YouSaid · the spoken record

Kieran Flanagan

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-08-10
most recent: 2022-08-10
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

“One of the things when I talk to founders in B2B, every founder now tells me who are doing product like growth, oh, the thing we really want to do is replicate the Canva template model. So what Canva did was they templatized their entire, like everything you can possibly do with a product to create a template for, then they actually created a marketplace so now people can actually create their own templates and you can buy them, which extends the amount of traffic that they can acquire from search. They just execute really, really well in terms of how they build amazing distribution engine. And then I think Stepan, which is a kind of played a move app. I think their game mechanics are really interesting in terms of how they've grown.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have bought, let's say 100. I had a bit of an issue with buying domains at some point. You know the one I nearly was like, oh, this could be a good idea was I bought a remote cal.com. I think it's dropped, so I don't think I have it anymore. And what I was going to create was remote workers because like if you think about it, your community has moved online to some respects. So you don't get the same kind of ability to network with people who are in your industry. So remote workers could have a calendar. They could put in times that they actually want to get matched with people, put in interests, and they will get matched every month with other people who have the same schedule as them because one of the hard things is scheduling, but I never did it.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the more defined it comes, the easier it is for founders to figure out how to leverage it and when to leverage it. So I think what the team is to structure the team, goals of the team, and how it should be aligned with other teams, I think that is the best thing that could happen for it.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The meetings matter, making sure that the person, being proactive about getting that person set up to talk to other people, everything your remote work is on schedule time, we all have to schedule time and put the Zoom link in and actually interact with each other through these kind of video chats. Whereas when you're doing it organically within the office, it's much easier to have these organic conversations with people. So you really have to be proactive about making sure that that person gets time with people and gets to spend time and start to meet people.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customers' data and team, like if you're close to all three things, you're going to be successful, know your customers better than anyone else, know your data than anyone else, and be an advocate for your team better than anyone else.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think how you set them up for success, right? What their structure is, how you make sure you align them with the business and other teams, and how you can be a sponsor of their success.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if anything dies, right? I think it just kind of becomes less effective. You look at paid advertising, I think that's going to become less effective over time because of privacy because of Horizon CPMs. So you look at search. One of my favorite channels, but how that holds up over time with Google decreasing the amount of traffic you can actually get from them. I think if anything died in the last couple of years that came to mind for me, it was like anyone who was trying to market on Clubhouse. But I think for most tactics plateau versus die.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, growing a company is really fucking hard. Founders are amazing people. It really has just home how hard it is to build a company. Because when you've been in HubSpot and I joined when we were 300 people, like we're thousands and thousands of people now, you're kind of like, oh, well, like this is what it's like in a startup. Like they just grow and they become like really successful. Angel Investor has really grounded me in that. Wow, it's just really hard to build a company. Like it's really hard to build something that's really successful. And the founders that do it are inspiring. Like they actually will put all things on the line to actually try to make this company a success. Mostly grounded me in how hard it is. Like grounded me in the things all of the decisions you have to get right and all of the things that have to go your way.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operations, but I mean operations that they'll like build in the project management tool and all of that kind of stuff, I don't enjoy doing it. I don't enjoy doing operations. I don't enjoy doing all of the admin work that comes with managing lots of people. It's part and parcel of the role, but that's not where I'm like, oh, how do I build a great operator model for my team today? I have to force myself to do it.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things we do that is really good, it's our people offs team, it's not me, is we build 100 A plans for people. Because when you come into a new role, you're like, oh, wow, what do I do, right? And especially in remote, actually remote onboarding is a whole other topic like remote work onboard.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I'm going to be honest with you the way we got there is like through lots of friction and fighting and falling out with each other and getting back on side with each other, I would be lying if I said, oh, well, we had this like really amazing playbook. That was the hardest part, I think, of the PLG motion for us is we just miss Willie underestimated how hard it would be for all these teams to start working together. And I think we got there through grinding it out is the way I think about how you get to be a great presenter. You just have to grind it out. And I think that's how we got there. We got there is like we trusted each other. We're okay. We fall in out with each other. And over town, we got to a place where things work much, much better.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go and figure out how we build that solution. Marketers are very solution orientated. Marketers could do a lot better if we ground ourselves in the problem and some do some don't. But I think we're much more solution. Here's the solution. Here's the solution. Here's a solution. And so when you go and start working with growth teams who sit in product or product and engineering teams, marketing are like, here's the five things I need you to do. Oh, well, I've just told the PM, I need you to do these five things. PM has to go to the engineer team, do these five things. That's not how engineering teams want to work. And so you have to start to figure out how do we all speak the same language? Like how should we work together? How do we make sure that we are aligned around the problems?”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into a quick fight I'll give you a couple of my learnings. So, if you ask someone, oh, like what's Karen? Like, one of the things they'll tell you is, oh, well, he was very black and white. This is the right thing. This is the wrong thing. This is how things are. This is how they shouldn't be. And actually in cross team comms, it's not black or white. It's really black and white, right? You actually have to be able to understand both sides of the story. And actually, there's most of the things live in between in the gray. Most of the things live in the fog. And so I never used to dive into the fog. I used to say, wow, you're doing this thing. It's dumb. And then you didn't know all of the reasons that those things existed. That happens across teams. And because you speak different languages, if you're all black and white, then everyone seems like they're doing kind of dumb stuff. The first thing is you have to live in the gray. You have to have the context for why things are the way they are. The second thing is marketing and product speak somewhat different languages. The job of great PMs crystallize problems and then present them to their engineers and their engineers are like, oh, yeah, we believe in this problem. Here's how we think about this problem.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This comes back to how do you build a portfolio across the things at a short term that I can measure and the things that are long term that I can't measure? Because predominantly that's what we're kind of discussing in the long term unmeasurable bucket to do something like that. You have to have very deep conviction. I talked to a friend who recently, I won't give the company her the name. They are building something for three to five years. They don't accept to measure in terms of like how much revenue this is generating for the business. They just have truly deep conviction that if they pull this off, they will actually win within their market some of the things that we've talked about, like community media old and these kind of things. And so you have to have a founder that has deep conviction in terms of how they see the future and not try to kill something because it doesn't immediately show direct attribution to revenue because again, if we tie everything to revenue, then we're all going to do the same stuff. It's not going to differentiate that much and it's hard to build something differentiated when we're all measuring ourselves in the same way.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question. So, again, how you define community? I would tell you most people would say Hubspot has built a really large, vibrant community through our content. But I'll give you like an honest answer. I think we've built a tremendous community, but we have a lot more to build. If you think about community as like our community.havstock.com, like the connections part, where do I go to get connected to others? We've primarily focused on building a community of products. Like how do we build a community around our customers, the people using our tool. I think the thing that we could do better is we have all of these people, millions of people consuming our educational content. We've never tried to build a community of practice, which is how do we build a community around knowledge and connect those people to each other and connect those people, do cohort learn and workshops and live classes. We're doing that much more. So we haven't blended the community, like the connections part with the personal achievement part as well as we could have. So I think that's where we could improve that community of practice around.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think most of the horizontal tools stay horizontal to get mass distribution and they verticalize to monetize. You have a calendar which is applicable to anyone, right? What a great tool, what a great company. They monetize through sales teams or they monetize through different verticals. And so you're getting out their messaging. Like when I go to their website, how do I know this tool is for me? I don't know if that's how those tools grow. They grow like through virality word of mouth, right? You have a small group of people who use that and they start spreading it to other people. I don't know how much their position in, I'm sure it matters, but I don't know how much it truly matters that I go there and I see that this product is for me because I probably onboarded to the product through a referral, through someone sharing a notion with me, through someone doing word of mouth because it has such broad sets of use cases. But the way they monetize when you actually need to go vertical and monetize, then you do need to start to figure out what are the teams that would truly want to use this, whether that's, hey, this is truly great for engineering.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's understanding the value you can deliver, and you have to understand the value you can deliver at scale. And so first of all, you have something intrinsic. Your brand is associated with something that person wants to learn. So the best example I can give you is if you think about the three pillars of community, for the most part, communities are built around personal growth. Like I myself want to get better by joining this community. Then they are around the connections you create. I actually can connect with peers and they make me a better version of myself. And then the third part, which actually is unknown where you can build a motor around your company, is the reputation. Like by doing those things, I actually can achieve something, but I can show people that in a visible way and get some sort of payback from that. I think the companies who win in the future excel at those three things, which is breath, personal knowledge, like how do I create a mass amount of people who can learn things from me, be a better version of themselves. Depth, which is the connections, like how do I get them into smaller groups and make sure that they are connected with people they can learn from?”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intrinsically the opposite of how you would want to grow a community because it actually you need to care about breadth. I need to get thousands or hundreds of thousands of people into my community to be able to actually grow my business in a meaningful way. And so how do I create depth if I have breath? I think in the future we're going to get better tooling to really help us figure out how we can segment our community into different cohorts of depth. Like the toolin is not good and then we will be able to build breadth with better incentives. And I think the cliche is the incentives are coming from the Web3 industry and it's really about ownership, right? In today community gets you maybe better knowledge. It gets you information around the product. It gets you people who are shared interests and hobbies. In the future, it should get you ownership and a stake in that company. And to me, that's how you can start to really build the breadth and it can be a meaningful part of your go-to market. But I think the number of winners in community-led group is small, but they get exponential returns because”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I think it's how you define community. So, we're defining community by like if we include our media mediums in that, it depends what you include in community. If I just include my Slack channel, can I grow my Slack channel to like a million users? That could be a meaningful way of how I grow my business. And that's probably hard to do. But if it includes your events and your media and then all of the people who are in Slack and Discord and stuff. So I think, first of all, it depends how you define it. But I do think you said something important, right? So community to me is like, how do I master bread and depth? And so depth is how do I get a small group of people who want to interact with each other and achieve something and become better in something together, right? The best communities to me are the smaller communities who truly have a passion for something, who are truly trying to learn something, and they can connect me with each other and learn from each other and do those things. And so community-led growth, which is like, oh, a community is going to be the way we grow our business in the future. So we'll grow our community and then we'll have people from our community go and use our products and services.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a product light growth used to be the thing that I think was really hard to define when you went to certain companies. I think it's actually much more defined now. Community-led growth, even just speaking to companies or advising companies, even just having commonalities of what's included in community does not exist. To me, when I think about community for the most part, I think about, oh, I go create, I can't connect with other people and I discuss things with them. Then you go to another company and it's like, well, it's anyone who's in our email list, anyone who's on our Twitter following, and you're like, okay, so it's just everything. And I think community is your tribe. It is like the group of people who believe in the things that you do and they are engaged with you in some meaningful way. We're going to have to define that over time because at the moment, to me, that is like, well, I've created an account and I'm starting to interact with people, but they believe in the things that you believe in and they are starting to engage with you in a meaningful way. But that definition does not, I don't think, clearly exist.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do the HASA deal based upon metrics, we did not pitch the board and say, Oh, these are all the kind of cool metrics, it's a bet on how we want to be seen within the future, how we want to build our audience in the future. So I think there is, but I think that is a real struggle for most brands. I think most brands are baked in how does every single action you take get me some amount of pennies, dollars, and customers.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think data has been the best and worst thing to happen to marketing. Why best? Well, marketers used to stuck doing crap stuff because no one wanted to give them anything good to do because they couldn't figure out if it actually created any real revenue. Like marketing wanted a seat at the revenue table be taken seriously. But hey, how do we actually show the value of the things I do? Over time, we got better data, but then we become so focused on that that we just try to iterate a way to marginal gains. Oh, I have to show every single piece of content. Every single thing I do has to actually result in some sort of revenue for the business. And so now everyone is coming into the middle because if we do that, we all end up doing the same stuff. I think creativity and brand is how you build a big company in the future. Founders who can truly see that they want to invest in something that will make me differentiated, that will make me stand out, that will create a larger audience around my brand. And I know that that thing is not going to be unmeasurable. I know that thing is going to be really hard to quantify. We did the hustle deal. We did not.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think great distribution starts with great ideas. The thing that I have learned from the people who I've been immensely impressed with in the hustle is they have great ideas. They are able to find things that are interesting that is not widely covered. And then they are able to have their own spin on things. And so they have their own kind of brand in terms of how they create content around those things. And so they're not just stuck in the middle doing the same thing as everyone else. But then to your point, they also know how to get distribution on their content. Like they think, how do I actually get people to see this? So much great content goes to waste because to your point, we just publish and then we think, hey, like my job is done. Someone will find it and good things will happen.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that is a great point. That is a great point because we underinvest in content. Like mentioned this before, is that we'll spend a million dollars on Facebook campaigns and then outsource our articles for $10 and expect like, why is this content not working? And the Facebook thing is working really well. Well, you're spending $10 an article. So it's first of all, we think in how we think about media, build an environment where creators actually want to work. There's interesting ways that you can build environments that you want creators to work. One of those is like paid well, freedom. I think long term you can talk about things where you have upside on the things.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at his reach compared to any traditional media org's reach, like he has much more reach and he does that because he plugs into the culture. He knows how to instill emotions, whether they are positive or negative on mass scale. And I think that's what brands are trying to do is try to create some sort of emotional connection to their audience. You want it to be positive for the people you're trying to reach and not care too much, but not get swayed by the negative. Like sometimes the negative is not something to actually not stop doing things.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Elon Musk, for all the things he's done, he's also probably one of the better examples of a brand who is willing to do edgy things in a way that does not alienate his tribe, actually makes his tribe want to embrace him even more. They're fanatical fans of everything he does.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Educational content to get them to engage with me each day, every week. To me, that's the whole kind of discussion around why are you seeing all of these tech companies moving much more into media? It's because we want to be ever present within our consumers' life.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's really challenging. For me, even though I said companies shouldn't sit in the middle, I don't disagree with why it happens because you have a large market that you were trying to market to and you don't want to alienate them with such point of views that are like half of my audience agree and disagree with that. But I think you can do it in a way where it's not alienating to your audience, but it is engaging to your audience. For me, every tech brand in the future becomes immediate brand because we have something to say. If you think about content in most companies, we've traditionally leveraged education to build an audience for our product services. And why have we done that? Well, when the internet became popular in 2006 and continued to grow, educational needs become more niche and brands were able to fill those educational needs by serving a smaller subset of the market, but that service actually helped to onboard those people to their products or services. I think in the future, brands are going to have to take much more about inspiration. Like, how do I create inspirational content to say something to my audience? How do I create”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that's a great question. I think we build our tribe around inbuilt marketing. What's interesting to me is a transformational company will always move towards at some point just a message that is not transformational anymore. If you're a transformational company and you have a transformational message, so like ours was in by marketing, hey, like either in the inbound camp or you were doing all of this outbound stuff that people hate. Like people hate those kind of marketers. At some point, if you win that conversation, then that just becomes the ad hoc way of the way that people think about marketing. Like inband is not new now. We kind of won that war. People agree that that is the best form of marketing. And so your transformation of the messaging just becomes best practice. And so it's hard to keep that passionate for against when you've actually won the conversation and people agree and implement that and become as best practice. And so that's something I think a lot about is like you build your tribe at the start, but eventually I think your tribe becomes a much bigger cohort of people.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friends don't want to have points of view. They want to sit in the middle with everyone else because it's safe, it's comfortable. I think we are increasingly moving to a world where everything is pop culture. If you actually look at FinTech 10 years ago, if someone said, hey, you know what's going to be one of the best content spaces online? Financial. Like you're like, what? Like that's boring. No, like FinTech is like moved totally pop culture. You're seeing it in business. We're moving much more pop culture. Like you're a great creator. You're creating content on places like TikTok that gets thousands of views. We're going to continue to see that. Brands who don't get with that and don't know how to plug into the culture of today and sit in the middle say in born things and being born in terms of their product position and brand. I think they're going to struggle. And I think there are people with points of view, mem creators, gift creators, creators themselves that are going to be much more important for companies to enable to create environments they will want to work with those companies and help them actually plug into the culture.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, man, the creator life is a good life. Again, that part of the hustle, we got some really great creators, and I've never been more appreciative of how hard it is to be a great creator and how amazingly talented great creators are.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've said before, and I got really negative comments for saying this, but I've said before an average marketer at a great company makes more money than a great marketer at an average company, right? Because they can ride the Grave Vetrain to success. And so you have to try to figure out what that person's done versus what the collective we have done. And I think that's an important thing for founders to try to figure, right?”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did he tell you to say that? I'll give you a great one. I'm not going to mention this, but I'll tell you a great one that actually is prevalent within marketing is hiring people based upon how good their personal brand is. Their personal brand is always much better than their skill set. Some of the truly great people are doing work.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh wow, that's a good question. I will tell you that there's a couple of areas I built at the Media Org within HubSpot. It's about 80 people now. We acquired the hustle. And so I put all of that together and I hired someone recently who is incredible. And so I think that's one of the areas. And then I have an incredible person who's actually helping to make me much more redundant on the customer demand generation model that I built on HubSpot. So you want to have people that you think are going to be much better and brighter at you in those spots. And I think that's what I've constantly tried to do. And if you look my career in HubSpot, as every two to the two and a half years, I get new missions and I can do that because the stuff I used to do, I have people who are better at me at doing that anyway.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, everything can be distilled down into a simplistic framework, and that framework has like a couple of inputs that matter. Because when you actually ask someone, like, oh, how is this team working? And how did it be successful? This is like long-witted presentation. They're doing all these things. What are the couple of things that truly matter? And if you can always assess about the couple of things that truly matter and try to continue to build systems around to scale those inputs until there's just nothing left, that's how you actually build true scalable playbooks. The other thing of a kind of a great leader who could scale with company is the job of any leader is to make themselves redundant. They actually want to have a team that is good enough to take away their work. Because if they don't take away their work as the company grows, you get more work, but you actually haven't relieved yourself of the work you already have. And so now you're in a real pinch, right? You actually just have two months stuff. You're spread too thin and you can't actually think about the big things you need to pick. Every great leader to me actually figures out how do I make myself redundant so I can actually build green space and build available time to take on new things.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I see commonalities as mistake more so founders are unsure even when they're hiring for growth and when they're hiring growth people I don't think they're still sure what they want the growth team to do they know that they want a team to come in and iterate and work on their go-to-market metrics but I don't think they've like really defined what they want that growth team to excel at in the next 12 months and the other thing that I think is really pivotal when you bring in a growth team is the founder has to be the sponsor of that team in particular for the first year because the team can cause some friction especially if it's not in the product team and it needs to touch product or if it's touching these other things that are owned traditionally by other teams you have to have a CEO and a firm response to the growth team and say hey we're structuring this team for this specific mission and what we need is great collaboration from other teams and support from other teams to make sure they're a success”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's actually pretty interesting. I think you could do one of three ways you could actually already have growth within the company and actually have a model you can give them. You can build a theoretical model and give them that just as a case study. It doesn't need to be anything that complex. Or you could actually have them build a hypothetical growth model for your business. The only thing with that is the reason I like to give them the data beforehand and the reason I tell founders that it's cool to give them the model beforehand because if they were just doing the model themselves that they can't really challenge themselves like being on the treadmill. you could basically decide to get off it whenever you want to get off it and so if you give them a growth model with some complexity in it that you want them to see if they can isolate it and spot it it just makes that i think a little bit better”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counter and say, I think one of these experiments is much, much better. And these are the reasons to see if they actually have a strong point of view, to see if they're not scared to actually say, hey, I actually disagree with you for these kind of reasons, right? You want someone with a strong point of view, not just someone who's going to be swayed because you told them you think that they're wrong.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think on the case study, one of the case studies that I would like to do is a theoretical model. And within the theoretical model, there's a theoretical goal for the company. Hey, we want growth to help us grow to 10 customers per month. Here is the model today across my entire go-to market, like all the different metrics that matter across that go-to-market. Based on that model, asked them to tell us what did the most important metric to focus on because one of the things if you're a pre-seed seed series A founder, you're going to need someone who focuses on the most important things in a given point of time because you don't have the resources to do every single metric and every single experiment. So I would say here's my theoretical growth model. Here's my theoretical thing that I'm trying to get to over the next six to 12 months. Here's what I think is really important. Please come back to me and tell me how you would prioritize a metric, how you would build a team to actually be successful in that metric. Give me some examples of experiments. Tell me why you think those experiments are right within the question and what I would do is I would actually”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who we think would be able to dig in on certain aspects of their experience of the way they think to give us a 360 view of the candidate? And then in the case study, we have a small group of people who will look at the case study, quiz the person on that case study, and make sure that we've got the full perspective of all of the things that we need that person to be good at, to excel in that role.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would do an initial conversation, again, that informal conversation. I try to do an informal conversation and make sure that there is a good match. And what you're trying to match is the people who do best enrolls will enjoy the thing they're doing. Get in the informal chat, you can just get a sense of like, is the problem you're trying to solve something they are going to find interesting? And the controversial part about that is what most people try to do is find someone who solved the exact problem before. And I think that's a great thing to do it. But there's a great quote. He's the kind of like godfather of mindfulness. And he has a great quote. In the beginning of his mind, there is endless possibilities in the expert mind. There are very few. And so when you bring in someone who has experience but also has something new to learn, something is new. Actually, all your senses become much, much more aware. So I think in the informal conversation, you're making sure that it's something that they have the experience to do, but also something that will stretch them as you bring them towards that beginner's mindset. I think if that goes well, then we bring them into scenario where we have the team and some other people.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all great parent processes have three sections. It depends how big you are, how these, like if you're Google, maybe they last a year. If you're a smaller company, you want to get them done within a day. But when I think about great interview processes, one of the things I love to do is just like reach out and say, can we catch up and just talk normally, get to know each other? What are the things you enjoy doing? What are the things you're passionate about? What are the things you want to do in the future? And start to see, I think there's something here that this person is going to find really interesting. I think that's the first part. Then there's the formal part where you actually have your team and the people you think are really important to dig in their experience and to dig into the way they think.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And retention, it's very rare, I think you will find a company that has that kind of model that also has the SEO and the paid search in growth that usually belongs in marketing. And I think that's actually the right structure. What you need to do is build great relationships between marketing and product. And then again, in the marketing and sales-led business where you have a demo trial, the growth teams you find in those businesses sit on marketing and they just run performance market. And so in the heyday, they were called performance marketing, but growth sounds like cooler. So they've just changed their name to the growth. But it's like the same. It's the same stuff.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I think about our biggest learners than the PLG wrote, and one of my biggest learnings, I learned a lot about myself, but I learned also that we really underestimated the change in team structure going from a traditional SaaS BDB company to like a PLG company, because we went from a company where sales and marketing were in the go-to-market team, and now we had sales, marketing, customer success, engineering, and product. How do all these teams actually work together? Let's kind of go through that question in terms of different go-to-market type companies. If you're an Airbnb, a fiber, a thumbtack, your product is basically your entire go-to market. The product is the way that you acquire onboard, upgrade people. The perfect split there is you have a central growth team that lives in product. They own all the go-to-market metrics, and then those kind of companies marketing is really how do I build a great brand? How do I build great product position in? Then you have product-led companies like Calendly Miro, Figma, and what they do is they have a marketing team that help acquire the demand and then a product team that sits within the product team that's centralized, that does the onboard and monetization.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of the times the things that they're thinking about don't matter. A lot of the times they're trying to think about how do I acquire users at scale? How do I do all of these things at scale? One of the things I talk to founders is you should try to grow into the problems you have, right? Don't try to take on other people's problems. So their problem is like, how do I build a great product obsessed over customer feedback and find a use case that actually fits within a group of customers who will use me on an ongoing basis? Now, there's sometimes where to do that, there's some growth mechanisms you can build that will be really interesting for you to build at an earlier stage. But a lot of the times I've talked to founders and pre-product market, they're obsessing over things that just are not that important right now. They don't need to worry about how do I build great onboard inflows. They don't need to worry about how do I build virality loops which everyone wants to do. And so you have to grow into the problems you want. I think most of them, even though I've said there's reasons to do growth pre-product market fit, but nearly sometimes a waste of energy and a waste of resources.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think pre product market fit is retention. You're looking for a cohort of users that use your product in the meaningful way and postpone market fit its revenue. I think revenue is the combination of all those different things. How do I acquire users? How do I get more of them to upgrade? How do I get more of them to retain and actually pay me money? So pre-product market, even though I'm giving you examples of how you acquire users, ultimately what you're trying to do is find retention and you could find that I'm acquiring wrong users and doing the wrong stuff. But I do think growth, the mentality of growth for me, I just think it's going to be instilled in the way we create products. I've talked to founders who are pre-product market fit and just want to shoot the breeze. And what they really want to understand is like, how should I start to build in this stuff in my product now? I don't want to wait until I start to acquire users and do these things. I want to actually start to think about how I build these mechanisms into my product from day one. I think that's actually a really smart thing to do is start to build traction, spin the flywheel much, much sooner.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to out compete all these other brands. So I think that's an interesting way to think about growth and why there's something there in the pre product market fit stage. But again, it could just be built into the way engineers and PMs think about building their tools.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think this is an interesting place. I'm not surprised when I was actually thinking about this, I had like proper growth function in the series A and beyond, right? And that's like typically the advice you would give. Like Series A beyond, you have things that you want to start to actually grow. Why would you want to do that pre-product market fit? Well, actually, growth can be instilled in your product roadmap rather than an afterthought. I can build my product in such a way where I can think about how does this product going to require users. One of my favorite examples is genius.com, right? used to be wrap genius back in the day when there were large lyrics sites now when you are building another lyric site there was already well established lyric sites like how do you differentiate in that but they built inbuilt this really creative feature that allowed you to annotate the rap lyrics why was that so ingenious well now it made their pages much more rich in content and so they just outranked everyone else everyone else had lyrics they had lyrics plus annotations that's an example of a feature that you could build pre-product market fit to say hey we're going to build in this feature because we believe that's how we're”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a great question. I've talked to great companies who have started growth with a single engineer. If you really define a core metric that you want that engineer to move. And so I talked to some founders who were trying to move retention and they had a single engineer obsess over how do I get people to retain better within my product. I think when you need a leader is when you need the bandwidth because for the most part, when you have engineers or you have these kind of dotted growth people, they're reporting up to the founder or maybe they're reporting up to someone else. And then over time that team grows and you actually need a core leader to start to manage that function. And when you have a meaningful amount of work for them to do, and so we can actually discuss what that means because I think growth could be applicable pre-product market fit, right? When you actually are trying to figure out how do I instill these mechanisms within my product to better acquire people, to better onboard people, to better retain people, it's built into your product roadmap. That kind of comes back to centralized, decentralized. If it's decentralized, it just has”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Define growth in the PLG way where it actually helps to power your go to market. Growth to me is how do I acquire onboard and upgrade people and then retain them? Growth means something different dependent upon the go-to market motion you have, right? Let's talk about two different go-to-market motions. If you're in a marketing or sales-led business, you do have growth teams, but they predominantly look after performance marketing channels like paid advertising affiliate. They don't touch the product because it's a market and sales-like business. And then on a PLG motion, which I think growth is much more prevalent, you have a growth team that owns the performance market and part of it. Like how do I get users in here than the onboard and touchless and retention? Growth is a way that you can build models iteration and experiments to actually power your go-to-market.”
2022-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source