YouSaid · the spoken record

Austin Hay

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-08-13
most recent: 2023-08-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because most businesses either start with first touch or last touch and then eventually they want to move to a multi-touch attribution model. And for those who don't know what that is, first touch is where you kind of collect the data about where from somebody first came from. Last touch is where you collect the data about where the person last came from. So an example would this be like if I went to Lenny's newsletter from a Google ad and that's all he has, that would be my first touch and my last touch if I first came from a Google adminisc, but then later I came from a Facebook ad or I don't know, direct, then that would be my last touch. And so it's this question of like does the Google original first Google channel get credit or does the second one, the Facebook or Direct get credit? And the first such attribution model, 100% goes to the first channel and the last such attribution model, 100% credit goes to the last touch, and a mixed attribution model or multi-touch attribution model, you're trying to figure out how to split the difference, right?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mixed media modeling, and MTA stands for multitouch attribution. And it's these two ways of kind of like measuring the world in marketing to understand how you should allocate resources to campaign spend. MTA and MMM though are both underpinned by how you collect data. They're both informed by the user object and the event objects that you collect on your website or your application that then lead to the data that data scientists use for MTA and MMM. That's the connection between data and Martech is like often the tools and systems that we build and stand up and manage are what are used for these very complicated growth experimentation and attribution results at the end of it. And one of the most discrete things you can do for MTA, because I get this question all the time around, hey, like do we need MTA? What should I do first touch or last touch? Should I do both? And there's actually really like I can send you this guide, but there's like six or seven things you can do to basically future proof yourself from needing to needing either way.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so back to our conversation around division of responsibility. I'm not always the person you should talk to to create an MMM model. I'm not a data scientist. I know how to make MMM models and I know what they are.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I listened to your pod on multi-touch attribution. I'm forgetting who you was with at this point, but it was like, I was just loving it because it talked about MMM and MTA specifically.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No good solution. It's just like you have to figure out for yourself how do you want to acquire use at the top of the funnel? How do you merge them into the bottom of the funnel of the Salesforce? And again, there are lots of options or versions of the world. You could use amplitude only and collect all your user and event data and then merge that into Salesforce directly. You could collect data in an amplitude or segment and then post that to HubSpot, which then posts that to Salesforce. But of course, as you make these decisions, your system becomes more complicated and more than one person can manage. So there's this trade-off between complexity and resources that you always have to juggle.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a B2B business, you have all that complexity, but at the end of the day, you might not really need it if all the person is doing is it's just the company is signing the contract and then you don't really care what happens afterwards. You might track users and events inside your application, but it's not for the acquisition. It's for the retention of the user. B2B2C is fascinating because you have all the complexity at the top, but then like how and when do you tie a user to a company or some type of entity object and what tools do you need to do that? And where do they live in the system? And do those tools actually have competing priorities? Let me give you the greatest example of this that happened at Notion when I was consulting with them, at Chris when I was consulting with them, and at RAMP is having both HubSpot and Salesforce. Both are CRMs, both have the ability to track users and companies. Neither are CDPs. And how you actually mapped the data from HubSpot to Salesforce kind of determines how much hell you're in.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mapping out on a whiteboard how we would design our first version of our system, like how we capture leads, how we get them into Salesforce, how we would email them with a little tool called Outreach at the time that was like still a startup. And I'll send it to you after this if you want to show it to viewers, but it's like so MVP, but it still models what a lot of people have today. There's like some ingestion point for your data. There's Salesforce. There's some type of outbounding tool. There's an enrichment tool. And then a lot of other Jerry Rigg stuff hooked up to.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah, yeah, so we talked about B2B, or sorry, B2C. B2B, I probably don't have as much history as, say, like people who survived the dot-com crash in 2008. I started really my career in B2B in 2014. So I'll share a little bit of my experience. I'm just hopefully just saying this because listeners may chime in and be like, oh man, this guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, which is like totally fair game. 2014, though, I remember working at Branch. I was working for our COO, Mike Molinay, who's now at this really cool company called FINA. But at the time, I was working for Mike. And, you know, as we talked about before, oftentimes growth stacks just appear because you're given a challenge. And I'm like sitting in this tiny room with Mike. We were over in Palo Alto, like right off the fills in Palo Alto in this tiny room. It was boiling in the room, like so hot. We were sweating. And we were like.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I personally think the reverse ETL is a capability. It's the ability to move data from a warehouse to a tool. So technically speaking, you'll find reverse ETLs in CDPs and as standalone products. Segment has a reverse ETL function they just launched. MParticle has a reverse ETL function they just launched. Rudder stack, which is a CDP, has always had a reverse ETL function where you can take warehouse data and move it to different cloud infrastructure. Then there are distinct standalone products census, which was backed by 16Z and HighTouch are the two standalone reverse ETLs. And like I said, I'm an investor in HighTouch, love their work. We use them at RAM. At the end of the day, you should pick tools because they help solve problems, not because of anything else. So we can come back to that if you want. Awesome. Great, great.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, have an integration with Snowflake that lets you feed data directly out of Snowflake. And then you could use a reverse ETL to just pipe that data wherever you want. There's a really good section, though. Again, sorry to self-aggrandize, but there's a really good section in the reforge module this fall that talks about what happens when you have multiple ways to move data. You buy amplitude for your CDP and you're moving data to your warehouse. Amplitude is a bunch of integrations, but you also have reverse ETL and you can move data out of your warehouse. Where do you choose? And I would say a lot of businesses get in trouble when they don't have a methodology or a system for how and when to move data from one place to the other. So they just do it haphazardly, right? And the key in systems management is you want to design a process for doing it. Some type of waterfall or mental model for when it makes sense to move data directly from amplitude, which is like the ingestion point of your data stream, or from the warehouse where you can model it and make it better. I think the key is...”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a CDP. And so I'd say now today when we think about B2C businesses, you can either go to the traditional route, buy CDP, hook up all your tools, third party. I think that's a great move if you do not have a lot of engineering resources because you're not spending a ton of time and energy on a warehouse and all the modeling that comes with it. You're just spending time to implement one SDK. I think like if simplicity is the name of the game for your business, CDP, centralized stack, great move. If you are an advanced engineering culture and you are cutting edge and you're going to do a bunch of modeling in DBT and you already have Snowflake, you should move towards a model of using a reverse ETL. What it means is that there's a way to get your data into the warehouse and then how you activate it is completely independent from the CDP. And so what that means is actually you can have like lots of different variations of the stack. You could use amplitude as your CDP, collect all your data, stream it into Snowflake.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Airbnb was probably doing all this well before anybody else was, but they had the main advantage of a lot of money and a lot of resources. So now come 2020, it's cost efficient to have a data team with your own warehouse and to manage data centrally in something like Snowflake, right? So now this question is like, okay, well, we got to get data into the warehouse, but how we move data around is totally different, right? And that's what really led to the rise of reverse ETLs. So now you can actually build your own CDP and lots of businesses already have. I'm consulting with a well-known financial trading platform a couple months back and like they have a CDP. They have all this internal data in their warehouse, but they have not been able to activate it because it's pretty old architecture. Everything's batch-based. End of the day. What they need is a reverse ETL. They would need to take that data and just get it out into the world. So they need the reverse ETL component or the transformation component.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So B2C, if you back up to 2016, 2017, you have segment and emporticle and the rise of the CDP, consumer-based businesses have to collect a user and tie a bunch of data to them and then track their actions to send it back out to performance ad networks and email marketing tools and product analytics tools. And so you would see this very commoditized stack. It would be like CDP in the middle, bunch of tools connected. The promise of the CDP was you integrate one SDK, your engineers don't hate you, you send all the data to the other tools, you can create audiences, great. Lasted for a long time. The thing about it, though, that I think really changed around 2020 is that the cost of ownership of warehousing became much cheaper. And so 2021, you start getting the place where like, yeah, it actually makes a lot of sense and is really easy to store all your data in a warehouse, model all your data in the warehouse, and to do it without needing a vast data team.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of stack, again, we think about B2B and B2C, right? B2C, I would say the stack was largely solved from 2017 to 2020. We have a renaissance of the data architecture. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you through B2C then and now, and then we can go B2B, then and now.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiring more people, acquiring more users, and your total cost of tooling per person goes down. That's like the dream. And there's lots of ways you can build that financial model. But I mean, that's kind of what I think most marketing technology leaders should strive for is to make sure that they're controlling costs over time because most businesses don't. There can be some goals that are discrete in nature that are not cost efficient, but more like net capability related. So it's like, hey, we want to design a first party system that's world-class, that achieves these three goals, right? Maybe you want to incorporate artificial intelligence into some part of our platform and incorporate third-party tools. And those are more like discrete products in the same way that a business might launch an extra.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. And I would like maybe this is like at the end of the podcast we ask people about this because I would love to know what is a better version of going. So there's two ways that I've thought of it. One is my goals are directly tied to the people I'm serving. So if user acquisition has, we have, I mean, we do. We have a growth goal and we have a CAC goal at ramp, right? So like, you know, my goals are tied to them. So I'm going to help make sure that that is achieved. But then there's also like a cost and efficiency goal that I internally think is valuable, whether or not the business thinks is valuable doesn't really matter. I just, I come from a sales background and I like to run lean and efficient teams. And so I'm always thinking to myself, how much were the tools when I came in? How much are they now? Have I set us up for success so that as we grow our cost per user or cost per seat comes down? And how much more efficient are we because of that? The ideal world is that you actually are growing as a business, making more money.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It off of did the opportunity occur and what was the kind of the ideal value for that opportunity? And you're sending that data as a synthetic event back to Facebook and all those guys. So it can be really cool and super advanced stuff depending how deep on the funnel you get and how complex your business is.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you'll see I have the person who's responsible for bidding and acquiring users and paying down those campaign costs. And you have the person who's in charge of how does it all work? How do we get this thing to actually run? And that's very similar to where we have at RAMP. We have an amazing user acquisition team. I know Sri Bachu was on here a while back. He hired a guy named Cody Morgan at Ramp who has a user acquisition team. And the way to think of it is like my job is to help support them in running all their campaign needs. And when they have a directive from the CEO that says we need to improve CAC or change any of our metrics, it's my job to partner with them to help them do that. And actually, one of the coolest and most fun projects that we worked on early when I joined RAMP is we were optimizing, we're trying to get top of funnel data all the way down to the bottom of the funnel and tie it with opportunity data so we could send that back to the ad network. So that rather than like, you know, optimizing your campaign off of when a user clicks a button on the website, you're actually optimizing.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To kind of get there. So that's my way into the engineering world. And you typically find that a lot with marketing technologists in particular is that there are software engineers or they've got enough experience to kind of moonlight as software engineers. And so we get to this problem set of like a user acquisition person, how would they rely on a marketing technologist? Well, I think like the most superhuman user acquisition people out there are engineers and they just like they don't need a marketing technologist because they set up the tool themselves. They know how the paid campaign runs and they just do it all. And you'll typically find these superhumans at small startups where like, you know, the engineer is just told by the co-founder, hey, go figure out how Facebook ads work. And superhuman is porn. More often, though, that doesn't happen or those people, once they do it, once they never want to do it again. So you'll typically find the role split, right? And that's the natural thing that happens as you scale. You divide responsibility.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe a key differentiator too, because we didn't talk about this in the beginning, but there's like marketing technology and marketing operations. So in my mind, this is just my own kind of mental framework is marketing technology has tech in it. So it's usually an engineer or somebody with an engineering background doing that function. Marketing operations is usually not always technical. It's maybe a system analyst or a business analyst could be somebody really, really smart, but they may not have an engineering background. So I think that's a key distinction too. And you typically see that in B2B where you'll have a MarOps function, which is like setting up campaigns, sending email blasts, debugging, doing analytics work, SQL queries, all like semi-technical work, but not engineering based. So in my mind, when we talk about marketing technology, I'm really thinking of it as an engineering-based role. And even by background, I'm not a software engineer, but I was a civil engineer and I learned how to program and I went through a bunch of coding.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just permissioning gone wrong, you know? So, like, I think a big part of the role is designing systems that are automated to handle that stuff. Because ideally, you don't want to be sitting around your computer all day clicking one conductor request to approve permissions. You should kind of look at the role, look at the experience and tenure in department and make a decision about which access it should get. So automating that is a big part of my job. The manual part of my job, which I feel like is actually really fun, is, again, the designing systems and contracts for the future. So it's about how do we design a system and kind of create a vision and persuade people about what our system technology can look like. Over the course of one to two years, because that's the time span that I usually look at.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's half of marketing technology, which I would call somewhat administrative and high leverage. It's managing PII requests and PII technology, managing administrative stuff like contracts and admittance tools and permissions. This is all at like a big company scale. You probably don't do this when you're a small company. But that stuff matters because I'll give you an example. You give edit access to somebody who wants HubSpot and they send a fake email test to like a million people and now you're like on Twitter being embarrassed as a company. And so it's like happened to me, but I've gotten the emails from certain companies where it's like, this is a test. And it came from an intern. You're like.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make sure people actually have access to the tools that they want and can solve their problems, but we're not introducing duplicative tech into our organization because a really well-known sorry to put SaaS vendors on the spot here, but well-known SaaS vendor play is the land and expand motion, right? You get in small and then you grow your business. Well, you know, that's a distinct problem for businesses that are trying to control costs and simplify the way the world works.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Yeah, it's a game of persuasion and salesmanship. You have to convince people why the problems are big. And especially as you get bigger, a lot of the decisions or problems of marketing technology are not about rapidly making a huge transformation. It's slow transformation that can have big implications. I'll just give you one example like lots of big companies I talk to have two CDPs or two attribution tools. And it's like there's the cost problem. How do we get rid of this secondary tool to reduce the cost? Maybe it's a million dollars. But there's also the complexity and decision making problem. How do we make people move and work faster by not having the complexity of asking which tool do I use in such a simple decision, right? And then you get to a really big scale like at Walmart where your problem isn't even how do we consolidate the stack and make it so tools are helpful for people, but how do we prevent from getting back to that state? How do we put safeguards in place?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The secret sauce is more of like how good of a cross functional team player are they? I almost view them like a true quarterback. Everybody says people are quarterbacks, but really marketing technology because it lives between so many departments, it plays that role of having to call plays and pull on different departments.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, like, all marketing technologists at some level are ICs. I think it's a great job, personally, because I get to be an IC and a manager. You have to be an IC in that you are the most senior technical expert on all first party and third-party systems. So you have to know really well how third-party tools work. And you don't know that without doing the work yourself. So I do find that some of the best marketing technologists have at least at some point in the last five years been an operator and expert managing tools and systems. And then usually the teams are small and super cross-functional. So what I would say is more important to look for than how many people has this person managed is how well can they manage upward laterally and downward because they're going to have to go talk to the head of RevOps if they want to change something in Salesforce. They're going to have to talk to the VPU product if they want to make a big platform change that touches something else. They're going to be relying constantly on data resources from their head of data. So I think this person.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or resources spread too thin and the priorities on a line that it makes it challenging to get work done. And yeah, I would just say, especially on B2B for people out there listening, there is no right answer. And I even think that marketing technology could live in product. It could also live in engineering. Some of this has to do with like, who is the leader of this function? If it blends more towards ops, meaning like managing processes and systems, then yeah, maybe you want to decentralize it and keep it in its representative function. If you have a really technical leader who was an architect or a PM, that might indicate where that person should actually be leading their team. So it's very case specific, which I know is like a terrible answer, but it's the way it is.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then for B2B, I think B2B is really messy because not only do you have like pure B2B, where you're only selling to enterprises, but you have this concept of B2B to C, which is where you're actually selling to users and to businesses, sometimes at the top of the funnel and the bottom, but also sometimes at the same time, like Notion. Notion sells to users. So they have a little growth acquisition funnel at the top. But then they also sell to businesses. And I find there's two ways, decentralized or centralized. Actually at RAMP, we've gone back and forth between the two models. We started centralized with the RevOps group. We decentralized it and put marketing technology into the CMO work, and now we're rolling it back into the revenue operations org largely has to do with who is our customer, like whose problems are we solving, and where resources allocated. Because if you have a decentralized model, then you run the risk of having to have lots of resources decentralized across the team. And the question is, can that function actually get work done?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have B2C, B2B, centralized, decentralized. And a B2C organization, I think actually thinks it's quite simple. Most of the time, your tools, your marketing tools are intended to help the growth team. The growth team has a job to be done, which is to spur user growth, and tools are just meant to solve the problem. So marketing technology's job is to serve the growth team. Now, it obviously serves product and analytics and data, but it's key stakeholder and customer is the marketing or growth function. And so I think it makes a lot of sense.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I have not to shamelessly plug my reforge course in the fall, but I'm going to shamelessly plug my reforge course in the wall. We have this awesome matrix that we built that shows where this person should live, what they do, who they should report into, and it's all part of the fall course. If you want to like the deep dive into it, there's going to be a section on it. But just the gist of it is I like first like to break it down into two dimensions. First is a B2C company or B2B company. And then the second dimension is how important is it to you that this person report into a specific function or not? So first with B2C, and really maybe like a simpler version of that is centralized versus decentralized, right?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, efficiency and pain. I would say pain drives people more. It's like, hey, we can't do something because nobody knows this thing. We can't do something because we don't know the best way to set up these tools or to change these tools. Or we can't even move forward with a business plan because we're worried that changing our tools might have an impact. And usually this is related to like email marketing tools and data tools, so like CDPs and folks like Braze and Erdogal, just because a lot of times your email is the thing driving recurring customers to come back to your product and use it. So you can't actually sometimes make the changes you want without understanding how something was set up in the first place.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exposure, what's it going to cost us if we actually scale? It's great that we have this cool rate at 500 MTUs. What happens when we have a million MTUs? So I worked at Mparticle, which was a CDP provider for a long time, and I was their VP of growth. And, you know, part of their SaaS vendor strategy is like, how can we design these cost structures in a way so that the company scales, we make more money? That's just part of the business, you know? And so if you have that mindset of, well, I'm looking out for the business not just now, but two, 30 years in the future, that's where you can also have a lot of value from systems or marketing technologists.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That marketing technology is just the third party tools, but actually it's designing, architecting, and building that stuff on top of your third party tools. That's how you actually have a lot of velocity is thinking about not just build versus buy, it's build and buy now. So you buy the tool to get 90% of the way there and then you build the cool thing on top with the other 10%. And so kind of that architecting decision usually falls on this person. The one really unsexy part of it, which I tend to love because it's really high leverage, is the contract part, right? When you start out, but as a business, you sign any contract you want with a third party because you're just trying to get going. You have much bigger problems. Product market fit, staying alive, runway. But at some point, as you scale, you know, and you were starting to make money, now you start to care more about not just how much money you're making, but how much money you're losing, usually from contracts and SaaS tools. And so that's where you start to have more scrutiny around what types of deals are we signing, what are the terms, do we have liability?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This comes up all the time, by the way. I talk to businesses every year that have this problem of like, you know, we have a growth team, we're growing pretty fast. We have a guy that we hired, usually an engineer who stood up all these tools for us. Or it could be Gal2, just to be clear. But this person has been here for two years and knows all of our systems really well. But now they're becoming overwhelmed. They don't have enough time. The systems are too complex. This is the flavor of story that I hear so often around startups who have hired a great growth person and managed tools and systems, but at some point they reach that kind of point in time where it's no longer manageable by one person or even a set of people. And that slice of works looks like setting up new tools, building new tools on top of them because a lot of times you'll take a third party tool call it like a segment or an amplitude and you'll build tooling in your own stack behind it to power something much more advanced. And everybody thinks.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. That's exactly right. And I have this adage I always say, which is like tools are just meant to solve problems. And the problem set for marketing technologists and business technologists is like you focus on the tools.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing technology was just part of growth, and Pratt kind of owned that as a system, as a different example, though, at RAMP, we're big enough and we're a B2B company, but we have a B2C top of funnel where we try to acquire users and get them to fill out our application to get a credit card. We have like a distinct revenue operations team that's broken into business technology and marketing technology. So there's lots of flavors of how it can exist. I think that's what's kind of the interesting and fun part of marketing tech is that it's not just one single version of the world that you apply to many companies. There's like a million variations that I've seen and they all kind of look to solve the same problem.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody has to be responsible for knowing how data flows through tools, how it's worked, what's the schema, and that's not even considering procurement and legal stuff, right? You have like infinite liability if you kind of don't manage your contracts well. And so usually around, I would call it like 100 to 150 people is the critical mass where you can't just have a village approach to systems and tools, much like in the IT org, if it was a village approach to SSO, like businesses would be in a lot of danger. That's where you typically start to see the question of, all right, we need a systems and tools person. We need somebody to manage these systems and manage.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some levels, there's maybe no difference. There's a lot of startups that would say are 30 people or less where you have a growth team and your growth acquisition person is using a CDP to send data to their ad network to run their ads because that's part of their job. And maybe they are the Martech person. And actually you find a lot of people who consider themselves Martech professionals now having started in growth or user acquisition roles because they had to just use tools that already get their jobs done. But what I would say is like as a company grows in scales, it moves from being a community or village driven aspect of your product to being something that's centrally owned. You know, like if you're a startup again like 30 to 40 people, everybody might chip in to manage your CDP or use amplitude or build a first party solution on top of those. It's a mixtured first and third party tools and engineering and product and marketing all kind of work together on it. That doesn't scale though is you cross 100 to 200 people.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you asked this other question around like what exactly the role of somebody in Martech? And maybe we'll talk about this a little later, but it's such a function of the size and the stage of the company that you're at. At Airbnb, I would say Dimitri, who you might have worked with, was the Martech guide, right? He managed a lot of Airbnb's first and third party tools. Airbnb at that size was, I don't know, maybe 800 people or so. And so it makes sense to have a function with product and engineering resources. A small startup, for example, when I was working with CKE, we were just talking about this at runway. There was no such thing as Martech. There was like me and Tanner and Siki standing up tools and using them because you just have to use the tools to get the job done. And so I would say on the spectrum of what is Martech, you really have to look at the size and the stages of the company. And as you grow, you start to see it become more refined or pronounced.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a good question because marketing technology is like this very amorphous cross functional discipline that lives at the crossroads of product and growth and engineering and marketing. It brings together processes and systems from kind of like a wide range of disciplines. And I think really the way to think about marketing technology is it's a product manager whose specific role and focus is the system or the third party or first party platform. Because marketing technology can mean a collection of third-party tools, which is a lot of people think, but as a company scales and grows, actually could include a collection of first party homegrown solutions that you build yourself with or an addition to third party. So I like to think about marketing technology more as like, you know, one piece is people and process and the other is the system and the platform. And that probably sounds pretty familiar to what a lot of product people think about their world as. And that's how I define more.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm so excited because, you know, it seems like you might be one of the first people in product and growth to talk about Martech”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From 2010 to 2020, we had the golden years of deterministic matching where it was very easy to run an ad and understand with precision who installed the app, maybe to know their name, but you actually would know their IDFA and you could tie that to their PII. You can't do that anymore. So what that means is these ad networks are becoming more complex, sophisticated, and interesting right at the same time that it's harder for marketers to really understand how they're spending money. And so I'm paying a lot of attention to how marketers make decisions with probabilistic data because most of the work that I'm doing now is actually saying, well, given that we don't have determinist data about a certain audience or where somebody came from, how can I find other information that will create a model for 30% of the population? And we can use that to extrapolate to 100.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source