YouSaid · the spoken record

Jesse Pujji

lines on the record: 95
first: 2021-04-01
most recent: 2021-04-01
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

“I'll talk about the founder of Red Ventures, Rick Elias as a mentor and an inspiration to me. And I was telling you about the culture and how the culture got really negative and ambush. He's the only person who's ever put money into the company other than me and Nick and Chris's 100K. And you did this deal. We flew out to Charlotte to meet with him. And we took our whole management team with us. And he's like this fancy dinner. And he comes in and he's like, how's the temperature of the company right now? Like, how are people feeling? How are people doing this? And it was a very innocent question. There was something about the way that”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was off. I don't think people want to buy direct to consumer rubber gloves. I just don't think it's a thing because my waypoints taught me that nobody clicked on the ads I ran. It could be, you know, I was testing the wrong things on my waypoints. It could be my execution wasn't where I'd like to be. But then based on the response, you kind of start that cycle over. And again, I'm not sure that any of this is super original. The idea behind it is language matters. The approach matters. The words matter. And it's about learning and growth of the people and of the process and not about must hit this goal at all costs. And we're trying to make it fun and enjoyable in a play orientation for building businesses and entrepreneurship and not like life at all costs has to be put in this direction.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The narrative starts to shape around that. Why did that happen? What's next? And we said, you know what? Let's pull all the emotion out of accounting. Accounting is just what happened. Tell me the facts. Tell me exactly. And the facts could be, we missed this number by this. We beat this by this. Accounting, we realized and we started doing it in meetings, it's like a five to ten minute process because there's just no story. There's no narrative. There's no nothing attached to it. You just go, this, we thought this, this would happen. And then the response is a much more interesting conversation. Okay, what can we learn from this? Oh, you know what? We're like pretty bad at setting goals as it relates to how many creative we can build in this much time. We're pretty bad at setting goals around X or Y. Maybe we didn't actually miss the mark. We're just not good at actually setting the goals, right? Or, you know what? I don't think we have the right people who can do this. So the response is a separate activity where you start to think about it. And the response can range can tie you back into any of the three buckets. So you can say, you know what? I think our desired future.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or I'm like, I just cussle. I just get it done. And we go, neither of those quite satisfied us. And we said, okay, there's a two by two here. And there's like hustle on one vector, yes, no. And then there's rigor like, you know, are you being analytical? Yes, no. And we actually use it as a coaching technique internally, which is like, hey, you're really good at analyzing, but when it comes to getting stuff done, you need some work or you're really good at hustling, but we need you to be a little bit more analytical. And we think that the best entrepreneurs do both of those together, right? So they're looking at numbers, they're reacting, they're constantly going through their own version of this, and that's the way you execute. And you try to accomplish those waypoints. And then the last part of the loop is accounting and response. And so counting, there are a couple interesting things we learned, accounting is separate from response. Because think about what typically happens in an organization is I ran my waypoints. I didn't prove the thing out I thought I would prove out or the numbers didn't come the way they would wanted them to. Immediately, if you're an executive or your person,”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write your score, whatever. Go through this whole process. Essays, get your recommendations, and then you get into business school or not. This is much more of a, I don't know exactly what's going to happen. So then the way you set goals is much more about either hypotheses you have, doubts you have, which is an interesting one. Like, I'm not sure that people will buy this product. Let me launch an ad campaign to see if people will buy it, or I'm not sure that the content's going to get that in. Let me launch five of these things to get content. And it tries to really engender that beginner's mind, right? Sometimes we call it learning leverages goals. So learning leverage means what can teach me the most in this moment about what I'm trying to figure out. There's some prioritization again, but generally you're operating less from a, I must hit this metric or 0.7 of this metric and more of where do I need to get to the next step and what's the progress that I'm going to get as it relates to that. Then what do you do? So you set that all up. Then you do what we call entrepreneurial rigor. And this was like a learning we had after a long time, which people would say, I'm either really rigorous and analytical and I analyze everything and I come.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we are, and all of us kind of go through that sometimes where we have a bad situation, we didn't get in the college we want to eventually, then we get, okay, we're gonna accept this. And now what? Now what do we do, right? So it's kind of like trying to make that a real system or process. That's sort of the basics. Okay, here's where we are today. Here's where we'd like to be. And then we have this thing that we call waypoints. And it's a sailing analogy. I'm not a sailor, but somebody taught this to me. And it's the idea, this is where it's like a little different than OKRs is when you're sailing, apparently, I'm not a sailor, you don't just say, I'm going to go from here to India. You go like to get to India, first I need to figure out how to get to Hawaii. And so I'm going to actually, my waypoint is next. I'm going to put my degrees in this thing. I'm going to get to Hawaii. Then from Hawaii, I'm going to look at where the best place to go is. I'm not necessarily going to go to Japan. I might go down to the Tahiti or whatever. Then I'm like, you're sailing around the world. And that's, we think that's more similar to the process of building a business than OKRs. OK, ours are kind of like getting into business school. There's a checklist. Do your Gmath.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you talk, and I just did it. I just got you excited about my vision of an organization. And then current reality, you're like, Jesse, you're not, you know, you didn't do reviews for people. Five people are waiting on their reviews. What the hell, right? And part of current reality, the challenge of it is, first of all, seeing it clearly and not with rose colored glasses or not seeing what you want to see, but what's actually there, which I struggle with. And then the other part, and this is a really interesting one, is accepting the current reality. And so what acceptance means, what do we do when, okay, man, our numbers desired future state was 50% revenue growth or whatever, and now it's 25%. We try to explain it. We try to blame. We go to these negative places, which is very common. Oh, it must have been because of these three things happened. And, you know what? Honestly, if you just think about it, and this gets very sort of meditation, whatever, mindful, it's just what reality is in this moment. This is the number. This is actually what happened. And oftentimes we don't think you can do the desired future chain until you're accepting what is here and just fully, okay, this.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to have an operating, if you want that, you have to have an operating system that supports that. And so it starts with this idea of what's our desired future state? What do we want in the future? And that's not uncommon. And we give this example of JFK saying, we want to put a man on the moon. It's like motivating, exciting thing that people want. But it's not a thing you have to do or you should do. And you often hear the words entrepreneurs and business, we should really get this launched or we should really become the highest market share. No, no, no. It's not the thing you have to do or you should do or you must do or the world ends. It's something you really want. It's coming from desire and it's ideally coming from a play place or actually helping people in some way. So that's what it starts with. That's the desired future state. That part most people get, but it's disconnected from today's reality. It doesn't have to be what today sits. And then the next point is there's this idea of current reality. And this is a really hard one. This is actually one of my biggest personal development challenges. I'm the guy who can do desired future state all day.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, I don't know that it's possible to be clear Bill Gates talks about himself as being a terror when he was building the biggest company in the world, right? Uber, we've heard stories like there are other stories like Red Ventures where I think they're truly they have a”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which we'd been using, and we said, you know, gosh, these things, there's two issues with them we didn't like in particular, and most of the goal setting processes and systems. We said they seem very fear-oriented. They just felt like you got to set this arbitrary goal out there and you're going to rush, rush, rush to hit it and it's got to be a big jump up. And if I don't hit it, oh gosh, you know, that's not a good thing. And the other thing we didn't like about it was it tends to, it's to us at least, it seemed like way better for a business you understand and know to go, I can improve conversion by 20%, but entrepreneurial ventures, you don't exactly know what's going to happen. And so the motivation behind the loop is can you build an organization and a culture that gets all the benefits of entrepreneurial thinking and approach, speed, ambition, creativity, problem solving, tenacity, all these amazing things, and mitigates the things that tend to make humans lives not fun, the fear of fundraising, the failure of someone getting.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made some money, you sold a part of your company, and now you're just, you don't feel scared anymore. And so you're struggling with what motivates you and kind of went through this whole process. And the context versus content idea is it's sort of like from where are you doing it? And, you know, there's people who are mission-driven cancer curing companies, but if they wake up every morning and they're coming from a place of fear or they're worried about how they show up in the trades or how much money they're going to make, you'll hear that they're not happy, their cultures are not happy. On the flip of that, you'll hear of like insurance brokerage or some random commodity business isn't sexy, doesn't have a great mission, but the people doing it, the founder especially, is coming from a place of wanting to make his employees lives great and wanting to help people get better in their careers or truly wanting to help this customers. And those businesses are flourishing cultures and all the great things. And so that's the concept of context versus content from where are you coming. And a lot of the paradigm of conscious leadership is just starting to first notice in one moment you're feeling fear, in one moment you're feeling like you want to help an empathy. And we looked at, okay.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And other people, and it tends to run out. It's not a non renewable resource. It's the common thing where someone goes, I got my number, then you get to your number and you go, oh, no, now I want that other number because I was scared. Now I'm here and I sort of run out of motivation. And love and empathy and play in genius tend to be renewable and they tend not to leave an aggregate. They tend to lift people up as you do them. And so we start learning about this and kind of had this moment where we were like, oh my God, we've been more or less totally fear motivated for a very long time. And no wonder the culture, no wonder everyone feels negatively. And the other concept I tie into this is the concept of context versus content. And this is just another paradigm, which is like, oftentimes really bright people, especially go, oh, do I like healthcare? Do I like marketing services? Do I like, and I got to this point personally where I was like, I don't like marketing services. Why did I start a business like this? And I'm not motivated to keep doing it. With the help of my coach, email me say, like, you were fear motivated.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first concept was types of motivation. And there's these five types of motivation according to this paradigm. And it's fear, extrinsic, intrinsic, play or genius, and then like empathy or love. And that's more about the human experience, not about a person individually. And these are all, again, these are fractal. So we might feel these, all five of them in any given day for given different things that are going on. And in general, we're motivated by them, right? And you think about fear motivation as like a chip on someone's shoulder. I'm not great enough. I'm going to go conquer the world. And you think of Empany Love as like Mother Teresa. I'm going to make everyone's life a little easier, extrinsic as money, titles, intrinsic as my own thing, playing genius. I think of like Buffett where it's like, oh, I just love what I'm doing. I'm enjoying it. And they talk about fear. They're all effective forms of motivation, by the way. And there's nothing better than worse. Fear tends to leave a negative residue on your.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me talk a little bit about why we built it, because I think that's a very important piece of backdrop. So we started the business when we were 25 in the first few years, like most businesses, it was really fun. And then the business actually had real revenues in EBITDA. And then we realized we were waking up more often than not shit scared that somehow the Golden Goose was going to go away. And then we said, you know what? We thought we wanted to build something long-term in cash flow, but like, let's just sell it. Like, let's just get this thing in an exit. We grew it really fast. Glassdoor started popping up with very negative things about the culture. My wife was like, what's up, dude? You don't seem that happy doing this anymore. And we really got to the point where we said, man, we're not enjoying this. And our culture is not great. People don't like the culture. And this is a very common entrepreneur refrain, especially in the first business. And so we started working with a coach and we got very, we said, what's going on here? And there was a few things. We started doing this thing in the conscious leadership program. There's this book, the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, which has been pretty life-changing for me. And I'll just share a couple of the concepts and then talk about the loop.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't match the ultimate kind of economics. They're much more built for the venture returns that they could generate by getting big fast, which is all great in today's economy, in today's world, but in a more challenging world, I think it becomes very tough on those businesses.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As many times over would have saved us from making those mistakes. The amount of reps that those people have seen about building businesses, they're very valuable. Another one that was negative is it's really nice to be running your own show. It's kind of sad sometimes that nobody else cares about your business except for you. Literally no one else matters. It doesn't matter to them if anything happens to that or not, maybe your customers, but you have no investors. You have no person who's going, hey, how's it going, guys? Like, let me figure out what's happening with your business. I think the other thing I think about with more of my pure investor hat on is again, there's just a lot of businesses being capitalized that don't have sustainable moats, especially in these direct-to-consumer segments. Where at scale, you look at the business and you go, man, you're going to raise $200,000, $300, $400 million. Uber, I get. I get that it created an immense amount of value that could only be built in one wave through speed and scale and all that stuff. But how does a business that sells generic medicine to people maintain that advantage in a 10-year horizon? I don't think it's possible. So I think the ways a lot of these businesses are capitalized.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can make a dollar a month in profit or cash flow. If you can hire a certain number of people, if you can hit the units you want, you get to build the way you want it and you get this really deep execution ability and problem solving orientation that can take you very far away. And it's your show. You get to do whatever you want and you get to take the business in the direction you want it. And if you want to try something different, you can try something different. And it's fun. I do think there's meaningful trade-offs, right? I think there are certain businesses like Uber or maybe a biotech business where There is a true value in the capital getting you to a point of either like a marketplace that get that scale is going to be the ultimate outcome winner or there's just something so capital intense that there's no way you could bootstrap you just need that money you need that cash to do it i think one thing we struggled with i think we made a lot of mistakes early on we've been every type of incorporation type we've been a c-corp we've been an ls we've been an s corp like just silly things like that that i think having vcs having people who've built business”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asking your customers to pay up front, just things that can keep you alive in the cash flow concept and learning it very early is super, super important and being able to figure those things out. And I think the nice thing about”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out a way to sell 12,000 of those. And to us, that's a big part of the culture early on, which is like, man, you learn the energies of all these things very quickly to understand instead of talking to me about your investor deck and how many investors you're going to talk to, because that's the metrics everyone typically talks about. I go, talk to me about your unit sold math. What's your plan to get to 12,000 a month? And I'm passionate about this because not because I think there's anything wrong with venture funding, but I think it's it gets a lot of airtime relative to this other path that I think there's a lot of potential for. And so a lot of entrepreneurs will go, yeah, I had my whole pipeline of 100 investors and this and that. And I go, just do that. Just apply that same energy to 12,000 units a month math. They'll come back and go, wow, I did that. And dude, I have a path. I don't need, you know, investor money. I'm going to go do it this way. The age-old cash is king mindset. And I think being creative and thoughtful about that, whether it's using credit cards because that's a deferred cash liability. I have talked earlier about negative working capital, like things that can provide you cash today.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You we've shifted a lot of the math and the thinking here. So, one is we say your customers are your investors. Very simple. They're the people paying and let's solve for exactly what they need, which I think all these things have to be taken in the middle. If you go too hard on that, you become too much of a services business. If you go too far in the other direction, you're just building random stuff they don't want. You have to find that happy medium between them. And there are some compromises you would make. I think that's a really important one. The other one that we do is my favorite one is the unit soul. I call it a unit sold math. And with the unit sold math is you come to me and you say to get the basic operation running, I probably need about $50,000 a month. And let's assume you're not raising any money. How many of whatever you're doing do you need to sell minus the gross profit to get to 50,000? Okay, you're Hawking supplements for strength training or whatever, 50 bucks a bottle and you make $40 every bottle and you need $50,000. Okay, now by hook or by crook, by any way you can, right?”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of it, you know, one thing I also want to talk about bootstrapping, which is very personal, we had set ourselves up with the cushiest cushions of life if this didn't go well. And so I don't want to be the like hustle porn, yo, you got to go. We went to Wharton. I worked at McKinsey. Then I worked at Goldman Sachs. And then I said, you know what? The worst case scenario is I'm going to apply to business school in a few years if this doesn't go anywhere. And I'll probably get some insane, very high paying job that I'll be lucky and grateful to have. So yes, I'm okay charging $50,000 on some American Express. It would be inconvenient if that happens, but it wasn't a life and death thing for us. Another version of that I say that is like, I think most people who want to be entrepreneurs, they start thinking about it 10 years before they become an entrepreneur. In my case, I had my dad when I was 15, right? And so by the time I was 25, I was ready. And people go, man, Jesse, you're such a natural. No, I just started thinking about it when I was 15. You might start thinking about when you're 25. And by the time you're 35, you'll have enough savings. You'll have whatever. And then that'll be the right time.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think there's this, it's not just ownership in the equity sense, but there's ownership in the like whose show is this and how is it going to run that I think as early as you can try to figure it out and sometimes you can start a whole business and go down that path and the second one you go okay this one I want to I want to own I want to be the person running the show and in charge but I think people who bootstrap for like to maintain more of the cap table or vice versa if that's not the reason it has to be something that you truly want and you're willing to go through that orientation so for us it was We want to do this a long time If you make one dollar of profit a month or cash flow in the case of like Bezos' orientation, you can exist forever. And that for us was important. We want to exist forever. We don't want the pressure of burning tons of cash and being dependent on the kindness of strangers for the next round of our funding. That was just very important to us. And then, you know, we put up whatever money we had and let our credit scores drop down to 800 from 800 to like 650 or whatever. And we charge up a lot on our credit cards.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it has to be like what's driving you, and what are you solving for? For me, it was like, I want to do this for a long time. I don't know exactly what business I'm going to be in. And I don't care. I want to live every day. I want to solve problems. I want to work with great people. And I want to do it for as long as I can. And for me, that was the motivating thing of like, I'm going to bootstrap. Why would I go raise money? Yes, I'm sure I could put together a deck and pitch someone and they would give me money. But why am I going to go do that when I don't want to go on that path? And I think that path starts, I always tell founders, it starts probably after your angel round. You could probably raise money from a bunch of individuals and still go bootstrapped. Once you start taking institutional money, their job, not in a bad way, is to get a return on that capital for their investors. You got to stay on that trajectory to go to an outcome and to exit. And I don't think, by the way, there's anything wrong with them. In fact, I think VCs are amazing at building businesses. I think they can get you faster, better. But typically that ends with some kind of an outcome for everybody, including yourself. And that has to be something you want. And it might be public. You might be a public CEO.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And playing that they all have decided they're going to do. And to me, that's the mode of executive that I get excited about too from an entrepreneurial perspective and think about investing in because it's someone who can talk about like a CEO of a company who I ask them CAC, maybe they know it, is your CAC driven by click-through rate? And they start to show that they lack the ability to go into that. I'm like, hold on a second. I'm not sure I'm going to invest in you because I want someone who can, they don't live in the bone, but if they need to get to the bone, they can quickly get there and they quickly understand it. So let's switch gears to talk about bootstrapping. I think a lot of it starts with what you want. I think there's at least two reasons people start businesses. One is like you have this idea and you just want it to exist in the world and it's the only thing you care about is this idea and some version of it existing. And then there's others that are really like the idea of starting a business is very exciting. You're just excited by business and entrepreneurs. But the first thing is like bootstrapping is to me a very personal choice.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last thing to add on to the previous thing, and it kind of relates to this question of the way we had a point of view and around businesses and executives, there's a certain type of executive, and there's kind of this funny buffetism, right, where he says, I want to invest in a business any idiot can run because eventually an idiot will run it. And there's these incredible franchise, like visa, right? Like, man, I don't know anyone at Visa. I'm not saying they're bad executives, but like that is a fantastic business. And there's a lot of command and control and like my reports. I'm going to make sure my reports do this. And that's sort of the traditional kind of what you think of as big corporate businesses. And then there's this other one, which is like, I can go to the bone anytime I want because I can dive in deep businesses like Amazon, like the senior people there could get into the innards of these things you and I are talking about any day of the week if they wanted to I met the president of Disney plus and I kid you not the guy has 1300 people responding to him he went toe to toe with me in a conversation about Facebook attribution how does a guy who has 1300 reports it's just a certain way of thinking”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Haven't even tried, it's like the base base VC playbook, standard big market, whatever, and then believing that there's a lot of marketing alpha in their business.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit economics is have they already built some of these unique moats? And typically, by the way, that shows up, by the way, is in some insane LTV to CAC, right? Or some Max Trik where you're like, wow, they're getting five to one economics or six to one. And you go and they go, oh, wow, they've got this huge little SEO community of like 200,000 people that are constantly coming in. And yes, they can blend down their Facebook costs dramatically or wow. Their email is really compelling. Oftentimes that stuff will show up economically, but you want to make sure it's consistent. It's not just they're really good at Facebook ad buying because as those things scale, you're going to want to see the ability to have multiple things that blend to superior economics over time. It plays well in two directions. One, you can spend more on marketing and scale. The other one is you can actually put more into your product and actually improve. If you're selling medication or whatever, you can get the formula even better. You can do other things with it. So I'll spend a lot of time on is this the best their economics will ever get? Or do I actually think they're already pretty good at this?”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is like everyone knows that they have this problem. Like, I know my teeth are a little crooked. Ooh, I like that a lot, right? I can build very engaging, creative that's going to catch people's attention to drive up interest, you know, in this dynamic. I talked about the numbers in a campaign. 10 million people, 1% of them click. It's oftentimes very driven by the psychology of impulse. And oh, okay, yeah, I've been meaning to get that done. You don't need to convince me that I have that problem. Okay, I'm going to click on that. Oh, there's a funnel. Well, I got to like go either go into a center or actually do a home kit. If you get really great at that, there's a lot of alpha ability in building that out. And then the product is like 2Gs, which is much cheaper than the competitor Invisalign, all in economics of customer acquisition can be 15, 20%. It's very believable that that's the case. And then I'm like, yes, I get this and it makes sense. And then the APM, I think over time can get better and better in those businesses. It can be in every different channel. The other thing I'll look for, the kind of it's a little bit talent, a little.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The place I typically will start would be maybe not surprising, like understanding the economics of the business. And by that I mean, what's the revenue? What's the gross margins? What's the cycle of selling this thing? How challenging is it? It's all these things that kind of happen after the click, if you will, to try to understand how big of a problem is this for people and what do the economics look like when you get it right. And so there's some of the common lenses of what's the actual value prop? Is it a big market, the standard stuff? But then the next step is, okay, what are the economics of this business? And how much does it recur? What are the gross margins associated with it? And kind of go through that economic thing to understand how challenging will it be for them to get from a person looking at this all the way to actually purchasing this? And then what does it look like if they're successful? If you believe that someone can be successful in doing that, an example of business I did invest in, it's like a competitor smile direct club called Candid. It's one of the first angel investments I made in the Ampush journey. And I was like, oh.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What other ways can I serve that customer trying to make a purchase decision to allow them to get that? That's a win for everybody, by the way. The customer gets a better experience, aggregator gets paid, and the person gets a customer. Generally, this category is called affiliate, affiliate has some negative connotations associated with it. But generally, affiliate will be anywhere from 15 to 25% of the mix of a scaled marketing direct response campaign.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In one of those spaces, especially early on because they're fixed price and because they already get volume of customers, they're a really good place to start because there's no variable cost, there's almost no risk as long as your economics work on your side of the revenue event. I think in every vertical, you're going to see versions of that. Let me help the consumer make a decision and then God get paid by the company. And Google's pretty good about managing that. And even customers are pretty smart. Like if they go to something and they have, this is so biased, it doesn't make any sense versus the people who keep it puritan to do better in that realm. And aggregators take all kinds of flavors. Like you'll see some that they really are just editorial articles and they make money on the back end of that. You'll see you mentioned thumbtack where they really want to help the customer from end to end. There's a lot of creativity in that world. At the end of the day, there's a customer who wants or needs something and has some challenge and there's like businesses who provide it. Yes, Facebook is this massive non-verticalized but has this ability to show the person the right messages, the right places at the right time. But then there's so many different onion layers of”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So generally speaking, those businesses are trying to help a customer navigate a purchase decision. If I'm a, what credit card do I get for this or if I want to maximize my points? And typically most of the source of their traffic is non-paid, partly because of the way the economics work. They want to write really good content, build calculators, all these tools so that you can come on the site and get value and you're getting picked up through SEO, through organic search, which is sort of a fixed investment, but no incremental cost every time you come on, right? And then I'll go into your wallet. I'll read a different bunch of different articles, and then I'll go, oh, yeah, this credit card based on I have two kids. I live in the Midwest, whatever, that's the right credit card for me. Click through and buy it. And then the credit card companies say American Express will pay NerdWallet a bounty every time they attribute the customer back. So it's a form of performance marketing where they start as a source and it exists in almost every vertical. And so those businesses, I think if you're a brand.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 50,000 people have heard of them, they actually are the best economic trade off. And by the way, this is all happening on Facebook, Instagram, Snap. So it's not like these are channels per se, but they're almost a tactic inside of the channel. You asked about the nerdwalls. That's a massive business. It's a really, a lot of what Red Ventures does is buying those businesses”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Orchestrated by third companies that are doing this, but it's like Shopify meets some of the 301 influencer stuff where these people are launching their own stores or even temporary stores, right? Or this live TV shopping stuff. Part of your question is like, what exists out there? Well, there's SaaS companies that are powering the recruiting, almost like an applicant tracking system. They'll power the recruiting of them, the payment of them. So that's a whole segment. There's probably three or four really good companies doing SaaS stuff there. their services businesses that will help you recruit it there. There's talent agencies that are now involved in this. So there's an entire ecosystem coming up in and around this. You know, they're all mostly micro influencers. One of the crazy things we learned early on was that there isn't a correlation necessarily with scale and size and ability to actually convert economically. And in some ways, there's like money ball, right? Where you go, I don't want to pay snoop dogs fee or whatever to run a campaign from his thing. It's just too expensive and it doesn't back out. But some niche person who you and I have never heard of.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So influencer 101 was I'm going to pay someone a fixed fee, they're going to write an Instagram post and they're going to say buy my product. 201 for influencer was, hey, influencer, record a bunch of different ads for me and I'm going to run ads from my handle. Influencer 301 is I'm going to take your handle and I'm going to run media from you. So I actually have a separate voice in the marketplace that's beyond my own brand. I have some woman from the bachelor or whatever. And she's going to have her own creative talking about how great my product is. We apply the prowess of Ampush's media rigor and all that to like an ad campaign coming from whoever whatever Kelly so-and-so's name. And we're able to get massive scale. They're incremental to what we're doing with the brands and stuff like that. But the 401 and the 501 is like, we've seen some of this in the past with the Kylie Jenner stuff. I think China is the only place I go to look when I try to understand this. Like in China, there's literally entire firms that they recruit influencers. Influencers have their own product lines. And it's all.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's when you're on Hulu. Hulu has a self-serve ad platform now. And so if you have the ad version of Hulu in between your random episodes of Seinfeld or whatever, you'll have ads that'll pop up for D2C brands or for others. And you can actually upload a video creative, serve it there, and pay the way you would run a Facebook or Google campaign. And because the Vanity URL will say fooji.com forward slash Hulu, there's actually a really easy ability to tie it back to what you're spending there. And we've heard lots of positive things about it in the marketplace. That's a very meaningful frontier. We actually do a lot with this, and it's growing fast and it's big. It's not a channel so much as a how, I guess I would call it in my little thing as influencer stuff. And I think influencers in the top of the first inning.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TikTok is an obvious one. It reminds me of Facebook in the early days. I mean, there's going to be something big there. There's almost no question in my mind about that. They're very early, and so it's going to take some time. And there's a little bit in this space we learned it the hard way a few times of that adage of pioneers get slaughtered and settlers get rich. So there's no reason to be the first oftentimes. It's actually better to be second or third and let somebody else go through all that rigor rule and then come in and just build a better mousetrap and these specific channels, the CCTV or DRTV, I think is going to be a beast. Like it's going to be a big, big thing.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the market we see, is what's your CAC? And one telltale sign again of someone who's not yet sophisticated enough, they'll go, Oh, it's 50 bucks. Well, hold on. The sophisticated answer will go, well, we have five. We know our highest quality people, the people who say refer remittance business we work with, well, the people who have family everywhere and they send money every week, we'll pay $300 for those guys, right? And then the next level, we pay $200 for these types of these other people. We only pay $15 for because they use us once for a transaction, they never come back.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think my depth is much lower in retention. I think what we've seen there learned, some of it is the old adage of great products, great services, people stick around, and that matters a lot. I think the best companies think a lot about the natural orientation of a customer. Everything we've talked about goes back to customer centricity in some way or other. But they go, if you email someone every day and that's not the natural cadence they need your product or service, it's spam. If you never email them, they're going to forget you exist. If you're never interacting with them. So I think the best companies think about what's the natural interaction that happens with a customer and they put a little bit of extra pizzazz or fuel against that to keep the person engaged and keep them going. The other thing is, and this goes below back again, I'm a hammer here looking at a nail, but like people who segment their customers to understand, there are some customers who never leave you or keep spending more with you every month. How did you acquire those? Who are they? Let's actually, you know, one of the funny examples.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, how do we and you think about the funnel for driver is insane, right? First, you have to sign up, then they contact you, then they like run a background check on you, then you have to get your car checked, then you have to actually start driving, and then they have to keep you driving. And so I think the level of rigor and the experimentation at every little piece of that kind of blew our minds, right? We were able to connect things like, you know, amount of driving the person did or even amount of effective customer demand they drove because of incremental supply to the specific ad creatives that we were running. And that kind of rigor, you don't see it that often.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We worked with Uber for a long time and did a lot of driver acquisition for them. And that was a fascinating one. It made me realize how much of our business was the bottom of the funnel in activation versus traditional marketing. They were a huge customer of ours was a huge badge of honor, right, to work with them. And I get into every Uber I got into and I go, how did you hear about Uber? And they go, my cousin, my nephew, my uncle, my best friend. And I was like, we're spending like tens of millions of dollars on this. And then I realized I was asking the wrong question. Then I started asking same question. Where did you hear about it? I said the same answer. I said, where'd you sign up for Uber? Oh, Facebook. Oh, I did that on Facebook. And I was like, yes, like that's an ad from us. And I think what they did that was really well was Uber because of the immense talent and rigor there. We talk about a long funnel in building an advantage in that funnel. They would test and measure in every little piece of it. Where did that person come from? What city was running? And was it better to text message them once they sign up or better to call them?”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And individually, the economics did not make sense for either of the first two when they combined them, the economics were like a six acts. And you just maybe it's a slightly older demo they're going after. It's like, oh, they heard on the radio. Then it's like, how many impressions did you serve to the person before they did it? But I think the biggest underpinning of all this stuff is be very open-minded. Be very curious, and constantly experiment and never tell yourself that did not work. Again, we would change the language to say we were not able to make that work or it didn't work for us, right? Because the thing works. Somebody is spending money on it and doing it. And so I think for all those other channels, I think DRTV is going to be compelling. Again, the big things that matter are like reach. Can you get to a lot of people at scale? Can you measure effectively? One reason DRTV is compelling is because of that vanity URL. So the fact that you can say, you know, same thing with podcasts, like you can really get to the specifics of that and then can you build this kind of analytical and testing framework on top of it? And from those things then on.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the easiest hack for it, honestly, is just look at what people are doing where and what's working. And by the way, that could be a reason to do it there. It could also be a reason to not try to sell auto insurance on Google today. You're going to get crushed. So maybe you got to figure out a different who, what, when, where for Facebook. The other big thing that you'll see is there's a techification of old world channels. So there's this company called Pebble Post and they let you run a direct mail campaign like it's a Facebook campaign. So you can log in, you can make your creative, you can decide what kind of addresses you want to send it to.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They tend to be a leading platform online education and search or insurance and search is amazing. I'm looking for auto insurance. I want to buy it. And so thinking about product channel fit is a really important concept broadly.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple interesting trends I'd highlight. One is always experiment with everything. People always go, Oh, I tried that. Hey, have you ever tried this? I tried that. Didn't work. We try to train people to say, last time I tried that when I did it, it didn't work. It's back in the bottom of the pipeline. I'm going to try it. And I'll give you a very specific example, which is kind of crazy. Snapchat when it first came out was not great in terms of their marketing. And then Instagram stole stories. Instagram made stories creative work and made that thing work. Now someone this year literally inside of Ampush, I heard this as like a bullet point somewhere, hey, we took what we were doing on Instagram. We tried it on Snapchat stories and it's crushing it. And you go, wow, Snapchat, it's the fastest growing channel for us right now as an organization, right? And so constantly test and experiment everything. And there's also, you know, we didn't talk about product channel fit, which I think is another important thing, which is some products and some things are just better for certain channels than others. Gaming tends to work on the Snapchats and even Facebook in the early days.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Orientation. And that's kind of what we think to look for, but just for the founders and everyone out there, those people are not, that's not like an engineer or even a product manager. The world is not as developed yet in that talent orientation so that those things exist. And so part of it is you'd have to be willing to create that or just recognize that that's what's out there today and that people need to learn to get there.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Developers, the doers of the actual marketing. So there's like these centers of we call them marketing leads or whatever growth marketing leads, but they're really doing the day-to-day of that stuff, but they're surrounded by the people who are helping them execute those things and have a scaled organization. We've talked about how this is a new discipline. And I think that's just an important thing for people to recognize. I think what you tend to see in the world is you see there's a lot of, I'll call them hand wavy brand marketing. And it is not meant to be negative towards them. It's just they're not the people who are going to run rigorous analytical Facebook campaigns. They're the ones who think of big ideas. There's a lot of hustlers in this space, which again, I don't mean negatively. I just mean they're freaking creative people who come up with good ideas, but they're not particularly rigorous. And now there's like we call the ampush breed that every phase of growth at DoorDash is run by a former ampush person to give you a perspective, right? And they're the people who combine a little bit of hustle, but really they're analytically rigorous people who get into this experimenting and testing.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a great organization is like you've got a CMO ideally who is strategic who can look forward, who can tell the story, you can do all those things, but also is pretty analytical and can think about numbers. And if they're not, they certainly have surrounded themselves with another person who's highly analytical at a senior level, who can drive those things to leadership then breaks down into there might be stuff like PR comms or other things, but really the head of growth is this person who we think of them as they look like a VPN investment bank or an engagement manager at a McKinsey type place. They're very strategic. They're very rigorous. They're very comfortable with numbers. And they really can understand how the pieces fit together to be able to build and scale this thing. And they have a system and a paradigm that they built. And then underneath them, it depends a little bit on the business. Sometimes people do it by the major product lines. Sometimes they do it by channels. But there's some form of like the actual marketing output that's going out and then surrounding those groups is like designers, web.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a little bit of our own biases, but we see a lot of organizations that do it because their investors want them to do it or because they want to tell a story. And then literally in two years, they'll call us back and say, oh gosh, like this isn't working and I need more help. And I think the ones, the Amazons of the world, some of the best companies build these organizations like critical functions in their thing and those are really strong. But there's a lot of businesses that sort of do it to check the box. What does it look like? I think early days It's ahead of growth and maybe some consultants someone to analyze numbers and data someone who can do the creative stuff and maybe a web developer who can make the experimentation faster. One thing that we always recommend is like engineering and product, you have to create some kind of a sidecar for marketing. Otherwise their stuff gets deprioritized underneath the core product stuff and you're not able to make marketing go as fast. An early team could just be like ahead of growth, 50% designer, 50% analyst type person at scale.”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team and stuff in a second, but we'll say, oh, now you're like a real brand. Now actually, you need scale, and now you could go find yourself the CMO of blah, blah, blah. And yeah, maybe you should have a feel-good billboard. And, you know, you should do these things that are going to really get you on the map in a more serious way. And your marketing budget's going to head to 100 and your top line is going to head to 300 or more. And you want to be thinking about stuff like attribution, brand messaging, and really going to the next level with a strong performance marketing engine at the core of it and a strong funnel and analytics and all the things we've talked about already today at the most core around what you're doing. So that's progression that we would say, you know, I think around that 30 or 40 million, if you're serious about building your own performance marketing organization, I think throughout that entire journey, having a really strong kind of head of growth type person, even with third parties or not, I think if you're serious about building a performance marketing organization, I think you start building it and you're sort of at the end of an ambush lifecycle of 20 or 30 million in spend. Often I say serious because we”
2021-04-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Pujji - A Primer on Performance Marketing - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 27] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source