Grow Fast with Outbound Fury with Raj Sarkar, 1Password

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Startups what is this concept of outbound fury? I know it might sound funny, but the literal definition is being furious in your outbound motion. Imagine anything you can do to garner your customers attention. It's the concept of having a consistent presence in the media using vital treats, controversial blog posts, funny videos, pr, product launches, et cetera. In product there is a saying called moving fast and breaking things. It is about bringing that scrappy entrepreneurial mindset to marketing. I need some traction. You need some traction. Lets get some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more.

If you build it, they will come. This was the mantra in Silicon Valley for quite some time, but it's no longer true. SaaS is competitive and your users have limited attention. You do need to build a house and then invite everyone for a party even before you have finished painting the walls. My name is raj, I'm the CMO of 1Password and the thing I'm going to talk about today is the reason I'm on this stage. More on this later. First of all, why is this topic relevant today? Rising inflation, bear market, low consumer demand. We are all facing the economic headwinds right now. Marketing organizations are challenged to be creative. We have limited budget and resources, but our targets are still very aggressive. I always tell my team, scarcity breeds innovation and this is the time when CMOs and marketing leaders need to be creative. What do you do during uncertain periods like this? You don't need a billion dollar marketing budget to build a brand. The Internet has democratized advertising and leveled the playing field for everyone. What do you need? You need outbound fury. Ok, so what is this concept of outbound fury? I know it might sound funny, but the literal definition is being furious in your outbound motion. Imagine anything you can do to garner your customer's attention. It's the concept of having a consistent presence in the media using viral tweets, controversial blog posts, funny videos, pr, product launches, et cetera. In product there is a saying called moving fast and breaking things. It is about bringing that scrappy entrepreneurial mindset to marketing. Not clear. Let me give you an example. This example is from the heydays of competition between GitHub and BitBucket. We were the only two Git players in the market at that time. GitHub was number one and BitBucket was number two. GitLab was nowhere near what. One thing I enjoyed is the competition was very healthy. We were very respectful to each other. We even used to do happy hours and we even had an annual dodgeball competition. So Zach Holman, who is one of the star developers at GitHub, quit and tweeted a joke. So this was what he tweeted and we jumped on it. We waited a week and then sent out this tweet back. Holman, we missed you at orientation yesterday. Your desk is here waiting for you. It came from a BitBucket account. It didn't come from any personal account. The developers loved it. There was so much engagement on this tweet. It created a lot of buzz and traffic to BitBucket. It got picked up by Hacker News. This wouldn't have happened in the pre Internet or pre smartphone days. Now you can reach your audience instantly without even spending a dime. You just need a Twitter account, a blog, a website and a good sense of humor and voila, you are in business. So how did I get introduced to Outbound Fury? The story began in 2011 when I joined Google Enterprise marketing team. This was the time of Google Cloud versus Microsoft Cloud wars. Microsoft Office was the incumbent with a giant market share and Google Apps was the disruptor. Larry just became the CEO and he refused to spend any dollar on brand and all his attention was obviously on the consumer side of the business. So we were operating on a very lean budget. The apps team came up with an aggressive target of being included in every single blog post or article that talked about Microsoft Office. So what did we do? We put this cross functional team together called the Outbound Fiori team. It constitute people from marketing from different functions like pr, brand demand generation. We also added someone from product and sales as well. And then we'll meet on a weekly basis to talk about what's happening that week from a competitor perspective, what's happening in the market and what are we gonna do that week. So let me give you a very simple example. We learned that Microsoft was gonna launch a cloud version of their office called Office 365. So what did we do? The day before the launch, we posted this blog post called 365 Reasons to Consider Google Apps. And guess what happened? The blog post went viral. The media loved it. The media devoured it. So next day, when Microsoft actually launched Office365, every single press release, guess what happened? They linked to this blog post. And what this blog post does is compare how 365 how Google Apps is so much better than 365. So I'm going to walk you through few. I think I have three specific examples to walk you through. So this one is very near and dear to my heart. For those of you who have worked with developers, you know how developers hate marketing. They just hate marketing but they love to brag about their work. They love to share their work with their peers. And the other thing we knew, they loved Atlassian Swag. So there was this BitBucket T shirt called the Angry Nerds T shirt. And we'll take that T shirt to every single conference. We will run out of that T shirt within the first hour. So we combined these two together and came up with this concept or a social media. This was just a social media campaign called Built with BitBucket. And the idea is the developers will showcase the apps they are building with BitBucket and then every week we'll pick a random winner and they will get a BitBucket swag. As you can see, the idea just caught fire. It created a lot of buzz and traffic and signups to BitBucket. This is another really good example about outboundfury. For those of you who are not familiar with the product, Intercom. Intercom initially launched to go after product market product minded founders. And the idea was you'll use Intercom to communicate with your customers via the product and then later on they pivoted to the marketing audience. Now how do you go after marketeers? You create content so compelling that marketeers flock to your website. That's what they did. They created a microsite which had no mention of Intercom and it had all amazing content around marketing. I remember this product launch blog post which I was a huge fan of and I will share that blog post with my peers, with my team and they generated a lot of awareness via their marketing microsite. I say it is a very savvy outbound fury way of building a brand. We did something very similar at Atlassian as well. We built this thing called the GIT microsite and the Microsite. Basically, you come to the microsite to learn about git. And the microsite had no mention of Atlassian or BitBucket. Within two years, we are generating almost a million visitors a month. And then we put a small link and it started generating a lot of referral traffic and signups to BitBucket. And obviously, I'm gonna have an example from 1Password, how many of you have seen the cybersecurity skincare ad? So people who are not familiar with 1Password, 1Password has a pretty unique product. The name itself tells you what the product is. It's a password manager, but it does more than password management. A lot of consumers use it to secure their digital life. They store their driver licenses, passports, crypto keys, vaccination cards. A lot of businesses also use our product, and they use it to protect the apps which sit outside the IT purview, which is not protected by single sign on. So when I join 1Password, my mission was 1Password should be like a toothbrush. Everyone should be using this product on a daily basis, and it should be super simple to use. How do you make a topic like security accessible to the masses? As my boss, Shiner, would say, make the hard thing the easy thing to do. So we teamed up with Ryan Reynolds. Full disclosure, he is investor in 1Password, and we created this ad, which is an easy, friendly way to reach our core audience. So let me show you that as.

The owner of Wrexham Football Club, I need to watch out for our players. I've been a star for a long time. These guys have no idea what's coming.

Cold.

Look, we got a big match coming up, and I know what you're worried about. Cyber security. How many of you have heard of 1Password? Really? Okay, how many of you have downloaded 1Password? Wow. No idea. Wales was so cutting edge. So I guess you know that 1Password completely secures your digital life. Bullet, I will shove a red card so far up your ass, people will think it's your tongue. Now, let's talk nighttime skincare routines. 1Password. Simplest, smartest, secure, rarest.

I love the secure, rarest touch. In the end, that's Ryan's genius. We debated whether to keep it or not, but we added a new word to the dictionary. So Ryan posted this on his Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn account. And through just organic impression, obviously the ad went viral. Not seems like it went viral here in this audience somehow, but we got 15 to 20 million impressions. And then we syndicated this ad and we got around 200 million impressions. We did a survey and found out like 17% of our core audience have seen the ad within the first month itself. So the question is Outbound Fury gonna work for any kind of product? I believe it works really well with PLG products which everyone talks about nowadays where you sell directly to the end users. It may not work as much for products where you sell to CXOs or which have top down GTA motion. So I say there are the three prerequisites for outbound Fiori. First and foremost, it should be simple to try. A user should be able to sign up the product with a few simple clicks and a form fill. The product should be simple to use, shouldn't need a user manual to use the product, and most importantly, the user should be able to get to the aha moment within the first five minutes. And lastly, the product should be very simple to grok, which means you won't need ID help to explain to you what is the value prop of that product. Okay, now I've convinced you about Outbound Fiori and you're gonna use Outbound Fiori in your organization. The question is how do you operationalize it? Like the Google example. First form a cross functional team including different marketing functions like pr, brand, product marketing, demand generation. Have a sales and a product counterpart as well. Meet on a weekly basis to talk about what are you going to ship that week. When I say ship, it's not just product ship, it's like marketing ship as well. Talk about what your competitors are doing and then what's happening in the market. Create a monthly roadmap of all the activities you and your teams are going to do for that month. Put all the stuff you know about your competitors or anything interesting you know is happening in the market. I'm sure there will be holes. Figure out how to plug those holes and then at the end of the quarter just assess what's working and what's not working. It's going to take some time to build this muscle, but I promise once you build it, you'll see the light at the end of the tunnel. And like I said, yes, you can use this for your personal brand as well. This is the reason I'm here today. If you follow me on LinkedIn. I post frequently on LinkedIn and what I've seen is whenever my posts become popular I started getting more followers, more connection requests, more profile views, and then obviously emails from recruiters and headhunters. So I wrote a blog post about OutboundFury and put it on Substack and then people started sharing the post. Actually Forbes linked it to the linked it in one of their articles and it got picked up by a lot of my marketing peers. A few months back I got a cold email from Lied asking me if I'm interested to come here and talk about Outbound fiori. So using OutboundFury to talk about Outbound Fury isn't that meta. So during this turbulent times, CMOs and marketing leaders need to be creative. And the way to be creative is use this concept of Outbound Fiori, which is a scrappy, entrepreneurial way of doing marketing. For all the founders and CEOs in the room, my advice is to spend on marketing as much as you do on product and see magic happen. Have any of you seen the Colin ad? Nike ad? Okay, then you'll get the joke. As Colin said in the Nike ad, believe in Outbound Fury. Even if it means sacrificing everything, Just do it. Thank you.

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