Building Cash App's Growth Engine: Dyan Khor's Playbook for Mobile Marketing

One of the most valuable things that I've ever spent my time on is personally sourcing people that I hire. The best people are often not looking, and I think that that personal outreach, like me reaching out to my first hire at Cash App, was literally the first person I reached out to on LinkedIn. Me doing that fundamentally changed the way that I think things went at Cash App because he's still there. He's still like it changed his career trajectory. We're still very good friends, so it's something that I'm super glad that that I did, and it's something that I spend a lot of time with my clients on as well, like helping them find the right people because a A 10x player is so much more valuable than someone who just fits the job description.

Today on Brave New Digital World, I'm thrilled to welcome Dyan Khor, a growth marketing expert with over a decade of experience scaling performance-driven teams and managing over $500 million in ad spend profitably. Dyan built and led Cash App's growth marketing stack from scratch. Scaling investment from zero to over 9 figures annually and acquiring more than 20 million customers profitably. That's no mean feat. From brand awareness to customer retention, she has a remarkable track record of driving full-funnel growth and now advises startups and growth-stage companies through dyankhor.com. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Currently, she's working on some personal projects and coaching marketing leaders to reach their career potential. Dyan, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Andy. Great to be here.

Yeah, it's great to meet you. So, you know, for the listeners' benefit, I've never met Dyan before. She was recommended by actually somebody from the feature team who's worked with her in the past. So, yeah, really great to have you on the show, Dyan. Really keen to hear a lot more. You've got a super interesting background, so I'd love to hear a bit more about your career journey. But first, something that we do with every guest on the show, I'm gonna ask you to comment on a quote by one of my favorite sci-fi authors, William Gibson. He wrote Neuromancer, amongst other great, great novels. He was talking with The Economist magazine back in 2003. And he came up with this, with this great quote, which is widely quoted, not always attributed. The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think that's an interesting one because with the pace of technology and innovation, we're always experiencing something that feels maybe ahead of its time. You know, there's kind of that classic chart that you see of an adoption curve. And are you an early adopter? Are you part of like kind of the middle of the curve? Are you a late adopter? So something that's current to you is the future to someone else. And so I think the pace of adoption in the future is about creating innovation through designing something that's novel through the same technology that everybody else is using. So I think experiencing the future is that kind of pace of innovation that we're all creating. I think that's particularly relevant right now in a time of a lot of uncertainty. I think people are like experiencing this new frontier with AI where people are creating things that they never thought were possible. It could also create a lot of sameness. You know, everybody could plug in the same things and experience like, if we all use creative through AI, for example, you could end up with a lot of genericness. And so I think that it comes down to being able to create novelty through still like this kind of human experience. But I think the future is always something that is forward-looking, but different people are experiencing different moments of it at different times.

Yeah, you're not the first guest who's kind of hit on this theme actually of sort of novelty being the sort of differentiator in the world of AI. And I think it's a really interesting concept when you think that there are a lot of people concerned about AI actually taking over and doing everything, right? And eliminating jobs and creativity and, you know, all manner of different things because AI can just do it. But Yeah, I think there is an opportunity there for finding the deviations between what the AI does generically and where— if being able to maybe leverage that in a more unique and novel way, as you say. Yeah, fantastic. Let's get back to you and your career journey. Like, so you've done a lot of stuff. And yeah, I'd love to sort of hear a little bit about kind of what's, you know, what— how's that journey been shaped? What's sort of— what were some sort of key milestones in that journey that has really shaped your career?

Yeah, so I actually kind of fell into growth by accident. Originally was looking to become a data scientist, but this was maybe the early 2010s and I didn't have any experience yet. Was knocking on some doors in Silicon Valley. People said, maybe not data science, but could you build us an attribution model? Gaming companies were looking to spend millions and millions of dollars on paid not that many people were interested in working on marketing teams yet. I had no idea what marketing or growth was, but I said, yeah, I mean, I'm sure I could figure out what an attribution model is. Had no idea what any of the context was, but talked to some people at AppsFlyer and things of the like and just got to coding. Was self-taught in Python and SQL and started on the analytics side of things. And so started out in gaming, learned the ropes, and then realized that there was this whole world of things underneath that that actually linked to creative. And I think that's always been Kind of the tension for me was like, do I want to do a technical job or do I want to do something that's a little bit more creative? My dad's an engineer, my mom's a designer, and they both thought like, oh, you're going to do my thing. And so I think I actually ended up with the job that's the perfect marriage of the two. I think that that's always what I tell people that I mentor in growth is that you have to be able to marry the left and the right sides of the brain. And so I started on the left side and ended up somewhere in the middle being able to do both, and I think that that's where you end up with great strategy is being able to take the data and take the creative and bring that together to drive growth. And so over the years, have come across a lot of different opportunities, have led creative teams for some time, have led data teams, have managed many millions of dollars of spend, have done a little bit of product, have done all kinds of things. But over time, it's been mostly about being able to figure out what is the best lever at a given company and how do you scale the team, scale the growth. But yeah, I think the most important milestones from a company standpoint were the opportunity when I joined Cash App was kind of ambiguous. It was like, hey, we're kind of at this cliff from like a, we think the LTV has increased enough to maybe start investing in growth, prove out this opportunity, come in as an IC, build out everything from attribution to our first creative to managing the campaigns and here's $1 million, go do something with that. And that turned into a 4-year stint and a significant team and hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of experiments into everything from performance to brand to a little bit of product marketing and all of the things in between. And then yeah, like working with a lot of early-stage companies as well on their strategy, joining early-stage companies as well. So it's been a really great experience, you know, working across the board and understanding, you know, what makes companies grow, which I think at the end of the day, driving impact is what growth is really about.

Yeah, 100%. It's about getting that measurable business impact for whatever business you're trying to scale, right? In terms of like, so you started out actually sort of in games, right? Tell me a bit more about that. Like, I'm also like, my background is games. I kind of came from the other angle of like sort of I was making games from an early age and, uh, slowly kind of crossed more into the, the dark side of data and marketing. Uh, but, um, but yeah, I'd love to hear, yeah, did you find that working with those games companies was, uh, was a very sort of good training ground? Because, uh, you know, usually they're sort of really ahead of the curve in terms of, you know, speaking of the sort of future not being very evenly distributed. Typically, I'd say the games companies are a bit more on top of things than, than than what we see in the app space. Did you find that to be the case as well?

I think especially in the 2010s, that was extremely true. No one was doing it like gaming companies were, and no one was thinking about spending as much budget. They were kind of the true frontier. Initially, I had some interest in particular industries. I was looking to either go into fashion tech or travel tech or some particular things that I had personal affinity with. When I started talking to founders in that space or people who were in growth in that space to try to make the transition into those spaces, they said, you know, I think that it would make sense for you to either stay in gaming or to just be in gaming because you're gonna learn so much more because of the size of the budgets. When you have the size of budget, you have more to be able to play with. You know, starting to think about the marginality of the dollars I was spending, I was able to, you know, really build infrastructure around like ETLs, for example. and like have databases for all these things. And this was stuff that just didn't make sense for a lot of these other companies that were spending sub-million dollar budgets. And so it was just the playing ground for all this innovation, being able to build creative testing infrastructure, lookalike audiences when that wasn't a thing apparently for other companies yet. And so I think that they were beta test grounds for everything that Meta and Google were creating. And so it was a great place to be able to learn. And I think also on the retention engagement side, a lot faster paced. And you could also play with a lot of things on that side to be able to really get closer to that. I think gaming companies think about monetization faster than other companies do as well. So you learn a little bit more versus consumer companies outside of the gaming space kind of go like, okay, let me figure out the top of the funnel and then go back to my investors. And then after my Series B, then I'm going to think about my monetization. unless you're a subscription app. So it's a pretty different game. But yeah, I think that that's kind of the thing. And there was also a very intense focus, I would say, on profitability in comparison to other companies. So that rigor, I think, has translated into me being a better leader for the consumer companies that I've joined since then on being really true to what is incremental, what is profitable for the company. Because a lot of gaming companies that I worked with in the early days were able to be bootstrapped. They weren't venture funded. And so marketing was not something that was just like, oh, well, we have, you know, tens of millions of dollars to play around with. It was like, if you spend a dollar, it better pay back in a reasonable time period and you better know how to measure it. So it was a great foundation to work with.

Yeah, that's quite some rigor, which I'm sure has stood you well. So then, you know, you've worked with huge companies like, or helped to scale companies like Cash App, but you've also worked with a lot of like early-stage startups. Tell me about that and sort of what is the sort of difference in approach that you need to take? You know, you talked already about like the games guys having like the huge budgets that allowed you to learn a lot. How do you take that learning and then apply it at a much earlier stage of the business?

Yeah, I mean, I think at the earlier stage, there's a lot of things that if you didn't have the large-scale experience, you might kind of spin your wheels on, like, is it worth testing this? Is it worth testing that? So that's maybe where the large-scale experience is helpful. I would say, like, the gaming experience was somewhere in the, like, $1 to $10 million budgets per month. And then the Cash App experience was in, like, the $10 to $20 million budgets per month. And then the early-stage startups are the, like, how do you get anywhere near $1 million per month, right? And so I think the how you ramp there is a question that a lot of companies have. And so being able to do that for the first time, I think is a huge unlock. And so that's a slightly different skillset though, of like, I think being able to identify, and that's a mistake that I've made in my career a few times of being able to really objectively talk to founders and say like, is this company ready for paid marketing? Is there enough product market fit? Am I able to assess this funnel? And if I'm— if I don't think that they're ready for paid marketing, is there anything else from a growth perspective that can be done? What's the best advice to give those founders? Because there's definitely, you know, work to be done, or at least consultation to be given to those founders as well who are not yet ready to push on that growth lever. That's kind of the space that I'm in right now is being able to give an honest opinion on that as well. And then for those people who are somewhere in that range of trying to scale scale their paid marketing towards a sizable budget, what are kind of the pitfalls that you can avoid? How do you build the infrastructure towards best in class so you can scale those budgets in a meaningful way and do it at an accelerated rate? So kind of providing my fractional time so that they can make that pace of learning a lot faster. But I think the things that they tend to need a little bit more differentiation on than a larger company are It's less about like channel diversification, for example, and it's more about like building that initial infrastructure, which to be fair was something that was needed at Cash App. It's like, how do you build the creative testing framework that is particular to this industry? How do you define your KPIs and how that feeds into the overall business as it relates to paid marketing and the attribution model that's going to make sense for this particular business? And I think that those things are relatively similar across companies, but do need to be built per company. So that's usually where things need to be kind of tightened up and sharpened as I come into most startups.

Let's talk about measurement. You've talked about measurement a bit already, attribution models being sort of a key thing. So, you know, obviously the world of measurement is changing quite a lot at the moment. Maybe you can sort of speak to your experience with that and how you're thinking about that and how you're navigating the The changes in the ecosystem around measurement?

Yeah, measurement is actually one of my favorite topics, unironically. So I started my career working on measurement, and then for a long time, user-level attribution was kind of the expectation everywhere, right? Like, if you couldn't track everything all the way through, you didn't believe it was real. Performance was just totally based on that. And then iOS completely changed. And I think that 2020 was the pivotal moment in many ways for a lot people across a lot of factors. But let's talk about iOS 14 in particular. 2020 was iOS 14, but also the year that I happened to move to Cash App. So we were launching paid as well as experiencing the incoming change of iOS changes. And so there was this really awkward conversation that was happening, honestly, of like, well, we're building this attribution that's user level. Really great job, Dyan. You've coded this entire thing. We have a view into it. We've scaled the budgets, but you're also telling us this thing is about to go away. And so what are you going to do when this thing goes away? And I think now saying this 5 years later, this sounds a little bit less innovative, but I think that people are still probably struggling a little bit with this. But in 2020, we were like, okay, we won't be able to get perfect user-level attribution for an app like Cash App. You aren't going to do the user prompt for user-level data. But also, even if we got user-level data on the iOS side, it wouldn't be perfectly comprehensive. So we didn't want to rely on that. And so we realized we were going to use some amount of scan data, but we also wanted to be able to have more certainty overall. And so I reported into at the time our head of business, and he asked a pretty thought-provoking question. He said, what could you do from a data science perspective? Like, is there anything probabilistic? And so I thought about that and I took that away and said, maybe media mix modeling. And I didn't know any other apps at the time who did media mix modeling because I think before the iOS changes, not a lot of people were thinking about it that way. And so very early into 2020, we decided we're just going to stand up a media mix model as like one of the first things we do once we have more than a quarter of spend. And we figured this is actually like a very valuable 2 birds with one stone kind of mentality of it'll allow us to put iOS on a more level playing field with Android. We can use some of the indicators that we have from SKAN, but we can also then compare with that MMM data. But that also opened the door to understanding the overall incrementality of paid marketing, which was a valuable question to a business like Cash App that had a lot of referrals and organic traffic as well. And so there were 2 different kind of values to being able to do this kind of modeling. I think today the way that I view measurement is that you do have to have this triangulation of the different signals that are available because there is continuing kind of degradation of the data that is available, whether you're in-app or on web or Even Android is approaching some of these frontiers as well. So the triangulation between deterministic data and media mix modeling data is one thing, but also running incrementality tests, obviously, to validate that media mix modeling and being able to make that actionable, I think, is also the hardest thing, obviously, where a lot of teams really struggle is like, well, I have these 2 data sources, like, what am I supposed to do with this now? I think that there are increasingly more options in this space that are providing frequency of media mix modeling results, but you still have to be able to actually tie those results to the deterministic data to make your actionable decisions. At the end of the day, the platforms are still based off of some form of semi-deterministic data. And so I think that that's kind of the current state of things. It's like, what do you use to manage your campaigns versus what do you use to make your allocation decisions, how do you create a construct and a system in which you can make those decisions and understand your investments and your optimizations? So that was a huge infrastructural project and something that I also consult on some clients with now, which I think is the kind of new way of thinking about things, which allows us to also, I think, invest in interesting things as well. You have a level playing field with non-deterministic channels like podcasts or TV or things of the like as well, which I think opens the door to what really is a performance channel. At the end of the day, this is about what acquires customers.

And like, to your— in your view, do you like— is this kind of infrastructure something which folks kind of need to build in-house and custom? Or have you seen good kind of off-the-shelf, you know, like build versus buy, basically? Where do you stand on that?

I actually do believe that this is something that most teams can buy. I think that the kind of caveat to that is you need to have a reasonable in-house team to interface with the teams at these companies, because the most difficult thing about building a model is deciding on a KPI. And if you don't choose the right KPI, you will always end up with hard-to-decipher results. So an example of this is like, should you use profit or should you use users as your KPI? And that's going to depend on like when profit arrives per your user and how you're able to kind of decipher that information. And that's something that the outside entity is never going to be able to help make the decision on for you without you being able to guide them. And so I think building the right internal team of stakeholders to really question how are we going to be able to make decisions off of this is still necessary. But that's quite a different set of skills than someone who's going to actually build the media mix model themselves. I do think there's a lot that goes into the data cleaning and the model updates and the synthesis that is quite automated by a lot of the platforms these days. A number of the more new age platforms are, to be honest, cheaper than a data scientist in some ways and provide some more value. They also synthesize data sources that cost money to you since they're able to share them across multiple clients. And so I think that there is actually sometimes a value add that you can't get by building yourself. I think the case to build yourself is one in which you want to have perfect clarity into your model specificity and you already have a very strong team of true data scientists who are very strong at rigorous modeling. And in that case, if you already have the resource, then definitely can be built internally. And I think that there are then some trade-offs of, do you think you can build a better model than the options that are available to you?

Yeah. Would there be any off-the-shelf solutions that you'd be happy to call out and recommend to people who are maybe thinking about this right now that they should go check out?

Ooh, free advertising. I think that it depends on what is the price range that people are looking in, and what is the industry that people are looking in. I think for retail, Recast is probably the best vendor that I could think of. And they give the most frequency of readouts. But I think that it depends on kind of like what you're landscaping as your KPI. Paramark is another one that's relatively on like kind of that more new age side of the spectrum and also fairly frequent readouts and covers more industries than Recast does. It also includes incrementality, but they're a little bit less frequent than Recast. So it And they use different methodologies between the two. So I think there's a lot of nuances to what would be best for different businesses. So a little bit hard to compare there. And then for very, very advanced businesses that might want custom models, I think Analytic Partners is probably the top-of-line choice of the more traditional vendors for building a bespoke model. But I think for folks who are very heavily considering those things. There's a lot of nuance to that question. So something that we'd be happy to chat with them about.

Cool. So they can also come to you for some help with that. Just like last thing on measurement. I was at dinner recently with a few folks from the gaming industry. And I was kind of surprised to hear that they all actually seem to be relying very heavily on fingerprinting right now. Like fingerprinting hasn't gone away. And when you're talking about sort of like these sort of semi-deterministic, like not quite deterministic, but also pretty close. Seems like a lot of folks, and now also because the MMPs have started to build these fingerprinting models like directly into the MMPs for iOS particularly. So it feels like it's almost like we're going back to the days of fingerprinting, at least in some industries. So I was surprised you didn't mention that as sort of one of the things which you're seeing folks doing. Like, are you seeing that with the companies that you're working with? Or is it— Is it more the games companies that seem to be still clinging on to fingerprinting?

I would say mostly the games companies I've seen cling on to fingerprinting. I think that fingerprinting and probabilistic, it depends on the amount of data that you're able to offer as well. And so, I've seen in some cases pretty inaccurate data come through, and it depends on the structure of your funnel. Whether or not that is going to work. So it's not something that I would definitely by default recommend to people. There are some apps that I work with that don't prompt at all. So I think that it's just a completely different space. But kind of in trying to validate the data, a lot of them have found that they don't see as strong a correlation with the fingerprinting data. So it's not something that they feel comfortable working with. So given kind of the stability they're looking to work off of, scan data and something predictive like a media mix model. So that's kind of where I've seen most people lean. But I kind of get the dependency given where gaming is at, where their metrics stand kind of along the funnel, and also given that a lot of them are prompting as well.

Yeah, it struck me as strange because I think there was a point where everyone assumed that Apple was going to completely like, you know, kick apps out the store if they caught them doing fingerprinting type stuff. And it seems like, and they were sort of making noises that that would be the case. And, you know, like it always feels like this is one of the other things which is probably going to go away, even though it's fairly hard to enforce.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, it's still around for now, it seems. Right, let's move on. I'd love to hear from you, like what is a kind of an insight or a prediction, you know, something that you've noticed about digital marketing That challenges maybe the conventional wisdom that's out there?

Yeah. I think that I don't know whether or not this challenges the conventional wisdom. It might depend who you ask this question to. But if you ask a performance marketer this, I think it would challenge the conventional wisdom. But I think that as things evolve in the digital marketing space, there's less and less difference between performance marketing and brand marketing. I think all marketing is marketing. And that's something that like for a long time I was like, oh, like brand marketing is social. Like brand marketing is these like flashy billboard campaigns. But you see performance marketers when they run out of budget try to like move into these spaces where they want to run TV ads or want to run out-of-home campaigns. You see brand marketers like me to to run on digital channels. At the end of the day, what do these things actually mean? And when we started running the media mix model, it kind of became apparent that both start to play in each other's field. And then the question becomes, what is the creative that you're actually running? And so I think that the non-integration of marketing teams. So for example, I've sat in a number of organizations where we either didn't have a brand team or it was just a brand design team or the brand team sat separately from the performance team, I think it creates actually a meaningful disruption in your ability to drive efficiency through your marketing, but also to create a cohesive brand. And so the thing that I would challenge in this case is what actually is brand marketing and what is performance marketing? And I think that in collaborating together, you can create something that's meaningfully better. I think a lot of performance marketers will argue back to me that I still want to be able to create ugly ads. Often ugly ads work, whatever have you in that direction. And that very well may be still true, but your performance ads affect your brand sentiment. Your brand ads drive acquisition. Like all the things in the funnel affect each other. So I think kind of collapsing the funnel, like if you eliminate your your brand work, often your funnel won't work as well. And beyond a certain point, if you don't have brand awareness, you can't scale as far as well. So I challenge the growth teams to think about that after a certain point of when you scale, what more can you do and how would you approach that?

Yeah, I think lots of words of wisdom there. I think It's a false dichotomy, isn't it, to really kind of, yeah, try and separate these things or to separate any part of a connected growth system, which, yeah, which absolutely I would completely agree with. It's all part of one big connected loop or multiple loops that feed each other. And if you start to take bits out or work on them very independently, then you lose cohesion in the overall power of that system.

Yeah, totally.

Right. I'd like to ask a little bit about what I would call your brave new digital playbook. What is one of the biggest challenges that you think growth or marketing teams need to overcome?

Yeah, so I think that to— I feel like everyone's probably talking about AI in a variety of ways. I'm not going to talk about AI when it comes to the actual marketing pieces, But I think that with AI advancing technology, you're going to see more and more competitors in every space. For example, one of the roles that I was at recently was at Speak. Speak is a language learning app. Like Duolingo and a few others have kind of like ruled the language learning market for a long time. Now you see like 10 competitors that have come up in the last like year or so in the language learning space that are all AI-driven. Driven. And if not AI-driven, AI is allowing technology companies to create apps faster. And so I think with more competition and then their marketing teams also being able to use AI to create things faster, differentiation becomes harder and harder. And so I think that that is kind of the macro challenge that marketing teams are going to face is that from like kind of a product marketing standpoint, you can't really rely on being like one of 5 anymore. You're one of hundreds. And when you copy, like, you know, like the kind of conventional wisdom is like, oh, like use your like best competitor's ad. When you do that, you don't have 5 people doing that anymore. You have hundreds of people doing that. So the ad fatigue is faster and everyone's doing it at a faster rate. So the wheel is just spinning faster and faster and faster. And so I think that that goes back to the thing that we talked about at the top of the show of how do you create true novelty? How do you create true differentiation where yes, you can plug something into all the AI tools in the world to create things faster. But I think the people who are going to be the most successful are going to have to still steer some degree of novelty. to create that differentiation where they're going to create that idea first, and they're still going to get the incremental gains on top of the people who fall and follow after them. So I think that that's going to be one of the largest challenges, like all of the compounding effects of AI.

You've touched on this theme already a couple of times of novelty and differentiation. I guess that's maybe the new gold, if we can figure out how to mine it. So, yeah, so now I've shamelessly stolen these definitions from Wired magazine. I used to really love Wired magazine as a kid. So they had this like, what's wired, what's tired, and what's expired section. So I'm interested, like, from your perspective in the world of, you know, growth and digital marketing, what's tired or expired? What are things which you can safely say are over? And are not really going to work for marketers or for growth teams anymore?

I mean, I think that I have some severe skepticism of the power of DSPs currently. So I don't think that there's absolutely no value to DSPs, but I think that people kind of start with their core channels like your Googles, your Metas, your other paid socials maybe comes after that, and then you go, where can I get more impressions after that? And people turn on DSPs. If you're starting to measure incrementality, there's just so much forced click, and then there's so much impression overlap that comes from DSP. And I think as people start to get smarter about incrementality, a lot of people are going to cut a meaningful amount of their display budget. So I don't think that it's zero, but I think that the The CPMs of that have to go down in order for the economics to work if people are taking the incrementality into account because it's kind of an economy, right? And if more people realize that, that's going to come true. I think in general, people over-index on channel diversification too early in their budget increases because they go like, oh, how can I spend more? How can I spend more? more channels is usually the first thing that people go to without really taking into account, like, am I really getting incremental reach out of this? And is this incremental reach really incremental? And that's one where I think that it's not. So I hope that it will be tired.

Okay, well, it sounds like it's— you're definitely making a good case for tired and possibly on its way to expired. But yeah, let's see. Yeah, I'm reminded of the the famous test, which I forget the name of the guy. I'll try and dig it out for the show notes and put a link to the article. But there was a— I listened to a podcast.

Is it the Lyft or Uber one where they turned off like half of it?

The Uber one. Yeah, exactly. This guy came in, switched off, yeah, like $20 million ad spend or something like this on these DSPs. And then it basically, like the organics just rose to exactly the same amount that they were previously being attributed to the Yeah.

And I'm sure, especially for a large brand, like that's the hardest part is like you already have such a strong brand presence. Maybe for like a smaller brand, like I will say for gaming, I could see like a reasonable argument for DSPs that are gaming specific that like you do actually get gamers in other games like that. That's fairly reasonable to me. But for a lot of other companies, it's a little less reasonable.

Yeah, I think the most outrageous part of that whole story, it was great. It's a great podcast episode. I'm going to dig it out and put it in the show notes. But the guy told the story really well. But like the most outrageous part was not the fact that like there was a complete lack of incrementality. It was just that his bosses were like really pissed at him because he's like, where are you going to spend this money now? We need to spend this budget. Like, what do you mean you've saved $20 million a month?

Yeah, I've definitely been in that position before where they're like, how are you going to spend more money? And I'm like, I don't know if it's responsible to spend more money. Like, are you telling me that I should do it anyway? Like, I'm the first person to be honest about these kinds of things. So yeah, sounds like this guy and I would be friends.

Yeah, there's somebody, somebody once said, yeah, like you should spend, spend a marketing budget like it's your own money. And I think that really rings true, right? Do you maybe make different decisions in some cases if it was really your money at stake?

Yeah, we used to joke that we should get a percentage of our total marketing budget as our compensation. And then I joked back that maybe we should get a percentage of the LTV to CAC or something instead, so that it's efficiency-driven. But yeah, there must be some kind of incentive-based way to go about this. Maybe that's an agency model more than an internal model though. Something for you to think about, Andy. Yeah.

All right, I'll give it some thought. All right, actually, Lynn, that leads me to like pretty much my final question. It's a great segue, actually. If you had unlimited freedom and/or budget, what's one really big change you would make right now? Given that you're like sort of an independent, you're an advisor, you feel free to pick maybe like a company that you've worked with in the past or maybe one that you're advising right now, but just sort of what would be like a really major change that you would make if you had like, you know, No limits to your ambition.

So I think that a lot of the things that I would want to do at the companies that I've worked at in the past actually are not related to marketing. I think that some of the things are things that would make it easier to do the marketing in the long term by enriching the overall product experience or the user experience. experience. So one example of this is, I think CX is probably one of the most important things. But when you're kind of looking at budget line items, it's really easy to continue to cut from those kinds of things. But what does it look like to build best-in-class CX in a way that then enhances your trust? That then unlocks your ability to be able to be the leading player in banking, for example, for Cash App, and then you're able to go unlock all the campaigns that you want to run. And so I think things like that are the kind of things that if I had unlimited budget, I would change. And I imagine that if the company had unlimited budget, they would change as well. And so, yeah, I don't know. I had like the craziest experience the other day with like Uber CX over something like really silly. And it's something that I think about often where one of the operations leaders that I worked for at Cash App asked me really smart question once where he said, like, you know, Dyan, you can advocate for all the budget you want, but if you could advocate for budget for someone else instead, would you do things differently? And the answer to that, I think, is often yes, because like, if you were to think about like, if CX could save us from churning a user, a retained engaged user is so much more valuable than like the cost for us to go acquire a user is so much more to the business. And I would much rather if it costs us $5 to keep a user, it costs us $10 to acquire a user, for sure, go keep the user. That's the best trade-off to do in that occasion. But on a day-to-day basis, I'm not given that choice. That's not something that I get to decide as an individual. So if I had the opportunity to change those things and to make those choices, I think I would.

Great answer. And also comes back to this idea of a connected growth system and cohesion between all the units, including product, including CX. including brand, including performance. It's all related. And ultimately, yeah, it's all contributing to one number of, you know, sort of value for the user, right? So, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. So, what is one book or resource, could be a podcast, could be, you know, whatever, like YouTube video, like something that you've like read or consumed lately, or maybe a long time ago that's been kind of instrumental and you think that it's really good and you'd like to It can be about anything. It doesn't even have to be about marketing, really.

That's a good question. I think there isn't as much on his site currently, but back when I was originally starting growth, I was more interested in reading things that were outside of my area of expertise, which is a little bit more on the analytics and media buying side of things. And so, one of the people who was writing really interesting things from a product perspective was John Egan. At the time, he was leading growth at Pinterest. And I really liked his writing. I'm not sure that he writes as much anymore because I don't see as much from him, but maybe he is still writing. But yeah, I really enjoyed his blog. So, I would highly recommend a read there.

Yeah, fantastic. What a great recommendation. I had the pleasure of meeting John In fact, actually had him on a previous podcast that I was hosting. We had him on as a guest. Super, super great guy.

Yeah, he's great. Yeah, I've met him at a few conferences back in the day. He's awesome.

Met him at MAU Vegas, and I think he was even— Classic. Yeah, he was even out at the party, like, super late. I spotted him on the dance floor at, like, you know, 4 in the morning. Like, it's good times, good times. Yeah. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch?

Yeah. So, I mean, obviously you can find me on LinkedIn. My name's pretty easy to find. And then also my website is my name. So dyankhor.com.

We'll put these in the show notes.

Yeah. You can contact me about consulting opportunities, advising opportunities, but also for any growth folks who are operating at their own companies who are looking to chat about any of the things that we talked about on the show today. I have an AMA on there, but also I'm happy to chat, so feel free to reach out.

Amazing. Great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I've got one final question for you. I keep saying I've got a final question. I'm coming with one more. This really is the last one. In your opinion, what is one thing that companies or teams need to stop doing?

So one thing that I'm personally pretty passionate about, maybe this is like a start doing, but by proxy, like stop doing, is I've noticed that a lot of teams tend to only hire out of the people who apply to the role. And I think that that's a pretty weak talent pool. And so one of the most valuable things that I've ever spent my time on is personally sourcing people that I hire. And I think that sometimes people will do this for the most important role that they have. And I think the only reason I started doing this was because the first role I had open, I was so desperate to find the right person for it that I like, it's like, I'm going to go on LinkedIn myself and I'm going to find the right person. And the thing that I realized in doing that is that no one knows the role like you know the role, right? If you're a leader in marketing, yes, your recruiter might be great, but they don't know growth marketing the way that you do. You know the companies that were doing well at the right times in the right places. And so investing the time is so important, if not to train the recruiter to be better at it the next time, I think, as well. And so, I think that the best people are often not looking. And I think that personal outreach, like me reaching out to my first hire at Cash App, was literally the first person I reached out to on LinkedIn. Me doing that fundamentally changed the way that I think things went at Cash App because he's still there. He's still— it changed his career trajectory. We're still very good friends. So, it's something that I'm super glad that I did. And it's something that I spend a lot of time with my clients on as well, helping them find the right people because a 10x player is so much more valuable than someone who just fits the job description. So I think, yeah, don't settle essentially is maybe what I'm saying. Yeah, that would be the one.

Great advice. That's really, really great advice to finish on there. I think for anybody who's building a company, building a team, just hiring into their team. Yeah, I think, yeah, you really also just, I think, touched on something there where if you're only sort of searching for people, like, just particularly when it's recruiters doing it and they're just sort of looking like for certain keywords or whatever, they're going to get a bunch of very samey profiles and you risk getting a sort of a homogeneous group of people that technically tick the boxes, but it may not be the best people. So yeah, really, really good advice there.

Thanks.

Thanks, Dyan.

Yeah. And if anyone's looking for great people, I may have some people for you. So that's also something you can reach out about. Lots of people come my way.

Great. I might even hit you up for that as well. We're always looking for people at FeedCheck. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Dyan. It's been really a pleasure speaking with you. The wealth of knowledge that you have and the sort of analytical background, digging deep into measurement. It's been a really great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Enjoyed it as well.

If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. That really helps to boost the show's visibility, and I'd really appreciate it. If you don't want to miss out on future episodes yourself, you can subscribe to Brave New Digital World in your podcast player. Brave New Digital World is a production by FEATR. We're a mobile growth consultancy trusted by some of the world's leading brands as a growth partner that can help boost retention, revenue, App Store ranking, and much more. You can find us at phiture.com. That's P-H-I-T-U-R-E dot com. Stay brave.