How to Align Product and Marketing at Your Startup | Andrei Vlasov

Speaker A: I think a good actionable tip for, for anybody, whether they're on the product or marketing side, is to audit yourself and think in a given week. The decisions that I'm making, the tasks that I'm doing, what are the inputs that go behind that task? If I'm a channel manager and I am responsible for creating paid creative, what are the inputs that go into that creative? Is it the recent performance on Google or am I getting insight from product that informs the creative creative? Am I using competitor research, Am I using different data points from the product team and maybe similarly on the product team when I'm making a decision about a feature to add, am I only looking at product research? What's happening in the funnel? Am I also taking inputs from response rates on different messaging ads and things like that? So for the synergy to happen, you're right, it's probably different in each organization. But if you're sitting within an organization you can practice some self awareness and say am I using kind of a diversified set of inputs to make these decisions on a day to day basis? Andre, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thanks Paul, thanks for having me.

Speaker A: I'm excited to chat with you today. Uh, I'd love to kind of kick things off. You're very much a hybrid uh, marketer, right? You have the paid marketing experience, you've been in growth marketing roles at a number of different startups but now you've recently moved into more of this hybrid role where you're playing a little bit more in product. Can you talk to me a little bit about what that evolution looks like and what maybe got you interested in the paid marketing side of things and how that has kind of transitioned and adjusted over time as you've developed your career?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I do consider myself being more of a generalist in terms of call things growth and I have experience across very early stage startups and some more mature companies, mostly in consumer tech. My journey in growth started back in I think 2017. I had some previous experience in marketing but more like the brand, um, that comes so side of things. But I really started diving into growth like back then when I joined one of the startups. And I think that a lot of the startups when they think about growth, they think about acquisition. This is like from my perspective growth is of course much more than just acquisition but uh, your I think stereotypical startup sounder things about acquisition in the first place. So, and this was the immediate need at uh, the company I was at uh, back then and I started working on um, paid user Acquisition across different channels. You know, your typical Facebook, Google, Apple search, those things, but also tapping into influencer marketing, affiliates and some other strategies. So I think to answer your question, just came from that immediate need of the company. And you know, we need to fuel uh, growth through acquisition. So that's where resources and budgets were put in. Sure.

Speaker A: I think, you know, starting on the paid side, you kind of become addicted to that process of acquiring customers. And it's such a fun feeling to launch a campaign and then watch leads, installs like things come in. You're like, wow, I am, I'm growing this thing. And then as you start to run more and more campaigns and pay more and more attention to it, you see, okay, there's so much happening here after that person submits their email, as they use and engage with the product, so many teams that influence that behavior outside of paid. Was that like a natural kind of evolution for you to start paying more attention to the product side of things?

Speaker B: Yes, I would say it was natural. And also as I was learning more about the discipline and what are the different levers you can pull and thinking about it holistically rather than being really focused on this like top of funnel metrics such as customer acquisition costs, payback period, like what is else out there, like what are the other metrics, uh, we can influence and what is important for the business. So once I started gaining this more holistic view, I was like, onboarding is super important, like activation rates, things like that, they influence ltv, uh, much more than probably a tweak at the top of the funnel or a different creative message. I'm not discounting the importance of top of funnel and acquisition. I still think it's super important. But you have to think about the whole funnel and that's kind of how I'm thinking about thinking about it holistically. And back then I started talking to product teams and folks from, think back from that data science and they were building some LTV models and I started getting interested in that, that and this is again like how I gained this more holistic view in terms of the journey of a user.

Speaker A: Do you think it was ultimately uh, like, like a metric that kind of made you realize that? And the question behind the question is, you know, I wonder if more entry level or even senior marketers can become more of a generalist by focusing on a specific metric like ROI and moving away from this very like CAC oriented acquisition mindset.

Speaker B: So maybe to go back a little bit to uh, your previous question and your previous point of like you see the impact in acquisition and that's what drives me. Like I really love seeing the impact almost immediately from the campaigns I'm launching. So that create a test and all that. But then again like once I start thinking more about the business as a whole and like what's important, like revenue is important in the end of the day is your mostly post product market fit, right? And like what are the inputs on um, the revenue, what are some of the input metrics? And this is where you know, you again start thinking about like yes there is cag, there is all those leading indicators. But like if revenue and ROI is the ultimate metric, like what are some other levers you can pull and what are some other metrics that actually matter and move the needle outside of acquisition metrics? So probably to answer your question, it's a yes. Like you have to think about roi like on a business level or a company level and start putting it all together and really understanding how the business works. I think it's really easy to get caught up with like your day to day like optimization type of work and being focused only on like return on ad spend and payback period and kind of missing out on this broader picture. But if you want to grow and develop in this discipline, like you have to understand how the business works, how it makes money, like what are the different levers you can pull there

Speaker A: you have the kind of interesting experience of sitting on both teams and working on both teams and maybe even beyond paid and growth product life cycle, etc. I totally agree that having this kind of holistic perspective makes you a better whatever your job function is, do you think that it is more of a pronounced problem in the paid marketing function, in the product function, in the life cycle function, like where are folks more siloed? Where are folks able to be more of a generalist? Or is it just kind of everybody?

Speaker B: I think it can happen to everybody. But from what I've seen it's uh, less so common for product folks because like a good product manager, they probably heard this, they're like CEO of their feature or like whatever product they're working on. So they have to understand that then they're ultimately their success is measured by the success of the product and the revenue. But then folks in marketing and growth marketing, especially if you're focused on one channel or one tactic and you go really deep into it, you can definitely be siloed. And this also brings me to this topic of marketing versus product and where is this line that divides it and how do you bridge the gap between product and marketing. And I think that a lot of organizations big and small have this uh, challenge of marketing. Living in a silo or product, not knowing what marketing is working on, how they communicate a specific feature. And I think this is super important to close this gap. Be as close as possible. I don't think there is a one, uh, size fits all approach. And like you know the ideal team setup, it's very individual for each organization. But like if you're within the team you have to be thinking about like if you're on the marketing team you have to be thinking about like what's the product doing? How do I learn more about it? How do I communicate what my team is doing to the product? How do I learn from the product team like they doing? They're probably doing a lot of user research. How do I take this insight from the apply them to maybe my creative strategy on the user acquisition side or maybe some of my messaging on the website. Things like that are just so crucial for being successful and operating as a team as a whole and not being silent. As you said.

Speaker A: I think a uh, good actionable tip for anybody, whether they're on the product or marketing side is to audit yourself and, and think in a given week the decisions that I'm making, the tasks that I'm doing, what are the inputs that go behind that task? So when, if I'm a channel manager and I am responsible for creating paid creative, what are the inputs that go into that creative? Is it the recent performance on Google or am I getting insight from product that informs the creative? Am I using competitor research, am I using different data points from M from the product team? And maybe similarly on the, on the product team when I'm making a decision about a feature to add, am I only looking at product research? What's happening in the funnel, Am I also taking inputs from response rates on different messaging ads and things like that? So for the synergy to happen, you're right, it's probably different in each organization. But if you're sitting within an organization you can practice some self awareness and say am I using kind of a diversified set of inputs to make these decisions on a day to day basis?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And I think from both sides people would welcome these suggestions. Like I think a product manager would love some um, insights from your creative tests and seeing like what resonates and what doesn't. And then if you have this relationship with the product manager of the product team as a whole, it can also inform your product, uh, your Creative test and go beyond just testing different hooks but maybe testing just completely different value propositions or maybe there is like this specific audience that the product team is thinking about and they're not, they, they still like not correct the use case or the product market fit for this specific use case and you can go and think together. How can you test that from top of funnel and then feed those learnings back?

Speaker A: Sure I've seen that it can be challenging to do certain cross functional work. You know just to simply state that these different functions are in silos and we have to fix them is a little bit lazy. And I've also seen where trying to force collaboration between teams where there's not like an aligned business case usually fails. And I'm thinking about examples like well the lifecycle and paid marketing team don't really talk a lot. So like we should have a meeting and talk more. And then you realize hey, the way you're evaluating things are completely different. Your messaging is completely different and we're showing you things that you don't care about. So maybe there is some trial and error there.

Speaker B: Sure. And I've also seen this uh, between paid team or growth marketing team and a brand marketing team or like a social team depending on how it's structured. And same thing your creative testing on the user acquisition side they can potentially inform some of the social strategy and the content that's put out on social channels or some of the brand communications and vice versa. But like there is a difference in terms of how these teams view those things and like what, which metrics are important to them and just like frankly the mindset can be different. So I think you need to come uh into it first of all with like being open to different perspectives and you know in as we uh, as you mentioned previously like you can be really focused on like this one metric and this is what's important for you and like your, this is the most important thing. But I think when you come and collaborate with those teams you have to be kind of more open minded and accepting that their world is very different from your world. And the second thing is same as with product, you have to give value. So I think it's great if you come in with JPM or someone on the social team, on the brand team and you say like hey these are some learnings and I think these learnings might be uh, useful for you and no pressure if they're not. Here is what worked for us in the past month, here is the copy, the hooks, whatever messaging that works, the Formatting that work. These are the audiences that converted the best. You just can give it to them and then let them decide whether it's uh, helpful and useful for them or not. And this is how you start kind of this relationship. And as you said, not putting time on the calendar with a topic of brand and marketing, sharing, collaborating, whatever it is. I'm a proponent of giving value first and then seeing how it goes from there.

Speaker A: For sure. Yeah. And I mean that, that sharing can have a, uh, compounding effect over time where you see that teams are starting to just act more synergistically, being aware of what the other teams are working on, taking that into account, taking that into consideration. And I, um, think it's a really good kind of tip for, for junior marketers. I mean, I manage a team of kind of more junior folks or more, even more senior leaders that you can come up with a experiment, you can come up with a report, a Visual, an insight, etc. And that data, that value is leveraged by the amount of people that can act on it. And so when you're getting an interesting insight on a, uh, piece of ad creative, it's only, it's so valuable if you share it with your paid marketing team. It's more valuable if you share it with paid and lifecycle. It's more valuable if you share it with the company. And so thinking about like insights and learnings as this thing that has leverage, I think is a nice framing for it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I will say that when you're thinking about like what to share, I don't think it's best to share just metrics. And you know, here is the top performing creative in terms of spend or in terms of ctr, in terms of CP or whatever metric there is, it's the most valuable is like the why behind it. Like, why is this the top performer? Like what, what is the thing that worked? Like how does it compare against the others? Not in terms of metric, but more in terms of like in this hook. We started with the problem versus, you know, highlighting our user, highlighting our user Persona, whatever it is. And we found out that this actually resonates more just like speaking the natural language. And don't assume they know like all your metrics that are important for paid user acquisition.

Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. And I think like, even, even that as an exercise is a valuable exercise for somebody to think about and helps them to extrapolate their value across functions. Because you could see a piece of creative. And if you said, okay, tell me, tell the paid team why this is interesting. You have to think about a way to message it to the paid team. But if you have to think to yourself, tell me how this is valuable for the Life Cycle team, well then you have to put yourself in the Lifecycle team's shoes, which gets you thinking in that different way. I want to talk about experimentation for a little bit because it's something that we're all doing and you know, um, what I'm curious to get your feedback on as someone sits on the page and the product side is how you think about kind of like an overarching experiment, a growth experimentation strategy where it's okay to have silos, where it's not. And the quite the reason that I ask is that, you know, at my company I see that we have kind of paid budget experiments that we run, we have creative experiments that we run. The Lifecycle team has email and kind of audience experience experiments they run. The product team has a whole bunch of things that sometimes have nothing to do with messaging and are uh, more technical that they run. And that stuff can become quite siloed. But it also kind of relates to this conversation we're having around like what is valuable for everyone. And I wonder like at uh, your current role at HOVER in the past how you've thought about kind of experimentation strategy more holistically across these different functions.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a big topic. I honestly haven't seen an experimentation program that would work across all the functions that you mentioned in like in one place. So it will probably be siloed unless you have maybe unless you're like early stage, a very tight knit team that just runs experiments across the full funnel, which I, which I've also seen before. But if you're at a larger organization, you know, like probably 50, 100 plus people, you will have those functions owning their own experimentation roadmap and prioritizing their experiments based on their okrs metrics that they want to move. And I think that, frankly I think that's okay. But I will say that sharing the learnings from this experiment, this is what's super important. So once you. And let's talk about acquisition as one of the examples and we'll use a simple example like launching a new channel test. Like you want to test Reddit, right? And you're doing it, uh, you're mainly allocating whatever, like 5%, maybe even 10% in this given month and you have like all your metrics or experiment plan, budget, et cetera, et cetera. In this case you want to communicate what you're doing even before you launch that to the product team and the lifecycle team because it's going to change the uh, mix of the users and it can potentially impact down the funnel metrics and it can potentially impact activation rates and email open rates and all of that. And there's been many times when someone from product pings me and say like, hey, we noticed this drop in our onboarding conversion rate. Have you made any changes to your channel mix? Have you launched any experiments? And then there's been times when they might have assumed that or they might not even ask and this kind of got lost inflation. So you want to be proactive with these type of things. And then on the other hand, if there is an experiment on the lifecycle side with some, um, email flows, push notification, whatever it is, this can also impact your return of ad spend. M. And it might be uh, hard to kind of pinpoint, especially if you're running many experiments simultaneously. But what I'm leaning to is if again, look at this holistically and if your experiment is big enough that it can either impact down funnel performance or upper funnel performance in this case, communicate what you're trying to do beforehand and give heads up to the other team. So then you're already kind of know it. And keep in mind. And then once the experiment is finished, you want to share out learnings. I think that's, that should be the default. And like sharing learnings is so important because you cannot even know in some cases that like your experiment results might like spark some other idea or impact. The lifecycle team is thinking about this sequence. This works well. So I don't know if it's like a good enough answer. Again, I haven't seen like a holistic experiment program ran across all the, uh, functions. But the sharing piece is just crucial as I see it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that, that that sharing piece is where there needs to be some sort of, you know, that usually happens at the executive level. And then I think that executives also have a responsibility to distribute down that knowledge accordingly. And that also becomes a challenge where the paid team, for example, runs an experiment and then shares it with the VP of Growth Marketing. And then the VP of Growth marketing brings that into the weekly exec meeting and the VP of Lifecycle Marketing hears about it, but then the junior Lifecycle marketer doesn't hear about it. So there is sometimes that kind of challenge too where I think like execs a lot of times get access to a lot of information that maybe they don't always share out as effectively to their teams.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, I think that's true and you know, they typically have a lot on their plate.

Speaker A: Uh, sure, yeah, it's, it's, it's an unfortunate thing and I think you know, we're talking a lot about cross functional dynamics. It's just the uh, the reality of the world sometimes is that you're working on a million different things you don't remember to share or if you are a more kind of junior person, you don't know what impacts your world just yet. And I think that also comes back to the focus on that all teams should be oriented around similar metrics when possible like revenue, like ROI and be able to reverse engineer their metrics and their KPIs to that. Like I think that it's okay for the lifecycle team to be focused on open rate. It's okay for the social and team to be focused on engagement and organic impression volume. But being able to translate that into ROI is super helpful so that they understand, hey, like my impressions are going to get a better ROI on the social side if there's a better onboarding funnel, like my lifecycle emails are going to get a better open rate and that will translate to ROI down the road if there's better paid ad creative. So yeah, maybe like KPI alignment is where some of these issues get fixed.

Speaker B: Yeah, but I agree, but I will say that like yeah, revenue is the ultimate method and then each team probably have their like inputs that you're trying to move that ladder up to revenue. But then once team's input can also input the other team's input in a negative way. But like net net it will be positive. And again maybe giving an extreme example, with user acquisition you can launch a channel which drives super cheap signups and yeah, their conversion rates suck but at the end of the day it's ROAS positive and it's ROAS like 2x higher than the other channel. It hurts and impacts all the life cycle metrics because they don't open emails or maybe even the emails bounce and all of that. But at the end of the day with this volume you're able to drive more revenue and depending on if you're focused on your revenue growth or profitability, this might make sense to you. So there is always this dynamic and kind of trade off and it's, I think it's a little bit more nuanced and not like always as perfect as we think it is. Uh, and you have just to, you have to just accept this reality and like try to do your best to navigate it.

Speaker A: Sure. Switching gears. I know we wanted to talk about scaling an influencer program and specifically scaling a YouTube influencer program. There are a lot of folks listening to this that will want to scale a uh, YouTube influencer program. So can you tell me a little bit about how you've done that in the past and how that might be valuable for folks listening?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So when speaking of influencers, I'm personally a big fan of YouTube for a few reasons. One, it helps build your long tail and organic traffic content on YouTube videos. On YouTube, they live on YouTube forever as you know, as opposed to Instagram or TikTok. They're searchable. YouTube does search engine number two in terms of volume after Google. So you will have this long tail effect if you post on um, YouTube and if you collaborate with a YouTube influencer that eventually will improve your organic traffic. It's kind of you pay once but you, you have this long payoff. And this is one of the biggest reasons why I personally like it. And then there are a few more. Like typically if you work with a creator, they're like very engaged, they have more loyal audience. I would have just, you know, scrolling through reels on Instagram where like you don't even know who this creator is. Like typically on YouTube they have more engagement because they have more long term viewers. Like people follow this specific creators, they wait for their videos, things like that. I also think it's easier to measure because you have like more real estate, you can put links into descriptions, you can leave them there, you have comments, you have like other ways to engage the audience and I think like, frankly just more trustworthy uh, as a channel. So these are just like some of the reasons why I personally love YouTube. Not saying that you should not do Instagram and TikTok or other channels, but I've seen success with YouTube for these specific reasons. Yeah, yeah, I have tried to keep it relatively high level but I'll, I'll go over some important, maybe misconceptions and some important things, um, that you should uh, pay attention to. Starting with like is this even the right channel for you? Like how do you evaluate that? And you, the, the first step would be to research like whether your audience spends time on YouTube. And I'm pretty sure unless it's like a very specific audience segment, the answer is yes. The next step is like you're in uh, creators or channels that are within your topic or segment. And here you can, you know, if you're now like selling houseplants Just, just as a random example, there are like quite a few channels that talk about house plants, right? And no shortage of that. But if you're like into some very specific, quirky, whatever topic, maybe there is just not enough channels there and it doesn't make sense for you because you won't be able to scale. And if you work and maybe there are like two or three channels, it's probably not worth it, to be honest. It probably don't have a lot of views. So evaluate this and then you would you, you can say like, hey, but then there are like all these lifestyle channels and video blog or vlogs and whatever it is that kind of tailored to a very broad audience. Like, yes, you can do this, but I'm personally more a fan of like going more specialized. And maybe you're sacrificing the views, but you're getting attention of the audience that actually matters to you. And I think this is a good bridge to like, what are the metric sets that are important when evaluating channels? And I've seen that and a lot of times people look at the number of followers, but this is actually not important because you're not paying for followers, you're paying for views, you're paying for impressions. So you want to look at how many views on average the channel gets and what can you kind of, what can you expect there? And you also want to look at consistency because maybe some video, maybe a, uh, creator had like one or two viral videos and then all the other videos are like a thousand views or even less than that Risk bet, you know, so you want to look at views, you want to look at engagement, like likes and comments, you want to look at how frequently the straight up posts. Um, but my, my point is like followers doesn't really matter.

Speaker A: Let's just get a, take a very, uh, specific example, right? Let's just say I created this like digital Nomad keyboard, that's the lightest keyboard in the world that can fit in your backpack that you don't have to think about. My target audience is, you know, 25 to 40, single or in a relationship, not married. And I find a list of Digital nomad influencers on YouTube to go after. And I see, okay, these guys have a good, consistent content, that they're putting out a good number of views, et cetera. I have a list and I'm ready to reach out to them, but I'm like, shit, how do I, how do I know that this is going to be profitable? How do I reach out? How do I do that?

Speaker B: I go from there before you reach out. And I'll talk about reaching out in a sec. But before you reach out, like, you need to model this all out. And as you said, like, how do you. How do you know how much to pay for that? So you might want to go backwards from your customer acquisition cost and what makes sense for you. Uh, and if the keyboard costs, like, whatever, $100 and you're making, what is your profit margin on that? So you want to go backwards from it and then build some, um, assumptions. So let's say you want to work with an influencer who gets 20,000 views on a video. You assume one maybe like, 2% conversion rate from 20,000 views. Uh, so you would have like 400 clicks on, um, or 400 visits on your website. And then out of that 400, maybe like, 5% would convert into buying. You would have 20 conversions. Like, 20 people will purchase. This is all kind of made up, but I think it's in the ballpark. And this goes back to, okay, like, 20 purchases, $100, you know, 2K. What is my profit margin here? And then, like, this is how much you can afford to pay. Get influencer based on it, and you come up with, uh, essentially a cpm and you can apply this CPM to this influencer. Now when you're reaching out, like, I'm not a fan of just giving a price right away. I'm more towards, like, this is the product. Like, keep it short. Like, this is the product. We're a big fan of your channel, of your content. I think it's a great fit for your audience. Would you be interested in collaborating and, like, how much do you charge for it? Like, let them give you a number first. And then you look at this number and you see, like, does it make sense for you based on these calculations that I just walk you through? And I think there is, like, there's m definitely room, like, in going over and going under. Maybe it's like a really great fit and you're assuming a high conversion rate so you can afford a higher cpm. Or maybe it's more like a lifestyle channel and you're assuming a lower conversion rate so your CPM will be lower. And you're applying these average years per video and you're figuring out your CPM based on the quote that gave you. And you just looking at the math and seeing if it financially makes sense for you.

Speaker A: One of the challenges with this now is the supply and demand market of influencers is different for a given industry. And so There are scenarios in which, for example in the finance industry they are just going to have really, really high CPMs. And so if you want to work with influencers, you sometimes need to be a little bit creative and think about where is, who is my target audience and if I am, you know, marketing a keyboard, ah, for example and like maybe digital nomads are too expensive. So maybe I look to the tech reviewer pool or maybe I look in another kind of category to figure out something that makes sense for my unit. Economics.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think there are a few M factors that go into it and a few levers if you will, like you can work with two large influencers or 20 small ones. And I'm a proponent of working with smaller influencers because you kind of diversifying your risk. And typically what I've seen is out of 20 influencers you would have like an 8020 rule apply and like 80% of your conversions would be driven by like one or two influencers and then all the rest would be kind of a long tail. So you're diversifying your risk, uh, working with um, these smaller micro influencers if you will. You can also, you can also uh, think about different formats. It can be kind of uh, an full integration at the beginning of the video, it can be an integration in the middle of the video, the end of the video and the price is different based on it. You can also maybe think of it like what I laid out in this calculation. This is like a very performance driven approach. Right. But you're also getting some brand awareness, some brand value. And you want to think of like what is kind of the dollar amount that you can apply to it from that perspective. You can also think of um, oh, maybe they can give me licensing rights to use these assets, this video, ah, for some of my ads. And uh, this is like a big factor. You're immediately saving on some of the UGC content that you'll be producing otherwise and you're gaining more credibility in your ads. Uh, when people see that, simplifying your ads. Uh, so that's another fact. So I think there are like different ways of. Yes, like it's expensive but you can, you can think about it and you can kind of mitigate this risk of being super expensive through these strategies.

Speaker A: I love it. And I think uh, like you know, if, if you're a marketer that's listening to this and you're making that trade off between a lot of times it's going to be like a more upper funnel awareness based channel and you want to allocate some more budget to influencers. Well, now you kind of have an approach where you are starting with your ultimate KPI and then you are reverse engineering all the other metrics to work your way back from there. Yeah, and I really like that. That's super valuable. I know we have a little bit of time left. I want to kind of finish up with some rapid fire, if you wouldn't mind.

Speaker B: Sure, let's do it. Sweet.

Speaker A: All right, first question. Favorite book? All marketers should read.

Speaker B: Contagious by Johnna Beggar. Yeah. Yeah. I really love that book. I think it's very like, I. In general, I think that human psychology and human behavior, it's so important to the work we do as marketers. And it lays out in simple terms of what is, what is. Like why do some products go viral and like, what is it driven by? And this is, uh, more on the psychology level. So it helps you just understand it and put yourself in shoes of your customer, essentially. Cool.

Speaker A: What do marketers do? Get wrong about product. And what do product folks get wrong about?

Speaker B: Marketing Marketers getting wrong about product is. I think marketers in many cases think that when a new product is built or like a new feature in the product is built, it's like a well defined thing where like, we gotta build exactly this thing and it's gonna work because we, because the product team did all the research and all the coping and all of that. And we're putting so much time into building this feature. But in reality, it's kind of like each feature can be kind of like three product market for a startup. It cannot be a set. And maybe they're not using the right messaging to describe it. Maybe it's not the, uh, right fit between the ICP and the value. And they're also figuring it out in some cases as they go. So I would say, like, marketers should not treat the work of product as like a very straightforward thing. Like they, they absolutely are absolutely confident that this is gonna work and kind of give them some slack on that and product. I would say typically they underestimate the value of marketing. And I'm not saying it because I'm more on the marketing side of things, but it's not like, you know, build this thing and they will come, which is, you know, you see it. But he also seen that like, this is not true. And I think they underestimate the value of the brand marketing work and the wireless work and like all those little things that shape up marketing as a function just beyond growth Right. Like they all contribute to the success of the product. Sure.

Speaker A: I love that. This might be like completely random, but it kind of reminds me of like if you, if you are, you know, you live with a significant other, like you're like living at home. Like, like my dad would, you know, mow the lawn or like clean something in the house that was dirty. And he comes over and he's like, like look at, look how nice it is. And it's just like, I'm like, oh cool. Like the lawn's mowed. Great. But he puts so much effort into cleaning that thing and it just looks normal to me. But he's like, oh, I'm so proud of it. And maybe it's like the product team, engineers, they put so much effort into this thing. Um, but then they don't maybe understand that that value still needs to be communicated and described and people are not, they don't have the same investment in that thing that the product marketer or product team actually has.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'll say one last quick thing is I think a lot of people think that they are marketers, uh, and they have a lot of opinions on that, which I think is fine. And you see a billboard on the road and you have an opinion about it. Is it good, Is it bad? Uh, and I think it's much harder to have an opinion about a specific product decision. And this is where also a little bit of misconceptions and maybe even tension comes from.

Speaker A: Okay, last question In July of 2025 today, what do you think's the most overhyped growth trend?

Speaker B: Probably controversial, but using AI for video creative production, especially for like UGC style type of videos, you can still obviously tell it's, it's like not a real human even. Like I think there is this kind of uncanny valley thing. Like it looks very real but there is still like something that kind of itches you and you're not believing it's real. And I think we're still not there yet and I don't know when we will be. In terms of like video production, I think for statics it's amazing but for video, uh, there is like link themes are very over indexing on that right now. But there is still value in just, just pure UGC content that you would get from your creators a hundred percent.

Speaker A: And I, I think, I mean one of the like things that to me is overhyped is that you need to be testing thousands of different variations of creative. I think that's absolutely bullshit. Like I think that you just need to create. You need to know what, what your value prop is. And you have to have a certain amount of diversification, but you don't need thousands of ads and the whole, like, AI helps you create thousands of variations. I don't think that you need that now. It's definitely industry dependent. Like maybe E comm. You have a bunch of skus. Like it's a little bit different and things like that, but for the most part, yeah, that's my strong opinion.

Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker A: Cool. Andre, thank you so much for joining the show today.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Paul. It's, uh, a pleasure.