#90: Career Growth, Riding The Wave at a High-Growth Startup, Marketing Experiments and more with Danny Schreiber (Sr. Biz Ops Manager at Zapier)

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Exit, exit, exit. All right, Danny's here. I'm going to give you the intro in a minute, but not many guests send me good notes like this before, and so I just want to. Want to give a quick rundown of your career so far. So you've been working at Zapier this time or early 2010s. You helped start a regional tech blog, which was your entry Point into tech. 2013, you joined Zapier as the first marketing hire, content marketer, employee number seven, 2013 to 2017. Built a small, scrappy marketing team, part of the company leadership team. Had a tough conversation with the CEO about your ceiling as a marketing leader. Helped bring on our CMO. We're going to talk about that 2018. You spent one year with the content team. Priceless lessons in management for me, which means hard lessons if I could decipher having been there 2019 through today, you've been working as basically a chief of staff in a chief of staff like role support and go to market leaders at Zapier. You got a bunch of different topics that you enjoy talking about, which I'm excited to have. And somehow during this journey in tech, you and your wife grew your family from 2 to 7, which is no small feat. And you still have a nice, nice head of hair, unlike, you know, your friendly, your friendly podcast hosts here. So, Danny, thanks for taking some time out. Now, that's my introduction. Give me your. Give me your quick introduction as to who you are and what you do.

Thanks, Dave. I think you covered it well. So I'm over here at Zapier. Been here about 10 years. I stick around because I love the people here and we're pursuing a problem that's interesting. And the customer values that we see from it is exciting. I mean, it's. I was a customer before I came in, where I see the product, I say I want to use this made it easy to join the team early.

Zapier obviously has had a great run the last 10 years, and many B2B SaaS, marketers that listen to this podcast are using Zapier. And if you don't know that, you're using Zapier, someone on your team is probably using Zapier in some way. Like, we just moved my Exit 5 community off of Facebook into Circle and between Circle and HubSpot and Typeform, and we use Zapier. I felt like every six days I was putting my credit card back in to upgrade, which is a great, a great pricing model.

Love it.

But even though you've been at Zapier for 10 years, isn't it like now because of what's happening with AI, Just a very. There's going to be like another wave. Like, I. I can see very clearly what the next 10 years of Zapier would look like. But isn't there something really interesting happening right now with AI and chat, GBT and OpenAI and kind of all that stuff?

Absolutely, yeah. That's a whole another podcast series, not even episodes series. And I'd say I point to my boss today who I report into work with, Kieran Flanagan. He runs Market against the Grain podcast. I got to give a plug there. He talks about that extensively. But yes, there is more or less Zapier has a strategy in which AI is something that accelerates the strategy. It's not something that you have to say, how does this fit into it? And if you're using Zapier, we have seen customers take something that was a mundane set of. I got to add a task to do this formation of data. I got to add a task to filter this out. Now it's like, what's the right prompt to make that seamless? It's quite magical, to be honest with you. And I think overall makes the product more compelling to a less technical user base, which has kind of been our, our barrier to entry for many folks. It's like, I gotta get all these. You tell me I need to build a zap. How about just tell me what it is you know you want to do?

Yeah, I think that's. I was looking at some of that stuff earlier. Just the ability to just literally write out the thing. It's like in the past, I might have to send a message to somebody in Marketing Ops to do that. Now if you can just say that thing to software, like, can we send out yesterday's webinar recording to all registrants in HubSpot? Like with just typing, that is. That's what's going to happen. And I think people either believe it or they're still kind of on the fence. But like, that, that is going to happen and that is going to be the next wave of marketing Software over the next decade for sure, to tie.

It back to where we started with the conversation around. You've been at Zapier's 10 years. I think what's interesting from my perspective as an employee who has seen different leaders come in and seen different strategies take hold, is that we are revisiting problems we had four, five, six years ago, but now with a completely better tool set. And it almost is like, yeah, this conversation feels a little bit like deja vu, but wow, we've got more clarity on the problem, we've got different ways to attack it. And I think there might be something around the corner here.

I worked at Drift for a while and I think now about, like, oh, man, if we had some of this OpenAI stuff, like five years ago, it would have been a whole different level of what was possible. All right, so there's a bunch of different things that we want to talk about, but I think one of the most interesting, and I want to hear about some of the early stage Zapier stuff, because people love that. Where did your first customers come from? But maybe we'll get there later. But first, I think I want to talk about this tough conversation that you had with the CEO about your ceiling as a marketing leader. Because I think the majority of the people that listen to this podcast are in marketing and they are aspiring marketing leaders or current marketing leaders are just. And this is kind of always a topic that comes up is, is you're kind of, you're growing your career and at some point you intentionally or not, you get put on the path to be a marketing leader. Maybe you don't want to be that. And I, I'm trying to raise more awareness to that on this podcast in that there are multiple paths. You want to be the cmo, great. But also let's double click on that and make sure you understand what that means and make sure that you understand. Does that match your skillset and the things that you want to spend your time on and what you want to do? And so when you had shared that, I thought that would be a great, a great thing to talk about. So you were there, you'd been there for four years, you built a marketing team, the company's doing well. By 2014, 15, 16, Zapier had a lot of respect in the B2B SaaS world as a great company. So there's probably some, you know, positive, and I don't mean this in the negative sense of the word positive ego, things like, this is a great company. I've been leading marketing here. And then what happens? What is the conversation? How did, how did you have this conversation about your ceiling?

First off, I'd say while I led marketing, it felt like more at the time, Wade, our CEO, was the marketing strategist and always gave the best direction on where we should invest in marketing. I think my role to start was specifically how do you spin up content marketing as a channel that supports a really strong, from initial, from initial launch, really strong programmatic SEO program, Programmatic SEO strategy, the app directory, as we call it. And so it was very narrow. It expanded as the needs grew and then it also my scope and leadership expanded as we started to hire. But I couldn't ever say, I am the marketing director, I'm the marketing leader. It was sort of ambiguous. The head of marketing, the person getting it done, pulling this team together and being accountable ultimately to the results. And so as charts continued to go up and to the right and we had really strong product market fit, great word of mouth, the content program, content marketing program was taking off. You don't have a conversation because it's like you're doing the right things, you're delivering results, we're getting it done and people are happy. Then all of a sudden things start to slow down and there's problems that exist that you as that leader are tasked with and you got to define one, what the problem is. Two, what are you going to do against the problem? And then when are you going to do it? Not even going into who's going to do it. And I came up short. I was looking at this problem of signups were kind of slowing down. We were plateauing in this one channel. We weren't getting some. I think it was some partnerships were not turning out like we thought they were. So it comes up in a conversation, hey, what's your plan to curtail this, to work against this? Think about it for a week and the next conversation is, are you the one to do this plan? And I think that's the kind of question if it's are you the one? And there is a lot written on this. But immediately my mind went to this great. I think it was a USV blog of Fred Wilson's, of your founding team is not your series A team, it's not your series B team. These are all different teams through different stages of the company. And so I think there was this self awareness that I had at the time of it's not me, but I'm here for the ride. And in zapier, sometimes you'd say we're on this rocket ship. We're going on this rocket ship ride. And so I was able to, at that point, I had a tough conversation with my dad, who he stuck with the company for a long time. He saw folks go above him. Ultimately, he ended his career on this real high note where he served in the leadership capacity in the company and it felt like a mentorship call where he said, the best thing you can do is think about what makes the company succeed. Yes, your career is important too, but ultimately your career is attached to that company. You got a story to tell in the end about you were part of this bigger story. And that's what led me to the next week. Go back to Wade and say, hey, this isn't me. Let's hire. I think he had already made the decision, but he was very gracious in giving me this time. He actually gave me, I think, a month, which at the time feels like forever. But he did it with these cues. And if I, if you're listening to this thinking like, gosh, this, this feels like maybe where I'm at or maybe I have a report who I need to have this conversation with. I think the reflection piece was, was key and it wasn't something I was doing at the time, but should have been.

Was it like a fake test? And I don't mean this in a bad way, but like, was it like, hey, go figure out why sign ups are not growing. And then like, you don't do it. And then like, actually, well, this is not the reason, but. And I'm saying that because I feel like so often it'. It's not really that signups are not growing. So Danny's not smart enough to come up with a new channel because you're obviously a very talented and scrappy marketer. But I feel like so often at that inflection point of the company, four or five years in, you actually needed to probably go up market a little bit more. And to do that, you need to bring in different type, you need to bring on sales and like the inbound, you know, kind of wind at your back that Zapier had to maybe grow that first four or five years through content, through word of mouth, through all the integrations. Like, that was like the first product that was like plat, like the first plateau of the company. And then to get to that next level, you got to bring in someone who's going to hire and change operationally. Was it? I'm just, I'm trying to say this because it's, it's not I'm guessing that it wasn't like a tact, a tactical thing. It's not like, oh, Danny can't execute on this tactically. It's like, no, we need to kind of rethink. We're rethinking like the business. And this is, this is kind of just like the perfect storm of things coming together right now.

It feels like what you're speaking to is I ended up taking after the fact, the reforged course on marketing leadership. And I look back at that, should have taken that course four years earlier. But one of the first pieces they talk about in that course is as a marketing leader, as a channel leader, you're going to likely hit what is this gap in going from channel to multi channel. And that was me to a T. I could do my existing channels, I could talk about where we're going to have incremental growth or even iterative growth, just small wins. But when push came to shove and it was how are you going to add paid marketing to the, to the marketing strategy? That's where it was for me. I don't have an answer and frankly, I'm not the person right now, maybe one day, not today. And I want to be part of the team that sees this realized, but it's not my role to lead that team.

I had a similar, very similar story in that the first couple years of Growing Drift, the first two years of Growing Drift, it was amazing. There was just non stop. Everything that we did worked. It was all organic, all inbound, no paid, didn't have to do anything. Year three comes, we raise money. I have a budget now. And they're like, here's your budget. I'm just making a number, like it's a million dollar marketing budget. And I'm like joking with the CEO, I'm like, I have no idea how to spend this. We don't, we don't spend money at all. Like the, you know, I'm meeting with the finance guy and I'm in my one on one with the CEO and we, we had a great relationship. And he was like, you know, I was like, you know, and, and he was like my partner in the scrappy marketing ideas. And so I thought he loved it that I didn't spend any money. And one day he was like, hey, let me tell you something, you better learn how to spend the budget. And I was like, ha ha. Like, I thought it was a joke. And he's like, no, no, no, seriously, like you need to, you better go learn how to do this because like this is going to be the next phase of this company and that's exactly the same thing. And I think looking back and what I, what I learned now is I spent so much time, and I guess you only have this through making the mistakes. Spent so much time on the goals today and you're so busy and you got so much going on that you're not thinking about next quarter and the year after that and the year after that. And that's exactly. I was. I had too many direct reports, I had too many things going on. We were too focused on today. I had no time to think about the future. Now you look back, having taken the Reforge marketing leadership course and, and you learn that the hard way.

Yeah, I think that's. I resonate with that story quite a bit. I could turn this podcast around right now and start asking follow up questions.

Go ahead, go ahead. You should, you should.

So you make that admission. Where do you go next?

Well, for me it was like, oh shit, I gotta go learn how to do this. And so part of it, like, you know, V1 was figuring out how to do this and luckily having some good advisors and good people around the company, which the founders wisely had. And we had people like Mike Volpe, who was the CMO at HubSpot, and Heaton Shah, who I was able to say, like, hey, do you have any frameworks for like having to think about this stuff? And, you know, ultimately I survived that, that next wave. It was the part after that where I kind of raised my hand and said, I'm not sure I'm the right person for this job because I love the scrappy marketing stuff. We had gotten to the point where the company was hundreds of people. The marketing team was 30 people. It was pretty obvious that the role was going to be, hey, if you want to be CMO here, like, this is going to be cmo. You're going to be a corporate marketing executive. And what that means is you're not going to get to spend your day hacking on the little fun marketing experience and you're not going to. You know, it's not cute that you're the one that writes the website copy anymore. Like, you're going to have to be managing your team and doing performance reviews and hiring and always being recruiting and thinking about org structure and internal conflicts. And I realized I was able to see that those are the things that I talk about this with my kids. We talk about like, you know, what fills your bucket and what, what empties your bucket. Right? Those Things emptied my bucket. I'm like, man, why am I so stressed? Why am I burnt out all the time? Oh, because I'm doing those things. And so the conversation that I had with David was, was very similar to the one where we got to it, where you got to with Wade. But I think, you know, in that scenario, if I had said, nope, I want, I want the CMO job here, I think they would have said, great, like we're going to support you and we can go do it. But I also think the company was at an inflection point where they were going much selling much more to the enterprise. And I think there is a level of like working with a field sales organization, working with enterprise sales, more of an ABM role. They, they wanted to find somebody who kind of had. Had more of that playbook. And so, you know, there's definitely a big ego blow to that that happens. But I'm so happy that we're having this conversation now because I know a lot of marketing people like, are going to be in this position. And I remember that when we did bring on the CMO at the time and I got to be, I got to transition to be VP of marketing. But my focus was mainly like, brand. I felt like the weight of the world was off my shoulders and I felt like I was, you know, bent. I was struggling to bench press, you know, three, 3:15. Like I had three plates on. I got everybody in the world trying to help me spot and now I'm just like repping. And that felt. That felt amazing. And so I think you got to have a hard look at yourself and like, what's going to make you happy and what's going to put you in the biggest position to succeed. And I think a lot of people, the CMO job is not best marketer in the room. The CMO job is people management basically is the job.

There's so many good pieces of wisdom and value to take from that. A couple things that come to mind. You talk a lot about self awareness. You just recently finished Claire Hughes Johnson, former CEO of Stripe. She talks about one of her founding principles or one of her principles is build self awareness to build mutual awareness. I think that's been a theme from the moment this happened where it was, I'm not the person for this next stage. I'm here for the team, but I'm not that leader. Once you have self awareness there, you have that mutual awareness within the team and you know what role you're going to fit and you're going to build this thing together.

Well, like in your case, you clearly handled it the right way because you wouldn't still be at zapier at year 10. Because usually if you're like, no, I should be this person, or you might say externally to Wade or whoever, you might say, yeah, no problem, I've seen this happen. But then behind the scenes, you're the one that starts gossiping about other people and you're sabotaging things internally and you're all of a sudden you become the negative person. Like, I don't know, maybe you were, maybe you were this. I have no idea. I don't think you were. But I think it's, I think it's like you also have to like, it's not just like let it go and bring on the cmo. You have to truly embrace your new role. Right? You can't be then nitpicking and like, you can't make this.

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It's new CMO that comes in your, your, your enemy. And so in my case, when we finally did bring on a cmo, I tried to fully embrace this person and say, hey, look like I'm an equity whole. I have a lot of my net worth like tied up in this company. Like, damn it, like, you better figure this out and I'm gonna help you.

I love that. I mean like that's, that's the honest truth though. Is there is this, this tension of.

Well, it's like the conversation you had with your dad, right? That's real.

Yeah. There's been one quote I go back to time and time again. It's a couple sentences long, but I'm going to say it out loud here because I've shared this with 4 or 5 people within the company as well. And it feels like this is so important to anyone in a high growth company, anyone in a fast paced startup. And it comes from Elad Guild's high growth handbook. He says one piece of advice I give employees is at these type of high growth companies is don't sweat it too much. And that's in terms of not meeting your expectations because every six months, that's reality, your company's doubling and it's a very different company. So if your peer is suddenly your manager, it's possible new year you'll suddenly be their manager's manager. So as long as you just keep your head down and do good work, things tend to work out because it's growing so fast that if you join early, you tend to be in pretty good shape. I have that thing. I should actually have it as like a text snippet that I consistently go back to. Things that resonate with me here is the recognition that this company is changing and growing faster than your own personal growth rate. That's something hard to stomach, but it's the truth and actually kind of makes me feel a little better. Like I used to be at a company where I felt like I was growing faster than the company. You get bored. That's no fun. I don't think any of us who are listening to this podcast want to be bored at work. We want to be challenged. And challenge is, you know, that spot of being uncomfortable and growing and coming out better on the other side.

Hey, it's Dave.

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The founders at Drift used to talk a lot about the company's growth and your personal growth. At some point they're going to outpace each other and it could go. It could be that you're growing faster than the company.

Right?

And that's the, that's a bad fit or not a bad fit, but that's when things break or fall down or the company's growing faster. And so, so like, I don't know, take it. Let's just say you're one of these like hot new AI companies and making this up, right? And you were like the young scrappy marketer there when you started out. And then all of a sudden, two years later, that company goes from zero to a hundred million. Well, they're going to need someone who knows how to manage a hundred million dollar business and that's. You could be the best marketer in the world and that's not going to be a knock on you. They're going to have to go find somebody who just did that at, you know, they're going to have to go hire the, the Kieran from, from HubSpot or whoever, from this company. And I think you have to be able to look in the mirror and be like, oh yeah, I actually have no idea how to do that, but I still have the same amount of upside, if not more. And now I'm part of this team.

Exactly. But by the way, I think what can get lost in this discussion is the bigger picture of somebody's own personal motivation to grow their career. So I think I could look at this experience and say, Danny, you didn't give it your all. You should have given it more. You should have at least dragged it out, maybe taken this marketing leadership class while you were having the Wade conversation. Yeah, I could have. I don't think I'd still agree with that. But in the end of the day, I'm on this podcast and you're talking to me about my involvement, my part in the Zapier story. And Dave, I think about your part in the Drift story. I actually have an email from you in 2016 in which we were, you were pitching some partnership between Drift and Zapier. And like, I couldn't tell you exactly what you did at Drift, but I know you were part of that success. And the same goes for people that are really at Dropbox, that were early at Snap or any of these companies. You know, they're part of that story. You might not know what they role they played, but I think being part of the story sometimes in the career growth and the career trajectory is bigger than, you know, what role you play in that story. So I like to keep that in mind as well.

I love that you've been at the company for 10 years now. One thing that I've seen that can Be a detriment with a lot of tenured employees is holding on to the past a little bit, right? And this idea of nostalgia, like, man, we used to be this scrappy team or we used to do it this way or we used to do it that way or we used to do it this way. How have you not done that? Or how do you not be that guy? Obviously they still want you around. If you've been there for 10 years, how have you been like, what's your mindset to be able to kind of roll with changes and be open to new ideas or not. I've seen people in the past be like, man, we've tried that. This is not going to work here. Didn't work. And it's like, no, no, hold on. That didn't work like three years ago when we tried it under a completely different context.

Yes, yes, this is very familiar topic. First thing I'd say is I think this is best covered by this blog post by Michael Loop blog rants called Old Guard. If you haven't come across that very much recommend we link it up and have folks read that. And it basically says, you're going through these company changes and you're going to have an old guard and you're going to have a new guard. And that new guard is going to say, this is the way things ought to be done and you're part of the old guard. Likely. If you're reading this article and you're saying, no, this is the way we did this things, this is the way we do things. Specifically, you hit these different milestones in those companies journeys where you're at the 150 number, that dumb mars number, and you start to lose track of who's in the company. And it's very easy to feel like you've lost track of how the company operates or how the company works. I think things that have worked well is we've consistently had the same company values, but revisited and updated probably every two or three years. Molly Graham, who was early Facebook, early quip and now runs programs for operations folks, she says culture is a conversation. I really like that framing because I think what this gets to is culture. The culture is built in the early stages that scrappy at Zapier, you got a core principle or value as default to action. So early Zappians felt very empowered to just do the thing that they thought needed to be done. You get 850 people in Slack and you get those folks defaulting to action. It's a mess. It's a mess. And people are like, this value is anti productive. And so there's a conversation around that and it is, what does it mean in today's terms? And it's very much the old guard appreciating what the new guard has to bring into this conversation. And I think you meet in the middle often somewhere. So that's one side of it is accepting this new guard. The other side of it is appreciating that you're in Zapier. The term probably elsewhere is too og. You're an og. That's happier. That's kind of like colloquially what you would be referred to at the annual company retreat. Oh yeah, you're Danny, you're an OG. My line to these folks is we're all OGs. And I actually heard this from Kieran when he talked about joining Zapier where he felt like this is the early days of Zapier and this is like HubSpot early days. We got a lot of growth ahead of us. And so I think if you take on that mindset, you come to that understanding of we're going to constantly be changing and it's going to feel like this company doesn't stay like what we know it is today, but it's for the betterment of the, of the future, which is this thing is going to be sustainable, it's going to be legacy business, it's going to be important and big and I'm a part of it.

Oh, I love that. Yeah. So I mean, if you all believe in the long. It takes belief, right? If so, if you have a long term vision, you have a, you believe this, right? Yeah. I don't know how many HubSpot probably has 5, 7, 10,000 employees now as an example. So you could have been there for five, six, seven, eight years and felt like you were one of the og, you know, felt like you were not one of the OGs, but you were. And so, yeah, if you have 850 people today at the company, it's reasonable to assume that there's going to be 2, 3, 4, 5000 Zapians sapiens, as you call them. So that's crazy. Yeah, no, that, that, that, that's, I mean, it's just, it's a good example of like why vision and this stuff matters is because you need a frame of reference for, for all those things. I want to. You have an interesting topic in here in that you, you like talking about team rituals, staff meetings, business reviews, all hands. And this is an interesting. I wanted to bring this up because it's interesting. I want to talk specifically about kind of the mark two marketers here because Zapier has been remote forever. I guess you all are the OGs of of remote.

Nice.

There's a lot of people listening to this that are managing remote marketing teams or involved in remote marketing team. Talk about. Let's talk about some of those rituals and how to be successful. I'll give you an example. So when I was a CMO at Privy, I joined there December 2019, brought in a whole new marketing team and then by March 2020 Covid happened and I just completely had no idea what to do. And we were doing a million meetings and daily standups and one on ones with everybody every single day. And within three weeks everyone was just so burnt out of and so I'm curious to hear your point of view on like how do you run marketing remotely? What's worked, what doesn't work, what what type of rituals are good for this.

Honest answer today is we're figuring out the marketing side of things. And part of that's because over the last year these rituals, the operating cadence or operating system you might call it, has changed. Actually focus more aligned with who's the we call them bets internally, who's that customer you're serving? What's the target financially that we're looking to get on a return on that. So some of these rituals have gotten disrupted, which is also my reason for high interest. But I'll talk about where we came from with this and where I think a good spot for inspiration is for this. So ritual, what is a ritual? Like when we talk about a ritual, you just mentioned some from your time at Drift and you think about if you're joining a company, your manager in your onboarding docket is going to say every week, every month, you're going to make sure to do these things. Those are your rituals. Those are the things that people talk about and people can kind of reference. And you prep for early Zapier remote tried to go pretty heavy on asynchronous communication and that meant we had two rituals. One is we reserved all company info for an internal blog which you would publish whenever you'd like. And that's a way to distribute. We didn't use email, so there was these rituals around when a project's finished, you put up a results log or when a project kicks off, you put up that change log. And then we'd also do a weekly company stand up or hey, here are some things to know. It was a very contextual meeting. Here's some things to know in the company. Then every Friday you as an individual would put up a Friday update of here's what I do. That's kind of a ritual locally within your team. Where we are today, seven, eight years later is the rituals around. Here's what we did is it's now a more formal weekly business review where you've got finance providing the numbers breakdown and hey, what's the marketing spend against the results this week? What when expected, what didn't, why the commentary on each line? If you Google business reviews you're going to find a bunch of content on that and every company has its own flavor. But it's this real strong partnership probably between a biz ops team, a finance team or individuals and the actual operator, the actual folks within the marketing roles themselves. Other rituals we have would be your staff meetings weekly but they're really defined on in the staff meeting it's about team building, it's about context sharing. It's not about decisions. Instead decisions are in a ritual around. We have these dynamic meetings where these folks come in and we call them bullpens at Zapier and you're going to get to make a decision within that meeting. You're going to present a doc beforehand, ask folks to read it and when you come it's clear we're going to get something done. So these rituals are built around the needs of, of how we currently operate and then frankly revisited every three to six months. And so we're just. This morning we were revisiting what, what do our current rituals look like? Does it support our needs or is it kind of getting in the way?

Do you have kind of a standard goal setting framework like you know, some people have adopted Salesforce v2 moment people other companies believe in okrs. Do you have a specific one that you all use?

No. This is a tough question to answer. We were very OKR driven up until three years ago. But today much of our goal setting cascades down from financial targets that we're setting and we do bottoms up as well to say okay, we're going to aim to increase sign up rate by this and that's going to turn into this X dollar revenue. But this is an area that we haven't, we haven't nailed. And I think when we decided to retire OKRs because of the overhead and aspirational confusion that caused that was the two main reasons we didn't find a good way to replace it. That worked for company wide. So it's kind of led to the teams and leaders Themselves.

All right, so today you spend your time. You went from being a leader of a specific unit inside of the company to supporting the go to market leaders. I'd love to hear your perspective on what does it take to become an effective executive? The differences between, like, what's the difference between the up and coming director of marketing and the cmo, the different language, the different responsibilities that you have to have. Talk to me. There's something that people ask a lot about, like, what does it take to become an executive? And you have an interesting perspective on that given where you sit now. And I'd love to hear you just kind of rant on that for a bit.

It's a great question. I don't know if this is if I got a lot to say on this one, Dave.

All right. That's okay. That's okay.

I, like, I, I would go off on it, but I, I recently listened to an episode of yours that you spoke about. Or it was your, it was your podcast or another marketing podcast. Spoke about the different types of marketing leaders can bring on. I, I probably would start there.

It was my podcast. It was our podcast. Don't. Don't listen to another podcast unless it's marketing.

This is one question I cut from the. If you do this, if you edit this down.

No, there's no editing. There's no editing. What is this? What do you think this is, npr? There's no editing here. You got to ask questions. There's.

You got it. I have no, I have thoughts on this, but it feels like this isn't where they feel great to just. I don't know if I could rant it. I can't rant on it.

Fine, don't rant on it.

Whatever. I will edit this out for you.

No, please don't. I don't want that. I don't want that. All right, let's talk about early stage. Let's talk about some of the early stage zapier stuff. Now, from my perspective, one of the ways that the company grew really fast was you had basically and still do a product that is kind of like. It's kind of like glue, right? It can, it can. You know, you built this, you built this product that can basically attach to any other product and can connect, you know, Trello to Slack, to Typeform, to HubSpot to this thing, to that thing. You can do all these things. And so that made for a really genius marketing playbook, right? Where product, it's product driven, but you can basically constantly announce new integrations and do Partnerships and really lead with SEO and very specific use cases. Do you think a company could replicate this playbook today or were you also early enough in the web blog SEO days where you're able to create a moat with some of that stuff?

Yeah, this question's asked actually quite a bit.

Well, it's interesting. I've heard from a lot of. In my basically two years of working with a bunch of different startups since going out on my own, maybe one out of every three startup founders wants to replicate the early Zapier content integration model.

Yeah, it feels like it can be a silver bullet to growth. There is one individual who I think, I'm sure he's out there in a number of blog posts, but is worth calling out that the inspiration for this programmatic SEO came from Patrick McKenzie, goes by patio11online. He wrote this piece on SEO for startups. If you look at the date, it's within a year before Zapier got started. Zapier actually, great fact. Our SEO strategy started even before the product existed. We had these pages, we were filling what Patrick McKenzie would call gaps in search. So if you searched for, hey, I'm looking for that Trello Asana integration, what you end up finding is community forums looking for it. That's a gap in a search. Zapier put a product in that search result really powerful because very high intent, high need individuals looking to get a direct solution and you're presenting them with a page that gives exactly that. So I think it's specifically, I can say, like where we were trying to meet that gap. It's become very crowded. Is it replicable elsewhere? Absolutely. Though if I'm a SEO strategist or even a marketer trying to reach an audience today, I think about how, how do I want to build a strategy around something that the interface is going to change maybe in three to six months? That's what we're thinking about. I don't think that's any surprise is can you rely on a search strategy in a chat first experience for what Google might become or what Bing might become? And the other piece is, how do you play into that? If you think about how AI is indexing today's pages, how do you stand up something overnight that gets indexed against all the brand equity and all the pages that got built up previously?

Yeah, that's an interesting point. I guess so one answer is maybe yes, you could do it, but also where a decade later the landscape has changed completely. And so you would have to think about it in this new context and what do all these changes mean? And this is why I think it's so important to be able to take chances and like, try out new stuff and be early on trends because you got to ride some of those waves and hope you hit on one of them.

Yeah. And I think your school of marketing you're teaching, build viewership on your site, bring people like, don't go to another platform and build that up. And that was an early intentional decision we made. Medium was big when we started Zapier, but we didn't blog on Medium. Facebook was big as well, but we chose not Facebook because it wasn't our audience. Hard decisions to make early on and hard to get leadership buy in on those. But if you go back to your first principle of we're building an audience, a brand, a destination for folks to come and grow their knowledge around the category we're serving, then it's a long term play. It's super hard. But bigger payoff because now you've got something that folks will go back to and not continue to seek out and find.

All right, this will be my last question of the night. And you've had your AC off for 42 minutes now. So it's got to be, it's got to be moist where you're at. What is your favorite? Go back and give me one. Favorite marketing play marketing tactic. 1. One of your favorite things that you, that you were a part of. Going back to your time at Zapier.

Can I get two?

No, you can't. Yeah, maybe if you'd answered the other question. Maybe you answered the other question about, you know, leadership. Yes, but you can have two.

All right. Early, early content marketing exploration. You know, you want to meet that reader on their way to discovery, like on their way to solving the problem, getting the job to be done. All right, so we put out a, a lot of content early on, and it didn't all make sense. When you go to that blog homepage, you're reading through a number of these things, you're like, how do these things connect? But we knew that search is that primary vehicle. We were always retargeting these pieces of content for search. And we found a good niche with productivity. Productivity brought in a reader who was apt to sign up for a tool that promised productivity. And so we'd see some strong signal that that readership worked. So we started to take productivity talks that folks had given on YouTube and summarize them in blog posts. One of these things blew up more than we imagined because it got put in the Pocket newsletter. I don't know if you remember Pocket, but, boy, that newsletter had a lot of readership.

Pocket. Excuse my language. Pocket was my shit. Pocket was my favorite app because I was like, I used to be really into Dig and RSS readers, and I used to just read a ton of Internet stuff and. And save it all to Pocket. I would also say that Pocket would be, like, where my articles would go to die. Like, I'd save out of a hundred articles I'd save to Pocket. I'd maybe go read, like, one or two later.

All right, so this is the conundrum. You get what we call the Pocket bump. So one day it gets in the newsletter. Wow. It was hockey stick visits to the blog. Okay. Three months go by. Some of that's traffic sticks around, yet actually increase in blog subscribers. At the end of the year, Pocket comes out with its most saved stories of the year. We're number two on the list right back.

Another bump. Boom. I love that.

Another bump. But also, I'm thinking, wait a minute, we're the top. I didn't care to read that story, but it sounded good post of the year. So it's like, I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna put that as a W. Because it's all about brand exposure here. It's all about getting more eyeballs on the actual distributor, the. The site itself. But somewhat funny in, you know, when you really think about it, like you said, it's the app where everything goes. Where I don't read. You know, it's a productivity boost because you just sort of get that off your mind. All right, that's one. The other piece is, gosh, I love the risk you can take in early stage because, you know, as you establish yourself, you got a reputation to uphold, an experience to uphold. But an early PR risk of ours was we really wanted to get our name out there as a remote company that was hiring for us. Remote meant we can recruit anywhere. I mean, literally anywhere. And that's a huge advantage. When at the time, this was back in. What is this, 20, 15, 16, where San Francisco continued. I mean, everything. It still ends. I mean, it's the same story. You know, you've got a hub of innovation that people want to go, and Zapier wasn't in that hub. In fact, we'd have folks speak to us and be like, let me meet you at the office. Sorry. Like, literally fully remote. That. That address you see on our newsletter is just the mail center. Like, good luck going there. And so we were at a company off site. And with this in mind, someone, an engineer leader of ours, Brian Cooksey, he threw out this idea. He's like, why don't we talk about this more that we can support working from anywhere. And you know what? We're going to target these folks that think San Francisco's the place to live. We're going to do something. What if we called it the delocation package? If you hear that and you think, wow, I remember that trend. It was zapier who put that out. And actually we've had three or four other companies do something similar. Kind of looks different in the post Covid world because everything is very remote friendly, or almost everything is. But at the time, the media ate that up because it was a story of Facebook's having to find additional housing because of the cost of real estate is up and they're trying to get folks recruited in. But here's a company that's taking a twist on it. They're paying their people to move out of the Bay Area and they're going to pay them $10,000. The truth behind that is this thing came together in a week. It was pitched, it got taken within a couple hours. We had Wade penned the hey, here's what we're doing post. I mean, these were like ideas, acted on interest, and you go for it. And today, if you try to do that same thing today, you're talking, and I think it's warranted, but you're talking at least a week cycle of decision making, probably eight people in the room, we can get better at that. But I think if I'm me back in the day, if I'm me in a company, early stage company, take those risks, that's where you see growth and that's where you feel like you're doing something to accelerate the growth of that company.

When you got to work for and have the trust of a CEO or whoever you're working with that says, love it, great idea, go do it. Or even, I'm not sure, go do it. You need the freedom to. To do that. You got to be able to act fast. I love it. Danny, I have a feeling that you and I could chat for a while about all this stuff, but unfortunately, we got to go. My producers are telling me that our time is up here on the Exit 5 podcast. So do. Do me a favor. Go to LinkedIn. I want you to. I'll put up with Danny's LinkedIn in the, in the notes here so you can go and send him a note. Go, go and connect with him. Send him a note, tell me you can relate to his story, you appreciated his insights. Danny Schreiber, his his time at Zapier and his learnings. It was great to talk to you about this this topic about you know, how to manage your career at a high growth company. I know it's going to be something that a lot of people can relate to and good to connect with you my friend and I'm sure I'll see you around. All right.

Thanks Dave. Pleasure to be on.

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