#107: Marketing Leadership | Taking a New VP of Marketing Role, When to Optimize for Learning, and Personal LinkedIn Strategy (with Amrita Mathur, VP Marketing, ClickUp)

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All right, so first let's start with tell people what you were doing. You spent the last four years working at a company. Talk about that company, the role, what you did, and then talk about the new opportunity and I'll ask a bunch of questions and interject in between.

Yeah, so I spent four years at a company called Superside. When I started there, they were super, super early stage, a little bit sort of pre product, you know, didn't have any recurring revenue, had some ACV coming through, but it wasn't recurring. And I don't think they had figured out exactly what the product or solution should be. And they certainly did not know at that time what the customer or ICP or any of that should be. So that was a leap of faith for me because I'd never done super early stage before and I was like let's just jump in and see what happens and see if I can build this puppy up. And we had agreed early on that this is going to be a very marketing driven engine and that we were not going to do like the highly sales LED approach and we wanted to grow efficiently, et cetera, et cetera. So I spent four years of my life there, just recently quit and joined another company which is absolutely on the opposite side of that spectrum, which is they're established. Just to give you a sense of how established they are, this company is called ClickUp and they're in a very different space than Superside, which is where I was. ClickUp gets 6,000 signups for their product a day. A day?

Okay, that's amazing. That's like it depending on the product. But I, I was at a company and we get maybe like 10,000 trials a month and that was a good month.

I mean even that's also amazing to me because like we would create like a hundred opportun a month. Right. As an example, like it's just, oh my God. Like the scale is just like.

Also, I don't mean this as a slight to the company ClickUp. I haven't used the product, I don't know, but from my perception I'm somebody in this space who like, I think I know this space well. But out of the like 10 to 15 people that I work with, none of them use ClickUp right now. And so what's interesting to me is like, whoa, that just talks about the size of the market, right?

If TAM is gigantic, that's crazy. Yeah. I think the ClickUp opportunity is that I don't think they even think about it like that, which I find wild because as an outsider, this is how I saw it as now a new user that is sort of like using the intricacies of the product. I see them as a replacement for not only like an Asana and Monday, which I was a power user of, but also for Notion and airtable. Like for me that's the stack that they kind of replace and I don't think they ever think they're like, we don't compete with Notion, we don't compete with airtable. I was like, sure you do. People are doing all the stuff that they do in airtable and ClickUp at our company and like we could steal that share of wallet and same goes with Notion and they just didn't see it like that at all. Even now I think I have some convincing to do. But the TAM is huge, it's gigantic. And like, there's room for, it seems like for everybody.

Cool. And before we talk about the ClickUp experience, I just thought of this. While you're talking about your career, like, you had basically focused on demand gen and like a manager role and then a director role and then at a VP level and then it seemed like you wanted to make the jump in your career. Okay. I've kind of proven I can do this on like a slice of marketing. I want to now go take a job where I run all of marketing. And that's what got you to be VP of marketing at Superside. And you did what you did and grew there. Talk about that moment. Because I think there's a lot of people that listen that, that are at that point where they're like, yeah, I want to run marketing one day. I'm currently like focused on a specialized area. In your case demand gen, which is obviously huge. Why did you want to make the leap? Like, why did you want to make the leap outside of just that specialty to run all of marketing and talk a little bit about just like how you felt, as everyone does, like, I have imposter syndrome. I don't know all these things. But you made the jump. I want to dig into that a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, to be totally honest, I don't think anyone, I mean, maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I don't think anyone would have given me the opportunity to run market marketing at a more established company. Like, I think I needed to prove myself and cut my teeth at like a smaller company. And so Superside was like the perfect stepping stone from that perspective. I, when I was at the company before that called Top Hat, Canadian company, very different space than both Superside and ClickUp. The demand gen function, I just realized over there and other companies, the demand gen function is like super central. Like, it is the engine for revenue and connects all the dots across a number of different other functions. I think often people think that that's product marketing, which is true. I think product marketing is that connection between product and marketing and growth if in fact that is different than sales. But I don't think they're the engine and the machine building part. Right? They're the hub, but they're not the machine. Demand gen is the machine. It actually forces you to ponder all of the stuff that you haven't figured out because you need to know certain basic things before you can execute an amazing campaign and actually drive revenue from it. So in that role, which was like a very interesting role, I also ended up launching all sorts of stuff that normally demand gen wouldn't launch. Which is like an example of that is like we launched a marketplace. So I built the product with a small group of engineers and we launched it with like a ragtag team of four people. And that experience just opened me up to like really realizing that I think I have the chops to run marketing. I don't need to, you know, report to a cmo. Let me see if I can be the cmo. And it was just a leap of faith, honestly. And at that point I was just like high on like, ooh, look at me. I've done this and done that and I could, you know, it was like one of those things. And I was just like, I'm gonna leave this company, but I'm only going to look for VP marketing or CMO opportunities exclusively. Any sexy role that came my way, that was like at a cool company, but was not a VP or CMO role. I was like, it's a no brainer. I mean, I just can't. It's a deal breaker. I can't. So I gave myself that challenge.

At that time, I had a similar experience in like, I didn't come in as that high of a level. I was much. I came in as like a manager, but it was because of the company, I think, like going to an early stage company. I was a marketer who just was like a hustler. Right. Like I would. Okay, we got to figure out seu, like, I don't know how to do SEO. I'll figure that out. I'm going to figure out paid. I'm going to create a landing page. Hey, we're announcing this new launch tomorrow. Oh, boom. Hack together. Landing page, email. Okay. We were going to try some PR now.

Yeah.

And that was like the best, most fun time in my career because you get to learn by doing. And I think it's like, yeah, we talk about all this stuff on LinkedIn, you know, all day, but ultimately there's so much nuance to it and the best way to do it is to find a place where you can learn and like actually get your hands on some of that stuff. Like I had prior to that, I had been in roles where I was supporting those other people, but I didn't have the keys to anything. It's really fun when you get the keys to everything. A little bit intimidating, right? But when you get the keys and you're like, wait, I get to come up with the strategy now? Yeah, that's where you learn the most.

I think, and I think you said, I don't know where you said this, but in some ways, like the precursor to being successful in that environment is like, you can do those things without repercussion. That's the key. I think, like, if you have permission to throw shit at the wall and know and everybody know the CEO, everybody knows, hey, half of this is going to fail and we're okay with that. I think you were at Drift, at least you were kind of able to do that.

Yeah, one thing for me was like the CEO just liked that.

Like I did shit.

Like instead of being like, hey, I have an idea, email boss about it, wait for reply. Like, and obviously there's reasons that like this may have been easier for me to do inside of the company than others. But like, I just was like, cool, I think we need to go do this thing. And we did it. And he was like, huh, this person's showing initiative. And then kept doing that and kept doing that. And I think now I see the reverse of it. Like as someone who then became like a cmo, the people that you want on your team are the ones who you like. You feel like they're just on top of it, right? I might not know. Like when the execs get stressed out, when they think they got to like pay attention to every tiny little detail that's going on, that means they don't trust you. And so it's the best feeling in the world as like a CMO as an example to have like, oh, I got so and so on my team, like I feel great about, they're proactively telling me like, hey, we need to do this. And we did this thing. I can go to sleep at night knowing that they got it. And I think like in the early days I didn't come in at as a director level person, I just was like a scrappy marketer. And I think within the first like three to six months I became the like if the founder and he was very involved in the marketing but like he basically could tell me something and I would go execute it and the next day he'd show up at work and it would be done and right and good and we'd iterate and learn. And so at that time that was like how I got my way into a leadership role as opposed to like, I'm going to become a leader at this company. But anyway, I think being able to go and do the things at a company is, is very worthwhile. Even if you don't think this company is going to be the next salesforce, like, could you go take a job where you go there to learn and you have a specific set of things that you. Hey, like yeah, I don't think this company is going to be a billion dollar company. But like, if I could spend two or three years here, get my hands on a bunch of stuff, grow a bunch of stuff, I think that's an amazing way to like take the jump and try to grow.

Yeah, 100%. If you optimize for like learning, then yeah, the world is your oyster. I sometimes I hear, and I love your perspective, but like I hear of a strategy which I don't even know what to call it. I think it's kind of gross, but lots of people subscribe to. This is like you change jobs every couple of years. You go from, you know, Unicorn or Decacorn to Decacorn or whatever. And you just do a few little things, collect your equity and then you're on to the next thing. And. And you do a few things, collect your equity and you go on to the next thing. What is that? And is that like a way to grow your career? Because it looks good on your resume, I gotta tell you that. And it's probably really good in your bank account.

It could be. I mean, it depends on what you're doing at those companies. If you're just doing it for a year, it's tough to say without knowing what you're learning. I don't necessarily think it's that bad.

To like not optimize for the learning and to like sink your teeth in. But.

Well, no, I think you can learn a lot in a year at a company. And so if you learn something. And there's a. Because I also think like a lot of times I believe you have to just look out for yourself. And I've been at companies either too long or like you need to. I think I wouldn't say this if I was a CMO still, but I can say it now. Yeah, I would always be looking and I, I'm. As a candidate. And I can say this now because I'm like, maybe I'm not at a company in the position I'm. But like, we're all getting messages all the time if you're a top performer in your niche or even like look like one just based on the company you're at. And like, I don't know, there's going to be a company that's going to offer you 30% more money than you're making right now. And it's not all about money. Granted, you could take the big pay cut, pay jump, and then like, go work for a worse team and a worse product. And it's not all gravy, but I just think, like, part of you should be looking for the next thing. And anyway, my rant, I do see both sides of this because for me, I jumped around a lot. I worked at five companies in six years, but that was as a much more junior employee. So I worked at. I worked at five companies in six years until I found my drift and like, got a place to settle. So. Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting. It's interesting. This is a good. I'm glad, like, we're bringing up these sides because I'm curious to hear what, what people think. It's. I see it from the employer standpoint and like, how. And how you got to learn, but I also see it as like, ah, you could say your company for a year and the company's like, hey, like, you're so awesome at your job. You did such a good work this year, but we're not doing raises right now because of blah, blah, blah. Like, we've all been there. Like, we've all been through that. And so like, on one side of the coin, if you're like, shoot, I want to, like, I want to grow my income, this might be a time to do it.

Yeah, for sure. I think there are situations that warrant that, for sure. It's just. Is it a strategy on how to like, grow your career and live your life? That's what I was questioning mainly. Yeah. Cool though.

Okay, so super side, if you took a wrap, if you put a wrap around the four years ish there, right? It was four years. Okay. What are like one or two of the biggest plays or things that you accomplished that you're proud about? And I don't want to hear about like the, the cool campaign that you did, but I think people want to hear about like, strategy, internal company stuff. What made the biggest impact on you as a VP of marketing?

Yeah, I think like, the number one thing, which I alluded to earlier was that we wanted to grow and scale efficiently. And that was a mandate that we had from the beginning. So what that meant is, you know, what sometimes startups do when they're early is like, throw like a bunch of bodies at a problem, get like a bunch of sales reps, SDRs, whatever they are, go figure it out and like, figure out product market fit. And then like, if that works and it sticks, then we'll build a Marketing machine, blah, blah, blah. We did it the opposite way. I think that was super beneficial because by the time we launched, the marketing machine was like halfway built. And then we could scale that where we thought like we were getting good bang.

So did you kind of have like there was a marketing budget, but you kind of just needed to pick everything in one off and justify the costs?

Yeah, basically we had a pretty sizable budget. Like it was a pretty good budget. Like I think our budget even like when we had zero recurring revenue was like a solid like 2 million. Which honestly like not a lot of startups have that kind of budget. So I was definitely given a good amount of like things to play with. There was no team, it was just me. But I could use freelancers, contractors, hire up a couple of people. So there's like lots of flexibility in that.

Wait, I want to interrupt you on that and ask a question. So they give you $2 million budget. What's something that overworked in that $2 million budget? And then what's something that looking back, was a waste of budget and didn't work in that time?

Yeah, I'd say in the first year. So because we wanted to get to product market fit really quickly and the speed and velocity piece was like really important. The first and only thing I did is invent the brand and the general positioning that went with it and stood up like literally like a 10 page website. It was like the most hacky but cute, like really nice but you know, high converting website. But like literally 10 pages. There was like nothing else on there. So figured that out and then basically deployed a bunch of paid social spend on it. That was literally the first thing I did. So that told us in three months that this is a viable thing, that there is a need for this. I listened to every sales call that we had and we had like at the time like four sales reps or something or three maybe at the time that were just like taking these calls and closing deals and whatnot. And we were learning super fast from that and we got a place in. So we launched in September 2019. By the end of the year, we knew exactly like who would buy us and who wouldn't buy us and where there was a beachhead strategy looming. And so then we took that insight, which happened really fast and then said, okay, here's the plan for 2020. Here's the plan for how we're actually going to infiltrate these specific types of accounts and these specific icps.

And just for clarity, like when you joined, was it similar product as it is now, like creative as a service.

No, not at all. So what was the product?

Because I'm trying to just understand, like. Okay, got it. Like you're up to the website.

Yeah.

Then you put paid.

Yeah. The company used to be called Consys. Actually, if someone wants to go to Wayback Machine and pull up consys.com, you could probably see it. K O N S. That's what I was.

Actually. I'm doing that as you're doing that.

Literally. Okay, cool. Yeah. So Consys was basically like better version of Fiverr and Upwork. Yeah, that was all it was. And the width, like the breadth of like what we offered was quite limited. And the whole spiel was get design done in like 24 hours or something like that.

Okay, that's kind of what I'm looking for. So you had a great. You had a clear. Even though it ended up not being right. Right. You had a clear offering which is like, oh, this is something that we want to offer right now. It's not, I think like a lot of people, it depends on what company you work at.

I mean, it wasn't a clear offering because like marketing productized what we thought the offering could be. So we launched a slightly new offering only geared towards mid market and enterprise, which was not this weird pay as you go design, like upworky kind of thing. It was like a subscription. I designed the pricing myself. Like literally. It was like literally coming out of my brain based on some user interviews and whatnot that we had done. And this like test that we were running on the side. Like every single day we would look at like what the comments on Facebook would be, what are the sales calls, all the notes, all the win loss analysis from there. And we'd be like changing like the offering on the website literally every week. Every week we'd be like small iteration here, small iteration there. It was insane as like literally building the product as we were getting feedback, which is how software development honestly should be. Which is how like I think Paul Graham pioneered this term long time ago. Customer development I think he called it. That's basically what it is. You build it as you get feedback and validation.

Yeah, this is exactly the time that I was at Drift and I just wrote about this the other day where I was like, I just said something about like people mix up like positioning with just marketing's job. And it's like when you're in the role that you are in, which is so early in the company and you're sitting in that room like, and you're working together and you're, you're not making these changes just to change the copy. It's because you're iterating with product and trying to change the packaging. I bet for the duration of your four years at Superside, like you're able to tell such a compelling company story because you're working with the product team. I think where a lot of positioning fails is like product goes and builds the product and then it's like here you marketing position this and it's like, well no, no, no. Fundamentally like positioning has to involve the product because you wouldn't know what to build if you don't know what the positioning for that is going to be for. Yeah, that's like what I learned from David and Elias at Drift, which is like now that I've seen that and I'm hearing what you did, I can't unsee that. And again, this is why for like the founders that are listening, this is why you hire. You don't wait to get traction and then bring on marketing.

I know, I find that like a crazy thing. And until Superside, I was in that camp too. I was like, oh you. I've literally been in job interviews where I would be like, I don't think you need marketing right now. And I was so wrong because like you need it on day one because they're informing what it is that you're building in the first place. Like, where are you getting all this insight from?

Yeah, and like that is we were doing like weekly launches. And so like we would literally, here's what we think we're building. We would do weekly sprints and we'd say, okay, next week we want to launch this slack integration. We think this will be huge. Awesome. I guess I know what I'm working on for the week. You know, that's literally how you come up with your work. There's like, there's some like, when nothing's going on, you can do longer term work at a startup like this. But if you're the first marketing person, you're like, cool. Then we're going to spend the rest of the week like working with the product team, coming up with the messaging for that, coming up with the product marketing, the screenshots and we're all as a company, I also think it's like how you create that company momentum too. Then you're like, launch iterate learn. Yeah, it's just like, man, people go to companies and it's like we take three to six months to like roll out our positioning and it's like just, please just go.

Yeah.

Because you need the feedback and you need to iterate along the way. I couldn't find the consist one, but I see hassle free design for growing teams, dedicated team of top designers, fast turnarounds, reliable and affordable.

Oh my words.

I love that.

And just like coming up with nostalgia. Seriously, it's so cute.

Don't worry. Here's what's going to happen five years from now, 10 years from now, Supercy is going to evolve and they're actually going to come back to the old positioning and then everyone there is going to take credit for like initially for writing that and you're going to be like, what? That's my message.

I know that message well. Yeah, that's okay. I don't care about the credit.

What's old is new.

Yeah. What's old is new. It just comes back. Yeah. Over and over.

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All right, so we got a little nugget out of that story. What was. Okay, so you deployed paid social media.

Yeah. Learned really fast. Figured out the beachhead, knew exactly how to evolve the positioning and actually pricing. We got tons of pricing feedback through that.

Oh, sorry. Did you do the positioning on your own or did you hire somebody?

No, on our own. Like, it was just like the brand and positioning kind of went hand in hand and it was like a small team of the CEO, the CEO, me, and this like extremely new creative director who had joined alongside me who was in operations.

Did you have a framework or a doc where you're like, hey, we're going to do positioning. Here's the Google Doc template we're going to follow or how did it come up?

No, just honestly, like whiteboard. Yeah, whiteboarded a little bit actually. Like, it was interesting because even before I started, they had given me this, like, to the interview process, they'd given me like this as like assignment to like, kind of think about this. So I'd kind of done the work before I showed up. And then we just took that and like made it a bit better and then that was it. That's what we threw up.

Well, that's also like a side awesome story. That's like, so you get the job with your plan. It's not like you made up some and then you come in, there's like, hey, great. Like, we want to hire. See this plan this woman did. Like, we want this here's money to come work for us. Now go do this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, this is actually the nugget here is that, you know, a lot of people hate on like, oh, like, don't ask people to, like, you know, do assignments before you take the job and it should be a paid thing.

Like, yeah, okay, let me ask you this. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, I know it's counterintuitive and I'm gonna get canceled for this, but. No, just do it, man. Like, you're trying to prove you can do the job. Just do the work.

Okay, high five. The. When people say that to me, it means they don't. It's not the right job for them. Because if you found, if you were so fired up about taking that job, you would do it and you wouldn't. Like, if you're a designer or whatever. Like, obviously if we, if we ask you to do designs in the interview process and then we use the designs in our marketing and we don't hire you, like, yes, that's shitty.

That's shitty. Yeah.

But like, if you're want to be the marketing leader of this company, like, how on earth are you going to convince as well as you interview? Like, there's the personality interview and then there's like the no, what are you going to do here? And I think the fact that you got to come in and execute on that shows, you showed them right out of the gate, like, hey, I have a vision for this. Here's how this is going to work. Here's what we're going to do. Like, that's how you're going to get the job.

Yeah, especially that job because it's a high risk on both sides. Like, I am joining this, like, early stage company that could go to shit in six months. And then they're hiring this VP of marketing person who they're like, we don't even know exactly what we need. So they needed something tangible, I think, to like, hang their hat on and be like, confident that this could work. This could potentially work.

Yeah. Also I remember so, like, when I was at Drift, we were hiring and interviewing other VPs and even people that we wouldn't hire. Everybody would do some type of presentation or come in with one. And just inside of the company, like, I learned so much from candidates who would come in and like, break something down. Not information that you can steal, but like, the right candidate for a role is often going to be the one that like, teaches you about something and is like, oh, this person might be better at this than me.

Like, we should hire that person.

Yeah, absolutely. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I've learned a lot along the way for all sorts of candidates that you know, and sorts of roles that I've tried to hire. Yeah. Actually it's so funny because when that person teaches you something and you like clock them in your head, like, for me at least they stay with me forever. Like two of those people I'm talking to right now at ClickUp, for example, that we did not actually end up hiring at Superside for a variety of reasons. Not because they were like, not a good fit or anything. But. Yeah. It's just so funny how that happens.

I can think of one guy specifically that, like in the interview, like, he stood up in the interview and like rolled up his sleeves and like on.

The whiteboard, like, amazing.

Showed me something. And this was about like ABM and Enterprise.

Oh my God, I love that.

At the time, like, I was hiring marketers, we needed somebody to do abm and I was gonna manage that. This person had like 20, 30 years more years of experience than I did.

Wow.

And he came in and just was like, amazing. And I was like, we got to hire that guy.

Yeah. Did you?

Yeah.

Okay, sweet.

Yeah, it was amazing. And that's doesn't always happen that way.

Yeah.

But that's when the hiring process is like, oh, this is pretty obvious who we should hire.

Yeah. How do you do that? That thing that happened with you and this guy, how do you do that over zoom? That's my question. Because the whiteboarding.

Yeah, that's so true. Wow. Yeah. Here's how, like, I'm out of the loop. I am not like working in a company that is such a huge element of hiring is spending that time, spending.

That time and seeing like how someone thinks real time. I think what's happened with the remote hiring thing and the remote interviewing is that it's not easy to just like take post its and put it up and whiteboard it. Like you can kind of do it on virtual stuff like Miro or whatever, but it's yucky and it's not quite as real time.

Yeah.

And yeah, so much gets lost in that.

Yeah. Because they could present a deck to you, but that's not as like kind of free flowing and open as a whiteboard might be. That's interesting. All right, call into the listener line if. Do you have a way of. We'd love to hear how you're managing interviews and stuff for those companies remotely. You can pop into exit 5 and start that discussion. All right, super side. There's a lot we could tell. I've asked enough questions. I want to talk about when you decided to leave. Because the culmination of, like, deciding to leave or that thing is a big decision for people. How do you make it? And then, like, how did you choose ClickUp? And why'd you take the job? How did it come up? All that stuff is interesting to me.

Yeah, no, that is. I mean, it's funny because I've been trying to tell this story to other people, and I've noticed about myself that the story changes every time I tell it, which is, like. I don't know what that is because.

Like, with the story of why you.

Left and the how, like the orchestration, like, the order of operations of, like, how and why and blah, blah, blah, like, yeah, it's been changing as I tell it. It's just so bizarre because I think some things are becoming clear even to me. You know, stuff that you feel in your gut or is in, like, the back of your brain, but it hasn't, like, come to the forefront. It's like, things are more clear to me now that I've been at this job for two weeks and all that stuff is behind me. I don't know.

It's hard to explain, but I hear you 100%. I know that feeling.

Yeah. But I'm in Boston at my cousin's right now, just here for a wedding, and I was literally just telling them the story last night. And I started off by saying that for me, it comes down to one clear thing. And there was a day that I realized that there was a slight loss of enthusiasm, and that's the day that I decided to quit.

I would love to hear if you could share.

Yeah.

Like, did you start looking? Did you let people know that you're available? Did you go find recruiters? Like, and then how did you land at ClickUp?

Yeah, the first thing I did, and this is why I said earlier, like, this is, like, obviously very privileged position, and not everyone's in this position boat. But I think I had just somehow in the last year, a crazy amount of inbound recruiting stuff and just insane amounts. So all I did, like, I was on vacation, actually, and I just called up my boss when he was available because he was on PAT leave and I was on vacation, and it was, like, hard to schedule time, but finally got a hold of him, and I just said, I think I'm done. Like, I had the whole conversation with him and I was like, I think it's done. I think you should start looking for a replacement, and I'm going to start looking for a job kind of thing. So literally, that Night, I just sent like a standard message to every single person that was like kind of half credible saying, hey, I think I might be on the market. Let's chat. That's all I did. That's literally all I did. And yeah, ClickUp was born of that.

And was that just to see, like, of those messages? Let's just go take some calls and see how it goes.

Yeah, totally, absolutely. And like, there's some people that I Also follow on LinkedIn and the interwebs in general, you know, and there's some people that I admire. So it's always kind of nice when people that you admire kind of want you on the team. And that's kind of how ClickUp happened. Like the chief growth officer at ClickUp, like, he's actually maybe like lesser known because he's been on the consumer side and he's lesser known in B2B, I would say. But he's just brought together the thing that I've been trying to do forever, which is growth inside the product and then growth through marketing. I don't know what that's called. That's growth. And he's built this amazing org.

So do you report to the Chief Growth officer? Oh, cool.

That's right. That's right. But the growth team here is product and marketing.

Yeah. Which is awesome.

Which is awesome. And like, it's crazy how many companies aren't structured like that and those intertwinings aren't really there and it's like pulling teeth.

Well. And there's a lot of people who would want to be CMO and go to ClickUp and be like, well, I want to own some of those things and compete.

Yeah.

But, man, your life is going to be much easier if you know exactly what you're doing and where it fits with everything else. And to hear that stuff is aligned is cool.

Yeah. So what I loved about ClickUp was one, the CGO was there. He had built this org, which is like the dream org that I wanted to be a part of. I also thought that, you know, I'd never done like the slightly later stage, kind of, you know, 6,000 signups a day type company before. So just from a challenge perspective, I was kind of like, this would be cool. Now I'm going to have the full variety, the full spectrum of variety in my resume. I've done super early stage, I've done the growth stage, and now I can do kind of not necessarily late stage. They're still in growth stage, but they're a little bit more established. They have Pretty good product and, you know, they're at least known in the market. So that was kind of. Those were the two main factors I looked at.

Cool. You said that over the last year or so, you started to get a lot more inbound from recruiters. Do you think there was something that kicked that off? Was it the culmination of three years and superside growing and more people knowing about the company? Where did it come from? Because you started writing on LinkedIn, like your posts, you became someone that I saw all the time.

Really. I don't even write that much. I write like one post a month.

But that's what I know. But when you write what I think is cool about your LinkedIn strategy. So for people that are listening, that want to see somebody who's good at LinkedIn, when you write something, you go in though.

Yeah, there's some f bombs usually have.

Like a take or something specific or you something you did when you write, I mean, look, you say, I don't do much on LinkedIn. I'm looking at your post right now. 457 likes 81 comments from this lady who says she doesn't really do LinkedIn.

But I write one thing a month rather than one thing every day. Like, which is a lot of the LinkedIn influencers love that.

So you're not sharing some, like, corny quote. You're like writing something real or you have something to say.

Yeah, and I think my strat, I don't have a defined strategy. I honestly, whatever's big and percolating in my head, I like just like vomit it out typically.

So do you think that LinkedIn contributed to increasing your brand as a VP of marketing?

It probably did, but I actually suspect that it was more. I think it was twofold. One was, I think Superside was on the map officially. And then people are always curious, like, ooh, I'm seeing your ads. Ooh, I'm seeing who is the person behind this. And I think they just go look of like, who the heck these people are. And I think I just show up as part of that posse. Right? I think that's part of it. So I think supersight definitely helped me establish credibility.

So for people who are like, I don't want to be another one of those LinkedIn people. Like, I want to actually do the do the work and do the results. Like, I think what you said is so real, which is founders, CEOs, recruiters, whoever, they look for company, especially when you're in marketing, they look for companies who's doing Good marketing. And I think Superside was doing interesting things from a marketing perspective. And then exactly what you said. Yeah, I do it all the time right now I'm like, oh, no, that was a cool ad. Let me check this company out. I've been seeing this company, Apollo IO. They're like a Zoom Info competitor. I just was literally clicking on this thing before and I. I saw something, some marketing that they put out and I click on it and then I go and find out, oh, like, oh, interesting. They got this person doing marketing. Yeah, that's such a good point.

Point, Totally. So you kind of try to find the people behind the good marketing. Right. And I. That's how I find a lot of candidates for roles and whatnot as well. So I think that definitely helped that we had good marketing and then that I could ride the coattails of the stuff that we were creating, our team was creating. And then I think the second thing that helped was you had me on your podcast and a few other podcast hosts had me on a podcast in rapid, like, succession. Like, it was like every month. I had like two podcasts somehow booked. It just so happened in the last year. And I think that probably helped. I think those two things together really helped.

Well, I'm glad to hear that, but inviting you on is the easy part. I think you win people by.

Huh.

I just learned something from this person over the last hour. I'm going to send you a message. I love that. Thanks for sharing that with me. Yeah, please, whoever's listening, clip this out. Make that an ad or something. All right, so you've only been ClickUp for two weeks, so maybe in a couple months you'll come back on and we could do like a first 90 days in a new VP marketing role. Especially working with growth and product. I think would be super interesting. But just give me. We'll wrap up with this, like a sneak peek of like, you know what, what does a new VP come in and do, especially at a huge company like this? Are you just listening to GONG calls for two weeks or what have you been doing? And how do you come in and make an impact?

Yeah, no, for sure. I could easily spend two weeks on listening to GONG calls and win loss reviews and whatnot. But that is not the ClickUp way you drink from the fire hose here. This is a real thing at ClickUp. So it just so happened that they do this, like, internal leadership summit every year. It's kind of not really an SKO or anything, but it's like, like, come to Jesus kind of conversations. And it's like a lot of leaders in the gtm. Org. So it's like product marketing, sales and customer success essentially. And I think support was also part of it. And it happened to be the day. Like it was on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday was my last day at Superside. So they said, come to this thing. It's the perfect time. My sign date was actually in September, like after Labor Day, long weekend. And they were like, you should come to this. This is going to be important for you. And then as it turns out, we just changed my start date to then, but it was like the weekend. Like, I finished on Friday and then Saturday I flew to Miami to go to this thing and Crazy. I think if I hadn't had that deep dive with like that leadership team, it goes like maybe 30 people in various sessions and meetings all the time. I think if I hadn't had that, like, I'd be like, way far behind. Like, I knew leaving that summit, I knew exactly what the big problems were where I could make a dent. Who are the players? Right. That's a big piece. Because they have a guy for everything here. There's a guy for everything. You know, it's like, because it's a.

Big company, I hope it's not actually a guy for everything.

Guy, gal, whatever. You know, there's a person for everything. Right.

So what's the total employee at the company? Is it.

I think it's like a thousand.

Okay.

Yeah, I think it's like a thousand.

Yeah. So you've reached like, website. Yeah. That's tough because there's a lot of gatekeepers. You can't just come in here. No, go change everything. Because that's Mary's area. You can't come in here and step on Mary's toes 100%.

I was like, this enterprise paid sucks. Can I go change it? They were like, nope, you have to submit a ticket and then do this and. But I was like, oh, my lord.

I would have already been fired. Sorry.

No, but I know all the peeps now and they want to help me. Right. So that summit, like, solidified a lot.

Of that stuff without, like giving away the company, the strategy and stuff. But what do they want out of you? Like, why hire? Why bring in if they got this great growth and product team.

Yeah.

What do they see? The role of marketing doing my number.

One mission, it sounds like nothing, but it's a really big mission, is that ClickUp has been successful in very small pockets of, like, micros and SMBs and with agencies that is the bulk of their customer and user base. They have some amazing logos. I will give them credit that they have some really amazing mid market enterprise logos. But that is not the bulk of it. That is not the bulk of their signups. That's not the bulk of their revenue. So their strategy is we're going to go upstream, upmarket and the way to unlock mid market enterprise and as my boss calls it, go wall to wall inside a company is not something that they have nailed. They don't have that playbook, they don't have the people, they don't have a content machine. It's all like the scaled stuff, right? It's like SEO engine, plg, ba ba ba. But they don't have like the how do I get the entire company to buy ClickUp end to end? They don't know how to do that.

I swear I've seen ClickUp like plastered in hallways of airports. Am I making that up?

Probably. I mean, they've shut all that down because they want to build it more efficiently, which is another reason why I'm here, I think, because I've did that at super.

All right, so you're going to build brand that way, but that's cool. Okay, so, and what's cool about partnering with the growth or being with the growth team like that? Like you're going to go do enterprise stuff, but you're going to have like this kind of like secret weapon team helping.

Exactly. Like that engine is like, keeps the lights on. And then we just build on top of that and we identify from the 6,000 signups a day. Like our strategy is very simple. You identify of those 6,000, who are the ones? How do you identify? How do you pql them? How do you know which ones can actually grow with us? What's the expansion play? And then you deploy that playbook. And then of course you cast a wider net and a bigger shadow through amazing social and content marketing. And all the stuff that we don't do for some reason we used to.

Be like, call them. That's how we're going to call them. We're going to call all 6,000. We're going to call them 15 times in the first two weeks. That's how we're going to get them. We're going to call them.

Yeah, sales tried that. I think they did call them and they were like f you by hang up.

All right, my friend, it's great to have you on. Let's have you on in a couple, in two, three months. I always appreciate trading emails with you and Marita. People can go to LinkedIn and send you a message. I know you'll. I can't wait till you email me because I know for feeling you're going to get so many people that reach out or.

Well, I'm in the community now. I'm in the Exit 5 community. I signed up last week, so.

Took you long enough. Goodness gracious. Why didn't I give it to you? Bad follow up by my team.

I was waiting to see if I would get a credit card at ClickUp but no, no dice. So then I was like, I'll just use mine.

About that we usually send, you know, we usually onboard the VIPs with something special. I have to think about something else Anyway. Okay. Yeah. So if you're in exit five. Yeah. No be or if you want to send a message, that's a great paywall benefit. Go join. All right. You're awesome. I always appreciate talking to you. I hope you have a nice weekend in Boston. Enjoy the wedding and I'll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

All right.

Exit.

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