#199: Marketing Leadership | From Employee #4 to CMO: The Path to Marketing Leadership with Sylvia Lepoidevin, CMO at Kandji

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My guest on this podcast went from the first marketing hire and employee number four at this startup to now they have 300 employees. She's the CMO. She runs marketing and the company has a $850 million valuation. Her name is Sylvia Lapojdevin. She's a CMO at Kanji and we had an awesome conversation about her path to marketing leadership, what's actually working right now in marketing. She told me about why paid search is working, but she wants to make a big bet. Inorganic but has some hesitations about what's happening with AI. We also talk about the role AI.

Can play for marketing teams and why.

She thinks she might not have to build such a big team because of what's possible with AI for B2B marketers today. It was a great conversation. A Little mix of tactical and path to cmo. Here's my conversation with Sylvia Lapoin. All right, I have a great guest today. Sylvia Lapo Divin. Who I just learned how to pronounce her name. How did I do? A minus. All right. Killed it. So Sylvia is a CMO at a company called Kanji. How do you say it?

Kanji.

Kanji. Kanji.

She seemed trip up on that one.

It is what it is. Look, when I was at Drift, the company was initially drift with 2 t's cuz they didn't have the domain. And for like 4 years after that, anytime somebody would write in. And then I had one of my mentors used to troll me. He's big. How are things at Drift? And he'd spell it like with three Fs and three Ts. So, you know, we don't always name the companies we work at, Sylvia. We turn them into brands. Right?

Yeah. Kanji is technically the name of the most poisonous jellyfish in the world. And the founders chose it because it was easy to pronounce, which, you know, we can agree to disagree on that. But it is a unique name and the domain was available. So here we are.

All right. Yeah, I love that. That's how like how I named Exit 5 was like, it's a great story and I can tell a marketing story about it, but I really just wanted to call it like you told me before you were OG dgmg. It was initially called the A list on Patreon, you're OG member. And I wanted to rename it and I wanted just like a simple name. And so I was like, kind of the art of marketing is like, it's not always like you have this. It's not like a name just like speaks to you. And I feel like some people when you go through product naming exercises or company is like, maybe there is, oh, this, you know, this Japanese phrase for whatever has been the inspiration for my life. Well, I didn't have anything like that. So I was like, well, what am I going to call it? Well, it's kind of like a place. Okay, let's come up with names about a place. Oh, Vermont. Okay, there's something in Vermont Exit 5. That was how it came, you know, and I think it's funny. And then how do you talk to founders like, oh, how'd you name your company? I don't know. Just came up with it. Tom had an idea over drinks.

Yeah. People always ask about the name, like there's going to be this grand story. And oftentimes there's not, and that's okay. And, yeah, I was an early DGMG member, and actually, now that you say a list, I think I was part of the initial A list group when you first posted on LinkedIn. And I joined at that point, I believe, and then it changed to djg. I didn't even remember that until you said, hey, list, and then it came back to me.

That's so cool.

Hell, yeah.

All right. I mean, it's always better. You know, sometimes I do podcasts. Like, I do podcast interviews with a lot of people, and I'm not always going to know everybody. We might not always have a backstory, but sometimes, like, you interview a CMO or whoever, and you have no prior history or no prior chemistry, and I'm like, no, it's always. If I got somebody who's, like, listening to the podcast and is around, this audience is always so much better. So it's a treat to have you and you have an awesome story. We're going to get into it. So you joined Kanji. I'll get it. You joined Kanji. I'm from Worcester, Massachusetts. There's nothing I can do about how things come out. You joined as head of marketing, you're employee number four at the company, and now you're CMO five years later. And I'm calling this out because this is, like, exactly why we do this podcast. There's like, either we talk to subject matter expert, you know, hey, we're gonna talk about LinkedIn ads today. But more and more have been. Our community is about helping people grow. And I love hearing from somebody who just recently went through this crazy, crazy time. You still look amazing. Your hair looks amazing after your five years. Mine, like, all fell off during that time period, so congrats to you on that.

I've definitely aged, but.

Yeah, right? I know. I see pictures of myself from, like, 2016. I'm like, dude, you look so young.

Every time I celebrate an anniversary, like, f. Five years, I was like, five years feels like 50. Four years feels like 40. It really does.

It's crazy. So you. You joined employee number four, joined his head of marketing today. Your CMO. The company has 300 employees. You got a marketing team, and company just raised a Series D, and the company's valued at $850 million. So that's amazing. And that's the story that I want to dig into. Just the progression from head of marketing to VP to cmo. How's that sound?

That sounds fantastic. And I think the journey from 0 to 850 million. First of all, very rare. And actually are now CRO and I join within a week of each other five years ago. So I was head of marketing. He was head of sales at the time. We both grew with the company and are now CMO and CRO. So that's been just, you know, incredible partnership.

That's helpful too. Like when you can grow together like that. What did you do before? Where were you at in your marketing career? Like, before you join. You decide to join a startup as first marketing hire. Head of marketing. They clearly hired a head of marketing for a reason. You weren't hired in as like, marketing manager. So what did you do before that?

So my big dream when I was young was to be a CMO by 30, and I ended up being CMO by 29. So I'm a perfectionist. So I.

Hold on. I have a question.

Yes.

And, like, how young? Like when you were seven?

No, like, actually how I got into marketing is. My parents were a nonprofit world. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Africa, my whole childhood. And then I moved to the US at 17, going to college. Which major to choose? And I went to business, the business center. And I was like, what's the least boring business major? And that's how I chose marketing. And I wanted business because my parents were a nonprofit. They, you know, don't make a lot of money. And I wanted to be different. I wanted success, I wanted to build something. And so business always stood out to me. And so, yeah, least boring major marketing. Never looked back. I'm sorry. So glad that I did it. I love the variety, the pace, the dynamism, the fact that I can be, like, buried in spreadsheets one day and, you know, playing with design and Figma the next day. I love that about it. So basically, that was my dream. So I started out, I basically landed this job at this tech company called Flo Cast. And I was maybe 22 years old.

I've definitely heard of Flowcast.

They're an accounting software company.

Accounting, okay.

Yeah. So they started in la.

That's why I knew it has a weird spelling. It flows cash.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool.

Also, yeah, speaking of names. And I was the first marketing hire there, and that's really. That was my first big break. I kind of came in with this chip on my shoulder, like, okay, this is my shot to prove myself. And when I interviewed there, they actually told me they're like, you're the least experienced and youngest candidate that we're interviewing. So I have no idea why they hired me. Raw passion, maybe. But I started hiring.

Okay, what do you want? Yes, I am. And.

Yeah, okay, exactly. And so I started. Started there, and so I grew the marketing function there. And that company's actually valued at 1.6 billion now. They're eyeing an IPO. They're killing it. And so that's how I started. And then, because I wanted to be a cmo, I was doing a lot of growth stuff there, and I wanted a variety of experiences before I went to cmo. And so I went to a company called Data Fox, and I worked in product marketing. And that was really helpful in just kind of building out that messaging, storytelling side of my skill set. And they actually, eight months in, were acquired by Oracle. And so that was great. I got that experience. And then after, I didn't want to work at Oracle. I love building Oracle is not where I wanted to be. And so that's when I found Kanji Dang.

Do you make any money in a transaction like that?

I made a little bit. I paid off my student loans.

Nice.

And I think I paid off my car at the time, which was not a nice car at all, but I'd say it was minimal. I mean, I didn't join super early there. I think it was employee 60 or something. But it was still an amazing experience. Just the experience of earning any money from your equity.

Right.

Changes your whole perspective.

No, I. I asked you that because, like, I talked to a lot of people who have had exit events like that, and for some reason, I'm always weird about asking them if they made any money. I'm not asking because I want to know how wealthy somebody is. It's just more like, I feel like so many people that listen to this podcast, like, you join a company at some point. Point, it's like this weird thing, right? Like, equity is such a part of everybody's comp package. You got to get equity, you got to ask for equity. But nobody ever talks about, like, the other side. Like, oh, how much did you make? Like, did. Oh. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. So you were only there for eight months, but you were still able to make enough to pay off some loans. Okay, that's interesting. Like, so I hope you don't mind me asking that, but that's where it comes from.

Yeah, not at all. And I think a lot of people are really uneducated on equity, even folks that are much later in their careers because they've never had that exit. And so it's just been something that's been Theoretical the whole time. And so they're just going to go after comp and the equity kind of gets forgotten. I always respect when I hire someone and they negotiate equity. I have so much respect for that because it shows that they are one just bought into the vision and building and you know, being a part of growth. But it also just shows that they're educated in terms of their thinking long term. They're not just thinking about the next paycheck.

This made me think of something else also, which is like being a first time head of marketing or hiring somebody at a startup and CEOs like, okay, you can go hire two people, we got headcount. Okay, go out, do the hiring. All of a sudden you send out an offer, that person starts negotiating equity with you and you're like, I don't. Wait, what? I don't know. It's like so many things in the job are like a forcing function to learn that. And I'm like, I couldn't be like, hold on, let me get dad in and dad can tell you all about the equity. You know, like the CEO, I'm not going to bring my boss in. I'm like, I got to learn this, I got to go find out how to talk about it. And so you learn so much that way. And how nice does that feel by the way? Even just something like being able to pay off your car, pay off your student loans. That was such a big one. When I finally was able to pay off my student loans, I was like, okay, now all the money I earn is mine. Mostly.

Mostly. Exactly. And it was actually the point in my life when I went from negative net worth to positive net worth. And that was a huge moment. And so, you know, that's cool.

It's good to hear you talk about like wanting to grow and wanting to be successful. It's interesting you come from a background where your parents were at a nonprofit and so like, you know, growth and money wasn't a big priority. I think sometimes we swung far in the pendulum of like, it's like not okay to like want to be successful sometimes. Like if you write a post about how I want to. You want to become cmo, I feel like a lot of the comments would be like, this is toxic, you know, work hustle culture. And I'm like, no, it doesn't have to make you into a jerk. But like, you know, I think we're on this planet to like go do things, to make things, to strive to be successful. It's refreshing to hear you come on and be like, yeah, that's who I am. That's my brand, damn it.

I love that. I agree. I think growing up, my parents would sort of talk badly about people who are wealthy and they would describe, oh, they're probably unhappy. And I always just kind of questioned that when I was a kid and I felt like I wanted to, at least I was curious, you know, it's not like I felt like I needed money to be happy, but I also felt like this idea that if you are wealthy, you're unhappy, I didn't really buy into that. And so I think we, we get taught a lot of different things about wealth. And I agree. You talk about wanting to be successful or make money, you know, it's kind of frowned upon. And I don't think that should be the case. I think that's part of our fire and our drive and part of why I worked so hard in those early days and came into that company, Flowcast chip on my shoulder. I was working like 12 hour days at the time and it was because I didn't have a safety net. It was like if I failed, I always had in the back of my mind, I'm going to be homeless. That was my big fear. And that created so much drive for me and I evolved past that now. Now I have different things that motivate me. But I think that was in a way, kind of helpful in the beginning and it really drove me to try to build something and that was like a fire that I had and I love that.

Another thing about your background is like in your current job, you've been there for five years, right? But before that. So you just mentioned a bunch of successes, right? But look at the time span, people listening to this podcast. You were at Data Fox for a year and a half. So before you're in this current role where you've now grown to cmo, you've been there five years. Before that, you're at Data Fox for a year and a half, you're at Flo Cast for two years, you're at another company for two years, you're at another company for one year, three months. So I'm saying this because I had a similar path where until I found the company where I was able to grow my career, each of the other stops was not. It was a huge learning, but I think they're just learnings. You're putting your bucket. Then I land in this opportunity similar to yours where like I joined as marketing manager, I ended up getting promoted to director. They brought in like a Real VP over me. That didn't work. Then they were like, okay, I think it's time for you to take this job. And so I grew on a similar path, but before joining that company, I worked at five companies in six years. And I was talking to somebody the other day. She was hiring for a role, and she's looking for a head of marketing. And she's like, one of my concerns is that a lot of the applicants that we have, these head of marketings, they jump around every year. They jump around every two years. And that's a red flag for me. I'm like, I can understand why you'd say that. But at the same time, like, what if your company could be the place where this person now can be, like, plant their flag and grow for five years? You know what I'm trying to get. I don't know if you agree with my perspective that or not, but I think it's okay to hop around a little bit to then find the place where you're going to land.

Yeah. I think what matters so much more than the tenure is the story. And so every time I interview candidates, and I actually pulled some stats on this because I was doing a talk on hiring, I've done 500 interviews just in my time at Kanji in the last five years. So tons of interviewing. Right. And what matters to me is if you have a clear story about why you made each move, and not just obviously why you left the previous company should be part of it, but also why you went to the next one. What were you trying to build? What path were you trying to create? And I'll ask them, you know, what do you want to create here in this next chapter? How does this support your big vision? And I would say nine out of 10 times, people don't have a clear answer to any of those questions. And then that, to me, is a red flag. If you don't have a clear story of why you made those moves, then that's the red flag, more so than the time itself.

All right, let's get into you joining. So what changes between, like, we can talk about things you did at the company as the company has grown, but more on, like, the career side of things, like, what changes from being like, you know, marketing manager, individual contributor maybe to head of marketing, to now cmo. And you've said you've wanted to be a CMO from the beginning. So what is it that a CMO needs to do versus, say, a marketing manager or individual contributor?

Yeah, such a good question. I mean, I Think the. Honestly, I've reinvented myself many, many, many times over on this whole journey. So I think the most important thing, because it's very rare to start as the first marketing hire and grow to the CMO and still be here today. That is an incredibly rare thing. And I think it requires you to continually reinvent yourself. So there's not just like a few things that have changed. Everything has changed. And often what it evolves into really is more of a like, self awareness, personal reflection, personal growth. How am I showing up as a human? How am I being authentic? How am I leading and inspiring people? It becomes a lot more about the person you are versus the work that you're doing. And I. When I first started at Kanji, I was very kind of like, professional walls up. I was very perfectionist. I'm going to check all the boxes and do all the right things. And I was doing all the jobs. I've done every single job in marketing in this company myself. And so, yeah, really turned from like, execution to leadership. And leadership sounds cool, but it's really hard. And it's really about looking at yourself really honestly and figuring out what you need to change and, you know, showing up as your true, authentic self. Because if you don't, people will see right through that and you're not going to have the type of connection with your team that you need to really inspire and grow people. And so, yeah, I would say many layers of reinvention along the way on that journey and. But the biggest, biggest change is moving from execution to leadership. And leadership is everything that goes into that from, like, personal growth, reflection, communication with your peers, with your boss, with your team. You know, it's really about just like communicating all around and making sure that you're working well with the team. And some people don't want to do that. Some people prefer to stay in execution mode. Great. There's great roles for that as well. But I've had to really reinvent kind of my entire self, honestly, along this journey to get here.

Yeah, you mentioned an important point about the management side of things. It's like your job is to meet with the CEO, is to meet with the CRO, is to be in product conversations, is to basically be like the liaison for the function of marketing for the entire company. And I think I was like, hesitant to embrace that at first. And I'm more just like staying in the landing pages and like, ugh, VP of Sales reached out to me and wants to go for a coffee. Like, again, I don't Want to do that. I don't like those kind of meetings. Well, that it is the job. And if you're not willing to do those, that is, you need to take that call from the head of product. You need to, you know, be in that meeting with the cfo. And then your job is to represent those functions for marketing so marketing can go do a better job and so you can help the business win. And if you're not willing to, like, understand that that's the job and to be in there, you're not going to be super happy in the role.

I agree. And I think there's two main ways that I look at the job right now, at least my current focus. One is internal marketing, and the other is building the team. And internal marketing is like, I've put a huge focus on this recently and it's made a massive difference. But it's basically like my job is internal marketing. Going to every single person in the company, telling them about what we're doing, getting them bought into the vision, getting the resources that I need, getting smart people to speak at my, you know, events and in videos and things like that. And that's the job. And then building.

Let's pause on that and go into that. Because people often ask, like, what good internal marketing looks like. And so tell me more specifically, other than just like, meeting with people, like, what types of internal marketing initiatives do you have? Or is there regular meetings you're presenting at? Are you sending regular updates? If so, what do they look like? People want to hear that type of stuff. So I want to pause there.

Yeah, the main thing I've been doing is we have all these different team weekly meetings, you know, the weekly customer success meeting, the weekly sales meeting, et cetera. And so one thing I've been doing is showing up to each of those meetings and giving really, you know, I put a lot of work into, like, the presentation that I give there. I want to wow people in that meeting. It's not just, hey, here's a project we're working on, here's what to expect, blah, blah, blah, like, that's not that interesting. I found that those go best if I really show up and tell a story. And so it's like taking all my external storytelling passions and just pointing them internally as well. And a lot of times, yes, just like, showing up to the weekly customer success meeting, telling that story. And I'll have people slacking me afterwards saying, I want to get involved in this program or that program, or, you know, if I need their help on something later, then they're happy to help. And so that's been a huge part of it. Also just speaking on our all hands, same thing. Really putting work into those presentations and really wowing people with what I'm saying and telling a really strong story around it. And then with my executive team, so like our CRO and CEO cfo, those are a lot more one on one. So it's sitting down with each one of them. I actually started doing this thing recently where I just started calling people because I felt kind of disconnected from the executive team. So I would just pick up the phone and call them with no agenda and we'd end up having the best conversation, like get some new ideas, you know, make some progress, brainstorm something. And so sometimes it doesn't have to be that structured. It can literally just be like pick up the phone and call someone. Which has made a big difference.

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So the conversations are good. Those are super helpful to be able to do that. One thing that comes up often in the community is like, hey, I'm creating all of this stuff. I'm creating, I'm sharing our goals, I'm creating decks, I'm creating, you know, internal pages about marketing. I'm sending out company emails and updates, but people still say they don't know what's going on. Do you have any thing like that that you're doing where you're like, I guess more like asynchronously communicating, like, here's a status update on marketing, here's what we're doing.

Yeah, for a while I would send. I've basically put together a deck every week and what the deck and actually I didn't do the deck. My team did it. I would have a deck with a bunch of slides and it was essentially like a highlight reel. And I had two sections to it. One was here's what we shipped last week and this other was here's what we're shipping next week. And it was completely visual. There was hardly any words on it. And I found that really worked best because I would show a screenshot of the blog post we published, or a screenshot of the big announcement we made, or a screenshot of a comment a customer left on something where they were really excited about it. And those really worked best because I find if you try to make it too lofty or too numbersy or too frameworky, you lose people. And so I found the best thing was just the highlight reel. Each slide is one thing and it's just a big screenshot and that I Had people reaching out to me saying, wow, marketing is doing so much. And I would be sitting here like, we've been doing this the whole time. You just didn't see all of it. And so, yeah, I would say just keep it really visual and really simple. And, you know, I think sometimes we get so caught up in all of our, like, frameworks and themes, and sometimes you just kind of have to throw all that out the window and ask yourself, like, what's the highlight reel?

I also think, like, internally, people, if you can show them how the marketing stuff relates to what they're doing, I think that goes a long way. Like, you can either give your team a plan and say, here are the instructions. Go do it. And they're gonna do it and be whatever about it. Or you can be like, you figure it out. You come up with the solutions. Like, you're more engaged if you come up with the solution yourself. Anyway, for me, it was like, how do I get the engineers to, like, not fall asleep when we're talking about marketing? Well, it's like, hey, that thing you've been building, you know how it's going to do X, Y and Z? Well, check this out. Here's what people are saying about it, and they're like, they love that. Okay, this is a. You're the feedback loop, right? And so it's like, look at this reporter wrote this article in this publication about the thing that you're doing. Like, that's pretty dang cool. Or I remember even being like, in the early days, we did, like, a product update blog post, and we did it in a really good way and it was really successful. And I remember showing the engineers, like, 1200 people in the last three days, like, read this article about the thing that you built, and that was a light bulb for them. It's like, oh, there's actually people out there. So the more you can connect it, whether it's how you help the HR team with some, like, employment branding stuff that ended up landing this can, it's like, you got to find those small wins to show each team. And then they see marketing as a resource that is a net positive for the company, which is the place they work at and want to feel proud of. I think people genuinely want to feel proud of what they do and where they work.

Yeah, I agree. And I think I'm so glad you mentioned engineering, because I think that's one of the teams that I've been so surprised at how much they want to hear from me. And they get so excited when I share a recap of a launch with stats like that. You know, 5,000 people saw this LinkedIn post or viewed the blog or here's some comments that people left, and they were excited about it. And that means so much to them because oftentimes I think they feel like they're in this. This black box and they're building whatever they're told to build. And if you just give them some insight into how much people are loving it, they eat that up.

All right, so you mentioned. So that's a little bit on internal marketing. And then do you have, like, a week? Like, I remember I would send like a. Every Friday, I'd send an update. Do you have anything like a regular cadence like that?

Well, the deck that I mentioned with the, like, shipping last week, that. And then what's happening the upcoming week, I would send that on Mondays every week. And then.

Yeah, I like that one. So it's like, here's what we did this week, results, and here's what we're doing next week. Yeah, I like that.

Yep, exactly. And then every time we have a big launch of any kind, like a product launch or a big content launch, then I'll usually send an email at the end of the day to everyone just sharing a recap of, here's what went out. Here's some of the comments we got. Here's how many views we have on these different things so far. Here's how much our website traffic spiked. You know, things like that. So, yeah, the Monday regular and then the ad hoc. If there's a big launch, I'll send it at the end of the day.

Okay, cool. That's helpful. The other thing you mentioned is building the team. So what are you doing intentionally there? That's part of this job. When you say building the team, of course you're hiring, but there's more to it than that. What are you doing?

So hiring is a big part of it, for sure. Right now, I'm really focused on employer brand, which is not something we've really put a lot of weight behind in the past. But my thought on this is like. Like, if we're a company that people want to work for, we'll be able to go and get the best people. And the best people is the difference between us absolutely killing it and us being an okay company. What the difference between those is the people. And so employer brand's been a big focus. So I'm doing a lot of speaking. I'm doing a lot of local events, I'm doing a lot of just like up leveling the careers page, et cetera, all that stuff. So that's definitely been a big focus. And then.

But do you see this as like employer brand for you as a CMO hiring or like as the broader company employment brand?

I would say both. I'm just trying to kind of lead by example and do it myself. And so I've been doing a lot of speaking engagements and things like that just to try to kind of like lead the charge for everyone. And selfishly, I, I want to build that brand to hire my marketing team, but I also know that's going to benefit other teams as well. And then other initiatives are more company level. But I care a lot about. I think as a cmo, you can take or not take the opportunity to kind of be the face of the company from an employer brand perspective. And I want to take that opportunity. So it's really going to trickle down to both.

Yeah.

And then from a recruiting standpoint, some really interesting things I've been trying out. I've been cold LinkedIn messaging people. And so our recruiting team, we have an internal recruiting team. They do a lot of outreach, of course, but I found that if I go and message somebody, then I'll get a lot higher response rates on that recruiting effort than if our recruiting team does it. And so a lot of times if they have. Yeah, if they have a list of people they're reaching out to, they'll reach out to them three or four times. They will.

I don't want the message from the recruiter. I want the message from the CMO who would be my boss. It feels different when that person is like, hey, we should talk. Okay, sure.

Exactly. And I'll send them like the most basic message. I'll just be like, I'm hiring this role and that's it. You know, it's not that complicated.

Yeah.

And I've just gotten just incredible responses rates from that. And so that's been really helping with our internal recruiting.

Well, I like this. I think more, more people need to hear. This is like the purpose of being on LinkedIn doesn't have to be for your own ego. You can definitely like create content and become a thought leader in your field, whatever, if you want to be that. But the value from a recruiting standpoint, like people are everything. The most important thing you can do as a CMO is to build an amazing team. Well, LinkedIn is the best recruiting tool there is. And so you can literally go find people, message people. And if you're someone who is active There, that message is going to land better than someone who's never been there. And like, clearly this person hasn't updated their profile in 15 years. But I go to Sylvia's page, I see she's okay, she messaged me, let me go check out what this company does. I click at her page, I see she's been writing about stuff going on, you know, oh, 300 people, $850 million Series D. Oh, interesting. All those things count. It's cool to hear you say that. It's not just for yourself though, it's like for the benefit of the company. I think marketing plays a huge role in employment brand. The challenge is having time to do it separate from lead. Like all of a sudden the HR team wants you to do all the employment brand stuff and then there's.

Yeah, that is not enough challenge for that. So true. The other thing I've been doing in terms of developing the team, I have this new philosophy for how I want to structure the team and it's that I want there to be as little interdependencies as possible. And so I want everyone to be self sufficient. And I actually think this is a really great use case for AI. So it feels like in a lot of traditional marketing teams you have the growth team and they're launching a campaign and then they kind of like hand over a bunch of stuff to the content folks and the content folks make the content and then they hand them to design and design makes the design. I think AI can plug in some of these places and allow each member of the team to really be fully self sufficient in their own role. So social media content, for example, they shouldn't have to go to design for every single design. Like can we leverage AI or can we also create templates and things for them so that they are fully self sufficient in their role? And that's not to say everyone shouldn't collaborate, but if we're collaborating, let's make it fun and interesting, let's make it about brainstorming, let's make it about partnership and ideas. Let's not make it about like, oh, I'm just waiting on this thing from this other person. And so I think this is going to help us move a lot faster and just kind of, yeah, enable folks to really be able to look at something and be like, I built that and I want to create that for my team. That's something I'm passionate about for myself. That's why I love starting at early stage companies. But it's a big shift in my Thinking about structuring the marketing team, it's like how can each person be responsible and fully responsible for something? Obviously there's going to be some little exceptions to that, but how can we set things up and leverage, you know, AI and these other tools to make them just completely self sufficient in their role?

So you think you can have a smaller team than you may have needed 10 years ago?

I think so, to be honest. And I don't think it's necessarily a smaller team. I think they're just completely different roles. Instead of having a, you know, three designers and three writers and then three growth folks, maybe I can have. Maybe they're not all growth folks, but maybe there are nine people that are each kind of owning their own stream and that way we can do more. And so I don't think it's necessarily about, you know, making the team smaller. I think it's just about. It allows us to do more of a variety of things.

Yeah, and that's okay. My hatch is my producers that you got to clip that. That's a clip because that's the AI take that. I think people are missing which is like we're all obsessed with like it's going to replace our jobs. The craft of marketing is going away. All the copy is written by ChatGPT. I think of it more as like and you mentioned earlier, like yes, you're the cmo but you're like, you know, in Canva, making landing pages, writing copy, making decks and I like to have my hands in that stuff too. So I think the real exciting opportunities. It basically turns every marketer into like a full stack marketer. Right. And so not all this is possible today but like you can start to see where it's going like to build website pages and landing pages with no developer, no designer. That's going to be possible. Right. Like I think everything is just going to be like Canva. And so instead of. I'm not saying we're not going to need designers, you need a strong designer. But I bet you I can get a lot of things like 90% of the way there's on my own. And how much of your career did you come up? It's like wrote the copy, copy sits in a Google Doc for three days while it goes over to design gets developed up. There's a five, takes us five days to get a page out. Just examples like that. And then you start to get in some of the things like ways you can use audio. There's tools like hey gen which has somebody. Have you seen that at all. Have you seen hey Gen. No, I've.

Heard the name, but I don't know much about it.

So it's hey, it's H E Y G E N. And basically they can take a bunch of like your photos and videos and make an avatar of you.

Interesting.

I actually did something similar to this. It was called Sector S E C T A. So you mean like AI Headshots? Basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a video and so it would literally be like you'd think that it was me talking on a podcast video. Now, some of it is still a little bit like, you can tell it's AI, but I'm trying to see the future in it and be like, wait a second. If we can do that, I should be able to like write a script for a product video. And it should just be able to make a product video, right? With all the right inputs. We have the design files, we have the graphics, we have the copy. That's the stuff that I'm like, man, that would be amazing if instead of like, let's go make this video, film it for two weeks, do all that. If we can do stuff like this as marketers, I love that. I think that's a good take on AI and that's how I would make like the steel man argument for it in marketing.

Yeah, I totally agree. And something else I did recently which the self sufficient approach is kind of like the next iteration of this. But one incremental step I made is I actually organized the team into squads and each squad was focused on a particular motion or stream. And so we had like the paid squad and we had the product launch squad and we had an SEO squad. And so what I did is I, instead of having the team, you know, give the ball to this person, give the ball to that one. Each squad had a weekly meeting. And so the paid squad, for example, would be, you know, design, dev, content them, you know, et cetera. Maybe not just those people specifically, but someone who could handle all those things. And then each squad would meet weekly. Each squad had an asana board that had all their projects for the quarter. And it really helped, that helped the team move faster. But now I feel like I'm iterating a step beyond that now, which is making everyone as self sufficient as possible. So it's almost kind of like you don't need the squad, you are the squad. So it was a step in the right direction, but now I want to take it even further.

I love that. And so do you see building out A team. Like there's been similar models. This where you build like small pods of people so you have three people on the team right now, you're going to go to 10. What roles are you hiring for and how do you think you're going to structure the team?

Yeah, so the big pivot we're making right now is really leaning into brand and leaning into more of a creator style content brand. And I think this is really the future for all B2B companies. I think B2C has kind of started to figure it out and B2B as usual is a few steps behind and so we're really leaning into brand. And so I'm hiring roles. Like I hired a social media content role. I'm hiring actually a research role. I'm really excited about this one. I think original research is going to be such an up level for our content. So this is things like surveys, but it could also be leveraging first party data. Like with within our product we have so much data, it's a data gold mine. And so I want to hire someone whose full time job is literally just looking at all that data and storytelling with it. And so it's like a research role but that's turning it into a content engine. And there's some great companies, I mean Gong I think is a classic example of a company that's done this really well. They took all the data from inside their product, they turn it into a content machine. And so I'm hiring someone for that and then I'm also hiring a couple product marketers because I think product marketers are just incredible roles. They're so versatile. If you want content, if you want storytelling, if you need someone to build a webpage, if you need someone to help sales with solving a challenge like product marketers are just great assets to have on the team because they're so flexible, they can do so many things. So we're hiring a couple of those and then most of the other roles are just kind of oriented around brand. So hiring a full time brand designer that essentially is going to come and do like a full kind of overhaul of refresh of the website and our identity and things like that. So really leaning into brand because I had kind of a big aha moment around this recently where I was looking at just our growth so far. A lot of it's driven by paid, very effective, very predictable, very scalable, very inefficient and brand, you know, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but brand is really the thing that's Going to be the path to profitability for us. And when I look at Brand, I see like 40% of our revenue comes from Brand and we invest maybe 10% of the budget in it. And I'm just like, this doesn't add up. We need to really lean into this. And Brand is not only going to help us hit our number, but it's also going to help us get there profitably and efficiently. And I think it's going to be something that's going to last into the future. You pay for an ad, you pay for that one time and then it's gone. And Brand isn't that way. And so I want to start building something that's going to really take us into the future. Brand research, a sort of creator, video based style, content plan are all kind of pieces of that puzzle that are going to get us there.

Why are you thinking about scaling from like a leadership perspective? Like you're going from three people so today you can have two people report, you know, everybody report directly to you. You have a team. Are you starting to like build out the org a little bit? Because if you could snap your fingers right now, you'd fill all those roles and all of a sudden you'd have 10 people. I'm assuming not all 10 are going to report to you. What are you thinking about how you're going to structure the team? People are interested in hearing that?

Yeah, definitely. So I think the core groups. One is product marketing. So I have a product marketing director right now. So the two product marketers will report to him. The next group is growth. So I have a senior manager of demand gen and so the growth roles will go under her. So paid SEO and then a lifecycle marketing person that's kind of just looking at the whole customer journey, looking for efficiencies. So that's the growth group and then brand is the final one and there could be additional groups. I'll grow out after that. Right now I'm keeping the brand Org pretty flat. Those will all report to me and then growth will report into the growth leader, product marketing into the product marketing leader.

And when are you going to hire all those people?

Yesterday? I'm working on it. I'm sending a lot of LinkedIn messages.

And then obviously like a lot of it is just going to be adjusting on the fly. What are the company goals that you have for marketing? Like what are the goals that the team would support?

Yeah, I think the primary goal is finding a way to scale. Like we raised the series D right, a hundred million it's like what are we going to do with the 100 million? How are we going to turn the 100 million into 10x growth? And so one of the big changes we made recently is actually investing in a product led growth motion to complement our. We've historically been completely sales led. And so the way I'm thinking about the goal right now as it relates to marketing is how do we 10x kanji without 10xing every single supporting role and every single team member, how do we do that without 10Xing the team essentially? And it's not because we don't want to grow. We need great people to be able to grow. But I don't want the team to grow with the same scale as the revenue is growing. And so what we want to do is turn all those people into force multipliers by bringing more of the experience and automation, product led that type of thing into the flow. And I think brand is also a good example of that. So I'd say our main goal right now is really, I guess, efficiency, trying to hit that number and get to that next level growth, but do it in a way that's much more scalable and isn't necessarily reliable. Reliant on every single dollar we spend and every single person we hire.

I should have asked you this way earlier, but now that we're talking more specifically about Kanji, can you just talk about what the company does and like what industry you serve?

Yeah, definitely. So we manage and secure Apple devices. So we work exclusively with Apple. And so if your company gives you a MacBook, for example, we are the software that lives on that MacBook keeps your device secure, but it also helps folks be more productive. So it does things like it gives you all the apps you need. And so it's really kind of like productivity plus security, but very focused on Apple, which is really cool because 10 years ago Apple was not something that people used for work very often and now it's like everyone's working on a Mac. And so it's cool because our total addressable market essentially is growing every day and we get to benefit from that.

And what is the marketing playbook been like? What's worked you mentioned like okay, brand.

Drives a lot of interest for us.

How have you noticed brand driving demand there? And I'm just curious to hear like what the overall go to market playbook is that you're running.

Essentially our pipeline comes from three places. It comes from abm, it comes from paid, and it comes from brand and paid. Our Playbook is Very much Google Ads, which we're actually trying to reduce that spend as much as possible because it's pretty inefficient. I think Google has built an incredible machine, but we do want to try to, you know, pivot some of that more into brand. It's just lower cost. We don't have to pay every single time to show up. But the reason Google's worked well for us is because there's a lot of demand for what we offer. And so there's just people out there searching for it all the time and we want to be there. And so that's paid. We also do some paid social and things like that. But I'd say paid search has been one of our biggest drivers. And then brand what's worked really well for us, we've done a handful of events, but what really works for us actually is big flashy product launches, which is kind of interesting, but we make a huge deal out of them. We do like a YouTube live. We'd go super high production on it and we get a lot of people really excited and that. So we get these like big brand boosts every time we do a big launch.

Okay, two questions on the search. On the paid search side, like what is it specifically with paid search that's working? Does Kanji have a lot of brand awareness and you're scooping that up or there like keywords specific related to your product and then where do those pages go? Like what does the funnel look like? What's working?

So the big groupings are competitor keywords. So we have a lot of competitors in the space that are more on the legacy side. And so there's a lot of folks that are literally like searching for like X competitor alternatives. That is a high volume search query. And so we get to capitalize on that. And then the other category is terms that are related to just the function that we have. So things like Apple mdm, Apple Device Management, Apple security. We always put the Apple modifier on there because there's a lot of people searching for device management security that aren't Apple specific. And so we get a lot more efficient when we kind of hone those into the Apple specific keywords. And then what's working with paid? One thing that's worked really well for us is building really good custom landing pages. So for a long time we were really focused on like the bidding algorithm and trying to make sure we had the keywords right and the bidding strategies right and all that. But when we pivoted to really focusing on the landing Page experience, we saw a huge uplift in our efficiency and what we were able to capture there. So that's been a step in the right direction. But actually the next level for us is pivoting a lot of that resource into organic search instead. And that's a little bit kind of like shaky ground because it's like, how is that going to change with AI in the future? What does SEO in an AI world look like? And so that's what I'm digging into a lot right now.

Yeah, but are you going to shift like spend that would have been unpaid into organic or are you going to keep doing paid? And then like, okay, you've proven like you kind of know a little bit about what works for these particular keywords. Is there or isn't there an organic side of this that we could be doing?

Exactly. I think the two need to be married together. In some cases you may capture way more of the search result if you have an organic and a paid listing showing up. Like I think trying to dominate the search results, there's something to that. There could be some cases though, if the paid cost is really high for that keyword, then it might be worth just leaning into the organic result instead. And so we are moving some resources, but just in the form of headcount because, you know SEO, there's less of a paid component. We don't want to go with an agency. So one of the roles I'm hiring is an SEO role that will report to that growth person.

Are you doing it all in house right now?

We actually we had an agency that we just parted ways with. They worked with us for a couple years. But I just feel like, you know, we're spending so much on paid search. Why not funnel a good percentage of that to an in house full time role? That's like this is their full time job. It's like the economics on that make a lot more sense.

We're doing the exact same thing in a different world. Like we, we've done a lot of business like through sponsorships. We have a lot of demand for companies that want to do, you know, like podcast ads, newsletter ads, events. We're doing a lot more events. So we've had a lot of demand for sponsorship grow and we've all been doing it as part of our job for the last year. It's such a big part of our business and we need like a dedicated time and effort and we want to do more, we want to make everything better. And so we just opened a role for account manager and That's a similar example. It's like, yeah, let's have someone like we've kind of tested this and I think this is true for like all hiring. It's like we've kind of tested this. It's proven that this is a working channel for us. Let's now go invest in like whether it's an agency or internal person. Anytime I've, if I look back now at the connections and I failed hiring somebody, it was like we've never done an event, let's hire a full time events person. And like that recipe doesn't work where we haven't proven out for the business yet. And so I think that's just a, that's a good model in there.

Yeah, I agree. I think everything you do, every role you hire, you should test it out first before you hire that role. If you're just hiring someone who's going to come in and build something that you've never built, there's just the risk level is really high. You don't know if it's going to work or not. And sometimes you try something and it, you realize it's not the right fit for your audience or that doesn't work with the company or whatever. It's like, like I see it as a way of de risking the hires that you're making because every hire is a bet that you're placing, right? You don't have unlimited funds or unlimited people. And so every hire is a bet. And it's like why do you think you should take that bet and what's the risk of that bet? And if it's very risky, it's probably because it's something that you've never proven out before. And so that's. It could work, but it's high risk.

Nice. Then you mentioned the other thing was product launches. So you mentioned you do these big product launches, high production. I get that. How do you get people to care and how do you get people to show up? Like we could do a high end product launch but like seven people are on the live stream. So what, what do you have to do there?

The biggest thing that's worked for us is mystery. And so when we do a product launch, our landing page is like black background, flashy image and like a headline. And that's honestly what works the best because people are just curious and they just want to see what this thing is. I also think our community, we sell to a lot of it and security folks, they care a lot about product launches for some reason. So it's Just something that is inherent to our audience. So this may not work for other groups, but I would say, like, the mystery piece is what gets people to show up.

And do you have like a big email list? Are you promoting this, like, with paid. How do you get their eyeballs on it?

The biggest one is our email list. So we have 14,000 subscribers on our blog. And when we track kind of like where did the signups come from? The email is always the biggest contributor. So I think email's having a comeback. Like, newsletters are cool again.

I think they work because there's like, all of our life is like these rapid updates. It's, you know, social media. Bam, bam, bam, bam. These very, like, ephemeral posts. And I think there's some value in like picking out a couple brands that you want to stay in touch with and follow and like sending out a newsletter. Our newsletter has been doing well for that reason. I think people, everybody's like, short form video, short form video. You got to do that. Okay, we're doing that. But you know what's really working right now is the newsletter, because people want to get it. It's once a week. You're going to read it Monday.com has a great Monday Insights email. They do. So I think if you have the right offer and the right, you clearly have an audience that is receptive to that type of content. And so it works. Okay, we got a wrap. I could have talked to you forever, but this is not going to be the first time we're going to do content together. We got to bring you in the Exit 5 community in some way. Maybe have you at an event which we have more planned. But Sylvia, thanks for coming on. I took a bunch of great notes I got from employee number four to CMO internal marketing, building the team AI for marketers. Like, how is Kanji drive growth through paid search and product launches. And a little bit about your career path along the way. It was a great use of time. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Sylvia. I'll see you around.

Thank you, Dave.

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