First On: Marketing with Andy Young
My guest today is Andy Young, a self-described “startup Swiss Army knife”. He’s led Marketing / Growth functions at some of the world’s most impactful companies, like Quantcast, Facebook and Stripe, and has advised dozens of startups within London’s most prestigious company builders. Andy takes a deeply data-driven approach to Marketing leadership, but that’s not to be confused with purely quantitative. Andy’s career journey has taught the power of balancing analytics and direct customer feedback to discover and unlock product / market fit. In our conversation we cover hiring tips, the archetypes of Marketing leaders and what the field might look like in a post-cookie world. Whether you’re a founder or operator, if you’ve ever struggled to bring people to your product this conversation is for you.
How does an engineer who knew nothing about marketing end up running entire marketing teams at multiple companies?
I started out writing codes as a kid when I was given a computer that when turned on was just a flashing cursor. I had to learn to write code in order to play my own games and I’ve always loved building things. Also my father was self employed so I inherited an inability to work for other people. That love of creating stuff and selling it, rather than working for an hourly wage, took me down the entrepreneurial route.
I experimented with various startup type ideas and fell into the trap of building stuff that I thought was cool, which then required me to spend all of my time convincing other people to agree with me. It’s a way of doing things, I suppose, but not necessarily the best way. Eventually I got pulled into product management, which differs by first figuring out what other people find useful. Over time I realized that you can still build good things but if no one knows about it then you’re still in trouble. This realization took me to marketing.
I think marketing is often misunderstood. Everyone knows what sales is, because you've experienced it. Everyone knows what advertising is because you see it in billboards or TV ads. I think people often conflate marketing with advertising but there's actually much more to it. To me marketing is the science of understanding a market; figuring out the personas, sizing up existing products, identifying what the needs are and packaging things up to position products. I found a way that, for me, made sense and I was able to pull together the right data to understand what was working, what I should do more of, what wasn't working and what I should change.
So my love of building stuff and love of learning new things brought me to Growth. Growth is really focused on whatever drives business value. It brings together Marketing, Product, Data, Engineering and whatever else it takes to figure out how we can take what we have and take it to more people.
Do you think there's a clean line in the sand between Marketing, Growth and Product or those functions so interlinked that it depends on the DNA of the company?
I think it's possible to make a very clean line, if you get really academic about it, but really that’s not right. I’ve observed that labels can take and just become popular, like Growth. People latch on to that term because it’s the latest cool thing but really just means customer acquisition.
You mentioned that there are two schools of thought within marketing, scientists and artists, and that you see yourself as more of a scientist. Could you explain that framework and share what was your journey like to become that scientist CMO?
Andreessen Horowitz published a really great blog post back in 2017 on how to hire a marketing leader. And they divided up the universe of CMOs into Artists-CMOs and Scientists-CMOs. An Artist-CMO usually comes from a branding and advertising background. Scientists-CMOs come from a much newer background like performance marketing or direct response - high volume paid campaigns with lots of analytical work. The blog post made the point that typically the leader at the top of the Marketing function sets the culture and the overall direction for the company. Therefore it's worth paying a lot of attention to whether the marketing leader fits the type of business that you're trying to build and the market that you're in.
I fell into marketing by being an engineer. I was very data driven and my early experiments were throwing up Google ads and trying to engineer ways to bring in customers. We did a lot of web scraping. We scraped hundreds of thousands of contact details to set up email campaigns with auto created profiles and this taught me the really long and expensive lesson of the need to provide value, not just spamming the hell out of people. One of the mistakes back then then was spending too much time sitting behind dashboards. I was too deep in aggregate statistics and overall patterns and was too far away from actual individuals and their sentiment. I didn’t really know who the people I was reaching out to were. It’s so important to get really close to customers and ensure the quality of the feedback.
Do you think that the Artist-CMO discipline is a dying breed? The need for growth and analytics within marketing seems so much more prevalent in the world today.
No, I don't think the artist style is a dying breed but I do think they're in a tough spot. I simultaneously have a lot of sympathy and also not so much sympathy for them. Marketing has had a large number of people who come into it and call themselves marketers with no particular background or training or real insight. They’ve gotten away with having the job title but are really just posting content without much thought or impact. The push for more measurement is a healthy force to get these people to greatness and hold them to account.
On the flip side, the value of a brand is huge and very misunderstood because it’s so hard to measure. When you have business leaders who don't appreciate this there's a real risk of becoming overly focused on activities that show numerical impact. In reality the two must come together. I recently saw someone on Twitter say that direct response is what harvests current demand and branding is what generates future demand.
Brand advertising often works by reducing your cost of acquisition in your direct response marketing. If you're launching a new competitive Coke you’ll probably launch a bunch of billboard adverts on bus stops and outside stores. People will pass your ad and won't really pay attention to it. But when they go into the store and they're looking at the shelf, they’ll see Coke and next to it is your product. A lot of marketing for new products is about creating trust and creating interest. The very fact that we've seen something before means that we will trust it more.
The digital world is often the same. You still see ads at tube stops and buses and whenever you Google something later and you see a banner with a brand you recognize you’re much more likely to click on it. “I've seen this before so it's probably a legitimate company.” That is often under-appreciated by people who are not experienced marketers.
Is there anything that's particularly unique or different in your methodology when you're talking about Marketing within a B2B context?
A lot of the same principles apply. You trade value to the customer. You have to incorporate trust and brand recognition so people appreciate what you have to offer and why it's good for them. Of course, a lot of the tactics and channels are different. Much of it comes down to whether you're selling a high volume or low volume product.
Regardless of B2C or B2B, either your pre-product / market fit or you’re post. Until you reach it your only goal is to find it, which requires research and iteration. Post product / market fit you start to look at who you're currently selling to and how to get more of them so you need to understand your audience. Where do they hang out? What are they looking for? How do they buy? Consumers buy for emotion or status or just to feel good about ourselves. With B2B it’s more about having a tangible problem to solve.
A lot of this series is focused on pre-product / market fit startups. How would you advise those founders in thinking through what makes a great VP of Marketing for them? What are the skills or experience that they need to think about as they're writing that job description?
First off, it may be too early to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing. The people you need then are going to do hands on work - customer discovery, iteration and experimenting with different channels. Often senior leaders, even if they're up for rolling sleeves up, haven’t done that for years. It may be that you're better off having a junior who's scrappy with a nice range of experience and can just experiment very closely with the founders and the Product team. Marketing can’t just get bolted on as some magic way to find leads. It should be part of the iterative feedback loop between building products for the market that you're finding. There are exceptions for some businesses. If you're in a B2C space and you need build out a huge brand, then you’re going to need someone who's up to that task.
Great marketers for early stage startups are people that have already sold to the same audience in prior roles. Not the same products, not competitors, but a lot of Marketing is about understanding your customers. What makes them tick? Where do they hang out? Which channels are good for reaching them? They can find novel channels that are less noisy and provide better returns. If you can find people who've worked at companies that have sold to the same audience, even a completely different product, hopefully they’ll have a lot of trained muscle.
When a founder gets to the point where they do need to bring someone on, do you hire for raw ability and hunger or do you have you need to lean into experience?
Startups are founded on first principles thinking because if they're not, they're likely not going to be that disruptive. The trap is if founders apply first principle thinking to things that aren't their core business. Be very intentional about what you're going to reinvent and what you're going to repurpose. You don't want to reinvent everything within a business. Maybe it's the distribution channel that is being reinvented and actually, you're just disrupting a go-to-market. In that case, maybe you don't need such a disruptive product. A lot of startups fall into the trap of trying to reinvent from first principles when they don’t need to. It’s not really a great idea to disrupt with your product and marketing and distribution and sales and also how you manage people.
Stripe is a good example of this with their developer community. No one ever thought about using developers as a go-to-market before. Stripe didn’t really do marketing for a long time and didn't have to hire that CMO for a while. Their go-to-market was very disruptive and very grassroots. If you're a B2B company and you think you need a sales and marketing machine then you probably want to bring in someone with experience who knows how these machines work and can apply best practice.
When you actually list out everything that Marketing needs to do it can quickly become unruly. I found an old presentation that you gave, which talks about focusing on the one metric that matters. I'm curious how you've learned to focus your team on the handful of things that actually move the needle.
This is something that I definitely learned the hard way. At one point I realized that we had three different ways of finding customers, three different value propositions and were trying to monetize in three different ways. Obviously with all that nothing was working. Bottom line, it's absolutely critical to focus.
When I worked with 500 Startups, a lot of my time was spent on helping founders design simple growth models to allow focus. If you're a commerce business, you need to know how many sales you’re making per week. If you're a marketplace, it's how many transactions per week. If you're a subscription business, it's how many active engaged subscribers you have who aren’t at risk of churning out. There’s only so long you can go without increasing that number week over week. Often founders have complex visions in their heads but really struggle come up to a simple KPI.
99% of the time it’s probably one of those three metrics and you really just need to figure out what are your key inputs because revenue can be a trailing indicator. With e-commerce you can either get new customers to buy or you can get existing customers to come back and buy again. Your job as a leader is to identify the core input and design a strategy for the week or month or quarter.
Do you have a view on growing people from within a Marketing function and building that capacity or leveling up through expert hiring?
You can benefit from experience, but particularly in the early days, the only way to learn is by being super close with potential customers. If you outsource this you have to write a specification for what you want the person you're hiring to do. And if your ask is to develop a market, then you're basically outsourcing a spec of “figure out my startup for me”.
So yeah, hire consultants to instrument your analytics because there's no point in spending three weeks becoming an expert on that. Hire a consultant to run a few tests in different channels. You can benefit from contractors or consultants who can run quick experiments to find out, is there any juice here? Is this an area we should be investing more into? If yes then you can think about bringing in the right sort of full time staff. You don't want to hire an SEO expert only to figure out that's not your growth channel.
Post-product / market fit it may make sense to have an agency who's really good at optimizing your paid ad spend because they do it all day, every day for multiple clients. But there you're giving them a very clear brief: this is the product, these are the customers, this is the value proposition. At that point it’s an optimization problem and they may well be more efficient at it.
Do you have a litmus test on how much time you should be spending with your customers? What are the flags that you've gone too far and removed yourself too much?
I really like the bullseye framework from Traction. It talks about spending 50/50 between Product and Marketing in the early stages. You need that constant feedback loop between discovering who your customers are, what they relate to, how to position your offering and then building the right thing. If you go too far one way or the other way you can fall into a trap of not having anything to sell or having the wrong thing to sell.
You may have heard of consultative selling, which is having sales conversations that’s optimized for learning as opposed to converting. There's a big difference when you're just trying work through a known process - it's just sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. People who haven't done a lot of consultative sales think that sales is like giving the perfect pitch. Actually some of the best salespeople approach calls with, “Yeah, we're in this space, but tell me about you. What are the problems you’re trying to solve right now? What have you tried already? What is holding you back?”
Jeff Lawson, the Twilio founder has a book and 100 pages in and he shares this really cool anecdote that when people start asking, “but wait, like, will it do X for me?”, then you know that you're onto something. He told a story from the early days with Twilio where pitching the idea of a service API that would let you send messages or phone calls or whatever. And people get it but then a few minutes later there would be a, “Oh, hang on. Could this notify my customers when their orders shipped?” And right then they had a use case. So it’s not just what percentage of time you're spending with your customers, but how you are spending it.
As you look at marketing today are there any trends or ideas or theories that you're really excited about?
This may be super controversial, but there's this whole thing with Apple shutting down attribution on mobile. A lot of the Marketing world, the consumer space in particular, is freaking out about all the analytics going away. This could be a really good thing. Think back to that mistake I made around sitting behind my wonderful dashboards but completely missing the real sentiment of the customers I was dealing with. I honestly think that a lot of startups think about marketing and growth by reading blogs or hearing about stuff big companies do and assume that that's what they should do as well, like terrible A/B tests that change the color of button. This makes sense for Facebook with their bajillion users per day. If they can get an extra 5% to convert that's huge revenue for them. That kind of optimization is for high volumes of people where there is some little usability blocker that is holding people back and so they're failing and churning out.
Startup marketing isn’t like that. It’s all low volume without statistical significance. You should be thinking about how you can get a 100% lift by changing your value proposition, not how you can get a 5% change by moving the box around. I think taking away a lot of this data and tracking could force people back to just talking to customers.
One time at Quantcast, we were struggling with our signup flow and we ended up using one of those Intercom-like chat tools in a really helpful way. Rather than throw up the chat box as soon as someone arrived we waited until they had started signing up and then popped up an open question box with, “what are you looking for today?” and it blew our minds. We had these people who were on our landing page, which clearly said what we have to offer, and clicking on the signup button to create an account but then just stalled. We were going crazy asking ourselves, “why aren’t these people activating?!” It turns out that a good 50% of these people who were going all the way through the signup process were actually looking for a completely different product that we used to offer. At some point, without too much thought, we had squirreled it away somewhere and people could no longer find it but they really wanted it. So they were clicking around, found a different product to what they wanted and thought, “oh maybe if I sign up, I'll find the thing I'm looking for”.
It was a great example of the real failure of disconnect between people on two sides of a web browser. You have no idea what's in their heads so just get as close as possible and ask them directly. Don’t just try to sell to them but understand them. It feels like this is on a resurgence.
First On is an attempt to uncover functional greatness by asking the experts themselves. I hope you enjoy the mini-series and with enough interest I may extend this into a more ongoing effort. If you have any functions / roles you’d like covered or have ideas for future guests please let me know.