#56: Amrita Mathur (VP Marketing, Superside) - $0 to $30M ARR in three years, marketing team structure, when to exploit vs explore

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Exit.

Exit Will you tell me your name and tell me what you had for breakfast today?

Oh my gosh. This is how you start. Audio podcast. I had a little bit of chai and that's it. That's. I'm not a breakfast person, to be honest.

I go back and forth. Sometimes I am, and then sometimes I think it is nice to kind of let it ride until 11 or 12. I don't, but then sometimes I wake up and I'm like, hungry and I gotta eat right now.

Yeah, no, I get it. The whole intermittent fasting thing. You know, people are talking about it these days, like a lot. And I'm just like. But I've literally been doing that my whole life. Like, I just don't eat until like noon or one.

It's funny how that happens. Like a trend happens. And then people are like, wait, this is a trend? I've just been doing this thing my, my whole life. I did it more just like out of convenience. Like I just found when I was living in Boston and like going into the office and the process of just like having to get breakfast every morning. And I think a lot of, there's a lot of like health nutritional advice. It's like, you got to eat breakfast. You got to eat breakfast. But I think you can get the same amount of meals in just later in the day and then you don't have to. It is a little bit freeing to not have your whole schedule be structured around like, I gotta eat or I'm gonna pass out right now.

Yeah. And the, and the newest is that not only do you gotta eat breakfast, but you have to get 30 grams of protein, which is, which is sizable. That's like a burger patty kind of. Right? I think 30 grams. And it's like, I don't, I don't think I can eat that. You know, if I can have half a banana, that's pretty good.

Yeah, right? We're not all like Hollywood celebrities with, with private chefs. You know, it's like you gotta have. You gotta have convenience. Okay, so see, no, what happens is when you ask somebody that, then you, you start in a normal conversation and it's. I knew you'd be a good guess anyway though. Cause I've heard you, I've heard you talk before. So tell people your name and background so they can get context for your, for your voice and maybe describe what you do at Superside and, and what Superside is.

Yeah, for sure. So my name is Amrita Mather. I work for a company called Superside, which is very cool and innovative and disruptive in some ways. You know, we're tackling an age old problem which is how the heck do you get good creative done, good design done? And the answer is that there's many, many different ways and there's many different models and constructs for doing that. And our approach has been to say, hey, you could be an Amazon, you could be a meta, you could be a UBS or a Morgan Stanley or whatever, and maybe you have this huge, gigantic, super powerful internal team that can crank out this amazing stuff, maybe you use a bit of AI, et cetera, but there's still going to be times where you need added capacity and maybe that is a permanent state that you live in because your marketing team and your go to market teams are actually always ahead of the curve and they're always pushing the boundaries. So it's kind of impossible for the creative team to like fully catch up. So you're always going to be in this like, state of flux where you're just like, holy shit, I need more and I need better and I need faster, right? And it's like, think about how we even do like Facebook ads these days. Like, you need like 57 versions of the same thing to properly test it and you need that in two days. And then, by the way, the experiment data just came back and now you need to change your whole approach and that whole cycle, the test and learn cycle, that's so a big part of marketing now is complicated. And design and creative teams just need to find a way to like, catch up. So that's, that's ultimately the.

Well, it's interesting. It's. It's like for a while in my job at Drift, I. I ran the creative team and that was like, I had no idea what I was doing. And well, I was good at the creative part. Like, it was fun to come up with ideas and come up with campaigns, but I noticed really quickly that you kind of keep bumping into the same problem, which is like, the answer is always, yes, we can do that, but that means we gotta take this other thing off. It's such a game of. It's very similar to like engineering and like prioritizing different things and it's hard. And I ended up building so much empathy for the creatives at Drift, for example, on that, on that team because, you know, they don't often know the needs of the business or like, who, which internal, you know, relationship between this VP and that VP is like, why you need to actually prioritize this page. There's just so much nuance and like, what's going on? And they're like, look, I just want to create stuff. So. But I can't because there's a limited number of hours in the day. And so you always. It always. You bump up against a resource thing and always comes down to, do we hire somebody internally? Do we hire somebody externally? Pros and cons to each approach, right? Because sometimes you just like, I need this. I need. We need this support now. We need this magically now. It's like, I need this work now. And in either case, to find a good freelancer or to hire someone, you got to train them on board and they're just. There's a lot that it takes. And so I think, you know, separate from even like the product, right? And you working there. I just think as a marketing. Org challenge, this is something that a lot of people that listen to this podcast, like, are probably nodding their heads.

To and struggle with 100%. And you know what? There's so much more nuance, right? Like, it's. I think it's so easy for everybody to dumb everything down to, like, lack of process. You know, like, if you. If you normally bring up stuff like this, no matter what the team is, what the department is, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just need a good process and, like, then you can do it. And it's like, really, some things can't be solved by a good process. Sometimes you actually need multiple machines working together in unison. And, like, different machines actually tackle different parts of it. I actually have a really good example. Someone gave me insight into how Amazon operates. I mean, they're just a case study for so many amazing things, but this in particular. So what they've done is in some subsidiaries, they've split up the creative team into three buckets and there's like, one team that's purely experimental. Like, all they do is run experiments. Like, that's it. They don't do anything else. They don't do anything else. Then there's like a core team and then there's a SWAT team. The SWAT team is basically, like, akin to the core team, but they jump on urgent items. So all they do is, like, tackle, like, urgent. It's like, really no credence to what's actually strategic and important, but it's just like just tackling the urgent shit. And it's always, like, somewhat execution focused. And I love that model. I love that they know that there's these three different problem spaces and they're going to have three different capacities almost figured out to tackle that because, like, one team can't possibly think about all.

Of those Things I thought that the, the team that only handles Urgent is just called the marketing team in startup land.

Yeah, you and me, we're there, right? That's, that's.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Like everything is urgent. But yeah, no, I think, I think that's great. I think even just what you like, that Amazon team structure makes me think of also just interesting ways to structure marketing orgs. Like it is so hard. You have this traditional structure of like you have demand gen and product marketing and then content, but then you're trying to do things on a campaign basis. And I've always. One of my frustrations like that I learned over time inside of a company was how many people need to be involved. And so one of the reasons that I went and worked on the creative team was like between like myself, a video person and a designer, just the three of us, like we could get some big shit done really quickly. And, and it was just always, it's always like, man, if you just have small teams of people that are aligned around like a specific problem, it gets really hard for like one kind of centralized body to like take in all of the work inside of a marketing team and then spit it out. Where I love this concept of just like having smaller specialized teams for different parts of the funnel or different parts of the business. So you're, you run marketing over there, you're VP of marketing. Tell us a little bit about like what the company does. Can you talk a little bit more about like what does your org, what does your org look like? And then you know, what's the go to market strategy for Superside?

I'll get into how the org looks in a second because there's so much context to provide. So I was marketer number one. I joined when we were super early stage. Like we had no subscription revenue, we didn't even really have a product and we kind of had like half a product. But like it wasn't really like set up for scale and it wasn't really oriented towards this like subscription model. So we had, we had nothing. And we weren't even called Superside. We were called the parent company Consist, which no one could spell. And we knew we had to rebrand.

So did you join as like VP of marketing? Like it looks like you were, you were kind of a proven marketing exec before this. Did they hire you with the premise of like you're going to do this and build the early team?

Exactly, exactly. Which is actually strangely uncommon in our world. Right. Like you've, you've seen this Like, a lot of, I think founders and CEOs, they kind of fully understand how to leverage marketing. So they end up hiring a lot of, you know, sometimes early young in their career, junior marketers. Nothing wrong with that. Right? Like, you need that as well. But then no one has that strategic oversight. So I think in some ways, I mean, maybe this is just because it's relevant to me, but it seemed like the right approach for this kind of business. I wish more people would consider that.

Let's talk about that for a second. Actually, just as a side note, one of the most common questions that I get from startup founders that I work with is like, hey, or one off random things. It's like, hey, what, what should I look for in that first marketing hire? And I agree with you that there's usually. I usually tell them, like, there's kind of Camp A or Camp B, and I think there's pros and cons to each, which is like Camp A is you hire the junior person, you have a specific idea of what you want marketing to do right now, and you as the CEO, have to sign up for being personally responsible for marketing. And so, like, the example that I have there is like, at drift, when I got hired at Drift, I wasn't VP of marketing Dave. I was marketing manager Dave. David was the CEO and he was like, hm, we want to start doing content and building our audience for Drift, I'm going to hire someone that can do content. And I became VP over the years because, like, I rose through content. I took on more. And that was one path. And while I was there, there was actually three VPs that were hired over me. And so it's like you could. There's multiple different paths. That's why I always tell people also, like, if you get hired over, it's not. It's not over for you. And then you have this other scenario which is like, maybe the company idea is a little bit more fleshed out and the founders, like, we want to go for Amrita. Like, she, she's been. She's already done this before, but she's scrappy enough where, like, she can come in and build something and hire. I think where companies fail at that stage is when the VP who they're bringing in doesn't even know how to like, log into HubSpot or can't create a landing page on your own. I think you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and do.

Some of the stuff 100%. It's not for everybody, you know, it's. It's definitely not for everybody to get that job and then do the work. I mean, I think by the time I made my first hire, it had been six months. So I was doing everything from A to Z for six months. Listen, I think, I think it's important for founders to look at generalists. Some founders, like in your case, it sounds like David Cancel had a very good idea of where to begin. Right? He said content marketing is where we're going to invest. So I need a great content marketer. Doe like that makes total sense. He had a very clear idea. Many founders and CEOs don't necessarily know that. And frankly, like, it's hard to know that unless you've done this a few times. Like you. The answer really is you need to experiment. You just need to throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks and see where, where it's more sufficient.

You'll learn by having no strategy and then hiring the junior people to do it is. That's when it just, it blows up. Whereas, like it's okay to have no strategy, but you need to be like, I'm hiring this person to do it. And like we talked to her during the interview process and she already told us what marketing here is going to be. Here you go, lady. Take the key. You know, take the keys.

Yeah. When fact, I mean I'll, I'll just give this anecdote. When they interviewed me, there was like a step where like I had to do like a proper case, like an assignment. And basically the assignment was what would your marketing strategy be? Knowing what you know about the company? Which was like not that much, right? And I said, listen, I don't know shit. Like I don't know anything. Right? We don't even have a name. We don't have a dot com domain, we don't have a website. We have nothing. I have no idea. So here's how I'm going to run these experiments. I've been in B2B tech for a long time. I think we emulate that model, apply it here. Here are the three parts I would invest in. This is the order in which I would do it. I would get money in the bank first. First I would invest in performance marketing. Then I would go to content, which is like long term, blah, blah, blah. Laid out all my thinking. This is the order in which I would do it, right? Like there's no right answer. Things would change. We're not going to stick to that. We're not going to be like, this is the plan and this is all we're going to do. Constantly looking at the data, constantly doing customer interviews, trying to figure that out. But I had a general plan and I always like to. This is like an abstract model, so it might be hard for people to fully understand, but I always like to think of, like, exploit versus explore. There are times in a company's life where you have to exploit the opportunity in front of you, and there's times in a company's life where you have to explore because you just really don't know. And that's what a startup is like. You don't have anything. So you have to be in this full, full discovery, exploration mode. You know, you're like a captain of a yacht going out. You're like Columbus trying to like, find, like, where to go and what that looks like. You have no idea. But then when you find land, it's like, okay, now how do I exploit this opportunity? Oh, great, let me establish a trade route. Let me bring more people here. Let me have like, lots of mini boats, whatever, right? That's really how super I grew. All we knew in the beginning was, hey, there's a need for this. We had done enough discovery information that we were like, ah, there's a need for this. We had a hypothesis for, for what the buyer Personas would look like, but we didn't really know for sure. In our case, the beauty was that in some ways I was selling to myself so I could get there a lot quicker. Like one of our buyer Personas is someone like myself. So there's just like a shortcut, right? Like that, that was easy. And then the third thing we did is, yeah, we just experimented like crazy. And wherever we found the efficiency, we invested there. Which is sometimes, I think again that people get caught up in this trap of like, oh, we need to be folk. We need all these, like, scalable systems and all. And then, yeah, yeah, there's time for that. But first, you need a little bit of money in the bank to prove your hypothesis.

So you did a bunch of things. One thing that you shared with me before is that since you all have grown from essentially 0 to 30 million in revenue in three years, which is fantastic. Good, good work. I know how hard that is. And congratulations. Now you just have to double that and triple that.

Exactly.

Let's maybe try to unpack that. If we were to just kind of bucket, you know, some of the big levers in going from 0 to 30 million, what, what would you say there? And it could be, hey, we went all in on this Go to market strategy. And we did this approach or it could be some tool or platform that, that you're using. Like what are, what are some specifics in the. How Superside went from 0 to 30 million.

So at the, at the foundational layer, I'd say there's two things that we wanted to really dive in on. One is this slightly more like product led approach versus a more classic sales led approach. And by sales led, I don't mean that sales is going out and prospecting. I mean marketing still doing that and lobbying. Really hot, you know, high intent leads that have actually booked demo over the fence. You know, we agreed that marketing would do all of that work and sales should really just focus on closing. But that whole approach is like a classic sales led approach, right? So we said, okay, we have product led, we have classic sales led. Let's do both in parallel and see what makes more sense.

Just to pause on that and go in there for a second. So that meant that you could go to your website and sign up. Like if I had a design need, I could go and get and fulfill it self service up to a certain price point or if it was over a certain price point or need, it would go to the in house of field team. Sales team.

Exactly. Yeah. Like a really mad. Yeah. And usually that never happened. Usually people wanted to try us out, do like a couple of projects as we called it, and then that would turn into subscription.

And what would the project be? Is it your product goes and finds a freelancer for them?

No. So our model is that we have employees, so we have a bunch of creatives, different talents. Different talents stack entirely. So we have animators, you know, motion designers, illustrators, people that are just like super specialized on landing pages and UI and that type of stuff. All these different specialists. So usually what would happen in the PLG model is people would come in, say, hey, I really need urgent help to do this landing page for my, you know, whatever launching Vitamin Water in Brazil. Right. Like I need a landing page for that. All our billboards and advertising is going to point to it, yada yada. So we would be like, cool. And so that would go to like a UI person that was specialized in landing pages. But it was very, I think the challenge with that model is like you don't have a chance to understand that person's business, like totally out of left field. Right. So for the creative, you're trying to process that without that much time and it's like, usually tends to be like fast turnaround type stuff. But we said, you know what, let's just see how that turns out. And some of those things did turn into subscriptions. Right. So that was great. We did that for I think almost a year and our data showed that only 3% of people that started single or multiple projects with us actually turned into a subscription.

Yeah. So most of those people were probably people that have better been better served going to Fiverr or something and finding a one off quick project. And was the literal burning need, like found you on Google and like, I just need this done.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It was like, I have a keynote at so and so conference, south by Southwest and I just need like someone to help me spruce it up or whatever. Right. Like there was like a lot of those instances where it wasn't an ongoing need. So very quickly, within the first year we realized, okay, we only need to service those people and teams, frankly that have like this like sort of conveyor belt of stuff that's coming down the pike again. Using that Vitamin Water example, you, maybe you're launching Vitamin Water in Brazil, but there's this whole campaign designed around it and now you need like 57 different artifacts to produce to actually make that campaign come to life. That's where Superside shines. Right. So then we were just like, that's the first qualifying question we need to find out is like, is this part of something larger? And if the answer is no, then sorry, buddy, like, you're not for us.

You would still take them if they had a burning need, but the burning need would be like the hook to get them in. And then it would only be a good fit longer term if they were like, burning need has me in. Oh shit, they did a good job. I'm going to upgrade now and hire them to do, you know, some recurring thing. Okay. And how did people know that Superside existed? Where were they? How are they finding out about you and signing up?

I'd say like the PLG funnel was primarily powered by search, both paid search and organic search, which kind of makes sense because it's a high intent kind of value prop. Right.

Like, was organic hard for you to crack? Because, like, the company's not that old. I would figure that there's a ton of competition in the, with the companies that are in this space. How did you crack some of the SEO stuff?

Yeah, I know it was very, it was very difficult. It was definitely hard to crack. Thankfully, by the time I'd come in, well, I don't know if I should be thankful because it was def. It was like A lot of traffic, but not the best quality traffic. But we had a bunch of blog posts that had been written by the CEO and with the help of a bunch of freelancers in the past and they were all very design capability focused.

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PowerPoint decks. One would be about pitch decks, the other one would be about landing page design. Like so very specific and we had kind of sufficient traffic, like 30, 40,000 visitors a month kind of thing to those four blog posts.

They just wrote those posts and they started to rank at some point.

Yeah, exactly. They had been written about a year or nine months to 12 months before I had joined. And so they had had a chance to rank and they were very, very comprehensive with templates and downloadable stuff and all of that stuff. The right way to do it, right? Like really solid pillar post, but still not the kind of customer we were eventually looking for. So even today they're still active. We update them all the time. They bring in a lot of traffic, but shit leads, right? So that's, that's the thing with search is that you don't have control over the targeting. It's. It's really based on intent and the volume and it's a lot of, it's a little bit out of your control.

Right, well you'd have control over the targeting if it was from a longer tail. As longer tail, it's a much longer tail keyword. But the volume is probably not going to be sufficient.

Exactly. Yeah. So, so I, I did have something to start off with, right. So it was like organic search, paid search, mainly funnel, kind of.

It's a gift. And the curse though, they're like, here's all this traffic and then you got to be the one to tell them like, well, these people aren't going to buy.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But we didn't know what we were even selling right in the early days. So I was, I was like, just give me everything. But then in parallel, like I said, we said, okay, we're going to set up a more traditional funnel which is, we warm you up however, we bring you to this landing page. But eventually we'll bring you to this landing page of hey, do you, do you want to explore this a bit more? Do you want to book a demo with sales just to explore this. Right. 15 minute. We experimented with 15 minute call, calling it talk to sales, calling it request a demo. I think I saw a post about that today on your LinkedIn asking like, what is the right call to action. We've experimented so much with that positioning and found that requested demos the best combo of high intent and high quality, but also bringing in sufficient number of people. You don't want to sacrifice volume and have the highest quality in the world. It's rather, it's better that you capture them and then you see what you can do with that.

Have you experimented with anything? Like, it seems like you have a cool, you could have a cool sales process because like people are coming to you with actual specific projects in mind and so you're not just like, well, let me, let's talk about it. You could have a, you could have a cool model and maybe you've tried this and failed. But I'm just thinking out loud, like where somebody actually gets to sign up for that specific thing and you could position. What I'm trying to say is this is a good example in B2B SaaS where you can position the sales call as an actual good thing. Right? Because you're like, hey, we can like let one of our experts like talk through your landing page and we can give you a recommendation of what we can do in the time frame as opposed to like just asking a bunch of qualifying questions and taking a bunch of like sales process nonsense. It seems like you can kind of get right to it.

Yes, exactly. The experience that we've curated is that you don't, there's no qualification. You don't talk to some junior BDR and then get qualified in or out or whatever. It always goes straight to a sales rep. The sales rep has been, I wouldn't say that they're creatives themselves, but they're so close to the creative process that they can in a very educated way, tell you very quickly, can we help you? Or do you actually need a different solution? And that's usually a pretty positive thing. And even though we don't close the sale, we find like a lot of those people do come back eventually for some other type of need, which has been great. We've won actually a couple of our big accounts like that. That's a, that's a very astute observation. And one of the things we're trying to do now is like finding a way to like make that very turnkey and visual for people today. It isn't, it's not maybe as visual as we would like it to be, but it would be nice if it was almost like, let's just do a tear down right now. Like, like, let me bring in this expert and like, let's just do it right now. And that could be really, really cool. Cool. Coming back to your original question, so we had these two motions going in parallel. One of them was primarily driven by search. The other one, I'd say was primarily driven by paid social. We, we actually were able to crack Instagram in the first three months, which was really amazing. And we were just able to turn that into a total flywheeling machine. And so, like, a ton of our leads just came in through that. And then it was just about figuring out, okay, what is the talk track? Who do we focus on in terms of, like, where's the win rate actually good? Where does the water flow more easily, et cetera, et cetera. And as we discovered that, we. We just narrowed down.

Who are you targeting? I'm interesting to hear that Instagram works well. I think it makes sense given, like, the design component of this. But, like, who are you targeting that this works so well on?

Oh, gosh. I'd say in the early days, we were targeting anybody that looked like a marketer or a creative or a underserved business leader. So, like, you could be like, you know, sometimes banks have, like, VP of strategy. No idea what they do, but, like, you own some. Some component. And maybe it's like a combination of marketing and sales and some other operational stuff. Right? But there's a ton of. In the enterprise world, like, there's a ton of these, like, sort of more, I'd say, like less defined roles, and they all have a need for creative, but they're a little bit perhaps practical.

I was actually just thinking, like, this is a fun marketing job. Well, maybe it's not off the record. I'm just kidding. I don't know. I don't know that. No, it seems like a fun. Because you're selling something that is. You're not trying to prove that this is a need. Right. Every marketing team on the planet and creative team on the planet, like, it is a fact that they're burnt out, they can't take on more work. And if a marketer needs something in a pinch, you. You can't get it from your team internally. So, like, as opposed to different companies trying to, like, create demand for a product doesn't seem like a lot. What you have to do is create demand. It's more about, like, how do you get into those conversations? And I just, as I, as I was asking out loud, I'm like, well, what? I was just thinking, like, I wonder, was it like some ridiculous ad copy or offer or creative on Instagram? And that kind of was like, actually, no, this is like, you're fishing with great bait. You're like, we can fix, we know you have this problem. We can fix this problem. Let's talk. And I just wanted to call that out for this podcast because I think so often we, we beat our heads against like the tools and the tactics and the optiva optimizations where it's like, it really is this, this is why the story is the strategy and the, the product piece of this matters so much. And then the rest of the marketing becomes easier when you have the right fit.

No, that's an absolutely great point. Like we're not necessarily creating the demand. We don't have the pressure to do that. And these buyer Personas are very clear that. And the problem exists. I think the thing with us though, and this is why it might the part of the, the job that's not super fun and easy, I would say. Well, I should say it's not super easy, but parts of it are fun. Is that for us, we actually need to reframe that. Right? They everybody comes in with this like very standard frame of reference. It's like, yep, I have this need. Oh, you're going to solve this like an agency or you're going to solve this like a freelance marketplace, right? And, and we're like, no, no, no, we're this like different model and here's where it makes sense and here's where it doesn't make sense. And like that whole reframing is actually not that easy. There are customers that are good fits for us and there's absolutely customers that are going to be horrible fits and sometimes we still sell them and that's maybe not a good thing. That's where the marketing magic lies. It's not so much the bringing the horse to water, it's like getting.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense because like the need, it's a very impulsive, needs driven like thing. Like I need this right now. Yes, I can pay five grand to get this website page done by with two weeks from now. But if I'm the buyer, I'm kind of only thinking about that. I'm not, I'm not coming to that conversation like prepared to talk about my next six months of creative needs.

Exactly. You have no roadmap. You just want to solve that need. The other problem it creates for us is that our, our marketing machine in the beginning was just tapping like just picking off the low hanging fruit. Right. Like as it should be. Like you just want to like get traction. You just want to get Money in the. So we picked off a lot of the low hanging fruit and then there did come a time, I'd say, like maybe especially about a year ago, where we were like, okay, wait a second, I think we have picked up a lot, picked off a lot of the low hanging fruit. And now we need to go to the people that don't have a super clear understanding of their own second order pain points, like maybe their first order pain points. But if we actually want to start selling people beyond just their immediate need, which by the way, like, you know, ebbs and flows and might come come up sometimes and might not other times, we can't be waiting around for people to recognize that need. We need to go to them and show them why there's a better way. And so to do that, we have used some of the same, you know, frameworks and tropes that you and others like April Dunford have talked about. But we've kind of tried to coin a term that allows people to change their frame of reference. We've coined a term called cast creative as a service that is clearly different from an agency and clearly different from a fiverr that allows us to be like, people are like, oh, what, what is this cast thing? And why should I, you know, take note? And then, then we can get into the story of why, which is just an opportunity we're hungry for.

So. All right, got it. So this all stemmed from my initial question, which is about asking about go to market. Tell me if this is wrong or right. I feel like. And by the way, the. When I do these interviews, I'm kind of like, I'm just like ran writing random down, like trying to come back to. So my guess would be that from a acquisition and interest standpoint, that stuff is easier for you between SEO and paid. And I'm sure you're doing events and content and traffic, but you have no problem getting people to be interested in this thing. It seems like a lot of the marketing day to day challenge that you have is going to be around product marketing muscle and bottom of the funnel types of activities. Is that right?

100%. Yeah. Top of funnel acquisition, not hard at all. It's. It's really like changing people's minds and forcing people to be like, wait a second. The solution I have right now is, is. Is not great. I need to think about something different that actually makes me more resilient and sets me up for scale, which crazily a ton of marketers don't think about because they think of creative as someone Else's problem.

Right? All right, let's talk about, let's talk about some of the things as a marketer and you, that you and your team are doing to try to crack this problem. Because a lot of people listening actually would be thrilled to be in this position, which is like, I got a bucket full of people who are interested and we got to do a better job at getting them to buy. So what, what are your kind of big rocks or initiatives in marketing? As much as you can share to go after that? How are you approaching that?

So we talked about this like positioning thing that we're trying, which is, you know, really going to be like a campaign led, almost pseudo category creation. I hate to use that word because it's a big word. We're not necessarily trying to create a category, but very clear positioning that just, you know, makes us distinct from the incumbent solutions that are out there and showcases, I think like the winning part of what we do. Well, that's one that's like a huge body of work.

And that, by the way, category or not, I think what you're doing is great. Which is like you're, you're naming it like you, I think category or not is a separate discussion, but you're like, oh, what is superside do? Instead of like, well, it's not, you know, creative as a service. It's like, everyone's gonna understand that. Or at least to the point where they might, they might say, interesting, tell me more. They don't have to understand all of it, but they're just gonna catch them. I think it's a great hook. Yeah.

100. And most people are like, okay, tell me more. That's exactly what we're looking for. It's like, just give me the permission to tell you more. Right? I need two minutes to unpack this for you. So that's one huge body of work and everything that surrounds that. The second thing is like, we've really pivoted this year. The team, the pretty sizable content marketing team that we have that focuses on everything from content creation to social to community. We're pivoting that entire team to very much focus on middle and bottom of funnel, but almost entirely on bottom of funnel. So conversion oriented content, mind bending, mind changing content, like stuff that will actually make you be like, wait a second, right? Like, we want that, we want people to like do the nodding and like going along and like, you know, to the end of it, they're like, okay, cool, I, I get it. But we actually want people to stop dead in their tracks and be like, wait a second, what, what are they talking about? Why do I need, I need to pay attention to this? I need to understand this better.

So what does that look like? I love that. So they're focusing their efforts on mind bending bottom of the funnel content. So is that like an article? And it's. You just need an article. You just need a, a 2, 500 word killer. Well researched, well written. Objection. Smashing article.

Like, yeah, no, I wish, I wish that was the antidote. I mean, listen, it could be for some people. I think a lot of, you know, there's different ways to do this. What we're trying to do is, you know, as an example, one of the programs we're standing up is, you know, customer led storytelling, which sounds so obvious, but I think how we've gone about it in the past hasn't been the greatest. We've kind of unpacked like what the customer used us for and like what they got out of it. You know, the classic like challenge solution, whatever it was, no result. But I think our approach now is going to be, hey, maybe it's a video, maybe it's a, it's a webinar, it's very bite sized. It's going to be like 10 minutes max. And we're going to get the customer to actually elevate it to like a higher level business problem. So it could be, hey, I'm the director of performance marketing at so and so, big financial services company. Our CAC has been through the roof over the pandemic. It kind of shot up and we were never able to bring it down. Now it's like, what the hell do I do right? It's like, okay, there's all these like five different things we could do. But we realized very quickly that creative is at the center of all of this. And so we have to just do like a lot more rapid testing, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you distill that problem down into like how you actually did that. And Superside is a player in that whole ecosystem. I don't think we need to say, oh my God, you solved your big problem of reducing CAC by using supersight, right? Like, that's ridiculous. So I think that type of storytelling where our future customer can see themselves in the same shoes, can be like, oh my God, I have that CAC problem. I need to be thinking about this formula, this playbook, this framework. Oh, and by the way, Superside can help me with that. That's the kind of thing that we want to bring across so that could come in many forms. I'm just giving one example here, but that's an example of something I like.

This that you wrote. You, you wrote this on LinkedIn about a month or so ago. You set up writing a long ass memo to the marketing team about 2023 content strategy. And I can't wait to share it with the world. Quote. By narrowing our focus and favoring depth instead of breadth, breath will weather this capital scarcity environment and AI induced content tsunami.

Yeah.

Can you explain that? What do you mean by, for the, for the people listening, what do you mean by focusing on depth instead of breath? I mean, I think you, you kind of just, you talked through it, but do you have an example of maybe something that's in the works that you can, can share?

Yeah, the depth thing we kind of talked about, I think it's also like I want to address that. It also means saying no to things. So for example, on the blog we've been very search focused. So we write content to match up with what people are searching for, obviously in correlation with the things that we care about. That Venn diagram. Right. But we're actually actively now going to move away from that this year and really kind of go to like the areas that require, I'd say like significant. It's the kind of thing that teases out the real, at the core, selfish desires and problems that our buyers face. An example of that is a very simple one. I mean there's a bunch, but a very simple one is a lot of the creative directors we chat with and our customers, especially when they talk about their selfish desires. It's often something like this. It's often my team is demoralized, I need to help them not be demoralized. And that's different than saying I need to optimize my team or I need to do more, I need to crank out more creative. Like it's not really about that. Those are all the rational needs and stuff. Right. But it's like ultimately where they're hurting is like their team is demoralized. So how do we tell the stories that allow us to position superside along that selfish desire and that selfish pain?

Well, it's interesting. You, you, you also can, I think this, this is another kind of meta lesson in this which is like you're also positioning is very much a moving target. And at this time in business right now and in the world that you sell to, something that most companies care about is like they're getting crushed from a budget standpoint. Right. They're cutting budgets, they're having to do layoffs. And then to your point about team morale and this and that. And so I think it's smart to like, okay, well, let's use those factors. I do see many companies that don't ever change their positioning because it's gotta be relevant. And that could change next quarter. Right. It's like six months from now, everything comes back and then it's going to be a different conversation that you could spin your story that way. And so I think it's, it's just cool to hear you do that. And I think that's an underrated ingredient of positioning, that it.

Don't be afraid to change it.

I think we don't like to change it because it takes so many meetings and people involved, which is like, make the case for not having to do that. Who's. Who leads that effort. This creative as a service thing, can you talk about how that came to light inside of the company?

Yeah, I would say, like, we didn't really have anybody actively thinking about it. The only thing that the CEO and I guess agreed on is that we were tired of people referring to us as an agency, or sometimes they would call U.S. agency 2.0, which was even worse because I was like, 2.0. I was like, well beyond 2. Anyway, so we experimented with giving our platform that powers our service a name. We thought that if we brought the platform to the forefront and really talked about the tech and how it's purpose built and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that that would work. So we experimented with that. We called it a Design Ops platform for various reasons, which actually part of it actually worked out really well because it entrenched us with a lot of Design ops professionals, which is a new function that, you know, a lot of big creative teams invest in. You know, Airbnb has an entire department called the Design Ops team, which is separate than the design team. So that experiment failed because I think, I think it still only talked about a portion of what we did and not the entire model and the movement that we were trying to create around it. So we, we knew that that wasn't quite working the way we imagined, and we knew we, that we needed to, you know, come up with a new term. But then we also weren't sure, like, if it goes into category creation territory. And there was one day where I think we were just batting around stuff on the marketing leadership team. And, and I think I, I just said, like, it would be nice to kind of like, hitch a ride on this, like, SaaS bandwagon. I was like, if we were creative but for SaaS or creative, like, for SaaS. And I think it just, like, we just, like, spitballed it. Like, it just came out, you know, we were just trying to, like, be, you know, synonymous with something that people understood. That was the insight that it had to be synonymous with something that our audience, which is highly concentrated in tech, Internet and gaming, that they understood. And SaaS just kept coming to mind, and I think we just came up with it, and I think we just pitched it around inside the company. People didn't hate it.

That's how it always starts. They didn't hate it.

Yeah, people didn't hate it. And actually there was, like, a very fortuitous event. We were chatting with Jason Calacanis about. I can't remember what the call was about. It was me, our head of performance marketing, and Jason. And like, he's a big deal. He's been around the block. He. He knows everything about SaaS, businesses, startups, you name it. And he said, enrita, tell me what Superside is. And like, I. And I had, like. I think we had, like five minutes with him. So it was like, very crunch time. Right.

And I was just like, what was the call for?

I think we were trying to advertise on his podcast, I think. Yeah. And I think sometimes he joins those calls if it's interesting for him. I don't think normally he leaves it up to, like, the minions, but he just. He just showed up and we were like, oh, wait a second. So because we had just talked about this casting, I ended up like, blurting it out, saying, like, you know, Superside is like, creative as a service. Like, we're like creative SaaS for, you know, blah, blah, blah. And he just loved that so much. And he said, listen, when I do. Oh, yeah, that's right. It was for his podcast advertising. He said, when I. When I do these plugs for companies, he's like, I like to record it in my own voice. I don't like to follow a script. So you tell me what this company is and I'll just do it. And then when he finally did record it and we saw the output of it, he had just positioned Cass and used it so beautifully in a sentence. I was like, oh, my God, this is it. Like, he did our marketing for us.

I love that. I mean, that's. That's why. That's a perfect example of why, like a. Make a decision, pick a name and go start to tell people what you are. Because eventually like, the market tells it back to you. And a lot of the positioning work is like, it's really hard when you're just sitting there either in a room with a team or you have the open Google Doc and you're just like, trying to write it. It has to be a. It has to come organically until, like, boom, you got a name for it. You put it in some creative. They actually tell it back to you differently. I mean, I've seen this multiple times. It could be the way a customer. The way a customer responds to an email, and they're like, hey, I've always thought of you as this. And that email gets screenshotted and sent around. Or like, your CEO meets with a customer and the customer says it this. And the CEO texts you is like, listen to how she described us. And you're like, ah, that's it. And I think you have to move fast to open yourself. You have to, like, make a commitment to then move. Then you can get some data on that really quickly. Now you're like, boom, this guy said it a. He liked it and he said it better than us. I bet if I looked over your super side copy somewhere, you got. You've now taken that and turned it into copy that you're going to use at some point.

Yeah. 100. So, like, now we're using it everywhere. But that was just like an early proof point, right? That was like, okay, someone else outside our company got it right away within like 30 seconds and like, set it back to us in a better way and let's just like, float it and try to use it. And I think when the CEO also heard how Jason said it, like, I think it kind of sunk in better with him as well. And, you know, already people didn't hate it. And now we were just like, okay, there's something here. And then we just started slowly testing it. We hired our first product marketing hire in the fall of last year, and he just talked to a bunch of customers in his first three months on the job and just like, use that term nonstop with every customer. And good response, right? Like, that was just like, okay, check. Like, customers aren't hating it. They get it. Most people are like, okay, interesting. Tell me more. And granted, these are people that know us and have already purchased, but those are the best people to talk to to see if it's like, actually, like, jiving with their impression of us.

I love that and I like that. The big lesson is not some tool or some channel. It's this overall story of getting the Company aligned around creative as a service. Okay, what, what's changed with. Where are you placing bets in marketing in. In 2023 and how is that different than maybe it was last year or the year before? What, what's some new stuff that you're doing?

Yeah, so the two things we already talked about this, casting and then pivoting all of content marketing and then the, I guess the third thing is like we're heavily leaning into expansion of existing accounts. I think this is like a known thing. Like if you sell to enterprise, at some point all of your big bucks are actually going to start coming from existing customers. Because why not? They already know you, you have a champ. So we're just turning that into a playbook that's a huge focus of the company this year. So marketing, sales are tag teaming it. We're figuring that out.

What role do you think marketing will play in that?

Yeah, so interestingly, I think we have a lot to do with account selection. I mean, I could say on this podcast that I think our first, the first time at this rodeo was not fruitful. And I think it started at just like not knowing who our best fit customers are and how to expand within them. You still, even though it's expansion, you can't go about it willy nilly. You still have to kind of go with customers that fit your ideal buyer profile, et cetera. The one thing that we look at very carefully, for example, in case this is a clue to other people, is what is the level of respect and accountability that our buyer Personas have inside the company. If you're a company that does not respect design or the creative team, for example, chances are they don't have a lot of leeway and chances are they don't make their own decisions. So to go there and just try to sell to them to the creative director there or the head of design there is pointless. So we try to think about that. Like, you could call it whatever, right. But like importance or respect or amount.

Of clout, how do you get to that? Is it like a judgment call by the, by the sales rep or something? How do you know that?

Yeah, no, we look at it industry by industry and we've industries, we've actually said, hey, generally, you know, tech companies grow and understand marketing and creative to a large extent. Not every company out there, but generally. Right.

What's the industry that doesn't.

Well, in financial services, I would say there's like a whole smattering of stuff. So crypto and fintech, obviously huge on the list. Right. Like they, they love it, they get it, I would say. Then it starts to taper off. Strangely in insurance and in insurance in particular, and lending also to some degree they understand marketing and creative, particularly from an advertising lens. Not maybe holistic marketing, but I'd say like from an advertising lens for sure. Banks actually have so much regulatory stuff and they have so many hoops to jump through that even if they get it, they can't really do that much about it. So actually that's not an audience for us. So we split financial services, for example, into these like subcategories where we think we can win and we only go after those categories similar in media and entertainment. Like you'd be surprised. Like of course, Netflix, Walt Disney, you know, Masterclass, all these guys get it. They, they're super into it. But then there's traditional media that just isn't there. You know, you just have to go around them. The account selection part is like really important. But really after that, the main role that marketing can play in it is like really figuring out sort of more like customized messaging and creative. You know, it's, it's roughly all the same story, but there's like a level of personalization that needs to happen. So we try to do that. And more recently this year, this is a new bet. We're actually going to be doing custom things like brand new content. Like it could be an ebook or a guide or it could be a webinar that we specifically run for that.

Account in a one off way.

In a one off way.

Wow. So marketing might write a dedicated piece of content to close one customer.

Yeah, exactly. But it could be like for us, the LTV or an enterprise customer is gigantic. So let's say we spend even $5,000 on that dedicated piece of content. That's going to yield like 2, 400,000. Right. So that's.

Is that how you think of your revenue plan? Is it from a target account standpoint now?

Yeah. So on expansion, yeah, it's like basically we go through it account by account, figure out, hey, what are the tier one accounts? And then here are the accounts that we're going to put a shit ton of effort into, like from a marketing lens. And here are the ones that will still like do expansion playbook stuff with them. We have like an army of BDRs now that's going to like outreach, all the subsidiaries and all of that stuff. But we're not going to do like the custom things that we've talked about for the tier one accounts. So that's a Huge. That's a huge investment and a totally different playbook than what super site has done in the past. We've been very obsessed with payback period and efficiency in general in the past. And I think for the first time this year, ironically in a recession, we have ditched that for the first time to try to invest in these high cost activities.

And do you have the freedom to do that because things are going well or is this just a bet that you're making?

I mean it is a bet in terms of like how it comes about. I would say. I'm just thinking out loud that this is a very good question. I think we just have so much alignment in the company around expansion that anything we can do to move the needle on expansion in particular we kind of. I'm thinking out out loud in real time but maybe I'm obsessed with like modeling everything. Even if it's like back of the napkin, like just like what is, what is this potentially going to yield? What is this potentially going to cost? And we didn't actually do that for this particular playbook. So now I'm thinking maybe I should go back to the drawing a little bit.

Well, I was wondering if maybe you know it's also possible that like because it's very specific and that and you're in the focus is large revenue, you have to take more kind of creative. It's not such a channel that needs to be under the ROI microscope because the ACV is going to be hopefully so much more than even if you were. Yeah, sure. We don't need to measure the exact ROI on this $5,000 guide that we wrote because we're trying to close a half million dollar customer and it's part of that campaign. Maybe, I don't know, I'm not but the reason I was asking was it's just interesting to hear somebody say that. We're in a world where a lot of VP of marketing are under a tighter microscope to know to no payback period. You've done it historically, historically and here's a new channel and you don't have to do it.

Yeah, I mean no one's asked for it and everyone knows what the plan is and everyone's like gung ho and go for it. So I guess we just never did it. But yeah, like I think the realization across the whole company is that if we want to move upstream almost exclusively sell to enterprise, that requires a different go to slightly different go to market and it probably means more upfront cost. That's, that's what I've realized from talking to people that have just nailed enterprise, we'll never shed our efficiency roots. Like, we'll always be obsessed with the LTV CAC ratio and looking at payback period and all of that stuff. But, you know, I think certain risks are totally appropriate. I would also say, like, the risk appetite. Our company is definitely higher than most other companies. I've, I've worked for a lot of B2B SaaS companies and yeah, things just get, things get approved a lot more easily here. And sometimes you don't even have to go get the approval because, you know, our CEO encourages local decision making.

That's great. I mean, that, that makes a huge difference when you can just, sure, let's go, let's go test it and let's go try it as opposed to, like, we have to make this huge business case just to do this.

Yeah. And you know what? Sometimes it's the CEO that's coming up coming to us without his ideas. Like, he's the best. He's like a mark. He's like a half economist, half marketer at heart, which is like the perfect combo because he's prudent, but at the same time, like, he's like crazy and like, has all these wacko ideas, which is great. Usually. This is nuts.

That's fun. I mean, that to me is like the ideal marketing job is when you have creative visionary type ideas coming to you. And sometimes your job is to actually filter that, you know, you got to figure out, okay, well, you just said this. Now this is the complete opposite, but which one should we do? You know, there's a lot of guessing at the same time. Okay, Amrita, this was great. I feel like I could have talked to you. I could talk to you for three hours, but I have to. We gotta wrap up. I'd love to have you back on in the future for, for a follow up. I think you're great to talk to, a great interviewer, a great person to have on this. You've interviewed me, you're great at that. And it was fun to have you on this end. So I'd love to have you back at some point because I. There's a bunch of questions that I didn't get to, but people can check you out on LinkedIn. We will put your LinkedIn there. They can go and check out super side. And if you like this episode, send Amrita DM on LinkedIn and be like, Hey, I heard you on Exit 5 and you're great. And I hope more people find out about you and the company because it's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Likewise. Thank you so much for having me.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just, just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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