20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

probably fire most of your marketing team. - My philosophy is the e-com playbook is the right playbook, force ass. Every single cent needs to equal a purchase or not to cart. Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG. I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You've met a Google in life cycle. You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. We have kids that are like 17, 18, 19, that are making 20, 30 K a month, just making a couple ads for us. This is 20 growth with me Harry Stebing. So 20 growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the biggest and best growth leaders to discuss how they grow incredible products to millions of users. Well, today we have one of the best, Mars Wollinsky. He's worked at Superhuman. He's worked at Whisperflow. And now he's just joined ExcelBatVicta.com. And he's looking to make it third time. I wouldn't say lucky, 'cause he is a master of growth. Look at Superhuman and Whisper. These are two of the fastest growing product, like growth products. And this is a masterclass in how you grow really fricking fast in a world of AI. But before we dive into the show today, we used AlfaSense on an investment that helped us close an $8 million deal. $8 million, baby, that's a lot of money. That's why I'm genuinely excited to have them as a partner on 20 VC. AlfaSense combines AI with one of the world's deepest libraries of market intelligence, including expert interviews, broker research, earnings calls, company filings, and real-time news. Every answer is grounded in this incredibly trusted evidence and fully traceable to the original source, which is so important. So you can make really high conviction decisions with confidence. But the best part, they're building Superanalyst and always on AI Analyst. 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And we've seen these companies and a huge amount of SaaS companies rise with the product-like growth PLG motion. And now we're entering a world of agents. What changes in the growth world when we shift from humans to agents with product-like growth? - That's a great question, I think. I mean, all of the startups I've worked with have been PLG, right? And I think in a world of agents, there's definitely a layer where PLG still matters because PLG assumes you have a perfect self-ser funnel to the human. And in the same way, you're definitely gonna want to optimize it for how is an agent doing research? How is it picking the tools and the APIs that it's actually using? And I think it just takes the same framing and diligence to why the product already worked from the human end and just understand how are agents making decision-making. So the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned in my opinion for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop when tools are being selected for certain tasks. - When you look back at, say superhuman, if we go back in time chronologically, it grew very kind of crossman-like with founder referrals. Was your reflections or lessons from that experience on superhuman's growth that you've taken with you? - The taste-making of what it means to create a strong product, that for me was born while I was at superhuman. Because at the end of the day, no matter whether, if you've used superhuman, you've likely stayed using superhuman just because every little element of that product is hyperrefined to make you want to continue using it. But I think the difference of what was the early scale of superhuman where it was super founder-led word of mouth referral, there was essentially an asymptote that the product hit, where they had to follow a different playbook. Like this was three years ago, roughly. Back then, what was SAS, now we call AI SAS. Everyone was running more of the, just PLG motion referral word of mouth without doing paid. And they were laughing. Like, you know, e-coms have been doing, you know, the UGC programs, hundreds of thousands of ads, like paid ad spend is the way to drive performance. And the resistance was definitely there while I was at superhuman. But, you know, seeing what, you know, I've been able to do alongside a great team at Whisper and Now Victor. My philosophy is that the e-com playbook is the right playbook for SAS. Because if you look at e-com, you have every single cent needs to equal a purchase or not to cart. You have hundreds of UGC creators' variety of creative. And you also have a ton of channels that you're essentially balancing to showcase the entirety of the brand. That's the model that I took and applied at the end before the Grammar Law Acquisition and Superhuman to scale paid and then follow that exact same motion for Whisper Flow. That's really what put it on the map and got it to where it is. Because like we were talking about before, distribution to me is the only mode. And you have to have that strong of a playbook when it comes to marketing. Because like in today's world, that's the only way to succeed. - Dude, I'm gonna love this show. Because most people say the same thing and what everyone tells me is that, no, no, you should wait to do paid. You should wait to do paid. It's a dangerous drug that you can get hooked on. When is the right time, do you think that? - By the way, right. So like at the end of the day, paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG, that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape, or form, right? Like there's a ton of narrative that like focus on brand, go organic content, build all that base. That just takes too much time. Yes, do that motion while also doing all of paid. Because you can refine messaging, do creative testing, test your funnels, test your positioning, all within a week on paid. How long is that gonna take you? If you do some content writing, you talk about it on a podcast, you see if it sticks, you're gonna do some user interviews. Great, do all of that. But then you have a much faster engine of validation on the other side on the paid amplification end. - When we actually break that down, if I'm an early stage founder, what should I actually do? How much money should I take to spend on paid? Should I do it on one channel versus 10 channels? If I'm an early stage company, I don't have mega budget. What do I actually do? - Yeah, so I mean, I would say it's definitely start with what I say is the core two. You have Meta Google and Lifecycle. And obviously like your site and all the rest is in the middle. Because you have your strong video intent platforms, both in Meta and like YouTube ads. You have the search intent of like people not knowing your product exists, but they're searching for something, right? The key words. And then I add in Lifecycle as well, because if you don't have a net to like nudge people and show up in the right plates, email SMS, whatever it is, push if you have an app, you want those three things spun up because you can scale to your first million, 10 million AR, just off of those three things. And then obviously you know, you're investing into the site, you're investing into founder-led content. There's like the other things in there, but in paid, just focus on Meta and Google and you'll totally be fine. Everyone's like, oh, we have to do TikTok and Reddit. Like there comes a time and place to add in a million things because in the same way that like a lot of people get lost with agents is they like start doing a million things with agents and they do them all poorly. Same thing here, right? If you do it million channels and you do them all poorly, it's not going to help you out. Okay, so we have a matter, we have Google, we have a life cycle, and we start spending, I don't know, let's just put a hundred grand on it. So we've raised a, if we raised a three million dollar seed, round is a hundred grand for? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on like your average revenue per user in the unit economics, right? Because it depends how long is your funnel? What is that hundred can you give you? But usually I'd say like, yeah, if you raise, let's say three to five million, that's like a good start budget to essentially validate that we put money, people are going to actually want my product. What should we be looking for then? We have a hundred K, and we put it across matter and Google, let's just say those two. What is a sign that it is working versus not working? Yeah, so I'll also frame I think a massive gap in the SaaS space where like I'm waiting for, for startups to be made that fill this gap. So I'll zoom out and if you look at Ecom, there are companies like Triple Whale and Elevars that have existed for many years. And what those tools do is Triple Whale is essentially a mutual exclusivity platform that tells you, okay, you add a pixel to your website, it's out of the box, you plug in all your ads, and then it tells you, because there's usually overlap. If you run meta ads in Google, they're double counting, right? And then life cycle is also triple counting at that point. So what a tool like that does for Ecom is say, great, I plugged in all my variables, tell me exactly what is driving revenue from a new customer basis. And you have that out of the box, you don't have to set anything up. And the other side is conversion tracking, which is like at a cart purchase server side, there's like a ton of technical stuff on tracking, that's just like a massive headache. But there's a solution in Ecom that is out of the box, takes 15 minutes to set up, and it's done. You know how to think about it for SaaS, completely different world, because you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch. Right, when it comes to analytics, there's a DB, there's a BILA or so maybe you're using Click House and Hex. Last click, first click, Attribution, all of this is homegrown at every single startup. There is no out of the box SaaS that fills that. And that's why all of the companies that struggle don't do that first that you have the right MarTech stack to understand if we're spending what is actually moving the needle? Because the platforms won't tell you because you have the wrong set up for conversion tracking, you don't have measurement and you're spending into the air. And I'd say 90% of companies don't do that as a first step. Before you spend your first cent have everything set up. How do I set that up if we don't have it in SaaS? How do I set it up as a founder? This is what I essentially did both at Superhuman and WhisperFone Out Victor is essentially coming in and defining what that looks like. Right, and it comes to have a strong analytics leader, as well as like a strong analytics dev that can essentially set up all of that on your website, set up all of that inside of your product to make sure that you are because most people stop at the we have analytics to track our product or all the marketing platforms getting the same signals. There's like there's a thing called matrate on like meta and then there's like a enrichment score on Google. If you're not maxing that out, you're like missing 50% like it's just ghost people. Meta doesn't see them, it's not attributing conversions and the way that the platforms work in today's environment is each platform's algorithm does what you tell it. So let's say we have poor conversion tracking that doesn't track when someone subscribes to our product and it's like a 50 50 match, right? And if I optimize for that subscription, the higher volume amount of events I have, the more data it has of what a subscriber looks like. When I optimize for that, meta will give me more of those people, but if you have poor conversion tracking, meta doesn't know who those people are and it just randomly targets people and you have a super high hack, you'll say, uh, pay doesn't work for me. I'd say most of the time people haven't done the actual setup correctly before they can say pay doesn't work for me. So we get that analytics data, we get that setup in place. What are we looking for then? What is good matric? And what matric should we be optimizing for is it acquisition as a retention is it spend when your first getting started. The main thing that you optimize for is like it's the most important event to you as a business. So it's a subscription or let's say the the start trial or in whisper flows example was, you know, the download right super up or funnel event because we had a desktop client and iOS app made it super hard to track. But you pick what that event is and essentially validate that we spend 100k what is traffic cost what is our acquisition cost per user right and just focus on acquisition cost because PLG and the product team are going to focus on retention as long as you bring in the quality user right and that's why over time you'll probably change the conversion action to be what the most important event is right. So for example, at Victor, it's like a pretty hard funnel to go through and admin slack or let's see your smaller team and anyone can add apps or you need to be a tenant Microsoft teams. You go through onboarding and then you add Victor into slack or Microsoft teams. That's our conversion action. Super down funnel, but we know that we've optimized for that and like because we were super high ARPA we can have a couple thousand dollars in cash and the economics will work. But you need to like take the time to find that out right like what does success look like at at the channel level, but it's just acquisition in the beginning. Okay, so in the beginning it's like cost per download exactly cost per download and so if we're thinking about good ratio so we hear like five to one cat to LTV or LTV to cat can obviously in the early days is one to one OK what is OK what is good what is great what is worrying. I think it depends how much you've raised to be honest if you've raised a lot you just burn a shit loading one to one and that's OK. Yeah, because I mean like like we were saying right distribution is everything in today's market. There's you know you you open up X every day and there's like a hundred new products five that are in your category to that have absolutely just cloned your website right this happens every single day and the only way you out compete them is distribution essentially you want to run one to one to one to essentially get as many users using your product and believing in you as soon as possible. You don't want to do it below that because then then you are burning money and then you have to analyze the website the funnel and try and get it to that one to one and then I think there comes a room of scale where you have enough other channels. Sponsorship your your pumping on a when all this other stuff starts to lift your your LTV to cat ratio and I think everyone in terms of economics is trying to shoot for like a three to one and it also changes depending on what kind of sass you are right like LTV to cat is usually not enough you want to probably look at like LTV gross profit is specifically if you're you have token cost because your the biggest cost item is usage at the end of the day so economics are a little different depending like how does that change and with a whisper and evict or why you do have a token cost being much more significant than you have an assassin will let out a no token cost. The biggest differences are first in that like meta and Google are not optimized for like B to B sass usage based products like they go absolutely nuts with a so you're telling me there's a predictive revenue of a one person could be a 50,000 you know annual contract while another person will be 50 right there's just like huge variance depending on single person can be a high user and like the the algorithm has no idea what to do with that. But the other side of it is we obviously have way higher average revenue per user but you know average cost per user is also higher right so you essentially want to make sure that you actually have a good grapple on what cost is and a lot of people were like oh well that's my anthropic bill what about modal what about inference cost what all the other things that is allowing you to serve as your products and like have a good finance leader that's going to be able to essentially got check. Yeah you've been missing these cost items this is what you should be optimizing for so we don't burn money and that's a lot I think a mistake a lot of people make is not doing that analysis at first. How much should I spend on creative for these paid channels like if we're going to do Instagram marketing we should do we need we need a video we need creative we need to how much should I spend on that because that can't be an off thought. Yeah I would say you probably want to be spending not at scale but in the beginning as much in ad spend on creative because creatives everything in today's environment and like people have you know heard this buzzer thrown around there's an update in meta that was called and drama that essentially change the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting so what meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are we're going to analyze the creative and based on who we know you're trying to target we will find those people for you so essentially that removed like all the media buyers that were like tinkering campaigns and had strategies how to do it that went out the door and their whole job had to be creative strategy so in the beginning you'll see this for Victor as well as whisper we have hundreds of creators that are doing it. Different demos different use cases to different audiences and that's the only way you can scale spend let's say you have a hundred K meta budget you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month otherwise you're going to plateau you're going to get out competed how do you do 400 to 500 new creatives a month you have a creator program where like at you know at Victor we have our own creator program where we give a percentage of ad spend to people to essentially create ads for us we obviously you know that's not going to be a lot of people. We obviously have some storytelling and they use the product so it takes you know a little bit to acquire them but once they do that they create three to four videos a week and we have a couple hundred of them we work with five agencies we also have our in house creative team so again e-commerce has been doing this for over a decade that is how the entirety of e-commerce function you do see creator programs hundreds of thousands of variations of creative and they've been doing that and that's like in their DNA. SAS had to grow up to this and like because I come from that world that was the instilling factor that I always brought in again I'm a startup founder you will my advisor and angel investor well done just can be very unprofitable investment for you. How do I create a UGC network I'm a startup I need three to four hundred creatives there are a million agencies now right like in all of these gaps and opportunities the sheer amount of like aggregation service based businesses there's there's hundreds of thousands of UGC agencies. But most of them are shared we get a lot of people everything that I get a hundred plus. last match has been out. I can create clips for you. I'm going to create a-- What should I do as a startup founder to know which agency or marketplace to work with versus not? Yeah, I mean, I think it comes from asking peers, who do you use? And that's the nice thing about creating UGC. It doesn't actually go on their page. So they can represent every brand, right? And they can do ads for every competitor, as long as-- Ah, OK. OK, so in this case, I'm creating it for you, and then you use it as a-- As a charity. I pump a million dollars on that ad. And it never shows up on your channel, right? It's just pumping creative videos. And then, yeah, you can also run partnership ads. Those work really well. You should have probably 30% roughly of your spend going to someone posts in collaboration with, put spend behind that. But yeah, it could be someone that has no experience. The kids that are making bank nowadays doing UGC for brands that will pay them a percentage of ad spend. We have kids that are 17, 18, 19 that are making 2030 K a month, just making a couple ads for us. And the nice thing is, if we keep spending on it, and it's a great ad, they don't have to make another one for a while. Have you found 80% of the ad revenue comes from 20% of the creative? Yeah, 100%. Right? And that's also just how the algorithm also works. Is it finds the best ad, and it pumps all the spend out. Have you found there's commonalities in those 20% best performing? Be it a girl versus a boy, be it direct camera versus not, be it, I don't know if you've seen this, but the trend of like cutting things in a kitchen whilst talking about something, making a coffee also about something, it's a hook. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think pattern disruption, as well as like getting you to stop, because like the sheer amount of content that we digest in a day, if it all looks the same, then you're going to get drowned out. So the best creative essentially is like a rough shake of the camera that like seems like it's a mistake, but it got your attention, right? And stuff like that works really well, where it's just like a messy star, like, oh, yeah, like what's up? Like, and then talk about the product. But at the end of the day, the key thing around creative is not the one creative. It's the package of all of your assets together. They have to be different to the algorithm. They have to look and feel different. So different ages, different genders, different settings, different hooks. If you only focus on this is what works and you pump just that, performance will crater. You need to constantly be creating net new, completely wild, weird ideas. Otherwise, your acquisition costs will start to rise. So what extent was that be replaced by AI creative? We had Cliff White's been who's the founder of Speechley on the show. And he spoke about how essentially he did it once. And then they use AI to change background, change his clothing, and actually one turned into thousands of variations. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the superpower of AI in creative is spinning up variations. But if you look at the like full videos that are AI, they're slop. Like you can tell immediately that it's an AI video. I think there's a place for it, maybe 5% of your account is just kind of just like a weird AI videos that just like are diverse. But I think that's the secret sauce is being able to create variety in no way, shape, or form is anything and creative to the point where you can replace real people. I also don't buy the, the algos don't down a great AI content versus human content. I agree. Yeah, you're 100% right. OK, so we've got this 100K and we've got this UGC network. It's not really working. What does not really working look like? It's not doing the one to one. How long should I give it? Should we do this for three months, straight? Should we do it for six months? Yeah, I mean, you'll usually be able to say that like, if you just get started, the campaigns have to warm up. There are like certain things you have to have already in place. So like we said, you have your analytics, you have your conversion tracking. Let it just run. And of course, you already have to have customers coming in the door. And ideally, and that's why like PLG and product excellence is still the beginning step, right? Like have a product that people genuinely love. And they want to tell their friends about. That's already happening. Then your conversion tracking is working on your website or your app or whatever. And you get to 50 conversions. Then you can start paid. Because that's like the minimum line of whatever your conversion action is that the algorithm is going to say, OK, I have enough data to understand who your target best customer is. And then I'd say within two to three weeks, if you launch a campaign and go through a couple, you'll do two or three iteration cycles of, we launched some creative. This worked. This didn't. Why? OK, let's throw some diverse stuff. Let's do some variations. You probably want to give it a full three months, but you'll be able to say, yes, I can start printing money today in like two to three weeks. Or I have to go to the drawing board on all of these things. Because there are a lot of moving pieces, right? It's the ad creative, the ad copy. What is the landing experience? What is your messaging on that landing experience? Is your page speed good? Are your screenshots in the app store actually sensible? Like all of those things are micro levers that compound. So like you also, you need to be refining everything along the way as you spend. Otherwise, also things will plateau. So a couple of things there, which I just need a bit of help on. The landing experience. What do you mean there? What should I know as a founder? Yeah, so I mean, like a lot of people have really poor like UI UX or website designer branding. Like absolutely awful, right? And like-- I don't want to throw a shade, but if you've seen post talk, I go on this side and I'm like, I have no idea what's going on. This is like Beijing's version of UI. The thing is, is that's like a pattern to swap things for them. And they know who their target audience is. And the target audience appreciates the weirdness. Oh, yeah, James is amazing. And it works. And it's a brilliant company. And like phenomenal. But I just look at it and go, oh, yeah. I mean, on the flip side, it's just like, OK, like do you know what your traffic mix is? Is your site mobile optimized? The sheer amount of sites I see that the main CTA is like a scroll and a half away. Come on. Like that's the first thing that you start with that like a basic audit will show you, right? And that's what I mean by the landing experience. If I read nothing else but your headline, do I know what you do? Like it's hard sometimes to explain what this crazy AI/SAS niche product does, focus on your messaging. I actually have something that tells a user. If they didn't move their thumb, they didn't do anything. I want to try that out. Like go through that proxy. Same thing with the creatives and then with a copy. That's a frame that you want to take throughout the entire kind of funnel. Page speed really matters. So page speed matters because it depends obviously who and where your target customers are, right? So like you as you can, like, you know, we have good data and it'll be fine. But like where page speed really starts to matter is both AEO and SEO. It is one of the core elements in what gets your site to rank in, let's say, a top 10 position on Google. And then same thing. If, for example, a bot caller goes to your website and it's a cheap call to say how long did your page come to load? And if you're on a low, essentially, ranking from like 8F, the average person in the world will probably not load your site immediately. So like any second improvement is a drastic jump in conversion. And then just the numbers show that, right? And even though it seems like, oh, yeah, like it loads in half a second versus 200 milliseconds, it does make a difference. OK. So we have this 100K. We've done three months. I'm really enjoying this. As I said, for me, it's nice to follow the chronology. You have 100K. It's going well, I think. How do I know whether to pour fuel on the fire, keeps the budget as it is, and just keep testing, but in a more measured fashion? Or, uh-uh, this is not fucking working. You want to chart your total spend to your acquisition and how elastic it is. There's always going to be a lag where I spend today, and then I convert to paid in 14 days. Let's say, right? And that's like, we're looking at two main things. Like revenue is the most important thing from an error standpoint because we're in SaaS. As I spend up, does that error also spike, right? And how elastic that relationship is? We'll immediately tell you oil on the fire, or let's pump the brakes because as we spend up, this is a very common thing that you'll hear how incremental is your spend. It's a question you should ask relatively early, because once things are working, it's really easy just to like dial it up to 13 on a scale of 10. Sure. And what ends up happening if you're not very diligent, all that additive spend could have not been there, and you would have gotten the same results. And then you're just giving money to Meta and Google, right? And there's that fine line. And that's why I'd say like true people that understand this in growth are on the rare side because like, there's usually like I am a expert in Meta, or I'm an expert in some other channel, but being able to sit above the whole thing and say, okay, here's how the interrelationship of this much spend here, this many sponsorships, this many, you know, podcasts features. This is how, you know, how much PR we're pushing. All of that interrelationship is how you essentially ensure the most elastic spend to revenue impact. And that's like further down the 100K, but that's like the, that's the end state. You are everywhere all at once at the right moments. Why did superhuman growth asymptote end? At the end of the day, it was very much a, you know, premium product, immediate paywall, and the core ICP founders, right? And we also experienced this at Whisper, right? Like the early adopter tech founder is not an infinite audience. I think today it's an ever growing audience because everyone can be a founder, right? But if you look back even two, three years ago, the tan of that is finite, right? And that was the first asymptote. So essentially, you know, going after additional ICPs, like sales and how do we turn superhuman to be more of a sales engine for people? Looking at the recent opens on the right, that's my favorite feature, right? I can see who's creeping on my emails and send them reply. So like stuff like that, like adapting the product to more ICPs is where you get those additional step changes. But the asymptote is because it was hyper focused on one ICP, and if you don't proactively open up the layers of the onion, you're going to hit, you know, some kind of level. But if you look at revenue scaling, you see fixes scale faster than superhuman in the top-bime revenue number, do you not just go, we fucked up paid? Well, yes, right, like a fixer followed the e-complaybook. UGC, tons of ads, strong on meta. The thing is is slightly different. different value proposition in that different market, different market, different consumer, right? This is someone that like once a simple tool that adds labels to their Gmail, would you say faces should continue to just spend a hell out of this market then? Well, from what I know, right? Their scale was both on the BDC side through meta, but also they made big revenue jumps through the outlook consumer that was hyper frustrated and big enterprise deals, right? And that's also where superhuman mail, they did the same thing where going after big logos and ensuring that you can essentially have sales led growth alongside PLG, I think fixed, or did that also super well. They pushed hard on the sales side 'cause that was also their background relationships they had from the email space. And that's why I like same thing for Whisper, right? Like it was really interesting to see that, you know, we were BDC PLG, but like a very large component of our ARR was enterprise before we had a single AE, 'cause it was self-service enterprise adoption, team licenses and that kind of stuff. So you also want your product to be like adoptable easily by enterprise, I think that's a nice unlock as well. We mentioned the three channels, meta Google lifecycle. What are your lessons on how to do YouTube while? We hear about YouTube being the acquisition engine and machine that it is. Any lessons that I should know as a young founder? So I mean, it's a totally different type of creative. So if you look at meta and YouTube, they have like similar but slightly different like hook curves where like the hook happens slightly later on Instagram and Facebook, you want that immediate validation while on YouTube, you're kind of there to spend the time digest the video. So you have a little bit more of a longer attention span. And a lot of people actually are terrified of YouTube because you know, the best performing YouTube ads are 16 by 9. So they're landscape and most people are like, "Well, I have a UGC program. I just have story placements. What am I supposed to do?" So we did a really cool thing at Victor. We had Victor build an app for us that takes any story video and adds it into a static template that has like logos that use us, G2 rating, and then a CTA and the videos, the replaceable asset. And we turned all of our story ads into YouTube ads. Every single one ended up on YouTube, not all of them worked the same. We had to edit them a little bit to fit the format. But that's usually people are like terrified to get started with YouTube because of that reason. But just like go into Figma, make a template for that's a static asset, throw your video in that and just export that. Welcome to YouTube, right? Like you're gonna run ads that way. And there's also just like a different storytelling where you want it to feel like a organic YouTube video. So like someone talking about a hack or use case of like, "Yo, I just started using this "and it absolutely changed my life. "I'm gonna show you how." You're not gonna say that in a meta ad, right? It's a very different script and framing and filming. So we have a separate team that does the scripts, films, the YouTube videos. It's an entirely separate program from our UGC. We use some things from UGC in YouTube. But it deserves its own focus. We're gonna go into the kind of team composition I try, I wanna stay on channels. We now have a working program. How do we determine how much fuel to pour on the fire? Yeah, I mean, I think it's all dependent on that elasticity that we define. So like at Whisper, did what I think everyone should do is go as hard as you absolutely can and then see it blow up and then understand where and how it blew up, hold back and use that as information of now we know what is incremental. We know where our ceilings are. We know that we hit audience saturation or we need more creative. So we did that last year at Whisper, right? Like we like five X to the budget from one month to another and where do the pieces fall through, right? But the thing is the reason why we did that instead of trying to figure it out over time is like you don't have six months to say okay. We need to be growing 30% 40% month over month over month. And the only way that we can do that is okay. Let's see where our ceiling is 'cause maybe we would have been surprised that we would have been scaling infinitely which didn't happen, right? But we then knew okay, meta needs to be second to Google. Here's why here's how all these things worked together. These newsletters were shit. This podcast doesn't work. How did the pieces fit together? So I mean, in my opinion, go hard to understand what doesn't work and where your mix needs to be adjusted then bring things down and then scale back up with those learnings and then you can get a repeatable ramp. If something doesn't work today, do you just turn it off or do you wait to give it time? I would say it depends on how poor the metrics are, right? Like if there's no world that this is ever going to make sense to turn off immediately. Let's say some leading indicators are saying, it's pretty crap, but let's give it a little bit of time to see if there are other things that are impacting this. 'Cause like I said, there's a million dials. From the ad to the conversion, there's a million things that you can tinker along the way and that's why you wanna give it time, right? Like this asset is going to the homepage. What if we had a hyper personalized landing page that says the exact same thing that is being said in the ad and even includes the creator's face on the page? It's a random idea, right? Does that move the needle? And test some things to give it some time and then scratch it off. What single channel worked best at Whispers and what did you learn from that? Definitely Google in terms of-- - Flies institutional ICO. - Google ads. - Yeah, Google ads. Google ads is still the main driver, just, and it would surprising across literally everything. Non-branded search, PMAX, YouTube ads, everything prints there. The reason why it's like it's the middle of the funnel, but you have essentially all top to bottom, right in one platform. And if you have like all the right conversion tracking, Google is a big marketplace with a lot of services and just optimizing for app download because it's a freemium product, we have a lot more fine tune control than we do in meta when it comes to like, hack and how much we want to spend in India versus in the US because of different price in those markets. We don't have as much fine tune control in meta 'cause like I said, it's like they've removed all the manual settings. Creative is your targeting. Either works in a G or it doesn't. You just iterate on creative. It's a completely different job than like, you have a pretty structured beast to essentially understand how to scale there. So it was Google and that's also because longer form video for like a pretty difficult product to explain like, okay, I talk, it turns the text, but where and like text boxes like, explain that to like the average Joe that's walking on the street. It's gonna be like, they're gonna look at you weird. Like, yeah, voice notes. Like, what do you mean? I send them and what's that, right? Like, there's that education that needs to happen. So like the 30 second to one minute videos in YouTube that educated the base ran for a while. Got millions, hundreds of millions of impressions. Then fed into non-branded search, PMACs, different placements and display and then eventually those people converted, right? So it was all those pieces worked together. Is performance always best at the start of a channel or does it get better over time? It gets better over time, but again, it has its own scaling laws where like, there's a point where you have to diversify into other platforms before you see an additional unlock. And when you hit like some kind of audience fatigue of like whatever you're targeting, but in the beginning, it's always shit because you're waiting for the conversions. When you hit audience fatigue, do you keep spending waiting for a next unlock? Would you just go, I've tapped out this channel? - Well, you wanna unlock the next audience, right? So like, you know, for example, when we were looking at Victor, when we launched, we purposely had the, you know, the AI employee for everyone. And we did this to see who came in the door and we had, you know, agencies, e-combrans and SMBs that first showed up. And essentially what we did is we went through in order, right? We went, okay, we have evergreen stuff. We'll continue that running. But now let's go agencies. Can we acquire them? What does the funnel look like? What does the creative look like? And then once we unlocked one audience, and it seems like the economics work, now there's a repeatable process to refine it, then we can go on to the next audience. So you essentially want to, you'll hit audience fatigue in what you're currently targeting. The marketing now is very ICP specific. We have all of the latest and greatest tools that can tell you in a prompt, whether you're using Victor or whatever tool, simulate this person, like, what do they read? What do they think about decision making? Run that prompt. And then you have like, the richest ICP research you possibly can have, create it for that person, create an experience from a landing, onboarding, and product experience for that person, you can continue scaling by just going down to the niche audience by audience. Because I don't think, as an investment company, I don't think that was a good tagline. And you may hate me for that. But the AI employee for everyone, I didn't know what the fuck that means. If you were to say the AI video editor, great, amazing. If you were to say the AI copywriter, amazing. AI employee, you're doing my tasks, you're doing my creative one. But my point is, are you able to do horizontal tag lines and then the class, and that's the right approach? - So I mean, I think because the category is so wide, and I wouldn't say we're the first, but we're the first to say AI employee and actually deliver on that promise, where work is being given, and the usage is actually our way, positive, actually valuable. And we started with that because it's again, how else are you gonna frame it as being different than cloud or chat to BT and these other players, where you have to, for us, it's the positioning around knowledge work. There was other than AI coworker and AI employee, there's no other positioning that really makes sense. And because it hasn't been used a lot, I think it's confusing, but now that there are more use cases and stories to back it up, then we can shift the framing to be a higher victor and here's what he did. And then it's a guy's name, it's an employee, always an AI tool, right? You can invert the process now, but we had to start with something to essentially build those use cases. - One of the things that is supposed to be a growth engine is what is referrals, and referrals programs. Any lessons from whisper from superhuman, that it really important for me and founders to know on how to build great referrals engines. - I think it's one of the core things like we talked about in Metag Google Lifecycle, when you think about PLG, like have that referral program set up, and it be very front and center, and easy to discover in the product, to make it effortless for someone to share the product and get something for doing that. And at Superhuman, it was give one month, get one month. And we had people that had hundreds of referrals, hundreds of months, they were never going to pay for the rest of their lives. And because it was delightful and it was easy to discover, but it was very tactile. Where I'm getting something for doing this. So it was a similar thing with Whisperer when you hit your, let's say, 2000 word limit. So now that we're changing a little bit of how that trial works, but essentially finding the right moment to show the referral program and make it tangible. So like you're right about, you're right about to hit your word limit. Did you know that if you share this with your friend, you can get the next month free. Okay, I'm going to take five seconds and go and do that. And I'll tell one friend, hey, sign up for this and if they sign up, I get that one month. And now I have another person that can spread the word. And that K factor is what makes her breaks that. To align referral program to usage limits. If that is your product, right? Like what is the thing that if you have more of won't frustrate you, right? So like for a victor, right, the referral program that we have. So it's all token based. You get credits to essentially use and victor. Whenever you're near the limit, we give you essentially a decision tree, depending on who you are, of what you could do to earn free credits. We have a creator program. If you just post on LinkedIn about victor, we give you a payout via CPM directly to your account in credits to any user. And that gives us social and virality that we can essentially push forward on. Or you can be a part of the actual referral program where you can invite companies and you get a percentage revenue share of the referred companies paying plan in credits every month. So if I'm a company and I know another cool company that should be using victor and I know that victor is expensive. We have eight person teams that are spending $15,000 a month to use victor and it replaced all their hiring. We can go into that later. But for example, that's a cost item and I know that if I can bring, I have another friend that has an agency that will probably spend $5K. And I'll get 20% of that as rev share and that lowers my cost. But to us, that makes sense from a CAC basis. We're willing to spend $1,000 depending on the cohort to acquire a customer. We'd rather have our customers finding those best customers for us. Yeah, fuck if I'm a startup founder, I've got loads of founder friends in non-compatible markets. Great. Game on. Yeah. Totally get that. Anyways, that founders fuck up referral programs so they should avoid. I mean, it's either not making them tangible or just like a, hey, refer your friends and it's a, what am I getting for it? Or it's just like some like, you get swag or just like things that don't really matter. Or they create these like hyper complicated 20 tiers. Like do these actions and like a gamifying the referral program and then no one wants to use it because it's just like, it's a pain. So I think it's like it's somewhere in that spectrum of like, you're either doing that or that. Like you need to hit the sweet, the sweet spot of what that looks like. Unless it's palantissed swag in which case that's really quite cool and I would love that. We mentioned that like the timing of which you put that referral in front of people. The paywall is a difficult one and it also like, it's like where to put it. Whether it needs to be hard in the media, whether you need to show value. How do you think about lessons advice to founders on the immediacy of the paywall and where it sits best? I think even before the paywall analysis, the main thing you want to adjust for is like when that magical aha moment happens and you want that magical moment happen as soon as possible. But you also don't want like you want the paywall near that moment where like that moment is either your first discovery of wow, this is amazing. But you want to kind of continue that over time. So like you have that magical aha moment and then you're kind of you stay in that kind of like honeymoon phase of like this is just amazing. And then within that phase paywall, right? And that's like whether it's words per week or how many credits you get in Victor. This is a big game that we're trying to hyper refine now is how many free credits should we give you and how do we nudge Victor to show you really useful workflows? Because the moment you have one that goes, this is game changing paywall. Then you want to open up your pocket book because you've you felt something magical that you haven't felt before. And because there's so many products, the true unique magic, this is this product is insane moments. And like this happened at whisper for like when we had that first rocket chip moment when like LinkedIn was going absolutely not so like there's this thing whisper and I'm not typing anymore. And a lot of that was organic, right? But that's because people hit that magical moment. And that's like similar like with the amount of posts that are happening about Victor. A lot of like I'd say half of them are organic half of them are like the creator program that I said you post and you can get credits. But it's all genuine, right? But it's the that magic moment that matters should credits go in marketing budgets. So we call this fully loaded. CAC. So our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. If you're not doing that, then you're not really calculating your acquisition cost. So yeah, trial credits or like anything free that you're giving away is cost and it goes under it is marketing cost. You mentioned another one that was very interesting. You said a, which is obviously kind of on Surrounding Optimization, we invest in peak, which essentially optimizes this. How do you think about that as a new channel? How do we embrace it? What should we know? A.O. In general, followed the the core tenets of SEO in general, where what like used to be old school SEO, like pumping out thousands of pages came back again because like Google because they own the the SEO algorithm. Essentially penalize people that were just pumping out pages for SEO. So like over the last couple of years, people stopped doing that. But the sheer amount of pages that you have in A.O. That is also changing a little bit. But like, you know, if you look at you can ask any agent to analyze the site map and essentially do like cron. So we do this with Victor. We look at every competitor during we look at their site map. We see how many pages they're making. All these companies are doing like 100 to 200 pages a week. It's like a lot of it is just like generated AI slop. So that's also what you don't want to do at scale. You actually like want valuable content that says valuable things because the AI crawler essentially ingest that. And then what you're saying there is what gets written about you when like what is the best tool for this or like I'm trying to do this and it's doing these citations. So the things that I'll say that are the most important A.O. Now it's like yes, have an engine that you send content through your website on specific things. But the most important thing is YouTube, Reddit and like the social narrative. So like one of the early lovers that every founder should do when they're first starting with you know scaling is investing in good YouTube reviews because YouTube reviews because they're long form the rank long tail. They're one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. So you'll have your website PR external sources talking about you and one of the biggest best external sources are how many reviews and videos do you have on YouTube. They're really high citation on chat. And that's like one of the early I'd say strong things that every founder should focus on. Data is traditional P.O. and news dad. And what I mean by that it's like you know being in tech crunch used to master. I still think it matters in the sense that like I have the opinion that you know when you launch do a product hunt get featured in tech crunch like that's just like it's like founder initiation short table stakes. Yeah, yeah, I mean I'd say like it builds a level of credibility and trust that like you are on the map in the same way that everyone went through the process. But like the reason why it's important the PR is less of a like PR blows up and there's like a traffic wave. Really that PR is mean for citations right around a.o. Like how many external credible sources are writing about you. Then you'll see your a.o traffic significantly increase because the more of a not owned narrative is being talked about positively about you the better off the product is should I bother doing take talk. I think there's a time and place for it depends on you know are you more B to C than anything else like I've never met a C.o. Or had a growth he's been able to crack it. I've never. I think there's a time and place to like do some audience diversification but yet to be honest in any of the three kind of core companies that have been at so far it hasn't worked yet but maybe I'll get a chance to change that at Victor totally get that final one again before we move to team conversation but what happens if when we turn off paid as much so we're spending really aggressively and it's working it's working and we get to 30 40 50 million in revenue and we're like we got a bit of a paid engine now there were a bit hooked on turn off the paid diet really right back and growth down. Let me see other problems right like I think at the sweet spot for organic mix should be around like 35 to 45% of acquisition is word of mouth organic and like truly people just discovering it based on everything else that you've built in the beginning because you've just started and there's not a lot of stuff out there about you it is entirely tied to paid but in the later stage if you turn everything off that means you have forgotten about the other half of the job which is yes you the a.o. The reviews everything being written so like you sometimes want to dial down and see how elastic it is again to the previous part that we were saying because that's like you definitely want a strong mm model and incrementality when you're like the moment you start spending north of a million dollars a month definitely have a model that says this channel is incremental this is not and like the model in the beginning always be wrong make some changes dial things down do holdouts whatever and then see if the model proves true model gets better over time and then you have your your less than the dark right like you you actually understand what levers go up and down and where you can actually spend a lot so things spending down to understand how much drop off you have is actually a good very strong learning moment I'm a good grossly just to actually think there are not a lot yeah if I'm going to be honest I really not a lot there's a lot of founders who'll be listening to this and going wow I'm thinking through like three companies in and take her around my shit, I wish I could put my mind there. - Yeah, I think I've had an interesting kind of like, grow up through marketing is because I started, I started corporate consulting, which was an absolute life stock I hated it, and that got me to found my first agency where I had to learn how to do everything myself from zero, right, and because I had to do that, and I did that in both Ecom, SAS, and AdWrizB2B, my agency's still around today, and not involved in the day today, but like because I had to do that, I understand how to launch a meta ad. I'm not as, you know, how to grow through a CMO that like has no idea how to do execution. This is why also as how to grow at Whisper, up until December of this past last year, I was the only person doing execution on a three, four, five million dollar budget. I was doing everything myself. - This is what I say to university students and young people say, which is like, it's never been more important to be full stock. Like you need to be writing the creative, shooting the video, editing the video, putting the video on matter, whatever it is Instagram, YouTube, B name it, full barrel. Like the whole, oh, I just do creative and copywriting. Fuck that. - I think a lot of people have been saying this, and I definitely echo that like hyper specialists are dying of slow death. Like you need to be like, I've always seen myself as a specialized generalist, and like the way that, you know, you have to pick something that you are better than the rest at, but like get your hands dirty and learn how to do a little bit of everything, and that's like a lot of growth leaders actually get lost in the marketing analytics, the conversion tracking, like that stuff is usually where like, they don't really understand how that works, and they, if you don't understand the fundamentals, you actually don't know what makes the system tick. We also live in a world where like, chat GBT, quad, Victor, right? Like, they're the best learning vehicles ever in the history of humanity. If you don't know how to do something, God damn, ask it. Have it tell you, give me everything step-by-step that I need to do and go and do it, and then see where things break, and see what you don't understand. Like, there's agency, if you are hungry and a learner, those are the best people that win, or the people that are nerds that are curious, right? Like, that's the line for me. If we go to the team itself, the requirements for talent changes. How has what you look for in talent changed in the last year or two? - Yeah, I mean, I think it's complete 180. I'd say, now a year ago, I'd be looking for someone that has 10 years of experience, in, let's say, meta-ads. They've scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're, let's say, the best in the world as a meta-adds media buyer. And that would be the main thing I'd be looking for, let's say that's the person I'm hiring. Now, I'm looking for that, but they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If their AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will outcompete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native. And that's like, I'm seeing that happen. Where like, I'm gonna have a hot take here, I think a lot of teams are trying to make their teams AI native and they're failing. - Why are they failing? - The people that are in those roles are not systems thinkers. Like, if you're in a marketing or, let's say, ops role and you're not a systems thinker, you don't know, you actually don't know. - How do you think, well, what do systems think you mean? - To me, that's being able to step back from, let's say, a task that is a part of my job. Being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say, in my role, what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day-to-day basis? What are the inner relationships? Where's the boring admin? Where's the reporting? What's all of that? And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works? Because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part. Now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job. A lot of people go and go to chat GPT and ask a question and then they go on still doing their job the manual way. If you take a step back and say, what would it take for me to fully automate, let's say, all of my job? Of course, it's not gonna work, things are gonna break apart, but run yourself through that thought experiment. And the thing is, if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don't really understand their job. And because they're not systems thinkers, they don't actually know what are all the inputs and the outputs. So that's the line for me. So like when I interview people to fill in the team, it's like partially like an engineering interview where like, systems thinking is the bar. So what do you ask them to do? Well, I want a job with you, okay? I clearly fucking brilliant and I'm a pollcaster. What are you gonna put me through? How are you gonna test me? - Yeah, the core question is more of like, how do you use AI as a workflow and work? But I'm actually more curious, how do you use AI workflows in your personal life? Like do you have any systems that you feed through AI that make you a better person that's at a work? And like maybe the line blurs of like what you do is also work as personal, whatever. And so a good answer to that answer would be, I mean a bad answer would be, I have a skill or like a chat thread that's like a project in chat GPT that I talk to and it has like some context. 'Cause it's like, yes, that's actually correct. That's how you should use, let's say a memory layer and a context layer and you have one proactive chat conversation. So it works. Chatting with the thing is not a workflow, right? Where if there's no feedback loop, like one of the core things that I always test for is, let's say an AI gives you a slump. What do you do with it? So a lot of people they'll do is they'll take the slump and then say this is slop, maybe it changes and they get frustrated then they take the dog and start writing it themselves. And if you don't go through the pain of giving it feedback, like that's the first kind of feedback loop that I test for. But the next thing is, is from, let's say you have a loop and like I use this example before of like, I built like a sponsorship system as whisper but essentially the workflow is a self-improving loop where like if a newsletter sponsor emails me, my agent essentially knows that this is a newsletter request, it asks them for their rates, it does research on what their audience is, it does that first part of negotiation for me, I step in to approve the, like, yes, we want to work with them. We get a contract and that's where my manual step in newsletter ends. I throw the contract into the agentic system, it ingest all the cost data into the file system, it does copywriting, it does all of the email sending, it creates all the links, it creates all the conversion tracking, it sends everything out to the partner 'cause like a newsletter is like a boring antiquated email, I will email you and you will tell me the performance and then based on the copywriting and based on the cost, it will essentially also know what performance looks like and then say do we continue on with the partner? That's also an agentic decision because I have, CPM should be this, conversion should be this, let the run fizzle out if it didn't work out, right? And again, that's a workflow, right? Like I have a couple of human touch points but the things that I know that if it analyzes the data and the same thing if it generated a copy, it knows all of every link's performance and can say this copy works, this doesn't. So the next time it generates copy, it's based on all historic data. It's not a, and that's like a self-improving system. - What do you use for this? - So this was first the marketing OS I built at Whisper. So it was like cloud code on a computer that's just the folder system and like skill and dot MD files. That was the beginning of that system. So it would essentially be that, right? Where I have cloud plugged into my email with you know, Cron set up to essentially check it nine, check it at noon, check it six. Are there any new newsletter requests? Do a workflow to respond to those things? And then bubble up to me a message and slack being like, hey, these need your decisions. Here's some contracts that got sent over. And then that system evolved. So that was like my own OS. I had to then get control that folder to share that with the team. So other people can use the workflow. So then for essentially a year and a half, I was the one person at Whisper doing all execution. So imagine a million a month on Google, hundreds of thousands of keywords, ads, experiments, landing pages. I owned every KPI from eyeball to download and then product to cut over, right? On boarding. But then ad meta ad newsletter. So at a given point, I was working with between 70 and 120 unique newsletter providers that would send me emails asked for copy approval. I needed to create unique images. So I said, why are newsletter still in like the stone ages? That there's no platform like it's all through email. And you're negotiating and haggling with these people trying to get you on a CPM, right? So that was one of the first things that I created a workflow around. And like, I don't code, right? Like I learned how to do this by doing it. I want to automate this, Cloud Code. How would you do this? And I started by I built the OS, asking how to build an OS, right? And then every single day, I would say 90 to 95% of my work through the entire day was fed through the AI. So like, I want to optimize the ads. Can you pull the reporting? All right, what are the keywords? And I would make all the changes, see all the copy through Cloud Code in the terminal, because that allowed me to give feedback to the feedback loop. So every day, got a little better, got a little better. And there came a point where I could, like the models also got good enough. I was an early adopter of Cloud Code. So like December of '25 was when the Cloud Code moment happened. I adopted it in September before it was good. And immediately you saw that insane ramp. Like it was wrong a lot. Like there was like the copy was poor. Like the things broke. It was early days, but like I was curious. Like I'm a tinkerer. And like I used that to essentially learn how to do the whole thing. And like I know we deviated from the team question. But that as me having to learn how to do the workflow, essentially because I had to do it, not knowing how to make that work, going from A to Z, that's what I test for. Is can you take a hard problem and build a system around it that you have solved? How many candidates do you actually meet? You have that level of depth? Less than 1%? Exactly. Yeah. Can you even build a team on that? So that's the thing, right? Like I think the team composition of today and tomorrow is way leaner than it was before. So like we likely will, like for, you know, at Grammarly, you know, say a bigger startup in SaaS, startup is in the air quotes there, big corporate SaaS. They have a-- influencer marketing team, right? They have like three, four, five people. Today and tomorrow, that is one really good person with an amazing suite of agents that will only ever touch, like, imagine you've scaled to 100,000 influencers that are posting on you in a month. If you have an agentic system and you know how to weed through the data, understand where you need to be plugged in, you can do that. And that's why even though it's 1% of candidates, that's fine. If I find that one person that is gonna be able to fully own to build the systems and like right now, and this is like my bet for the next three, five years, 80% of our work is still manual, 20% is agents. Hence why like my bet into Victor, but it's essentially solving all of knowledge work. I think in three years, companies will essentially be like board of directors, where 20% of the work is the strategy and the thinking, and then agents just do 80% of the execution, right? Like right now, it's still like, we're still editing as manuals, sending an email is still manual, even though we have the tools, like, we're still a human layer into that. I think that will change as quality gets better usage and like actual adoption towards an ROI basis gets there. That's my bet and that's also why the stuff is so important, right? Because if you can't understand how the systems work, you're never gonna be able to see your agents. So that's the 1% B2B CMOs today. Are they fucked? I don't mean that to you bloody, but I don't know any B2B CMO. It ain't a scaled company. That's any fucking clue what you're talking about. They hire those people around themselves, which I think like there's, do they really? They try to. I mean, I'm not gonna name companies that are and we're shit on people, but like if you look at some of the big providers, you seriously saying in your, no, no plans in your coupers in your, that anyone has a fucking clue what you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, that's also why I think the companies that do will quickly gain market share against those that don't, right? And that's why I think we live in very interesting times in terms of competitive environment where the incumbents that don't adopt this at the senior level will essentially, their growth rates will stand still while the hyper growers that are doing exactly this framing will essentially gain that market share and how compete them, right? So I think you're right. I think leadership needs to change. But like I said, I think a lot of teams and my hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team. That is not a systems thinker. Like stop brute forcing people in, hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed. The JD is no longer the same what it was a year ago, right? And people are still brute forcing people into these new JD's. I think there needs to be a bit of a shake up. Okay, I'm a founder. I'm looking my marketing team today. There's 10 people on my series A, B from whatever. Who should I fall? How do I test it? When you're not looking and you come back and they're suddenly now systems and that one person is 10x themselves, you're not gonna fire that person, but then you will barely clearly see who hasn't done that. And that like that difference is being felt where like the A players are becoming S tier players and the people that were B players are becoming D players. And that that rift is created. The only thing I just think is like consumer marketing is not consumer marketing and B2B marketing is not B2B marketing. It's just marketing. Yeah, at the end of the day, there's a consumer who has a buying decision at a big enterprise or as a past 100%. I mean, that is also why people were questioning our initial marketing strategy at Victor because we're like, like I said, super high-cock B2B SaaS, right? Like you were hiring an employee into your team and you're paying thousands of dollars for this thing, right? That's a B2B SaaS tool, but we approached the marketing like a pro-sumer app, right? There is a 19, 20 year old at Polymarket School Tobin. Maybe it doesn't mind me saying this. I mean, he was at Whisper, right? He was originally at Whisper. He was at Whisper? Yeah, he built the original UGC viral program at Whisper before he went to Polymarket. So I know Tobin. Oh wow, well, this is perfect then. Yes. Where I'm like, you would pay through the nose for talent like Tobin who just gets it, who is Tanax, what anyone else would be in that position. Do you not agree? Yeah, and I think in each lane, there are those people and that's also why like, you know, from like an ML researcher standpoint, you'll pay millions of dollars for a person that's gonna move a model forward. I think we're coming to the place that like people in these marketing roles, they're unicorns, they're rare, and you want them in your company. And I think that same like ML crazy moment is maybe gonna happen over the next year in the marketing acquisition side. Did you ready for a quick fall? I've loved this. What is the most underappreciated growth channel today? As a channel we haven't mentioned, and I think a lot of people do this poorly, and it actually compounds if you do it well, and that's affiliate, where you're paying, let's say, a percentage of revenue or some kind of cact to people that are not your customers, and they go out of their way to create content and reviews and all of that. And so at like at Whisperer and Victor, it is the highest ROI channel. And if you set up a strong affiliate program and you bring people into the door and they feel like they can earn money, even before they're your customers, they will become your customers. And it's one that like, it's a little bit outside of the referral program 'cause you're not through the product. It's how can you make this sexy external program that's someone that is just an affiliate, wants to like, they have a surface area, they have a website, they have some audience that they have, and they want to sell your thing to that audience, acquire them that way, and that's one of the highest early ROI channels that if you start doing in the beginning, it ramps. So for Victor, a good 10 to 15% of our acquisition on a monthly basis comes through our affiliate program. People that want to earn money, because we give them between 10 and 15% revenue share. So if that affiliate gets a company that pays 10K a month, they're making 1,500 bucks a month from one sale as an affiliate. That's also like, get a creator program that wants people to earn money, and this is the other thing that we said, "Can I do this, creator?" (laughing) So I have something like 10 companies deferred. (laughing) Mom, I'm retiring. Yeah, I mean, we have some affiliates that are making 20, 30K a month. What's the most polluted channel? What's the, oh, this is just shit, Pat. Oh, I'm gonna say X in the sense of, just the launch video is boring. That's exactly what I mean, right? Wait, where everyone is trying to do exactly the same launch viral thing, and it's also polluted in the sense that X ads don't work. (laughing) And that to me just means the platform is still-- They don't work? I've yet to meet a SaaS, how to growth, or performance marketer, that says that X ads print. So if someone has gotten X ads to print, please tell me, because I would love to be challenged on that. That's fascinating. Okay, so X, I'm with you, I'm just so bored of this. I don't know if you saw there was one video yesterday, and we're talking about it, so obviously worked. But this is company I can't wait, I think it's cool. Where they jumped out of a plane, and did the like copy, jumping out of a plane. And you're, as we got to that stage, is it that mature market that you have to jump out of a plane and read it while doing that? The formula of like, shark and awe launch videos, because to be honest, and then specifically those are the ones that like, well, we don't really have a product, and I'm not saying maybe in their example, but like, the sheer amount of like, we launched this for that, and we spent way more time into our launch video than actually any time in our product. And like, I see so much of that, and that's why I say polluted. What would you most like to change about the world of growth? Have more good growth leaders, but in honestly, I think, my request for startups would be, I don't know why we don't have a school, which basically says, "Hey, completely understand. You need to be AI-pilled." Great, what the fuck does that mean? Come to our school, and for six weeks, we will teach you how to get jacked up on every system process model for six weeks. Nine to five, this is your job, and you pay 10,000 bucks. I would say that's more valuable than university's, so for teenagers. - I'll go start another company. (laughing) No, no, I mean, I, you're 100% right now, 'cause I would fund that company today with millions of dollars. - What does that mean, Sarah? Well, if you're JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs, and you put that at the bottom of Canary Wharf, would you not send every single employee there? - 'Cause then you built the hyperscalers of tomorrow. I mean, super interesting. So like, I went to NYU for college. And what's interesting, I did not take a single, I mean, zero marketing classes, and I learned everything via doing. And I think what's interesting is like, the education around marketing, I think is also like, still, and again, I haven't been into a college today. Maybe that has changed, but like, are they teaching you how to install a Facebook pixel? And no, right? Like, the framing of how it works comes after you start doing the execution, right? Like, you can do and then understand, versus understand and send in a room and learn, and then go and try to do the thing. You're gonna learn so much faster just by doing. So I grew with you. I've got to see like, true A to Z boot camp of what it means to be a growth leader. And I mean, like, reforge and Brian Balfour, they've tried to do this, but like, it's still-- - I'm actually not even saying a growth leader. I'm just saying how to get knowledgeable to the extent where you can build processes, systems, start replacing yourself in with-clawed with, you name the provider, where you can start doing expenses, copy. - Yeah, it helps. - In that frame, I agree as well, right? Like, I'm applying it to like, do that in marketing, but the grounding is people don't know how to do the beginning step. - You're right. - You're right, beginning step. How do I simply set up my claw to be efficient with integrations? So it gets access to all my files in the right way, with the right permissions. - Yeah. - You said 9, 12, and 6, where it does the check-in. Do you know, I think you'd forget where people are? - Yeah, and I mean, like, to me, what I think is like table stakes, I always forget is like, people don't set up things this way. So like, I, for example, and this is when I was using Cloud Code, now I'd say like 80% of my work is Victor, but for the people that are not using this, If you're using Cloud Code and you do one thing, is set up what I call as the session end skill. If you set up one skill that's gonna let your work compound, it's what I call session end. So I have a terminal or a Cloud Code session and I'm doing some realm of work. And it's almost done or like I wanna end the session. So what is inside of that skill is essentially, I have connected to my Cloud Code, a obsidian vault. That is every day, a log of everything that I put through the terminal, all decisions, all open tasks, all learnings, essential notes and atoms. And like all of everything that I'm doing in every session is being sort of in Cloud memory, but then you don't have access to that, right? So what session end does is it analyzes the session, distills what we worked on, what was the frame, did we accomplish this thing, what are the outstanding items? And it moves that over into obsidian, which is like a node-based system, which lets me go back to any day and understand, what did I work on that day? And you can see this web grow over time. And that's like one massive hack to essentially turn every session to be compounding. Because then that connects the node-based system of obsidian says a week ago, you worked on this and then you hit a wall here, you worked on it again today, you solved it. And because the agent also can analyze everything, it creates those interrelationships for you where you worked on meta-ads with this creative type here in two places and normally you'll forget that, right? And so will the system. And if you have a place where your work, your memory, that to me is also probably the most valuable resource for people is if you can document every little thing that you're building tweaking and refining, that is how social capital was the big thing. I think like what do you have on your computer that is saved in your AI output? That I think as we walk into the next couple of years is the treasure trove for a lot of people. - So you know, here's something wild. Every single week we enter the I.C. Investment Committee for the Fund and we now have all of our calls graded by an AI call grader which measures every single call we've ever done. We have this obviously feedback loop. - Oh yeah. - It collects every single call and it simply just stack rounds out of 10 and ranks them across five different variables like Founder Marketfit, Product Marketfit, Deal, a load of other things, the quality of product, but what else? And then we just go down the AI rankings in terms of priority. And we actually fully delegate trust of prioritization to the AI rankings. - But if you put the thought into, here's the decision tree of prioritization and you put the thought into that, then you can trust the system, right? Because it's based on your framing. - You know, it's never been wrong in its ranking. - I believe that I only done it for 12 weeks, but 12, that's, I mean. - It's pretty good. - Yeah, so I've 1000 companies. - And in like, same thing, like I do this, so I use a, you know, a botless meeting recorder that records all of my meetings. And at the end of the day, it ingests all of them and says, "What did I promise to do on calls that didn't end up in a due software somewhere?" And then it drops all of that. It says, "Did you do any of these?" And then I have much to do to list for tomorrow. - Oh God, no, I have a girlfriend for that. And that's challenging enough. (laughing) Final one for you. Which company growth strategy that you're not tied to? Do you most respect and what do you learn from it? - I think the craft of product and like the hypotheses the deep experimentation and like building true user experience excellence, that to me is just like sexy. 'Cause I think if you look at like the sheer volume of products that are coming out every single day, very few of them have product excellence. And the people that steer that craft are like true product leaders. I learned so much from them and apply those things into my world, but seeing the way their brains work and the way that they're analyzing the data and how they understand the customers is really inspiring. And I think a lot of people can learn how to do that. 'Cause I'd say this is less maybe across the company more like the people in companies. But I think to be honest, like I think in terms of companies, I am more impressed by the net new things that like are starting from zero. And like even as step one, they're doing pretty well in the sense of like we thought through the branding, we launched into this marketing thing. That's like, that's what I appreciate that way. - Give me a company. (laughing) - I mean, again, this is more like two to two my horn a bit, but like just seeing like what the original launch was for Whisper. - Like that was a, you know, like seeing that product correlation with marketing, even though I had a part in that, like that was truly like it entered the map because of that. And then same thing, like yes, I was a part of the ride there, but like the adoption and the fact that a Polish startup that of course raised a big series A, became massively seen on the map and was very quickly loved. Like those are the kinds of things that like make me want to get up in the morning. We did a thing, we put a lot of thought into it and there was pickup around it. And I think that's like, that's what fascinates me is like what are all the moving pieces that like, you go and finally launch the thing? - And it got damn works. - Right, and that's like, I think that's the beauty of you know why I do what I do because those are some special moments. - Matt, I've so enjoyed this. I can't thank you enough for agreeing to share all of your secrets and for letting me drill down into all the strategies. - This is an absolute blast. To the next one, to the more nougues next time. - But before we leave you today, we used AlfaSense on an investment that helped us close an $8 million deal. $8 million baby, that's a lot of money. That's why I'm genuinely excited to have them as a partner on 20VC. AlfaSense combines AI with one of the world's deepest libraries of market intelligence, including expert interviews, broker research, earnings calls, company filings, and real time news. 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