will have a seat at the table for product strategy and all of that stuff. So what will be your tip, your number one tip, your number one kind of advice for the VPs of marketing out there who

51:29 Amrita Mathur are struggling because their CEO, their founders don't get marketing? Yeah, I think that, first of all, if you have the ability to do this, and I know not everyone has the opportunity and the job market is the way that it is right now, if you can, try to look for companies that have a proven track record of investing in marketing and at least someone in a position of power. It doesn't have to be the CEO, right? And marketing may not even report to the CEO, but someone in a strong influencer position gets marketing. They don't have to know the ins and outs of it. I wouldn't say my boss, the CEO, knows every aspect of marketing, but he values it at a fundamental level. So try to gauge that in your interview process and try to work for companies that get that or that you think you can help them get there. And then the second thing I would say is, I think it's easy to hide and cower and always try to prove your worth. I think poorly managed marketers often end up adopting that stance, that posture, which I did at my last company, and I've learned from that. I think you just lead, if you just lead with the assumption that everything you're doing is the right thing and this company absolutely needs marketing and adopt a slightly different posture, hopefully people will come around to that. That confidence can definitely help and you need to be able to tell that story. You need to be able to show the data, you need to be able to tell the story. I love going to town halls and saying, hey, we won this deal. Let me tell you how we won this deal and I'll go through, like literally, first they came to the blog and then they did this and then this rep reached out. I try to tell those stories as much as possible. So adopt that sort of posture rather than like hide in a corner, which some of us have done and myself included. And I would say like, listen, learn from my mistakes, life is too short. I mean, the pandemic basically showed the light, like life is too short. You don't need to be at these companies that don't value your brain trust and your IP. You just absolutely don't need to be there. So if you can afford to leave and go somewhere else, or hey, even better, do your own thing, all the power to you.

53:48 Louis Grenier Well, yeah, very good tips. I have nothing to say. Usually I can add stuff. No, I completely agree. Sorry. What would be the top three resources you'd recommend folks listening today?

54:05 Amrita Mathur Kind of depends on what industry and stuff you're in, but I just generally love spicy takes. So I like this one newsletter that this guy, Brendan Hufford, sends out. I think it drops every week or every, maybe twice a week. It's called Growth Sprints, just the one from the other day. Was like, the CMO says story crushes tactics, right? And he always picks like one story to go deep in. And then they'll always kind of like say, they talk about like a few other trends that are happening in the market, et cetera. So I love reading that newsletter because it's the kind of thing that you read, like, I don't know, maybe on the toilet. Like it's like funny. Like it's kind of like, yeah, it's like, it's like edutainment, you know, it's like educational, but entertainment. And, you know, everything's like, I love like when things are like zero click content, you know, like everything's in the email. I don't need to click out and go somewhere else. That's just like easy skimmable. So I love his stuff. I follow a lot of what I would consider like smart people on LinkedIn and Twitter. I learn a lot from them. And like, I think, you know, I think you don't have to be like active on social media. Like you don't necessarily have to contribute, but if you have, if you build, if you curate your smart people circle, like you can actually learn a lot from them just from like observing how they do things. Like I love how, for example, Amanda Natvydad frames her tweets. The way that she writes, I just don't understand like how she does it, but the way she frames them, some of her ideas are very, very standard and simple. But the way she frames them is like beautiful, right? So what my learning is not necessarily about what she's talking about, but the how she's talking about it. So like copywriting chops, right? I picking that up from her. So that's another one. And then, you know, there's like a ton of podcasts that won't necessarily be applicable to your like day to day, but sometimes they'll just like spark some other idea and stuff. So like I listened to podcasts about, I don't know, like music, you know, sometimes like culture. I also like weirdly don't shoot me, but I really like the Masters of Scale podcast. I don't even know why, because it's some of the subject matter there's just like, yeah, like this is applicable to like two Fortune 500 companies maybe, right? But you know, sometimes it just sparks an idea. So I like to listen to like the Reid Hoffman podcast. I love the fact that you knew that I didn't like it and we didn't talk about it. Yeah, and it's just, yeah, and it's not gonna, it's not gonna like give you like tools like right away. It's not an actionable kind of podcast, but you know, it's kind of nice to like zoom out a little and be like, absolutely. What do these Fortune 500 companies, how do they operate? What are the things that they think about? And yeah, oh my God, there's like, there was like this woman one time who was like, had like this weird title. And I was like, wow, there's jobs like that, you

57:03 Louis Grenier know, it can help you with aspiration and things like that. Yeah, you should absolutely expose your brain to like information from completely outside of your little circle and stuff. I completely agree. That's a great advice as well. Amrita, you've been a pleasure. Honestly, it's been really, really interesting conversation. The time flew by, which is why I asked you if you had a hard stop, I didn't realize, which is always a good sign. I hope you've enjoyed yourself as well. Thank you so much for taking the time. Where can people connect with you learn more from you?

57:33 Amrita Mathur Yeah, I'm on both LinkedIn and Twitter. Amrita Mathur, just find me there, dm me if you have any you know, thoughts or comments or questions or if you have a similar story, I'd love to learn. And yeah, like Louis, like this was so fun. And you know, I love that you're like a you don't care about like the veneer of what a podcast host should look like and do and say. What do you mean? I do I look ugly like I'm not well presented. No, you're well. I mean, you're you're chill. Like you're not like in this like whole attire, like your background. I don't know. I just feel like the the veneer aspect of it. Like I feel

58:11 Louis Grenier like I'm talking to a friend basically is like what it really comes down to. So we just become best friends. Yeah, maybe. Can you give me your number? I'll text you every day. Some random ideas. I know you would. So I'm not going to give you my number. And the like the way I approach this podcast and thank you for saying that the way I approach it briefly is I'm not trying to make you look good. That's kind of the thing. I'm not trying to make my guests look good. I'm just trying to get insights from you. So if I cross you, if I like if I ask you a question that make you like cringe a bit or you don't want to say like, I don't care. You know, that's kind of the the vision I had for it. And it's work. It's work. It works really well because it forces you to to ask the right question, not just to make you look good. I think that's one of the the way. Anyway, I'm Amrita. Yeah, you've been really a pleasure. I mean, thank you so much for for your time. Thank you so much. Have a great day.