Marketing With $0: How Branch Grew to $4 Billion with Mada Seghete

Good marketing is when people don't know you're marketing to them. People don't buy products, they buy stories, relationships and magic. 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, People, 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 O A S T AI. 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 and 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@contentallies.com Driving growth doesn't mean raise.

Money, hire a big team, spend lots of money. It's about prioritizing activities with the biggest impact. And Mara is going to tell us all about it. She's a co founder of Branch pioneer in mobile measurement and deep linking that helps businesses of all sizes drive app installs and user engagement. Branch powers more than 15,000 apps and 2 billion monthly users around the world for apps like Airbnb, Buzzfeed, Pinterest, Target, Yelp, et cetera. And recently they announced a 300 million Series F funding at a 4 billion valuation. She's also an investment partner at X Factor Ventures, which provides pre seed and seed stage capital and Chief Co Founder, Mobile Growth A community of over 22,000 app developers and mobile marketers in more than 50 cities. And your accolades go on and on.

You wrote, oh, my God, man, you're, like, making me blush. Look at this. It's like, blush, blush time.

You wrote this awesome book on mobile growth and you're born and raised in Romania, so a badass immigrant founder in Silicon valley. Also in LinkedIn's next wave. 150 top professionals in 15 industries, all under 35. Welcome back to Traction. Mata, how are you?

Thank you, Lloyd. I'm really good. That was definitely making me blush. Super excited to be here and chat with you. You're one of my favorite people. And for those of you who don't know what Bose does, we use something like this for branch. Like it saves you a ton of money in taxes. And definitely check them out. Every time I tell founders that I invest about this initially, they're not reassured and they look into it. Holy shit. We saved all this money, so definitely check them out. Thank you. Loy did not pay me to say this. I just truly believe it's an amazing service.

Mara, you've had a super impressive career as an immigrant founder, growth leader, community builder. Give us your backstory and how did you land on Branch with your co founders?

I grew up in communism in a small town. My mom took us out of poverty by when revolution came. She trained to become a financial analyst, investment person, and she moved to Bucharest, moved my dad and I after her. And then she read in some newspaper that you could apply to schools in US and get the scholarship if you're good at math. And I used to go to math contests on Olympiads as a kid. So I just applied and ended up getting a scholarship, Cornell. And then it's funny, my whole story is driven by visa issues. So my H1B got denied and I ended up wanting to stay in us So I applied for school. I ended up at Stanford. I loved they were starting the design school. I ended up working, taking class in the design school and working with all the startups. And I had this one professor, Michael Deering, and I remember one time I was walking home and I was helping him actually take something to his car after a class. And I was like, we work with all these startups and they're so great, I don't think I could ever start a company. And he like, stopped, put his boxes down, looked me deep into the eyes and was like, if you don't, who do you think will? And I think that was the moment I decided I was Going to start something. So then I went and worked for startups because people are like, you have no experience. You should like maybe get more experience in the startup world. And then came back to Stanford for an mba. But I was very set on finding a team and starting a company. So I like foundation. The smartest guy I think I was. I was like looking around, who's the most driven, smartest person in my class. And our CEO Alex was always coding. I would come back from parties and he was coding in the MBA lounge. And I was like, okay, that dude. So I convinced him to work with me and we ended up convincing Mike. And then Dimitri dropped out of undergrad. We started with Fitbit for Dogs, which is not deep linking, obviously. And we actually took a class from the same professor that like 16 years earlier had told me that he thought I could start a company. And it was cool. We like worked in that class. They helped us incorporate. And then we're like, maybe Fitbit for Dogs is not like the right thing. It seems like a very small market. So then we built an app. So we worked for about a year on this app called Kindred Photo Books. Same founders. It allows you to print photos from your phone and social media and also in this little cute booklets. And we really faced the problems that people face when they try to grow a mobile app. It was very hard to do virality, it was very hard to do any growth hacks because we found it was so hard to pass information to install. I wanted to do this thing where I started the photo book after a trip and then I shared it with my friends. They downloaded the app, they added more photos and there was no way to make them match. So trying to solve the problem for ourselves. I remember asking Alex, let's go to Stack Overflow. It must be someone. So we found a way to do it using at the time fingerprinting. We don't do that anymore. But at the time that's how we started. And like linking seems to be really complicated. Android, iOS, let's start a solution. A company that does that. And then I think as like the industry changed and Apple introduced universal links and Android and Google introduced app links, things got even more complicated. We now help with that problem for all brands of all sizes. But then we, since we do the links, you also help with the measurement of how people get your app. But that's the story.

What was that moment that made you pivot?

So it's interesting, I think I also invest in companies and I look at a lot of and I think the hardest thing I've noticed for founders is to realize that something's not working and pivot. And, you know, our pivots weren't small. They were something completely different, like hardware to a consumer app to B2B, like deep linking. I think if I'm being extremely honest with myself, I don't think I could have made those pivots on my own. I think I'm very emotional, like a very attached idea. But I think Alex, our CEO, is just a very. I think he makes decision based on data and I think he taught me how to be more that way. And he actually, every time we worked on something, he's, this is what I think the goals should be. And if we get there, that means going to work and then we can move to the next stage. So we always had these goals and it was very obvious that with the other ones that they were very hard to get. We ran our numbers for the photo we're printing up, and even though we were acquiring users, they were quite expensive and our margins per user were very small. And the hypothesis there was that someone was going to buy a lot of different books. That's the only way our model worked because it was really easy to send. And we're like, these are really cheap. You'll send them to a lot of different people. And it's really like that was the wrong hypothesis. So when we started realizing that, and we also thought we could do virality and we couldn't. So it's very obvious that all these things that we needed for the business to succeed weren't working. But I think it was very hard to let go. We were so attached. Even when we decided to move on, we ended up selling the company instead of shutting down for very little money. And then we spent a lot of our time supporting the company. After we sold it, Alex even thought about buying the company and running it on the weekends with his wife. This was a lot of emotional attachment. And it wasn't like a company, it was actually working. People were buying photo books. We sold over 10,000 photo books. So it's very hard, I think, to let go of something that's. If something's really not working, I guess it's easier, but if something's working, I think the mistake I've seen a lot of founders do, and we almost fell into it ourselves, was to keep thinking that you can improve it. And I really understand that you actually need something completely different and you don't quite have product market fit. And I think that's the Hardest thing. And I've seen many make that mistake actually.

Now some great learnings there from a marketing standpoint. How did you get your customers in the early days at Branch? How did you validate that this could be a thing?

Honestly, it was all friends and people in our same investor community. It's very hard. It was a very hard product to convince people to use. Like when you are the link that takes people to an app and actually when the app opens, you, you need to call us and be like, hey, where does this person come from? Is it from your link or not?

Maybe you can take a minute to explain what is deep linking.

So basically it's you click on an, you click on a link and instead of taking you to, then let's say it opens the app directly to the thing that you were supposed to open. So let's say someone shares a house with you from Airbnb, you don't know where someone's going to click on that link. We power those links. So if someone clicks on a link in Android and they have the app, we should open the app to that house. If they don't have the app, you can make a decision as a brand, do you want to take them to your website to the house, or do you want to take them to the App Store? If you go to the App Store and someone downloads the app, then you need to make sure you take them to the same thing that was in the link. And that's sometimes very hard to do. And I'm sure many people here have experienced when that works and it's quite magical. And when it doesn't work and you completely lose the dress you're trying to buy or the thing that someone shared with you. So we help solve that problem. But in order to solve that problem, every time an app opens, they have to ask us, where should we take this user? And sometimes they'll come from a branch link and we say, hey, take them here. This is the routing. Or we might say, no, we actually don't recognize this user. We don't know where you decide take them to the regular onboarding. It doesn't come from us, but they still are call to us. So we are in the critical path of an app open. So if we don't work, it can really slow the app down and really like the links. We have this tagline, a branch that says our links must always work because if our dashboard is down, sometimes it's okay, we'll fix it and people will get in it half an hour later and they'll see their data and it's not the end of the world. But if the links don't work, then people don't get to the app. So our link, like our link uptime is extremely high and there's a lot of people making sure that our links never fail. So because of that, in the early days, we were just startup. It was hard to get people to use us because people were like, no, you're just like little startup. And you were asking me to put you in the critical path of my app. We started with smaller companies that. There was this guy who was a classmate and he had worked on an app. It was called Van Gogh. We have a room named Van Gogh after him, after his app. And we convinced them they were trying to build a referral system and it didn't work without Branch. But the only way we convinced them to use us is we actually ended up going to his office. Well, not we. Alex went and he basically built the entire referral program with Branch. And then once we were live in his app because. Because now the referral work, we could go to others and convince them. And one of my friends worked at a company called Gogobot, ended up being chip.com and he introduced us to the CTO and we. They gave us a shot. And they were like a really big brand. And once we were in them, it was easier and then became a lot easier once we had some of these early customers. Because people are like, okay, they're using you and you're stable and you're a real company and everyone needs it.

So when you were figuring out customer acquisition and marketing in those early days, let's talk about that because a lot of founders here, right. You're a new startup founder. Especially now during this downturn, all the advice is conserve cash.

Yeah. What.

What should marketing look like? How do you figure out your marketing strategy? And how do you get scrappy on. On a tight budget? You've been there.

You know what's funny? I feel like I'm still there because as you grow and we don't have. We've never used. If you compare us to some of our competitors who really spend, we've never had such a big budget. So I think when I think about our marketing strategy, we've always had these three pillars, and I don't think it was like they were so clear in my head at the time. But looking back, we've always had the same three pillars that we have today, and we've gotten a lot better on each of the pillars. But we started, I think, with all three from 30 days. So the first pillar, there's a few codes that say that marketing is really good. Marketing is when people don't know you're marketing to them. People don't buy products, they buy stories, relationships and magic. So I think there's three pillars around this quote. So the first one, stories twice as content. We tell stories about how people use branch, how they really change their marketing stack, how they could really solve problems. And stories can be everything from. In the early days, it was really blog posts telling people how they can do something, how others have done it. But today those stories can be videos, case studies. But content is extremely important to us. And one of the main ways that we grew early and then we're still growing now, and we can use money to promote that content. We don't actually, I think our content is good enough that if you really create really good content, you don't need to actually spend that much. But to generate good content, you have to put your own. You have to hire really good people, understand your product. You, as founders, need to work on content. The early days, I think Alex and I and Mike and Dimitri all wrote a lot and it's hard when there's so much going on to also find time to write. The second pillar is relationships. And I think it's interesting, like building a community. Building relationships with people can really help you sell your products. So if people, like, understand who you are and understand why you're doing something and build a relationship with you, obviously they won't necessarily buy because of it, but they'll definitely look at it. A great example is I built this community, the mobile growth community, and we invited people and we built this relationship with people at Pinterest. And they were using a competitor and they weren't willing to switch and that was okay. But then Apple made the change, introducing universal links. And it became very hard to do deep linking. The people that I built those relationships with a Pinterest, when that happened, they were like, hey, this is not working anymore. We want to give you, we want to see if you work. They gave us a shot and it worked and then immediately started using us. Switch from the competitor. And it took like a long time for them to. But if we hadn't had that relationship, maybe they wouldn't have thought of us. So they didn't buy. They bought because of our product. But the relationship really helped open that door and it helped them considering us. So I think a lot of our marketing today is built around relationships. We do A lot of VIP events, community events, we have mobile growth awards. We do a ton around this. And the last one, which I call the magic, which is one that I think we're much better than we used to be, is the measurement. For us, I think it can be different for everyone. But in our case, our magic is the ability to really figure out what works. And we build this like really intense model that basically B2B measurement is hard. B2C measurement on mobile is hard. We solved that as a company, but I think it's hard because someone touches so many different things and so many different platform, but you still have only one person. I think in B2B measurement you have multiple people who make a choice and becomes even more complicated. So not only do you need to understand all your all the touches, but you also need to understand all the different people. So we have this thing. When an opportunity gets created, we actually look at every single person that is on opportunity. Some people are decision makers, other influencers, and they all get added to the opportunity. Then we actually take all of those people and we look at all their touches. Their touches could be a salesperson, talk to them. They open an email from an sdr, they went to an event, they read the blog post, they are using one of our partners and got an intro for bd. Everything gets points and then we apply the time decay over the past year and we basically take all the money and divide it by all the points and all the people. So every single activity gets something, gets an amount of money and then we add it from all the different opportunities and we can really compare what works and what doesn't. So we don't have first touch, last touch, whatever, which I know many other companies do. For us it's like full on multi touch attribution and also not multi person attribution with the time decay. And it really helps you understand what works and what doesn't. And things that in a last touch or first touch model wouldn't get credit. Like our newsletter for example, get a ton of credit here and it really understand, helps you understand what makes an impact.

I love this point system, especially when you're doing brand and community activities. In companies that do last touch or first touch attribution, all your brand activities get lost.

Exactly, exactly.

Like how do you know? So let's unpack each of these pillars. So the first pillar you said was content. What was the playbook like? How did you seed it in the early days and then how did you distribute it?

Yeah, I think there were two main Things that we did that worked well, we tried everything, right? But the main ones were, so we started writing blog posts and then we're like, oh, wow, people come and read this blog post and they actually come and sign up for a branch because of the blog post. Let's write more blog posts. But then let's figure out, let's be more thoughtful about what to write. So we started building the system. I worked with the data analyst on the data team and I was like, hey, can you look at all these different keywords from our competitors, our own keywords. And, and this was very early on. This was I think maybe five, six years ago. And she built this model and then she came up with these are the keywords that I think have the most potential. And then I would take the keywords and based on my knowledge of the industry and of people, I would come up with the topics and like she would say web banner works or something. People are looking for web banner. And I would be like, I think a good topic would be how or web banner Android. And I'd be like, I think a good topic would be how to open an app from an Android web banner. And some of those worked extremely well. And that SEO, like, even today, when I think about like our pipeline and in, in this model that I explained, content generates about half, you know, of the points and the majority of a big portion of that content is like SEO driven content. And I think what's really interesting about SEO, different content is that it also gets you a lot of new leads and if you do it well, you don't need to actually do paid. Like we actually have tried doing paid and then we compare it to the SEO and we just get so much less from paid. So it doesn't actually make sense for us to do a lot of it. So focusing on content on organic can do extremely well in the early days. And if you do it well, it's like the gift that gives on giving. Because one thing that's really interesting is like Google might come and change our algorithms, but it never affects us because we don't go and do any gimmicky stuff. When it comes to SEO, we're not like, oh, let's have this many inbox. We just are like, no, let's write really good content and make sure that obviously the titles are like, there's some tricks on like writing good content, but it's not like at the end of the day, those are minor and if the content's good, that's what's actually going to really matter. So we did that. There's a company that now we're going to start using. My friend Ethan started a company called Graphite and he works with bigger brands on helping them generate content. But he also has a tool. So we're using his tool now instead of having a data analyst figure out what we should write for. And he's really cool. He works mostly with B2B brands, but I think we're using it now for ours and we're like a test for him. And then the other one is figuring a really good piece of content and instead of writing small fluffy things, do one thing and do it really well. And I've seen other companies do it. This was not like my idea. I think I copied it from someone. But we did it with this mobile growth handbook and we've done it almost every year. It's a few hundred pages. It goes through everything. We put a lot of resources. We, it's. It takes us a long time to put that together and it's like really good. So a lot of people download it, everyone knows about it. It's become this thing that people know and look for when the new one comes. And other people have tried to copy us, which is really, which is I guess the point where others are copying your thing. It's, you're doing well. We've done other content things, but if I'm to think about the two that did the best, it's like these two. So a one very important. And I think the other really interesting thing when you write content is really understand what does your customer need and what is your, what are they looking for. So even though the mobile growth handbook is not like the branch handbook, we try to figure out what is, what are people looking for and what is the pain point and write around that.

And then your second pillar, let's dive into that a little deeper.

Yeah, that's been like, we basically understood 30 days. We were like, let's start a community. I think you've started your own community so, you know, not that different. You build a community and then you realize that by building a community you create relationships with people and then they know about you and they're more likely to take a call from your team and check you out. And people move from companies but then they like still have a warm view of you. And I think the important lessons to the community is you can be too salesy. Our mobile growth meetups, we do a three minute intro to branch at the beginning and the rest is a panel and there's no questions on one branch and sometimes we have customers on the panel, sometimes we don't. But there are very much like people used to come. We're redoing them in person, so it's cool. But people come because they're. They want to learn about how to grow on mobile and it's not. They know it's not going to be like a big branch sales pitch and it helps with obviously the people attending, but also the speakers. By getting people to speak on a panel, you build a relationship with them and it goes both ways. So that has been really good. And then we do a lot of other things. Like we've realized that as we started going into these bigger enterprises and selling the community works. But I think you need the other types of events. So I started a retreat called Leaders in Mobile. It's like a invite only for our bigger accounts. And we did one in Hawaii. We're doing the next one in Marrakesh. So that's a much smaller event for maybe the leaders who might not come to who are busy and maybe need something a little bit different. But it's still a community. We built an online community around it. It's just smaller, more exclusive community. But it's a very similar. There was no talks, it was all roundtables, people learning from each other, like a similar model. So it's been cool to explore all these different ways of building relationships with people.

Like from 0 to 22,000 developers and even in many ways, we started this traction community. We called it traction because we didn't want to want people to feel they would be sold to. And we started with pizza nights. Like one ideal customer inviting them to the pizza nights evolved into the conference and then webinars and all of this. So I want to. My one belief fundamentally is if you build a community, you won't become a commodity always. Yesterday's innovation becomes today's option and then gets commoditized. But if you look at from Harley Davidson to HubSpot, they're all built on the back of communities. And the community also gives you feedback to improve the product as well as becoming a brand and voice for you. So let's dive into this 22,000 developer community.

It's a lot more than that. I think it's a very old. I think it's probably around 300,000 around. Wow. And I think the number I'm using is someone on our team, Alex Bauer sends his newsletter to the community and it's one of the best, honestly, I think it's one of the best newsletter in the industry. It has no unsubscribe rate, 40% open rate. It's just like really cool. He's very snarky, very opinionated but that's how I measure the size of the community. He's so let's stick with 300,000.

I think I looked at a very old, maybe five years old bio and that's where it was. You got to get.

I think there was more. Yeah and when we went online in Covid it really grew. People like anyway things changed a lot in the past few years. I think that's probably four or five years ago.

Yeah and during COVID even we went from like few thousand like 30, 40,000 subscribers to a hundred because doing two webinars a week. But let's talk about a little deeper in building this community Led growth is taking the world by storm this year Every VC is asking me to come and speak about community in their offices to their portfolio.

It's the cool thing today and very hard Lloyd. It's very hard.

It's hard.

I don't know. I think it's. How do you define a community? Also like the leaders in mobile community is like 100 people and that's very much like everyone's very active. Our 300,000 is not as active. It's just people who read our emails sometimes come to an event. I think out of all those people probably one they've come to one thing. But is that a real community? Do they talk to each other? Not as much So I think it's just. I actually believe that it's important to do these events but how do you define the community and how you keep the community engaged is very hard and I haven't found a way and I know people can do it but I haven't found a way to do it well online. I think we've been always the experts at doing this in person. Our events are really good people keep coming. We do them all over the world. We used to do 100 events a year. I think online has been very hard and we don't really have. We have a slack community for our leaders one but it's small and it's easier to manage and even there I find that tagging people you have to put a lot of work into getting something a community to be active. So I think that's very. That's a really interesting. Some people are able to do it well but it's very hard I think and you need a really good community manager to really do it well. Or you need. And I think each community can be slightly different. Some communities are more engaged and others can be a little bit more passive and just like consuming information.

So I'll dive into this a little bit. Building the community piece, right? Oftentimes founders will come and say, we want to build community or VCs. Oh, we love you guys because you have this massive community. And I tell them, if you don't have the DNA for giving, just don't build a community. Because people will think that you're very contrived and you're salesy and you'll stop. If you're looking for immediate roi, you don't build a community. There's easier ways. Like you said, building growth tactics, content, sending emails, running ads, there's a hundred different ways. But if you're building a community to get immediate results, it won't happen. So let's dive into this early days, right? You started, I think it was the right move, start a community around mobile growth professionals and just generally help developers become more growth oriented. Everyone was a mobile developer, but how do you become more growth oriented? Give them the tools to become better. The craft is a great mission. If you had to break it step by step though, how did you do it? Like how. What did the first few months look like? How did you seed it at the beginning? What were some tactics you use? Maybe you did one thing and I think you were doing.

I think you have to start with just an event. Like we just, I think someone mentioned this, I think was this guy, he was Greylock Eir. She was like, oh, you should just find the topic and do something around it. And he was like, oh, mobile growth is the topic. And we ended. I remember we were driving back, I was driving. Mike, my co founder, just went to meet up and he created the meetup group called Mobile Growth Hackers and then put an event for three weeks from then. And then I just started inviting everyone I knew. We reach out to people and try to convince them to speak. We got, finally we got two speakers and then we use the speakers. We did it in like our Stardex place so we didn't have to for anything. And then I remember we just went and bought pizza. I think we called three different restaurants to find the one that had the cheapest pizza on that night. We went to Safeway and bought drinks and we showed up and that was the beginning of the community. Like it wasn't like, oh, we didn't. We weren't trying to build a community, we're trying to do an event and see if people would come, are interested in this. And it's interesting. The person who spoke about at first meetup was a person who later on got us into Pinterest. We didn't like really know that. We just built a meetup and saw if people come. And then people, a lot of people came and they're like, this is really good. They're like, okay, let's do another one and then let's do another one. Then I think we did one once with 500 startups. There was like so many people that like, they couldn't let people in the door. And we're like, okay, cool, this is going. And then I hired someone and then, because, you know, it's funny that even that meetup at 500 Startups, I didn't know how to get people's emails and like, I lost nothing, turned into leads. I was like, really bad. But I got the people there. And then once we hired this person, Elizabeth, who now does community slack, but she was with us for a while. She was like, oh no, we need to build systems and people need to sign up and they need to check in. And we just learned a lot from that. And then we just started. Then we built the process, then we did it internationally and they were like, we want to do it everywhere. Let's have ambassadors do it. And then we realized that these ambassadors, some were good and some were bad. We hired the good ones full time and that's how we started our international expansion. And then the bad ones, we just realized that we needed to run all the events because it was an extension of our brand and if it was a bad event, it reflected bad on us. But for maybe a year or two we had ambassadors and I hired someone to manage the investors and he became our head of international expansion. So it's just really interesting how things just evolved and it wasn't like, oh, we're going to build. I would say that with the leaders community, which is a newer one, and I think I've learned a lot more. The thing that I did, I think it's important to have a kernel and then build from that. So we actually decided to do the community, but instead of launching it, we waited to do our event first and then the kernel of people or the people came to the event and now we're adding, keep adding people to the community, but it's like one by one and we're not like, it's not a bunch of people who don't know each other. You have the kernel and then the newer people, they're doing intros. And I think it's been interesting, very similar stories.

Right. We started traction. We were doing pizza nights. And then every time more and more people would show up. And one day we had 200 people show up at the co working space. They said, get out. And again, it was all our ideal customer profile. They're like, you can't do this anymore. So then it evolved into a conference and then Covid hit and I didn't want to do like a two day virtual summit because I can't sit through it. So I reached out to all the speakers and said, hey, why don't you hop on a webinar two times a week for an hour is more palatable. And then it grew like tenfold during. In the last two years. You said it beautifully. Right. Start with the ideal customer profile. And in many ways we also went and got the cheap pizza.

Yeah, you have no money. You're like, like there's always, during the week, there's always a pizza house that has two for one one night of the week. So you have to find the one that has it that night. So we called all the pizza until we found the one that had the two for one.

And yeah, so that's the thing, right? And more and more people come because they're. It's like when you are doing an event focused on a very specific icp and that person, that ideal customer or that profile or audience, they come, they see other peers in the space talking about topics they like and shaking hands and rubbing shoulders together, they build connections and then they keep coming back over and over again. And this is something you won't get with traditional marketing techniques because running ads on Facebook and everything hits a saturation point and it costs twice as much. Right.

We still don't do it. Like we. Because we now have a model, we ran the model and our ads just don't do that well. And we don't actually run any ads. We sometimes maybe to do some awareness in a completely new market, but outside of that, everything else that we do, all our events have such a higher ROI than ads, even if. And we measure ROI for our events with the cost, but also the people's time. So we have a whole model. Like, we don't just look at like cost. We do look at the amount of hours people spent on it, but you get all of that. It's just nothing. Ads are like 2x ROI. And some of the things you do are like 5, 6, 10x I think are like minimum do you hope that.

One attendee will turn into a customer or a referral or how do you. What is your goal when you do these events? And I want to dive into how you built this international ambassador playbook. But like here, how do you.

Because you have to have. Yeah, we look at pipeline that was generated from the events. We don't measure close. We basically feel like our goal with marketing is to open doors.

Yeah.

So we look at stage two Pipeline, which is basically. It's not someone just took a meeting, but someone took a meeting and said that they were interested. So it needs to be very qualified Pipeline. And also stage zero in our case. Stage zero, Stage one is like pipeline gets generated but you don't actually know how much they would pay. Stage two pipeline is like pipeline that like a salesperson talk to them, they know they're interested and they've done the numbers and they know how on average, like they have a really rough estimate of how much the, the contract would be.

And so stage four, two pipeline. Exactly. There's a budget, there's a need, there's probably a time frame and you have a sense of quote.

Yeah, we look back, we do it like every six months. It takes a while for something to happen, so we don'.

Like.

But every six months we look at all our pipeline and what drove it. Was it like meetups, VIP events? Everything has aligned well. I'll tell you, there's something like our newsletter that I was talking about earlier. It's one of our best. And opening a newsletter gets very few points, but people open it and love it so much and they open it over and over. They open every single one because they're good. So it does so well. And you would like not really expect that everyone's oh, I look forward to this newsletter, etc. So that's how we know that's something that we should really continue doing. And then like blog posts get like the amount of points that someone gets. I think it's a six minutes on average. Our points are similar to minutes, like the amount of time someone spends with branch. So like a meeting will get 30 to 60 minute points. But like a blog post gets five. Right. So things get very different points and the points get to like how much pipeline each thing gets. But everything like we basically create, let's say a few million in pipeline. That few million gets split between everyone, bd, sdr, sales, marketing and then in marketing we can split it among all the activities and that's how we know. And it's like extremely interesting because if you do it that way, you really can. We obviously have some test budget for things that are hard to measure, like brand marketing. But even a lot of brand marketing can be measured that way. Not everything. Not if you put a billboard, but other things can.

Yeah, that's. That's a great way to look at it. I like how you've broken it down. So what is your event journey now? Before you scaled international, like, you've got the newsletter that you send weekly, you've got the meetups, but then you also got.

It's a lot. Yeah. It just depends on the person. Sometimes people we look at like the journeys a lot when someone. When an opportunity gets created. And many of them have read a few blog posts. Some have listened to the newsletter, some haven't. Actually, the newsletter tends to do better. Like customer, not everyone. It still does well with Pipeline, but it does even better with retention, et cetera. They may be downloaded one of our white papers. Sometimes they came to either they spoke at an event. They came to an event, they listen. We have our webinars do extremely well, but they're very.

How often you do them?

Once a week. Okay. But they're very like focused on topics. So it's not like someone comes to 10 webinars each. They're very like someone who will go to one webinar probably won't find the other ones useful because they're like very specific and we usually present on topics. And maybe someone spoke or listened to our podcast. I have the podcast that are more general. So just like a mix. It just depends on the person. And you'll find that more senior people will probably do very different things than more junior like that. We call them above the line and below the line. So below the line, they'll probably read our blog post, go to our web pages, maybe come to an event versus someone more senior, maybe spoke at an event or read the newsletter or they are different. And I think it's important to have different strategies for all the different stakeholders and decision makers on the account. And those are different. Right. You need different strategies for the person who's like researching the tool than for the person who's signing the contract.

It's all tied to the journey of the buyer Persona that you're targeting. And you create content. Now you do the mobile awards as well, right?

Yeah.

And how did that come about? And what value does it add to the whole community and ecosystem? It sounds really cool. And I've thought of doing traction awards too.

Yeah. I think it's a mix of it's actually incredible content because finding out how people do some of these things is actually extremely cool. And then. And then it's educating the community because we, like, we put together this paper and you can see all the cool things people have done and some of them are awesome. So almost like a paper of mini case studies. I really love it. And some are branch focused and some are really not. There's a lot that have nothing to do with branch. It's just, like, cool to learn about. It's a learning thing about the industry, which also is cool. And then it's also a lot of relationship building. So you build relationship with everyone applying. You build relationships to the judges, the winners. Like, it really helps you, like, understand the industry and build relationships with people on all facets, which has been, like, really cool. So that's kind of why you do it. So I think it's a mix of. It's actually a mix of the first and second pillar because it does both quite well. And it's not that much effort. You just have a form. It's a lot of getting the judges. We actually have no say in who wins. All our judges are external, so there's a lot of getting people together, getting them to agree. It's lots of logistics. But Brittany, who does she actually, the person who runs them is a. Runs also customer marketing. So it's a very. It's a cool event, It's a cool program. It does really. It's like roi.

It's a great way to drive social proof and make people feel special. If you look at it, one of the things I learned, and I don't know how I chanced on this, just following people like yourself, is once you have the buyer, you have three circles around them, right? One is who do they follow? Which is who are the influencers in the space? Who do they fund? Meaning what other tools they pay for and who do they frequent, what blogs, magazines. And if you're doing events, you can build lists of those people and you just invite all of them. So when they go there, they feed, call. I'm in, like a Disneyland or for my community. Like, I see Mara there and I see Mark Andreessen there and I see Stripe, and you genuinely feel that way. And so then they get more and more emotionally connected to the community. So tell, like, what drove this international expansion and what are the key traits of finding those ambassadors? Because, yeah, doing these events and meetups in Silicon Valley, I don't know.

I don't know if I'm like, we stumbled into our international expansion. There's part of me that wished we were more. Funny enough when we did other countries, we were a lot more thoughtful about it. And I have ran some of that and I can tell you it's better to be thoughtful than the way we did it, which was very much, oh, I ran some ads in India and then we started getting a lot of people using Branch and I'm like, oh, let's hire some people in India again. India is actually a great market for us, but it was. I think it's better to be more thoughtful about it than doing this ambassador and stuff like that. I will tell you that I built this playbook with this guy Govind who worked for us for six years and we opened up some of the Southeast Asia and Latin America using a playbook. And the playbook is the following. And this is that I think you should use if you're looking about the new market. One is you have to do a lot of research. Stage zero is like you go and you do your research and the research is, are there enough? In our case, we're looking for developers in mobile. We're like, so we had a debate. We started. Australia was one of the first places we did this. And I went to a conference. I think it was Collision. No, not collision, sorry, Rise, the collision version for. And I was like, wow, there's a lot of Australian apps. You should go to Australia. Govind was like, no, no. And there's no in Australia. There's nothing being developed there. All the developers are in other places. I'm like, let's test it. So I put together this. Let's look at how many mobile apps are built there, how many people are using. Like, we just had a whole thing. And if it passes Stage zero, meaning we think there's a potential. Let's actually go in the market. So we went and did this intense one week meet with everyone. I think for Australia, Govind actually did on his own. He just met with everyone, everyone in the ecosystem, VCs, mobile startups, and try to understand is this like an actual place where there are enough customers for us and then try to have, try to sell some of them and have at least two or three open opportunities and then you can hire someone to start doing things in the region. But I think it's actually important to do that kind of stuff in advance because if you just go. We went to some places that were really not good markets for us and we wasted time. We did the similar thing in Latin America and I really understood that Brazil was going to be an important market for us. We opened up Brazil and then we were like, hey, Mexico, for example, was really good, but we felt like maybe was less developed in terms of mobile than Brazil. And we felt we should wait a few years. And we're going to Mexico now. So I think actually doing that research and sending someone first, doing your research in numbers, are people willing to pay? Are there enough of your customers there? And then actually going in the market is a much better way of doing it than just randomly finding and hiring people without having done their research, which is. I think I've really changed the way I think about this. And all the places that we've done using kind of this method works really well. We've also had places like China where we didn't do the method, which is we need to be in China. We did that, and it worked really well, too.

So the methodical way to summarize is you research the market, you see how many people in your ideal customer profile are there. And maybe you guys did this. I would mine those lists and then host a big event there.

Yeah, no, sorry. When you go for that week, you also host an event. So when I went and did Brazil, we did a dinner and then we did a meetup. And our meetup, there were people around the block you couldn't like, it was. And I'm like, okay. But we've also been to places where we tried to do a meetup, and we're like, oh, my God, no one's coming. And you do the meetup at the end of that week, so you invite everyone you met. And we do a lot of outreach before. And that worked really well in Australia, Brazil, Singapore. It worked less well in, like, we struggled doing France, for example. And like, we realized that maybe we need to do things differently and we need a local person. And so we learn. And in some places you can do it in English, in some places you can't. So a hundred percent, the event is part of that week when you go and explore the market.

And back to your original point, it starts with understanding your ideal customer. So if you're doing it in France, you probably need a local person. Maybe somewhere in India. You may or may not just to close this out in finding these ambassadors, because initially you had people that weren't your employees and some became your employees. What are the key traits for being or hiring this ambassador in different markets?

We have these four traits that we look for at branch. So our four traits we look for are drive, humility, smarts, and Collaboration. So I actually think you need someone who is very high on drive but has all the other ones, because you need to be humble to be able to adapt to this, to a market. You need to be collaborative because you're going to be the only person by yourself in a country. And you need to figure out the way to communicate really well with people from other offices. And so I think it's like someone who. And I think someone who's okay with chaos and is really okay. I can actually think of people, a branch, who have those four traits who probably wouldn't be good for this role because they really like processes. And so I think it's someone who's really. Who thrives in chaos and uncertainty and likes to just be somewhere where there's no definition and they need to figure out, define the thing. And there's some. There's a type of person, like, I am probably one of those people. I don't like processes. I'm much better in those early stages. But then you bring someone in once you've done some of this who can build the processes and help skew up the market. And I'm probably less that person, actually.

But you know what doing an event is? Oh, it's. I don't know if anyone has planned a wedding here. I have my. My own wedding because my wife was in residency at the time. It's. You know what? It can be a business event, but a sizable meetup or an event can be chaos and there's, like, a lot of emotion always flying.

Yeah. Yeah.

If a person can host a big plan and host a big event, then they rightly have a lot of skills.

It's good to have some process people that help. Like, when we did the event in Brazil, I figured out a lot, but I had someone from the US Team, Cynthia, who is amazing at, like, making sure everything. All the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted. And she partnering with someone like that made the event really good because she made sure everything was really great. And I got everyone excited and got people to come. And so you just need, I think, to build a good event, you need a mix of both. Right. Someone who's good in uncertainty and can figure out when things change, but also someone who creates some processes and make sure that, like, you're getting the leads and there's a good schedule and. Yeah.

So summarize for me, because you've done. You've done a really good job. Now you build all this brand through content and community events, ambassadors. Right. Starting Very small with meetups inviting your icp build your pipeline and then you have this points playbook. Summarize very quickly all the activities in that points playbook and what tool you use to manage that. Because multi touch attribution is still not many companies. You're probably one of the first companies I know that does multi touch attribution. Like what tool do you use to manage this? And maybe a few key points over there for people starting to do this.

Everything gets a point. Some points, case studies, video watches, blog posts, newsletter opens, email opens, meetings, SDR meetings, coming to an event, speaking on the podcast, listening to a podcast. Everything that we can measure is in there. The way we measure it is actually we build our own. There is no tool for this. We built our own dashboard using Google Data Studio and we pull data from Visible and Marketo and a few different places and also Salesforce because we like sales touches are also there. Everything's there. It used to be so marketing started this tool but now it's used by the whole go to market team because you can actually compare how much pipeline and SDR has driven. You can look at very cool things with it. So we actually have someone on the Revops team owning it. Even though we originally created it and we call it Pipedash and it's all built in Data Studio and it pulls data from like a bunch of other places. It's actually really cool. We have a pretty technical person owning it now and even the person on our team who created it, it's actually the guy who writes the newsletter, Alex Bauer, he ended up creating Pipedash but we don't manage it anymore. And it's something that once a quarter or actually twice a quarter the entire go to market leadership meets and we look at the pipeline dashboard and we actually have a rev dash which is the same thing but looking at points of what drives actually like close one things as well. But yeah, unfortunately there's no tool for this. I think all the other ones full circle and stuff, they don't actually look at everything and the way they do it is they take everything and they only split it for marketing and I think it's important to actually split it between all the different departments and yeah.

Yes, so that's what I thought because like your HubSpot or none of that, if you're building community, you won't be able to do multi touch attribution. You maybe do last touch or first touch and last touch but every newsletter touch every time they come to an event. Listen to a webinar watch YouTube. So I'm assuming pipedash is this third party kit toolkit.

I mean we built it, we built it. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's a dashboard that we created in Google Data Studio. Okay. There's no like I was Google searching.

Pipe Dash when you're going through it but you pull basically inputs from event to ads to.

Yeah. So you see. Yeah, we don't have to do from event brands and ads. A lot of that distract invisible or my cattle. So all the, all the marketing data comes from that and then but we also pull like partner intros from like a tool called Partnered or in Salesforce we pull all the like meetings, emails, SDR outreach is the tool that RSDRs use. So we actually pull data from other non marketing places and everything gets pulled in there. And then we have this model where we give things points. I think we use visible for that. But then the visualization as in the visualization is in Data Studio because it can pull and you can do a lot of cool stuff actually with Data.

Studio I'm going to try this, doing this on my own. And so you figured out a great way where people mostly they think about oh I can't try how do I balance brand and performance investments when brand doesn't immediately generate. I think this kind of attribution you.

Have to look back like you look every year of what happened the past year you can't look at. And we still like measure things and things take a long time to turn into something.

There are cases where like a YouTube watch or a press mention, you don't always get the email.

We don't measure. We don't, yeah, we don't measure those.

Unfortunately anything that doesn't get an email you don't. Or maybe you could cookie them if there is in the perfect world I'm thinking of now a whole different startup.

Idea that's too much like we don't do that. Like we don't get. I have a comms budget and I just believe in the comms budget but I don't measure my comms budget. And also even actually the podcast listens, we don't measure those. Unfortunately there's no way of measuring that or YouTube watches but we do have our own videos on our site and those we measure, we use Vidyard for that. So if they come to our website and look at the video or if they look at the webinar recording, we measure all of that. But we don't put things on YouTube because they're harder to measure.

Yeah, but YouTube can give you its own audience. Like for example, our attraction YouTube channel has almost 2 million views. But it kills me every day that that content's there getting 10,000 views. And I can't prove that what it's generating. Right. Like even the podcast you can't. Like you have links in there. But I think from all of this there is a. There's a great startup idea for somebody who wants to do it is tie the offline to online and anything like basically improve the attribution there. You're a new founder, you got to product market fit. You need to build a GTM or growth or marketing team. Who are the first people you hire? Who did you guys hire to get you to product market fit? Hyper growth and billions in valuation. Like in what order?

It's hard because we had. I was running marketing and I was. Some companies don't have that. I think market think you can hire later? Actually, I think. I think it's a mix and I think it depends who you have on the team. Like Alex ran as product marketing and I ran as the management. So if you have founders, but if you don't have anyone who understands product marketing, you probably need someone to figure that out. Usually the CEO does that or one of the founders does that. But if you are not that type of founder, you need that. But if you have a founder who can do that, then you don't need to hire that early on, you should hire that later. I think it's better for a founder to do that. And then I think like we had someone doing content and someone doing events. Those are like our early hires. I also think very important point and I make this to a lot of my friends. It's very hard to find someone who can do both content and programs. So the type of people who are good content writers are usually not the type of people who go and organize events and get everyone super excited about you. So you have to decide which one you want first. And they usually vary different types of people. You can get a content person who does some product marketing and they're like content product marketing, that side of things. And then someone who's just going and creating events and they're a lot more logistics focused. They understand usually the product class. They just. They're like field marketers.

But like in the early days you were that go to market co founder, the Swiss army knife testing.

Yeah, but I feel like there are people very early and even when I was running events, honestly my Co founder Mike, who's our coo, helped a lot with all the logistics because I wasn't that good at it. So you need. I was very much the more like idea thinking person and I would come up with ideas for the events and get people excited. I just wasn't like, I didn't remember about the pizza. He had a checklist of things you should do for a meetup and I was like, okay, cool, thank God you're here. And then I hired someone to do that for me.

That is amazing.

I wasn't a full Swiss. I wasn't. I needed some help.

You need help, but at least taking the lead on a few different things. A lot of people go very deep before they figured out one channel that'll dive growth and then they realize that, oh, I need this other person. So I think being able to be resilient and try a few different things is key there. What metrics should be top of mind in the early days for founders.

In the early days you might not even have Salesforce. I think it's just like people using your product and revenue, even if it's little revenue, people paying you money and if you have a free product, how many like in our early days it was, we called it into live integration. So someone who was. It wasn't sign ups because someone could sign up for branch and not actually integrate into the app and be live with it. So integrating live, integrating branch and being live with it was our main thing in early days. And then it became revenue. And now my team's goal is pipeline, but as a company it's a lot more like around revenue and adoption. Those are two main ones we have.

Cool. As we close out, actually any unconventional advice as you advise founders and marketers, but any unconventional advice that you share that people ignore and shouldn't, you're like, oh, why are these people not listening to this? They absolutely should.

If something's not working, if a few people just be more open that others might be right. I think when we were doing the printing thing, so many people were like, it's a terrible business, you shouldn't do it. And we're like, no, but we know better. We're going to figure. No, we did not figure it out. It wasn't terrible. It's a very hard business and we just wouldn't listen. And I think it's a good trait for founders to have this crazy conviction. But I also think sometimes maybe they go too far. And I was one not they because we did that too. And sometimes it's Actually okay to listen. Like, even like VCs might not fully understand your product, but if they feel like, oh, this is not a big thing, there's probably something there. So ask more questions. Try to understand. If they don't think it's a big market, they've seen a lot. Maybe there's something there. If you give us as an example, like the first companies, no one wanted to invest in us. They're like, you guys seem great, but like the market. And they were right. And as soon as we did branch, people are like, oh my God, we want to invest in you right now. So. And obviously. And it was a big market, so actually like, these people who live in it try to be more open to what they're saying.

Ultimately, openness is the biggest and most indispensable enabler of globe. You don't grow by not being open. What are your favorite books, Mara or. I don't like to read. I invite smart people like you twice a week and interview them.

I read a lot of sci fi and fantasy. That's probably one. Not what you were asking, but I read a lot of culture books. So the best ones, I would say I probably read five or six. The top three are the culture code. That's all around, like, how do you get a group of people to coalesce and feel like a team? You are what you do by Ben Horowitz. Really good. I think that was my favorite culture book. And the Netflix book was good. Very interesting.

Netflix on culture, right?

Yeah, yeah, I can't remember the name. Those are my top three. Very different, but still, I think that Ben Horowitz is like, how I think of culture. He has this quote that says, culture is what people do when no one's watching. And I thought that was very interesting. And like, how do you measure that? And I think a lot about culture. Branch Lloyd. I've done a talk before. Like, half my time today. I have very strong leaders on marketing. So half my time is spent on like, really thinking about culture and how to maintain culture to scale through hiring and all these other things. So yeah, that's like my side passion.

I genuinely feel culture is the leading indicator of growth. And if you have a crappy culture or watching it decay, like one toxic person becomes two and then that becomes the whole company without a great culture.

That's what keeps me up at night.

Yeah, people build companies, not the other way around. What are your top learnings on culture? And we will have you at the in person conference in August and you can give your Playbook on culture. But what are the top? Especially for early stage founders, because when you're poor, you can't have value sometimes. So what are the.

I think you need to figure out values very early on because as you start hiring, it's really important to understand. We are four founders, extremely different from each other. And we decide. It was very important for us to come in a room and decide what we care about because as we started hiring, we were looking for the same things. And then I think the other thing is if you decide to decide what your values are when you're 100 people or 50 people, everyone has an opinion and it's so hard to get people on the same page and believe in it versus if at the beginning. And you tell people all the time and then you can change them. We've evolved our values over time. They're small evolution. It's not like we change something completely. And it's a lot easier to make small evolutions than to just one day say, these are our values. Oh, you didn't know for the past. So I think it's actually sitting down in a room and deciding what your values are very early on, extremely important. And then figure out what kind of company do you want to be? Do you want to be a company that's fun? Do you want to be a company that's serious, that helps you attract the right people and then you won't wake up one day and be like, oh, we were super serious, but now everyone's playing ping pong. That's not who we are. So I think this also helps because when you hire people, you can tell them. Like I tell people, we're an intense culture, we're extremely flexible. We have this mode of build, grow in. It's like we're culture builders. You're going to build the best work, we're going to push you outside of your comfort zones and you're going to grow a lot of and you're going to feel like a winner and that's what you're going to get here. If you're looking for like a place that's like fluffy and like lots of games, there's not who we are. We work super hard and then we go. People go home and do their own things. And it's very different than other cultures. I think it's important to like describe that. So people opt in and be like, oh, this is the type of place I want to be, or this is not the type of place I want to be. So I think it's important to do it very early. And actually I've talked to many founders people who haven't done it early. They really regret it because it's very hard to do this when you're bigger and you have a lot of people with a lot of opinions if you.

Don'T align on values and you can't measure actions on values. And I often also tell founders is your purpose, your vision, your mission and your values. Like how do you behave every day is really important. And if you can't align on values, it becomes very hard to work.

And I've made this exactly it helps you as a funding team work better together because you've just there were very tough conversations in the beginning because my personal values are different than the branches values. But I also the branches values are secondary and like I've actually changed more and I'm closer to the branch values than I was at the beginning. But I committed to those values in the early days.

And Mara also has a great talk on culture and values that she did two years ago on the Traction YouTube channel. So just search Mara and Attraction Conf and you'll find that and she'll do a refresh at the in person. Mara, thank you so much joining us. And I learned a ton because a lot of it is like my one hour advisory session.

This is so funny. I have a podcast if you guys want to listen how I grew this I interview B2C mobile leaders. So if you're interested, it's a little bit different. It's more about mobile. But I have some cool people go.

To Branch IO, they have a lot of resources in the footer about their community. And then check out her podcast as well. Thanks everyone for joining us. Mara, where are you active?

I'm Most active on LinkedIn.

Go to an in person event that Mara hosts and mobile growth.

Yeah, we're going to do one in the Bay Area soon. But you can come to our virtual ones obviously as well.

I love the in person. The one thing I learned is anytime you incorporate more than two senses, like now we're sight and sound. But once you're in person, your taste, touch, smell, you incorporate more than two senses. You build genuine connections. People stay longer.

So if you do virtual ones, you should send people smell kits. Is that why send people wine smell.

Kits, whatever it is, in person? Because if we did this podcast now live, then we would stay longer, we'd eat, we'd probably discuss a whole bunch of things, hang out with people and it just builds. It strengthens that bond and people genuinely want to stay. So that was my learning. What changed from in person to online.

That's all.

Mara, we'll see you in person.

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