YouSaid · the spoken record

Krithika Shankarraman

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-05-25
most recent: 2025-05-25
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

“Across my time at Stripe, marketings are very different purposes, and so I kind of see it in different epochs or chapters of my time at the company. The first chapter when I join our head of partnerships at the time, Christina Cordova, handed me a hackpad at the time, which is like a notion document.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, there are so many things to choose from because I was Stripe it for almost eight and a half years. Joining as the company's first marketing hire, you know, building that marketing function. Experience really taught me the importance of deep product understanding as well, like you couldn't really play act at understanding the product, especially when developers are trained to spot bugs, right? So not only do they spot those bugs in code, they spot those bugs in marketing and in blog posts. And so if the marketing pieces are your first impression of the product, they're an extension of the product itself, you have to hold yourself to a very high bar in terms of how you communicate about the product. And so we did a lot of investment in design work, in polish, in terms of how the marketing came together, and the value of creating marketing artifacts that were deeply integrated with the company's mission and the craftsmanship that went into the product was another lesson that I learned very deeply at Stripe.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, like talking about ourselves as a payfack solution. So we decided to kind of do a reverse RFP system where we created a piece of content that said, hey, if you want to be a payment facilitator, here's the secret playbook. Like here's all the things that you have to do. And by the way, if this feels onerous or annoying, it is, and you should use Stripe Connect instead. So there's still a little bit of a zigging where others were zagging. Yeah, but I think if we had done the same thing in terms of becoming a consulting service to become a payment facilitator, Connect would be nowhere near the sort of run rate or revenue that it drives for the company.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You still have to do something a little bit different. I recall a very specific example at Stripe where our product Stripe Connect, which was made from Marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb, where not only are you accepting money as a platform, you're also paying out people, the seller side of the marketplace. And we were really, the competition truly was to become a payment facilitator. So rather than using another off-the-shelf service, instead of using Stripe Connect, you might go off and become a PFAC yourself. And a lot of the services organizations, the consulting groups that were helping companies become PayFax, the things that they were doing was really leaning into that old school terminology, the jargon of the legacy systems and so on and so forth. And Stripe kind of figured out, hey, we need to rank higher for the SEO terms that people are searching for. So how do we help rank for PAFAC without”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really litigate some of those channels too because on the surface they might be working, but they're actually driving pipeline and revenue.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a lot of the copycat competitors in the market, we had terrific traction with true enterprises who were paying for the product, who believed in the product, who were expanding within the product. And so having them tell the stories on our behalf was so much more compelling. And no other company could replicate the kind of customers that Retool had in its bench. So we wanted to make sure that we were using those logos, we were using those companies to the best impact possible. And then we experimented. We tried to put together webinars, different types of sales dinners, different types of event formats to see what actually worked best for us and scaled the ones that worked and discarded the ones that did it.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the leads that are coming through the funnel? Are they turning into sales qualified opportunities? What kind of pipeline are they driving? A lot of marketing metrics. Tend to be vanity metrics. They tend to be about the number of clicks that you got, number of views that a tweet got, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. Like really what you want to be looking at is your impact on either signups if you're a self-served product, PLG, or in terms of a B2B company, sales leads and revenue that you're driving, pipeline and opportunity that you're driving. So we diagnosed that. And we found that for the most part, our paid social channels were doing not much for us. And so we had to invest in new engines. So that was that diagnostic. When we looked at some of the competitors, you know, we saw that they were doing a lot of content marketing, they were doing a lot of events programming. And we could have kind of followed in those footsteps, but there was the ability to take a different path. And so what we decided to do was double down on customer marketing and customer storytelling because the thing that differentiated retool.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that comes to mind is definitely retool. Retool was very different from both my experiences at Stripe and at Opening Eye because both Stripe and OpenAI, for better or for worse, were inbound companies, right? There was so much latent demand that we were fighting off people breaking down the door trying to get to our products. With Retool, marketing was between the company and revenue, and we had a fantastic product market fit with the enterprise space with the developer community. awareness was a challenge. And so how do we go out not just like wait inside of our house waiting for people to knock down the door, but rather step outside of our house and start introducing ourselves to the neighborhood. So thinking about outbound channels and building demand engines was the name of the game. And here, you know, one of the ways to think about that is, hey, should we just scale the paid marketing channels that we already have working for us? And that's when the diagnostic really came into play.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being cheaper is a race to the bottom, especially when you think about sort of scaling laws and how things are playing out. Every company is sort of becoming an AI company at this time. And so as models get cheaper and more capable, being cheaper is not going to be the thing that really is a durable approach in the market. And I think in terms of doing things differently, it's not just for the sake of it. I think it's really that novelty and that differentiation is something that people are craving for. They're not looking for yet another tool in the market. They are looking for something that aligns with their values, aligns with what their goals are. And so if you can be really crisp on understanding the user need, understanding what is the problem space in which they're operating, I think that kind of one, two punch of a fantastic product experience and then the marketing experience to match can be a superpower for your company.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a marketer through and through now, so I mean, you got diagnosed D, analyze A, take a different path, T and experiment for the E. So it's the date framework I just coined it.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The final piece is just experiment, test, validate, all of that, and then scale what works and kind of discard what doesn't. So you really have to have a lot of that ability to throw away work when you might have spent a ton of calories on this wonderful piece of content. But if it's not working, don't double down on it. Like that bias of sunk, the sunk cost fallacy really comes into play, especially when you've poured your heart and soul into creating artifacts for marketing. Experiment, test, validate, give people that psychological safety to fail, especially your teams and organizations. And then, yeah, once you find what works, really double down on it.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather than thinking about phase shift changes and breakthroughs that you could make as a company. But when you analyze your competitors' approaches, evaluating what others do in the space can kind of give you a useful baseline and identify opportunities and gaps and niches that your company can take in instead. And then this is the critical step, the next one is you have to intentionally take a different path than what everyone else is doing. And so driving a strategy that sort of sets the company apart is really critically important. I think it's so core to the discipline of marketing, ensuring that differentiation in the market. And you don't have to go into a cave to come up with these ideas and strategies. You can usually go and look at domains that are far outside of your own rather than your direct competitors and come up with some great ideas that you can cross apply and bring in and steal into your own domain or vertical instead.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Critical to them that is hurting them the most, and your solution is resonating as a solve to that problem. And so that means, yes, probably throwing in more at the top of the funnel is a very good move to make at that time. But on the other hand, if you say, yeah, I mean, like we get a lot of interest, but once they're in the room, they have a bunch of questions. They're asking about, you know, how do you compare to X competitor and Y competitor? And why does it cost so much and et cetera, et cetera, that probably means that there's more to be done in the product market fit zone rather than throwing in more at the top of the funnel because you have a leaky funnel at the bottom. And so hiring a demand generator, maybe the worst thing that you can do versus thinking about more of a product marketer who's thinking about the competitive differentiation, the positioning, the sales enablement that gets more people through at the bottom. So that's that diagnostic step at the top. Second to me is like analyzing your competitors' approaches. So to me, this is not about like being super laser focused on your competition because that leads to these local”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was an engineer before I became a marketer, and so I have brought a little bit of an engineer's framework to the marketing side of the house. And so something that I've tried to do is put together like a four-step process that has served me pretty well. The first step here is diagnosing, so diagnosing the actual problem. Again, this usually means taking a zoom back when a founder comes and asks like, hey, we really need to hire a demand gen leader. Like, who do you know in your network that we should be thinking about? And I'm like, let's talk about your funnel. Do you have a lot of people coming in at the top of the funnel? And when they do come into the top of the funnel and you start talking to them and having a sales conversation, how likely is it that you close them? How likely is it that you win that deal? That usually tells you very astutely, do you have product market fit? Like once you're already in the room and people are converting, you have found that problem statement that is”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To become more of a diagnostician, to understand the right strategy or tactic in the first place rather than saying, how do you copy something that led someone else to success because those criteria may not apply to you at all?”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my current role and in my career, I've spoken with a lot of founders, and typically the founders reach out because I've worked at companies that they look up to and they're looking for that playbook. They're looking for, hey, just like tell me how Striped did it, tell me how retool did it, tell me how OpenAI did it. And I really hesitate to share any such detail because there is a combination of context, competitive landscape, and the overall sort of zeitgeist of when the company is operating, how the company's operating that really adds a lot of nuance to what works in the market. And so doing the same things, like if you're just kind of kind of copying the outcomes or the outputs of the strategy and trying to follow in the footsteps of the tactics, you're not paying enough attention to the inputs and sort of what were the variables and the deciding factors which led to that strategy in the first place. So what I like to do is try to unpack more of a framework for how do you get”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the reality is it's not a solved problem, and a lot of folks, a lot of companies in the AI domain are trying to figure out the right pricing model. And it's something that you've talked about in your newsletter and so on, but there's a value creation aspect to using AI that doesn't kind of neatly fit the mold of SaaS-based pricing or seed-based pricing or even usage-based pricing. So I think there are still some frontiers to figuring out where is the value, how do different types of organizations and companies and consumers find value. And again, it's not the typical sort of KPIs that you would typically try to optimize and maximize.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typical organizations that I've been a part of and leading marketing for, the enterprise side of the house, the B2B side of the house usually fits the mold of demand generation, where you're creating demand for the sales team and you're bringing new customers and prospects into the fold and into the orbit of the company. That, again, was not the problem at OpenAI. When we turned on the contact sales form for ChatGPT Enterprise, which was”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Dunride, product management and product marketing should be best friends, and you're working together at every stage of product development rather than thinking of it as a handoff at the end of the conveyor belt when the product's been built, you sort of hand it off to marketing to take it out the door, if you can think of it as sort of a three-legged race from the very beginning of product development, then you go to market with the right thing in the first place. You get these insights from customers. You hear the language that they're using, which can be the sort of cheat code for how to message and position the product and market. And of course, there's like a creativity angle on how to differentiate your product in the market, but ideally you're doing that in lockstep with the product management side.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about all of the different stages of the funnel, awareness was clearly not the problem that ChatGPT or OpenAI had. Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one Zoom level further, the thing that came up was, I don't know what to use it for. Like I don't know what it replaces. Like, should I be using search for this? Should I be using ChatGPT for this? Or how can it even help me? And so the work of marketing ended up becoming creating the sort of use case epiphany where people could say, I had no idea ChatGPT could do that. And yeah, maybe I should be using it for XYZ reason in my own life. And so I think you have to be very diagnostic in terms of what can marketing be doing to help rather than just going off of the typical top of funnel and then middle of funnel and conversion-oriented tactics that end up being a playbook.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one Zoom level further, the thing that came up was, I don't know what to use it for. The work of marketing ended up becoming creating the sort of use case epiphany where people could say, I had no idea ChatGBT could do that. A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks that you got, number of views, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand?”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like there's a playbook for everything, there's a framework for everything. But the reality is, you have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source