How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski

Transcript

probably fire most of your marketing team. My philosophy is that the e-com playbook is the right playbook for SaaS. Every single cent needs to equal a purchase or an add to cart. Matt Swalinski, he's worked at Superhuman, he's worked at Whisperflow, and now he's just joined Excel-BackedVictor.com, and he's looking to make it third time. I wouldn't say lucky, because he is a master of growth. Look at Superhuman and Whisper. These are two of the fastest-growing product-led growth products, and this is a masterclass in how you grow really freaking fast in a world of AI. Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG. I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You have Meta, Google, and Lifecycle. You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. We have kids that are 17, 18, 19 that are making 20, 30k a month, just making a couple ads for us. Ready to go? Matt, it is so good to have you on the show. So thank you so much for joining me, Matt. Yeah, thanks for being here. Now, you've worked with some of the best companies, from Superhuman to Whisper, now with Victor, and we've seen these companies and a huge amount of SaaS companies rise with the product-led growth, PLG, motion. And now we're entering a world of agents. What changes in the growth world when we shift from humans to agents with product-led growth? That's a great question. I think all of the startups I've worked with have been PLG, right? And I think in a world of agents, there's definitely a layer where PLG still matters because PLG assumes you have a perfect self-serve funnel to the human. And in the same way, you're definitely going to want to optimize it for how an agent is doing research. How is it picking the tools and the APIs that it's actually using? And I think it just takes the same framing and diligence to why the product already worked from the human end, and just understand how agents are making decisions. So the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned, in my opinion, for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop when tools are being selected for certain tasks. When you look back at, say, Superhuman, if we go back in time chronologically, it grew very craftsman-like with founder referrals. What's your reflections or lessons from that experience on Superhuman's growth that you've taken with you? The taste-making of what it means to create a strong product, for me, was born while I was at Superhuman. Because at the end of the day, if you've used Superhuman, you've likely stayed using Superhuman just because every little element of that product is hyper-refined to make you want to continue using it. But I think the difference of what was the early scale of Superhuman, where it was super founder-led, word-of-mouth referral, there was essentially an asymptote that the product hit where they had to follow a different playbook. And this was three years ago, roughly. And back then, what was SaaS, now we call AI SaaS, everyone was running more of the PLG motion, referral, word-of-mouth, without doing paid. And they were laughing, e-com's been doing the UGC programs, hundreds of thousands of ads, paid ad spend is the way to drive performance. And the resistance was definitely there while I was at Superhuman. But seeing what I've been able to do alongside a great team at Whisper and now Victor, my philosophy is that the e-com playbook is the right playbook for SaaS. Because if you look at e-com, every single cent needs to equal a purchase or an add to cart. You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of channels that you're essentially balancing to showcase the entirety of the brand. And that's the model that I took and applied at the end before the Grammarly acquisition at Superhuman to scale paid, and then followed that exact same motion for Whisperflow. And I think that's really what put it on the map and got it to where it is. Because, like we were talking about before, distribution to me is the only moat. And you have to have that strong of a playbook when it comes to marketing. Because in today's world, that's the only way to succeed. Dude, I'm going to love this show because most people say the same thing. And what everyone tells me is that, no, no, you should wait to do paid. You should wait to do paid. It's a dangerous drug that you can get hooked on. When is the right time, do you think? Right away. At the end of the day, paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG, that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape, or form. There's a ton of narrative that focuses on brand, go organic content, build all that base. That just takes too much time. And yes, do that motion while also doing all of paid. Because you can refine messaging, do creative testing, test your funnels, test your positioning, all within a week on paid. How long is that going to take you if you do some content writing, you talk about it on a podcast, you see if it sticks, you're going to do some user interviews? Great. Do all of that. But then you have a much faster engine of validation on the other side, on the paid amplification end. When we actually break that down, if I'm an early-stage founder, what should I actually do? How much money should I take to spend on paid? Should I do it on one channel versus 10 channels? If I'm an early-stage company, I don't have a mega budget. What do I actually do? Yeah. I would say definitely start with what I say is the core two. I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You have Meta, Google, and Lifecycle. And obviously your site and all the rest is in the middle. Because you have your strong video intent platforms, both in Meta and YouTube ads. You have the search intent of people not knowing your product exists, but they're searching for something via the keywords. And then I add in Lifecycle as well. Because if you don't have a net to nudge people and show up in the right place, email, SMS, whatever it is, push if you have an app, you want those three things spun up because you can scale to your first million, 10 million ARR, just off of those three things. And then obviously you're investing in the site. You're investing in founder-led content. There's the other things in there. But in paid, just focus on Meta and Google and you'll totally be fine. Everyone's like, oh, we have to do TikTok and Reddit. There comes a time and place to add in a million things. Because in the same way that a lot of people get lost with agents is they start doing a million things with agents and they do them all poorly, same thing here. If you do a million channels and you do them all poorly, it's not going to help you out. Okay. So we have Meta. We have Google. We have Lifecycle. And we start spending, I don't know, let's just put a hundred grand down. Let's say we've raised a $3 million seed round. Is a hundred grand fair? Yeah. I think it depends on your average revenue per user and the unit economics, right? Because it depends, how long is your funnel? What is that hundred going to give you? I think that's it. But usually I'd say, yeah, if you raise, let's say, three to five million, that's a good starting budget to essentially validate that if we put money in, people are going to actually want my product. What should we be looking for then? We have a hundred K and we put it across Meta and Google. I should say those two. What is a sign that it is working versus not working? Yeah. So I'll also frame, I think, a massive gap in the SaaS space where I'm waiting for startups to be made that fill this gap. So I'll zoom out. And if you look at e-com, there are companies like Triple Whale and Elevar that have existed for many years. And what those tools do is, Triple Whale is essentially a mutual exclusivity platform that tells you, okay, you add a pixel to your website. It's out of the box. You plug in all your ad spend. And then it tells you, because there's usually overlap, if you run Meta ads and Google, they're double counting, right? And then Lifecycle is also triple-counting at that point. So what a tool like that does for e-com is say, great. I plugged in all my variables. Tell me exactly what is driving revenue from a new-customer basis. And you have that out of the box. You don't have to set anything up. Yeah. So I'll also frame, I think, a massive gap in the SaaS space where I'm waiting for startups to be made that fill this gap. So I'll zoom out. And if you look at e-com, there are companies like Triple Whale and Elevar that have existed for many years. And what those tools do is Triple Whale is essentially a mutual exclusivity platform that tells you, okay, you add a pixel to your website. It's out of the box. You plug in all your ad spend. And then it tells you because there's usually overlap, but if you run Meta ads in Google, they're double counting, right? And then lifecycle is also triple counting at that point. So what a tool like that does for e-com is say, great. I plugged in all my variables. Tell me exactly what is driving revenue from a new customer basis. And you have that out of the box. You don't have to set anything up. And the other side is conversion tracking, which is add to cart, purchase, server side. There's a ton of technical stuff on tracking. That's just a massive headache, but there's a solution in e-com that is out of the box. It takes 15 minutes to set up and it's done. You don't have to think about it. For SaaS, completely different world because you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch, right? When it comes to analytics, there's a DB, there's a BI layer. So maybe you're using ClickHouse and Hex, last click, first click attribution. All of this is homegrown at every single startup. There is no out-of-the-box SaaS that fills that. And that's why all of the companies that struggle don't do that first, that you have the right Martech stack to understand if we're spending, what is actually moving the needle? Because the platforms won't tell you because you have the wrong setup for conversion tracking. You don't have measurement and you're spending into the air. And I'd say 90% of companies don't do that as a first step. Before you spend your first cent, have everything set up. How do I set that up? If we don't have it in SaaS, how do I set it up as a founder? This is what I essentially did both at Superhuman and Whisperflow, now at Victor, is essentially coming in and defining what that looks like. Right. And it comes to have a strong analytics leader as well as a strong analytics dev that can essentially set up all of that on your website, set up all of that inside of your product to make sure that you are. Because most people stop at the, we have analytics to track our product. Are all the marketing platforms getting the same signals? There's a thing called match rate on Meta and then there's an enrichment score on Google. If you're not maxing that out, you're missing 50%. It's just ghost people. Meta doesn't see them. It's not attributing conversions. And the way that the platforms work in today's environment is each platform's algorithm does what you tell it. So let's say we have poor conversion tracking that doesn't track when someone subscribes to our product, and it's a 50-50 match, right? And if I optimize for that subscription, the higher volume amount of events I have, the more data it has of what a subscriber looks like. And when I optimize for that, Meta will give me more of those people. But if you have poor conversion tracking, Meta doesn't know who those people are and it just randomly targets people. And you'll have a super high CAC. You'll say, oh, paid doesn't work for me. I'd say most of the time people haven't done the actual setup correctly before they can say paid doesn't work for me. So we get that analytics leader. We get that setup in place. What are we looking for then? What is good metrics and what metrics should we be optimizing for? Is it acquisition? Is it retention? Is it spend? When you're first getting started, the main thing that you optimize for is the most important event to you as a business. So it's SaaS. It's the subscription or let's say the start trial or in Whisperflow's example, it was the download, right? Super upper-funnel event because we had a desktop client and an iOS app. It is super hard to track. But pick what that event is and essentially validate that, okay, we spend 100K. What is traffic cost? What is our acquisition cost per user, right? And just focus on acquisition cost because PLG and the product team are going to focus on retention as long as you bring in the quality user, right? And that's why over time you'll probably change the conversion action to be what the most important event is, right? So for example, at Victor, we have, it's a pretty hard funnel to go through. It could be an admin in Slack or let's say you're a smaller team and anyone can add apps, or you need to be a tenant in Microsoft Teams. You go through onboarding and then you add Victor into Slack or Microsoft Teams. That's our conversion action. Super down-funnel, but we know that we've optimized for that. And because we were super high ARPU, we can have a couple thousand dollars in CAC and the economics will work. But you need to take the time to find that out, right? What does success look like at the channel level? But it's just acquisition at the beginning. Okay. So in the beginning, it's cost per download. Exactly. Okay. Cost per download. And so if we're thinking about good ratios, so we hear five to one CAC to LTV or LTV to CAC, obviously. In the early days, is one to one okay? What is okay? What is good? What is great? What is worrying? I think it depends how much you've raised, to be honest. If you've raised a lot, you just burn a shitload doing one to one and that's okay. Yeah. Because, I mean, we were saying, right? Distribution is everything in today's market. You open up X every day and there's a hundred new products, five that are in your category, two that have absolutely just cloned your website, right? This happens every single day. And the only way you outcompete them is distribution, right? And essentially, you want to run one to one to essentially get as many users using your product and believing in you as soon as possible. You don't want to do it below that because then you are burning money. And then you have to analyze the website, the funnel, and try and get it to that one to one. And then I think there comes a room of scale where you have enough other channels, sponsorships, you're pumping on AEO, and all this other stuff starts to lift your LTV to CAC ratio. And I think everyone, in terms of economics, is trying to shoot for a three to one. And it also changes depending on what kind of SaaS you are, right? LTV to CAC is usually not enough. You want to probably look at LTV gross profit, specifically if you have token cost, because the biggest cost item is usage at the end of the day. So the economics are a little different depending on a Whisper and a Victor. How does that change then with a Whisper and a Victor where you do have a token cost being much more significant than you had in a SaaS world where there were no token costs? The biggest differences are first in that Meta and Google are not optimized for B2B SaaS usage-based products. They go absolutely nuts with a, so you're telling me there's predictive revenue of one person could be a 50,000 annual contract while another person will be 50, right? There's just huge variance depending. A single person can be a high user and the algorithm has no idea what to do with that. But the other side of it is we obviously have way higher average revenue per user, but average cost per user is also higher, right? So you essentially want to make sure that you actually have a good grapple on what cost is. And a lot of people were like, oh, well, that's my Anthropic bill. But what about Modal? What about inference costs? What about all the other things that are allowing you to serve your products and have a good finance leader that's going to be able to essentially gut check? Yeah, you've been missing these cost items. This is what you should be optimizing for so we don't burn money. And that's, I think, a mistake a lot of people make, not doing that analysis at first. How much should I spend on creative for these paid channels? If we're going to do Instagram marketing, we need a video, we need creative. How much should I spend on that? Because that can't be an afterthought. Yeah. I would say you probably want to be spending, not at scale but in the beginning, as much in ad spend on creative. Because creative is everything in today's environment where, and people have heard this buzzword thrown around, there's an update in Meta that was called Andromeda that essentially other things that is allowing you to serve as your products and have a good finance leader that's going to be able to essentially gut check. Yeah, you've been missing these cost items. This is what you should be optimizing for so we don't burn money. And that's a lot, I think a mistake a lot of people make is not doing that analysis at first. How much should I spend on creative for these paid channels? If we're going to do Instagram marketing, we should do, we need a video, we need creative, how much should I spend on that? Because that can't be an afterthought. Yeah. I would say you probably want to be spending, not at scale, but in the beginning, as much in ad spend on creative. Because creative is everything in today's environment, and people have heard this buzzword thrown around. There's an update in Meta that was called Andromeda that essentially changed the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting. So what Meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are. We're going to analyze the creative, and based on who we know you're trying to target, we will find those people for you. So essentially that removed all the media buyers that were tinkering campaigns and had strategies of how to do it. That went out the door, and their whole job had to be creative strategy. So in the beginning, and that's, you'll see this for Victor as well as Whisper, we have hundreds of creators that are doing different demos, different use cases to different audiences. And that's the only way you can scale spend. Let's say you have a 100K Meta budget, you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise you're going to plateau, you're going to get out-competed. So how do you do 400 to 500 new creatives a month? You have a creator program where, at Victor, we have our own creator program where we give a percentage of ad spend to people to essentially create ads for us. We obviously have some storytelling, and they use the product. So it takes a little bit to acquire them. But once they do that, they create three to four videos a week. And we have a couple hundred of them. We work with five agencies. We also have our in-house creative team. So again, Ecom model. Ecom has been doing this for over a decade. That is how the entirety of Ecom has functioned. UGC, creator programs, hundreds of thousands of variations of creative. And they've been doing that, and that's in their DNA. Sass had to grow up to this. And because I come from that world, that was the instilling factor that I always brought in. Again, I'm a startup founder. You're my advisor and angel investor. Well done. This is going to be a very unprofitable investment for you. How do I create a UGC network? I'm a startup. I need three to 400 creatives. Or do I just go and ask my daughter's friends at school to go and do it? There are a million agencies now. In all of these gaps and opportunities, the sheer amount of aggregation service-based businesses, there's hundreds of thousands of UGC agencies. But most of them are shared. We get a lot of people, every single day, I get 100-plus messages being like, I can create clips for you. What should I do as a startup founder to know which agency or marketplace to work with versus not? Yeah. I think it comes from asking peers, who do you use? And that's the nice thing about creating UGC. It doesn't actually go on their page. So they can represent every brand. They can do ads for every competitor as long as— Ah, okay. So in this case, I'm creating it for you, and then you use it. I pump a million dollars on that ad, and it never shows up on your channel. It's just pumping creative videos. And then, yeah, you can also run partnership ads. Those work really well. You should have probably 30%, roughly, of your spend going to someone posts in collaboration with, put spend behind that. But yeah, it could be someone that has no experience. The kids are making bank nowadays doing UGC for brands that will pay them a percentage of ad spend. We have kids that are 17, 18, 19 that are making 20, 30K a month just making a couple of ads for us. And the nice thing is if we keep spending on it and it's a great ad, they don't have to make another one for a while. Have you found that 80% of the ad revenue comes from 20% of the creators? Yeah, 100%. Right. And that's also just how the algorithm works. It finds the best ad and it pumps all the spend at it. Have you found there's commonalities in those 20% best performing? Be it a girl versus a boy, be it direct camera versus not, be it, I don't know if you've seen this, but the trend of cutting things in the kitchen whilst talking about something, making a coffee whilst talking about something, it's a hook. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the pattern disruption, as well as getting you to stop, because the sheer amount of content that we digest in a day, if it all looks the same, then you're going to get drowned out. So the best creative essentially is a rough shake of the camera that seems like it's a mistake, but it got your attention. Right. And stuff like that works really well where it's just a messy start and, oh, hey, yeah, what's up, and then talk about the product. But at the end of the day, the key thing around creative is not the one creative. It's the package of all of your assets together. They have to be different. To the algorithm, they have to look and feel different. So different ages, different genders, different settings, different hooks. If you only focus on this is what works and you pump just that, performance will crater. You need to constantly be creating net new, completely wild, weird ideas. Otherwise your acquisition costs will start to rise. To what extent will that be replaced by AI creative? We had Cliff Weitzman, who's the founder of Speechly, on the show, and he spoke about how essentially he did it once and then they use AI to change background, change his clothing, and actually one turned into thousands of variations. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is where AI creative, that's the superpower of AI in creative, is spinning up variations. But if you look at the full videos that are AI, they're slop. You can tell immediately that it's an AI video. I think there's a place for it. Maybe 5% of your account is just weird AI videos that are diverse. But I think that's the secret sauce, being able to create variety. In no way, shape, or form is anything in creative to the point where you can replace real people. I also don't buy that the algos don't denigrate AI content versus human content. I agree. Yeah. You're a hundred percent right. Okay. So we've got this hundred K and we've got this UGC network. It's not really working. What does not really working look like? It's not doing the one to one. How long should I give it? Should we do this for three months straight? Should we do it for six months? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you'll usually be able to say that if you just get started, the campaigns have to warm up. There are certain things you have to have already in place. So like we said, you have your analytics, you have your conversion tracking, let it just run. And of course you already have to have customers coming in the door. And ideally that's why PLG and product excellence is still the beginning step, right? Have a product that people genuinely love and they want to tell their friends about. That's already happening. Then your conversion tracking is working on your website or your app or whatever, and you get to 50 conversions, right? Then you can start paid because that's the minimum line of whatever your conversion action is that the algorithm is going to say, okay, I have enough data to understand who your best customer is. And then I'd say within two to three weeks, you can start printing money. So if you launch a campaign and go through a couple, you'll do two or three iteration cycles of we launched some creative, this worked, this didn't. Why? Okay. Let's throw some diverse stuff. Let's do some variations. You probably want to give it a full three months, but you'll be able to say, yes, I can start printing money today in two to three weeks, or I have to go to the drawing board on all of these things because there are a lot of moving pieces, right? It's the ad creative, the ad copy, what is the landing experience? What is your Then you can start paid because that's the minimum line of whatever your conversion action is that the algorithm is going to say, okay, I have enough data to understand who your target best customer is. And then I'd say within two to three weeks, you can start printing money. So if you launch a campaign and go through a couple, you'll do two or three iteration cycles of we launched some creative, this worked, this didn't. Why? Okay. Let's throw some diverse stuff. Let's do some variations. You probably want to give it a full three months, but you'll be able to say, yes, I can start printing money today in two to three weeks. Or I have to go to the drawing board on all of these things because there are a lot of moving pieces, right? It's the ad creative, the ad copy, what is the landing experience? What is your messaging on that landing experience? Is your page speed good? Are your screenshots in the app store actually sensible, right? All of those things are micro levers that compound. So you also need to be refining everything along the way as you spend. Otherwise, things will plateau. You said a couple of things there which I just need a bit of help on. The landing experience. What do you mean there, and what should I know as a founder? Yeah. So a lot of people have really poor UI UX or website design or branding, absolutely awful. Right? And— I don't want to throw shade, but have you seen Post Talk? I go on this site and I'm like, I have no idea what's going on. This is Beijing's version of UI. The thing is, that's a pattern disrupt thing for them, and they know who their target audience is, and the target audience appreciates the weirdness. Oh yeah, James is amazing and it works and it's a brilliant company and phenomenal. But I just look at it and go— Yeah. On the flip side, it's just like, okay, do you know what your traffic mix is? Is your site mobile optimized? The sheer amount of sites I see that the main CTA is a scroll and a half away, come on. That's the first thing that you start with, that a basic audit will show you. Right? And that's what I mean by the landing experience. If I read nothing else but your headline, do I know what you do? And it's hard sometimes to explain what this crazy AI SaaS niche product does. Focus on your messaging. Actually have something that tells the user, if they didn't move their thumb, they didn't do anything, I want to try that out. Right? Go through that proxy. Same thing with the creatives, same thing with the copy. That's a frame that you want to take throughout the entire funnel. Page speed really matters. So page speed matters because it depends, obviously, who and where your target customers are. Right? So US, UK, we have good data and it'll be fine. But where page speed really starts to matter is both AEO and SEO. It is one of the core elements in what gets your site to rank in, let's say, a top 10 position on Google. And then same thing, if, for example, a bot caller goes to your website and it's a cheap call to say how long did your page take to load, and if you're on a low ranking from A to F, the average person in the world will probably not load your site immediately. So any second improvement is a drastic jump in conversion. And the numbers show that. Right? And even though it seems like, oh yeah, it loads in half a second versus 200 milliseconds, it does make a difference. Okay. So we have this 100K, we've done three months. I'm really enjoying this because, as I said, for me, it's nice to follow the chronology. You have 100K, it's going well, I think. How do I know whether to pour fuel on the fire, keep the budget as it is and just keep testing, but in a more measured fashion, or this is not fucking working? You want to chart your total spend to your acquisition and how elastic it is. Right? There's always going to be a lag where I spend today and then I convert to paid in 14 days. Right? Let's say. Right. And we're looking at two main things. Revenue is the most important thing from an ARR standpoint because we're in SaaS. As I spend up, does that ARR also spike? Right. And how elastic that relationship is will immediately tell you oil on the fire, or let's pump the brakes because as we spend up, this is a very common thing that you'll hear: how incremental is your spend? It's a question you should ask relatively early because once things are working, it's really easy just to dial it up to 13 on a scale of 10. Sure. And what ends up happening, if you're not very diligent, all of that additive spend could have not been there and you would've gotten the same results. And then you're just giving money to Meta and Google. Right. And there's that fine line. And that's why I'd say true people that understand this and growth are on the rare side because there's usually I am an expert in Meta or I'm an expert in some other channel, but being able to sit above the whole thing and say, okay, here's how the interrelationship of this much spend here, this many sponsorships, this many podcast features, this is how much PR we're pushing. All of that interrelationship is how you essentially ensure the most elastic spend-to-revenue impact. And that's further down the 100K, but that's the end state. You are everywhere all at once at the right moments. Why did superhuman's growth asymptote then? At the end of the day, it was very much a premium product, immediate paywall. And the core ICP is founders, right? And we also experienced this at Whisper, right? The early adopter tech founder is not an infinite audience. I think today it's an ever-growing audience because everyone can be a founder. Everyone can have that frame of what is my tech stack to be an army of one, right? But if you look back even two, three years ago, the TAM of that is finite, right? And that was the first asymptote. So essentially, going after additional ICPs like sales and how do we turn superhuman to be more of a sales engine for people looking at the recent opens on the right, that's my favorite feature, right? I can see who's creeping on my emails and send them a reply. So stuff like that, adapting the product to more ICPs is where you get those additional step changes. But the asymptote is because it is hyper focused on one ICP. And if you don't proactively open up the layers of the onion, you're going to hit some kind of level. But if you look at revenue scaling and you see Fixer scale faster than superhuman in the top buying revenue number, do you not just go, we fucked up paid? Well, so yes, right? Fixer followed the econ playbook, right? They, UGC, tons of ads, strong on Meta. The thing is, it's a slightly different value proposition in that— Different market. Different market, different consumer, right? This is someone that wants a simple tool that adds labels to their Gmail. So— Would you say Fixer should continue to just spend the hell out of this market then? Well, from what I know, right, their scale was both on the B2C side through Meta, but also they made big revenue jumps through the Outlook consumer that was hyper frustrated and big enterprise deals. Right? And that's also where superhuman, now superhuman mail, did the same thing, where going after big logos and ensuring that you can essentially have sales-led growth alongside PLG. I think Fixer did that also super well, right? They pushed hard on the sales side because that was also their background, relationships they had from the email space. And that's why, same thing for Whisper, right? It was really interesting to see that we were B2C PLG, but a very large component of our ARR was enterprise before we had a single AE, because it was self-service enterprise adoption, team licenses and that kind of stuff. So you also want your product to be adoptable easily by enterprise. I think that's a nice unlock as well. frustrated and big enterprise deals. Right? And that's also where superhuman, now superhuman male, it did the same thing where going after big logos and ensuring that you can essentially have sales led growth alongside PLG. I think Fixer did that also super well, right? They pushed hard on the sales side because that was also their background relationships they had from the email space. And that's why I like same thing for Whisper, right? It was really interesting to see that we were B2C PLG, but a very large component of our ARR was enterprise before we had a single AE, because it was self-service enterprise adoption, team licenses, and that kind of stuff. So you also want your product to be adoptable easily by enterprise. I think that's a nice unlock as well. We mentioned the three channels, Meta, Google, Lifecycle. What are your lessons on how to do YouTube? Well, we hear about YouTube being the acquisition engine and machine that it is. Any lessons that I should know as a young founder? So, it's a totally different type of creative, right? If you look at Meta and YouTube, they have similar but slightly different hook curves where the hook happens slightly later, because on Instagram and Facebook, you want that immediate validation, while on YouTube, you're there to spend the time, digest the video. So you have a little bit more of a longer attention span. And a lot of people actually are terrified of YouTube because the best performing YouTube ads are 16 by nine. So they're landscape. And most people are like, well, I have a UGC program. I just have story placements. What am I supposed to do? So we did a really cool thing at Victor. We had Victor build an app for us that takes any story video and adds it into a static template that has logos that use us, G2 rating, and then a CTA. And the video is the replaceable asset. And we turned all of our story ads into YouTube ads. So every single one ended up on YouTube. Not all of them worked the same. We had to edit them a little bit to fit the format. But usually people are terrified to get started with YouTube because of that reason. But just go into Figma, make a template that's a static asset, throw your video in that, and just export that. Welcome to YouTube, right? You can run ads that way. And there's also a different storytelling where you want it to feel like an organic YouTube video. So someone talking about a hack or a use case of, yo, I just started using this and it absolutely changed my life. I'm going to show you how, right? You're not going to say that in a Meta ad, right? It's a very different script and framing and filming. So we have a separate team that does the scripts, films the YouTube videos. It's an entirely separate program from our UGC. We use some things from UGC in YouTube, but it deserves its own focus. We're going to go into the team composition later. I want to stay on channels. So we now have a working program. How do we determine how much fuel to pour on the fire? Yeah. I think it's all dependent on the elasticity that we defined. We at Whisper did what I think everyone should do, which is go as hard as you absolutely can and then see it blow up. And then understand where and how it blew up, pull back, and use that as information of now we know what is incremental. We know where our ceilings are. We know that we hit audience saturation or we need more creative. So we did that last year at Whisper, right? We 5X the budget from one month to another. And where did the pieces fall through, right? But the thing is, the reason why we did that instead of trying to figure it out over time is you don't have six months to say, okay, we need to be growing 30%, 40% month over month over month. And the only way that we can do that is, okay, let's see where our ceiling is. Because maybe we would have been surprised that we would have been scaling infinitely, which didn't happen, right? But we then knew, okay, Meta needs to be second to Google. Here's why. Here's how all these things worked together. These newsletters were shit. This podcast doesn't work. How did the pieces fit together? So in my opinion, go hard to understand what doesn't work and where your mix needs to be adjusted, then bring things down and then scale back up with those learnings. And then you can get a repeatable ramp. If something doesn't work today, do you just turn it off or do you wait to give it time? I would say it depends on how poor the metrics are, right? If there's no world that this is ever going to make sense, turn it off immediately. Let's say some leading indicators are saying it's pretty crap, but let's give it a little bit of time to see if there are other things that are impacting this. Because like I said, there's a million dials. From the ad to the conversion, there's a million things that you can tinker along the way. And that's why you want to give it time, right? This asset is going to the homepage. What if we had a hyper-personalized landing page that says the exact same thing that is being said in the ad and even includes the creator's face on the page? It's a random idea, right? Does that move the needle? And test some things to give it some time and then scratch it off. What single channel worked best at Whisper, and what did you learn from that? Definitely Google. In terms of- Like, is it traditional ICO? Google Ads. Yeah, Google Ads. Google Ads is still the main driver. And what's surprising across literally everything, right? Non-branded search, Pmax, YouTube ads, everything prints there. And the reason why is it's the middle of the funnel, but you have essentially all top to bottom right in one platform. And if you have all the right conversion tracking, Google is a big marketplace with a lot of surfaces, and just optimizing for app download because it's a freemium product. We have a lot more fine-tuned control than we do in Meta when it comes to CAC and how much we want to spend in India versus in the US because it's a different price in those markets. We don't have as much fine-tuned control in Meta because, like I said, they've removed all the manual settings. Creative is your targeting. It either works in a GEO or it doesn't. So you just iterate on creative. It's a completely different job than you have a structured beast to essentially understand how to scale there. So it was Google, and that's also because longer-form video for a pretty difficult product to explain. Like, okay, I talk, it turns to text, but where? And text boxes? Explain that to the average Joe that's walking on the street. They're going to look at you weird. Like, yeah, voice notes. What do you mean? I send them in WhatsApp, right? There's that education that needs to happen. So the 30-second to one-minute videos in YouTube that educated the base ran for a while, got millions, hundreds of millions of impressions, then fed into non-branded search, Pmax, different placements, and display. And then eventually those people converted, right? All those pieces work together. Is performance always best at the start of a channel, or does it get better over time? It gets better over time. I think, but again, it has its own scaling laws where there's a point where you have to diversify into other platforms before you see an additional unlock. When you hit some kind of audience fatigue of whatever you're targeting. But in the beginning, it's always shit because you're waiting for the conversions to... When you hit audience fatigue, do you keep spending waiting for a next unlock? Or do you just go, I've tapped out this channel? Well, you want to unlock the next audience, right? So it's who is... So for example, when we're looking at Victor, when we launched, we purposely had the AI employee for everyone. And we did this to see who came in the door. And we had agencies, econ brands, and SMBs that first showed up. And essentially what we did is we went through in order, right? We went, okay, we have evergreen stuff, we'll continue that running. But now let's go agencies. Can we acquire them? What does the funnel look like? What does the creative look like? And then once we unlocked one audience, and it seems like the economics work, now there's a repeatable process to refine it, then we can go on to the next audience. I've tapped out this channel? Well, you want to unlock the next audience, right? So it's who is... For example, when we're looking at Victor, when we launched, we purposely had the AI employee for everyone. And we did this to see who came in the door. And we had agencies, econ brands, and SMBs that first showed up. And essentially what we did is we went through in order, right? We went, okay, we have evergreen stuff, we'll continue that running. But now let's go agencies. Can we acquire them? What does the funnel look like? What does the creative look like? And then once we've unlocked one audience, and it seems like the economics work, there's a repeatable process to refine it, then we can go on to the next audience. So you essentially want to, you'll hit audience fatigue in what you're currently targeting. Marketing now is very ICP specific. We have all of the latest and greatest tools that can tell you, simulate as a pro, an inner prompt, whether using Victor or whatever tool, you can do it. For example, simulate this person, what do they read? What do they think about decision making? Run that prompt. And then you have the richest ICP research you possibly can have. Create it for that person, create an experience from a landing, onboarding, and product experience for that person. And you can continue scaling by just going down to the niche, audience by audience. Because I don't think that, as an investor in the company, I don't think that was a good tagline. And you may hate me for that. But the AI employee for everyone, I don't know what the fuck that means. If you were to say the AI video editor, great, amazing. If you were to say the AI copywriter, amazing. AI employee, you doing my tasks? You doing my creative? I think that the reason- But my point is, are you able to do horizontal taglines and then verticalize, and that's the right approach? I think because the category is so wide, right? And I wouldn't say we're the first, but we're the first to say AI employee and actually deliver on that promise, where work is being given and the usage is actually ROI positive, actually valuable. And we started with that because, again, how else are you going to frame it as being different than Claude or ChadGBT and these other players? For us, it's the positioning around knowledge work. So there was nothing other than AI coworker and AI employee. There's no other positioning that really makes sense. And because it hasn't been used a lot, I think it's confusing. But now that there are more use cases and stories to back it up, then we can shift the framing to be, I hired Victor and here's what he did. And then it's, oh, it's a guy's name. It's an employee. Oh, it's an AI tool, right? You can invert the process now, but we had to start with something to essentially build those use cases. One of the things that is supposed to be a growth engine as well is referrals, referral programs. Any lessons from Whisper, from Superhuman that are really important for me and founders to know on how to build great referral engines? I think it's one of the core things, like we talked about MetaGoogle Lifecycle. When you think about PLG, have that referral program set up and it be very front and center and easy to discover in the product to make it effortless for someone to share the product and get something for doing that, right? And at Superhuman, it was give one month, get one month. And we had people that had hundreds of referrals, hundreds of months. They were never going to pay for the rest of their lives. And because it was delightful and it was easy to discover, but it was very tactile where I'm getting something for doing this. So it was a similar thing with Whisper, where when you hit your, let's say, 2000-word limit, now that we're changing a little bit of how that trial works, but essentially finding the right moment to show the referral program and make it tangible. So you're right about to hit your word limit. Hey, did you know that if you share this with your friend, you can get the next month free? Okay, I'm going to take five seconds and go do that. And I'll tell one friend, hey, sign up for this. And if they sign up, I get that one month. And now I have another person that can spread the word. And that K factor is what makes or breaks that. So align referral program to usage limits, if that is your product, right? What is the thing that, if you have more of, won't frustrate you? Right? So for Victor, the referral program that we have is all token based. You get credits to essentially use in Victor. Whenever you're near the limit, we give you essentially a decision tree, depending on who you are, of what you could do to earn free credits. We have a creator program. So if you just post on LinkedIn about Victor, we give you a payout via CPM directly to your account in credits, to any user. And that gives us social and virality that we can essentially push forward on. Or you can be a part of the actual referral program, where you can invite companies and you get a percentage revenue share of the referred company's paying plan in credits every month. So if I'm a company and I know another cool company that should be using Victor, and I know that Victor is expensive, we have eight-person teams that are spending $15,000, $20,000 a month to use Victor, and it replaced all their hiring. We can go into that later. But for example, that's a cost item. And I know that if I can bring, I have another friend that has an agency, they'll probably spend 5k. And I'll get 20% of that as rev share. And that lowers my cost. But to us, that makes sense from a CAC basis. We're willing to spend $1,000, $2,000, depending on the cohort, to acquire a customer. We'd rather have our customers finding those best customers for us. Yeah, fuck. If I'm a startup founder, I've got a load of founder friends in non-competitive markets. Great. Game on. Yeah. I totally get that. Okay. Any ways that founders fuck up referral programs that they should avoid? I think it's either not making them tangible, or just a, hey, refer your friends. But what am I getting for it, right? Or it's just, you get swag or things that don't really matter. Or they create these hyper-complicated 20 tiers, do these actions, and gamify the referral program. And then no one wants to use it because it's a pain. So I think it's somewhere in that spectrum. You're either doing that or that. You need to hit the sweet spot of what that looks like. Unless it's Palantir swag, in which case that's really quite cool. And I would love that. We mentioned that the timing of which you put that referral in front of people, the paywall is a difficult one. And it is also where to put it, whether it needs to be hard and immediate, whether you need to show value. How do you think about lessons, advice to founders on the immediacy of the paywall and where it sits best? So I think even before the paywall analysis, the main thing you want to adjust for is when that magical aha moment happens, and you want that magical moment to happen as soon as possible. But you also don't want, you want the paywall near that moment where that moment is either your first discovery of, wow, this is amazing. But you want to continue that over time. So you have that magical aha moment and then you stay in that honeymoon phase of, this is just amazing. And then within that phase, paywall, right? And that's whether it's words per week or how many credits you get in Victor. This is a big game that we're trying to hyper-refine now: how many free credits should we give you, and how do we nudge Victor to show you really useful workflows? Because the moment you have one that goes, this is game changing, paywall, right? Because then you want to open up your pocketbook because you've felt something magical that you haven't felt before. And because there's so many products, there's true unique magic, this product is insane moments. And this happened at Whisper when we had that first rocket ship moment, But you want to continue that over time. So you have that magical aha moment, and then you stay in that honeymoon phase of, this is just amazing. And then within that phase, paywall, right? And that's whether it's words per week or how many credits you get in Victor. This is a big game that we're trying to hyper-refine now: how many free credits should we give you? And how do we nudge Victor to show you really useful workflows? Because the moment you have one that goes, this is game-changing, paywall, right? Because then you want to open up your pocketbook because you've felt something magical that you haven't felt before. And because there are so many products, there's true unique magic, this product-is-insane moments. And this happened at Whisper when we had that first rocket ship moment, when LinkedIn was going absolutely nuts: there's this thing, Whisper, and I'm not typing anymore. And a lot of that was organic, right? But that's because people hit that magical moment. And that's similar with the amount of posts that are happening about Victor. I'd say half of them are organic, half of them are the creator program that I said, you post and you can get credits, but it's all genuine, right? But it's that magic moment that matters. Should credits go in marketing budgets? We call this fully loaded CAC. So our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. If you're not doing that, then you're not really calculating your acquisition cost. So yeah, trial credits, or anything free that you're giving away, is cost, and it goes under, it is a marketing cost item. We mentioned another one that was very interesting. You said AEO, which is obviously answer engine optimization. We invested in peak, which essentially optimizes this. How do you think about that as a new channel? How do we embrace it? What should we know? AEO in general follows the core tenants of SEO in general, where what used to be old-school SEO, pumping out thousands of pages, came back again. Because Google, because they own the SEO algorithm, essentially penalized people that were just pumping out pages for SEO. So over the last couple of years, people stopped doing that. But the sheer amount of pages that you have in AEO, that is also changing a little bit. But if you look at, you can ask any agent to analyze the site map and essentially do cron. So we do this with Victor. We look at every competitor, and we look at their site map, and we see how many pages they're making. All these companies are doing 100 to 200 pages a week. A lot of it is just generated AI slop. So that's also what you don't want to do at scale. You actually want valuable content that says valuable things because the AI crawler essentially ingests that. And then what you're saying there is what gets written about you when, what is the best tool for this? Or, I'm trying to do this, and it's doing these citations. So the things that I'll say are the most important in AEO now, it's like, yes, have an engine that you send content through your website on specific things. But the most important thing is YouTube, Reddit, and the social narrative. So one of the early levers that every founder should do when they're first starting with scaling is investing in good YouTube reviews. Because YouTube reviews, because they're long form, and they rank long tail, they'll essentially beep. They're one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. So you'll have your website, PR, external sources talking about you. And one of the biggest, best external sources is how many reviews and videos do you have on YouTube. They're a really high citation on ChatGPT. And that's one of the early, I'd say strong things that every founder should focus on. Dude, is traditional PR and news fucking dead? And what I mean by that, it's like, being in TechCrunch used to matter. I still think it matters in the sense that I have the opinion that when you launch, do a Product Hunt, get featured in TechCrunch. It's founder initiation, short table stakes almost. Yeah, yeah. I'd say it builds a level of credibility and trust that you are on the map in the same way that everyone went through the process. But the reason why it's important, the PR is less of a PR blows up and there's a traffic wave. Really, that PR is mainly for citations, right, around AEO, like how many external credible sources are writing about you. Then you'll see your AEO traffic significantly increase. Because the more of a not-owned narrative is being talked about positively about you, the better off the product is. Should I bother doing TikTok? I think there's a time and place for it. It depends on, are you more B2C than anything else? I've never met a CMO or a head of growth who's been able to crack it. I've never. Yeah, I mean, in the way that the content gets digested, I think there's a time and place to do some audience diversification. But yeah, to be honest, in any of the three core companies that I've been at so far, it hasn't worked yet, but maybe I'll get a chance to change that at Victor. Totally get that. Final one again, before we move to team composition. But what happens if, when we turn off paid as much, so we're spending really aggressively and it's working, it's working, and we get to 30, 40, 50 million in revenue, and we're like, we've got a bit of a paid engine now that we're a bit hooked on. Turn off the paid, dial it really right back, and growth down. That means you have other problems, right? I think the sweet spot for organic mix should be around 35 to 45% of acquisition being word of mouth, organic, and truly people just discovering it based on everything else that you've built. In the beginning, because you just started and there's not a lot of stuff out there about you, it is entirely tied to paid. But in the later stage, if you turn everything off, that means you have forgotten about the other half of the job, which is the SEO, the AO, the reviews, everything being written. So you sometimes want to dial down and see how elastic it is, again to the previous part that we were saying, because you definitely want a strong MMM model and incrementality when the moment you start spending north of a million dollars a month. Definitely have a model that says this channel is incremental, this is not. And the model in the beginning will always be wrong, make some changes, dial things down, do holdouts, whatever, and then see if the model proves true. The model gets better over time, and then you're less in the dark, right? You actually understand what levers go up and down and where you can actually spend a lot. So I think spending down to understand how much drop-off you have is actually a very strong learning moment. How many good growth leaders do you actually think there are? Not a lot. Yeah. If I'm going to be honest, really not a lot. There's a lot of founders who will be listening to this and going, wow, I'm thinking through three companies in particular, I'm like, shit, I wish I could put them out. Yeah. I think I've had an interesting grow-up through marketing because I started corporate consulting, which was absolute livestock. I hated it. And that got me to found my first agency where I had to learn how to do everything myself from zero, right? And because I had to do that, and I did that in both e-com, SaaS, and enterprise B2B, my agency is still around today, just not involved in the day to day. But because I had to do that, I understand how to launch a meta ad. I'm not a how-to-grow-through-a-CMO that has no idea how to do execution, which is also why, as head of growth at Whisper, up until December of this past year, I was the only person doing execution on a three, four, $5 million budget. I was doing everything myself. But this is what I say to all university students and young people, which is, it's never been more important to be full stack. Yep. You need to be writing the creative, shooting the video, editing the video, putting the video on meta, whatever it is, Instagram, in both e-com, SaaS, and enterprise B2B, my agency is still around today and just not involved in the day to day. But because I had to do that, I understand how to launch a meta ad. I'm not a, how to grow through a CMO that has no idea how to do execution, which is also, this is why also as head of growth at Whisper, up until December of this past last year, I was the only person doing execution on a three, four, $5 million budget. I was doing everything myself. But this is what I say to all university students and young people, which is: it's never been more important to be full stack. Yep. You need to be writing the creative, shooting the video, editing the video, putting the video on meta, whatever it is, Instagram, YouTube, you name it, full barrel, the whole, oh, I just do creative and copywriting. Fuck that. I think a lot of people have been saying this, and I definitely echo that hyper specialists are dying a slow death. You need to be, I've always seen myself as a specialized generalist, and the way that, you have to pick something that you are better than the rest at, but get your hands dirty and learn how to do a little bit of everything. And that's a lot of growth leaders actually get lost in the marketing analytics, the conversion tracking, that stuff is usually where they don't really understand how that works. And if you don't understand the fundamentals, you actually don't know what makes the system tick. And we also live in a world where ChatGPT, Claude, Victor, right? They're the best learning vehicles ever in the history of humanity. If you don't know how to do something, God damn, ask it to tell you. Give me everything step-by-step that I need to do and go and do it, and then see where things break. See what you don't understand. There's agency. And if you are hungry and a learner, those are the best people that win, are the people that are nerds, that are curious, right? That's the line for me. Dude, I have to, I totally agree with you. You could take landing experience. Give me three examples of the best landing experience in PLG in the last year. I completely agree with you. If we go to the team itself, the requirements for talent changes. How has what you look for in talent changed in the last year or two? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a complete 180, right? I'd say now, a year ago, I'd be looking for someone that has 10 years of experience in, let's say, meta ads, they've scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're, let's say, the best in the world as a meta ads media buyer. And that would be the main thing I'd be looking for. Let's say that's the person I'm hiring. Now I'm looking for that, but they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will outcompete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native. And that's, I'm seeing that happen where I'm going to have a hot take here. I think a lot of teams are trying to make their teams AI native, and they're failing. Why are they failing? The people that are in those roles are not systems thinkers, where if you're in a marketing or, let's say, ops role and you're not a systems thinker, you don't know. You actually don't know. How do you think about it? What does systems thinking mean? So to me, that's being able to step back from, let's say, a task that is a part of my job, being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say, in my role, what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day-to-day basis? What are the inner relationships? Where's the boring admin? Where's the reporting? What's all of that? And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works, because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part, and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job. Right. And a lot of people go to ChatGPT and ask it a question, and then they go on still doing their job the manual way. Right. And if you take a step back and say, what would it take for me to fully automate, let's say, all of my job? Of course, it's not going to work. Things are going to break apart. But run yourself through that thought experiment. And the thing is, if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don't really understand their job because they're not systems thinkers. They don't actually know what are all the inputs and the outputs. So that's the line for me. So when I interview people to fill in the team, it's partially like an engineering interview where systems thinking is the bar. So what do you ask them to do? Well, I want a job with you. Okay. You're clearly fucking brilliant, and I'm a podcaster. What are you going to put me through? How are you going to test me? Yeah. So the core question is more of, how do you use AI as a workflow in work? But I'm actually more curious, how do you use AI workflows in your personal life? Do you have any systems that you feed through AI that make you a better person outside of work? Maybe the line blurs of what you do is also work, personal, whatever. And so a good answer versus a bad answer would be? Yeah. I mean, a bad answer would be, I have a skill or a chat thread that's like a project in ChatGPT that I talk to and it has some context because it's like, that's, yes, that's factually correct. That's how you should use, let's say, a memory layer and a context layer. And you have one proactive chat conversation, so it works. Chatting with the thing is not a workflow, right? If there's no feedback loop, one of the core things that I always test for is let's say an AI gives you slop. What do you do with it? A lot of people, what they'll do is they'll take the slop and then say, this is slop, maybe change this, and they get frustrated. Then they take the doc and start writing it themselves. And if you don't go through the pain of giving it feedback, that's the first kind of feedback loop that I test for. But the next thing is, from, let's say you have a loop, and I use this example before of I built a sponsorship system at Whisper, but essentially the workflow is a self-improving loop where if a newsletter sponsor emails me, my agent essentially knows that this is a newsletter request. It asks them for their rates. It does research on what their audience is. It does the first part of negotiation for me. I step in to approve the, yes, we want to work with them. We get a contract, and that's where my manual step in newsletter ends. I throw the contract into the agentic system. It ingests all the cost data into the file system. It does copywriting. It does all of the email sending. It creates all the links, creates all the conversion tracking. It sends everything out to the partner because a newsletter is a boring, antiquated email. I will email you and you will tell me the performance. And then based on the copywriting and based on the cost, it will essentially also know what performance looked like and then say, do we continue on with the partner? That's also an agentic decision because I have CPM should be this, conversion should be this. Let the run fizzle out if it didn't work out. And again, that's a workflow. I have a couple of human touch points, but the things that I know, if it analyzes the data, and the same thing, if it generated a copy, it knows all of every link's performance and can say, this copy works, this doesn't. So the next time it generates copy, it's based on all historic data. It's not a, and that's a self-improving. What do you use for this? So this was first the marketing OS I built at Whisper. So it was like cloud code on a computer. That's just the folder system and like skill and .md files. That was the beginning of that system. So it would essentially be that, right, where I have Claude plugged into my email with cron set up to essentially check at nine, check at noon, it didn't work out. And again, that's a workflow. I have a couple of human touch points, but the things that I know, if it analyzes the data and the same thing, if it generated a copy, it knows every link's performance and can say, this copy works, this doesn't. So the next time it generates copy, it's based on all historic data. It's not a, and that's a self-improving. What do you use for this? So this was first the marketing OS I built at Whisper. So it was cloud code on a computer. That's just the folder system and skill and .md files. That was the beginning of that system. So it would essentially be that, right, where I have Claude plugged into my email with cron set up to essentially check at nine, check at noon, check at six. Are there any new newsletter requests? Do a workflow to respond to those things. And then bubble up to me a message in Slack being, hey, these need your decisions. Here's some contracts that got sent over. And then that system evolved. So that was my own OS. I had to then git control that folder to share that with the team so other people can use the workflow. So then for essentially a year and a half, I was the one person at Whisper doing all execution. So imagine a million a month on Google, hundreds of thousands of keywords, ads, experiments, landing pages. I owned every KPI from eyeball to download and then product to cut over, onboarding. But then add meta, add newsletters. So at a given point, I was working with between 70 and 120 unique newsletter providers that would send me emails, ask for copy approval. I needed to create unique images. So I said, why are newsletters still in the stone ages? There's no platform. It's all through email, and you're negotiating and haggling with these people trying to get you on a CPM. So that was one of the first things that I created a workflow around. I don't code. I learned how to do this by doing it. I want to automate this. Cloud Code, how would you do this? And I started by, I built the OS asking how to build an OS, right? And then every single day, I would say 90 to 95% of my work through the entire day was fed through the AI. So I want to optimize the ads. Can you pull the reporting? All right. What are the keywords? And I would make all the changes, see all the copy through Cloud Code in the terminal, because that allowed me to give feedback, do the feedback loop. So every day got a little better, got a little better. And there came a point where the models also got good enough. I was an early adopter of Cloud Code. So December of 25 was when the Cloud Code moment happened. I adopted it in September before it was good. And immediately you saw that insane ramp. It was wrong a lot. The copy was poor, the things broke. It was early days, but I was curious. I'm a tinkerer. And I used that to essentially learn how to do the whole thing. And I know we deviated from the team question, but me having to learn how to do the workflow, essentially because I had to do it, not knowing how to make that work, going from A to Z, that's what I test for, is can you take a hard problem and build a system around it that you have solved? How many candidates do you actually meet who have that level of depth? Less than 1%. Exactly. Yeah. Can you even build a team on that? But that's the thing, right? I think the team composition of today and tomorrow is way leaner than it was before. So we likely will, for Grammarly, let's say a bigger startup in SaaS, startup is air quotes there, big corporate SaaS, they have an influencer marketing team, right? They have three, four, or five people. Today and tomorrow, that is one really good person with an amazing suite of agents that will only ever touch, imagine you scale to 100,000 influencers that are posting on you in a month. If you have an agentic system and you know how to weed through the data, understand where you need to be plugged in, you could do that. And that's why, even though it's 1% of candidates, it's fine. If I find that one person that is going to be able to fully own that, build the systems, and right now, and this is my bet for the next three, five years, 80% of our work is still manual, 20% is agents. Hence why my bet into Victor, that it's essentially solving all of knowledge work. I think in three years, companies will essentially be like a board of directors, where 20% of the work is the strategy and the thinking, and then agents just do 80% of the execution, right? Right now, it's still like we're still, editing is manual, sending an email is still manual, even though we have the tools. There's still a human layer into that. I think that will change as quality gets better, usage and actual adoption toward an ROI basis gets there. That's my bet. And that's also why this stuff is so important, right? Because if you can't understand how the systems work, you're never going to be able to see your agents. So less than 1%, B2B CMOs today, are they fucked? I don't mean that too bluntly, but I don't know any B2B CMO in a traditional company, in a scaled company, that has any fucking clue what you're talking about. They hire those people around themselves, which I think, there's still probably— Do they? Do they really? They try to, I mean— I'm not going to name companies. I don't want to shit on people, but if you look at some of the big providers, are you seriously saying in your— No. ...ana plans and your Coopers and your, that anyone has a fucking clue what you're talking about? No, no, no, no. I mean, yeah. I mean, that's also why I think the companies that do will quickly gain market share against those that don't, right? And that's why I think we live in very interesting times in terms of competitive environment, where the incumbents that don't adopt this at the senior level will essentially, their growth rates will stand still, while the hyper growers that are doing exactly this framing will essentially gain that market share and out-compete them, right? So I think you're right. I think leadership needs to change. And like I said, I think a lot of teams, and my hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team that is not a systems thinker. Stop brute-forcing people in. Hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed. The JD is no longer the same as what it was a year ago, right? And people are still brute-forcing people into these new JDs. I think there needs to be a bit of a shake-up. Okay. I'm a founder. I'm looking at my marketing team today. There's 10 people on a series A, B firm, whatever. 10 people. Who should I fire? How do I test it? When you're not looking and you come back and they're suddenly now systems and that one person has 10Xed themselves, you're not going to fire that person. But then you will very clearly see who hasn't done that. And that difference is being felt, where the A players are becoming S-tier players and the people that were B players are becoming D players. And that rift is created. The other thing I just think is consumer marketing is not consumer marketing and B2B marketing is not B2B marketing. It's just marketing. Yeah. At the end of the day, there's a consumer who has a buying decision at a big enterprise or as a person. A hundred percent. I mean, that is also why people were questioning our initial marketing strategy at Victor, because we're, like I said, super high CAC B2B SaaS, right? You are hiring an employee into your team and you're paying thousands of dollars for this thing, right? That's a B2B SaaS tool. But we approach the marketing like a prosumer app. Right. There is a 19, 20-year-old at Polymarket called Tobin. I hope he doesn't mind me saying this. I mean, he was at Whisper, right? He was originally at Whisper. He was at Whisper? Yeah. He built the original UGC viral program at Whisper before he went to Polymarket. So I know Tobin. Oh, wow. Well, this is perfect then. Yes. Where I'm like, you would pay through the nose for talent like Tobin, who just gets it, who is 10x what anyone else will be in that position. Do you not agree? You are hiring an employee into your team, and you're paying thousands of dollars for this thing, right? That's a B2B SaaS tool. But we approach the marketing like a prosumer app. Right. There is a 19, 20-year-old at Polymarket called Tobin. I hope he doesn't mind me saying this. He was at Whisper, right? He was originally at Whisper. He was at Whisper? Yeah. He built the original UGC viral program at Whisper before he went to Polymarket. So I know Tobin. Oh, wow. Well, this is perfect then. Yes. Where I'm like, you would pay through the nose for talent like Tobin, who just gets it, who is 10x what anyone else will be in that position. Do you not agree? Yeah. And I think in each lane, there are those people. And that's also why, from an ML researcher standpoint, you'll pay millions of dollars for a person that's going to move a model forward. I think we're coming to the place that people in these marketing roles also are unicorns, they're rare, and you want them in your company. And I think that same ML crazy moment is maybe going to happen over the next year in the marketing acquisition side. That's so fascinating. Dude, are you ready for a quick fire? I've loved this. What is the most underappreciated growth channel today? It's a channel we haven't mentioned. And I think a lot of people do this poorly. And it actually compounds if you do it well, and that's affiliate, where you're paying, let's say, a percentage of revenue or some kind of CAC to people that are not your customers. And they go out of their way to create content and reviews and all of that. At Whisper and Victor, it is the highest ROI channel. And if you set up a strong affiliate program and you bring people into the door and they feel like they can earn money even before they're your customers, they will become your customers. And it's one that's a little bit outside of the referral program because it's not through the product. It's how can you make this sexy external program that someone who is just an affiliate wants to... they have a surface area, they have a website, they have some audience, and they want to sell your thing to that audience. And so, acquire them that way, and that's one of the highest early ROI channels that, if you start doing in the beginning, it ramps, right? For Victor, a good 10% to 15% of our acquisition on a monthly basis comes through our affiliate program. And that's people that want to earn money because we give them between 10 and 15% revenue share. So if that affiliate gets a company that pays 10K a month, they're making 1,500 bucks a month from one sale as an affiliate. That's also like, create a program that wants people to earn money. And this is the other thing that we said— Can I do this, create a program? I swear I have sent something like 10 companies to Fred. Mom, I'm retiring. Yeah, we have some affiliates that are making 20, 30K a month. What's the most polluted channel? What's the, oh, this is just a shit pit. Oh, I'm going to say X in the sense of— Just the launch videos are boring. That's exactly what I mean, right? Wait, wait, wait, where everyone is trying to do exactly the same launch viral thing. And it's also polluted in the sense that X ads don't work. And that, to me, just means the platform is still— They don't work? I have yet to meet a SaaS head of growth or performance marketer who says that X ads print. So if someone has gotten X ads to print, please tell me because I would love to be challenged on that. That's fascinating. Okay. So X, I'm with you. I'm just so bored of this. I don't know if you saw, there was one video yesterday, and we're talking about it, so it obviously worked. But it's this company, I think it's called Weave, where they jumped out of a plane and did the copy jumping out of a plane. And it's like, have we got to that stage? Is it that mature a market that you have to jump out of a plane and read it while doing that? Yeah, because the formula of shock-and-awe launch videos, to be honest— And then specifically those are the ones that, well, we don't really have a product. And I'm not saying maybe in their example, but the sheer amount of, we launched this for that, and we spent way more time on our launch video than actually any time on our product. I see so much of that. And that's why I say polluted. What would you most like to change about the world of growth? Have more good growth leaders. But in honesty, I think my request for startups would be, I don't know why we don't have a school that basically says: Hey, I completely understand you need to be AI-pilled. Great. What the fuck does that mean? Come to our school, and for six weeks, we will teach you how to get jacked up on every system, process, model for six weeks, nine to five. This is your job. And you pay 10,000 bucks. I would say that's more valuable than university. So for teenagers, I'll go start another company. No, I mean, you're 100% right, because I would fund that company today with millions of dollars. Serious. Well, if you're JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs, and you put that at the bottom of Canary Wharf, would you not send every single employee there? Because then you've built the hyperscalers of tomorrow. Super interesting. I went to NYU for college. What's interesting, I did not take a single, zero marketing classes, and I learned everything via doing. And I think what's interesting is the education around marketing is still—and again, I haven't been in a college today. Maybe that has changed. But are they teaching you how to install a Facebook pixel? No, right? The application, the framing of how it works, comes after you start doing the execution, right? You can do and then understand, versus understand and sit in a room and learn, and then go and try to do the thing. You're going to learn so much faster just by doing. So I agree with you. I've yet to see a true A-to-Z bootcamp of what it means to be a growth leader. I'm actually not even saying a growth leader. I'm just saying how to get knowledgeable to the extent where you can build processes, systems, start replacing yourself with Claude, with you name the provider, where you can start doing expenses. Copy, design. Yeah, 100% right. And in that frame, I agree as well, right? I'm applying it to marketing, but the grounding is people don't know how to do the beginning step. You're 100% right. The very beginning step. How do I simply set up my Claude to be efficient with integrations so it gets access to all my files in the right way with the right permissions? You said nine, 12, and six, where it does the check-in. Dude, I think you forget where people are. Yeah, and to me, what I think is table stakes, I always forget, is people don't set up things this way. So I, for example, and this is when I was using Claude Code. Now I'd say 80% of my work is Victor. But for the people that are not using Victor, if you're using Claude Code and you do one thing, set up what I call the session end skill. If you set up one skill that's going to let your work compound, it's what I call session end. So I have a terminal or a Claude Code session, and I'm doing some realm of work, and it's almost done, or I want to end the session. So what is inside of that skill is essentially I have connected to my Claude Code an Obsidian Vault that is, every day, a log of everything that I put through the terminal. All decisions, all open tasks, all learnings, essential notes and atoms, and everything that I'm doing in every session is being stored in Claude memory. So I, for example, and this is when I was using Claude Code. Now I'd say 80% of my work is Victor. But for the people that are not using Victor, if you're using Claude Code and you do one thing, set up what I call the session end skill. If you set up one skill that's going to let your work compound, it's what I call session end. So I have a terminal or a Claude Code session, and I'm doing some realm of work, and it's almost done or I want to end the session. So what is inside that skill is essentially I have connected to my Claude Code an Obsidian Vault that is, every day, a log of everything that I put through the terminal. All decisions, all open tasks, all learnings, essential notes and atoms, and all of everything that I'm doing in every session is being stored in Claude memory. But then you don't have access to that, right? So what session end does is it analyzes the session, distills what we worked on, what was the frame, did we accomplish this thing, what are the outstanding items, and it moves that over into Obsidian, which is a node-based system, which lets me go back to any day and understand what did I work on that day. And you can see this web grow over time. And that's one massive hack to essentially turn every session into being compounding, because then that connects the node-based system of Obsidian. It says, because a week ago you worked on this and then you hit a wall here, you worked on it again today, you solved it. And because the agent also can analyze everything, it creates those interrelationships for you where you worked on meta ads with this creative type here in two places. And normally you'll forget that, right? And so will the system. And if you have a place where your work, your memory is, that to me is also probably the most valuable resource for people, is if you can document every little thing that you're building, tweaking, and refining. That is how social capital was the big thing. I think, what do you have on your computer that is saved in your AI output? That, I think, as we walk into the next couple of years, is the treasure trove for a lot of people. Do you want to hear something wild? Yeah. Every single week we enter the IC investment committee for the fund. And we now have all of our calls graded by an AI call grader, which measures every single call that we've ever done. We have this, obviously, feedback loop. Oh yeah. It collects every single call and it simply stack-ranks out of 10 and ranks them across five different variables, like founder-market fit, product-market fit, deal, a load of other things. Quality of product, blah, blah, blah. And then we just go down the AI rankings in terms of priority. And we actually fully delegate trust of prioritization to the AI ranking system. But if you put the thought into here's the decision tree of prioritization and you put the thought into that, then you can trust the system, right? Because it's based on your framing. Do you know, it's never been wrong in its ranking. I can believe that. We've only done it for 12 weeks, but 12 times. Pretty good. Yeah. It's over a thousand companies. And same thing. I do this, so I use a botless meeting recorder that records all of my meetings. And at the end of the day, it ingests all of them and says, what did I promise to do on calls that didn't end up in a to-do software somewhere? And then it drops all of that. It says, did you do any of these? And then I have my to-do list for tomorrow. Final one for you: which company growth strategy that you're not tied to do you most respect, and what do you learn from it? The craft of product and the hypotheses, the deep experimentation, and building true user experience excellence. That to me is just sexy. And because I think if you look at the sheer volume of products that are coming out every single day, very few of them have product excellence. And the people that steer that craft are true product leaders. I learn so much from them and apply those things into my world. But seeing the way their brains work and the way that they're analyzing the data and how they understand the customers is really inspiring. And I think a lot of people can learn how to do that. I'd say this is less maybe across the company, more the people in companies. But I think, to be honest, in terms of companies, I am more impressed by the net new things that are starting from zero. And even as step one, they're doing pretty well in the sense of, we thought through the branding, we launched into this marketing thing. That's what I appreciate. Give me a company. Fair. Again, this is more tooting my horn a bit, but just seeing what the original launch was for Whisper. That was seeing that product correlation with marketing. Even though I had a part in that, that was truly, it entered the map because of that. And then same thing, yes, I was a part of the ride there, but the adoption and the fact that a Polish startup that of course raised a big Series A became massively seen on the map and was very quickly loved. Those are the kinds of things that make me want to get up in the morning, that we did a thing, we put a lot of thought into it, and there was pickup around it. And I think that's what fascinates me, is what are all the moving pieces that you go and finally launch the thing and it God damn works? Right. And I think that's the beauty of why I do what I do, because those are some special moments. Matt, I've so enjoyed this. I can't thank you enough for agreeing to share all of your secrets and for letting me drill down into all the strategies. This is an absolute blast. To the next one, to more nugs next time. that spectrum of like, you're either doing that or that, like you need to hit the sweet spot of what that looks like. Unless it's Palantir swag, in which case that's really quite cool. And I would love that. We mentioned that like the timing of which you put that referral in front of people, the paywall is a difficult one. And it is also like, it's like where to put it, whether it needs to be hard and immediate, whether you need to show value. How do you think about lessons, advice to founders on the immediacy of the paywall and where it sits best? So I think even before the paywall analysis, the main thing you want to adjust for is like when that magical aha moment happens and you want that magical moment happen as soon as possible. But you also don't want like, you want the paywall near that moment where like that moment is either your first discovery of, wow, this is amazing. But you want to kind of continue that over time. So like you have that magical aha moment and then you're kind of, you stay in that kind of like honeymoon phase of like, this is just amazing. And then within that phase, paywall, right? And that's like, whether it's words per week or how many credits you get in Victor. This is like a big game that we're trying to hyper refine now is how many free credits should we give you? And how do we nudge Victor to show you really useful workflows? Because the moment you have one that goes, this is game changing, paywall, right? Because then then you want to open up your pocketbook because you've felt something magical that you haven't felt before. And because there's so many products, there's true unique magic. This product is insane moments. And like this happened at Whisper for like when we had that first rocket ship moment, when like LinkedIn was going absolutely nuts of like, there's this thing, Whisper, and I'm not typing anymore. And a lot of that was organic, right? But that's because people hit that magical moment. And that's like similar, like with the amount of posts that are happening about Victor, a lot of like, I'd say half of them are organic, half of them are like the creator program that I said, you post and you can get credits, but it's all genuine, right? But it's that magic moment that matters. Should credits go in marketing budgets? We call this fully loaded CAC. So our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. If you're not doing that, then you're not really calculating your acquisition cost. So yeah, trial credits, or like anything free that you're giving away is cost and it goes under, it is a marketing cost item. We mentioned another one that was very interesting. You said AEO, which is obviously kind of kind of answer engine optimization. We invested in peak, which essentially optimizes this. How do you think about that as a new channel? How do we embrace it? What should we know? AEO in general followed the core tenants of SEO in general, where what used to be old school SEO, like pumping out thousands of pages came back again. Because Google, because they own the SEO algorithm, essentially penalized people that were just pumping out pages for SEO. So over the last couple of years, people stopped doing that. But the sheer amount of pages that you have in AEO, that is also changing a little bit. But if you look at, you can ask any agent to analyze the site map and essentially do like cron. So we do this with Victor. We look at every competitor and we look at their site map and we look at what, and we see how many pages they're making. All these companies are doing like 100 to 200 pages a week. A lot of it is just like generated AI slop. So that's also what you don't want to do at scale. You actually want valuable content that says valuable things because the AI crawler essentially ingests that. And then what you're saying there is what gets written about you when like, what is the best tool for this? Or like, I'm trying to do this and it's doing these citations. So the things that I'll say that are the most important AEO now, it's like, yes, have an engine that you send content through your website on specific things. But the most important thing is YouTube, Reddit, and like the social narrative. So like one of the early levers that every founder should do when they're first starting with scaling is investing in good YouTube reviews. Because YouTube reviews, because they're long form, and they rank long tail. They'll essentially beep. They're one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. So you'll have your website, PR, external sources talking about you. And one of the biggest, best external sources are how many reviews and videos do you have on YouTube? They're a really high citation on ChatGPT. And that's like one of the early, I'd say strong things that every founder should focus on. Dude, is traditional PR and news fucking dead? And what I mean by that, it's like, you know, being in TechCrunch used to matter. I still think it matters in the sense that like, like, I have the opinion that, you know, when you launch, do a product hunt, get featured in TechCrunch. Like, that's just like, it's like founder initiation. Short table stakes almost. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'd say like it builds a level of credibility and trust that like you are on the map in the same way that everyone went through the process. But like, the reason why it's important, the PR is less of a like, PR blows up and there's like a traffic wave. Really, that PR is main for citations, right around AEO, like how many external credible sources are writing about you, then you'll see your AEO traffic significantly increase. Because the more of a not owned narrative is being talked about positively about you, the better off the product is. Should I bother doing TikTok? Uh, I think there's a time and place for it. It depends on, you know, are you more B2C than anything else? Like, I've never met a CMO or a head of growth who's been able to crack it. I've never. Yeah, I mean, it just like in the way that the content gets digested, like, I think there's a time and place to like do some audience, uh, diversification. But yeah, to be honest, in any of the, the three kind of core companies that I've been at so far, it hasn't worked yet, but maybe I'll, I'll get a chance to change that at Victor. Totally get that. Final one again, before we move to team composition. But what happens if when we turn off paid as much, so we're spending really aggressively and it's working, it's working and we get to 30, 40, 50 million in revenue. And we're like, we've got a bit of a paid engine now that we're a bit hooked on. Turn off the paid, dial it really right back and growth down. That means you have other problems, right? Like I think, um, at the sweet spot for organic mix should be around like 35 to 45% of acquisition is word of mouth, organic, and like truly people just discovering it based on everything else that you've built. Uh, in the beginning, because you just started and there's not a lot of stuff out there about you, it is entirely tied to paid. But in the later stage, if you turn everything off, that means you have forgotten about the other half of the job, which is the SEO, the AO, the reviews, everything being written. So like you sometimes want to dial down and see how elastic it is again to the previous part that we were saying, because that's like, uh, you definitely want a strong MMM model and incrementality when you're like, the moment you start spending north of a million dollars a month, uh, definitely have a model that says this channel is incremental, this is not. And like the model in the beginning, always be wrong, make some changes, dial things down, do holdouts, whatever, and then see if the model proves true. Model gets better over time. And then you have, you're less in the dark, right? Like you, you actually understand what levers go up and down and where you can actually spend a lot. So I think spending down to understand how much drop off you have is actually a good, very strong learning moment. How many good growth leaders do you actually think there are? Not a lot. Yeah. If I'm going to be honest, um, really not a lot. There's a lot of founders who will be listening to this and going, wow, like I, I'm thinking through like three companies in particular, I'm like, shit, I wish I could put them out. Yeah. I mean, I think I've had like, I've had an interesting kind of like grow up through marketing is because I started, I started corporate consulting, which was an absolute livestock. I hated it. And that got me to found my first agency where I had to learn how to do everything myself from zero. Right. And because I had to do that and I did that in both e-com, SaaS and enterprise B2B, my agency is still around today, uh, and, uh, just not involved in the day to day. Um, but like, because I had to do that, I understand how to launch a meta ad. I'm not a, you know, how to grow through a CMO that like has no idea how to do execution, which is also like, this is why also as had a growth at whisper, uh, up until December of this past last year, I was the only person doing execution on a three, four, $5 million budget. I was doing everything myself. But this is what I say to all like university students and young people say, which is like, it's never been more important to be full stack. Yep. Like you need to be writing the creative, shooting the video, editing the video, putting the video on meta, whatever it is, Instagram, YouTube, you name it full barrel, like the whole, oh, I just do creative and copywriting. Fuck that. I mean, uh, I think a lot of people have been saying this and I definitely, uh, echo that like hyper specialists are dying a slow death. Like you, you need to be like, I, I've always seen myself as a specialized generalist and like the way that, you know, you have to pick something that you are better than the rest at, but like get your hands dirty and learn how to do a little bit of everything. Uh, and that's like a lot of growth leaders actually get lost in the, the marketing analytics, the conversion tracking, like that stuff is usually where like, they don't really understand how that works. And they, if you don't understand the fundamentals, uh, you actually don't know what makes the system tech. And we also live in a world where like Chad, GPT, Claude, Victor, right? Like they're the best learning vehicles ever in the history of humanity. If you don't know how to do something, God damn, ask it to have it tell you, give me everything step-by-step that I need to do and go and do it and then see where things break. See what you don't understand. Like there's, there's agency. And like, if you are hungry and, and, and a learner, those are the best people that win are the people that are, that are nerds that are, that are curious, right? Like that, that's, that's the line for me. Dude, I have to, I totally agree with you. You could take like landing experience. Give me three examples of the best landing experience in PLG in the last year. Uh, I, I completely agree with you. Um, if we go to the team itself, the requirements for talent changes. How has what you look for in talent changed in the last year or two? Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's a complete 180, right? Like, uh, I'd say, uh, now a year ago, I'd be looking for someone that has 10 years of experience in let's say meta ads, they've scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars and they're, let's say the best in the world as a meta ads media buyer. And that would be the main thing I'd be looking for. Let's say that's the person I'm hiring. Now I'm looking for that, but they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will outcompete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native. And that's like, I'm seeing that happen where like, I'm going to have a hot take here. I think, um, a lot of teams are trying to make their teams AI native and they're failing. Why are they failing? The people that are in those roles are not systems thinkers where like, if you're in a marketing or let's say ops role and you're not a systems thinker, you don't know. You actually don't know. How do you think about it? What does systems think you mean? So to me, that's being able to step back from, let's say a task that is a part of my job, being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say, in my role, what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day to day basis? What are the inner relationships? Where's the boring admin? Where's the reporting? What's all of that? And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works, because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part. And now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job. Right. And a lot of people go and go to ChatGPT and ask it a question and then they go on still doing their job the manual way. Right. And if you take a step back and say, what would it take for me to fully automate, let's say all of my job? Of course, it's not going to work. Things are going to break apart. But run yourself through that thought experiment. And the thing is, if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don't really understand their job. Because they're not systems thinkers. They don't actually know what are all the inputs and the outputs. So that's the line for me. So like when I interview people to fill in the team, it's partially like an engineering interview where systems thinking is the bar. So what do you ask them to do? Well, I want a job with you. Okay. You're clearly fucking brilliant. And I'm a podcaster. What are you going to put me through? How are you going to test me? Yeah. So the core question is more of like, how do you use AI as a workflow in work? But I'm actually more curious, how do you use AI workflows in your personal life? Like, do you have any systems that you feed through AI that make you a better person outside of work? And like, maybe the line blurs of like, what you do is also work as personal, whatever. And so a good answer versus a bad answer would be? Yeah. I mean, a bad answer would be, you know, I have a skill or like a chat thread that's like a project in chat GPT that I talked to and it has like some context because it's like, that's, yes, that's factually correct. That's how you should use, let's say a memory layer and a context layer. And you have one proactive chat conversation. So it works. Chatting with the thing is not a workflow, right? Where if there's no feedback loop, where like one of the core things that I always test for is let's say an AI gives you slop. What do you do with it? A lot of people, what they'll do is they'll take the slop and then say, this is slop, maybe changes and they get frustrated. Then they take the doc and start writing it themselves. And if you don't go through the pain of giving it feedback, like that's the first kind of feedback loop that I test for. But the next thing is, is from, let's say you have a loop and like, I use this example before of like, I built like a sponsorship system at Whisper, but essentially the workflow is a self-improving loop where like if a newsletter sponsor emails me, my agent essentially knows that this is a newsletter request. It asks them for their rates. It does research on what their audience is. It does the first part of negotiation for me. I step in to approve the like, yes, we want to work with them. We get a contract and that's where my manual step in newsletter ends. I throw the contract into the agentic system. It ingests all the cost data into the file system. It does copywriting. It does all of the email sending. It creates all the links, creates all the conversion tracking. It sends everything out to the partner because like a newsletter is like a boring, antiquated email. I will email you and you will tell me the performance. And then based on the copywriting and based on the cost, it will essentially also know what performance looked like. And then say, do we continue on with the partner? That's also an agentic decision because I have CPM should be this conversion should be this. Let the run fizzle out if it didn't work out. And again, that's a workflow. I have a couple of human touch points, but the things that I know that if it analyzes the data and the same thing, if it generated a copy, it knows all of every link's performance and can say, this copy works, this doesn't. So the next time it generates copy, it's based on all historic data. It's not a, and that's like a self-improving. What do you use for this? So this was first the like marketing OS I built at Whisper. So it was like cloud code on a computer. That's just the, the folder system and like skill and .md files. That was the beginning of that system. So it would essentially be that right where I have Claude plugged into my email with, you know, cron set up to essentially check at nine, check at noon, check at six. Are there any new newsletter requests? Do a workflow to respond to those things. And then bubble up to me a message in Slack being like, Hey, these need your decisions. Here's some contracts that got sent over. And then that system evolved. So that was like my own OS. I had to then get control that folder to share that with the team so other people can use the workflow. So then for essentially a year and a half, I was the one person at Whisper doing all execution. So imagine a million a month on Google, hundreds of thousands of keywords, ads, experiments, landing pages. I owned every KPI from eyeball to download and then product to cut over right onboarding. But then add meta, add newsletters. So at a given point, I was working with between 70 and 120 unique newsletter providers that would send me emails, ask for copy approval. I needed to create unique images. So I said, why are newsletters still in the stone ages? There's no platform. It's all through email and you're negotiating and haggling with these people trying to get you on a CPM. So that was one of the first things that I created a workflow around. I don't code. I learned how to do this by doing it. I want to automate this. Cloud Code, how would you do this? And I started by, I built the OS asking how to build an OS, right? And then every single day, like I would say 90 to 95% of my work through the entire day was fed through the AI. So like, I want to optimize the ads. Can you pull the reporting? All right. What are the keywords? And I would make all the changes, see all the copy through Cloud Code in the terminal, because that allowed me to give feedback, do the feedback loop. So every day got a little better, got a little better. And there came a point where I could, like the models also got good enough. Like I was an early adopter of Cloud Code. So like December of 25 was when, you know, the Cloud Code moment happened. I adopted it in September before it was good. And immediately you saw that insane ramp. It was wrong a lot. Like there was like the copy was poor, like the things broke. It was early days, but like, I was curious, like I'm a tinkerer. And like, I use that to essentially learn how to do the whole thing. And like, I know we deviated from the team question, but the, that as me having to learn how to do the workflow, essentially, because I had to do it, not knowing how to make that work, going from A to Z, that's what I test for is, can you take a hard problem and build a system around it that you have solved? How many candidates do you actually meet who have that level of depth? Less than 1%. Exactly. Yeah. Can you even build a team on that? But that's the thing, right? Like, I think the team composition of today and tomorrow is way leaner than it was before. So like, we likely will, like for, you know, Grammarly, you know, let's say, you know, bigger startup in SaaS, startup is air quotes there, big corporate SaaS, SaaS, they have a influencer marketing team, right? They have like three, four or five people. Today and tomorrow, that is one really good person with an amazing suite of agents that will only ever touch, like imagine you scale to 100,000 influencers that are posting on you in a month. If you have an agentic system and you know how to weed through the data, understand where you need to be plugged in, you could do that. And that's why even though it's 1% of candidates, it's fine. If I find that one person that is going to be able to fully own that, build the systems, and like right now, and this is like my bet for the next, you know, three, five years, you know, 80% of our work is still manual, 20% is agents. Hence why like my bet into Victor, that it's like essentially solving all of knowledge work. I think in three years, companies will essentially be like board of directors where 20% of the work is the strategy and the thinking, and then agents just do 80% of the execution, right? Like right now, it's still like we're still, you know, editing is manual, sending an email is still manual, even though we have the tools, like there's still a human layer into that. I think that will change as quality gets better, usage and like actual adoption towards an ROI basis gets there. That's my bet. And that's also why this stuff is so important, right? Because if you can't understand how the systems work, you're never going to be able to see your agents. So less than 1%, B2B CMOs today, are they fucked? I don't mean that too bluntly, but I don't know any B2B CMO in a traditional company, in a scaled company that has any fucking clue what you're talking about. They hire those people around themselves, which I think like there's, there's still probably- Do they? Do they really? They try to, I mean- I'm not going to name companies that don't want to shit on people, but like, if you look at some of the big providers, are you seriously saying in your- No. ...ana plans and your Coopers and your, that anyone has a fucking clue what you're talking about? No, no, no, no. I mean, yeah. I mean, that's also why I think the companies that do will quickly gain market share against those that don't. Right? And that's why I think we live in very interesting times in terms of competitive environment where the incumbents that don't adopt this at the senior level will essentially, their growth rates will stand still. While the hyper growers that are doing exactly this framing will essentially gain that market share and out-compete them. Right? So I think you're right. Like I think leadership needs to change. And like I said, I think a lot of teams and my hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team. That is not a systems thinker. Like stop brute forcing people in, hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed. The JD is no longer the same what it was a year ago. Right? And people are still brute forcing people into these new JDs. I think there needs to be a bit of a shake up. Okay. I'm a founder. I'm looking at my marketing team today. There's 10 people on like a series A, B firm, whatever. 10 people. Who should I fire? How do I test it? When you're not looking and you come back and they're in suddenly now systems and that one person has 10X themselves, you're not going to fire that person. But then you will very clearly see who hasn't done that. And that like that difference is being felt where like the A players are becoming S tier players and the people that were B players are becoming D players. And that like that rift is created. The other thing I just think is like consumer marketing is not consumer marketing and B2B marketing is not B2B marketing. It's just marketing. Yeah. At the end of the day, there's a consumer who has a buying decision at a big enterprise or as a person. A hundred percent. I mean, that is also why people were questioning our initial marketing strategy at Victor, because we're like, like I said, super high cac B2B SaaS, right? Like you are hiring an employee into your team and you're paying thousands of dollars for this thing, right? That's a B2B SaaS tool. But we approach the marketing like a prosumer app. Right. There is a 19, 20 year old at Polymarket called Tobin. I hope he doesn't mind me saying this. I mean, he was at Whisper, right? He was originally at Whisper. He was at Whisper? Yeah. He was he built the original UGC viral program at Whisper before he went to Polymarket. So I know Tobin. Oh, wow. Well, this is perfect then. Yes. Where I'm like, you would pay through the nose for talent like Tobin, who just gets it, who is 10x what anyone else will be in that position. Do you not agree? Yeah. And I think in each lane, there are those people. And that's also why like, you know, from like an ML researcher standpoint, you'll pay millions of dollars for a person that's going to move a model forward. I think we're coming to the place that like people in these marketing roles also are, they're unicorns, they're rare, and you want them in your company. And I think that same like ML crazy moment is maybe going to happen over the next year in the marketing acquisition side. That's so fascinating. Dude, are you ready for a quick fire? I've loved this. What is the most underappreciated growth channel today? It's a channel we haven't mentioned. And I think a lot of people do this poorly. And it actually compounds if you do it well, and that's affiliate, where you're paying, let's say, a percentage of revenue or some kind of CAC to people that are not your customers. And they go out of their way to create content and reviews and all of that. And you just like at Whisper and Victor, it is the highest ROI channel. And if you set up a strong affiliate program and you bring people into the door and they feel like they can earn money even before they're your customers, they will become your customers. And it's one that like, it's a little bit outside of the referral program because it's not through the product. It's how can you make this sexy external program that someone that is just an affiliate wants to, like they have a surface area, they have a website, they have some audience that they have, and they want to sell your thing to that audience. And so, like, acquire them that way and that's one of the highest early ROI channels that if you start doing in the beginning, it ramps, right? Like, so like for Victor, a good 10% to 15% of our acquisition on a monthly basis comes through our affiliate program. And that's, you know, people that want to earn money because we give them between 10 and 15% revenue share. So if you're, you know, if that affiliate gets a company that pays 10K a month, they're making 1500 bucks a month from one sale as an affiliate. That's also like, create a program that wants people to earn money. And this is the other thing that we said, like- Can I do this, create a program? I swear I have something like 10 companies to Fred. Mom, I'm retiring. Yeah, I mean, we have some affiliates that are making 20, 30K a month. What's the most polluted channel? What's the, oh, this is just shit pit. Oh, I mean, I'm going to say X in the sense of- Just the launch videos are boring. That's exactly what I mean, right? Wait, wait, wait, where like everyone is trying to do exactly the same launch viral thing. And like, it's also polluted in the sense that like X ads don't work. And like that to me just means the platform is still- They don't work? Give me, I have yet to meet a SaaS head of growth or performance marketer that says that X ads print. So if someone has gotten X ads to print, please tell me because I would love to be challenged on that. That's fascinating. Okay. So X, I'm with you. I'm just so bored of this. I don't know if you saw, there was one video yesterday and we're talking about it. So it obviously worked, but it's this company, I can't, Weave, I think it's called, where they jumped out of a plane and did the like copy jumping out of a plane. And you're, it's like, have we got to that stage? Like, is it that mature market that you like have to jump out of a plane and read it while doing that? I mean, yeah, I mean, cause like the, the, the formula of like shock and awe launch videos, cause to be honest. And then like specifically those are the ones that like, well, we don't really, don't really have a product. And I'm not saying maybe in their example, but like the, the sheer amount of like, we launched this for that. And we spent way more time into our launch video than actually any time in our product. Like I see so much of that. And that's why I say polluted. What would you most like to change about the world of growth? Have more good growth leaders. I mean, but in, in, in honesty, I think. My request for startups would be, I don't know why we don't have a school, which basically says, Hey, I completely understand you need to be AI pilled. Great. What the fuck does that mean? Come to our school. And for six weeks, we will teach you how to get jacked up on every system process model for six weeks, nine to five. This is your job. And you pay 10,000 bucks. I would say that's more valuable than university. So for teenagers, I'll go start another company. No, no, I mean, you're a hundred percent right now. Cause I would fund that company today with millions of dollars. I mean, serious. Well, if you're JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs, and you put that at the bottom of Canary Wharf, would you not send every single employee there? Cause then you, you, you built the hyperscalers of tomorrow. I mean, what's, I mean, super interesting. So like I went to NYU for, for college. What's interesting. I did not take a single, I mean, zero marketing classes and I learned everything via doing. And I think what's interesting is like the, the education around marketing, I think is also like still, and I'm like, again, I haven't been into a college today. I mean, maybe that has changed, but like, are they teaching you how to install a Facebook pixel? And no, right? Like the, the application, the, the, like the, the framing of how it works comes after you start doing the execution, right? Like you can do, and then understand verse, understand and sit in a room and learn, and then go and try to do the thing. You're going to, you're going to learn so much faster just by doing. So I agree with you. I, I've yet to see like true A to Z bootcamp of what it means to be a growth leader. And I mean, like Reforge and Brian Balfour, they've tried to do this, but like, it's still. I'm actually not even saying a growth leader. I'm just saying how to get knowledgeable to the extent where you can build processes, systems, start replacing yourself in with Claude, with you name the provider, where you can start doing expenses. Copy, design. Yeah, 100% right. And in that frame, I agree as well, right? Like I'm applying it to like, do that in marketing. That's like, but the grounding is people don't know how to do the beginning step. You're 100% right. The very beginning step. How do I simply set up my Claude to be efficient with integrations? So it gets access to all my files in the right way with the right permissions. You said, you know, nine, 12 and six, where it does the check in. Like, dude, I think you forget where people are. Yeah, and I mean, like, to me, what I think is like table stakes, I always forget is like, people don't set up things this way. So like I, for example, and this is when I was using Claude Code. Now I'd say like 80% of my work is Victor. But for the people that are not using Victor, if you're using Claude Code and you do one thing, is set up what I call is the session end skill. If you set up one skill that's going to like let your work compound, it's what I call session end. So I have a terminal or a Claude Code session, and I'm doing some realm of work, and it's almost done or like I want to end the session. So what is inside of that skill is essentially I have connected to my Claude Code, a Obsidian Vault that is every day a log of everything that I put through the terminal. All decisions, all open tasks, all learnings, you know, essential notes and atoms and all of the, like all of everything that I'm doing in every session is being stored in Claude memory. But then you don't have access to that, right? So what session end does is it analyzes the session, distills what we worked on, what was the frame, you know, did we accomplish this thing, what are the outstanding items, and it moves that over into Obsidian, which is like a node based system, which lets me go back to any day and understand what did I work on that day. And you can see this web grow over time. And that's like one massive hack to essentially turn every session to be compounding, because then that connects the node based system of Obsidian says, Because a week ago you worked on this and then you hit a wall here, you worked on it again today, you solved it. And because the agent also can analyze everything, it creates those interrelationships for you where like you worked on meta ads with this creative type here in two places. And normally you'll forget that, right? And like so will the system. And if you have a place where like your work, your memory is like that to me is also probably the most valuable resource for people, is if you can document every little thing that you're building, tweaking and refining. Like that is like how social capital was the big thing. I think like what do you have on your computer that is saved in your AI output? That I think as we walk into the next like couple of years is the treasure trove for a lot of people. Do you want to hear something wild? Yeah. Every single week we enter the IC investment committee for the fund. And we now have all of our calls graded by an AI call grader, which measures every single call that we've ever done. We have this obviously feedback loop. Oh yeah. It collects every single call and it simply just stack ranks out of 10 and ranks them across five different variables like founder market fit, product market fit, deal, a load of other things. Quality of product, blah, blah, blah. And then we just go down the AI rankings in terms of priority. And we actually fully delegate trust of prioritization to the AI ranking system. But if you put the thought into here's the decision tree of prioritization and you put the thought into that, then you can trust the system, right? Because it's based on your framing. Do you know, it's never been wrong in its ranking. I can believe that. We've only done it for 12 weeks, but 12 times. I mean, pretty good. Yeah. It's over a thousand companies. And like same thing. Like I do this, so I use a, you know, a botless meeting recorder that records all of my meetings. And at the end of the day, it ingests all of them and says, what did I promise to do on calls that didn't end up in a to do software somewhere? And then it drops all of that. It says, did you do any of these? And then I have my to do list for tomorrow. Final one for you, which company growth strategy that you're not tied to do you most respect and what do you learn from it? The craft of product and like the hypotheses, the deep experimentation and like building true user experience excellence. Like that to me is just like sexy. And like, because I think if you look at like the sheer volume of products that are coming out every single day, very few of them have product excellence. And the people that steer that craft are like true product leaders. I have, I learned so much from them and apply those things into my world. But seeing the way their brains work and the way that they're analyzing the data and how they understand the customers is really inspiring. And I think, you know, a lot of people can learn how to do that. I'd say this is less maybe across the company, more like the people in companies. But I think, to be honest, like I think in terms of companies, I am more impressed by the net new things that like are starting from zero. And like even as step one, they're doing pretty well in the sense of like, we thought through the branding, we launched into this marketing thing. That's like, that's what I like, I appreciate that. Give me a company. Fair. I mean, again, this is more like tooting my horn a bit, but like, just seeing like what the original launch was for Whisper. Like that was a, you know, like see, it's like seeing that product correlation with marketing, even though I had a part in that, like, that was truly like, it entered the map because of that. And then same thing, like, yes, I was a part of the ride there, but like the adoption and the fact that a Polish startup that of course raised a big series A became massively seen on the map and was very quickly loved. Like those are the kinds of things that like make me want to get up in the morning that like, you know, we did a thing, we put a lot of thought into it and there was pickup around it. And I think that that's like, that's what fascinates me is like, what are all the moving pieces that like you go and finally launch the thing and it God damn works. Right. And that's like, I think that's, that's the beauty of, you know, why I do what I do, because those are some special moments. Matt, I've so enjoyed this. I can't thank you enough for agreeing to share all of your secrets and for letting me drill down into all the strategies. This is an absolute blast to the next one, to more nugs next time.