This honestly should not be possible. 👀

“Growth Marketing” is a pretty major search term.

With only 18 reviews Channels of Growth as of writing this post is beating out Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis, a mammoth with 1,437 reviews.

This was actually the major success goal I had set out to achieve when launching this thing. If I could write a “top 3” book for Growth Marketing this whole project would be classified a success.

But I honestly figured i’d need hundreds of reviews to get to this point. I was shocked how easy this was to rank.

Here’s my tin-foil-hat breakdown of why this happened.

First - Despite having 1,437 reviews, Hacking Growth only has a 4.5 star average rating.

My book, despite only have 18 reviews, has a 4.8 star rating. It was previously ranking #8-#10 for the search query “Growth Marketing” and it had only made the jump to the #2 placement once the most recent review came through, bumping it from a 4.7 to a 4.8 AND giving it that gold “five stars” round up.

This is pretty wild.

It tells me that Amazon places a VERY heavy emphasis on the average rating. So much so that if you can get a really strong average rating it will help you beat out competitive products with thousands more reviews.

Second - I had a spike of sales.

I’ve noticed this previously, that as my sales went up or down slightly that my position within Amazon would also fluctuate.

To be clear though, this most recent spike wasn’t “crazy” and there were previous times it had gone viral in certain communities which drove bigger sales spikes. And this definitely had helped in the past, but it had never hit the #2 slot, or even the top 5 before.

Third - My keywords are super optimized.

I built the entire book around ranking for “Growth Marketing” on Amazon. It’s in the title, it’s in the description, it’s my entire career.

Growth Hacker Marketing & Hacking Growth are reallyyyyy close to “Growth Marketing” but it’s not the same thing.

I set out to write the #1 book very specifically for Growth Marketing, to dominate this little niche that I have found myself. Optimizing the keywords across the entire “book-as-a-product” I believe has definitely helped it rank way way better than it deserves to.

… Put all 3 of these things together, and you have a textbook example of dominating a Channel of Growth. :)

Done well, a tiny baby product can out compete giants.

If you haven’t yet make sure to pick up a copy. ️‍🔥

But it matters. A lot.

As your company scales from 10 humans to 100+ humans, you get to experience this really distinct sensation of “I don’t actually DO anything anymore”, and your world shifts to “the output of your team” is now YOUR output.

Designer makes a crappy design? That’s your design.

Sales rep tells a customer something factually incorrect? That’s coming out of your mouth.

Finance sets up your FP&A wrong? That’s your forecast.

Chances are you’ve probably already heard this message repeated 1,000 times. Hiring is important. Hiring is important. But honestly, I’ve read all the books, I talked to all of the executive coaches, nobody ever really pointed me at a resource that I found super useful.

So here’s my “ultimate guide” to hiring a team of S-Tier employees.

Core concepts:

1. The right butt for the right seat

2. Vetting the role correctly

3. Speed is half the game

4. Selling on more than compensation

5. Negotiating compensation

6. Closing candidates

7. Selling through the close

The right butt for the right seat

For the love of the tech gods & all things holy, it is not the candidates responsibility to understand what problems you are trying to solve. Before you throw up that JD and start interviewing people, do your absolute best to understand what problem you are trying to solve.

And you ARE trying to solve a problem. Not just hire a role.

Maybe you’re making your first sales hire. You’re not trying to “hire a sales rep” you’re trying to solve a problem.

For example:

1. I have a lot of inbound leads, and I need someone to close these leads and turn them into paying customers.

2. I don’t have any inbound leads, and need someone who can go hunt down business.

3. I already have 2 sales reps, and I need to give them real guidance, feedback, and to hire a few more.

4. I don’t know what systems to use, Hubspot, Salesforce, what’s the right phone vendor? How do I record my calls? etc.

These are all very different problems to solve (and doesn’t take into account any requirement for technical skills or specific industry knowledge). A high preforming Account Exec, might have zero interest in prospecting for new business, and no idea how to manage and hire a team.

The #1 hiring mistake I see when talking to founders is that they are hiring for a role without a strong understanding of the problem they actually want solved & the work that needs to be done.

Even for leadership roles where there is a strong requirement to “manage up” and to define your own roadmap, make sure it’s really clear what problem you want solved.

Build the product. Drive revenue growth. Invest money to create a high ROI.

The clearer this is up front, the more likely you are to make the right hire.

Vetting the role correctly

Vetting kind of sits on a spectrum between “having a couple calls & does the team like you” to having a “12 step interview process with 2 take homes & a work trial”.

Here’s a couple of key concepts to help you vet better.

First - make sure you know what great looks like. If you’re not hiring for a role that you are a technical expert in, then make sure first you talk to some people who are just absolutely killing it in that role already.

It is hard enough already to vet someone for something you know extremely well, it becomes 10x harder when you’re trying to vet someone for a role outside of your own domain.

Second - The #1 indicator of future performance, is past performance.

If they are a software engineer, did they build big hard technical stuff? Did they ship a lot of things quickly? Do other engineers admire and look up to them?

If they are a sales rep, were they consistently the top performer on their team? Can they talk about their own product extremely well?

Even outside of direct professional experience, I’ve seen so much success with people who have a history of just absolutely kicking butt. Chess champions, professional athletes, marathon runners - people who have proven they can work hard, do hard things, and win.

The tricky bit here is making sure you understand who was actually responsible for any work done or success created.

Who is the magician, and who is the magicians assistant?

Dive into the details to try and separate these, ask specific questions, grill their references on exact contributions to wins.

Third - You need to see their actual work before they are truly on the team.

There’s not a magic answer to this, but all of the vetting in the world can’t tell you what’s going to happen when rubber hits the road and you actually begin to see their real work.

Different solutions that address this:

• A sales rep giving a demo of YOUR product

• A one week work trial for a software engineer

• A designer making a landing page

Anything that you can do to get them to give a sample of “real work” can be so incredibly impactful because that’s as close as you’re going to get to the truth of their performance.

Now - there’s a risk/reward trade off here. The more work you give them, the slower and heavier your hiring process becomes, and S-Tier talent will have 5 other offers who may not be asking for such a heavy process.

The way you want to handle this is different depending on the roles - but what I’ve found works best is to keep a VERY light work sample up front (a 2-5 hour project max), and to do my best at having a strict 30/60/90 process.

The better you can become at filtering out people who aren’t preforming with a 30/60/90, the less risk there is with moving fast and making an offer without seeing an extensive amount of work.

Fourth - don’t waste time vetting poorly.

This can happen in a lot of different ways. Talking to multiple team members who all ask the same question. Giving take homes that don’t actually provide a real world sample of what their work is going to be like. Having too many people in the process.

Don’t have a 12 step vetting process with two take homes and then the CEO makes a decision at the end of the day based on vibes.

Vet what matters, do it quickly, move fast.

Speed is half the game

The faster you move, the greater your risk, but you literally won’t close S-Tier candidates if you move slowly. By the time you set up an initial call they will already have made a decision.

Taking this to the extreme, the perfect hiring process moves quickly enough that the candidate feels like you actually DID vet them (people want to feel tested), but that you fell for them SO HARD that you just had to make them an offer asap.

Time kills all deals, and if your process is too long you will filter out your best candidates.

ONE caveat with this, is that you want to be the last person they talk to before they accept their offer.

Candidates bias extremely heavy to whoever it is they talked to last. After you make an offer if you don’t get a “yes” on the spot, make sure you understand who else they are talking to, when they are talking to them, and then follow up with the candidate after that conversation.

Selling on more than compensation

So many people truly truly drop the ball here & think that all people care about is money, and it’s simply not true. The more that you fail here, the more you are going to have to pay to attract talent, and even all the money in the world wont be enough for S-Tier talent.

People care about so much more than money.

• Mission - feeling like they are doing something important. Going to mars, saving lives, helping people.

• Doing amazing work - being able to do cool things, work on projects they wouldn’t have the chance to anywhere else.

• Team - people want to work with amazing people. Nothing is sadder than a company where people are paid at the top 90th percentile but they all hate each other.

If you’re able to craft a story where you are executing against a giant exciting mission, doing work that can only be done at YOUR company, with a team of people that are ultra talented and super nice - you almost don’t even have to pay them.

Seriously.

I can’t tell you the number of people who have turned down job offers making 2x-10x more to come work with us, because of things that had literally nothing to do with their monetary compensation.

Not every company has a perfect story here, but the better your “non salary” narrative is the stronger candidates you will be able to attract and the less you’ll need to pay them to join.

And if you completely drop the ball here, you’re going to be left paying the absolute max because there’s no other reason to join.

Negotiating Compensation

Almost always, I try to do my absolute best to throw out the number first. This is referred to as anchoring the negotiation.

There’s a lot of advice out there along the lines of “haha, they said they’ll take $80k even though I was willing to pay $100k!”

But here’s the thing. Your absolute best candidates are probably making more than $100k. The person that’s willing to join for way less than what you’re willing to pay them, that’s not the top 10% of the candidate pool.

Anchoring is psychologically really really powerful.

“I know you’re probably being paid way more than this right now, but the pay range for this role starts at $80k, how far off are we from where you need to be?”

I usually only do this if I think the candidate is currently making way more than what our salary band is too. It is way better to start lower and then give some, then for the candidate to tell you something way higher and needing to talk them down.

A really important caveat here … anchoring can be important when closing extremely highly paid employees.

Sometimes - often with more junior roles, it can be in your favor to offer them something wildly over what they are currently making.

You can negotiate to get someone to take a way smaller package with your company … you can also negotiate to create a raving life-long die-hard cult follower.

Give someone who was making $60k, a salary of $100k, and they will follow you to the ends of the earth.

New roles can be a chance to build a team that will worship you. They can be a chance to literally change someone’s life. They are a tool to motivate.

You’re not just negotiating to get them to say yes. You’re negotiating to get them to perform. Don’t forget that there’s more value for you to capture within a salary negotiation than them simply signing on the dotted line.

Final note on this - make sure to begin this process as early as possible. You don’t need to present them the offer at the first call, but make sure you go over salary ranges to see if they make sense for both parties.

Closing candidates

When you make a candidate an offer, this is a MOMENT. It’s time to make this a BIG DEAL.

At Rupa we have offer parties, where everyone who was involved in the process hops on a call. There’s music playing. We have a fun slide congratulating the candidate. We go around in a circle where each person says something they liked about the candidate and why we are excited to work with them.

The “yes” is assumed. “We are so excited to work with you!!”

Then we kick everyone off the call and the hiring manager goes over compensation and presents the exact offer.

Afterwards, everyone texts/emails the candidate telling them how excited we are.

This is the moment their life changes. They are about to embark on a new adventure. They are about to leave the gravitational force of their current job, or that their job search process has ended.

It is a important moment in their lives. Make it special.

Don’t make offers async over email or text, don’t do it half hazardly. It is such a scary scary thing to start a new job. They are going to be thinking to themselves “do these people really even want me?”

Humans are extremely risk adverse creatures. They need to feel confident in this new job. That their risk is going to pay off.

If they get one offer carelessly given over email or text, and another one where the whole team shows up and has a party - 9 times out of 10, the candidate is going with the company that REALLY wants them.

They’ll feel the energy, they’ll feel the excitement, they’ll be pulled by the momentum of the process.

Selling through the close

You have not successfully closed your candidate until they actually have started their job.

Honestly - you haven’t truly closed the candidate until the successful completion of 90 days of work.

I can’t tell you how many candidates I’ve stolen who gave someone else a verbal yes, or who even had a signed offer letter. Or how many of my own employees that got another offer (often much higher) a month or two into the job.

It’s not over until it’s actually over, and they are fully onboard, committed, and have proven that they are going to be successful.

• After you get a verbal yes, make sure the contract gets signed asap

• Send out the contract as soon as you make the verbal offer

• Have the team follow up with their excitement

• For senior leadership have the board/VCs send a text or email

• Keep messaging the candidate every other day or so until they start, keep the momentum

• AFTER they start, you still have to sell the candidate, make sure they meet people, make sure they are excited about their work, now is the time where you build trust & begin to deliver on YOUR promises

The failure rate from “verbal yes” to “successful 90 days” is honestly on average fairly high, probably 30% at best. You can help reduce this by making sure that you never stop closing until “the money is in the bank”.

Combine all of these concepts (or at least steal the parts you find useful) and you’ll be able to hire way stronger employees, have a much more cash efficient business, and truly build a team that A players want to work on. 🔥

I hope you found something here useful! If you want to keep reading make sure to check out the Channels of Growth book on Amazon for a Growth Marketing Framework for Dominating Channel & Building Better Products! 🚀

So, I wrote a very small book - maybe an hour read? Despite being tiny, this thing took me 2 years to write and was only possible after learning lessons from spending $100M+ growing startups.

Introducing: Channels of Growth - A Growth Marketing Framework for Dominating Channel & Building Better Products

Buy on Amazon

(Disclaimer: This is a beta launch! If you notice any errors my 5x editing process missed please email me. And if you love it, please leave a review. ❤️)

Why did I write a book?

When I was going through Y Combinator my experience of the program was being the dumbest person in the room. I’m not sure how I got accepted honestly, these people were all 10x smarter than me.

Despite this undeniable fact - I was constantly surprised by these brilliant founders who had created these incredible products, and couldn’t figure out how to make them grow.

So being one of the few “growth guys” in the room, they would ask me for help.

It blew my mind that they needed me because one of the secrets of Y Combinator is that it has done an incredible job consolidating all of the “right answers” into one place.

They tell you the books to buy, they give you lectures, they teach you how to take your product 0 - 1, hook you up with mentors to guide you along the way.

YC is basically a school on how to get to Product Market Fit.

… but then what?

There is a piece of tribal knowledge that is missing from the universe, a piece of knowledge that sparked this Substack & was a major component of 10’xing the growth of Rupa Health.

Here’s the obvious secret:

All users come from channels, this is the most eternal law of growth. It doesn't matter how incredible the product is, how strong the viral effects or the organic word-of-mouth referrals. Every user, that has ever used any product, has come from a channel.

Channels are simply the ways users discover product.

Our job as marketers, entrepreneurs, product managers, & engineers, isn't to fall victim to the trendy dogma of rejecting sales & marketing in favor of product led growth - but to combine these concepts, to deeply understand the channels that drive users towards our product & then optimize these channels to maximize growth.

If you're tired of the "either or" mentality that seems to dominate the conversation around paid vs organic growth, Channels of Growth lays out my personal Growth Marketing framework for dominating channel & building better products.

It's a short read (based on lessons learned from over $100M+ spent growing products) that I hope will make you a better marketer, product manager, and entrepreneur. 🚀

Buy on Amazon

I gagged writing that. 🤢

Really early in my career I spent time working in a brand shop. The kind of place where you’d drop 6 figures for some posh creative director to tell you why blue is the color of trust. The kind of place that would blow your money driving impressions without driving results.

Brand is extremely important - but if you want to know a secret, brand isn’t something you can pay for. Not to be vulgar, but trying to pay for brand is a bit like paying for sex.

You can buy design, the same way you can buy clothes.

You can buy advertisements, the same way you can buy dinner.

You can buy a brand consultant … the same way you can pay for a therapist.

No amount of money however can help you build a powerful authentic brand, because brand is the result of your day-to-day actions, not the sum total of your display impressions.

You can think of it kind of like startup karma. Every good thing and bad thing you do, all added up, is your brand.

Brand Equity can be defined as the sum total of every interaction anyone has ever had with your brand.

• [ads] Every ad impression.

• [public relations] Every publication you appear on.

• [content] Every article someone reads.

• [referrals] Every conversation users have with each other.

• [product] Every touch point a user has with your product.

• [support] Every email your customer support team sends (or doesn’t send).

• [hiring] Every interview you ever do, every candidate you ever reject.

Every single interaction someone has with your brand exists on a scale between “extremely negative” to “extremely positive”, and it has an impact/importance between “extremely weak” to “extremely strong”.

Brand Equity is the “net result” when you add together all of these interactions.

Brand Equity is important, because it represents the delta that someone is willing to pay between your brand & a generic identical product.

Coca-Cola without brand is unhealthy sugar water. The value of their brand equity is the premium someone is willing to pay for the well dressed sugar water.

Here’s how you build up brand equity that enables you to charge a premium, create defensibility, and inspire a generation (without blowing your money on billboards and consultants).

Creating your startup’s Brand Identity

Brand Identity can be defined as the elements one uses to associate your brand with “you”.

Don’t overcomplicate this. You don’t need some big drawn out process, you don’t need to spend an insane amount of money on designers, just follow a few really basic rules & get this done.

1. You need a logo - a “mark” that identifies your brand.

2. You need a name - a name that won’t ever need to change.

3. You need colors associated with your brand.

4. You need fonts to be associated with your brand.

5. [bonus] Subtle patterns can be an exceptionally powerful part of your brand identity by giving you creative elements that easily build association.

6. [bonus] Brand characters (check out Discord) can also be extremely powerful by giving you more creativity when creating content & ads.

The ONLY MAJOR WAY you can screw up your brand identity, is if you pick something that needs to be changed later.

Consultants will bill you a ton to tell you which colors make you feel a certain way, or which fonts create a sense of authority, or how a name will resonate with your audience … but the golden rule of brand identity is to pick something that won’t ever change.

Image if Coca-Cola changed their name to PopPleasure.

They would have lost decades of brand equity from people associating “Coca-Cola” with their product. Nobody would know what “PopPleasure” was. This would cost them billions in lost revenue.

The power of a brand is in what people associate with the identity. If the identity has to change, then people will no longer be able to associate their experiences with it. This is the most damaging thing you can do.

The most common way that people screw up their brand identity is by picking a name that won’t allow them to change or grow.

Maybe I’m a Supplement company and I name my brand “Smart Gut Supplements”.

1. This name makes it hard to add in supplements beyond gut health.

2. This name makes it hard to layer in products beyond supplements.

3. This domain name is taken so I can’t own the .com.

The way people mess this up is by associating their brand name with a specific product. The best brand names are timeless. Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Disney … X.

They are formless, and allow the brand to launch any infinite number of products underneath them.

Pick colors that make sense and aren’t ugly, pick fonts that are easy to read, create a logo that is simple and can easily identify your brand, pick a timeless name that could “become anything” (and doesn’t have other conflicting associations).

Product & Customer Support are the core drivers of Brand Equity

Once your brand identity is established, the most critical thing you need to understand about building an incredible brand is that what matters more than a billion billboard campaigns, is your Product + Customer Support.

Let’s use another huge household brand as an example, Comcast.

The horror stories of Comcast’s customer support are legendary, that at this point in time they basically are Comcast’s #1 brand association.

Someone says Comcast and millions of people think “shitty customer support”.

No amount of advertising will ever save Comcast. “You can’t pay for brand” brand is at the core of who you are and what you do.

A tweet can go viral and 1,000,000,000 people could see it, but a tweet is a very weak impression. A user actually using your product or talking with someone at your company, is one of the most powerful brand impressions you can provide.

If a startup or product is rotten at its core, no amount of “branding” will ever save it.

Another philosophical question … what is the worst part of the Coca-Cola brand?

“It’s unhealthy sugar water.”

Coca-Cola didn’t have this negative association back in the 60’s and 70’s. It might be a timeless classic even in 2023, but there has been a tremendous cultural shift towards eating & drinking healthier.

The product behind Coca-Cola has a fundamental flaw - it is actually extremely bad for you.

They tried to pivot with Diet Coke, and Coke Zero, but ultimately they were never able to rebrand and find a “healthy” positioning for their brand.

This key piece is what forced them to change their Brand Identity, to start launching and acquiring completely new products, with completely new brands (Vitamin Water, Powerade, Minute Maid, Gold Peak, etc).

All of the “branding” in the world will never be able to overcome the truth of your product - because your product (and the customer support/human interactions around it) are THE most powerful driver of your Brand Equity.

How to build your Brand Equity with Marketing & Advertising

When people think about "building a brand” they’re usually thinking about creative marketing + advertising campaigns, and the witty messaging behind them.

Just do it.

Every kiss begins with K.

Don’t be evil.

Have it your way.

Maybe she’s born with it … maybe it’s Maybelline.

Here’s the golden rule of leveraging Marketing & Advertising as tools to amplify and build your brand → do it profitably, with direct attribution.

The absolute worst thing a company can do when trying to build a brand is create a “budget for brand” that isn’t tied to profitably driving revenue.

Every dollar you spend on marketing and advertising should be profitable. Do not fool yourself into thinking “this will pay off in 5 years” or “this will drive brand recall” or “we’re entering a new market and just need to introduce our brand”.

There’s two reasons for this.

1. Spending money without creating an ROI is literally just burning your cash.

2. Marketing & advertising dollar spent profitably, allow you to scale your campaigns.

There is nothing special about a “performance marketing” impression vs a “brand impression”.

As far as brand is concerned, both of them are doing the exact same thing, providing a user with an interaction with your brand.

The difference is that when you are spending money on marketing & advertising profitably, you are able to purchase 10x more impressions because they are profitable and you begin to play a game of profitably maximizing volume instead of lighting your cash on fire.

Please, spend money profitably.

And then as a reward you can focus on these 3 critical levers.

1. The total number of impressions

2. The strength of those impressions

3. The frequency of those impressions

Some forms of impressions are stronger than others. If someone sees your brand on Twitter that might create a large # of impressions, but the strength is weak. If an industry influencer with 1,000,000 followers creates a 2 hour long tutorial on why your product is amazing - that becomes a MUCH stronger impression.

Follow me on Twitter, weak impression.

Read my Substack, stronger impression.

Read my book (about to launch), even stronger impression.

Grab coffee with me IRL, even stronger impression.

Work with me for 10 years? Probably the strongest impression.

Maybe you’re someone who has seen 1,000 of my tweets, read 4 articles, preread the beta of my book, hung out with me IRL, and works at my company. This is probably the absolute strongest “brand impression” I could possibly have.

That person will likely remember me for years and years and years (and hopefully have a positive brand impression).

Your goal when building a brand is to define your audience, reach as much of your audience as you can, do it with the absolute strongest impression you possibly can, and do it consistently, frequently, for generations.

And to do it profitably.

Why should you “build a brand?”

Brand is the difference someone is willing to pay between your product and your competitors product. It’s extremely important when you are selling a commodity, but it’s actively important for any company.

A final story for you 🙏🏻 when we first started trying to grow Rupa we tried “cold calling” our users. Nobody wanted to hear from us - they were busy doctors after all.

Today, cold calling is one of our top channels of growth.

The difference is brand. Brand we built profitably through influencer marketing, industry partnerships, Facebook ads, Google search, content, webinars, conferences, direct mail, LinkedIn ads, & an insanely good product with incredible customer support.

We call our potential users today and they say “OMG I’ve heard of you guys my friend XYZ loves you!” then they sign up and buy on the spot.

That’s the power of brand.

Do it right and your users will pay you more for the same product, it will unlock new channels of growth that used to not be profitable, it will provide a tremendous layer of defensibility, and maybe even your parents will finally know what your company does.

If you liked this post make sure to follow me on Twitter & check out the new video interview series on YouTube. :)

Want to keep reading?

• The Community Round - equity crowdfunding to hack superfans, distribution, & growth 🤝

• The job seekers guide on how to evaluate a VC backed tech startup 🚀

• [Framework] The concepts you were never taught about how the brain acquires knowledge

Imagine bringing on 100 to 1,000 investors who are bought in to what you are building.

1. They are likely early adopters of your product

2. They are now willing to support you by recommending users, employees, and other investors

3. They are available to provide product feedback, act as advisors & mentors

Community Rounds work by allowing your superfans to turn into investors with as little as a $100 investment, all within a single Special Purpose Vehicle which means there is only one line on your cap table.

While you normally need to be an accredited investor, anyone can invest into a Community Round up to a maximum of $2,200.

Startups give their employees equity because it helps align incentives & drives increased performance + commitment.

The exact same thing happens when you give your users equity.

Even if it is $100, it gives your users the chance to say “I own a piece of this product that I absolutely love.” This drives increased usage. This drives increased word of mouth referrals. This creates a deeper moat within your most loyal fans.

Here’s everything you need to know about the most important piece of your growth strategy, that you’re likely missing.

What are some good examples of companies that have raised a Community Round?

Breaking a WeFunder record, Mercury (probably the absolute best startup bank) raised $5,000,000 from 2,450 investors … within literally 90 minutes.

75% of them were already customers, and within 9 days they reached over $23,000,000 in reservations.

Why did they raise a Community Round?

"It's aligned with our mission and brand to give customers ownership and be part of our success. Most of our growth is word of mouth. We felt that ownership would supercharge that." - Immad Akhund, CEO @ Mercury

Mercury had already raised over $120M with their Series B, the key reason they went forward with their Community Round wasn’t to raise more funds but to supercharge their word of mouth growth.

Again, after raising their Series B, Replit (an online programming environment) launched their Community Round by announcing it at their very first annual conference.

Their goal was to allow their most engaged superfans to have first shot at the allocation. They ended up raising millions within an hour, and a total of $5,439,225 from 2,647 investors.

Why did they raise a Community Round?

"Users are waking up to the fact that they should be part of the upside. It's clear to me that the future of the internet lies in community ownership. And any startup that wants to align their incentives with that of their users should consider a community round!" - Amjad Masad, CEO @ Replit

Other major Community Rounds include:

1. Levels raising $5M from 1.4k investors

2. Synthesis raising $3M from 1k investors

3. Substack raising $7.8M from 6.7k investors (my personal favorite 😍)

4. Immersed raising $9M from 3.3k investors

5. Wefunder themselves raising $19.4M from 6.6k investors

Who should (and shouldn’t) raise a Community Round?

The primary reason you should be raising a Community Round isn’t actually to raise funds, but to allow your most passionate followers to become owners in your company … at really excellent terms.

This should be at the core of your strategy.

This means that the best time to raise the round is when you have a product that is already built, and superfans who love the product.

Mercury raising as a random bank that no one had ever heard of, likely wouldn’t have preformed as well. The hardest time to raise a Community Round is when you don’t already have users or at least “some” kind of community base.

When you raise the round, in addition to launching to your own community, you will gain distribution by getting placement on the Wefunder platform.

The products that receive the most rewards from this distribution are usually consumer focused or have a really broad appeal. If you’re an obscure B2B enterprise tool, this likely wont be super helpful.

This distribution was extremely impactful for Levels because everyone (who is into the wellness space) could use their Continuous Glucose Monitor.

Food & beverage, consumables, gaming startups, other marketplace startups, consumer focused DNA tests - these have all done pretty well.

Looking at what’s done best this week right now, it’s “another” platform for consumers to invest, cleantech, and a home glucose device.

The basic Community Round playbook

If you want to raise a Community Round start by setting up an account on Wefunder. They are by far the market leader in equity crowdfunding & you have the biggest chance of success on their platform.

Your basic playbook is going to look like this:

1. Build out your Wefunder profile with images, video, and the story behind your fundraise / traction

2. Launch privately to your email list, social media, and directly to your current superfans

3. Launch publicly on the Wefunder platform, gain enough traction (ideally from your private launch) to become featured as a top startup on the “most raised” section

Having a VC or notable angel lead the round will also help you maximize your distribution on the Wefunder platform. Not only is it the #1 section of startups that Wefunder will promote, but it helps create social proof to the rest of the investors that “someone” has vetted the startup.

After the Community Round is finished, make sure to follow up with swag, gifts, and asking your new investors for things that will help push the company forwards!

This can be directly asking for user referrals, promoting new hires, and engaging with you on social.

Execute it well and you now have an army of superfans who are literally bought in to your companies success & will be extremely happy to help promote you. Your success is their success, and you are all in the wild ride together.

PS - if you want help launching your Community Round just LMK 🙏 if you can’t tell I’m a pretty huge fan of Wefunder (30+ investments) & would love the opportunity to invest in some of my followers. 🔥

Want to keep reading?

• [Framework] The concepts you were never taught about how the brain acquires knowledge

• How to build a growth team 🚀

• [Playbook] How to determine if a startup has Product Market Fit

Unlike a VC who is likely using other people’s money and has their bets spread across 20-100 different startups … the job seeker is ALL IN on a single startup, waging not just the bulk of their financial success, but years of their life.

If the startup becomes ultra-successful, it means not just upwards of millions in equity rewards, but a vastly improved career trajectory for the rest of your life.

If the startup dies, it means lower wages, worthless equity, lots of pain, wasting years of your life on a pipe dream, and having to explain to your next employer how “you’re actually really great” even though the company failed.

It would seem to me, the stakes are 10x higher for the job seeker than the venture capitalist.

So why does no one create resources for the employees that want to work at VC-backed tech companies?

This is my personal framework for how to evaluate a tech startup. 🙏

Step #1 - Only work for companies with a good product

If you can become excellent at vetting if a product is “good”, you will 10x the trajectory of your career. Having a good product is the foundation for ANY level of meaningful success.

A bad product means growth is going to be hard, fundraising is going to be hard, hiring is going to be hard. A bad product is a death sentence.

Now, you might be saying, “what about pre-PMF startups, or pre-seed startups”?

Word of advice - don’t work for a company that doesn’t have a good product, unless you are extremely desperate. In the words of Elad Gil, startups are an act of desperation.

Want to become a product manager but have literally no experience? Then maybe a pre-seed no-product startup is right for you.

Want to become a founder and start a company (which doesn’t have a product)? Sure, go ahead.

The risk-to-reward ratio is wildly off for early-stage employees at a startup that doesn’t have a good product. Even if you get 1-3% equity, the chances of this hitting a “home run” for you is so extremely low compared to joining a good startup with a good product … you’re basically taking on almost the same risk as the founder, but without the upside.

What you want to do is join a startup as early stage as possible, ideally seed or series A … that has a good product.

Step #2 - How to evaluate a product

VCs love the concept of Product Market Fit to describe a rocketship startup, but usually give definitions that are super vague about how to define it.

Here’s how to understand if the product is actually good:

1. [Retention] There is an extremely low churn rate

2. [Love] Users LOVE the product, demonstrated through high word-of-mouth referrals + strong Net Promoter Score surveys or Super Human surveys

3. [Willingness to Pay] Not only do they start using the product, and love the product, but they’re willing to pay a lot of money for it

These three things are the most important pieces to determine if a startup has built something that is actually good. When going through the interview process make sure always to ask what the retention looks like, what the word of mouth or NPS looks like, and what the LTV is per user.

Asking these questions will ALSO help you stand out, proving that you understand the most important pieces of a good product.

If there are red flags on any of these “oh people love it but we’re pre-revenue”, run.

The startup might actually go on to build something amazing, but the risk/reward ratio isn’t worth it - you can likely find a startup that already has a good product with a similar comp package.

The second piece of PMF is the “market,” which basically means if you’ve built a good product … how many users could potentially want it? The larger this group of potential users, the better.

Having a market that is growing (instead of shrinking), is extremely ideal.

Step #3 - Evaluating the team

Who you are going to be working with is extremely important because these aren’t just the humans you will spend 50%+ of your day with, but they will be responsible for your career trajectory, the overall success of the startup, and potentially even your future job opportunities.

Most people chalk up “do I like the team” to vibes, but here’s how to go a bit deeper.

[Friendliness] “How friendly is the team” is a secret pattern-matching technique that appears to be primarily prevalent in Silicon Valley.

Friendliness is a superpower. High growth rates cause friction, and it is 100x better to work on hard painful problems with a friendly team that you love being around.

When you are interviewing, they are ALSO putting their best face forwards. Are they happy? Are they friendly? Do they seem to like their job? Do they describe the culture as “this is the best place I’ve ever worked”?

Reduce their enthusiasm by at least 50%, and that's likely the reality.

[Past Work] You want to work with a team of A players. A team that is world-class at what they do.

The best way to determine this is by asking them about their work, “I’m super curious about you, what have you done/built/grown that you are most proud of”?

Good engineers will have built impressive things. Good marketers will have grown big companies. Good product managers will have shipped huge features.

At early-stage startups, the best teams won’t have done this at huge companies like Google or Stripe, but rather at other early-stage startups. What you’re looking for is trajectory.

People that have taken a company from seed → unicorn, built a big product 0-1, 10x’ed the rate of signups.

[Filters] This isn’t universally true, but it’s more important to be right than to be wrong. Impressive people will have gone through extreme filters.

Harvard is a filter. Stanford is a filter. A PhD program is a filter. Y Combinator is a filter. TechCrunch is a filter. Building a service-based startup past $1M of revenue is a filter. Having 100,000 Instagram followers is a filter. 1,000 GitHub stars is a filter.

What filters has this team gone through?

There are a lot of different kinds, but when you’re in a crunch to understand the caliber of the team you might be joining, doing research to understand the filtering process the humans on the team have gone through can be extremely insightful.

Not all good startups are Y Combinator startups, but a Y Combinator startup has gone through a filtering process that weeded out 95% of the “bad” startups.

This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn as a no-name generic Idahoan from the University of Idaho. Filters actually DO matter, getting past them matters, and working with a team of people who have been through one matters.

Step #4 - Evaluating the culture

Most job seekers chalk culture up to “does it suck to work here or not?”

Do they micromanage the work? Does leadership listen to the IC employees? Am I expected to work on the weekends?

I think the most important thing about culture is understanding what a company cares about, and making sure that resonates with your values.

Here are a few of the most important questions.

1. “I like to work hard, but I’m curious exactly what the work intensity is like here?”

2. “What’s one thing you love about your manager, and one thing they could improve?”

3. “What are the traits that have gotten people promoted here?”

4. “What’s your favorite part about the company’s culture?”

5. “Who wouldn’t be a cultural fit for this company?”

People usually don’t want to talk about the more hardcore aspects of company culture, that you may or may not be excited about.

Some companies move fast & work extremely hard - Rupa is definitely one of those startups.

We make decisions quickly, we ship things quickly, and we obsess about our work sometimes on a Saturday morning. I wake up at 6am to write articles on my Substack before I head into the office.

I’m not knocking or promoting hustle culture - but it’s something our team (for better or worse) has subscribed to.

We also care about being a Kid at Heart, showing up to conferences in space suites, dance parties on the beach, playing music for offer parties with new hires, and showing up in costume at the company all hands.

Someone who is looking to work a 9-5 and wear a suit just won’t like our culture, and that’s okay.

The goal here for job seekers is to try and do their best to understand the most extreme spectrums of the culture, things that people should know upfront to opt in or out of.

Making money $$$

Tech work is extremely lucrative because it’s industry standard for employees to get equity, to have shared success in the outcome of the business. It might not be the same as the founder, but joining an early-stage company with a good product can result in life-changing rewards.

Spend a career building up a diversified portfolio of equity in companies with “good products” where each one is enough for a home run (you never have to work again) if the company 10x’es, and you’re extremely likely for at least one of them to work out.

Become extremely skilled at vetting for a good product, a strong team, and a culture you will enjoy/thrive in, and you’ll set yourself up for an insanely profitable career in VC-backed tech startups. 💰

PS - if you love my content, come follow me on Twitter. :)

Want to keep reading?

• [Playbook] How to just absolutely crush your conference marketing 🔥

• How Marketing & Advertising are parts of the product

• Building for Product Channel Fit 🚀

Our ability to learn things has given our society tools that our ancestors would look upon as sorcery, magical gifts from the gods.

We were sent (usually forced) through school to master this superpower, to learn things that would allow us to succeed in the world.

Yet, most of our educational systems have done an extremely poor job of teaching us how to actually acquire knowledge. If anything, it loaded us with debt to the tune of about $1.78 trillion, and for many, taught them to hate learning.

To learn to hate to learn is the greatest failure of any educational system.

Learning, is supposed to be pleasurable (link).

Good learning is supposed to trigger your dopamine system in a similar way that might happen if you eat a piece of chocolate cake, receive a kiss from a lover, or find a $100 bill on the ground.

This is because learning something useful, something incredible, is inherently valuable to us. At a very base level, learning things allows us to accomplish all of our fundamental drives, to eat, to reproduce, to find self-fulfillment & actualization.

Here are some of the most important concepts about how to acquire knowledge that you were (probably) never taught in school.

The feedback loop of obsession & passion

School teaches us that we must learn math. We must learn science. We must learn English. We must go to PE.

But what do you enjoy? What triggers dopamine in your brain?

Working in the medical field I often get the privilege of listening to extremely smart doctors lecture about the most obscure niches of science. Last week it was a Ph.D. basically giving his life thesis about the importance of urine testing for heavy metal toxicity.

You could just hear the passion in the man’s voice.

For this extremely niche area of knowledge, urine testing of heavy metals, he had gone beyond college, beyond a Ph.D. program, and dedicated 20+ years of his professional life to learning & understanding heavy metals.

He spoke in the same way about Bismuth biomarkers that my 9-year-old cousin might speak about diamond armor in Minecraft.

And he spoke to a crowd of like-minded individuals, on the edge of their seat, eating up every word, almost drooling over the shared knowledge.

The thing about obsession and passion is that it doesn’t start off as the end result. It works off the same mechanism that can create a raging alcoholic.

You don’t start off just downing a handle of vodka every day.

You start by drinking a single beer, and your brain goes, “oh, that was nice”. Then you drink more, and more, and more, chasing that reward system.

There’s a saying, “once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic” - this is because as you drink (or do anything that provides dopamine) it creates pathways in your brain that associates that “thing” with the reward.

You can train your brain to acquire knowledge with this exact same mechanism.

When you learn something that brings you pleasure, chase it. It can start small as a science experiment in chemistry class, a meme that goes viral on your social media page, or writing a paper that gets an A+ making your grandma proud.

Every time you learn something that triggers dopamine, it reinforces the pathway in your brain telling you, “this is how I get rewarded”.

There are some things that are painful to learn that you must learn anyways, but you will never ever develop the same level of mastery for them as the things that bring you pleasure, that drive you into a life-consuming obsession for a specific kind of knowledge.

Spaced Repetition Theory

Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards … but it is EXTREMELY relevant to advertising, marketing, & team building.

All humans live on a spectrum where there is a certain number of times, over a certain period, that they need to be exposed to a piece of knowledge in order to retain it.

This spectrum can be anywhere from “exposed once & retained forever” to “needs to see it 100 times to remember it a month from now”.

The theory basically states that if you actually want to acquire knowledge, you must be exposed to it multiple times over a prolonged period of time. It’s the reason why you have forgotten 90% of what was taught in school, but can recite the Nike slogan off the top of your head.

Just do it.

If you want to learn something, it’s almost completely pointless to only cover it once. You must have repeated exposure to the concept or your brain will discard the information.

1. Done with flashcards, you can memorize information by reviewing them periodically over a month.

2. Don’t read “just one” book over a subject, consume 3-5 with overlapping concepts.

3. Learn things that can be applied in your daily life, this helps not just with relevancy but repeated exposure.

Spaced repetition is also one of the reasons why remarketing ads are so powerful.

People might discover your brand once, land on your website, then you can cookie them & serve them multiple ads over an extended period of time. This is the core driver of the power of branding.

I haven’t seen an ad for a Purple Mattress in a really long time, but I was exposed enough times to their marketing that I will remember them for as long as I live.

If you want to teach someone a concept, “buy my product for XYZ reasons”, it’s not enough to expose them to it once. You must figure out how to get in front of that person multiple times over an extended period of time.

Small building blocks that make up large building blocks

In the book The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin (chess champion, BJJ blackbelt), it talks about how time can seem to slow down during competition for athletes or for people lost in a state of flow.

This concept “time slows down” is because the athlete is processing information quicker than they would otherwise, causing the experience of time moving slower.

What does this mean exactly?

Taking piano as an example, you can think of learning as a series of building blocks that stack upon each other.

1. [L0] Notes are the most basic elements

2. [L1] Notes strung together make up chords

3. [L2] Notes & chords put together make measures

4. [L3] Measures put together create a song

5. [L4] Songs put together create a composition

As you begin to learn to play piano, it can take you a long time to find a single key, maybe 7 seconds for one note. Then trying to string together a number of notes to create a chord and you can awkwardly fumble around for 30s-60s trying to put it together.

As you begin to master the piano, you no longer even think of the individual notes. You don’t think about where your hands belong on the piano, how you’re supposed to hold yourself.

You simply play - focused on higher-level building blocks & your brain has completely abstracted away the lower-level processes.

The problem that people often struggle with, is they try and skip levels much too quickly. They want to play the song, without mastering the notes.

Whatever it is you are learning you must begin by deeply mastering the most basic building blocks of whatever it is you are trying to do. Create flashcards, apply your spaced repetition, practice them over and over and over again not just until you know them but it becomes like breathing.

This allows you to maximize the pattern recognition your brain possesses & to consume so much information that time feels like it begins to slow down. Your mind starts to focus on the higher-level game that is being played instead of awkwardly trying to identify each note.

How long does it take to master something?

There are so many “rules” out there about how long it can take to master a skill. One of my favorites that shows just how quickly you can acquire knowledge is the 20 hour rule by Josh Kaufman.

To put this really simply (and definitely not scientifically), how long it takes to develop mastery for most skills goes something like this.

1. 20 hours - 20% mastery

2. 100 hours - 90% mastery

3. 10,000 hours - 99% mastery

4. A lifetime - 100% if you’re lucky

I practice Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu which is a form of submission grappling and it taught me one of the most important lessons about acquiring knowledge.

You’re not in a competition against anyone else, you’re not limited by a timeframe like a semester in college, the only thing that matters when you’re trying to acquire knowledge is putting in time on the mat.

You can be a slow learner, you can be a faster learner, there is no time limit - it does not matter.

Some people will get their black belt in 4 years, some people will get it in 20.

It’s really simple, the more time you spend acquiring knowledge in a certain direction the more knowledge you’ll gain. There is no replacement for mat time, while you would be surprised how quickly you can gain knowledge in 20 hours, there is no replacement to dedicating a lifetime to mastering a skill.

Our educational systems do a very poor job of teaching us this fundamental truth about learning.

They break up our days into periods, they break up our years into semesters, classes end & you’re supposed to have acquired the right amount of knowledge in the right period of time.

There’s no flexibility for going faster or slower like there is in real life. The process doesn’t reflect the actual learning process that there is no time limit, and the pursuit of mastery never ends.

Learn, Apply, Teach

This is one of the most powerful frameworks for acquiring knowledge, and is the primary reason why I write this substack in the first place.

All knowledge first starts by learning something.

Maybe you take a class on marketing, or you listen to a podcast about managing a team, or you acquire knowledge in some way. It can be YouTube, or Udemy, or Substack, or books, or a mentor, or 1,000 different methods.

All knowledge exists on the internet for free, and you can learn about almost anything if you just search for it.

Once you mentally learn something, you have to actually apply it against real life. Taking what you learn and seeing if it holds up against the world, practicing what you have learned.

All of the theoretical knowledge in the world is useless if it hasn’t actually been applied.

This process allows you to understand what works, what doesn’t work, to throw out what is useless and to reinforce the lessons that will allow you to propel yourself forwards.

Application is such a critical part of the learning process that is so often ignored. It’s one of the reasons why the martial arts world makes so much fun of the disciplines that do not actually spar/fight.

You can know 100 different punches, but have never been punched in the face.

Academia often falls into the same trap, PhDs acquiring a lifetime of theoretical knowledge that has never been properly applied to the fire. Brand new college graduates with their computer science degrees, who have very little experience actually building real things that real people use.

You must build yourself a sandbox in which you can apply the knowledge you learn. If it’s not your full-time job, make it an internship, a side project, something real with real consequences.

After you have learned something, and applied it to the world, teaching others what you have learned allows you to cement that knowledge within yourself.

“The definition of genius is taking the complex, and making it simple.” - Albert Einstein

As cheesy as it feels to quote Albert, there is something extremely compelling about this concept. When you teach someone something, you have to be able to explain it to them in a way that makes sense.

It forces you to deconstruct the concept, to deeply understand the building blocks, and explain it to someone in a way that a beginner could understand.

If you can’t explain it, you haven’t truly mastered the concept yourself. The teaching process doesn’t have to be about inflating your own ego or even some selfless desire to help others - it can be an extremely selfish act, to cement your acquisition of knowledge.

Learning to love to learn

If you can’t tell - I hated school 😂. I dropped out maybe 6 times before finally graduating with a General Studies degree & $30,000 of debt. Surprisingly my real superpower isn’t that I’m extremely good at advertising or that I’m a GTM “expert”, but it’s that I’m world-class at learning new information.

Need a software engineer? I’m your SWE.

Need a mortgage loan officer? I’m your MLO.

Need someone who is a master at a channel that has only existed for 2 months? I gotchu.

The Lean Startup teaches us that the output of a startup is its ability to learn new things. This is the real secret that separates world-class startups and the operators that are able to scale from seed to IPO, is the relentless pursuit of knowledge, the ability to quickly learn (and implement) “the right things” faster than their competitors.

It’s a tad meta, but spend some time diving into the rabbit hole of how to acquire knowledge, and actually apply what you learn, and you’ll find insane gains in your life/career/company. 🙏

This was a tad different than my normal post, I hope you found it useful or interesting! If you love my content make sure to follow me on Twitter. :)

Conferences can cost a LOT of money. 👀

Let’s say you go for the cheapest possible booth (which alone might cost you $5k for the space); you’ll likely have to pay another $5k for the booth design/construction, maybe $1k for lighting, and then you need to fly your team out there, pay for hotels for multiple nights, plane tickets, food, etc.

Showing up for even the cheapest conference might end up in the $10k-$20k range for a multi-day event.

If you don’t execute correctly, a conference can quickly become a money-fueled dumpster fire.

But if you DO execute them correctly, they can be one of the absolute most impactful things your business does. Especially if you have a high ticket price B2B product.

Here is everything you need to know about how to maximize the impact of conferences.

Rule #1: The most important part of a conference, is standing out

Walk through a busy conference hall and it’s a barrage on your senses. Vendors stopping you to talk about their products, attendees rushing past booths, some announcement is blaring on the speakers.

The trick to conferences is standing out in this environment.

The absolute worst thing you can do is blend into the chaos of the vendor hall. The returns of conferences are drastically skewed to those who are able to stand out.

This plays out really heavily in the “package” you pick to show up.

Most events will have some kind of “bronze / silver / gold” deal going on.

• [bronze] tiny booth $5k, no promotions

• [silver] medium booth $10k, some promotions

• [gold] big booth $25k, lots of promotions

What most organizations do is they start with the tiny booth. They think to themselves, “oh we’ll just try out this event and see if it works for us”. The problem is that the ROI on a tiny booth is like .5x, and the ROI on the big booth is 4x.

The tiny booth blends into the chaos, the big booth stands out. The returns of upgrading don’t scale 1:1, they are exponentially greater.

After you pick your booth, you need to do everything you can to make sure your booth stands out. This feels extremely obvious but it’s actually insanely tricky because the same booth design company makes all of the booths.

For Rupa Health, we show up as astronauts.

Our team goes to big stuffy medical conferences where everyone is in a suite a tie, and we wear sparkly space suits. There is music blasting, we are dancing, we walk through the halls, and everyone says, “whoa why are there astronauts here?”

Our design theme is visually disruptive, it literally has nothing to do with our branding. 🧑‍🚀

Rule #2: It’s not just about showing up, it’s about HOW you show up

If you’re a tiny booth stuck in the far back, it almost hurts your brand to show up to a conference. Even if the booth was free and your tickets + hotel were comped, it can actually be a damaging experience to show up in the wrong way.

Conferences are like a giant concert, you want your company to be headlining the event … because if you’re not headlining the event, then you’re not headlining the event.

These things can have an insane impact on how people view your brand, especially if you’re a digital product/service.

How you show up at a conference is how those users are going to think about you for the rest of the year. It’s the anchor about how those users are going to talk about you to their friends.

Showing up well:

• Big booth

• Amazing design that stands out

• “Headliner” promotions

• Book signing with industry leader

• Social proof from other attendees

NOT showing up well:

• Tiny booth, stuck in the back

• Poor design that blends in

• No event promotions

• “Empty restaurant effect”, negative social proof

It’s not just about collecting 20 leads vs 200 leads, it’s about what those people think of your product & brand after they talk to you. You want to leave people with an insanely strong and powerful impression, it will create a drastically higher ROI.

Rule #3: Deeply understand where your ROI is going to come from before you show up

Conferences are super powerful for B2B products that have a high ticket price, but the ROI of these things goes way beyond basic lead generation.

You can think of conferences as one of the most powerful brand impressions you can buy. If there are 1,000 people at a conference and it costs you $100,000 to show up, your CPM is about $100,000.

That’s REALLY expensive vs Facebook or Google ads.

But it gives you the chance to have an insanely strong impact on a critical handful of people. If you can close a single deal worth $100,000 & can do 5-10 of these at an event, all of a sudden, conferences start to make a LOT of sense.

Basic math to make $100k on an event work:

• 100 deals worth $1,000

• 10 deals worth $10,000

• 1 deal worth $100,000

If you’re selling $100 widgets, these things just aren’t going to work for you.

Conferences work for Rupa Health because an average practitioner will spend tens of thousands (if not hundreds) on lab testing every year. We show up to an event, bring on 100 new users, and that is easy ROI.

Add in the fact that we’re a 3-sided marketplace which means our lab partners are a critical piece of our revenue (THEY show up to the same conferences too), and the ROI of these events becomes exponential.

But in addition to all of the direct sales - there is a lot of insanely intangible benefits to having our team come to conferences.

Rupa is a remote company and we rarely get the chance to see our users in real life. At almost every big event, we bring key members from our product team who get to talk with our users IRL & watch them use our product. Multiple times this alone has led to an ROI that pays for the event by giving us deeply meaningful product insight.

Conferences are also super powerful for team morale & hiring. Do these things well, and all the other vendors/attendees start thinking to themselves, “damn, I want to work for that company.”

The ROI from conferences comes not just from being able to sell high ticket price products, but from being able to talk to your users IRL, and recruiting/HR benefits as well.

Rule #4: The most profitable perks, aren’t on the menu

Most people only show up to the events and don’t look at the organization as a whole. The menu that these events hand you are designed to get you to spend as much money as possible at the event.

Some of the items are worth it. Some aren’t. The BEST items aren’t on the menu.

I’ve found that, almost always, getting the event to send out a dedicated email about our product to their newsletter can result in anywhere between 50-100% of the signups we get from simply showing up to the event.

These organizations can’t send out 100 dedicated emails about each of the vendors, but they’ll do it if you’re their #1 sponsor.

The big conferences we go to are rarely negotiated as “just the conference” but rather part of a much larger package that goes far beyond the event.

We want to be a headliner for the event, but we also want to sponsor all of their digital inventory, email lists, social pages, etc. We want to work together on content, to bring their organization onto our platform, and a ton more, depending on the exact organization.

If you’re simply showing up to an event, you’re likely not thinking big enough about how to effectively optimize the partnership.

The most effective and highest ROI ways for someone to promote you, they won’t be able to offer to everyone - which means if it’s on some menu/media kit, you should dig deeper into what’s being held back.

Rule #5: Give them swag that needs to be carried, and brought home

Swag is a pretty critical piece of conference marketing; done right, and your logo saturates the event, done poorly and it ends up in the trash (again, bad for brand).

When people go to events, they usually want to bring something home for someone they care about. Kids, spouses, etc.

Swag that makes good gifts has been pretty universally effective. For Rupa we use little “Rupanauts” stuffed bears in astronaut costumes. People duel to the death for these things and then carry them around all over the conference (too big for a backpack).

I think RevenueCat does a good job with their cat socks, and there’s a company I can’t remember (but I remember their swag) that had amazing sloth plushies.

Big, cute, bulky swag designed to be a gift, tends to do pretty well.

Things that DON’T do well are smaller and easily hidden. T-shirts, stickers, pens, fliers, etc, all end up in the trash on the way home from the event.

Show UP, stand out, make money, find perks, & gift swag

I hope this helps, it’s the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of thousands spent on a LOT of conferences, and millions of dollars in ROI. If there’s only one thing that you take away from this article, let it be rule #1 - you must stand out.

Flash mobs, astronaut suites, pop-up concerts, puppy play pit, celebrity drive-by, cosplay squad, strobe lights … figure it out. 🔥

If you find yourself “almost” getting kicked out of the event, you’re likely doing it right. Conferences can be one of the most impactful things your business does, especially if you’re in the B2B space with the potential for high ticket value sales - execute correctly and watch your ROI skyrocket. 📈

PS - if you love my content, come follow me on Twitter. :)

Want to keep reading?

• How to build a growth team 🚀

• How my 271 Twitter followers drove over 10,000 Substack Subscribers in 60 days

• How Marketing & Advertising are parts of the product

There are a few reasons for this.

1. Investors often heavily promote “organic, product-led growth” even if that’s not what is best for the business.

2. Attribution is almost universally underreported.

3. CAC/ROI/Payback Period metrics rarely look at marketing as building assets, and instead classify it as a disposable expense.

Disclaimer: Before I go any further - I should express I am a HUGE proponent of the positive effects of PLG, you can read one of my previous articles on generating negative CAC (an acquisition system where you make profit instead of generating burn).

In this article, however, we are going to take a first principles look at understanding “how much money you should be spending on sales & marketing.”

We’ll look at not just the industry standard benchmarks for CAC, ROI, & Payback Period, but the logic and reasoning behind them, and understanding when you should adjust them.

A 3 month payback period is “bad” 😞

There are a lot of things wrong with using a payback period as your primary metric for measuring your S&M spend.

It’s a solid health metric & can give deep insight into how much financing you might need to fuel your growth, but the primary thing you should be looking at is ROI. AKA - if we spend $1, do we get $2 back in our bank account?

The industry standard benchmark for your payback period is 12 months.

This means that if you spend $100,000 in January on S&M, you’ll have $100,000 of true real profit back in your bank account by the end of December.

An extremely common mistake is thinking that having a shorter payback period is a good thing, that a "3 month” payback period means you are killing it. Your mental model should instead look something like this.

Payback periods (and ROI) should be bid with an ideal target in mind, and anything under or over that target is “bad”. When the payback period is less than 12 months, one of two things are happening.

1. You’re leaving a lot of volume/money on the table that you could be capturing.

2. There isn’t more volume for you to capture.

VCs like to hear that you’re growing with wildly profitable unit economics, but that isn’t actually always what’s good for the business. A really great litmus test for startups is to ask yourself before spending each dollar, “will this increase or decrease my runway?”

If the cost of acquiring your next user is shorter than your current runway (ex: 2 year payback period, 3 years of runway), then paying for that user is going to extend your runway and bring you closer to “default alive.”

User retention drastically impacts payback period benchmarks

“What happens after the payback period” is, ironically, fundamentally the most important part of the payback period benchmark.

Let’s say you have a 6-month payback period but 0% user retention after that 6 months is up. You might capture your money back quickly, but then you don’t actually make any profit.

Alternatively, if you have a 24-month payback period but your user/revenue retention is 99% year-over-year, you’ll likely have a 5-10x return on your investment over a 5-10 year user lifetime.

Your retention metrics (primarily after the payback period) determine how short/longer your payback period can be from the “12-month” baseline.

Using the same 12-month benchmark then applying it equally to consumer products that churn 40% year-over-year and also B2B products that have 95% user retention with a 110% net revenue retention, just doesn’t make sense.

The consumer product will likely need a shorter payback period to optimize its ROI, and the B2B product can invest in a longer payback period because it can reasonably expect a long lifetime of returns.

Bidding on ROI vs Payback Period

The thing you ultimately care about is creating a demand generation machine where if you put in $1, you get more than $1 out - this means bidding for ROI.

Payback period is an important health metric, and especially important when your financing is limited (maybe you’re bootstrapping or only have < 6 months of runway), but ultimately your financial story should center around the ROI of your S&M efforts.

There are two key “grains of salt” to keep in mind when calculating ROI:

1. Confidence of the user’s lifetime value.

2. “Reasonable” length of time to calculate ROI.

Another major reason why the 12-month payback period is the gold standard benchmark is that startups operate in risky environments where the future is unknown.

If you’ve only been operating for 6 months, it’s hard to have an insane amount of confidence to start bidding on a 3-5 year lifetime value.

The longer you have been operating, the more confidence you gain to begin bidding on the “real” LTV of your users (and why it’s safer to increase your payback period).

An extremely useful tool when you are unsure about the LTV (or even when you ARE fairly confident), is confidence intervals. This is basically forecasting out expected ROI, and then modeling different outcomes in case you are wrong.

Basic confidence intervals allow you to create a base case that says, “if everything performs like it does today, here’s what the future will look like”, but then also to provide a financial model for what happens if you’re wrong.

The example model above says, “we should make $340,000” over a 5-year lifetime, but even if we’re off by 30%, then we should still make $238,000.

We could be spending $161,500 on this cohort for a ~2 year payback period off the base case and still be very profitable even if our expected behavior changes wildly over the user's lifetime.

Investing in marketing as its own asset class

The final piece that is often missed from most financial models, is factoring in marketing assets into the balance sheet.

What gets lumped into “sales and marketing” expenses can have wildly different lifetime of returns and worth.

For example, consider the following investments:

1. A sponsored podcast ad placement

2. A billboard

3. $10,000 spent on Google Ads

4. Creating 100 articles

The time frame that these 4 different investments into marketing create returns is wildly different.

The podcast ad will have an initial spike and then a multi-year long-tail effect. The billboard will be generally high impact while it is “live”, with only brand recall as a longer-term ROI. $10,000 spent on Google Ads will have an almost immediate impact with very little if any brand recall value. With the 100 articles there will be extremely little short-term impact, but with potentially huge long-term returns.

The ROI of investing in marketing will look kind of like this, with shades of grey in between.

Spending dollars on things like Google Ads and billboard placements are primarily driving short-term returns.

Investing in articles, building email lists, and growing a social media following, are marketing assets with real monetary value that create decade-long returns.

Sometimes companies will split this out into a “brand marketing” budget - in my opinion, this is a really poor way of looking at it.

What’s important here is investing in building long-term marketing assets & not penalizing your short-term ROI goals. One of my favorite case studies is where Hubspot bought The Hustle for about $27M.

Slap together 1.5M newsletter subs, a strong blog, and a lot of social media followers … and you’ve built marketing assets worth millions of dollars (that should be properly reflected on your balance sheet & calculated into your S&M spend).

What feels “healthy” here can vary depending on the startup (lifecycle, how much you’ve raised, profitability, etc), but ~20% of your total S&M spent building long-term marketing assets usually feels healthy to me.

Optimizing your S&M spend

It’s always important to spend on S&M in a healthy way that’s going to create strong long-term gains, but failing to properly understand the ROI of your spend and the marketing assets you are building up along with way can lead to slower growth - and competitors gaining traction.

TLDR - Focus spend on ROI metrics over a reasonable & understandable lifetime, not any specific payback period (although 12 months is a solid health metric). The better your retention, the longer your payback period can become. Make sure to add in the marketing assets you build into your balance sheet & calculated into your ROI.

Want to keep reading?

• The Ultimate Guide to Building & Structuring a Sales Team 💸

• [EEAT Framework] How artificial intelligence will impact SEO & content creation

• How Marketing & Advertising are parts of the product

Is there truly a more complicated problem in the universe than trying to figure out “how do I structure my sales team”? There are so many different models it’s really hard to begin even to understand where to start.

1. Geography-based sales reps who handle the entire lifecycle (but for some reason only cover a certain city/state/region).

2. Sales Development Reps (SDRs) who are prospecting and then handing over leads to an Account Manager (AM).

3. Inbound sales reps who are “working inbound leads” trying to maximize the conversion rate of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

4. “Outside” sales reps, braving the weather & burning the rubber to bring home the gluten-free bacon.

5. Product Led Growth sales team working high ticket Product Qualified Leads (PQLs).

Fear not - for I have traveled the world, interviewed the experts, and wrestled with the building-a-sales-team-demons so that I may distill the answers for you, my dear reader.

To understand what kind of structure you will need to optimize your sales team, you first must be able to answer the question, “Where do my users come from?”

Forget about the actual human salespeople for a moment, and think about the channel & messages that drives your user acquisition.

1. Google/Facebook/TikTok/Direct Mail/etc ads that turn into demo’s or leads.

2. Organic SEO or content marketing (think Hubspot articles that create inbound demand).

3. Conferences.

4. Cold email sequences.

5. Cold phone calls.

6. “Knocking on doors” or walking into someone’s office.

7. Referral partnerships (think mortgage loan officer + real estate agents).

8. Linkedin messages.

The way that you send messages and the channels that bring users into your product, will ultimately determine the most optimal structure for your sales organization.

Geography-Based Sales Reps

This sales structure is when each rep has a “territory.” That territory can be a city, a state, or multiple states, the concept here is that each rep is responsible for a specific geographic location.

For example, I might have 50 sales reps, one for each state in the United States. Maybe I’ll split California and Texas into sub-territories.

Why on God’s green earth would I do this? Why not just have all my reps based in a single call center in Boise, Idaho, where the average wage with a college degree is ~$11.50/hr, and most people would be ecstatic to be making $70k a year?

There are a few first-principle concepts at play that should be guiding your thinking here.

1. Localized operations - the first and most obvious reason revolves around your product. Maybe you’re a cleaning service that only operates in that state. Maybe you need a state-specific license. Whatever the reason - sometimes your operations get in the way and you HAVE to operate in a region-by-region method.

2. Local partners - If you get business from having a network of partners, a geography-based approach can be super effective.

My favorite example of this is the relationship between real estate agents and loan officers, these two professions have a very close, mutually beneficial engagement. They will work off each other, referring business between themselves.

It’s REALLY hard to create a deep relationship with a real estate agent that lives on the other side of the country. It is 100x easier to walk into a local agent’s office, to show up at their open house, and to meet with their local clients in person.

There are huge networks of professions that refer each other business. Not just real estate agents and loan officers, but financial advisors, advertising agencies, photography shops, cleaning companies, construction companies, lawyers, accountants, and so much more.

If your acquisition heavily relies on referrals from partners, it is so much easier to build these relationships locally.

3. Visiting clients IRL - Geography-based sales reps are often “outside reps” AKA they physically go outside to interact with clients.

Sometimes you can conduct 100% of your business over the phone/Zoom, this is especially true in the post-COVID era. If you need to physically interact with your clients, however, having a geography-based sales team will save you a literal fortune on plane tickets.

This might be because you need to visit your clients to set up your product. This might be because walking into their office (or knocking on their door) is an extremely effective method of generating new business.

Whatever the reason, if you need to see your clients face-to-face, you’ll likely want to segment your team by territory.

The opposite of these concepts, can be an extremely strong signal that you DON’T need a geography-based sales team. If you don’t need to see them in real life, if you don’t rely on local partners or events, and if your operations don’t require you to focus on a specific region … it’s time to move on to a better structure.

Sales Development Reps + Account Managers

This is the standard playbook for VC-backed sales-led SaaS companies. Here you have an army of SDRs who are cold calling/prospecting for new clients and then some highly paid Account Managers closing high ticket deals (and maybe doing a bit of prospecting too).

In this model, the SDR is a specialized hunter seeking out new business. The Account Manager is a specialized closer, bringing big deals over the finish line.

There are two key things that need to be true for this model to make sense:

1. A high ticket value where a strong closer can make a huge revenue impact.

2. Cold email + cold calling are a primary channel of acquisition.

The standard advice for this model is that for every $1 you spend on sales, you should be bringing in $10 of revenue (ideally with an 85% gross margin). Basically, you should be selling really expensive things. Think $100k yearly contracts, not an $85 widget.

If one AM can bring in $5M a year in revenue, then that person performing just 10% better is worth $500,000. There can be massive gains made here by a super strong AM.

Where most people get confused, is when it comes to the SDRs. You only really need the SDR if cold calling + emailing is a primary channel of acquiring new users/leads/deals.

For many tech startups, this is the #1 way that they acquire new business. Nobody likes to brag about it, but you would be shocked at the number of companies that primarily gain new users through cold outreach.

However, if cold calling/email doesn’t work for you - then this model will likely make almost no sense … which leads us to our final “standard” model.

Inbound Sales Reps

When your primary channels of acquisition drives users towards your product, then you might end up in a situation where your sales team doesn’t NEED to go hunt for business.

Business just shows up at your doorstep (thanks marketing/PLG/referrals 🫶).

No matter the reason why this is happening (maybe it’s Google Ads or a giant social media page, or influencer marketing or whatever), the name of the game is SQUEEZE THE JUICE FROM THE LEMONS™.

AKA - maximize the conversion rate of your inbound leads.

If you have 100 leads that come through, you want to focus extremely heavily on increasing how many of those leads convert into paying users. This means aligning comp not on total volume but on the % that they close.

It’s 10x better to have reps closing 30% of 100 leads, than reps taking 400 leads but only closing 20%.

Leads cost money. Leads have opportunity cost. If you’re spending $300 on every lead that means 100 leads is $30,000 in CAC. If you have a 4x ROI on your adspend, that means 100 leads is $120,000 in revenue.

With those numbers, the difference between closing 30 leads instead of 33 leads (a delta of 3 leads or 10%) is $12,000/mo.

In this model your sales team acts as a conversion engine, squeezing every last drop of juice from your inbound demand. You set up commission structures around this, you create long lifecycle campaigns & segment them based on user type, you put all your sales team in a single call center in Boise, Idaho & train them on your “squeeze the lemon” playbook.

Product Led Growth … but also Sales

It’s almost an oxymoron, the guiding philosophy of the PLG movement is that we can reject marketing & sales in favor of a new age of PLG … but then some really big accounts came in that were complicated and needed hand holding so we thought it was a good idea to hire some sales folk.

The PLG motion (in relation to sales) usually means there’s some “free” version of the product that doesn’t need a sales rep to access it.

Users will sign up for a product, no demo required, and then start using it/”become activated.” At some point, they will either be prompted to upgrade into a paid tier or it will push towards a demo with a sales rep.

There are a couple of first principle concepts that will guide your PLG motion & determine if you actually need a sales team here (and what that team will look like).

1. How expensive is the paid product

2. How complicated is the paid product

For a SaaS product like Segment, users can join for free and begin to use the product extremely inexpensively. As usage scales, however, you can find yourself quickly spending $100,000+ a year.

PLG is great in this context because when the user’s LTV is ~$20/yr, it makes literally no sense to hire a salesperson to try and convert more of those users.

Once it starts getting into the $10k-$100k+ range, however, is when you begin to definitely want that human touch to maximize the conversion rate of your high ticket deals.

In this context, the product allows users to qualify themselves through usage, and then once they reach a certain point, they become a Product Qualified Lead & a salesperson reaches out to introduce them to the Enterprise tier.

If the product is especially complicated, it becomes even more important to have a sales rep (or even a sale engineer) involved in the process.

• It might require buy-in from multiple stakeholders

• It might be extremely technical

• You might have multiple products to sell them

The more complicated the buying process becomes, the more likely you are to need the sales rep sooner in the lifecycle.

Putting it all together

With all 4 of these models, the place you want to start is by first understanding how your product is going to acquire users. A PLG motion that relies on local referral partners is going to struggle, a SDR/AM process that’s trying to convert inbound leads isn’t going to perform anywhere close to a team dedicated to squeezing the lemon.

There are definitely slight variations of these 4 models & sometimes they will certainly overlap. At Rupa, we follow a combination of PLG + inbound + SDR/AM, but this framework helps us build, organize, and structure our teams most effectively based on the channel they are focused on.

So please - take your own first principles concepts, apply them to the models that fit your situation the best, and watch your sales team soar. 🚀

P.S. would like to give a quick shout-out to the sales leaders who have had a profound impact on my life & how I think about sales. Special thanks to Dini Mehta, Chris Cantrell, David Reid, Matt Scheid, & Alex Soran - I’ve taken major lessons from you all in the last decade.

Want to keep reading? 🔥

• 3 Growth Lessons From Rupa Health's $20M Series A

• [Playbook] How to use cold email to find PMF

• How the Dark Funnel effects Growth & Marketing

Personally, I love thinking about creating content in the context of Ven Diagrams. Here’s what it looks like for Channels of Growth.

There are actually a lot more bubbles that are overlapping my core niche of “growth” (I also write about advertising, leading teams, AI, PLG, & more) but this gives a solid visual representation of how I’m thinking about creating content.

Yes - I want viral (read: engaging) posts that will rank for large keywords, but writing about “marketing strategy” is honestly kind of boring.

What’s a lot more interesting is giving career advice, for growth professionals, who are working at tech startups.

Example: What does a "Head of Growth" actually do? 🤷🏻‍♀️

Creating a content strategy that revolves around the intersection of major categories can help you not just 10x the engagement of your posts, but it allows you to serve under appreciated niches that can be insanely impactful for your business.

Create more interesting content by combining passions/interests

Humans have this incredible ability to fall deeply in love with things, it’s honestly kind of beautiful.

If you want a really great example of this go to a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gym, there will be some purple belt in the corner that will talk your ear off about the right way to break someone’s leg with a heel hook for 3 hours.

You’ll find this same phenomenon in a CrossFit gym, you’ll find it in software engineers building a Conflict Free Replicated Data-type, you’ll find it in doctors who practice functional medicine who can’t help but rave over a GI-Map test.

Break down the categories of that last example with me for a second.

A doctor who practices functional medicine who can’t help but rave over a GI-Map test.

For that specific human, an article about medicine is probably going to be maybe 3/5 stars interesting.

An article about functional medicine is going to be 4/5 stars interesting.

A functional medicine article about the GI-Map is going to be 5/5 stars interesting.

The more specific a person’s interests are, the more passionate they usually become. It’s harder to find a community of people that share your very specific niche interest, often you view it as this thing of “how does everyone else not know about this?”

Creating content that intersects between major topics allows you to build things that are much more relevant to a specific human, and thus does a much better job of hitting on their passions and interest.

Serving under appreciated niches

The larger the topic is, the harder it becomes to create “the best” content for that topic. It can play out something like this.

1. “Medicine” is hard to make “the best” content for.

2. “Functional Medicine” is easier to make “the best” content for.

3. “Supplements for Functional Medicine” is even easier to make “the best” content for.

Start writing an article about prescribing vitamin D supplements to create optimal functional medicine ranges in your patients, and you’re competing with a VERY small pool of content.

The keywords however in that article, are huge.

Chances are you’re not going to rank #1 for any of these major keywords, but the long-tail effects of writing content that center around major categories can be massive.

Just like there are so many unique crazy startups out there building unicorns in niches you’ve never heard of, there are content niches that likely touch the core of what you are building for that are massively underserved.

For example, maybe you’re my friend Cody who is building an AI-powered podcasting platform called SwellAI.com that lets you automate show notes, articles, and social posts.

You could create content around:

• Building a podcast for venture capitalists

• Building a podcast for medical doctors

• Building a podcast for financial advisors

• Building a podcast for travel bloggers

Knowing him, chances are he’s listed out 1,000 categories and started creating The Ultimate Guide to Building A Podcast for XYZ for every single one.

Part of my job means going to a lot of medical conferences, and at almost every single one there’s some vendor who paid $10,000 for a booth out there talking to doctors about how to launch their own podcast.

There is so much room for creating amazing content in these under appreciated niches it’s not even funny.

Startup founders love to pitch themselves as “We’re Uber but for XYZ” … maybe now it’s more accurate to say “We’re GitHub copilot for XYZ,” but there’s a reason X for Y works, and it applies to your content strategy as well.

Build at the intersection of massive concepts to find niche passions & interests while also taking advantage of large interest groups. 📈

Want to keep reading? 🔥

• [Playbook] How to determine if a startup has Product Market Fit

• "Advertising doesn't work at scale", and other myths about growth 👀

• Understanding Product Led Growth ⛽

Google has a lot of economic incentives to unleash the ban hammer upon the hoard of AI-generated content that is being created right now. There are legitimate serious problems that arise when anyone is able to pump out 10,000 articles a month of AI spam.

Thankfully, they recently released some language around how they are thinking about this.

Google claims to reward high-quality content, however it is produced:

“Google's ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of what we call E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”

Original “high-quality” content.

The very first word of this statement is original. Is anything that AI generates original content? It has the ability to imagine new worlds, but it’s trained off the content that already exists on the internet.

Hell … devil’s advocate?

I’m trained off content that already exists on the internet. The content that I produce is a combination of thousands of podcasts, YouTube videos, tutorials, audiobooks, and then that knowledge is applied & tested against real-world situations which I then distill the learnings into my writing.

It feels like a bit of a catch-22.

Google is saying that they don’t care how the content is produced, but they are going to reward content that is original, high quality, created by (possibly aided with AI) trusted, authoritative, subject matter experts.

Let’s break down the E-E-A-T framework Google is looking at in the age of AI.

Expertise

When it comes to creating high-quality content, the expertise of the author who wrote the content is incredibly important. In addition to EEAT they also frequently refer to the “who how why” framework for creating content.

The very first part of both of these frameworks revolves around the “who”.

It needs to be really really clear who created the content. Was this article written by an AI under a fake pen name, or was it created by Koby Conrad the Head of Growth @ Rupa Health™?

If AI was used to create this article (it wasn’t, although I could have used it to help me generate ideas), it still needs to actually be made by a subject matter expert who has strong expertise in the subject they are writing about.

Google is telling us that it still deeply & fundamentally cares about who is creating the content. Personally, I sincerely doubt an article that is completely written by AI will count as content written with expertise.

Experience

Experience primarily talks about the user’s experience when they visit a page. Are they hit with a wall of ads? Does the page take 30 seconds to load? Is the “product” of your landing page high quality?

This is probably the part of the EEAT framework that is least impacted by content written by an AI.

There are a number of interesting ways though that AI could improve the experience of the page:

1. AI tools that automate optimizing the technical aspects of landing pages, optimizing load times, scripts, ads, etc.

2. Chatbots trained on the content of a website → Didn’t find your answer from the article or want to know something else? Ask a chatbot trained on the contents of your website at the bottom.

3. Mutiny style personalization, combining data to personalize the content that a person could be looking for (taking an article about “lab testing” into an article about “lab testing for naturopaths”).

It’s still extremely early days, but there ARE likely ways for AI to drastically improve the on-page experience for readers without ever directly creating the content.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness has traditionally been primarily tied to link building, basically how important does Google think you are?

Content created by AI likely won’t change how authoritative it thinks your words are, but content other people create (possibly with AI) might.

Even if some of it is spam, AI is beginning to massively increase the amount of content & articles being created on the internet. This is also increasing the number of backlinks being created.

Two key concepts around this:

1. AI is trained on the internet … so is AI-generated content only going to link to old articles that existed before the models were trained?

2. If you use AI to generate more content, even if it is “lower quality” would this increase the number of possible touch points for someone to start linking back to you?

Any AI content you create likely won’t directly affect your authoritativeness, but if you use it to flesh out the amount of knowledge that exists on your domain - as long as it’s high enough quality for someone to link to, it could indirectly impact your domain authority.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness involves things like spammy backlinks, bad actors, and domains that get penalized because they’ve tried to abuse Google’s system.

This is the most dangerous part of the EEAT framework when it comes to the impact of AI-generated content. Google says it doesn’t care about how the content is produced, but will AI-generated content continue to be a neutral signal when it comes to trustworthiness?

Google has many years of experience dealing with automation being used in an attempt to game search results. Our spam-fighting efforts—including our SpamBrain system—will continue, however spam is produced.

The internet is filled with spam.

Google IS Google because for the last 20+ years they have been the reigning champion of fighting spam. Their entire business revolves around identifying the most important piece of content and matching it with a user’s search query.

I sincerely doubt that the long-term view of content that is 100% generated by AI is going to be looked at as anything other than spam.

Imagine a world where content creators are:

1. Pushing out 1,000 - 10,000+ articles a month powered by AI.

2. The AI content has a 1:100 ratio of content written by a human vs content written by a machine.

3. EVERYONE is doing it.

There is arbitrage in the world right now where mass-producing AI content is generating insane results for some of the smartest marketers I have the privilege of knowing.

I have nothing but respect and admiration for my friends that are doing this right now, I think it’s going to be insanely profitable for them.

My most tin-foil-hat theory is that Google will eventually punish this kind of content, and that they will look at human-generated content as a major quality signal of not just expertise but also trustworthiness.

Backlinks are good, spammy backlinks are bad. Content is good, spammy content is bad.

In my mind, it comes down to “are we giving incredible answers & information to people’s most important questions”?

Google says it doesn’t actually matter how you created these answers, just that they are incredible.

How am I making content?

I started writing this Substack because written content is the only kind that I am halfway decent at creating. I would like to think that for the foreseeable future, i’ll continue to be able to create work that is 10x better than a LLM.

Putting the title of this post into Chat GPT gives me a bit of hope that this is true … for now.

Also - I enjoy it. I write about things that inspire me, and putting my words on page helps me to internalize concepts I’m focused on mastering myself. Channels of Growth won’t be handing the keys over to an AI LLM any time soon.

As far as Rupa Health goes? Our strategy doesn’t really change.

Every month we publish over 100 articles written by subject matter experts, doctors, licensed healthcare providers, and incredibly smart humans who are actively “doing the work”.

I think we’ll use AI to help us generate ideas and create article outlines, but ultimately it will be humans who create the content with AI serving as a tool that helps us level up the quality of our work.

And we’re going to remember that this is a long-term game. Publish 3 articles a day for 10 years - a slow stoic march to the heavens. 🔥

With the economy crashing & venture capitalists pushing hard for startups to be fiscally conservative, reducing Customer Acquisition Costs is top priority for many growth leaders right now.

Most of us are tasked with a job that defies the “laws of physics.” We need to continue to increase our rates of growth while reducing CAC.

Signups STILL need to go up, and the cost per signups needs to go down.

What many growth leaders are doing right now is focusing more heavily on organic channels - building out better referral programs, email marketing campaigns, funnel optimizations, etc.

… and paid CAC is being heavily cut, in some cases to $0.

While focusing on increasing organic growth is a great lever for reducing our average CAC, I wanted to discuss the concept of negative CAC. Driving users in a way where the acquisition efforts create profit for your business.

Introducing - RupaUniversity.com, a system where our users pay us money to learn how to pay us money.

“Product Led Growth” is more than a freemium → premium system

PLG is often considered solely in a “freemium to premium” system, where the focus is on building a product so great that it replaces the marketing & sales efforts.

My personal favorite execution of PLG is when you build mini products on top of your core product, which drives usage towards your core product. Ideally, products that generate profit.

For us at Rupa Health (a SaaS platform that allows doctors to order from 35+ different labs), we were spending a lot of money on paid acquisition by working closely with educational institutes.

We found organizations that trained doctors, and we paid them money to allow us to sponsor their educational courses.

At one point, we realized it would be fantastic that instead of having to pay someone else money, that rather we could own the educational assets that drove signups for our product.

This lens of “how do we create owned versions of the places we spend money on acquisition” is game-changing for reducing CAC.

We still spend money on lots of outside educational institutes, but by building our own educational product, we drastically reduced our CAC because now for every person that signups up for one of our bootcamps we make profit … and then that user continues on to use our core product after the bootcamp.

Where do you spend money?

The best way I’ve discovered to uncover a negative CAC channel is by first looking at where you spend money on paid acquisition.

The places that you pay for users are likely places where you can build profitable owned products.

Examples:

• Do you spend money sponsoring podcasts?

• Do you spend money sponsoring newsletters?

• Do you spend money going to conferences?

• Do you pay “partners” for leads?

Hubspot acquired TheHustle for ~$25M-$30M because it was able to drive users for Hubspot & they now own a huge media product (newsletter + website) that doesn’t just generate revenue, but it drives users.

The education model that we follow at Rupa Health can easily be replicated for other industries. Alchemy (the web3 development platform) launched Alchemy University, allowing developers to level up their careers through free courses, projects, and code.

Mortgage Loan Officers heavily rely on Real Estate Agents for leads, oftentimes paying for half of their marketing campaign or giving direct cash for referrals. Wouldn’t it be great if the loan office also led the real estate team?

Owned Products > Owned Channels

I’ll admit - this is a slight rift off the concept of building owned channels. Building a newsletter, creating a social media following, building up your organic SEO.

The concept of building owned products instead of just owned channels is where the difference between Marketing and Growth comes into play (and where exponentially better returns manifest).

Product thinking applied to channels of growth is the difference between “owning a really big newsletter” and owning TheHustle.com, a revenue-generating media giant that also drives business.

Start building an ecosystem of profitable products that drive usage towards your core product & you’ll watch your blended CAC plummet. Do it well enough, and the “team that drives signups/leads” will have a profitable P&L instead of having a cost per acquisition. 👀

Okay, so here was my question → is being on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list actually valuable?

Critics have hailed it as a fluffed-up dating status, an award that doesn’t actually mean anything, and a cliche Linkedin tagline. It seems to be the exact opposite of the Harvard alumni “I went to school in Boston.”

But is this actually true, or is there real value in landing a spot on the list?

I’m not a “Lister,” but after tagging along as a +1 to the 30 Under 30 event in Detroit, I have to say despite my initial preconceived notions about the event, I was honestly blown away at the social engineering behind the summit.

Here’s the breakdown of the event (and maybe some lessons you can apply to your own business on creating prestige within a niche).

Are the 30 Under 30 Listers “legit”?

A “Lister” is someone who made the 30 Under 30 list.

Don’t let the name fool you; there are actually way more than 30 of them. In the class of 2022, there were “600 of the brightest young entrepreneurs, leaders, and stars” that made the list.

This was my biggest question going into the event, were the people who won this award actually valuable (for lack of a better word)? Was this truly an exclusive award reserved for the very top individuals of our society?

The answer is yes, and no.

Objectively speaking, I sincerely doubt that for any individual category that the award is literally the top 30 people within that category. There were definitely a number of people (without naming names) who probably didn’t quite deserve the award.

With that being said - Forbes didn’t completely miss the mark. There were some absolutely incredible A+ humans (from a social status POV) that came to the Summit.

At dinner, I sat next to a founder who just IPO’ed his company, an M&A lawyer who made the list for running a charity, and a “tech consultant” who ran a firm with 80 people.

Afterward, we had dessert with some fellow YC founders who were currently going through the YC Growth program (read: they were doing well).

The Listers truly did include a mix of not only legitimately incredible entrepreneurs but doctors, nuclear bomb pilots, and rockstars.

And by rockstars I don’t just mean the random IG influencer with 10k followers - I mean real rockstars. Included in the list were celebrities like Kygo, Megan Stallion, and John Zimmer.

There are different levels of Listers

This is probably the most interesting part of the award. The average Lister was honestly decently amazing, but there were some truly world-class people on the list.

Especially Listers from past cohorts who went on to do even more incredible things.

“The CEO of Kickstarter is a 30 Under 30, and so am I.”

In my opinion, this is where 90% of the value of the award derives from. The Listers are people that Forbes thinks are “popping off” within their industry, and some of them go on to do incredible things. Founders of billion-dollar companies, supermodels with millions of followers, people who are truly impacting the world.

That then creates value for everyone else on the list because it lets you point to those people and say, “famous person is a Lister, and I am too.”

It’s a funny concept; why do awards mean anything?

Part of it is brand, most of it is the belief that other people have, about the award. If the world thinks that being a Lister is valuable, then it is valuable. Being in exclusive clubs is really only important when the exclusive club is desirable to other people.

The more that people want to win the award, the more valuable the award becomes.

This is honestly the brilliance behind the Forbes 30 Under 30. It’s not the fact that it’s truly a list of the top 30 people in each category, but it’s how they are selecting people whose careers are on an upward trajectory - and then some of them turn into absolute rockstars.

In a lot of ways, it’s almost like angel investors making a bet on risky early-stage startups. Some of the bets pay off and make up the bulk of the portfolio’s value.

Creating a Stage

One of the most important parts of being a Lister is getting to come to the 30 Under 30 Summit, after all, who doesn’t like a good party?

I mean it’s a conference - but it’s really a party.

The opening night kicks off with a Kygo conference, followed by dinner and a bar crawl. In fact, there’s a bar crawl just about every night. When you’re not eating and drinking, there are talks given on a huge stage by surprisingly incredible people.

The talks were my favorite part of the event.

Speaking was people like John Zimmer, CoFounder of Lyft, Andy Dunn founder of Bonobos, Josh Silverman CEO of Etsy, and Haroon Mokhtarzada, CEO of Rocket Money.

The talks were legit. They were filled with interesting people with interesting perspectives on the world.

I’m not sure I learned anything too incredible - but I walked away from them feeling like a really stupid person that hasn’t done anything with my life, which is low-key inspiring to start executing on shit.

Layered with the talks were these round tables, a chance for the average Lister to talk and feel important. Round tables were small group events on specific topics, usually 15-20 people each.

Each round table had one Lister selected to “run” the event. They were basically moderators who got a little bit of mini stage time.

Despite a certain level of everyone being really excited to talk about their startup, there was actually some really interesting conversation at these round tables. It was a bunch of smart people in a room talking about things that were good for the world.

So here’s the overall breakdown.

• A big main stage with “rockstar” Listers next to other industry titans

• Round tables where average Listers were selected to lead them

• Average Listers got to participate at the round tables

Everybody got a little time to feel important, but more importantly, it did an amazing job selling the award to the audience by putting rockstar Listers on a huge stage.

TLDR

So if I was going to reverse engineer this for my own industry, here’s what my basic framework would be.

1. Create an award to give out to top people within my niche/industry

2. Give the award to important people, especially those whose careers seem to be exploding

3. Create an exclusive event (or at least some level of exclusivity) and make sure the “most important” award recipients are coming

4. Leverage my own brand + the most successful people who received the award, to promote the importance of the award

My takeaway from the event is that it absolutely does have real value; even the “average” Listers are pretty incredible human beings. Overall I was honestly blown away at Forbes's ability to create prestige by simply making a list of important people and crafting exclusive events.

The most interesting part of the event was watching the playbook of how to create an important award for my own industry (and the incredible impact it could have).

But let’s look through this lens at a few iconic products.

• Apple MacBook Pro

• Coca Cola

• Tesla

If you’re reading this newsletter, chances are (84.2% to be exact, based on my device type data) that you’re using either a MacBook Pro or an iPhone.

I don’t know about you, but I feel cool when I use my MacBook. It makes me feel like a bougie tech worker, especially compared to my ugly ThinkPad that I was forced to use at my past banking/finance jobs.

I put stickers on the back. It tells a story of the company I work at, the vacations I’ve been on, and the techy events I have attended. These stickers don’t just reflect the story that I am telling the world - they are a physical manifestation of the story I tell myself about the product.

Maybe when it very first came out, there were some major technical advancements that came along with the MacBook Pro, but this simply isn’t true anymore.

Any design or technical advantages that it might have definitely aren’t worth the drastically larger price tag that’s associated with it.

For most of my career, I have attributed this to premium pricing strategy & brand equity. People think that higher-cost goods are worth more money, and Apple has invested a large number of dollars in advertising.

I recently realized that “premium pricing strategy” and “brand equity” don’t even begin to paint the complete picture.

The story that I tell myself about my MacBook is part of the product.

One of my favorite frameworks for growth is AAER. Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention. Most product roadmaps can usually be broken down into features that affect one of these core levers, maybe throwing revenue/margin into the mix.

The story that users tell themselves about our product is a major factor across all of these core levers.

We like to lump marketing & advertising into “GTM” or “acquisition” costs in our financial statements, but it affects so much more than just our signups. It impacts how likely they are to become fully activated, how often they use the product, and how likely they are to churn.

I love to compare old-school consumer companies with tech startups because so often, it highlights pieces of marketing we seem to have forgotten.

Coca-Cola has known about the impacts of advertising & marketing on AAER since before growth marketers had even begun dreaming of the framework.

If you’re like me and a fan of coke, you likely tell yourself a pretty positive story about the beverage. I tell myself I like the flavor more than almost any other cola, even when that is likely impossible with the variety in today’s beverage choices.

I tell myself it’s a cold treat on a hot day; even more than that, I have the beginning of an emotional reaction just looking at an image of coke.

This reaction I have to Coca-Cola could be lumped into “brand equity,” that by being advertised to for my entire life, I have positive brand associations, which leads to me choosing coke more often (E for Engagement) than another unbranded or unfamiliar product and being willing to pay a premium.

It’s more than that, though. The story I tell myself about Coca-Cola is the most major part of their product.

It’s not the can, it’s not the drink inside, but it’s the story about Coca-Cola that is told through their marketing & advertising efforts, which are the primary forces driving their product’s AAER metrics.

Let’s apply this concept to a product that doesn’t spend a lot of advertising.

Tesla makes great electric cars. If my MacBook Pro made me feel cool, driving a Tesla would definitely make me feel cool.

It’s a car made for rich techies who care about the environment, technology, and want to drive around a status symbol. They don’t spend a ton of money on advertising, but the product is still built around an extremely powerful story.

Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Elon Musk takes on the big fuel-guzzling conventional car industry with a self-driving sports car (but it can’t actually self-drive yet) that can save the planet and make all of your friends jealous.

It’s a great car, especially when it first came out. It’s not that great though.

A quick Google search for “best electric cars 2022” puts the Tesla Model Y in 3rd place. The key thing is that I had to Google it. After switching tabs back to my Substack to continue writing this sentence, I can’t even remember the names of the other two cars that ranked above Tesla.

The product of Tesla isn’t just beautiful electric sports cars; it’s the story we tell ourselves about them.

I think this is something that at least I myself am guilty of, especially when it comes to modern forms of digital marketing. I have tricked my brain into thinking that when I am managing a marketing budget, I am building a money printer, putting in $1, and getting out $3.

The reality is that marketing & advertising isn’t about cold, heartless ROI. We’re crafting stories that are told through channels, and these stories don’t just drive acquisition for our product but are a core part of the product itself, impacting every major lever of growth.

Without the stories that our users tell themselves, all we’re left with is incredible technology that no one cares about.

Friends - this role is extremely cool.

It comes with a multi-million dollar budget, a small team of world-class marketers, and the chance to do some of the most interesting marketing work I’ve ever seen in my life.

The scope of work is truly incredible, here’s what we got going on.

• Million dollar SEM budget

• Multiple six-figure marketing contracts with influencers like Dr. Mark Hyman

• Content Marketing that includes the Root Cause Medicine Podcast (#5 medical in the US), and the Rupa Magazine, a digital publication with 30+ physician contributors

• We took the concept of developer documentation and turned it into the Reference Guide for doctors (our organic SEO play)

• We show up as astronauts at conferences (15-20+ a year) 🧑‍🚀

• We scrape & sequence the email addresses of every single doctor in the US

• We built social 250,000+ followers in the last 12 months, pacing for 1M total within a year

And a WHOLE lot more.

We’ve raised a metric boat load of money, are recession proof, our product has some of the best PMF I’ve ever seen in my life (high NPS, users spend a lot of money, basically no churn, growing GMV cohorts), and the market is insanely huge.

There are kids eating chips on TikTok right now with 17,000,000 followers 🤯. Rupa Health is going to bring Root Cause Medicine to every human on the planet and build an industry-defining company in the process.

I need a relentless execution-focused marketer with A+ technical chops that can combine the science and art of marketing while managing & growing a team in the process.

If you want to come do some work that you’ll be able to brag about for the rest of your career (if you don’t feel like retiring afterward), submit a resume and HMU with a reply. 🔥

Apply Now 🚀

Sorry it has been a while since I last created a post, I came to a personal realization that I don’t think I will be able to continue to publish weekly content for “forever”.

In all honesty, my real job @ Rupa Health is incredibly high ROI for me and deserves the bulk of my attention. With that said the reason that I started this Substack remains the same - I am on a mission to help startups grow.

Because of this I am pivoting the format of Channels of Growth into a book!

I haven’t been publishing lately because I have been spending all of my free time and creative powers focused on creating the first 1/2 of the book. 🔥

I would love for you to read it.

If you would like to become a beta reader for the book please fill out this form! I’ll be inviting the first 100 people to read what I have so far 100% for free, in exchange for some quick feedback.

It’s currently about ~10,700 words, an hour read, and I hope just absolutely filled with engaging valuable information about growth.

Become A Beta Reader

If you tell your mom about an amazing new startup idea she’s likely to say “that’s great honey I’m so proud of you!”

But if you send out 1,000 cold emails, most of them are probably going to ignore you, a few might ask how you got their email, and there’ll probably be that one guy who tells you to fuck off.

Unless of course, your amazing new startup idea actually solves a problem that people care about.

The Mom Test teaches us that our users will lie to us because they don’t want to hurt our feelings. In my experience as a Growth Marketer however, no one has ever lied to me after I spammed them with a cold email.

In this playbook I am going to go over how to use cold email to discover Product Market Fit. Specifically, how to determine actual market size, sequence potential users, the correct type of messaging for finding PMF vs sales, and how to figure out exactly what problems a certain market might need solved.

Does this actually work?

So uh, you’re reading this email.

I’ve used ABM style email sequences for a lot of different kinds of products with a lot of success, but for the sake of this playbook I am going to use this Substack as the example.

There’s a couple unique things about Channels of Growth that I want to highlight.

1. This Substack is currently searching for Product Market Fit. What can I create (write) that my users will want?

2. Right now, with this very playbook, I am using a cold sequence campaign to try and discover my Product Market Fit.

I have no Twitter following, I’m not posting this article on Hacker News trying to go viral, if you got here anytime within the next ~3 months after the publish date, it’s extremely like you are reading this because I sent you a cold email.

Did you tell me to fuck off? Or is this playbook useful to you?

Is “finding Product Market Fit” one of your tasks to be done (or maybe this is a type of entertainment)? Is a playbook that helps you build & grow amazing products something that you, my user, wants? Do you want this SO bad that you clicked through on a random cold email to consume the “product” that I have to “sell”?

Wether or not I give you a good solution is still up in the air. But here you are, validating that my market has demand for a specific product… Because I sent you a cold email.

Step One: Start With Your Market, Not Product

Let’s say I’m passionate about trains & a brilliant software engineer. I want to work on things that I am passionate about, so I build a brilliant product for trains-as-a-service.

The product works exactly like I planned. My brilliant butt has found a way to deliver trains to YOUR doorstep.

So I take my product, I go pitch some investors about how trains-as-a-service is the future of the billion dollar train industry, raise a seed round, and start to go sell my product.

I hire my first Growth Marketer, they run some Facebook ads, and it doesn’t work.

Then some Google ads, and those don’t work.

Then some cold emails, and those don’t work.

Then I fire my Growth Marketer.

I have been this “hire” more times than I care to admit, working for brilliant founders with a brilliant idea, lots of funding, and a product that nobody actually wants.

The key trick to being able to consistently find at least some level of PMF, is to start with your market, not product. Decide on a market that you want to service, and then figure out what problems they have, and create a great solution for one of those problems.

My (primary) market, is people who work in Growth.

Specifically, there are 87,600 people who have “growth” in their job description & whose emails I have access to through Apollo.

For me and my goals, this is a “good” market.

1. If my Substack can dominate a significant portion of this market, I will have created the #1 Substack for my industry & this will have a significantly strong impact on my career.

2. Check my LinkedIn if you want, but I have a 10 year long obsessive career in different forms of “Growth”. It’s 8:34 pm on a Tuesday and here I am obsessing over it. I believe I am in a unique position to create a good “product” and solution for this market.

But notice what I’m doing…

Yes, I picked a market that I am passionate about, but in my search for Product Market Fit there is no strong religion around the solution or exact problem to be solved. Maybe it’s a playbook. Maybe I go interview cool and interesting founders. Maybe I create how to tutorials.

I don’t know, you tell me what you think I should build. Seriously reply to this email and let me know what you’re struggling with.

Let’s talk tools for a second.

Apollo.io is an AMAZING tool for cold email sequences. My campaign for this substack has over a 40% open rate, and you my friends are replying to the cold emails at about 8%.

Sometimes it’s really hard to identify your market through simple data tools like Apollo. But very often there are other ways to get the contact email for your audience.

1. LinkedIn is great for creating lists of people who have certain skills (developers who use Rust or Python for example). Go hire someone on UpWork to scrape everyone with a certain skill or use Apollo to prospect.

2. Targeting founders or product people? Again, go hire someone on UpWork to scrape Product Hunt.

3. Targeting small businesses? Go scrape Google+ listings for cleaning services or whatever.

4. Hunter.io + PhantomBuster.com will pull the contacts out of the bulk of any list of domains.

5. Remember to clean your emails through something like ZeroBounce.net.

Get creative with it, the tools to find correct contact info in this day and age are insane and there’s almost no audience you can’t identify and collect their emails. (It’s honestly a little scary.)

If your audience is SO niche, and SO small, that you can’t identify them with Apollo or LinkedIn (or Google search, or Facebook ads, or YouTube ads), have a serious hard conversation with yourself about wether you are in a “good” market.

Slides on an investor pitch deck are nice, but if you can’t identify your market through channels of growth, your market doesn’t actually exist.

Your action item here, start by identifying the audience you are passionate about serving, and figure out how to message them.

Step Two: The Right Kind Of Messaging

Talking to your users is hard, and honestly it’s even harder to do it at scale. One key thing to remember is that this isn’t a sales pitch. I’m “kind of” trying to get people to buy something just to get product direction, but I actually care about a LOT more than that.

1. I want to see what kinds of problems people are struggling with.

2. I want to see what kinds of messaging people engage with.

3. Sales/subscribers ARE nice, and strong indicator of PMF, but i’m not optimizing on conversions, i’m optimizing to learn.

Something that trips up really amazing Growth people (and was the hardest product lesson I ever learned), is that just because you can sell ice to eskimo’s, doesn’t mean that you have Product Market Fit.

The better you are at selling things, the harder this is to learn.

So lets deconstruct the winning variance of the cold email I’m sending out right now to use as an example.

In the very first line, I link the Substack & identify my audience. Then I bold my call to action.

Serious question, why did you read any farther than this? Why didn’t you immediately mark me as spam? Why didn’t you tell me to fuck off?

My one liner is something like “A substack newsletter for growth/marketing people”.

That’s honestly REALLY weak.

Yet, it’s not causing people to bounce. My current hypothesis is that there’s actually really shit content available for Growth/Marketing people. It’s mostly low quality spam, not really effective, or just in general really bad.

I think people like us are starved for really high quality in depth content, they DO have big problems they need solved, and that’s why people are engaging with this email.

But anyways, I immediately ask for a reply (read: user feedback). Unlike my cold emails at scale, the major CTA that I am caring about here is for you to tell me what you want, it isn’t to “sign up for my paid newsletter”.

Finally I drop a line or two about my background to hope that maybe you’ll give a shit about the content I am producing (and again seeding you for replies, not $$$).

Honestly it’s been crazy reading through all of your replies. Growth people telling me how much they resonated with the What does a "Head of Growth" actually do? 🤷🏻‍♀️ article, this exact playbook you are reading came from a request where someone wanted to learn more about how to use cold email to find PMF.

So I sent out a bunch of emails, asked my users (and market) what they wanted to hear about, and that leads us to our final step…

Step Three: Give Your Users What They Ask For

When you build products based on what your market wants to hear, the solution comes at the very end (and often it comes in iterations).

The goal is to continuously ask for feedback.

For me this comes by continuing to ask my users/market what kind of content they want. Trying to discover what the major problems are that they struggle with, and then creating content that addresses those problems.

Maybe it’s “playbooks”, maybe it’s interviews, who knows. Maybe you don’t even give a shit about Substack and you really want something completely different. I don’t know, you tell me, & i’m going to do my absolute best to create the type of content/product that I am uniquely capable of creating, to solve the biggest problems I can help you solve.

Let’s say you aren’t building a Substack (even though articles about a problem, are an amazing MVP for SaaS products).

You can have a waitlist for a product, or a tiny lean startup style MVP.

This is why the stereotypical startup advice is to first build the smallest thing you can possibly build, that your users will use.

It’s so you can then show it to your market and get their feedback. If your market says it doesn’t a give shit, if they tell you to fuck off, unsubscribe me, “I don’t care about trains-as-a-service”, then move on with your life.

Just.. Don’t pivot into the next product you are super passionate about.

If there’s any one piece of advice I think that would help new entrepreneurs the most, is that you should never be obsessed with a solution, but rather become obsessed with a market.

I love Growth people. I am obsessed with this market. I dream about the things that can move a startup faster & the impact that tech startups can have on the world at scale.

So I hope this post provided some value to you towards a problem you’re trying to solve. Send me a reply to let me know :) or better yet if you haven’t already toss a paid subscription so I know I am on the right path.

Otherwise, back to the drawing board & to figuring out what my market wants. 🚀

Besides from my initial cold email, I don’t know if I ever really made a formal introduction on my Substack, but hi my name is Koby and I lead the Growth team @ Rupa Health.

Today, I am extremely proud to announce the fact that Rupa Health has raised a $20M Series A round.

I came onboard more than a year ago as the first growth/marketing hire at a time when the ONLY channel of growth at Rupa was word of mouth. I had never ran a growth team before, I had never even had “growth” in my title.

I lucked out a little bit because I think I came into the role with the right mix of raw ingredients, previously working on marketing campaigns up to $5M/mo and some basic product chops thanks to Y Combinator and my previous startups.

Working on really large marketing campaigns however is drastically different than taking something from basically nothing, to significant scale. I don’t know how else to put this, but after struggling to figure out my career in marketing for the last 10 years, working at Rupa has taught me how the “profession” of Growth can help me find harmony between marketing, product, engineering, and sales.

It’s a little bit cliche, but as we pass this milestone I wanted to share a few of the most important growth lessons I learned that I think helped Rupa get to our Series A.

Hire friendly people who are excellent at what they do.

The startup world is obsessed with Product Market Fit, finding traction, and metrics, but all too often it completely overlooks the humans who are building & growing the product.

Culture is top down, and I could not even begin to talk about any ounce of our success without mentioning our incredible CEO/founder Tara and her cofounders Ben & Rosa.

I took this job because Ben was one of my best friends, and Tara refused to let me do anything else. I had multiple offers at companies with more proven products and traction, but I ultimately came to Rupa because of the people.

I think this statement is probably true for most of our organization.

We have 2 bars for hiring at Rupa. You have to be technically A+ at what you do, but you also have to be A+ friendly (to clarify, extroversion is not the same as friendly).

I think this friendliness is the secret weapon of not just Rupa but many silicon valley startups that I only truly encountered when I moved to San Francisco. I have constantly seen the advantages of a friendly organization play out in so many ways in the last 12 months.

People want to do business with friendly people.

It gives you an advantage when you’re hiring.

It gives you an advantage when you’re creating partnerships.

It gives you an advantage when you’re fundraising.

It gives you an advantage when you’re doing PR.

All companies deal with painful problems that are no fun. When you’re growing at a neck breaking pace, these painful problems are even more glaringly obvious and tedious, but when you’re working with an organization just filled with A+ friendly people that you love being around, it makes everything worth while.

Friendliness lubricates the friction of growth.

Growing is painful. At scale all of your processes break down. What used to work for a team of 10 will make your hair fall out with a team of 50. Your product will break down, your systems will break down, it’s a well known stereotype that everything breaks - and it’s 100% true.

Nobody wants to solve hard problems with a group of people that they don’t really enjoy. It sounds like a fluffy soft skill, but only hiring friendly people, who are also great at their job, will give you an incredible growth advantage.

Product Market Fit isn’t measured in growth.

Rupa has one of the most incredible examples of Product Market Fit I have ever seen in my life, but when I came onboard the growth rate was flat for the previous ~4 months.

I don’t know how many times it was drilled into my head before joining, “explosive growth is the most obvious sign of Product Market Fit”. I have been told that by hundreds of investors & articles on conventional startup wisdom.

This lesson is the main reason that I started this Substack.

All users comes from channels.

PMF is the combination of “a good product” and “a good market”. The product can be absolutely amazing, but if the startup hasn’t figured out how to connect it to strong channels, there isn’t going to be any growth.

This was the reality that Rupa was in 12 months ago. It was this amazing SaaS health-tech product that solved a critical problem for practitioners, that was growing organically through word of mouth, but had started to flatline because word of mouth was the only channel.

Here’s how to actually judge if a product has PMF.

• How much do users love the product? What’s the NPS or super human survey scores.

• Is the retention really great?

• Are people willing to pay a lot of money for the solution?

When you’re trying to understand how good the product is, growth can actually be really confusing. Founders do an incredible job of launching on Product Hunt, Hacker News, Twitter, at “pushing the bolder up the hill” even when there isn’t actually PMF.

Looking at growth doesn’t actually tell you how much users love the product, or even how many users exist within a market.

The confusing bit lies in the fact that the better the product is, the easier it is to grow. The danger lies in the fact of assuming that a good growth rate means that the product is good. Growing users and building a good product that provides value to people, while connected, are two completely different problems to be solved.

Product Channel Fit is the key to real growth.

Build things and sell things, repeat the process. When you connect amazing products to strong channels of growth, truly incredible things happen.

I’ve told this story a few times but while I was going through Y Combinator they asked us who here is a software engineer or could code, and about 90% of the room raised their hands. The early stage startup world is incredibly biased towards people who can build things.

It makes a lot of sense.

If you can’t build a product, you’ll never have anything to grow. It also results in one of the most common ways that I have seen startup founders with incredible products fail, they build these amazing things but have no clue how they are going to actually grow.

What’s worse is they often buy into the myth that if you just build an amazing product for a big market, growth is the inevitable result.

People know to reject the phrase “build it and they will come”, but it is hardly ever taken to heart. They hire outsourced agencies to run their SEM, burn through marketing hires and sales people.

There’s a reason why marketing has more turnover than any other industry.

To get to Product Channel Fit your organization has to deeply understand both the product, but also the channels that will drive users to it. They have to build their product around their channels, hire people who are experts in those channels, and learn to defend them at scale.

This is the true goal of Growth, at least how I see it at Rupa. Not to run growth hackey experiments trying to optimize everything into oblivion, but to deeply understand all of the possible channels that can drive growth for our product, and then understanding how to optimize the product to best fit our channels.

👋🏼 Hey friends, this post is part of a series on Growth as a Profession! I’ll try my best to give an inside look into what it’s like leading growth, building a team, and just working in this industry in general. Make sure to join the Discord. :)

Previous Post: What does a "Head of Growth" actually do? 🤷🏻‍♀️

Fun fact, on my growth team @ Rupa Health I have two incredibly talented doctors (shout out Dr. Jones & Dr. Greenan). Not only was hiring these two one of the best decisions I have made, but it also shows one of the coolest parts about growth teams.

The answer to “what is growth?” varies a lot between organizations, and so does the types of people doing the growth work.

Let’s consider a few types of companies for a second.

• Rupa Health (health-tech SaaS)

• Facebook (social media)

• Rocket Mortgage (mortgage/finance)

The point of a growth team is to help a company grow, but what kinds of people are needed to do that work are going to vary drastically depending not only on what kind of product you are working on, but what kinds of channels you need to build for.

Rupa Health needs doctors, Facebook needs engineers and designers, Rocket Mortgage needs loan officers and sales people.

It’s not enough to just say “a growth team needs to be a cross functional mix of marketers, engineers, and designers”, we have to build out a full stack team that has unique experts to our products & channels.

Hiring doctors for growth

I like using this as an example because it highlights a unique yet critical aspect of growth teams that I see repeated between organizations.

You need people who are experts in the product and channels.

Sometimes these experts happen to be engineers and designers, sometimes these experts are mortgage loan officers and sales people, sometimes these experts are doctors.

When I first started at Rupa I had a really interesting problem.

I like to consider myself an expert in email marketing. I’ve been doing it for 10 years, I built this Substack doing it, I’ve worked on lists over 1,000,000+ people, blah blah blah. Yet when I started my job and wanted to start sending out emails, I couldn’t figure out exactly what to say.

I have literally no healthcare background. How exactly am I supposed to send out an email about a Dried Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones?

I like to consider myself an expert in content marketing and SEO. Again, been doing it for 10 years, ran many successful blogs and magazines in my time.

But yet again, the last article on the Rupa Health magazine is A Functional Medicine Approach to POTS: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome by Dr. Jennifer L. Weinberg, MD MPH MBE.

You get the picture, without healthcare experts on my team my job growing users is almost impossible.

• If you are a dev tool company, the #1 rule of marketing is to be a good developer.

• If you are a healthcare company, the #1 rule of marketing is to be good at healthcare.

• If you are a mortgage company, the #1 rule of marketing is to be good at mortgages.

In order to excel in your industry you have to be amazing at your domain, and the people on your growth team need to reflect that. The combination of your product and channels determine the unique mix of humans required to grow.

Hiring channel experts for growth

The next group of people you need on a growth team, are those who are experts in the channels that drive users for your product.

For almost all growth teams, owning demand generation and the channels of growth are one of the core responsibilities of the function. In order to be successful you need to identify your channels and then build out a team around them.

Facebook for example is driven by viral network effects, so their growth team consisted of engineers and designers who were able to work on these network effects, run experiments, and optimize for them.

Take that same growth team and apply it to Rocket Mortgage, and they probably aren’t going to be as effective.

Rocket Mortgage is driven by Google SEM & video ads. The virality of a mortgage product is extremely low. You’re going to need a team who can optimize landing pages and lead qualification forms, but bringing in experts who can build out product virality is going to be mostly wasted efforts.

The reverse applies for Facebook’s growth team, having SEM experts probably wont do you much good.

The trick is figuring out what are the main channels of growth for your product and then bringing in experts who can manage, experiment, and grow those channels.

Building a full stack team

This is probably the trickiest part of creating a growth team, especially at the start. Usually growth begins with a single person either a Head of Growth or a Growth Lead, and when the company is small you’re basically in a situation where “the entire company, is the growth team”.

This is one of the reasons why some of the best early stage growth hires are generalists. People who are able to do a lot of different things and are able to learn the things they don’t know how to do.

As you get bigger, you should be working to build out a full stack team that doesn’t rely on the rest of the organization.

Usually there are two different kinds of organization structures where either everyone reports to the Head of Growth, or they might have a different HR manager but “live” on the growth team.

Either way, doesn’t matter. Especially at scale it becomes increasingly important for the growth team to be able to execute and run experiments without having to constantly rely on the rest of the organization.

Constantly having to take people away from their day to day jobs or their core priorities to build out a new feature or try a new marketing campaign leads to slow experiment velocity.

Growth isn’t just a cross functional team, it’s a team that can for the most part operate independently to build out experiments and try new things. Just make sure to also communicate what you’re doing so people aren’t blind sided by the crazy experiment of the week. 🚀

Poll: I’m curious what your growth team looks like! Come join the Channels of Growth community on Discord and tell us. :)