How to Reach $10M ARR on a Shoestring Budget with Matt Epstein, Rippling

How to get to 10 million in ARR on a Shoestring Startup Budget what I found after doing this a few times is in the early days, it really comes down to three things obviously beyond product market fit. One is finding the killer message, two is how you grow on the cheap, and then three, building that initial small SWAT team that gets you there and what that team actually looks like. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's 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 a hundred thousand 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, this episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year the US and Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging Boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out B Oast. This episode is also brought to you by Launch Academy, an international tech hub that provides mentorship, resources, network and the environment for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and grow their startups. Since 2012, Launch Academy has incubated over 6,000 entrepreneurs, of which 300 have grown their startups past Seed and Series A and have collectively raised over $1.2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch Academy's programs, check out LaunchAcademy CA. Special thanks to our Podcast partner, Content Allies From Podcast production and promotion, content allies helps B2B companies build revenue generating podcast. We recommend them to any B2B company that's looking to launch or streamline their podcast production. Learn more@content allies.com super excited for today's session.

How to reach 10 million ARR on a Shoestring budget. Not many people I know have taken companies from 0 to 10 and our speaker today, Matt Epstein, has done that twice. He was employee number one at Zenefits. He created a leading HR brand and helped them go from 0 to 65 million ARR. And today he's helped rippling go from 0 to unicorn status over 10 million ARR. And he's done it twice and driving Major impact with a minor budget.

What I'm here to talk to you guys today about is how to get to 10 million in ARR on a shoestring startup budget. What I found after doing this a few times is in the early days it really comes down to three things obviously beyond product market fit. One is finding the killer message. Two is how you grow on the cheap. And then three, building that initial small SWAT team that gets you there and what that team actually looks like. This was already covered in the intro, but I have been through this twice now. At Rippling, my current company, I joined as one of the first few employees. The second marketer, one was an operations person and two salespeople. And at Zenefits, I joined as the first employee where I literally didn't get paid for six months. Parker, the founder, paid me in Papalote burritos, which for those of you outside of sf, Papalote is like a really great Mexican burrito spot. And eventually we did get our first few customers and then fortunately moved out of Parker's kitchen and into this broom closet where my budget was effectively zero. And so at Zenefits we went from 0 to 10 million in about a year on less than a million dollar budget with a two person marketing team. And I was one of those two people and at Rippling, at least in the early days, because I've been here, been at Rippling two years, have a very similar story to tell, in fact even more significant, but can't share the numbers. So hopefully today I can leave you guys with at least one or two tips and maybe some high level guidance that can help you get there as well. But hopefully this gives you a reason to believe. I know at least one or two things about getting to hyper growth with little to no money. So the first step is finding the killer message. And the reason why this is so important is because everything you do is built on this message. It doesn't matter if you're doing Facebook advertising, it doesn't matter if you're doing LinkedIn advertising, Radio Outdoor, doesn't matter if you don't have a message that cuts through the noise and captures people attention, Nothing you do is going to work. So the question is, how do you figure out what that message is? What I think most companies do is they pontificate and go back and forth internally and they just put something out there that they think is right. The truth is that more often than not you don't know what's right and there is actually a scientific way to figure out what works. So What I did at Zenefits and what I did at Rippling was I actually spent my first, I'd call it probably first 90 days doing nothing except testing messaging. And there's really three tools you can use to get a data back answer as to what is the message that works. And that's by leveraging SEM, Google PPC display ads, Google Display Network and Facebook. And so what the process looks like, how it essentially works is you keep coming up with different ways of explaining your product and usually that boils down to some sort of tagline, not like a branding tagline, but like a way to describe your product and then a very short boilerplate description. So this is a fictitious example that is somewhat similar to Rippling or what we did at Rippling, but what we did. And first, let me give you some context on Rippling. This is like my 62nd rippling pitch. But let me give you context on what we do so you understand these examples. So what Rippling does, or I should say is first to market to do, is it gives businesses the first way to manage everything that touches their employees in one place. So their payroll, their benefits, their computers, their apps. That way when you for instance hire someone inside of Rippling, you can set up their payroll, their health insurance, all their documents, their computer, all the applications they use like Slack and Zoom, you can set all that stuff up in 90 seconds for the first time ever. Back to this example. Now how do you explain that in a few words? What is the message that works? So in this example, there's kind of two things you could do. We can either have a all in one HR and IT software. The first way to manage all of your HR and IT in one place, from your payroll benefits to devices and apps to employee management platform. The first way to manage everything your employees need from their payroll, benefits, devices, apps and more. You can see here the difference. They're somewhat similar, they're two sides of the same coin. But the question is, which is more effective? And so what you do first is you run ads on SEM and this is really what helps you understand what is that sort of four or five word description of your product that captures people's attention all in one HR and IT software or employee management platform, what you'll find is one of these will have a higher click through rate. And it's the perfect test because you have a basically a audience who is in the market to buy. And so that's what makes SEM particularly powerful is it allows you with data to see which message appeals to the buyer, then you do the same thing. And this is usually all at the same time with display ads. And you could do this both on Facebook and on Google Display network, or just one or the other doesn't really matter. Although the more the better, obviously from a data perspective. So you can see here all in one hr. It is the message down here. I didn't have time to create the second row, but the second row would be employee management platform. So what you'll find is that one of these, again, what you're looking for is click through, rate people who just see four words and go, huh, that's interesting. Tell me more. Then once you have that high level descriptor, you need to figure out your elevator pitch. And so how do you do that? And again, this is literally what I've done twice in a row. I've done three things. So the first is I literally hopped on demos and sold clients. I did that at Zenefits, I did that at Rippling. In fact, at Zenefits, I'm pretty sure I closed like our first 2 million an ARR. And what that allows you to do is to not just walk the walk, but talk the talk and actually have conversations with the customer in a buyer setting, hear their objections and tweak your objection handling over time. Because if you can as a marketer effectively close a client on a demo, then you can effectively create marketing that captures their attention. Then the question is, it's okay, I have the long winded version of that. Now. How do I sell my grandma? And I always use the grandma test. I love my grandma. She's great. Because it really forces you to explain something as quickly and as simply as humanly possible. If you can explain your product to your grandmother and she understands it and understands it quickly, then odds are you'll be able to market it really easily as well. Because marketing oftentimes you have four or five words to describe something and maybe 60 seconds to pitch it. And then lastly, is cold email probably the most important piece here. So let's say for instance, HR and IT1 that way of describing rippling, it's the first way to manage all of your HR and it in one place from your payroll and benefits to devices and apps. So now I have the high level positioning, I have the general pitch down. Now how do I explain this in writing? Basically, you'll find through all of this testing, at the end of the day, if you've done it right and by right you have found a message that cuts through the clutter, you Want to be looking for two things. You want to be looking for one, a display CTR that is 2X. The others on SEM on Facebook. The winning message should have a 2X CTR. And then the email to demo rate should be at least 1%. So if you email a hundred people, one of them will say, I am willing to give you 45 minutes of your time. That is ultimately when you know you've got the message that works. And so again, at zenefitsippling, I did this exact same exercise. I ran the ads and I found. I'll give you the example of Zenefits because this is actually a real example. The thing that worked 3x better than everything else was all in one HR, payroll, benefits, compliance. I didn't even like that message all that much, but it turned out that that's just worked. That is what worked the best. And the email to demo rate was the other thing I look for. If you have that 1%, that means for every hundred people you pitch your product to, one will be interested. That is how you know you've got a winner. And once you got a winner, you can take it and apply it to everything again. Facebook, outdoor TV commercial, doesn't matter. Now let's talk about how you actually grow on the cheap. So I know a lot of you guys on this call are startups and I'm sure some of you already have investors. And if you've had a board meeting or you've spoken to VCs or anyone, general consensus from every VC, the guidance is grow more and burn less, which of course is in direct opposition, especially when you're a startup with very limited money and you have to show these hyper growth curves but you have no money to spend. So how do you do that? I have basically taken this methodology and done it twice. What I do is when I first join, I have the message, I say, okay, what are we going to do to grow? So what I do is I assume that my marketing budget is just going to be 20% of our estimated ARR for the end of the year. Okay, that's my pot of money. Then I stack rank. I think of every single channel you could possibly use and I stack rank it by first, what is the growth potential, then two, what is the time required to execute? Three is cost and four is scalability. If something has high growth potential but takes two years to execute, how are you going to hit hyper growth? Probably not. A good example of that, for instance, is partnerships. Oftentimes they look really appealing and they do have Huge growth potentials, but they can take years and years to pull off. Or scalability is another one. For instance, people oftentimes think why yes, this has huge growth potential, but it's super unscalable. That doesn't really matter because if you get something to work that has really high growth potential, you can always worry about scalability later or raise money to basically solve that problem. So I stack rank it and then what you'll find you'll end up with really three things that you want to spend your very limited time, money and focus on. This is just like an example. Email, for instance, for a lot of companies is the first choice. Why is it the first choice? Because it has high growth potential, it's easily scalable, it's very low cost. Depending on your market, for instance, Facebook could be the same thing. So the trick really is to have conviction in your stacked rank list and then test and fail and learn as fast as humanly possible and to cut your losses as soon as humanly possible. If you're working on Facebook and your payback period is 10 years, odds are you're not going to get Facebook to work anytime soon. So move on to the next thing, cut your losses early. And again, it's important when you're a team of 10 people. The harder part is always not what to do, it's almost always what not to do. And I think especially startups have a tendency to get distracted and to do things that feel good but don't necessarily perform. Events and content are two very good examples. They feel good, you can make progress, but is it going to be the thing that gets you 3x? If I'm, if I'm a 10 person startup and I'm using my stack rank list, events aren't very scalable, they're very expensive content, same exact thing. Obviously I'm not being, I can't be too specific here because this is just so different based off your industry and product. But the sort of main takeaway from this section is not the stack ranking because that's, I'm sure a lot of you guys are already doing that, but it's actually about once you've identified your list, it's about how you execute that list. And the thing is, or at least the thing I've learned is that this sort of unnatural growth that you get at companies like Zenefits and Rippling and very high growth companies, it's almost always from one of two things. People are doing something entirely new in a channel or they're fishing an entirely new channel. So what I like to say is, if everyone is fishing in the same pond, you need to fish in that pond in a completely new way. And so an example of that is, let's take direct mail, right? You might stack, rank your list and say, for instance, lenders oftentimes have a lot of success in direct mail or fintech products. You might say, I want to do direct mail. I could promise you if you do direct mail like this, you are not going to see outsized growth. It's just not going to happen. Now, if you do direct mail like this, you might see outsized growth. Now, to be clear, this completely bombed. But for every 20 stupid, crazy ideas we have at rippling, one usually pays off pretty big. So what we did was we basically shipped 3,000 pre made pizza boxes to people with a handwritten note that basically said, hey, Jane, yes, this box is empty, but it's full of potential. And then we go on to give the pitch of Rippling. This is the difference between working and not working in almost every case that I have seen. Unless your product is literally first to market and you have no competitors, which is pretty rare. The other option you have is if everyone is fishing in the same pond, then you could just say, screw it, I'm going to fish an entirely new pond that no one's fishing in, at least in your competitor set. And so one example of that that we did that worked quite well was no one in our space was really taking advantage of outdoor. And so we ran a bunch of outdoor campaigns and took advantage of a channel that no one was working in that worked quite well. And one of the things we did that was crazy and out of the box was we put up this competitor ad. And just for quick context, there's a company called Gusto which does payroll, benefits and HR for very small companies. We were seeing a ton of companies coming us basically saying we're outgrowing Gusto in terms of feature set. That's why we came to Rippling. So we ran this very innocuous innocent ad basically saying outgrowing Gusto, presto change o with the tagline work magic. And there was more billboards that basically spoke to the power of the system, run payroll in 90 seconds, work magic kind of thing. Now, Gusto actually ended up sending us a cease and desist letter, which we then replied to with a poem and iambic pentameter. I don't know for sure, but my guess is this is probably the first time anyone has replied to a legal team in iambic. Pentameter, but you can read it. Dear Gusto, our billboard struck a nerve, it seems, and so you phoned your legal teams who started shouting cease, desist and other threats too long to list. The poem goes on and you can read it outline. It's actually pretty fun. We obviously intended it in good spirits and as a result we ended up getting a bunch of press on a bunch of sites. So, long story short, it's not just about taking the time to stack, rank and prioritize and really think through. If I have a year to show unnatural growth, what am I going to do? But it's about recognizing that once you have that list, if all you're doing is table stakes, it's going to be really hard to achieve outsized growth. It's not that you won't do well or you won't grow. It's going to be really hard to get that sort of 3x kind of growth. Lastly, what I wanted to talk to you guys about was just what does that initial team look like? It's always mind blowing to me how many startups don't even hire a marketing person until they're like 30 plus people? Because I think a lot of marketers are not. They don't have a growth lean. They do things like content and things that oftentimes don't move the needle in a dramatic fashion. And so at this point, if there's one thing I feel very good about, it is what that sort of initial two person team looks like. This team, just to be clear, is what drives all the revenue. So both at Zenefits and at rippling marketing drove 100% of the revenue, at least in the very beginning. When I say that 10 million number, that was 100% marketing. So the first hire, the most important hire is your Swiss army knife. This was effectively me, but this is a jack of all trades, master of none who can really do everything they can. Brand design, product marketing, campaign management, agency management, sales, development and sales. Those are really the main buckets. You could be hiring someone who's a senior marketer who wants to take the next step in their career and is looking to prove themselves and get a director or VP role. It's someone who knows enough about each of these buckets to be dangerous and that is creative and hacky enough to execute on this. The second, and this is again, this is the first hire I've made at every single company I've been at is marketing operations. Another hire I see unfortunately hired far too late. And this is essentially the brains of the operation and if you're small, you're really early on, they can do a lot of stuff. They can do your marketo administration which is all of your marketing automation and your email. They can set up and configure and help you administer your salesforce. They could also execute all of your campaigns on Facebook and AdWords or at least they can work with agencies to do that and they can set up your very early, early initial sort of basic rudimentary reporting and then lastly manage all your data. So if I could only have two people in the world, if I ever started my own startup, one of the first outside of engineers to build the product, the first two hires I would make would be this person, the Swiss Army Knife and the marketing ops person. And again at Rippling and Zenefits it was me and a marketing operations person at both places and we were able to hit that number. Lastly, leaning heavily on agencies and freelancers, a very common mistake I see is people bringing these roles in house early on and the truth is you don't need them for a long time. So SEM paid social, you can hire agencies and contractors to test SEM and see if that it's you could even acquire people profitably. Pr. I would never hire a firm. The thing you'll learn about PR firms is that when you're small and un noteworthy, no matter what they tell you, they are going to put the kid right out of college on your account. And oh by the way, they're going to charge you an obscene amount of money. So if you do want press, I would recommend freelancers. Third is a design again easily outsourceable. You can get it for cheap. You don't have to bring that in house for a long time. And then lastly front end development. In fact by the way, we only have one design director and 10 freelancers. We still don't have any in house designers and we're 500 people. This is for marketing, just to be clear. So after that the next two hires are either in parallel or depending on your needs, one or the other. But a growth lead, someone to really take all the campaign management off your plate and then a product marketer, someone to take more of the product marketing work off of that, that Swiss Army Knife's plate. With this team of people, Swiss Army Knife, your marketing ops person, your growth lead and your PMM, you can get really far. We only have a 12 person marketing team just for context and we have like 50 sales reps. Last few pieces of advice, just basically common mistakes. I see companies make and advice I wish I I would have given myself earlier. One is to launch fast and fail faster. If you are a small startup and you are happy with the work you're putting out, then you're taking too long. You should never be happy with the work you're putting out because it means you took too much time. And oftentimes the stuff that works is the stuff that I never even thought was going to work. And so the trick is to test and fail as fast as humanly possible to get to the thing that works. And it's very rare, at least in my career, that I have ever just done something on the first try and gotten it right. Two is to hire people with grit, creativity and raw horsepower. I think people oftentimes optimize for colleges and logos from places like Google and Apple and all those places. But those people at early stage companies almost never pan out. They don't deal well in chaos. They never really created things from the ground up or have the temperament to do that. And so the people that you really want to look for are the ones with almost a chip on their shoulder that have something to prove and that are super creative because those are the people. And I could think of three people off the top of my head as inner fits and rippling that can literally change the course of your company. And it's. I have personally never found that from the guy who, or a woman who has worked at Google for 10 years. And then lastly, always start with what would I do if I had unlimited resources? So this is actually a lesson I learned at Zenefits where we had an incredibly aggressive growth goal. And I basically went to Parker and I was like, look, this isn't possible. I can't do it because of this budget. It's all these reasons why I couldn't do it. And what basically Parker said after he had calmed me down, he said, okay, let's do this. What if you had unlimited resources? If I gave you infinite money and headcount, what would you do? I took a second and I thought about it and then all of a sudden I was like, if I had unlimited, I would do X, Y, Z. And it very quickly turned into the answer, this is what we should do. And then the question became, how do we just get an alpha of this out the door so that we can fundraise to scale that or dedicate resources like engineering resources to solve it. And I think many people, myself included, they're not trained. If I had infinite possibilities, what would I do? They think I have one headcount and $100,000. What would I do? And I think that really limits your ideas and basically kills good ideas on the vine. So that's all I had for you guys. My goal here was to just hopefully give you one or two tips and maybe some rough guidance that you could take to think about growth differently at a startup and get to that same level of growth without having to spend a ton of money. Because I think I'm living proof that it is possible. And if anything, I think not having money oftentimes puts your back against a wall and makes you come up with very creative solutions to problems that people usually just throw money at.

What would you do if you had unlimited resources and you came up with all these ideas? How did you prioritize that? Like, how did you distill it down? Because when you have unlimited resources, you probably have almost unlimited ideas too, right?

Came down to three things. Scalability, headcount. Actually, money was a distant third. But how we ended up solving it, once we said, okay, this could work, but we don't have the money or people, I ended up hiring like 20 people in the Philippines and taking an engineer from one of the product teams and lo and behold, like, it worked. Had I not gone through that exercise, I would have never come up with that idea in a million years.

How did you decide on the channels there?

It really came down to, again, the revenue goal. Backing into that, okay, 20 per. If I'm gonna. Let's say our budget will be 20% of their revenue goal. This is how much money I have. And given the growth goal, like the velocity we would need, it became somewhat easy. Like, again, depending on your industry. This is very different. But SEM is like a good example of where I see many people start. The problem with SEM is the house always wins. Basically, the game is rigged in Google's favor. And so AdWords is oftentimes something where you'll just end up blowing a shitload of money very quickly. And even if you get business, you'll find out very later, once your company's mature, that it's wildly unprofitable. So that's why I didn't start with something like SEM, or at least the first thing I started with was email, because we can service every company. Basically the United States or even the world needs payroll, benefits, HR it. And so I basically said, okay, we can service every company in the U.S. email is scalable, it's cheap, and it has high growth potential. The thing I focused on was email. And the question is how do you do that at scale, reliably and really well? And so that's where a lot of my focus went.

Email still performs the same way. Or do you transform that or morph that to LinkedIn and whatnot? How do you see LinkedIn sort of playing into this equation? Or maybe it doesn't.

Another lesson I learned about growth is anytime you discover something fundamentally new or really innovative from a growth perspective, it has 12 month shelf life. Marketers talk growth, people talk and whatever idea you come up with, people will have it almost immediately. Or in 12 months you'll see the effectiveness fall by half because everyone else is doing it. So there's actually a ton of emails that we created at Zenefits that you will now see everywhere that were originally created by our team. You could google it, you could find a few. So long story short, there's only so many channels in your tool belt. This is what I meant by finding a different way to fish in the same pond as everyone else. If you have a channel, if you are not going to do something fundamentally new or different, you're going to get the exact same conversion rates, if not worse because everyone else has more money, better brands, all that stuff. Email for instance, what we are doing on the email side at Rippling is nothing like what we did at Zenefits, but it is the same in terms of the amount of engineering and sort of problem solving that we put into it. And so we basically said, okay, everyone's doing this now let's do email this completely different way.

What's in your marketing toolbox to manage all of this? Like from like maybe sales development to marketing automation?

We have a pretty basic stack. Really the only diversity in our stack comes from data providers, but on the main stack is marketing automation system. So we use Marketo. That's all of your attribution, tagging, email automation. Then there's your CRM. I think a lot of startups making the mistake do make the mistake of getting Salesforce in the beginning, which unless you think you are really going to be a high growth company, almost never works out because it requires a dedicated person, tons of maintenance, it's very expensive, it's like 150 bucks per person. And so for that there's things like Pipedrive or other CRMs, but we have Salesforce and then Outreach for sales reps, although we don't let salespeople send any cold email. So a very common mistake today I think in tech companies arm their sales reps with outreach. And now you have 20 kids, right out of college, sending a hundred thousand emails a month, basically spamming the world. So I think that is a dangerous thing to give sales reps. You don't have control over it. But we do give it to them mostly for follow up sequences for prospects, optimizely for AB testing and lastly a bunch of data providers. But our stack isn't super complex to be quite.

I thought you were gonna say we built a bunch of stuff. This is good. Gives me hope that like folks like me can go and subscribe to a bunch of things and grow. You talked about the danger of lots of cold emails going on. Everyone is cold emailing, e blasting. What are your recommendations to getting around that?

So the first thing is, have you gone through that exercise that I spoke about in the beginning? Have you gotten are you getting a 1% conversion rate on your emails? If not, you're already doing it wrong because you don't have a message that works. Second thing is email just comes down to intent, signals and personalization. So once you have your sort of core message that works, how do you identify signals with data to know that this person's in the market? And then third is obviously the delivery of the email. How do you actually get it into someone's inbox? And that is the much harder piece that I think a lot of people struggle with today. And I think where the market has shifted is to basically giving salespeople outreach, which on one hand is great, but on the other hand I think almost always is abused and does more harm than good. By the way, sales reps don't send any cold email. At Rippling zero marketing manages everything.

Yeah, definitely. When I look at like conversion rates that go from like an outreach because it's connected to your Gmail or email, you're getting like 70, 80% open rates. For me in some cases, I personally use Mixmax and I get 80, 90% open rates even on cold things. And then you look at something that goes from sendgrid or mailchimp and you're getting like sub 30%. So that's why it's landing in the salespeople's hands here.

Yeah, definitely A big shift that has happened from Zenefits days is sending email from Marketo and mailchimp. Those days are long gone, which I think is. You're right. Why in partially the market shifted to tools like outreach.

You are essentially the first Swiss army knife there at Zenefits. So perhaps at Rippling, how do you prioritize your role? Because it's multiple things. It's sales Development, it's sales, it's messaging, it's branding. It's a whole bunch of things.

It really just comes down to a revenue number and what you need to do to get there. And I think people have what I call shiny object syndrome. Again, I think what's often the hardest part is just what to say no to. And so even now at Rippling, I get people saying, when can we get this? I say, maybe next year because it's not important. So for me, I'll just take Zenefits as an example. For me, it was okay, this is to get to our are a, we need to hit this number. What are the things I need to focus on? And we need to basically come up with a pitch and a demo. We need to have a basic website that gets like baseline performance. And we need to have at least two channels that we can reliably, in a SaaS way, reliably scale. And so literally all I did was for the first year was find the message that works, which I did through literally selling clients and closing clients and creating the pitch and demo myself. Then the second thing was just creating a website that just met baseline. And third was working relentlessly on finding those two channels. And it was all back of the knack. And math. Email, for instance, okay, 8 million small businesses in the world, if we get X percent conversion rate and this many demos and our close rate is this and our average deal size is this, then we need to basically send this many emails. So more often than not, it's just back of the napkin math that rolls up to a revenue goal. And when you do that, everything else just falls into the background because you realize, am I going to really spend a day on a content piece? Like, why? A hundred people will see, it'll make the sales team feel good, but is it going to get me an extra 20,000 AR? No.

Marketing teams can be aligned the same way that if it doesn't tie to a revenue number, don't do it. And marketers don't often think like sales or think in terms of revenue. Do you have a quota for marketing here, like a revenue number?

At Rippling, Marketing still generates a majority of the revenue. So I oftentimes lay awake at night staring at the ceiling in a cold sweat.

You mentioned Facebook as one of the tactics. What are some things you've tried on Facebook that may have worked or some advice there?

It really comes down to two main things. The first is really training the algorithm to find people that really match your target buyer. And there's a Whole bunch of stuff you can do to train the algorithm. For instance, people who add a phone number and it's an actually valid phone number so you validate the number on the back end. Basically only fire the Facebook pixel for people who enter in a real phone number because those people have a higher propensity to actually convert. Well now Facebook's only looking for those kinds of people. Like how Facebook does that, I have no freaking clue. But the biggest thing is your targeting. And then obviously the second sort of lesser important thing is just the creative and constantly testing creative to reach some sort of baseline. But with Facebook I think it, it really primarily falls down to targeting and then to a lesser extent of making sure your creatives don't fatigue because they do eventually fatigue and you have to keep on. It's like a hamster wheel.

If on the founding team the Swiss army knife doesn't exist. What are some hacks tips for finding that person?

Yeah, this is really tough. If I was basically a CEO hiring someone, what I would probably do is I would first check my network to see who does know a lot about this, who could help interview this person. For me, literally marketers job is to sell. And so oftentimes you can find, you can interview marketers who are really great at selling you. And they would, they'll make you believe that they're amazing. But as soon as you, if you really know your stuff, if you dig down, you realize that they're just great marketers but they're just kind of selling you a dream. So I would look for someone in my network who really did know a lot about growth and marketing. And I would have them interview the people that I was interested in. But I would look for people profile wise who have, let's say three to five years experience with a background where they were not the captain, they were the lieutenant, the one actually doing the stuff. You never ever want to hire the VP or the senior guy because they don't even remember what work looks like because they're so high up the layer cake. So you want like the guy one or two level or woman one or two levels beneath them who actually has done it. Have the person in your network interview to really gauge this person understand growth and do they understand marketing. And then obviously the third thing is to look for a track record of where they have demonstrated their ability to take something from 0 to 1. But most importantly, just look for someone who you are convinced has like grit, hustle and creativity. At Parker, I'm laughing as I'm like giving you guys these guidelines because at the time I didn't have any of that. I didn't really have the examples to point to. Parker I think had believed I knew my stuff because he had a front row seat, but I didn't have examples to point to. I think Parker primarily picked me because he just believed I was smart, hungry and creative. And it's those kinds of people who, when you're a five person company, if you're not working 16 hour days every day and failure is not an option and you don't come up with out of the box ideas, it's going to be pretty hard to be successful as like a very small startup.

And then you had one really impressive thing under your belt. Three years out of college you created this Google hireme.com website and you drove a bunch of traffic to it and it went viral and it was all over the press from ABC News to everything. Right?

Yeah, actually this is a good marketing lesson. Not that I ever like showing this picture.

You search your name on Google, the autocomplete is Epstein Viral video.

When I lived in Atlanta, I worked in advertising for six years. Couldn't get a job in tech in San Francisco. I quit. I'm like I'm going to get a job in tech in San Francisco. And it turns out no one in San Francisco wants to hire an advertising guy from Atlanta with no tech background. So I recorded this video of myself in a mustache without pants asking Google for a job. There's actually a lot of stuff that's not in the press. I spent my life savings on a propeller plane and flew the URL to the website around Google's campus. I printed out giant six foot board cutouts of myself holding up the website URL and shipped it to all of Google's HR offices. Anyway, long story short, I ended up getting an interview with Google. It worked because I, while everyone else was sending in resumes, I was flying planes around Google's campus and sending cardboard cutouts at myself. And the same is true for startups if the thing you're doing is, is being done in the same way as everyone else. Odds are as a five person company with no brand affinity, very small budget. Odds of you beating everyone else is going to be pretty, pretty small. Someone asked, did you get the Google job? I did not get. I got offers from a few big companies like Salesforce. Google actually did not offer me the job, which in retrospect ended up working out for me pretty well.

Since then you helped build two unicorns, so that's amazing. And I don't think very many people at Google can say that. How long do you have to wait before you hire that marketing ops person? Between like the Swiss army knife?

It's literally the first thing. I literally probably couldn't do it. I hired them immediately just because marketing at this point, it's directly linked to your basically your database and your targeting. And if you don't have marketing operations, you're going to have no visibility into the stuff you're doing. So you could be spending a ton of money and have no idea that it's actually getting really the unit economics are really terrible, but also the actual executional work. I'm a lot of things, but I can barely or I'm good at a lot of things, but I can barely create a pivot table and Excel. And I for sure, I could barely navigate my way around systems like Marketo and Salesforce. The reason ops is so important is the execution and the scale. Like marketing ops is what helps you do things like email very quickly at a high scale. And so if all you hire is the senior person, they're just gonna move so incredibly. Sorry, a senior Swiss army knife. They're just gonna move insanely slow because they're just gonna be bogged down constantly in technical work.

When you interview people, what are some two or three questions you ask to identify that this is the right person for my marketing?

So if I was gonna interview me, if I could ask three questions, I think one I'd wanna gauge, is this person a really good salesperson? I'm really referring to the very early days when you're like less than 30 people. One, I'd want someone who is basically could sell as well as my best salesperson because that is. That's essentially what marketing is. You're convincing someone to buy Cheerios over Frosted Flakes. So I would probably ask, tell me what is a product or service you absolutely love? And then I'd say, great. Now pretend we walk into a bar and I'm your friend. Tell me why I should use that service. And I think you'll find pretty quickly there's only two camps of people who knelt down and fall over their feet or people who they pitch you instantly and you want to buy that product. I think the second thing is I would go down the list of growth channels and probe on basically their experience in things like Facebook, in SEM, in email, and how they've used it in their career and some of the success they seem great. You did email at your last company. What was the conversion rate, how did you get that conversion rate, that kind of thing. And then lastly, I really try to really dig deep on their tenacity, their hustle and their grit. And you could do that by asking questions about personal life experience, work experience. But Parker, for instance, was sold. Because what person in their right mind spends their whole life savings flying airplanes around Google and doing all this crazy stuff? Like obviously that's a person who has creativity and grit asking questions to figure that out from the candidate.

At what point in the life cycle do you hire product marketing?

I would say pretty late, because that Swiss army knife, what they are, is a product marketer. And what you need in the early days is someone to explain your company and your core product and your pitch, just your evergreen pitch and taking that and executing a lot of the campaigns. When you need product marketing is usually when now you have. You're launching tons of products all the time. Your sales force is huge. I wouldn't hire product marketing until you've hired those four people. Your Swiss army knife, your marketing ops person, your growth lead, and then your first product marketer.

This was fantastic. I learned a ton. Thanks so much, Matt.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Tracktion podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at Boast AI that's B O A S T AI Blog.