Why growth is experimentation, not marketing | Hannah Parvaz | Aperture | Ex. Dice - BEYOND THE BRAND

Episode Introduction, Sponsor, and Aperture's Mission Where growth, what it actually is, it's an experimentation mindset to be able to learn as quickly as possible about what are the things that are the most high impact for you in your company or in your role. Speaker 2 This episode is brought to you by Sample. Sample is a precision trial and growth platform where brands like Nivea, Colgate, and Tony's Chuckle only use it to run targeted sampling campaigns. They don't just hand out product, they get samples to the right people, collect first party data, generate reviews, and actually track what happens after. If you're running a sampling campaign but not really sure what you're getting back, or if you just want. Speaker 3 More buyers to try your product. Speaker 2 You should take a look at Sample. You can check them out at sampletech.com. That's SAMPL tech.com on with the show. Speaker 3 Welcome to Beyond the Brand, the podcast where we take you inside the minds of today's top marketing leaders. Now here are your. Speaker 1 Hosts Matt Huntley and Adam Wright. Speaker 3 Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Beyond the Brand. Today's guest is Hannah Parvaz, who is the founder and Chief executive of Aperture, which is auk based growth agency specializing in mission LED mobile apps. Hannah, welcome to Beyond the Brand. Speaker 1 Hello Adam, it's so lovely to be here with you. Thank you for having me. Speaker 3 Likewise, it's a pleasure to have you on. I would love to kick off telling the audience a little bit about yourself, a little bit about Aperture and what's brought you here today. Speaker 1 Absolutely. I'm Hannah. I've, I've got a little company called Aperture. So Aperture has been around for three years. It's a full service growth consultancy and performance marketing agency. So we work with all kinds of different companies from tiny kind of one person startups all the way up to kind of huge conglomerates. I'm helping them launch new products. It's, it's been amazing so far. It's been a crazy three-year journey. And at the end of this period, I'm doing a lot of reflection about how, how the last year's got and what's going into, into the next couple of years as well. But but it's been really, really great. You know, within Aperture, the way the business works is half the business is focused on onboarding flows, monetization strategies, you know, CRM, just getting people into your product, a lot of mobile apps and we work with a lot of kind of ecom as well and getting people to consume your product, getting people habituated. We work with a lot of subscription products. And then the other half of the business is focused on performance. So we help companies build a creative operating system into their into their processes. So we really root everything in customer psychology and jobs to be done. We have a creative first experimentation strategy that we've talked to kind of hundreds of companies now and within on that side of the business. We run all your ads, we create creatives, we do all the creative strategy. We have a kind of a whole unit influencer management team helping kind of find the most relevant people to kind of talk about your brand, whether that's for organic or for paid. We do the whole shabang. Lots of attribution as well. That's obviously a very hot topic on everyone's lips for the last few years. So lots of attribution audits and things like this. But really, yeah, over the last few years we've become a full service growth agency. So helping people find out about your products and then and then helping people use it as well. From Music Industry to Building Aperture's Remote Team Really cool, loads to unpack there. So we're going to get into a few of those topics anyway. But you didn't really have the typical career trajectory into growth, I guess reading your CV, obviously starting music moves to dice curio now run your own growth agency. I'd love to unpack that a little bit about what what brought you to starting your own agency initially? Speaker 1 Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I was at an event recently and you know, when, when I was talking about the company and the consultancy work, a lot of people were like, oh, you weren't kind of at Bane before. And no, I never did anything like that. I, as you say, Adam, I started in the music industry when I was very young. So I'm from Manchester and although I don't really have that accent and I got involved in the Manchester music scene when I was very, very young. So putting on nights booking bands for shows, working at the Manchester International Festival. And then I moved down to London and started working in. And the reason I moved down to London was to work in music. Ultimately I was like, OK, this is the place where all of that's happening. I came down, I worked at a live music recording company, which basically meant we went on tour with big artists like Robbie Williams and recorded their live shows. Then I worked on a record label and did some artist management things and then yeah, I joined DICE. So I joined DICE as kind of one of the very first people working there pre launch. I was there for the first kind of three years of the company. I worked in marketing when there was no one else working in marketing works on what we were building for the product when there was not really anyone else doing that as well. So it was a really great place for me to, to kind of learn and it was the first mobile op I'd worked on as well. So it was a, it was a really interesting experience, definitely working at ICE. I learned a lot about lots of different things. And then after that I had the decision to make, you know, do I want to stay in music or tech? And that's a hard one. There aren't very many music tech businesses, or at least there weren't had 10 years ago. There are more now. So I had that hard decision to make. You know, I've been in music now for like nearly 10 years at that point. Do I want to kind of move away from that and go into tech? And I felt like at the time I was learning so much more from the work I was doing on the kind of product side, on the kind of data marketing side. And, and really I was doing a lot of very kind of nerdy techy stuff there. You know it was before. If anyone listening has a mobile app and they know about push notifications, there are now tools that you can use to send out the push notifications for you. I was scripting out every single push notification we sent myself, you know, in terminal. And so yeah, I felt like I was learning a lot more from this. So I decided, OK, I'm going to try and explore this, this app thing and this tech thing. And yeah, now I've been doing that for well over a decade again now. So I got from Dice into Nightlife app. We did some amazing work there. It was a free product to use. It was B to B to C, So it was focused on helping people find bars in your city. And then for the bars, it was a discovery tool. And then we had drinks brands that were sponsoring drinks in the bars that you could go and get for free. So you, Adam, as a consumer, could download the app, see a bar that was near you, go to that bar, get a free drink, you're probably going to stay for an extra drink at the bar. So the bar would get some money and then the drinks brand would sponsor that free drink that you got. So, so it worked really nicely there. And we did some amazing work there. And I learned a lot about kind of activation, about how to get people to really kind of come in and use your product and how to really measure the success of that. And then I got into subscription products after that. So I got into subscription of almost 10 years ago now, and I've been working primarily with subscription products since then, which is that was a bit of a baptism of fire as well, getting into that from the free products. And there's a lot to learn in that space. But but yeah, it's been really, really exciting. And then about 7 years ago, I started getting a couple of clients on the side and just doing some interesting projects on the side. And one thing led to another led to another kind of spiraled into them just going out and doing it on your own and building that little team. So. So yeah, it's been, it's definitely been a bit of a whirlwind adventure, but I've really, really enjoyed it. Speaker 3 And it sounds like that was fairly organic, I guess, to start, right? You were, I guess, kind of scratching your own itch and finding interesting projects to work on. And then suddenly that evolved into I've got an agency now and we need to spin this up a bit more permanently. Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah. It was like, you know, I'm someone. I'm, I'm a really curious person. I'm, I'm always asking questions, probably too many questions, sometimes for for some, for sometimes, sometimes people in my team, for example, like I just want to know everything and understand everything. And I'm really excited about different projects. So whenever someone's pitching to me something that I genuinely think can really help people or impact a lot of people that I genuinely think can scale and be very successful, but that really interests me, you know, is this a problem that I can help solve? And so, yeah, I mean, it just, it did, as you say, happened very organically. I learned a lot along the way. I've built up an amazing network of some incredible people that I've worked with a long time as well. So some of them have come in and been doing some freelance work with me as well. And some of them have joined, you know, in different capacities, which it's been really awesome as well. Having these people who you've worked with before who kind of really want to support and work with you again whenever you're doing your own thing. It's really, it's really special actually to create that kind of environment. And especially because my team is totally remote, I'm in London, but I have team members in some in London, but also in Scotland, Norwich, kind of Wales, but also further afield like Berlin, Portugal, Korea, places like this too. So, so it's been really awesome kind of being able to find the people that are really the best for the roles that we need, regardless of where they are. So yeah, it's great. How Public Speaking Drives Business and Knowledge Sharing Really cool. What role does keynote speaking play in that? Because I think one of the things that I see from I guess you LinkedIn, but also the wider things that you get involved in some thinking, things like system and kind of knowledge sharing. And in that it feels like you want to share a lot of the value that you know and learn. And you seem to get a lot of, I guess, pride and enjoyment out of sharing knowledge and like you said, being curious, but then at the same time sharing that back. Is that the reason that you kind of started public speaking and got into kind of keynotes, things like that? Or is it just something that you've always enjoyed and I wanted to do? Speaker 1 More, I was always a very nervous public speaker. I mean, I remember times when I was younger and we had to do talking in front of the class and I was like holding my paper and shaking. It's not something that came very organically to me, but I think in around 2018 or something like this, I was asked to do a talk. And you know what? I was so surprised by it that I thought, OK, let's do it. And I didn't have any design resource. You know, that talk is on on YouTube, I think. And the presentation, now that I look at it wasn't, it wasn't a great presentation visually or anything. The content was still pretty good, to be fair. But you know, I went up, I did my talk and I was like, OK, I've got programmed my brain to be able to do this. I remember beforehand I was telling myself over and over again, okay, don't feel nervous. You're not nervous, you're not nervous. Like don't feel any of these things. And now, yeah, I think 200 talks later, it's gotten a little bit easier. So you kind of find some stories that you know that people like and you find out ways to kind of articulate yourself in a better way. And I think that that's helped in lots of different ways. I mean, I think it's helped with being able to communicate ideas to simply to clients. I think system as well, free system. I, I coached or I mentored on a platform called growth mentor. I had joined that maybe 20-19 and then during lockdown, no one was doing anything. So I, I was doing a lot of mentoring. For me that was a really interesting thing to do because I was being asked questions in lots of different ways about lots of different things and it made me kind of figure out how to upscale my communication style on these specific areas. So I did, I worked with over 200 companies on that program and did kind of one-on-one sessions with them. And it was really at times very challenging some some of these things. So, but working with that many different people and being subject to that many different kind of communication styles was really, really helpful for me. And then yes, one system launched. I'm Matt Learner, who is absolutely amazing. I joined as kind of one of the first coaches or the first coach. And since then, yeah, it's been 5 1/2 years I've been coaching on the program. So system is a accelerator program for, well, ultimately all different kinds of startups that some of the biggest companies I've worked on, there are 50 million revenue. Some of the smallest ones are just, they've just launched as, as 3 founders, for example. So, so very big range. And again, that has been really interesting to work with such a kind of diversity of, of companies sizes and scales and people. And so, yeah, all of this has kind of come together really nicely. And then you asked what does the role that the, the speaking play in it? I suppose for me, I'm not someone, we don't have a sales team at Aperture. You know, we're not kind of going out and doing cold calling or sales emails or anything like this. It's been 100% inbound and referral because we get really great results. So we do get a lot of referral as well from our current partners and then a lot of inbound too. So I kind of made a conscious decision. You know, the people that I will want to be working with are in LinkedIn. So I post. I mean, I've had a three month, 4 month hiatus from posting now. Primarily I was posting every single day until until beginning of September for this year and that was really successful for what I wanted to achieve. I got to 20,000 followers on there. That only took kind of less than two years to go up to that point. So that was really cool and that helped. And then the speaking overall, you know, it's just another touch point with people. So you get to talk about the things that are really interesting for you that you're really excited about or frameworks that you're creating or results that you're getting. And I love to talk about case studies as well. I have a great case study about our creative operating system that we build where we reduced costs for one company by 93%. That's a really great talk. So some of these ones people see and then they asked me to come and do do the same talk for a different audience. And again, that's happened very organically as well. So I guess it's all part of this kind of larger picture of me, me not wanting to kind of nervously go and talk to people and finding it easier for them to come and talk to us. And then and then just starting to kind of enjoy it. You know, whenever you go to these events, when you, you have something to do, it's a little bit, for me, it's, it's a bit better to have that purpose at the events and not mission at the events to, to kind of go, so go do this thing and then you can relax afterwards basically. Speaker 3 What tips would you give to anyone who's interested in starting? Practical Tips for Confident and Engaging Public Speaking Because I know, I mean, public speaking comes out as like the number one fear on most people's lists of things to do in life, let alone at work. So yeah, any tips that you kind of helped you when you were first starting out? Speaker 1 I would say for me, I didn't allow myself to feel the nerves so I just totally suppressed them. But when I was first starting out I didn't have very many tips. It was only after I'd done quite a few different talks I started to think probably I should read something about this so I can breathe a bit. And I remember one thing I've read was you should breathe through your feet. So just slow down and try and let the breath go through your whole body while you're talking. You know, it's OK to take a second and pause and take that beats. And there are things that will go wrong on stage. I did a talk last year and I had this audio in the, in the talk where I was playing these two videos to show, show the difference between the hooks on some UGC videos and the audio didn't play. And it was really important, of course, for everyone to hear the audio. So I just acted it out for everyone. And afterwards I spoke to the the organizer and they told me there have been times where things have gone wrong and speakers have just walked off stage, for example. And for me that was never even something that crossed my mind like walk off stage. So yeah, be playful. It's going to take practice with anything. Everything will not nothing you do will be great the first time you do it. So take practice, think slowly, slow yourself down. I'm someone that accidentally speaks really fast all the time. My brain is always going 1,000,000 miles an hour. So just try and speak slowly and then breathe through your feet. The last one I heard as well was if you talk with your hands facing up it will make you feel less confident. So always talk with your hands facing down as well and that will give you more confidence. Yeah, just try and get your heart rate going a little bit to to release some of the adrenaline before the talk to before I did a talk in May, which was a fairly big event. A friend and I who were also who was also talking kind of did laps of the room that we're like the speakers room to just try and, you know, get the the adrenaline flowing and that that was actually really helpful to Ampers up as well for it. Speaker 3 Of that some great tips I did when I I talked. I spoke at Mad Fest a few years ago and gone, bumped up on the mainstage literally on the way on, on the way down, which, like is a massive stage. Yeah. And I wasn't quite ready for that. I was kind of psyched myself up for this nice backroom stage somewhere. And it's kind of a pleasant surprise, as they put it, that someone had COVID on the way down. And I got bumped up to that. And I went after home Rainsford, who's the CMO, Beavertown Brewery, and he just handed out loads of free beer to the audience. So I was like, how can I ever follow that? Like, I'm like behind stage already psyched myself up to go and do it. Luckily it went well, but it was, yeah. I mean, as you say, you never really know what stuff throws at you, and it's a little bit about psyching yourself, but how? Speaker 1 Did you psych yourself up for that one? Speaker 3 I was the same as you, like paced around the speaker room beforehand, but mainly like trying to go. I'm a huge fan of at least for the first minute or so, really nailing down what I'm going to say. Because if I, if I nail that first minute and I'm on balance, then for the rest of it. Now obviously as you said, you can't really predict what else is going to happen or what stuff gets thrown up. But I'm always a huge fan of of that. If I nail that bit of it and I feel like I've got a good opener and I feel like I've at least got people engaged in that first section, the rest of it tends to become a lot, a lot easier. Speaker 1 Do you have the technique for the first minute? Speaker 3 Just I practice it like to the NTH degree. Speaker 1 The opening line, yeah, it's a good one to do. Speaker 3 And I just, I will always and at least try and open with a bit of a human story around it. That's, that's also the other thing because I think I'm very in most of the time in work, you are very into the work. So you're like, your whole thing is around this is the project and this is what it delivered. And I think when you're particularly speaking to people outside, try and humanize it and open up a little bit more in that first bit tends to, for me at least, tends to work a little bit better because it tends to open me up a little bit more. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's nice, Nice. Very good. Aperture's Commitment to Mission-Led Growth and Client Selection Well done. For mainstage, it's very big. Speaker 3 Yes, it is. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd do it again in a hurry, but it was it was a good friend at the time or whether they'd have me back even. One thing I'm interested in digging into Aperture because one of the things I was reading about it is you are kind of focused on apps that aim to do something meaningful. So whether you've talked about like I guess health, education, social good, etc, that kind of mission LED growth is I guess is not that common really in in agency land, put it. What's the kind of story or reason behind that? Like what does it, I guess mission LED mean to you? And what do you focus on mission LED as a team? Speaker 1 Yeah, I would say I've always been very intentional about the companies that I've worked with and worked for. That's always been something that's been very important to me. I think I think one of the reasons that a lot of people want to come and work at Aperture as well is because we don't want to work with some of these, some of these companies. We've had people who have been working kind of big gambling companies and then say that they're kind of sick of that format of working, let's say. And then they're they're really interested about joining and things like this. And for us, you know, we've had some companies get in touch that we've said no to point blank because of what they're working on and so on. It's just not something that aligns with us. Ultimately, we could be making so much more money, but that's what is the most important thing for me. I'd rather do work that I really care about and that I really care about, like the outcomes of as well. We always wanted to build the company to just help people as much as possible. So whether that's working with a mother's meditation app or product to reduce food waste or supplement brand that has statistics, scientific studies showing its efficacy or an app to help the carers of Alzheimer's patients or any different things like this, they're really, really interesting projects for us. Now we do also work with some companies like that aren't necessarily doing, you know, the same level of good, but we definitely don't work with the companies that are that are doing kind of hurt either. So, yeah, like as long as it's bringing joy to people, helping people, bringing people together, building connection, all of this is really, really awesome for me. And also I tend to find that the people working at those companies are just such lovely people too. And so that's that's a really big an important part for me. I built this company to kind of work on things that. I wanted to work on it started with me having some freelance clients of projects I was interested in and then it spiraled from there. And so we've been really lucky to be able to kind of have some level of decision in the things that we want to work on basically overall. So yeah, it's good. I think the team really like like the companies that we work with, we get really great feedback from them. We try and involve the team in the decision making process where where it makes sense on the companies that we work with as well. So, yeah, we went after we have our calls to kind of bring everyone together and talk to them, like about which companies we've got on the pipeline, which ones are interesting for us, which ones we think we can actually succeed on. Not every product you can succeed on as well. So that's a really big part of it too. Which ones do we think we can actually have an effect on? So yeah. Speaker 3 I like that intentionality though. And I think, I mean, I've sat in a ton of chemistry meetings where agencies will kind of come in and essentially it's a role to for them to try and impress you rather than the an actual true meeting of what I imagine a chemistry meeting was kind of a mented for right. And it's, it's, as you said, it's like, do you actually as an agency think that you can add value to the business? But equally are they interesting and fun to work with? And is this something that you're actually going to enjoy doing as well? And actually that intentionality overall might cost you money in the short term, right? But probably it makes for a much better place to work, means you can probably attract better people. There's probably a snowball effect to to that as well. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the team I have are absolutely amazing. We had our three-year birthday 2 weeks ago and everyone came together. So because we're remote, it was a lot of them meeting for the first time and it was just so beautiful seeing everyone together as well. But yeah, there it's been absolutely amazing building this with those people who all care so deeply. They're all so passionate about what they do. Now I'm looking to hire people who are super nerdy about about their areas of expertise. Like that's something I'm always looking out for because that's what I'm like. They and they all care so deeply about, about their roles and about the companies and about getting great results. And I think there's been a combination of people who've been in house leading things and also agencies. So they, they really take everything very personally as well. They take all of the results very personally. Speaker 3 Nice. Understanding Customer Motivation with Jobs to Be Done I think one of the strengths and we could we talked about it a little bit at the start is kind of how deeply you focus on understanding real users. So a lot of people talk about jobs to be done and you are obviously a huge fan and of that which see the kind of idea around it and big up to Matt Lerner as well. You kind of signal to Matt. There's there's, yeah, his book Growth Levers is constantly on my desk. Like, phenomenal. Speaker 1 I buy it from my whole team, yeah. Speaker 3 Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Anyone who hasn't read it, honestly, you'll find a lot of value in in that. I come back to it all the time and I guess the idea of that is, is kind of the the why behind the why. So trying to really kind of dig into jobs to be done, but I would love if you could spend a couple of minutes introducing jobs to be done for people who might not know what it is. Speaker 1 Percent So jobs to be done is a, is a theory that came kind of indirectly out of IBM many years ago, championed by Bob Moester and who, who did an amazing talk earlier this year in, in London, absolutely amazing guy. And basically what jobs to be done is says is that your product or your service is, is actually being hired to do a job for someone. And it really helps you understand what that job is. So whenever I started learning about jobs to be done, I was working at the nightlife app and I remember working with Nopadon, who also works on system with my learner. And he was going over jobs to be done with me actually. And he was telling me, OK, I was working at the free drinks app, you could go to a bar and get free drinks. And I, he said, what, OK, what's the job that someone has to do? And I was like to go get a free drink. And he's like, no, no, what is that? What are the other reasons that people might want to use this? And I couldn't wrap my head around it at the beginning. And then as I started to speak to people, real people who use the product, I started to then understand this. And the reasons that people were using the product were to impress their boss, to go and hang out with their friends, to discover new bars, to do all of these different things, to look techie, to look also to impress other people because they had this interesting thing that they could refer people to. It was a social capital thing. So there were all of these really interesting reasons that people were actually using the product. It wasn't just about going out and getting a drink. And so then I carried that on and I worked at the audio journalism app after this, again, whenever we started to work on this product, Is it about someone just wants to listen to a story? I don't, I don't think so. So we went and spoke to a lot of people and that's the very first thing I did when I joined us from the first country two months talking to people that were using the product. And I started to ask them, OK, how come you you're using this? And I said, well, I want to listen to stories and find out about what what's been going on. And I asked them, okay, why is that? And they said, well, I want to understand the world a bit better. Okay, so you're getting a little bit with the Y beneath the Y and then, okay, how come you want to understand the world a bit better? So you can stop at any level, but it's good to just keep asking until you really get to something that is very kind of ego driven or emotional for them. OK, I want to understand the world a bit better. OK, Why is that? Well, there's just so many interesting things going on. I want to have kind of better conversations. Oh, how come you want to have better conversations? Well, you know, I'm a I'm a lecturer at university and people keep talking. My students keep talking about NFTS and I don't understand them and I want to be able to connect with them. I want to see more interesting to them. Or my mom has just got married to this new person and he's always talking about philosophy and we don't understand what he's talking about. Want to see more interesting like, and this thing kept coming up like I want to see more interesting. I want to see more interesting. I want to have better conversations. And these were the jobs to be done of using that product. So what I'm kind of portraying here is what jobs to be done are, are these kind of emotional, functional, social, technological drivers that people have to employ your product to make them do something or feel a certain way basically? Sample: Precision Trial and Growth Platform This episode is brought to you by Sample. Look, if you're a brand marketer, you already know how tough it is to get people to try your products. You've got a great media plan. But breaking through finding that right audience and getting them to actually try it is really tricky. That's exactly why more teams are turning to Sample. Sample is a precision trial and growth platform where brands like Nivea, Colgate and Tony's Chuckle only use it to run targeted sampling campaigns. They don't just hand out product. They get samples to the right people, collect first party data, generate reviews, and actually track what happens after. If you're running a sampling campaign but not really sure what you're getting back, or if you just want more buyers to try your product, you should take a look at Sample. You can check them out at sampletech.com. That's S AM PL. tech.com on with the show. Practical Application of Jobs to Be Done in Marketing So, so whenever you're thinking about your products, if it's a language learning tool, you know, is it that they just want to learn a language or it's that they want to connect with people when they're on holiday, they're all of these different things that someone might use it for. So then whenever we're thinking about that inside our company, we work with this, we work with companies in multiple different ways here. So for some of them, we actually go and run the customer psychology conversations for them. So we will go and talk to X number of people, usually 10 plus people, start to have these psychology conversations with them, start to map out all of the different jobs to be done or themes that they have as a part of their product that people are telling us. And then we will look for the most prevalent ones. We will then pull them out and start using them in in the ads as the kind of top of the funnel for the creative OS for other companies. We will actually educate them on the ways in which to have these conversations. So we will do initial sessions, talk them through all of this. They will go and talk to some people. They'll send us the recordings of the conversations. We'll feedback on it to kind of upskill them. We'll even join calls with them and show them how how to lead them. These are not product conversations about the product itself. These are psychology conversations about feelings and emotions. So it can be more difficult to do them than asking what did you think of the product? You know, it's a very different style. And then for others, some of the time they've also done a lot of their own research for these conversations before and they will feed all of that information to us. And we'll spend a lot of time analyzing that and doing our doing our own analysis ultimately of this to then pull out the jobs to be done and start that kind of creative OS process as well. So then from there, we take all of that, we test on different messages to identify different creative directions that might be most successful for the companies like without that people are resonating with the most. And then we start to kind of free branch out from each of these to come up with lots of different ideas. And someone said to me, actually earlier this week, we were talking to one of our partners and they said we'll learn there are infinite ways that people, you know, how far do the variations go on these? Aren't there infinite reasons that someone might use your product? And I said, there aren't infinite reasons that someone might use your product, but there are infinite variations of how to convey that. So that's why we look for these creative directions where I trying to identify what might be the 3-4 most effective ones for your brand. And then figure out lots of different ways to kind of convey or articulate or design or portray these different kind of jobs or themes or motivators or barriers or struggles or goals or however you want to call these things to, to the audience. Basically simple really. Speaker 3 Simple, yeah. So when you spell it out like that, yeah, as I say, like I'd highly recommend any marketers out there going to study this, even if you think that you're not in tech or anything like that, I think there's there's a huge benefit in understanding this and particularly understanding how to interview customers right. Like I've, it's one of the things that I've tried my hardest to get better over time because the richness is 100% in that like the upfront conversations. And I think I come, I mean, I come from a world of FMCG marketing and, and a lot of the, a lot of the way that you think in those businesses tends to be in categories. So you start to think about, right, someone goes into a store and straight away to the skin care aisle and then straight away looking for specific skin care and moisturizer. And your competitive set in that instance might be you versus L'Oreal versus whoever like you're, you're looking in quite a narrow competitive set. But actually, as you said, the kind of jobs to be be done is is starts way before that of like what you specifically solving for. And there's loads of people outside of that category that can still solve that same need. And that might be dietary, it might be, you know, like supplements, it might be there's loads of other things that you can kind of go and solve with that. And I think that's one of the things that I'm souping is it got me thinking 100% made me a much better marketer. Just trying to understand that. Speaker 1 Framework on how to do that. I know for supplements, for example, we took over one account and inside the account on Meta, they were running 142 campaigns at 142 campaigns and they had three creatives the same through creatives. And all of the campaigns was talking about vitamins more or less. And all of these campaigns all had kind of little micro audiences and the company wasn't working, it wasn't profitable. They were spending a good amount per month on this structure. And we stripped that back into the ad account to 4 campaigns. And we built in the creative operating system where we were testing and learning every week. And within three months we got them to profitability. And ultimately, you know, we stopped saying this supplement has vitamins and we started talking about better immune system, better skin, better sleep, but you know, all of these different things, which were the things that people were menopause, like people were talking to us about in the conversations. So with this company, we run customer psychology conversations, went over with their team how to run these conversations, developed a massive spreadsheet of all like logs of all of these different conversations to pull it out. And again, whenever you're you just mentioned competitors, I think that's a really interesting one also to think about. And whenever we're thinking about competitors, a lot of the time people think a dice, for example, people might natively think or naturally think Ticketmaster is a competitor. But actually we didn't see that whenever we were in the company. We saw our main competitor as Netflix staying in, as ordering at home, as home, home comforts, You know, our competitor was not going out. And so we just that we kind of reformulated how we thought about things in general for our messaging, for how we positioned ourselves. And that's a really interesting thing to do for supplement brands. Your competitor is inertia. It's feeling how I always felt. It's, you know, this is what I know and why would I change it to be any different? My family have never done this, why should I? So there's loads of different ways to be thinking about this. And so yeah, the inertias are, are one of the really key key things to pay attention to also whenever you're you're in these psychology conversations. Achieving High Creative Velocity and Meta Best Practices Really nice. You talk then about creative velocity and companies with big budgets still under produce creatives, right? Like even even with huge budgets, I think people underestimate the amount of volume that you have to be running to to do that. And having been in big business mainly to raft of approvals and other things, it tends to slow everything down to a snail's pace. But how do you help teams, I guess, build the discipline around that high velocity? And what does high velocity mean in today's world of meta and the direction that that's going? Speaker 1 How do we help teams and what does high velocity mean? So how do we help teams with that? So whenever we're working with any of the companies on the performance side of the business, we run the creative strategy by default, even if we're not producing the creatives. So we're doing the kind of putting together the briefs, putting together the copy, like the ideas behind it all, doing the reporting, making sure that it all makes sense together. For some of the companies that we work with, they produce the creatives. And for a lot of the companies we work with, we produce the creatives. We have creative packages for that as well. And so for them, we're trying to get something new out every single week ultimately. And for companies with bigger budgets, of course, we're trying to get more stuff out than smaller ones. Ultimately, if you are spending a very small amount, you don't need that back to many creatives to begin with. You know, but still I would be putting live maybe 8 to 10 new creatives per week. Even with a small budget for bigger companies where we're managing over a million a month, you know, we're putting live sometimes hundreds of creatives per week depending on the week. But that's a lot more work obviously. Like, it really needs to make sense that you're doing that. And for even bigger companies, there's been times we put thousands of creatives per week. But again, it really needs to make sense. What is the reasons that you're doing that? Are you experimenting around lots of different verticals? Are you localized into different languages? Why are you doing that? And it shouldn't just be for the sake of it. And lately, lots of people have been talking about this new Meta update, for example. And I overheard a conversation actually in my office recently of a different company talking, saying, oh, well, with the new meta update, it's made a huge change. And now the algorithm only spends on just a couple of your creatives. Nice. Kind of actually, I know the people well. So I went over and I just, that's not part of the update. Like the algorithm hasn't just made, it's not a new update that only spends on a couple of your creatives. It's always been the case that the algorithm will identify what it perceives to be the best performing creatives and spend on there. So ultimately with these new updates, no one should be too scared of them. If you're already doing best practice as well, that's all you need to think about. Am I understanding my customers? Am I producing good quality creative? Ultimately, I think what this was a reaction to was that were companies kind of uploading 102 hundred hundreds of creatives that had just a tiny difference in them and it was just just didn't make sense. And now with kind of losses, AI and the quality of the matching frequencies have been creased on the platform because of the quality of the targeting. You know, right now you just do broad targeting and this is the most effective thing you can do. So the frequencies have increased, but that also means that you need to diversify. Then what is your messaging types? You know, we, we for some companies at a certain scale, we might segment our campaign structures by, by different themes or different creative directions. But for others, we combine all of this together ultimately, because the targeting is now done on an ad level. So ultimately you need to work on making sure that you are finding creatives that are working. Probably only one in 21 and 30 creatives is going to be something that performs very well. The the meta actual average for for winning creatives is 5% of your creatives. So it's not like there's a lot of creatives that you're going to produce that are automatically going to be winners. And it can feel frustrating when you're producing lots of content and some things aren't working. But you have to remember, not everything works. Not every experiment about how am I getting the learnings from my last experiment, I'm putting that into my next experiment so I have a better chance of success in my next round. For one of our companies, we had a 60% hit rate. Eventually we did 60 experiments in a row that that were successful. And that was that was amazing. But that's because we had been working with them for years and we had taken all of the learnings from every single thing. And then it just meant that every time we were putting something out, like every batch of new creatives had at least one winner. So that was amazing. So how do I, how do I help them get that in place? So we work with them on their, on their psychology if they need that. But also for some of the companies, I also do kind of, and I will work with kind of one or two companies at a time doing this, but I will do like a few months advisory package with them where we actually work on building that muscle into the company. And ultimately that's all it is. It's a muscle like we building in the ability to to do reps on this. So with our, you have an experiment board that we've created over years where we reach out, we have a card from every experiment. We put a hypothesis for every card, We put the learnings on every card, the brief, we connect everything back with our naming conventions in the platform. And so we share that with those companies and we should talk them through our entire process. We guide them on messaging on the psychology side of things, help them do the analysis, help them figure out which creatives we would recommend optimizing or iterating on, and then kind of help them get into that process themselves. For the companies that we're we're managing, then we do all of that for them and they just sign things off basically. And then, yeah, we've seen, I mean, we've seen incredible results with this. Integrating AI for Automation and Creative Ideation What is AI fit into the workflow? Speaker 3 For for that, are you kind of a big advocate of trying as much as possible to outsource as much of it, outsource it to AI or how much do you try and keep as a human element? I mean, I think we're not at the stage now where. Speaker 1 We can't have a human in the loop. So we have an amazing team that are kind of humans managing the process, but we also do still build kind of projects. Like we have all of the team using AI as much as it makes sense to. So we build projects for all of the companies that we work with. We do a lot of crawling of the Internet and doing research inside these projects so we can ideate with them. And so, you know, whenever we're coming up with different ideas or hooks or things like this around a specific theme, you know, we might say, okay, this is the theme, come up with some hooks and then get some inspiration and then take that as inspiration and then refine it ourselves. So we're never kind of just doing a basic prompt and then copy and pasting that into into a brief for creator, but we will ideate with it. We use a lot of automation for our building. So all of our campaigns we build through automation and we've custom automations built connected to our notion, which whenever you move from one section to another, it will upload all of the creatives and then help us build everything. So that's really, really key for us. We have automations pulling into our reporting. So all of our dashboards are are live built with automation set up. So for us, it's really, really key not to be kind of data entry in every single day what the metrics from the day before are. We can go and look at this on an ongoing basis. And then, yeah, from a creative standpoint, we might be generating B roll or different kind of talking head hooks or helping us with like the other parts of the scripts or things like this as well. But again, there's always human in the loop. We're working with one kind of AI video generation tool at the moment. So with this tool we're making, we're using that to generate the ads themselves of course, as well, whenever, whenever that makes sense. So at the moment we'll work. On a brief to make ads that look like kind of animated movie posters. And so we're using that tool to generate the creatives to advertise that brand and that's that's really, really cool to be able to do as well So yeah, we're using AI where it makes sense. We should all be using AI wherever it makes sense. You know, an accountant wouldn't be kind of trying to do their job on paper with a pen anymore. Like they should be using spreadsheets and tools. And just like that, we should as well be using these tools where we can. Yeah, really good point. Mentorship and Guiding Principles for Early Career Marketers Last few minutes, I'd love. Speaker 3 To talk about a bit about mentorship and kind of what you've what you've learn with that, because you've mentored a lot of early stage teams and you seem to speak about things like having creative resilience, having empathy rather than just tactics, right. So it's kind of a side of growth work that I guess doesn't really get talked about very much because I think a lot of people will gravitate to much more towards like the kind of growth hacks, the tactics like what do I actually need to do to grow my company from one stage to another. And I think what you've kind of talked about within this a lot is, is a lot about the kind of theory and the grounding and, you know, jobs to be done is essentially rooted in how to ask really good questions and then use that to then out form the rest of it outright. What do you think is like, I guess junior marketers or people who are kind of starting their career out, what kind of guiding principles would you give people starting their careers out today? Like how would you try and think about people who is yes, starting out in growth or marketing When Yeah and whenever I'm. Speaker 1 Working with these people as well, I think one of the key things is don't lose your curiosity. That's that's really, really key. I'm a very emotional person, you know, that doesn't mean I'm totally like controlled by my emotions or anything, but I feel things very deeply. I'm very deeply empathetic person. And so for me, like not losing your humanity whenever you're going into this, like this world of growth and marketing can become very poisonous very quickly. There are a lot of things that aren't good. And so if you feel like something doesn't align with you, you don't have to do it. It's not like the olden days where it's like we have to work on this specific thing necessarily all of the time. Especially if you get practiced at your field, there are opportunities for you. You can create your own opportunities. I would say growth is a really hard role because a lot of companies and a lot of people don't understand what growth is. A lot of people think growth equals marketing, a lot of people think growth equals paid ads, and a lot of people think growth equals so many different things than it is where growth what it actually is. It's an experimentation mindset to be able to learn as quickly as possible about what are the things that are the most high impact for you in your company or in your role. The reason aperture, my company is called aperture is because the aperture of the camera is about helping you identify where to focus, like it's letting in more light or less light and putting things in and out of focus. And so for us, we're always looking for what is the area that we should focus on, what is that most high leverage area? And so that's what growth is about. If you're a head of growth within a company, you are essentially a conductor of making sure that all of the right things are being worked on. You're prioritizing effectively, you're bringing all of that into this. And then if you're working within those teams, really it's not about getting things to 100%. You have to really be able to feel comfortable working with impartial data. And you know, we did a panel 2 weeks ago and one of the founders on there was talking about how in his company they had this kind of culture previously of everything needs to be an experiment. We need to reach statistical significance on everything. And it got to the point where no decisions were being made. They'd have to leave things for weeks or months sometimes before they could make a decision on a tiny product change. And so they actually stripped that back over the last couple of years into kind of working with more kind of intuition and impartial data as well and validating things through conversation and things like this as well. And since then, they've managed to kind of forex their growth where they're a nine year old company. And that's been really, really amazing to see. So for people who are just starting out, I would say, well, read everything you can understand. There's a great book by Robert Cialdini called Principles of persuasion. I'd read this book so that you can understand well, what what those are the principles of persuasion. I would read the book the Mom test, which is 100 page, 111 page long book that helps you understand how to have kind of faster conversations and also understand that people are always accidentally lying to you and how to kind of get around that. And then I would say, you know, be be curious as well. It's really important that you kind of retain your curiosity because that's the thing that's going to get you the furthest ultimately in this role. You know, what is the thing around the corner? If I do this, what will happen if I do this and it works, then what will happen if I do this? And ultimately, I think that's where a lot of people fall down to. They lack the curiosity, but they also lack thinking about what happens after that. So if I ever am running something, I know what the five next 5 experiments I would run after that are where a lot of people kind of think, oh, I'm just doing this for the sake of doing it. Like, think deep, think deeply, stay curious, talk to as many people as possible and read those books basically. The Next Chapter for Aperture and Hannah Parvaz Awesome. I would love to. Speaker 3 Spend the last minute or so if you could just let us know what is next for Aperture, kind of where you see the next 121824 months, however far you want to go with that and then where people can find out more information on Aperture on you and follow, follow the journey. Absolutely, yes. So. Speaker 1 I mean, going into Aperture's fourth year, for us now, the team doubled in size over the last year. And so we're not some, we don't necessarily want to become the biggest company in the world, but that's not the goal. And we want to focus on now kind of retaining the quality, scaling, slowly retaining the quality and working with really interesting projects. So for us, we've really focused in the last year on the performance side of the business. And next year it's going to be even more focused on the kind of product side of the business, business working on monetization strategies, helping companies become more profitable with what they have and building this out. We're also thinking about launching our own kind of little products and courses and things like this too. There's a lot of requests for this. So that's going to be coming in the next, well, 12 to 24 months at least. And yeah, I think there's a lot of really exciting things coming. And we've been running our own event series too. So we're going to kind of keep up with that. It's a really great way to bring the community together. So we've run 10 events, they're called Aperture Sessions in the last year across 3 continents and it's been amazing. So, so for me personally, I'm going to slow down a little bit next year, really get back into it. I think I went to maybe 20 different countries or something this year. It was a lot. So slowing down, really focused on getting all of the processes right, really buckling down for like as we spoke about before, like, but before, before this call, like getting up to that five year mark and what comes after. So getting plans in place, planning for the future, making the team even more amazing and also focusing on our design too. And creatives. That's a really big area for us at the moment. We've been running creative for a lot of different companies and the demand is getting more and more interesting, let's say for that. So we're building our our creative team and our creative output. And I'm really excited for what's coming next. And then if you are curious about Aperture or about me, you can just search my name, Hannah Parvas, and I'll come up or you can type in Aperture London. So yeah, if anyone is curious about any of the things we've been talking about today, you can always connect with me on LinkedIn as well. And I'd love to hear from you. Amazing. Thanks, Hannah. Thank you so much for. Speaker 3 Having me.