Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman

It seems like there's a playbook for everything. There's a framework for everything. But the reality is you have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer.

You were the first marketing hire at OpenAI. I believe ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history. Let me ask you this. A lot of people might be hearing like oh chatgpt. It's like why do you need marketing?

Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one Zoom level further, the thing that came up was I don't know what to use it for. The work of marketing ended up becoming creating this sort of use case epiphany where people could say I had no idea ChatGPT could do that. A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks that you got, number of views, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand?

If your advice is don't just copy what other companies do. What should people be doing?

Put together like a four step process that has served me pretty well. The first step here is today my.

Guest is Kritika Shankar Raman. Krithika was the first marketing hire and VP of marketing at OpenAI, the first marketing hire at Stripe where she was the only marketing person for three years. She was also an early marketing leader at Retool and at Dropbox. She also did marketing for Android at Google. Currently she's Executive in residence at Thrive Capital where she supports their portfolio and founders on all things marketing and helps hire early marketing leaders for their startups. In our conversation we talk through all of the biggest lessons that she has learned about how to market your product from her time at OpenAI, Stripe, Retool, Dropbox and other places including her four step diagnostic approach to marketing, Her Anti playbook playbook what B2B companies can learn from Consumer Marketing Career advice for people looking to get into marketing and also just what people that don't want to get into marketing should know about marketing to be successful. A big thank you to Kevin Garcia and Kelly Sims for suggesting questions and stories to get into. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of world class products including Superhuman Notion, Linear Perplexity and Granola and more. Check it out at lenny'snewsletter.com and click bundle with that, I bring you Krithika Shankar Raman. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own. EPO does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time. An accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles. EPO also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the AB testing flywheel. EPO powers experimentation across every use case including product growth, machine learning, monetization and email marketing. Check out eppo@geteppo.com Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's get eppo.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product. Org together in one place. No more scatter tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central. After decades of working with world class product companies, think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike Rigid point Solutions, Product Central powers everything from resourcing to voice of customer to roadmapping to launch execution. And because it's built on Airtable's no code platform, you can customize every workflow and to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action? Head to airtable.comlenny to book a demo. That's airtable.comlenny Krithika, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be chatting.

So you were an early and the first marketing hire at some of the most iconic companies in the world. What I want to do with our chat today is basically go through a lot of these companies that you've worked at and see what lessons we can extract about your time leading marketing at these companies. And I want to start with OpenAI. No big deal. You were the first marketing hire at OpenAI. Things seem to have gone really well over there. I believe ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history. Does that resonate?

It does. Not that I can take credit for it.

Well, we'll talk about that either way. Nice job. Let me ask you this. A lot of people might be hearing like, oh, chatgpt, it's like, like, why do you need marketing? It's like the most magical thing in the history of the world. Like how much value does anything add to making it as successful? You just talk about just like the value that a marketing person adds to a product like that. That's already incredible.

Yeah. When you think about all of the different stages of the funnel, awareness was clearly not the problem that ChatGPT or OpenAI had. Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one Zoom level further, the thing that came up was I don't know what to use it for. Like, I don't know what it replaces. Like, should I be using search for this, should I be using ChatGPT for this? Or how can it even help me? And so the work of marketing ended up becoming creating the sort of use case epiphany where people could say, I had no idea ChatGPT could do that and yeah, maybe I should be using it for XYZ reason in my own life. And so I think you have to be very diagnostic in terms of what can marketing be doing to help rather than just going off of the typical top of funnel and then middle of funnel and conversion oriented tactics that end up being in a playbook.

So for folks that listen to this podcast, it's a lot of product managers, product builders, a lot of them don't have a lot of experience with marketing. I think it's an important insight there of just like this is a thing marketing can help you with, is helping people understand how to use your product, understand use cases, understand examples, things like that. So I think as we go through this, I think this is useful for folks to understand of like, here's what you may not be good at and may need marketing help with.

Yeah, when done right, product management and product marketing should be best friends, right? And you're working together at every stage of product development. Rather than thinking of it as a handoff at the end of the conveyor belt when the product's been built, you sort of hand it off to marketing to take it out the door. If you can think of it as sort of a three legged race from the very Beginning of product development. Then you go to market with the right thing in the first place. You get these insights from customers, you hear the language that they're using, which can be the sort of cheat code for how to message and position the product in market. And of course there's like a creativity angle on how to differentiate your product in the market. But ideally you're doing that in lockstep with the product management side.

The other element of ChatGPT's marketing success, I know that you spent a lot of time on the enterprise side is just like consumer ish marketing tactics for enterprise Y products. Can you just talk about that? And feels like that's emerging more and more just like consumer tactics for enterprise.

Products in typical organizations that I've been a part of and leading marketing for the enterprise side of the house. The B2B side of the house usually fits the mold of demand generation, where you're creating demand for the sales team and you're bringing new customers and prospects into the fold and into the orbit of the company. That again, was not the problem at OpenAI. When we turned on the contact sales form for ChatGPT Enterprise, which was one of my first launches at the company, our lead volume 40x'd overnight. It was unanticipated, even beyond our wildest expectations. And so some of the things that I had to do are not typical to marketing at all. Like I sat down with ChatGPT and I coded up a Python script that ended up functioning as our first lead qualification lead scoring model that was used in production for way too long, longer than I'd care to admit.

It's so funny, I think about when ChatGPT first launched and OpenAI just launched. Everyone was like, how will you make money? How do you make money with something like this chatbot? That's pretty interesting. Like smart, but sort of not that smart. I remember there's a video of Sam Altman being asked, how do you make money with something like this? And he's, I don't know if you just saw this. He just like at some point we will ask ChatGPT how do we make money?

And I think the reality is it's not a solved problem. And a lot of folks, a lot of companies in the AI domain are trying to figure out the right pricing model and it's something that you've talked about in your newsletter and so on. But there's a value creation aspect to using AI that doesn't kind of neatly fit the mold of SaaS based pricing or seed based pricing. Or even usage based pricing. So I think there are still some frontiers to figuring out where is the value, how do different types of organizations and companies and consumers find value. And again, it's not the typical sort of KPIs that you would typically try to optimize and maximize.

I will say though, in terms of pricing, it feels like it's like a, like it works, it's just like a monthly fee. Talk to it up to a certain limit. It's wild to think back now there was a sense we will, we don't have no idea how to make money. Like now it seems so obvious.

Truly was a research preview.

And I remember Sam Allman just launched here. Check out this chat thing that we are trying with and then just the fastest product growth in history. No big deal. I want to come back to this point you made about this playbook anti playbook kind of thinking. You kind of pointed out that with ChatGPT and OpenAI there was no playbook and you find that often people following playbooks don't work. Talk about that insight.

In my current role and in my career, I've spoken with a lot of founders and typically the founders reach out because I've worked at companies that they look up to and they're looking for that playbook. They're looking for, hey, just like, tell me how Stripe did it, tell me how Retool did it, tell me how OpenAI did it. And I really hesitate to share any such detail because there is a combination of context, competitive landscape, and the overall sort of zeitgeist of when the company is operating, how the company's operating, that really adds a lot of nuance to what works in the market. And so doing the same things, like if you're just kind of, kind of copying the outcomes or the outputs of the strategy and trying to follow in the footsteps of the tactics, you're not paying enough attention to the inputs and sort of what were the variables and the deciding factors which led to that strategy in the first place. So what I like to do is try to unpack the more of a framework for how do you get to become more of a diagnostician to understand the right strategy or tactic in the first place, rather than saying how do you copy something that led someone else to success? Because those criteria may not apply to you at all.

So let's follow that thread because everyone's like God damn, I need a play. I just tell me how to do this. Okay, so there's no playbooks that you like. If your advice is don't just copy what other companies do that have done well. What should people be doing? How do they approach figuring out how to market their product and help it grow faster?

So I was an engineer before I became a marketer and so I have brought a little bit of an engineer's framework to the marketing side of the house. And so something that I've tried to do is put together like a four step process that has served me pretty well. The first step here is diagnosing. So diagnosing the actual problem. Again this usually means taking a zoom back when a founder comes and asks like hey, we really need to hire a demand gen leader, like who do you know in your network that we should be thinking about? And I'm like, let's talk about your funnel. Do you have a lot of people coming in at the top of the funnel? And when they do come in at the top of the funnel and you start talking to them and having a sales conversation, how likely is it that you close them? How likely is it that you win that deal? That usually tells you very astutely, do you have product market fit? Like once you're already in the room and people are converting, you have found that problem statement that is critical to them, that is hurting them the most and your solution is resonating as a solve to that problem. And so that means yes, probably throwing in more at the top of the funnel is a very good move to make at that time. But on the other hand, if you say yeah, I mean like we get a lot of interest, but once they're in the room they have a bunch of questions they're asking about, you know, how do you compare to X competitor and Y competitor and why does it cost so much and et cetera, et cetera, that probably means that there's more to be done in the product market fit zone rather than throwing in more at the top of the funnel because you have a leaky funnel at the bottom. And so hiring a demand generator, maybe the worst thing that you can do versus thinking about more of a product marketer who's thinking about the competitive differentiation, the positioning, the sal enablement that gets more people through at the bottom. So that's that diagnostic step at the top. Second to me is like analyzing your competitors approaches. So to me this is not about like being super laser focused on your competition because that leads to these local maxima rather than thinking about phase shift changes and breakthroughs that you can make as a company. But when you analyze your competitors approaches, evaluating what others do in the Space can kind of give you a useful baseline and identify opportunities and gaps and, and niches that your company can take in instead. And then this is the critical step. The next one is you have to intentionally take a different path than what everyone else is doing. And so driving a strategy that sort of sets the company apart is really critically important. I think it's so core to the discipline of marketing, ensuring that differentiation in the market. And you don't have to go into a cave to come up with these ideas and strategies. You can usually go and look at domains that are far outside of your own rather than your direct competitors and come up with some great ideas that you can cross, apply and bring in and steal into your own domain or vertical instead. And then the final piece is just experiment, test, validate all of that and then scale what works and kind of discard what doesn't. So you really have to have a lot of that ability to throw away work when you might have spent a ton of calories on this wonderful piece of content. But if it's not working, don't double down on it like that Bias of the sunk cost fallacy really comes into play, especially when you've poured your heart and soul into creating artifacts for marketing. So experiment, test, validate, give people that psychological safety to fail, especially your teams and organizations. And then yeah, once you find what works, really double down on it.

Let me summarize what you just shared here. So essentially if you think you're like I need help with marketing or I have a problem and I think I'm going to, I need to hire a demand gen person or a paid growth person or a CEO person or I don't know, content writer or something that before you do that, first of all go through these four steps. So step one is diagnose. Spend time understanding what's the specific problem you want to solve, then analyze this. Is this so interesting? I've never heard it this way. So then it's analyze what your competition is doing so that you can then one find opportunity like inspiration and see where gaps exist. And then sounds like the core part of it is just make sure you differentiate and choose a different path versus just try to be the better thing or the cheaper thing. And then the final piece is just like, okay, here's our path. Let's test run some small scale tests.

To see if this could work. I'm a marketer through and through now. So I mean you got diagnose D analyze a, take a different path T an experiment for the E so it's the Date framework. I just coined it.

Beautiful. Okay, we got a new framework hot off the presses. I love it. Date. Okay, with differentiation, what's your thoughts on saying you're just a lot better or a lot cheaper?

Being cheaper is a race to the bottom, especially when you think about sort of scaling laws and how things are playing out. Every company is sort of becoming an AI company at this time. And so as models get cheaper, more capable, being cheaper is not going to be the thing that really is a durable approach in the market. And I think in terms of doing things differently, it's not just for the sake of it. I think it's really that novelty and that differentiation is something that people are craving for. They're not looking for yet another tool in the market. They're looking for something that aligns with their values, aligns with what their goals are. And so if you can be really crisp on understanding the user need understanding what is the problem space in which they're operating, I think that kind of one, two punch of a fantastic product experience and then the marketing experience to match can be a superpower for your company.

Awesome. Okay, so let's go through an example of a company you did this with, and this may take us to another company you worked at. And the story's there.

Yeah. One that comes to mind is definitely Retool. Retool was very different from both my experiences at stripe and at OpenAI, because both Stripe and OpenAI, for better or for worse, were inbound companies. Right. There was so much latent demand that we were fighting off people breaking down the door trying to get to our products. With Retool, marketing was between the company and revenue, and we had a fantastic product market fit with the enterprise space, with the developer community. But awareness was a challenge. And so how do we go out? Not just like wait inside of our house waiting for people to knock down the door, but rather step outside of our house and start introducing ourselves to the neighborhood. So thinking about outbound channels and building demand engines was the name of the game. And here one of the ways to think about that is, hey, should we just scale the paid marketing channels that we already have working for us? And that's when the diagnostic really came into play, which is, what are the leads that are coming through the funnel? Are they turning into sales qualified opportunities? What kind of pipeline are they driving? A lot of marketing metrics, again, tend to be vanity metrics. They tend to be about the number of clicks that you got, number of views that a tweet got. Number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. Like really what you want to be looking at is your impact on either signups if you're a self serve product PLG or in in terms of a B2B company sales leads and revenue that you're driving pipeline and opportunity that you're driving. So we diagnosed that and we found that for the most part our paid social channels were doing not much for us and so we had to invest in new engines. So that was that diagnostic. When we looked at some of the competitors, you know we saw that they were doing a lot of content marketing, they were doing a lot of events programming and like we could have kind of followed in those footsteps but there was the ability to take a different path. And so what we decided to do was double down on customer marketing and customer storytelling because the thing that differentiated Retool from a lot of the copycat competitors in the market was that we had terrific traction.