YouSaid · the spoken record

Luc Levesque

lines on the record: 91
first: 2023-06-15
most recent: 2023-06-15
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

“You can find me online at localevec.com. So first name, last name.com, and how can they be useful to me? Listen, we're always looking to hire the best of the best. So if you want to work at an amazing company with an amazing team doing very impactful work and learn the craft of growth, please reach out. We're always looking to bring on amazing talents. So that would be the one way.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's funny, my favorite Canadian food sauce I'm from Ottawa. There's a lot of Shwarma, Lebanese Sharma everywhere. I know it's not traditionally Canadian, but Canada is so multicultural, so I'll make this count. I love a good sharma, and it's so hard to find a good sharma in the Bay Area. So we've still been looking here, but my favorite Canadian food. Pseudo Canadian is Sharma. If I had to pick one purely Canadian food and this is related to Montreal where we first met, it's got to be a Montreal smoked meat sandwich.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making sure you're don't cause major damage. But the speed can outweigh the cost and time it takes to do experiments. So that's one change we've recently implemented that's been pretty impactful.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change that comes to mind is it's common to hear discussion around You need to experiment, you need to have rigor, you need to look at results, iterate based on those results. That's pretty much common knowledge is how all good companies that execute growth do it. See, the subtlety is that experiments are great, but they're also, they can be slow. You have to look at the results, you have to analyze how things went, you have to learn what's going on. You have to build the experiment. So there's a cost to an experiment, and not everything needs to be experimented. And that's not something that I generally hear growth teams talk about. It's usually, hey, we need to experiment. So one thing that we're definitely focused more on lately is this idea of sometimes you just need to yO it because it's a better product experience or you just kind of know it's going to work. And, you know, if you're YOLOing 40 things and three of them work and you can look at pre-post, you can look at holdouts. There's ways of.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple things mood afterwards is so much better. You get this great multi hour boost from doing it, especially like I mentioned not doing warm before or waiting 10 minutes and waiting 10 minutes after before you warm up after you get out. Great mood boost. It also helps a lot with sleep. So if you do it at night, which is a little bit difficult, it helps a lot with sleep. Those are probably the two biggest things. And you do get to a point I'm there now where I kind of look forward to it because you know how good you'll feel afterwards. So when I'm thinking about it, I know it's painful. It doesn't make it easier. But I do look forward to it now. It's a pretty cool thing.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Varies right now. I'm doing five minutes. Five minutes at, I think it's 53 degrees. So it's just, I started at 60 and it's slowly bringing it down. But you do have to go slow because I brought it down even further and kind of caught me off guard and got a little dizzy. So you've got to find your sweet spot.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I usually start going to a hot tub, warm up, then I go in the cold plunge, and back in the hot tub. That's an easy way to get started. But I will say I jumped in yesterday and today without going to hot tub, it was very painful, but I felt so much better after. So I might be changing up my approach.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got a cold plunge that I bought that I love. It's the Renew Cold Plunge. It's cold, but super convenient. And I do that every morning and I just love it.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teach me something about growth that I don't already know. And you could apply this to engineering product, any other area, because it really gives you a sense of what this person thinks is the top of the stack in terms of the smartest thing they know, whether you know it or not is irrelevant. But sometimes you actually do end up learning some stuff, but it's my favorite question because you can really engage in a conversation around, okay, the thing you think is so unique that maybe you come up with this learning yourself or if you've created this tactic and then gives you a sense of how much they know the craft. So that's my favorite question.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I watch that, and then, of course, all in podcast is always fun. So I make sure to watch those when they come out as well. A lot of fun and informative. So those are my two, I would say.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't watch TV much, and I haven't really watched any movies in a while, but I do watch a lot of podcasts on YouTube. And Andrew Huberman's got, of course, a great series. I watch, I think everyone he puts out. So I don't know if that counts, but absolutely.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My bookshelf there. Yeah, it's a great, great book. And it's because it's really the underpinning of so many different product and growth principles that you can apply. So that's just a classic that is good to reread at least once a year. So those are the three books.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always been big on writing crisply and being very tight and not having like three-page memos that you're sending off, especially now that we're remote and we're all doing Slack and email and different ways of messaging, how tightly you communicate, how crisp your communication is, is really important for frankly you getting your point across and also for the other person who's probably digesting 100 of these messages. This book is a book on how to do that. It breaks down how to write crisply and the different parts of it. And I've definitely seen improvements in the team since I've passed around. So that's a great book, frankly for anybody, work or personal because we're writing so much and communication is so key. So that's the second one. The third one is a golden oldie. It's one that I've read many, many times and I recommend from a growth perspective. This one you've likely heard of influenced by Kelini.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's one that I've already mentioned, which is Spark. It's the neuroscience of exercise. It's a great book. And it's not one of these exercises to stay fit and to live longer. This is really about, frankly, if you exercise and do it in a specific way, they have a kind of blueprint they lay out. It's good for just cognition and kind of horsepower and performance. So that's been a really important one. It has been a big part of me building on my morning routine. The second one is when I picked up about, I think about a year ago or six months, and I recommended it, geez, I don't know, at least to a couple hundred people now because I recommend it to my team. It's called Smart Brevity. Have you heard of this one?”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Eagles DoorDash some food. So you don't have to worry about cocaine. And I'm sure there's other things I've never really deeply thought about it, but in terms of what are the specific things I've evolved over time, but I don't cook anyway. So it would be terrible if I cooked. So this is much easier to do it this way. And as long as you're inviting kind of interesting people, everybody's going to want to come and spend some time and break some bread.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think the most I've done is 10. That's a bit too much. Six seems to be perfect. Six to eight at the max. I do get a catered, so you don't have to worry about cooking the topic, something like a topic that is common so that everybody can rally around. I do think it's important, like I mentioned, doing it at home. Usually we start around six, go till 9 or 10. And it's just been a really good thing that I've learned over time is a really good thing to do to just beg for a better life, frankly, a richer life with some great friends.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think especially now that everybody's remote and we're working from home, or most people are, it's more valued than ever. So it's something I'm looking forward to continuing and always actually through my morning reflection thinking about what are new ones I can spin up, who are interesting people that we want to break bread with. And I do think it's important that it's done at your house. If anybody's thinking of starting this, you can do it at a restaurant, but there's something about being in your home or being in somebody's home five or six people having a great conversation about a topic that's mutually interesting. And I think everybody values it. And it adds a lot of spice to life. I think it's really important.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just have really smart, interesting people come, and we'll talk about different topics that are relevant. Sometimes we'll pick a topic. So we'll have a group and then we'll say, hey, we want to talk about AI. So one of the advantages of being in the Bay Area is you can find three or four people that likely wrote some of the core code in Google or in AI, and then they'll join. And people want to meet. People want to get together and have these conversations. So it's very exhilarating. I learn a ton. It's a lot of fun. I don't know why more people don't do it. And it's a bit of work to organize, but it's also just tactically been a great way to meet fascinating people. It's helped a lot for recruiting, for if you need a back channel, now you know all these people that are in different industries. But business aside, they're very valuable business-wise, but they're just a lot of fun and they've become some of my favorite things that I do. And I'm really surprised why more people don't do it.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think interesting is the right way to think about it. I started this when I was in Ottawa. With a bunch of founders there. And it's become one of my favorite things to do. Honestly, it's like the bright spot in my month that I call them guilds. So the word guild is. Builders, and that's how it originally started. So Guild Knight is what I call it. And the idea is basically all interesting people doing interesting things actually want to spend time with each other. That's why I'm actually surprised more people don't do this, but I'll basically have interesting people come, usually five or six, and we'll sit around talking about specific topics. So I do one for consumer product.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. So I read before I became a dad, I read somewhere that one of the most impactful things you can do as a father is just be there for dinner every night. So I have been there for 15 years every single night. But it's a good reminder it's not enough. Having dinner is important with your family, but in our case, there's more you can do and just getting that feedback and doing some reprioritization is always important.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, I like that a lot. So it's tough, right? It's tough to balance it all out. It's very difficult because you want to sell at everything you do in life and you have to, so that reflection helps be a check-in as well of like, how am I doing in all these areas? And I find the color coding is helpful for that too, of just doing a bit of a gut check and asking for that feedback.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was very helpful for me to hear. And I'm big on routines and habits to make sure the things that you want to do are repeatable and it's not one-off thing. So ever since that day, I now have a daddy date if you want to call it. But every two weeks we do one-on-one time together with each of the boys. They get to pick what we do. There's a way that consistent, whether it's dinner or play basketball in the front. But it's all about feedback. So that's one example on the personal side.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a lot of personal stuff on it, but it literally is broken down between being a better friend, better husband, better dad, and then better leader. And so on the personal side, I've been known to work a lot of times, balance is always hard to find. From being a dad Thinking about how to be better there, I realized about six months ago that I've never actually asked for feedback on how I'm doing. So I asked my kids six months ago, I asked both of them independently, what's one thing I can do to be a better, to do more of or do less of, to be a better dad. And they were kind of caught off guard by it. My son's 15, and my other son is 12. And I said, it takes some time to think about it. And after about a month, my son came back and said, dad, I got one. He said, I want to spend more time with you. So”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Workouts. I do cardio, do some exercise. This is a great book called Spark, which is all around the neuroscience of exercise and really learned a lot from that in terms of having this great morning routine that really boots you up. I kind of call it my bootloader when I start in the day. If I go through my bootloader, I have a much better day. So exercise, stretching meditation, and then do a cold plunge now. So do a bunch of different things. But then I do some reading, but I do carve aside one hour where I go through, and this is probably important. It's kind of where I've landed, but structured self-reflections. That's why I have this dashboard. I have certain areas that I think about what's going well, what's not. I track all the experiments I'm running. And I'm just really passionate about if you're going to do something, try to do it as best as you can. And this is a habit that has allowed me to kind of sharpen my.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love doing, I love thinking. I literally can just sit there and think for hours, actually. And I have a dashboard on all the areas that I'm focusing on with red, yellow, green, and just constantly revving on Am I working on improving? What am I doing? What experiments am I running? And where am I doing well? And where am I not doing well? And how can I be better as in all areas of my life, including being a leader? So there's a lot of different things to it, but I think that's really important and something that I've learned over the years that it was probably the most valuable to have as a skill.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Art of self reflection and coaches. I've had coaches my whole career, but the macro theme is you're constantly iterating, experimenting and becoming the best you can be in your career also as a dad and as a husband and of course for your own personal health. But that reflection is so important and I've leveraged many many different coaches over the years and now do a lot of self-reflection through a morning routine that I have and that I've been doing for quite some time that has been a big unlock for me. And the biggest, most important part of that morning routine is like dedicating an hour aside to really think about what's going well, what's not going well, what am I screwing up. Why am I screwing it up? Which is often more important than what am I screwing up? And of course, what am I going to do about it? But as long as you're learning and iterating every day, then you're just making constant progress towards your goals. And it's something I do that I...”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably a bunch of things we could talk about here. This is the obvious thing you've just got to love what you do, got to work hard, you have to have impact. Certainly at the end of the day in growth, that's all that will matter. If I think back to specific things that I do though that I have to pick one thing that's been very important for me throughout my journey is”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is probably the right way to think about it. So if I'm trying to summarize it, I would say. 12 months is probably like max. If you can't see impact in 12 months, it's something wrong. If you have existing content, it could happen pretty early. Could happen on day one. Actually, I've seen that happen. It could happen. And if you have to build new parts of the site, it can take months. I've seen that happen in companies I've worked with where I think it would be like a quarter we had to wait until we saw a big lift. So it's somewhere between three to 12 months.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say a few things. I'd say if you already have content and pages that are pretty good and getting a decent amount of traffic, it doesn't necessarily have to take a long time. Would be my first reaction. It can take a long time. Generally, it takes a long time when you have to build new content. So the way to think about Google is it is going to take your content. It's going to show it to its users, people that are searching, and it's going to determine which piece of content is the best to rank highly. It's not just about little tricks and links and keyword ratios. Those days are over. Those do matter, but it's not purely about that. And if you have a new piece of content, it takes time for Google to build enough trust to say, okay, I'm going to start showing this to users now and then start collecting user feedback and then rank it appropriately. That can take some time. But if you have existing pages that are ranking eight and they're already on the first page, it just doesn't always happen. But I've certainly seen it. In fact, more common than not, that you can have sometimes hundreds of percentages of lift very quickly. It depends what you're starting with.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Ideally, you hire an amazing SEO person you can bring in journal. Second would be somebody amazing who can get things done, surround them with advisors, and then in my stack rank will probably be third would be agencies.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And have succession in place and a proper team so that you're not too dependent on this one person. But that would be my go to. And then if you're really stuck, you can use agencies. But my default would be having somebody internal supplemented with agencies if you have to. SEO is very specific. I mean, it's a very tight channel that knowing certain things about it can have a big impact. I think you do want people that have that experience that can bring that in from the outside to augment the internal teams. So it'll take a really long time to learn it.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard for an agency or a peer advisor without internal help to do it a really good job without internal talent at the center. So I would say I would start with just hire somebody internally and give them the mandate to incentivize them correctly to go and own this channel. Even if they don't know SEO, my advice would be hire, get an engineer, get somebody who is just a relentless doer who wants to learn this and surround them with great advisors. I've just seen that work really well. There are some good agencies out there. Agencies will be working with multiple companies, so it's a little bit harder to get the same impact from an agency. It can work sometimes, but my preference is generally a last resort would be an agency. And I'd much rather have somebody who's internal who knows the business, who knows the keywords, who knows who can have the knowledge internally inside the company permanently and help grow a team around them.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just got to lean into it. Yeah, we have a shop.ai, this great AI-based shopping engine. I'll tell you, I bought so much on it. It's so good. The more you use these technologies, the more you realize how good they are and that something big is coming. It's not just, oh yeah, there's another change. I was summarizing the Google changes to some people. And originally was thinking, this is the biggest change in the last 10 years. And then when I reflected on the last 10 years, I thought, this is actually the biggest change since the inception of Google, actually. I don't think we've seen something as profound as what's coming. And you really need to get ready for it.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's exciting. We haven't had a big just geeking out on growth a little bit. We haven't had a big platform change in a long time. So I'm like, all right, cool. We get to, let's go see what we can do here. How do you optimize this? How do you get listed if you can? We're not sure where the placements will be, but that will be the new game.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't blame the companies. They're doing what they have to do. ChatGPT is now 50% of my daily searches and not Google. So I think Google has to react. And this is what we'll see. So from a growth perspective, definitely something to start to think about.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different types of keywords. There's transactional ones like e commerce keywords with purchase intent. There's navigational ones where you're trying to get somewhere and there's informational keywords, which is, I have a question. I'm looking for an answer. It's pretty broad. It's a big area. I think that last category of keywords is particularly a risk. So if anybody listening to this is currently getting traffic on those, you should start thinking about what does that mean when things start changing. And I think the changes will be We'll probably start seeing things shift to paid. You have to pay for that free traffic. And the second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don't get many clicks anymore. You might drop down to a very small number of clicks, if at all, because answers will get questions will get answered directly in the search results. So it's a big shift. We have to see how things land, but I think over the next 12 to 24 months, if history repeats itself, we'll see that channel change. And we've seen this play out at all the different channels. They kind of evolve. Generally, the”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're all still trying to figure it out. I was at Google I.O. last week or the week before, and as soon as I saw the search result with the big box of AI answers at the top having done this for so long, I immediately knew the impact that I think is about to come. And I've seen this play out in travel where Google acquired ITA and did flight search and hotel search. Generally, it's great for users and great for Google and the search engines, but makes it a little bit difficult for the publishers and the sites that are adding value to the ecosystem through being ranked in the search results. So what we're about to see is basically Google, what they showed was a big box on”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then just backing up, when I think about growth, I don't think about Specific, it's not growth equals SEO and Instagram. For me, growth equals whatever it takes to move the needle. So, I get this question all the time How do you build a growth team? What does a growth team do? And I say, whatever it takes. And that could be zero to one building a new product. It could be M&A. It could be SEO. It could be social. It could be onboarding. And I think that's a better framework to look at. And then if you look at it through that lens, then partnerships easily folds into that, where I've seen a lot of businesses get very big on just really clever partnerships, either strategic or broad kind of affiliate-based partnerships. So there's a lot of channels. I definitely wouldn't restrict the scope of a growth team to just a small subset, but have a very wide funnel in terms of or at least strategy in terms of just test a lot of different things and go after the channels that work and pivot when it does and then really lean into the one or two or three that really work because sometimes that's all it takes for business.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ChatGPT is another upcoming one that we might want to talk about a little bit where I do think we've never seen that kind of growth for search before. And that's a platform that we have to start thinking about. How do we optimize for it? And Google just announced there are recent changes. They're going to be putting in an AI box at the top of the searches also. How do you optimize in a world where it's not so much about optimizing for the platform, but teaching the AI what you do and why you're the best in the world at it? So that's another whole other area we could talk about, but that's a big channel. I think that's growing. Viral loops are always a powerful thing if you can get them to work. That's more about psychology and channel optimization where you want people to be incentivized to share the product that you have with their friends and then to have their friends come back and register. So you can have one viral loop. You can have secondary vire loops. You can bolt vire loops onto existing products. There's different ways of doing it.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a variety of them. I think you have to look at where the intent is right now. And it does change over time, but you have social channels like TikTok, Instagram. Influencers are a great area to engage with there. You have SEO, you have search.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keyword was travel block. And so owning that was a big deal. And we did not own it. And I think we were ranked number two for a really long time. I can't remember if we got it in the end. But that's just one example where, and there was many, many travel businesses where I always loved looking at a business and trying to figure out what's their growth loop. Like, how did they do that? And it's not like, oh, it's a great business that just grew most of the time. price line crush it at SEM Facebook crush it at a Vire loop where you got tagged in a photo you got an email and you had to go register because there's a photo of you really want to see Trivai did a great job at SEO and it's often it's just one really strong channel that propelled the company forward and in this case it can literally come down to one keyword like like we had a travel pod”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's a lot I'm sure. I can speak to my own company that I sold to TripAdvisor. It was called TravelPod. It was a travel blogging website where you can think WordPress, but for travel, which I started early, it was the first site to do that. And I made the mistake of not knowing SEO or growth before I sold the company. And so that was a great learning for me when I went in. This is a story where we're looking to acquire another site. And I thought the product was pretty poor. And I remember talking to the founder and thinking he'd ask me if we'd want to acquire it. And the product's terrible. Why would I want to acquire that? He's like, yeah, they're 10 times bigger than you. And I'm like, what? And that was when I realized, okay, we've been building a great product and great engineering culture and is important, but you really need to know this girl stuff. So that's actually the moment I shifted to, all right, we have to really know these growth levers. And in that space, the number.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, maybe it is commonly known. I'm not sure, but it's definitely something that is non-obvious or intuitive, I think, to most people. And if you have an entire SEO team working on one keyword, I don't think that's crazy because one small number of keywords can define an entire industry or a business.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be a big channel. And this is also about creating content, but it's not your users creating the content. You have to go create the content and have some high quality answer to a question that's being asked on Google. And I think one thing to keep in mind with SEO is entire industries are based off of single keywords. I remember when I was in the travel industry that literally companies were bought and sold based on one keyword rank. So it's not like, oh, it's a little bit of traffic. And I think this is a bit unintuitive with growth. A lot of people think of growth as linear or it's another channel or it's another thing. I mean, growth done right is exponential. It literally is company changing. And when he's talking specifically about SEO, keep in mind the world is searching for that thing on that one, targeted on that one, that one keyword and likelier clicking the number one search result. So getting that number one spot is not like, oh, that's a little bit of traffic. You can literally build an entire business around that first spot. So don't think that's.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those come and go. You get an invite, you register, you don't. That happens. But the byproduct is when people join, they create this beautiful lightning page, which is your profile. That gets indexed. It's kind of like a viral loop feeding an SEO loop that continues to grow. So that's a good example of user-generated content, which kind of feeds on itself and grows. So those two categories. Going back to the first category, if you only have a small handful of pages, the way to think about that is you certainly want to optimize those pages. Then you want to start creating content that speaks to your audience beyond that. So you need a content strategy, whether it's a blog or creating new parts of your site that address questions that your audience might have. But generally speaking, I think there's an SEO play in any company and there's just different tactics, strategies, and approaches to get there.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awareness. So there's always some angle. And then I kind of divide. Websites or online products into two categories. There's the ones which are smaller sites, small number of pages, very targeted at your product, and don't have this kind of loop of creating new pages automatically. This would be mostly commerce sites, actually, would have a number of pages around the products about us, those types of pages. That's one type of site. Let's say you have a dozen pages. And then there's other ones with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages, which are either user-generated content or like TripAdvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces like Thumbtack and other types of websites like that. Those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact very quickly because there's such a large optimization surface. And ideally, it's growing and generating traffic automatically. I've always thought of LinkedIn as just a great example of this, where you have this viral loop where you would recall when it was just starting, everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been doing SEO for a really long time. It's a lot of fun and certainly being a trip advisor was a great learning ground for that, that we were able to really innovate and try new things there in terms of the playbook that we built out. It was a lot of fun those years. A couple thoughts. The first one would be, I do think there's an SEO play in any company, maybe to different extents, but Google is such a large funnel of existing demand for your product or your product area that there's usually an angle to get some SEO traffic there. So I do think it applies to most companies. I would say if you're an early product that's never seen, that the world's never seen, it's a brand new thing. There might be some creation, some demand creation you need to do, but most of the time there's existing demand in Google where you can harvest demand or there's queries that are related to your topic that you can start ranking for to start building.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should just go in with that mindset. When I'm deciding to work with a company, I'm in there for 10 years and I know that. And I say that as I'm in, I'm in, we're in this together if I choose to work with the company. But it does mean that the structure of the deal needs to reflect that. So you need to have a long tail at the end. So if you're taking options or RSUs and it's purely equity, make sure you have the time for that to happen. There would be nothing worse than putting in your heart and soul, having impact and then waiting, I don't know, a couple years and then your equity expires. So you make sure there's a long tail. I mean, it can take, it can literally take over 10 years for these companies to exit. And you should be okay with that. I think that's okay. You're taking some risks. They're taking some risk on you. And that's a great partnership, but you'll just need the time for that. So advice to growth advisors, make sure to ask for a long tail so that you don't end up in a bad spot in the end. And that incentive, again, are perfectly aligned between the founder and the advisor.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the arguably the most important thing because you can go and do a great job and then wait many years and potentially not see any reward for it. And I think that's the nice thing about the equity structure in that you're tied in the same incentives with the founder, which is just great in terms of any relationship to have the same incentives. But you want to make sure that there's a good likelihood of a decent outcome down the road. If I can throw another one in, the other piece of advice I would give is it can take a long time for some of these companies to be successful. That's okay. You should expect that. In fact,”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the right mental model as a growth advisor is around the same one as an investor. So the most important thing an advisor can do, aside from having impact and knowing their craft, is picking which companies to work with, especially if you're working for equity. So I'll only speak to that, but you're basically putting in your time, you're picking likely a smaller number. You only have so many hours in the day of companies to work with. And you want to make sure there's a likely exit in the future. So for me personally, I have a spreadsheet like most big decisions that I make in my life. And over the years, I've just added criteria and questions to ask myself about the company and then reflect on, okay, is this kind of checking all the boxes for a likely outcome? Because you don't just need to be successful. You need to be successful. And for the company to be successful and for there to be a liquidity event. So you need to put yourself in the shoes of an investor and look at it as an investment.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source