A Special Message from Matt

Hello and welcome to the last episode on the growth podcast. I am your host Matt Bellotti and after almost seven years at Drift, three, almost three doing this podcast, it is time for me to move on from the company to some new adventures. For those of you listening, I'll leave you with kind of some parting thoughts here. I've been with Drift since day one, essentially before we had our first customer.

And growth, I have realized looks so incredibly different throughout every single stage of a company. So from going to zero to one to just getting our first few customers, growth looked really different. It kind of looked like a lot of unscalable work, a ridiculous amount of manual work just to make things happen, to get a next step, to get some progress. It was all super manual.

And I think that there's no real substitute for that early on, with maybe the exception of every now and then a really special company finds some mechanic that unlocks some crazy growth right from the start. But it really really hard to do if you are trying to build a network and go from zero to one I think the cold start problem is an incredible book for that as a resource But otherwise in most like B2B type contexts, it's just going to be a lot of manual work. And the stage after that looks, growth looks like making things repeatable.

You've figured out how to do it a couple times. How can you do it five more times, 10 more times with a little less work and a little less effort. And towards the scaling phase, growth looks like finding new ways to do more and get more done. It looks like trying new approaches and channels and strategies.

It's kind of unlocking, you know, new step functions. And as things move into the future, and a company continues to scale, it's all about finding new opportunities to be ahead of the curve, right? How do you stay one step ahead of whatever competitors might be? How do you understand the market better than anyone else and kind of know where it's steering and, you know, put yourself right in front of that path right before everyone else gets there, right before the customers get there.

And at the end of the day, on that note, growth is really just about knowing your customers better than anyone else, right? It's knowing what they care about, where they exist on the internet or off the internet, and how do you get in front of them at the very perfect moment in the right way with the right message and whether that a referral system or a well ad or some other strategy you know some blow up over social media that gets you tons of eyeballs right It's all just about how do you best understand exactly who you're going after and exactly what they care about and getting the right thing in front of them at the right time.

For those of you that have been listening, I cannot thank you enough for doing so. it has been 90 episodes with some absolutely incredible guests. And I know there are some of you that have maybe listened to one or two episodes. And that's amazing.

Thank you for checking it out. And I know that there's a bunch of you too that have been around since the beginning listening to almost every if not every single episode. And for that, I'm forever thankful, grateful. I know there are so many things you can do and spend your time on and the fact that you spent it here, learning from the incredible guests that I've had means so much.

And for those of you that have been guests on the podcast, I am also incredibly thankful. I know it's a lot to take some time out of your day to hop on this podcast and talk things out and share your knowledge and wisdom. And these are really hard people to get a hold of. And I'm so grateful that they gave me the time and energy and space to join me here And for those of you that want to keep in touch or find me in other ways you can always find me on Twitter at Matt Pilati And otherwise keep an eye out for for things that I'm I'm up to in the future.

I would love to have you along for all of those journeys as well. Thank you so much again for the support on this podcast. And that is it. We'll call it a day there.

There will be no new episodes on this feed. But please, please, if you're just stumbling across us now and this is the first thing that you're hearing, the first episode you're listening to, please check out all of the other episodes we've had with all those amazing guests that I talked about. A lot, if not all of the knowledge and insight there is timeless. Growth is cyclical.

Tactics, you know, become really popular and they go away again and they become popular again. And same thing with strategies and all of that. And so there is gold there. There will always be gold there.

And so please go ahead and give it a listen. And thank you so much for doing so. Bye.