Nelio Leone: Grow Your Startup with a 6-Step Framework

Hey everyone, hope everyone's doing well. My name is Ehan, I'm the head of growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have an awesome, awesome presentation as usual. You know, Monday at 10 AM PST, we usually try to get a great individual to come and communicate and present about a really important topic. Today we have the pleasure of having Emilio from Urban Monks with us. So I'm sure most of you already know him or have been following him on LinkedIn. He's very strong presenter there. But, you know, we have— he's gonna come and present on all the different frameworks and tactics that he's used to kind of help him and his clients grow different startups. So really, really excited for that. Let us know in the chat kind of where you're coming in from. This is a global audience, so I've seen before we've got Prague, India, Miami Beach, Barcelona, California, Chicago, We have someone from Dubai. I'm also based here in Dubai, so it's great to see some people here from the same city. Awesome. We have a pretty international crowd. Toronto here, DC, Gothenburg, Amsterdam. Awesome, awesome. Really, really excited. All right, without further ado, Akshay in the background, do you want to bring up Nelio? While Akshay is bringing up Nelio, let me go over some housekeeping rules. You will see a Q&A button on the right-hand side next to the chat if you're on laptop or or tablet. If you're on mobile, you have to find the respective portion, but please use that for respect to the respective Q&A. We'll have a dedicated Q&A session towards the end of this session. You know, Neil will give about a 30-minute presentation, we'll do some questions and answers, then after that we will open up our networking. As you folks who were here earlier, you'll start a bunch of virtual tables. Jump onto the virtual table, network with each other, talk about what you've learned about today's topic, and then we can kind of go from there. Um, yeah, so that's Q&A, that's a little bit about the agenda. While we're getting— Neil, if you want to remove the microphone, unmute yourself and put your video on. Uh, let me run a poll. If you guys can see, we would like to know what stage are you currently in. Are you pre-seed, seed, Series A? This is, uh, this would be how good for us to know Awesome. Okay, we will have to let the votes coming in. Oh, by the way, we had like 400 people sign up for this, so we usually wait a couple minutes to kind of get things going. And because we get about 40 to 50% show up rate, so we're at about 129 people live, so I think we'll hit about 200 soon. Okay, cool. About 80% of the audience is kind of pre-seed. We have some people that are in Series A. It's growing, it's growing. All right, Nélio, do you wanna unmute yourself and say hi to everyone?

Hey guys, excited to be here. My name is Nélio and I'm really excited to show you a quick framework to help you guys in your journey. Let me just share, quickly share my screen. So it's going to be, Can you guys see my screen now?

Not yet. Can you? Yeah, it's loading. Perfect. Yeah, man, you're good to go. I'm going to remove my— Perfect.

Yeah.

I guess before we begin, folks, you can see some people are already showing some love on the emojis. You can press the keyboard, 1 for a clap, 2 for a heart, 3 for a thumbs up. That's the only way Neil or myself will be able to see whether or not you're liking the content. So if Neilio says something awesome, drop a 1, 2, or 3 on it. You can see it already. He's getting some love. Let's kind of get— just throw some engagement in there. All right, I'm going to remove myself. Neilo, the floor is yours.

Okay, let's do it. So as Ian mentioned, my name is Neil. My story is very simple. I was in the headquarters of working for very big brands like L'Oréal and Chanel. And then in 2014, L'Oréal, their anti-age division, gave me a task to work on emerging markets. And of all markets, they sent me to Saudi Arabia to study the market. And that's where I've met some like really crazy founders that were building a next-generation app called Careem. Joined their startup, we're just 7 people. And that's where I literally repurposed my marketing knowledge that I've learned as a, in my first part of the career in corporate, in really the startup environment. And especially like in the scale-up environment, that Series A and plus, this is where it like this framework and everything that I'm showing you today really applies if you are just bootstrapping or you're like super, super early stage, this may not apply to you. If you don't have absolutely no customers, no traction, et cetera, it's not going to be as easy to implement. This is more for scale up, like startup to scale up. So you're talking about seed, late seed to Series A stage. So what's very interesting is that all of the frameworks that I'm gonna show you today, it's actually what we did to scale different companies in different markets. This is the selfie from the early stage team when we actually knew that we were building first unicorn because we got acquired by Uber for $3.1 billion. Then I set up my first company called Digital Nomad Hubs, where basically I moved to Bali to build like one of the first one of the first e-com-based agencies. And then I came back to Dubai to scale my second venture called Washman. Joined very early stage as one of the first employees and really helped them scale to the same exact framework that I'm going to show you today. Today I'm working with Urban Monks. It's my growth studio. We're a team of 12 people plus interns and freelancers, around 20 people. And we mainly work with Series A, pre-Series A, late seed companies to really help them scale. We work both on marketing and growth. So we do very data-driven frameworks to help them scale companies. So going from product-market fit scenario to scale up. So I'm just gonna really walk you exactly what is growth marketing and why is it like very crucial to scale companies. The guy that literally pretty much started the whole concept of growth marketing is Sean Ellis. He's the one that brought Eventbrite and Dropbox that really helped them scale in their post product market fit scenario. Wrote a book that is amazing that I absolutely recommend you to read. It's called Hacking Growth. It's gonna give you all the case studies from Pinterest to Instagram from all sorts of different companies that made it big and how they actually did it. So it can give you a lot of very, very tangible strategies and frameworks that you can use yourself. And what's very interesting about Sean is that basically his whole problem was that after he started scaling the company, he was not able to replace himself because there was no one doing the exact same type of marketing that he was doing. So that's why he created this new figure of a growth hacker or growth marketer to really combine product, technology, marketing, and behavioral psychology altogether to really build frameworks to grow. It's one of good mentor friend. We spend a lot of time chatting, exchanging ideas on growth and where things are going right now, which is super interesting. Why does it matter? Well, startups and scale-ups, they actually fail in scaling up because of one reason, mainly growth. Like if you see a Forbes statistic, you'll see that most of the reasons why scale-ups fail is mainly due to growth-related, then it comes management, and then it comes product. Yet most of the founders that I generally work with, They're so obsessed about product because they fall into the sort of idea that if the product is great, people are gonna rip it off your hands and you don't need marketing. Then people are gonna talk and people are gonna refer other people. You don't need marketing if your product is great. And it's actually true, right? So it's true at a pre-product market fit. That's why I told you before that this type of of strategy is really catered for scale-ups rather than like really bootstrap startups, bootstrap founders. Why? Because initially, before you achieve product-market fit, you absolutely need to crack product. You need to understand the market. Before even understanding the market, you need like crafting a great product that fits the market. And once you have that product-market fit traction, then that's where marketing starts to come in. That's where growth starts to come in. That's when you actually start scaling. Yet most founders that we've worked with, and we've worked like a plethora of scale-ups, like I count right now 120 to 127 scale-ups worldwide, mainly in emerging markets, where we advise them and work with them on their growth strategies and their growth execution. So basically, what I see is founders that are still obsessed in pre-product-market-fit mode, because by being so obsessed by product, then they made it, they made the cut to pre-product market fit, to post-product market fit, which are two complete different scenarios in the life of a startup. Pre-product market fit, the absolute obsession has to be product and has to be market, understanding the product for a market. After, it has to be scale, it has to be scaled fast. So what most founders will get into, trick themselves. It's like, oh, but it's fine. Then, you know, once we get to marketing, we're just gonna throw a bunch of dollars in growth channels, in ads or lead gen or whatever, and it's just gonna come. Yet it's not really the case. Now markets are extremely saturated. The channels, you have like a plethora of channels. They are completely saturated and it's very hard to stand out. So why growth marketing is much more efficient to traditional marketing when it comes to scaling? I'll tell you why. Though if you can't see the difference, a marketing manager versus a growth marketeer are completely different mindset and different type of marketeers. The marketing manager will mainly focus on stakeholder management and really aligning stakeholders to deploy resources because resources are there, they're not really allowed to test or to fail, they don't have like that flexibility. That growth marketer would have. And the growth marketer has to focus on high tempo testing. What is high tempo testing? It's the ability to really test different thesis and based on the learnings of different thesis, then you double down or you cut back. And this is for instance, like a graph that I always really love. It's back from the old age of 2015 where basically Twitter started to really pick up because at that time they thought Twitter was kind of getting market saturation that they couldn't grow anymore. And then a growth, like the VP of growth came in, which was used to other platforms and very well informed about high tempo testing. And as soon as they started high tempo testing, that's when they started scaling. So they generally say that the scaling aspect comes from the amount of tests that you put into place. And the more you test, the more you scale, the more you gain ability to scale because the more you learn, the more you scale. Traditional marketing mainly focused on awareness and acquisition. That's where they're gonna spend like big bucks in like the Super Bowl ads and like TV and endless meetings for that. Whereas a growth marketer focuses on viral loops, which is basically creating outputs that turns into input throughout the whole funnel. So there is a structure for awareness, a structure for acquisition, a structure for activation, structure for retention, revenue, and referral. And every single input becomes an output. So even referral, then it would become like, it would bring more users on top of the funnel that then would bring users down the funnel. So that is very important with a full funnel approach to really build attraction. So growth marketing implies different skillset and mindset to operate on the full funnel. What's very important is the T-shape. This is like crazy marketing skillset that is absolutely needed. As you can see, in order for you to really develop yourself into a strong growth marketer that can help companies scale, you need to have like different, you need to have exposure to so many different set of knowledge. So from front-end coding, understanding omnichannel, understanding analytics, experiment design, funnel marketing, yet you need to become a specialist at one or two things. So you always need to pick your two verticals and then making sure that you still keep on developing the basic knowledge on all sorts of different, of different practices. Why? Because it's very important to understand what all the company does for growth. It's crucial. It's across a department or it's a pretty much like cross-organizational approach. So what's very important is also that it's not only knowledge-based, but it's also tool-based. And the better you are at building with tools, the better you become as a growth marketeer because then the faster you are in implementation. Generally this, you don't need to do it yourself if you're the founder. You're probably gonna have teams doing that. Teams of like maybe more junior people that really love like going and, you know, like geeking out on different products and making products communicate to one another. I've done all of that in my earlier stage, but now, you know, we have a team to do that. But let's say if you want to become good at, growth marketing in your initial stages, you need to start mastering tools like Google Analytics, SQL, creating like queries in SQL, understanding like proper Intercom and all. So let's go through the different things that we saw right now. The new generation of marketers, it's basically setting up high-tempo testing environments. So high-tempo testing is crucial to uncover different gold nuggets, what we call the gold nuggets. So every single thing that will help you achieve exponential growth focused on free growth before rather than finding, rather than scouting new channel all the time, you need to scout the channel where there is organic reach, free organic reach to start testing content and then boosting it. With paid ads. Uh, it's very— so it's a very demanding, um, demanding, uh, way of developing yourself into a marketeer because you always need to upskill your game because things move and they move very fast. So you need to be up with the trends. Um, you need to be obsessed with cross-disciplinary skills, meaning that you need to understand financial modeling, you need to understand analytics, you need to understand basics of front-end coding, you need to understand like the basics of pretty much everything that touches the organization without going into depth of it. Why? Because in scale-ups, especially if you're a marketeer and you're building like all your marketing, you know, your growth initiatives detached from the rest of the organization, you don't understand the impact of that. So it's super important that it's a cross-disciplinary skill. Data as the new currency. So it's very data-driven. Google Analytics, SQL, that should become like your best friends to drag users down the full funnel, meaning really understanding like the different life stages of customer acquisition up to like customer referral, and then understanding where are the new channels, what are the new channels that are popping and how viable are they. So what's very interesting is that all companies kind of go through like 4 major stages of growth. And you as a founder or as a marketeer, you need to identify where your company really is. So as I said before, before product-market fit, you're in a position stage. You really need to understand the position and positioning, meaning you need to understand your first users, need to understand how to position your product in the market, how to get the first users that generally come in organically. Or they come through like a sort of very basic flywheel that is generated by the founder or by the founding team. Then you need to create funnels to be able to systemize that type of growth, meaning that if you just get stuck into the position stage, then you never can grow because you don't even have the basic infrastructure to start structuring your growth. That's when structuring your growth happens. You start having like a basic funnel where you start looking at the different numbers of people that come on the top of the funnel and the mid of the funnel, and then on the bottom of the funnel. And then that's when you start getting in pre-Series A to Series A. Series A, pre-Series A to Series A, that's when you start scaling. That's when you need like very specialized growth marketing efforts. And that's when you generally, as a founder, you're gonna look for growth marketers or for, like, for CMOs or head of growth or chief growth officers to really help you scale the company and to really put, like, that system in place so that it becomes, like, a predictable engine. And then after, when you're in Series B, C, D, that's when you start talking about expanding, or basically you start going and looking into different other verticals. If you see like pretty much every company and every scale-up startup that you could think of goes through this journey. So where this framework is really, really helpful, it's like pretty much here in the middle part, in these two aspects, because it touches funnel and it touches scales. Doesn't touch the early stages of positioning up to seed stage, It doesn't really cover this part and it doesn't definitely cover the expansion part. So I want to tell you how I applied all of this knowledge that I showed you before, which is very theoretical and it's very high level, how this really translates into something very tangible that I've personally worked on and that I've personally built, right? So basically I'm gonna take Washman, which is a laundry app that we developed in Dubai as the first, it was one of the first laundry apps available in the market. What is a laundry app? It's basically, you just like have a lot of dirty clothes, you need to wash them, you don't have time, you don't have like mental bandwidth for it. Just in 3 taps, you can have someone coming to your door, take your laundry, wash it, and then come back to your place 48 hours after. This was founded by ex-Uber and ex-Lamborghini guy. And they were having like a very, very difficult moment when I first joined.

Why?

Because they were in Series A, they just achieved pre-Series A to Series A, and basically they achieved product-market fit. They had strong retention, meaning that, so the operations were very good, but the problem is they didn't have like a super strong top of the funnel. Like their acquisition was very slow, their referral was very slow, and they didn't have that engine to properly scale. And what the investors back then were saying were like, okay guys, this is great. That you've gone all the way up to Series A, but now in order to graduate from Series A onwards to Series B and onwards, well, you need to have like a pretty strong acquisition model to acquire customers at scale at a good LTV to CAC ratio, which is basically like CAC to LTV ratio is nothing but like a good cost of acquisition given the retention that you have. So how, Pretty much like I thought about this, right? So the first time I came, I started like drafting, okay, how do we solve this problem? How do we get this company from Series A to Series B? And please bear in mind that this is like a full, that this was my full-time position. I spent 2 years scaling that company, or at least not 2 years, but like 17 months, 17 months scaling that company. So that was like really, like that was for me to really craft the framework. So the first thing I did, I really put, like, I really applied all the different things that I've learned from Sean Ellis, from the books, from everything that I've learned, and from my previous experience at Careem, that the first thing was really to clarify and clearly identify the pain points. Because most of the founders, when they start, like, when they're in product-market fit to pre-product-market fit, and they get to product-market fit, they are in war mode. They don't really know where the growth is coming. They're just like running, running, running, and they don't wanna lose traction. So whatever brings traction, it's good, but they don't really understand their customers really well because they don't really have much time to pause and to start looking at the data more granularly. So the first thing was really to identify the pain point, meaning what kind of pain points were you really, really solving? Then it was to map out like the customer journey or the growth funnel map. And then the third step was to identify the point of differentiation that would make us like really different compared to any other solutions out there. Then the fourth was to really identify the frictions in the experience, defining like what were the key channels for us and what was like the top potential, and then started building content. And by called content, we mean like a growth model because whatever that was, it was either content or ads or whatever, we just thought of in that sense of content that helps the company scale. So the first thing that we did then was identifying the pain point and we realized that, so while the founders were coming from their own experience of launching the company, they started with their professional attire because they were ex-banker, ex-whatever, and they needed professional attire. And the experience in Dubai was really bad for that. So they said like, man, we're gonna do everything for professional, like for professionals, right? So in their heads, the key customer was like 28 years old guy that needs professional attire for a job and that is pretty much well paid. Yet when we started like really getting into the data, we understood that most of the people didn't really care about their professional attire, which by the way, all of our communication, all of our marketing communication was around professional attire at that point. It was more about the waste of free time. So we were not really in the business of professional attire as much as we were in the business of giving people free time back. And the second thing is like, we have to do laundry. Then I started mapping the entire growth funnel, understand a lot about the customer journey and realize that on the top of the funnel, basically when the experience started, most customers were not really wowed. People would say that, hey, great, but it doesn't feel like this is a real company, or this is like, doesn't feel like I'm part of something. It's just like laundry. And the way I got acquired was like, meh, whatever. I didn't really have like, I wasn't really hyped about it. So we knew that we had to do something to hype things up, to make laundry really cool, to make it really appealing, to really build that top of the funnel and do aggressive with it. Then we identified the point of difference against other laundries and realized that, well, while we had really strong operations with quality and customer service, our marketing was really bad, our UX and our app as well. So there was like, we, weak top of the funnel, but a very strong operation. So we needed to bank on the strong operations while strengthening our marketing. So then we started really trying to identify what made our customer unhappy and why some of our customers would churn, especially the highest paying one. And we thought of everything from, oh, maybe they moved countries or maybe there's a laundry that opened or maybe they I don't know, they realized it was too expensive or whatever. Well, we realized that the most, the biggest problem that would get people really angry was the amount of plastic, bag hangers, papers that our service would bring to them. So customers are very sophisticated, they're environmentally aware, and they're definitely price sensitive. So, and we would, that would reflect a lot as well on our social media where people would actually say, hey, By the way, our regular laundry charges less than half of your rates and this is the result of plastics that we got from like a couple of shirts, which is ridiculous. So then what we did, we started defining the key channels and we realized that we were spending a lot of money on Google, yet most of the growth was coming from Facebook. So we're like, and I remember back then my boss back then, One of the founders was like, "Man, we shouldn't even do Facebook because Google is our channel." Yet most of the growth would actually come Facebook. So what did we learn so far? That people got too much laundry, they don't have time, they got definitely a top of the funnel problem. They've got strong operations, but a weak top of the funnel. We're not perceived as eco-friendly, which is a great threat to our own existence. We're perceived as too expensive. We're spending way too much money on Google, whereas we should prioritize Facebook, Instagram, and more discovery channels. So that's when we started building like a proper content ad growth strategy, right? So we needed to talk about time. We needed to boost awareness with eccentric designs. We needed to insist on quality and customer service. We needed to make washcloths eco-friendly. We needed to insist on entry-level offer, and we needed to optimize all of our content for Facebook, Meta, Instagram, whatnot. How do we go about it? So the first growth hack that came to mind is like, what if we just take a couple of vans and we just take a designer on Upwork and we made these vans a bit like more like, you know, designing and more appealing, because these are like moving billboards if you think about it, when you see them around town, And actually we put a QR code at the back and that started driving downloads, meaning that people when they were stuck in traffic, they would take a screenshot of that, they would download the app from that. So we had a lot of downloads from the van itself. And then we started doing our old fleet, which back then was like 25, 20 vans, whatever. The second test that we did is that our ads were really bad, our creatives, So we said, okay, they're very bad because right now we're using stock images where there's like, I don't know, a Swedish guy with laundry, with perfect laundry. Whereas how could we make it a bit more quirky and a bit weird, a bit like that really stands out? Because remember, people on the top of the funnel, people like our customers on the top of the funnel, they felt that it was weak, there was nothing. So I just took my intern, I just took my phone, and I literally shot a crazy amount of 12-second video where I explain what is Washman dressed up pretty much like I'm in festival gears or whatever. And the whole ad would be, hey, I know you've got too much laundry. I know that you don't have enough time for laundry because you told me, right? "and I know that you're very price sensitive, so I'm telling you, you can buy everything from, like, you can wash everything for only 55 dirhams," which is like $10. So for $10, a bag full of laundry. Here I have the logo inside the laundry factory, so you're like inside saying all of that in 12 seconds. This started to work so well that then we went all out. We have then the vans, inside the videos all the time. We increased the size of the logos. We showed how much laundry we could actually, you could actually buy from it. And all of this was based on all the insights that I told you from the beginning. Nothing was done by chance. So the eccentric design, it's because top of the funnel was a problem. People didn't feel we had like a brand or something going on. They said like, man, you have to rev it up. So that's what we did. Then red up, okay, I'll dress up like whatever, like a festival guy trying to make whatever. You don't see our brand, now you see it twice. You say that we're too expensive. Guess what? We even A/B tested different pricing from $55 to $49. We show you the quantity of laundry that you can wash with us for only $45 new. 45 dirhams. So that's basically less than $10 now. So we realized that all of that was bringing massive traffic to the brand. We had massive downloads, a lot of different people really downloading the app, but there's very few that were converting. So we started calling people, all the people that did not convert, to convert them on the spot over a call center. That's what I personally did. And then I started building a conversion call center for all the people that did not, that were not, that they downloaded the app, but they were not trying us. We started calling them, calling them, calling them to try us for the first time for free. That drove a conversion to the moon. We got from 12% to 73% conversion. And a systemic increase in awareness and acquisition from. Then remember when most of the customers thought that we were not eco-friendly, so they didn't wanna like work with us or like buy us. Then we built the first home recycling program in Dubai, UAE to really recycle everything, all the plastic that we would bring to their home, we would ask them to put them back in a bag and then we would help them recycle. And that's where like, you know, the press went really wild because they said like, hey, this is the first company that is recycling in Dubai. You can send like all your plastic. We got like the equivalent of $1 million in PR on earned media just out of this initiative. So if we would have to pay all these newspapers to talk about us, that would cost us like approximately $1 million, whereas we had it for free because of these PR stunts. And then, kept on doing PR stunts with influencers, like bashing washing machines, because washing machines were our biggest enemy. And that's when we started really, once we did all these different things, that's when we started really growing to the extent that we became like a success story for Facebook, Facebook interviewed us as an actual business case where basically they would tell us, guys, what you're doing is pretty impressive and it's crazy that you've done it with our product. And the first month that we applied this, we just grew by, we almost doubled the revenue of the company in the first month. And then it was just growing, growing, growing for the next 17 months. And that's when we managed to then raise our Series B. So we went from raising in Series A around $4 million to then raise another Series B of $6 million. So yeah, so that's pretty much me. You can book a call with me if you are a pre-Series A founder to Series A founder that is looking to scale. We can provide both the growth intelligence, basically something exactly like what you're seeing right now, but for your own company. So we have a team for that. And then if you're just looking to grow and to really grow your metrics, then we have another team, which is our growth ops team that is really dedicated to help you grow and really run those growth campaigns. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can also connect with me via email. So that's pretty much me. And if you have any questions, I'm really excited to be here and to answer your questions.

Awesome. Thanks. I don't know if you're seeing this, Nilo, you've seen a lot of hearts, a lot of loves. I think people loved your presentation. Thank you so much for doing it. I think so far it was very educational. I've seen this presentation a number of times, but each time I listen to it again and again, That's great. All right, folks, we're gonna jump into the Q&A portion. Use the Q&A tab. Let's try to do maybe a few different questions and then we'll wrap things up. We can jump into the networking. I saw some people using the Messenger. Please use the Q&A tab so I can kind of bring it up. So let me bring this up on stage. John from, I don't know where this is, but he's asking, is it too early to do what you did for Washman? I think you mentioned it towards the end, when was the right time when you activated growth for them, but what's the earliest you can start when you start working with companies?

I think, so basically, as I said before, I always divide the lifecycle of a startup into two different buckets, pre-product market fit, post-product market fit. I would say that pre-product market fit, you can't do this type of stuff because it's like, your hands are tied. You don't have enough bandwidth. You don't have enough resources to do all this research and to really understand your users so well. You don't have that. Even if you do that and you have time to do that, then you don't have capability to execute because you don't have time and you're not gonna have money. So pre-product market fit, you can't. And in general, you won't get anyone assigning you a major check before you prove product-market fit traction. So I think like, uh, pre-seed, impossible. Seed, late seed, I would say this is the earliest you could start. Late seed to pre-Series A, and definitely Series A.

Awesome. Uh, I'm just gonna keep going and then we'll, we'll go there.

Sure.

I had the question here, so Galina from the UK is asking, he's like, you know, how do you think about enterprise customers because the content you covered was a little bit more B2C, but is this framework applicable also to enterprise?

Yeah, 100%.

At the end of the day, understanding your customers, whether you have—

Neil, your audio went to— I think it went to your iPhone. It's like distant.

Working?

Yeah, you're back now.

Okay, so I'll be very honest with you, nothing really changes because all marketing does, whether it's like B2C or B2B, Humans are humans and what marketing does, it literally changes perception to create like a human behavior. In one, the human behavior is like that I'm trying to influence is you to download an app and get the first order. If it's a client, the human behavior there, it's to sign a contract or at least to have a conversation with us and to generate that conversation. Now it's true that in B2B marketing, especially for enterprise, there's the sales element, which is different, which is not marketing, right? So what is the role of marketing and what is the role of sales? That needs to be very, very well defined. And in what marketing does, marketing has to create conversations, doesn't have to create sales. That is the big difference. However, then your KPI means that your— the KPI for your marketing team is How like is it generating enough conversations so that the sales team can then close those conversations into sales or they can build a pipeline. So don't get fooled by the fact that this was like B2C. We've worked with tons of B2B and we've like used the exact same methodology because at the end of the day, it's just all about influencing human behavior through smart out-of-the-box approach and leveraging content.

Yeah, I think that's a great way of looking at the principles of marketing. Stay true, it doesn't matter if it's early stage all the way to enterprise. So just, sorry, as folks are giving, uh, the thing, it misses, it just changes the order. Um, I want to see this. Yeah, so we have a lot of early stage companies. I think you talked a little bit about it with the precide, like, hey, you have to break it up with pre-product market fit and post-product market fit. But Alex, also from the UK, is asking, like, you know, do you have a, like, when you're in earlier, earlier stage, when people are still trying to figure out their positioning, is there any particular framework that you kind of go back to and review and think, okay, fine? Or is there any positioning framework you would kind of suggest to any of the, to the audience.

Yeah, 100%. And I think one of the most viral posts that I've done on LinkedIn was actually on this and where I laid down literally a step-by-step framework on how to do it. So it's very, very bootstrap, it's duct taping, right? Because there's no science.

To it.

But like the way I would go about it, it's to A, create a list of like 100 people within your close network that fits your buyer persona, or at least find them, find them through social media, organic social, whatever that is. The second, you get them to try your product. Initially, you might have to push them to try your product for free. So they're not really buyers. So that makes skew the framework a bit, but you need to push them to try the product. You need to provide them two Typeforms. Typeform is like questionnaires. One questionnaire would be about the why they're using this product and why they need this product and why they're using it and what they're trying to solve. And the second one is who they are. So the why and the who. Why you need that? Because you need to like profile them. You need to profile them and you need to use only open-ended questions. Why open-ended questions? Because then you can recycle all their marketing wording and all the wording they use to describe their problem. You need to use them for your marketing copy. Once you have all of that, then it becomes like marketing copy. You go on Canva, you go on Instapage, you literally steal all the insights that they're giving you. I mean, you don't steal, but like you literally take all the all the ways they're describing their pain, describing how you provide a solution, how they describe the language. You take that, you pretty much inject it into all your marketing materials, and then you start running ads. You get more people to try your product. This second iteration, these are paying customers, but you pay them like— you create like a paywall for beta testers, so very, very cheap. You reiterate that you want to use this product for $2 instead of $10, please go ahead. But the only thing I ask of you is to replenish this Typeform. How do you get people to comply to the Typeform and to get them to respond? By nagging them relentlessly through email marketing campaigns that you can easily do with MailChimp, Drip, Klaviyo, whatever that is.

I think that was great. Let's do one more. And I think this will be— I really like this question. You talked a little bit about it, but maybe for the ones that didn't understand it, can you maybe go over this concept again of viral loops and how it's different from traditional modeling? Folks, you guys are going to get the presentation and the recording after. So, but like—

I am absolutely happy to also keep on responding to other questions. If people have questions, I'm really happy, to be honest. So I'm super—

Do a few more.

Yeah, yeah, super happy to help you guys if this helps for you. So the viral loops versus that growth marketing uses versus traditional model. So the traditional model of marketing doesn't, is not really grounded and is not really focused on on experimentation. So what it does is that you build like a marketing strategy based on historical data, based on history, based on legacy systems, based on historical value, based on what has been done before, and you innovate a bit, you innovate a bit, you innovate a bit. So it's incremental innovation. Whereas what growth marketing really does, it literally needs to create that radical innovation within marketing because there's no system, So you need to build a system from zero or at least from a very small layer foundation that you've built during the product-market fit scenario. So what a growth marketer will do, it will literally test assumptions over assumptions over assumptions and iterate that over and over. And also because there's generally resource scarceness, you don't really have a lot of budgets, you don't really have large, you don't have those million-dollar campaigns that you can do. So basically you're going to recycle the assets over and over. So this ability to recycle assets and to recycle data and to recycle insights, this is what creates ultimately the viral loops. And mainly they happen within the product. So within, I'll give you an example, for instance, users that use the product, they can become your own marketers. So how do you turn those into marketers? Whereas a normal company, what they would do, like Coca-Cola, they would do like a $4 million billboard. People see it, maybe they buy Coke, but they don't go and get them back to then turn them into marketers for their own product. Whereas a startup, or especially like a growth marketer, would do exactly that. Would literally use, find ways to automate users that use your product to then, then they create and go and evangelize the product. So think of all the B2B SaaS companies that you've seen that they have like a community around their product. Community around the product does just that, creates like fans of the product, get people to talk about it, Slack communities where then you really feel that that sensation of, "Hey, I'm a user. I'm part of this community now. It's not— it's so much more than a product. It's a movement, blah, blah, blah." Awesome.

See, sorry, yeah.

What I really find super interesting is that how Apple actually used the more growth marketing approach rather than a regular marketing approach because Apple, yes, they— and it's a very good hybrid because yes, they use like million-dollar budgets and like Super Bowl TV ads or whatever that is, but they also use that mentality of creating evangelists. So product evangelists and people line up and then people would go and still like try. So they come from the tech culture of growth marketing and they kind of like recycle that into mainstream marketing.

Yeah, I think a really good example of that is they did this campaign shot on an iPhone and they just blew up billboards on it. So like it was a very user-driven growth. It's like, oh, okay, I shot an iPhone and all their commercials on YouTube and stuff is just people like, oh, you shot an iPhone.

I mean, all they did was they created like a UGC campaign as a user-generated content campaign, but on billboards instead of doing it on Instagram, you know?

Yeah, it was more authentic, was real. I 100% agree with you. This question I'm gonna bring up by John again, it was upvoted several times, but they want to know about how does Nudo think about experiments.

Yeah, very, very good.

Very good question, John.

Thank you very much for suggesting that. I'm going to walk you through the exact process that I used to get to rapid, to high-tempo testing and rapid experimentation, because it's not easy, right? In theory, you know, okay, this is high-tempo testing. You can read the blog, you can go, but then when you actually go and execute, like it doesn't work. And you're like, man, this is like interesting. It's like super cool framework book, but then it doesn't work. It doesn't work if you don't execute it properly. And for me, it took me some time to actually find the right execution model for that. So how I pretty much organized my week based on the experimentation process. So my week was timed based on the amount of experiments we were doing. And I'll tell you how. So I would start on like generally working on Sunday evening where basically I would review the analytics of the week before. Where are we growing? Where are we not growing? What are we missing? And then I would just like create a note for the whole team, which was like a growth note. And I would tell them, hey guys, our referral grew unexpectedly by 200%, and we believe that this happened, and we know that this happened because of this email that we sent out that people start sharing and that our referral went to the roof. So what we understood last week is that quirky email, funny emails, pushing people to refer, they work so much better than incentive-based emails saying, "Hey, if you refer 10, I'll give you 10," and whatnot. Whereas like, We didn't put any referral system, just the fact of like, "Hey, if you like Washman, sing Washman with us," or whatever. I don't remember the thing, but that works better. So because we learned that, this week we're going to try something new. We're going to try embedding videos into the email and we're going to try to shoot a video so that people can see a video on email. And we're going to start a video campaign to retarget all of our users on referral. And so we would start the Sunday evening reviewing analytics, Monday morning showing those analytics and what we've understood from the analytics week on week. And then we would start building experiment lists saying like, because we, because we've noticed this and we've learned that, then it means that if we do this, this should happen. And this is exactly what we did. So, and then we would execute those tests Monday and Tuesday, and by Tuesday end of day, we should have everything ready, all the assets, everything to go live. If we were not able to go live by Tuesday afternoon or Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning at max, then we would not consider that a test, a viable test. Why? Because then it's not a test, it takes us too much to execute on, so we cannot consider a test, it becomes a project. So it has to be— we would have to be able to execute it either on Monday or half day on Tuesday to then have it ready by Tuesday evening or by Wednesday morning. So that then we would have Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to see the results of those tests. At least 5 days. And generally we would run them as well like 2-week sprint or 1-week sprint, that depended on the nature of the test. But this is exactly how we run experimentation. Based on data, we create priorities of tests. Those tests needs to be very easy to execute based on a score. I'm not going to get super technical, IC score, impact, path confidence. Yeah, I don't remember what it is. Basically there's like an IC score and then you basically— es, yeah, es. Yeah. That's how we really implemented high tempo testing and rapid experimentation.

Perfect. I think this is a great place to wrap up, guys. Nilio, thank you so much for taking the time. I want to be respectful of everyone. We want to make sure we some time for networking for everyone. But everyone, add Nili on LinkedIn, we'll send out the deck so everyone gets the URLs, but, you know, LinkedIn him, keep in touch with him, and then like, you know, show him some love in the comments, show him some love everywhere. Nili, any last words, any words of inspiration for all our founders? So we had about 200, 250 people live, so, and obviously this recording is gonna go out, but any last words for anyone?

Yeah, no, thank you very much for having me. It was a lot of fun. I really love this type of community events, and I wish you guys best of luck. And if you need anything, just feel free to ping me on LinkedIn. That's where I'm mostly active these days, or just send me an email or book a call, and we can discuss.

Awesome. All right, thanks everyone. We'll wrap up now. And then we'll see you in some— then some of the FI staff will be in the networking portion, so feel free to connect with them as well. All right, thanks everyone.

Bye guys, take care.