YouSaid · the spoken record

Guillaume Cabane

lines on the record: 74
first: 2023-11-29
most recent: 2023-11-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A good learning is a statistically significant deviation from your status quo. It's hard. I'll give you one example, okay? People often change their onboarding email, their welcome email. Post sign up to get people to use the product. And they test and it's hard to get a lift there. You know what I tell them? Have you tested against a called out a control audience? And they tell me yes. And they tell me what the control is the standard emails. No, you're wrong. The control is no email. Have you tried not sending a welcome email? Not sending, you know, the first three, four, five emails to get people to use the product. And of course they haven't. And I tell them try it. Take 20, 30, whatever it takes to be statistically significant and don't send emails. And let's see what the true deviation in activation and retention is. And you know what happens, Harry? Most of the time, it's not statistically significant to the people who are all going to activate will activate regard.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. So, first, the biggest mistake that I see happen in Gwythe teams is they undertake an experiment without assessing the cost, the effort, all the audience size. And often I ask, can we reach statistical significance here? Is the audience big enough for us to be able to learn the outcome? And often when I dig it, the answer is no. There's just not enough people. And that happens very often in B2B SaaS products, which is like my stuff, post-product. It's very hard to get StatSig post sign up in the B2BS because you only need like a thousand users to be engaging with the product in a short time frame. Who has that? It's really, truly, it's rare. Just think about that. So you got to be able to like be ruthless and exclude those experiments where you won't be able to come out with the learning. What I care about is not so much the winds, because I can't predict those. What I care about how many experiments can I have?”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it's not, I oppose it to core product, core marketing, the traditional way of, I'd say, releasing features or campaigns.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answer two questions. Like one is growth right and what is growth. Let's start with what is growth. Growth is a risk adjusted way of creating value. What that means is that I have limited information when I'm an angel investor. I have a limited due diligence. When I do growth, I have limited knowledge on that experiment on that hypothesis. I'm going to do some simple heuristics and say, hey, is this a worthy bet? If I make not one, but 20 of those bets, can one of those pay back all the failures? That is typically a visa mindset. And that is the growth marketing mindset. I don't know what's going to work. You got to be very humble. You just need to move fast, have high velocity, and have just the right level of quality to be able to figure out will this stick. So it is a multi-disciplinary way of creating competitive modes, whether that's in pre-sign up acquisition or post-sign up in the product, it doesn't matter.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least once a quarter. So once you do that, how do you grow? Well, you go by, you know, you've maxed out your typical demand efforts. You're touching the people. You go by increasing price, by adding new products to convince people on products that you didn't have before, and by doing brand, by convincing them that their decision, that they made prior is wrong. That is an entirely new orientation, a new business. It's completely different. This is no longer Quelf. That's no longer growth. Once you touch everyone every quarter, what takes you to the next stage is traditional marketing, traditional product. You're now an established business.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In most successful startups, the CAC will rise faster than the brand can compensate for that rise. As you said, like every new audience is slightly harder to require and convert. Because if not, you would have converted that audience sooner earlier. That would be in the first audiences, right? The people who have, as I said earlier, seen your ad talk to you, took a demo, and said no, can you really reach back to them after three months and say, hey, Harry, you told us no three months ago, have you reconsidered your position? Nah, you're not going to do that. That just doesn't work. Eventually, I'll give you an example, Gorgias, coming that I love, right? Focusing on the e-commerce merchants. If you look at their total adjustable markets, we're talking of a couple hundred thousand merchants in the US and Europe. That's the market. By now, they touch each of those merchants at least once a quarter. At least every single merchant.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that you can calculate or you can attribute how or why customers have come to you at the early stage. I don't think it's worth it. You don't have the scale. You don't have the diversity. And even if you have found one channel that works, it's unlikely that you can scale it that way. And so to speak in simple terms, you can't take this Google Sheet cell and drag it to the right. It's unlikely to be real. And so don't try.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand where you're coming from on financial products. You can see the rate at which companies have switched their payment platforms and their like expensing platform. It tends to be, especially at the mid-market, very slow. And it's unlikely that changes because the cost of switching is super high. And that's the, you know, if you look at why RAM, but also Brex and others have raised so much money. It's because the VCs have made the same calculations and have decided, concluded that it is very likely that people stick for that long. That's the only reason why those companies are worth that much. It's because the churn is almost like slitch.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything below 12 is good. Now, when you think of that, generally, that's a very simple framework. If you want to be a bit smarter, you go into CactWheelTV, again, going back into it, I'm in fintech these days with RAMP where people onboard a financial platform, global platform like Ramp, they tend to stick for very, very long multiple years. And so you can afford, let's say, something much higher in terms of payback time because the LTV is huge. People stick for three, four, five at the mid-market eight years. So when they stick around for eight years, you can start being very aggressive. You can start spending more than one year, maybe two years.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The top quartile that's fully loaded CAC. What that means is that takes into account the marketing spend, the marketing headcount, the sales team, bonuses, and whatnot, everything, but building the product. Marketing generally represents about 30% of that, so about 30 cents on the dollar. And so if you take no on a payback of 12 months adjusted, like one for one, that's about four months of payback time. Four months of payback time is really good. That's really, really good. You pay back, you think about it. It's just like if you're doing a loan, you actually loan four months to a third party, to your customer. After four months, you start being in the money. That's how you should think about it. Every time a customer churns before four months is a loan that has not been repaid. It's a default on your debt.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. So, at first, why do boards want that now? Well, it's because we're in this kind of recession or tough times, I want to say, in a way, where capital is scarce. And when capital becomes scarce, there's two ways to win. You either grow fast out of it, less stuff, or you reduce cost. And found us right to do a bit of both, right? To de-risk. When you think of all of the people asking about PLG for PLG, that's another way of saying they're looking for low CAC tactics. They're looking for customers that bring themselves, that bring other customers for free that you don't have to pay for. If you go beyond that, if you can't do PLG, which most can't, as we discussed, I'd say low KAC, if you look at the top quartile of solids in terms of performance post $5 million revenue, you're going to see that roughly it's about a dollar of revenue, sorry, a dollar of cost for a dollar of revenue. So you spend a dollar to get your dollar.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company size different industries, then you go different segments, company sizes, and then you go into different geos. That's the way that you, and I see most companies grow. That framework is. The golden rule to be in the top decile of startups in terms of performance, thus in terms of valuation and funding and outcomes, you would have to grow past the first million, 3x the first year, 3x the second year, and then 2x for every year for the next three years. So three, three, two, two, two, two. All right. And if you do that, you end up at 100 million plus in revenue in five euros.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think often what you see is companies find one early adopters market, one audience where in the words of Grand Balford, there's like there's a message to audiences or a product to audience fit. And you start just maxing that out. You have a competitive advantage. Your message resonates well. And eventually you can plateau because you have convinced most of the early adopters, the people that are early into your product. Any others have made the conscious decision, they don't want your product, right? The friction increases and you're going to start looking for new audiences. You can think, hey, this small audience is too small for us. I can't raise my price. I can't convert more of those. I can't sustain my growth there. All right. I can't do my 2x, my 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2. So you're looking for new audiences. And those new audiences will be either in different industries, in different segments generally, more rarely in different GOs. So you tend to generally go like same.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enterprise features that don't want enterprise customers. I have one example, Zapier did that for very, very long. I talked with the Zapier founders when I was at segment and I wanted enterprise features and he said, gee, we love you, but I'm sorry, we're not going to build those features. I'm like, why? I pay you for that. You're like, yes, but we are lose focus of the huge market of SMBs and we want to close as many of those. Other people will take care of the enterprise markets. We don't want to go there. I remember it because it's extremely rare.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's first talk why do you land in that situation, generally because you find one of the two motions. Generally, to be honest, like most people started with the SME market because you don't have what it takes to close enterprise-based market companies. You don't have SOC2 compliance and whatnot, right? And eventually one exec at a larger company is more risk prone than others and is an early adopter and will come to you and will offer like a three, four, five times your current ACV and you're going to take it. Of course you're going to take it. And then you're going to wonder, are there more like that? It happens like kind of naturally. It just happens. You just start closing a few of those and then you need to start layering the cost structure you need like to support them. You don't lose them because the chart would look bad. You put the logo on your page because you want like that's an exciting logo. You put in your board deck. So you need to support that. Prevent the churn. Most of the time it happens insidiously. It's very rare that have people tell me I do not want to do it.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focus success in startups is being able to focus your efforts to grow faster than your competitors. If you lose focus, your competitors grow faster than you, you lose.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right, but it's worse. You're absolutely right. If you don't create the packaging, the pricing plans to support the high cost of the enterprise motion, then you're killing yourself. But there's worse. It's companies that are enterprise first with the entire car structure and product structure of an enterprise software and then want to open a PLG angle and says, hey, let's let people sign up on their own. And like nothing works like the acquisition does not work. The product is not self-serve. You can't build like a self-serve feature into something that was meant for your CSMs to build the instance. And that happens. I see those people come to me and it's like, this is just not going to work. It's impossible. You can't pivot that way.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it happens, it's rare, it's extremely rare that you have super strong virality, a real PLG. Most people who say, I want to do PLG, they don't do PLG. They have a free plan. They have a self-served plan. It does not mean there's virality. It does not mean that people invite each other. Even the people I love and care about, we think of like something like a ramp, amazing company. Like, do you think there's PLG? Do you think CFOs randomly invite other CFOs to use RAMP? Hell no. It doesn't happen like that. It doesn't work like that. Maybe there are some network effects we can talk about, but there's no PLG.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who does it well, Harry? Name me companies that at the early stage are really good at PLG or enterprise. It's a very rare that they have one of the two motions like pin down. And so most of the time they try a bit of PLG, they try a bit of enterprise and they land most of the time in between segment, both PLG and enterprise cells that drift ditto. Gorgeous ditto. All of the companies I worked for, I worked with, and we're going to talk about CAC, I'm sure, but like mostly for CAC reasons, they optimize for efficient acquisition and selling and the land with both motions.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Segment is a technical product targeting the engineering audience. I know I often get founders who have a similar audience, want to sell to engineers, and they're telling me, gee, like, you know, I've done emails doesn't work. Engineers don't want to be sold to. And by and large, that's true. Though if you're lucky enough to have a really good product, let's put aside those that have like a bad product. We have a truly good product that is useful. You have an incentive to have a free plan, a startup plan, because engineers will stay engineers as they change jobs and they no longer are in startups and they join a real legit company and they will bring your product along with them. That's what we found at segment. We did a crazy attribution logic where we found engineers across jobs by keying not on the email.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to come out with a really good product that you're not monetizing directly. First, because many people, if there is interest for your product, people have built a better version of it and have monetized it. So like a lot of those niche have disappeared. And the second is that the quality has gone down and people have become desensitized when they say, oh, there's like a free cost calculator written on investment calculator, like one of those typical things, right? Or website grader, most of those are terrible now. And so people think like, oh, I'm not going to like sign up or put my info, my PII there because I'm not going to get my values worth, right? But if you have something truly amazing, does it still work? Absolutely.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product works really well, especially for technical audiences. Both of those things merge in 2014, 2015 when I joined Mention and I started using segments. I'm like, hey, I felt it technical now and I know how to run experiments and I know how to do technical marketing. And at that time it started to be called growth. And I just landed in the right place at the right time.”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is I'm an old man now. I started in the early 2000 at Apple. And if there's one thing you want to know about Apple, especially I was based in Europe, is that it's a very centralized company. And so you need to ask authorization for everything and you never get it in marketing. You just never get it. And so my boss, who was the head of marketing for Apple France, he was not running campaigns because he was not getting authorized. He was running experiments. Because for experiments, he did not need to ask. We're talking about 2005 here, 2004. Did not need to ask for anyone. And then when he got caught, he said, oh no, we're just running an experiment to see if the audience of the market reacts well to that. Like, that's smart, right? And the second founding story, a couple years later, I was in ITC. consulting firm leading marketing over there. That's when I realized that leveraging engineers to build quasi-products to build demand and drive people to the product that is different. So have people build something which is a quasi-”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I care about how many experiments can I have running at the same time where I learn if you can drive value about mistakes, problems of the business, you have discovered that your audience does not know, you will get engagement guaranteed, reject any KPI that is vanity. You don't care about traffic. You don't care about any of those KPIs. The only thing you care about is weight adjusted pipeline dollars”
2023-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source