YouSaid · the spoken record

Mayur Gupta

lines on the record: 57
first: 2025-04-25
most recent: 2025-04-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you. Thanks for having me, Harry. Like I said, I've been a fan. Yeah, I'll look forward to staying in touch and keep talking.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was struggling because there's so much mess happening around the world, man. It's so tough. I'm a Buddhist and spend a lot of time every day chanting in the morning and thinking about how we accomplish world peace based on a principle of cause and effect. But if I have to be true to what I dream and think about every single day outside of my family and my life philosophy of Buddhism, I would say it is to create a world of financial freedom where access to wealth is not limited to a small subset of people around the world. And I'm obviously very grateful that I have an opportunity to live in this part of the world. I grew up in India, and more of the world is not like US and UK. While for us, a movement like crypto is a diversification strategy, it's an asset class. For a big part of the world, it is a way to survive and live. So I hope that there is more impetus and focus on the substance of this movement and not the”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing, they are doing great and well, and we love the competition. I want everything that we have rooted in Kraken to scale and grow and just enjoy the competition because I think at the end of the day it's great for gate fellow community.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Combination of all of those things that were isolated skill sets earlier, an engineer who's a dreamer and a doer, a product, a builder, a marketeer, a storyteller, an absolutely a data ninja and analyst who's obsessed with outcomes. They can choose to go deep in one or two, but they can't be one or the other. It's an and.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organic social and paid social. YouTube, I change it, YouTube. That's the most underleveraged social platform in the world. Most underleveraged, even though I think it has the highest number of mouse.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Programmatic display. DSPs, because when it came on, this is my CPG days 2011-2012. That was the thing. But I think it's been the amount of traction and the conversion you get. I don't see that as much as in other places. I would have said TV, but on the contrary, I feel it actually works.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for the North Star for the growth theme right now, what we call number of transacting clients, step change growth in our number of transacting. It's an outcome of LTV retention habit creation and all of that because you can't hit an aggressive payback until all those early habits and early signals are humming very well.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not anymore, but that is what our zero to one zero to two was. We were platform of choice for the advanced crypto degen trader. That is how we grew. That's why when you look at our numbers, our ARPU, the quality of our user is two and a half, three times more than the average retail focus exchange because they brought retailers. Nothing wrong, but see what's happening though now, Harry, in the 14, 15 years of the category. This is very much like the metas and the Amazons and the Googles. They all started with a different starting point. Amazon, you know, with a bookstore, Google with the Search, and social platform, but they're all converging. Same thing happening in crypto. We're all starting at a different place with a different product market fit. We're all converging and then diversifying now.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever worked for anybody else would work for them too. This is what worked for Dropbox, that's what worked for Kraken, and that's what worked for Spotify, so this won't work for me too. But if they could look at the underlying playbook, that would be exciting.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very important, the user that's coming to you has five other options. And if they're waiting too long, they've already tried. Also, it also depends on the category. Like if you're buying a house, you're only going to do this once, twice, thrice in your life. And if you're a real estate platform, you've got more time. But in a category like ours, people are moving, making decisions by the minute if the market's moving. And if you're not there and if the friction is too much for them to go through in order for them to experience it, they've already made a choice somewhere else where there was much less friction. So it's very important to shrink that, whether that is your core experience and onboarding to activation or something like referrals too. We were just, you know, we are about to activate our referral program again. But one of the things we were discussing yesterday is it's not just about how many users refer, but it is very important to know how fast does it take for that user to refer.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is ninety percent basis point movements with compounding impacts and many of them, but keep 10% to still try the next big swing. And that's what we are doing. We're literally two weeks back spun off a tiny pod whose entire job is to experiment ideas that otherwise would take months to try and see can we get proof points in three or four weeks and the expectation is $8.10 will fail, but keep trying. But 90% of our focus, though, is still on basis point movement at scale.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other words, tons of experiments, Harry, that we've done, which I call drive convenient value. So they give convenience and remove by removing friction, but you're able to prove incremental value. Because if you do one, not the other, you don't grow. If you give value, but it has too much friction, people will not use it. If you remove friction and it's very convenient, but there's not incremental value, then it's still going to be hard for you to use it.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The easiest one is our SEO team. We try to phrase on a landing page which focused on the traditional ELMR framework. And it said back in the day we would say, come to us because this is what our product does to really changing that to respond to their psyche. And we changed that to a phrase called trade like a pro. This is for a pro product. And we saw substantial basis point lift because we were now connecting our core message to the desire that our users had to achieve a status to be part of a tribe. So like trade like a pro. So there are tons of them like that in an onboarding flow. The decision to partner with an external partner that can shrink six steps into one single step. A single decision to take in the phone number and autofill everything else because you're using a service that can use that as an identifier to bring all your information.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build utility that gives them more reason to come back to the platform than just coming back to trade. So that's the evolution that we are going through now as we're expanding the aperture of what Kraken is. And third and most important is do one and two with strong unit economics. Building this engine and giving this very clear mission, I think has been the biggest and most successful experiment.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gonna give two. The fundamental learning and experiment is how you think about the engine itself. Like have you built the engine? And for me, the biggest turning point at Kraken in my growth trajectory is what we did last year, where when Arjun came on board, we decided that we want an end-to-end growth engine. We don't want it to be isolated between marketing, design, product. We want a growth engine that has end-to-end accountability and ownership that is collectively thinking about three very simple things. How do we bring the most relevant Kraken client into our ecosystem and remove as much fiction as possible to make them experience the magical moment for Kraken? That's one first, most primary goal, which by the way, marketing and my product growth teams work hand in hand. They appall, they live and breathe together to solve these problems. The second is figure out whatever way that we can actually build habits so you bring users back to the platform. And together with”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've seen it. We haven't been able to attribute it back to just one activation, which is Tottenham. But we have seen a lift. The reason I'm saying that is we haven't done a test which is isolated to just that partnership. But we have proven that the combination of our upper funnel has driven incrementality. What we are doing now is answering that question, which you just said. Now, what about at a channel and partnership level?”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like a modern version of a marketing mix model that basically use AI and machine learning in different ways to attribute, they look at all your growth and sales data to look at what were you doing in those moments. They look at all kinds of signals to tell you that you think that all the magic that's happening is because Everybody knows you already or doesn't care about you. So it doesn't matter how much you spend on upper funnel, you are not seeing incrementality, then you should pause”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a great discussion. The way we do it is four different ways one, we do match market tests. Very simple because in crypto, the categories across the world, it gives it a great benchmark. So when we are unlocking upperfront in market A but not in market B, where Bitcoin price is the same, I can show differences. So that's a match market test. We do a lot of control group tests. We get a lot of brand lift studies. And most importantly, we have a sleuth of short-term proxy KPIs. Because in today's world, in a product-led company, we don't have six months to prove the impact of X million that you already spent. So you got to give early signals. So we look at shade of search, we look at direct traffic, we should look at lifts. Is it fluctuating and so on? And then the last two levers, one, we've unlocked the other one we haven't fully yet is we also use MMM because MTA is no longer relevant. So we use MMM, we use a couple of different partners and we have our internal.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's harder, but it's possible. What we do, Harry, is not just the partnerships we have a whole portfolio of upper funnel spend, we do audio, video, digital display, and if you think about what the difference is between that and lower funnel, it's just messaging, by the way. Same channels, just the messaging is different. We are talking more emotionally, culturally, relevance versus formal action, offer. That's the only difference. Sometimes we create this really complex difference in between, oh, this is brand versus performance. Same platforms. I can use TV to run a lower funnel DR campaign. I can also use TV for a very inspirational moment that really makes you step back and think about and remember me as a brand. So the way we think about attribution and quantifying the impact, which by the way, we get rightly so, get challenged every day, every week. We spend the Sunday with Arjun four hours hurdle to tell him exactly how we are proving every single dollar, which was truly fascinating.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relative to the competition where they have shared, where we see the numbers publicly, we are extremely calculated. But at the same time, we will spend as much as possible as long as we keep proving payback.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can give you the exact number. What I would say is, in terms of percentages of my overall spend, it was single digit percentages.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any growth on the table. That's our ethos now at this stage of our growth. If you spoke to me 18 months back, I would have said something very different because not many people around the world knew Kraken. That's why we also did a lot of partnerships. We are now sponsoring Pottenham Spurs.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even pre IPO, in 2024 numbers, we shared a billion and a half in net revenue, not gross, net revenue. Hopefully I'm back here next year. We can talk about 2025 growth. We shared a RPU. We shared the number of funded accounts currently. These are not lifetime funded accounts. We should asset some platform close to 50 billion. We shared a volume, which is almost three quarters of a trillion dollars on platform last year. So all I'm saying is, first of all, of course, then there are Coinbase of the world, which are public companies. So we all know their numbers. Also, it's a strategy that could very well work for some of them. It is not like $200,000, $300 million of upper frontal spend is wrong. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying, in our world, we believe a strong balance is needed. And our strategy, the way, if you give me a hundred bucks at Kraken, the way we think about it is, the way we'll break apart the hundred dollars is first, we are not going to leave.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yes, absolutely. And we look at that all the time. But I can tell you that there is a reason why Kraken can come out and share our numbers with a lot of confidence, which we did last week, and if you saw, we shared our revenue and the volume, not every single, but we shared our first.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the size, the scale, and the pace of the flywheels are different based on who you are and where you are and the rest of the category, your market penetration, your core product differentiation. But in the long term sustainable growth, you cannot not have the fly view of your upper funnel spend that helps build, demand, and build your brand.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I've had the biggest realization, the same biggest realization too. But it's not at the cost of performance. So the way I think about it is, I'm going to use an analogy because this is the same question we discuss at every forum, at many team meetings, is how do you make a choice? How do you think about both? The way I say in product-led companies, not in CPG again. In product-led companies, you have to first think about growth and performance a lot lower frontal effort as oxygen. You don't have that, you are dead. You do not have a chance to come back the next day. You have to know your numbers and you have to move the numbers. So if you have 100 bucks, make sure you're using enough of the 100 bucks or all of it to hit the numbers you need. That's your oxygen. Then I think about this upper funnel spend. I'm reminding myself not to use the word brand. The upper funnel spend is nutrition, is good food, you know, or just food for that matter. You won't die if you didn't have it. You will eventually die.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of output, yes, we do a lot of experiments to look at because when the cack's looking good and we don't just always look at cak in our world, we look at CAC and early LTV, then we look at paybacks. But you will see when it's looking great, you tell the team, don't worry, just keep pushing and you start to see a cliff in CAC. Then you know, look, you've reached a saturation point, right? So you pull back and you normalize there. And then we challenge and we do tests and experiments to see now as you unlock upper funnel in that market in that particular market, can it unlock higher velocity, higher throughput? So can you expand the pipes through which new users are coming in by creating upper funnel? And that is how you prove incrementality of their upper funnel spend as well.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What point do you need both flywheels to be running? The magic is if you have a hundred bucks, how do you define and identify how much am I investing in which flywheel? And depending on what stage you are. So if you're in the early 0 to 1 stage, Once you've scaled, if you're not investing in upper funnel and you're not differentiating yourself, unless you're a Tesla where the product has differentiated itself from the clutter, you are just going to be a commodity because you have nothing that differentiates you from the pack.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work and both are absolutely must in the long terms to build a long term sustainable growth model, the differences are they play different roles. One is needed, to your point, let's say you saturated your demand, there's no more demand out there. Doesn't matter what level of discount and scientific lower funnel targeting you are doing, there are no more people. You have to create new demand by being part of culture, by creating inspiration, educating them about the value you bring. You just cannot give an offer and expect people will convert. That's what this upper funnel, which is the phrase I like to use more than brand, because otherwise brand as a phrase gets bossidized and the most hated word right now in the world of marketing and growth. So I think that upper funnel efforts are needed to create new demand when your lower funnel efforts have saturated whatever you had on the table. That's why you as a business have to think at what”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so now we are talking about brand and growth, brand and performance. That's a fun, challenging, but never dying dilemma. So a lot to unpack there. First, I would say whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing made the big s mistake and did the biggest injustice to labeling them. Because the moment you called one type of marketing performance and the other type something else, which is aka brand marketing, inadvertently means that one performs and the other doesn't, which is absolutely incorrect and wrong. And for founders and CEOs and companies that haven't spent in this, their foundation is based on that because a lot of their marketing understanding is from 30 years val, the age of the madmen, where it was a cost center. It was spray and prey with great marketing and people would come. But I feel that first of all, there's a fundamental flaw in our thinking that one type of marketing works and other doesn't.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At any point at scale, you don't want 80 to 90% of all your paid growth coming from one channel because too much at risk, right? I would say back in my D2C days, we used to obsess over it, but we would say no more than 25 to 30 percent in any single channel outside of organic. Also, because it's not just channel diversification, it's also the different type of audiences. Because in crypto, for example, we live and breathe on social. Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or search. So it's also diversifying the audiences because not every audience and product type is going to be going to make sense out of all these platforms and channels.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second phase is which are attributable, but they are not last touch. Like that's where paid social, your display ad networks come in and then gradually audio and OLV. Those are the ones where you now need to create a more sophisticated attribution and measurement model. If we just look at, oh, how many people came from paid social? The answer will be maybe none, but that doesn't mean it's not working because all the credit is being given to paid search. So you start to get smarter and build more advanced measurement and attribution models to understand the role that each of those touch points apply.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, more paid search, App Store, ASA. I mean, those are the ones which are more last touch models typically. So you're seeing your ads, you're being influenced, you're being softened. But where do more people convert? These are typically the last touch channels, right?”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not Facebook. I want not Instagram because they are the second layer of paid social platforms where attribution isn't all that straightforward. So I would bring them in the next wave of channels to unlock.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's assume we are starting from ground zero, where all you have is organic, which ones you unpack. Differentiating theory from reality. Because theoretically, I can say a lot of things. But reality is you pick the ones you can measure more directly and easily. Start there. Because I feel that spending on growth or spending in a product-like company is like your oxygen supply. You have to be able to prove what you are getting back. You are taking almost all your spend and putting that on the lower funnel, which is more directly attributable. And within the lower funnel, you're picking channels that you absolutely know are lost touch because you assume that you have some demand out there in the category. You were just not capturing it. So start on channels like paid search, you look at some display, and so on. And ASA, Google USC, channels that again are more digital, users are converting, and you can absolutely prove with very little ambiguity.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, what does your overall cost to LTV ratio look like over a 12, 24, 36 month period? So the goal has been how do we optimize that engine, scale that across geographies? And then if we can prove payback and the CFO believes, okay, if you're spending 100, you're giving the 100 back in less than six months, let's say, keep spending because we can see money coming back.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started with building the engine and we went from 10 to let's say spending 50 and then we are now spending a lot more which we can share. But the focus was the goal is not to be the loudest voice. The goal was we are going to invest in educating the world on the substance of crypto. At the same time identify who our core target audience is. And from a growth standpoint obsessing over not just spending and bringing people but obsessing over unit economics. So we spend a lot of energy, more so now like I said when Arjun coming on board, he's bringing a lot of more diverse perspective on what success looks like for us. So we invest a lot of energy on payback periods. What we want our payback period to be but not just the typical traditional marketing payback. This is fully loaded payback. We apply gross margin discounts. We apply a percentage of operating expenses on our cost and we challenge ourselves can we pay still pay that back within let's say X months?”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not of 80%. It's still organic. People who are coming. Now, if you apply, we invest a lot of energy on attribution and to decipher how many of those truly were organic and how many of those may have seen an ad and we're just not attributing. So we invest a lot of energy on attributing every single interaction and that normalizes that percentage a little bit. It starts to attribute to channels that are not last such like paid social and so on. So it normalizes a bit, but it's still a very healthy organic growth. The mission for us, Harry, when we started to scale our marketing engine, which is the second phase of growth around three years back, was not to slow down on organic. That's a race we are on. So a lot of effort on optimizing there. At the same time, we have to build this paid engine that just had never existed or not optimized enough.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you're a directive consumer e commerce business, you can pray to God and hope that more than 50% of your growth is organic. It'll never be because it's a massively CAC and unit economics driven world of direct-to-consumer where you're fighting for discounts. So I'm assuming it is 80, 85% paid, 10, 15% organic. At Kraken, because of her history of the first 10 years being purely organic and word of mouth, we still enjoy and are blessed with tremendous amount of organic growth.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should try it out. And we are, we do have an incredible SEO team that is absolutely focusing a lot on how do we show up. We monitor what percentage of search results are coming via traditional search engines and LLMs, and that's increasing, still very minuscule, but the growth rate is shifting more and more towards these LMS. And the way you have to optimize your content is very different for what the LLMs are looking for. And we're still learning. These are still very early phases, but a lot of the conversation, Harry, nine to 12 months from now, when the percentage of searches shift from traditional SEO engines to these LLMs, a lot of the conversation for the next two, three years will be, you know, what are the best practices? There'll be tons of agencies popping up to figure out, to make that a business model until it becomes a commodity again.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's less important. I think the way you optimize for SEO is dramatically going to change because the user journey is now going to begin from these AI engines and the AI engines are going to ask that question, but how will the AI engine find you? So you now have to optimize to show up within those LLMs. So as a brand, as a product, you still have to understand how you are going to be discovered. The mechanisms of discovery are evolving dramatically with AI, but you still want to be discovered. So what you have to do, the muscle you have to build internally is now from a human discovering you through this algorithm that this company called Google wrote and keeps changing without telling you, as they shouldn't, now that engine is an absolute machine led LLM based model. So now the challenge for all of us is how do I come on top of that LLM? How do I become the brand?”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see that in your curves, you see, are you saturating what your TAM is, how much market penetration you've had? Is your growth rate slowing down? Is there competition? Again, there are a lot more variables too. Are you in a saturated market where your product is good, but it's not absolute category creator, right? So look at Tesla. Category creator, more or less, yeah, there were some hybrid cars before, but they sucked. So they really haven't spent on marketing because every Tesla is a marketing channel and every Tesla owner, 90% of them, are marketing channels and advocates. Whether that is a pricing strategy or starting to think about how do we differentiate the brand itself?”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can you leverage the two strongest levers of growth, which are also the hardest levers? One is product. Can you bake in any amount of growth driven out of your product? Now, not every product would have inherent network effects. It depends on the nature of the product, but are you leveraging other tactical ideas like referrals? Are you leveraging virality? Are you thinking about anything that can squeeze, make your product your strongest marketing channel? And then two, can you leverage your existing client base as your strongest marketing channel? And then once you've done that, before you get into the drug of paid marketing, which is important, by the way, I'm not dishing on. We spend a lot on that now at Kraken. I would say the next layer is maximize every lever of organic growth that you can. So don't underestimate the value you can derive from SEO, absorptimization, all the things that are harder. Conquer those and then unlock.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say is one don't get too excited about growth because focus first on making sure that you have absolutely built a great product in a decent market. In other words, your proven product market fit, right? So invest enough energy in zero to one before getting excited about unlocking marketing or product-led growth or network effects. Like this is a struggle I see in a lot of early founders is this inertia and excitement to just grow even before they spend enough time to optimize and get enough signals that yes, I have a decent enough product that people are coming back and showing mistickiness, showing me habits for the core value prop. And once I've proven that and I've done a few things like, okay, I can demonstrate scale that if I go after, now you're saying now I'm ready for growth. That's one. Second, the way you approach growth, I would say, is first maximize the areas that are hardest, which is think about”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, it was planted back in the days of Facebook with Shamath and that team. They spun off something because the core functions were not thinking differently. Marketeers have the value of death of campaigns. So you run a campaign, you spike some growth and it dies. Product has a value of death or features and makes the product unusable. So they had to manufacture it that way. As Spotify, we had to manufacture it where I was a VP of growth on the marketing and the performing data side, but I had a partner who was a VP of growth on the product side, for example. At Kraken, three phases of growth, Harry. Phase one was the first 10 years where, like I said earlier, it was all organic. Great word of mouth, early player, category builder. Then in late 2021, we realized that the next phase of growth for Kraken, non-needs a conscious engine.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gets better and better as the entire organization bolts on. But that's not because it was a great product and people found it. You still have to do those mechanics, but the growth itself is inherently driven through the product or through word of mouth. You're still going out there, but the channels and the levers you're using are not your typical paid marketing levels just yet.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath the build it and they will come is still marketing it is just driven by the product. It's a world where there is infinite choice, there is infinite access from a user standpoint compared to 25 years back where access was extremely challenging. And until you saw it on the TV, you had no way to know that something new had launched. No longer, right? So this infinite access, there's no sense of loyalty. The friction to leave your product and enter another one is absolutely nothing. So what I mean by a great product is product in of itself is the magnet. It is a strong driver. So for example, Slack has network effects baked in. So as long as you get one client and you have 10 users within a team or one user within a team, the nature of the product itself inherits network effects where I'm going to ask all my team to join because the value of”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They understand incrementality, they understand payback, they understand user growth, and the challenge and the opportunity for marketeers to be successful is how do they then influence and inspire the rest of the organization to appreciate the value of the serendipity of brand building. At the same time use a lot of creativity to prove the impact of that investment.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meeting marketing. Yes, you can say Spotify is all about brand and the Barcelona partnership. Actually, it isn't. Spotify is first about an incredible product and all the good that is driven by product. I can bet my life on that. And then on top of that, then comes a sliver of marketing because in proclate company, brand is not built by marketing. We enhance it. Brand is built first and foremost in the zero to one stage by the quality of the product and the experience you deliver. And then secondly, it's built by the users. You know, they are your biggest marketing channel after the product. And then you bring marketing to say, hey, here's a foundation. Here's who we are. Now, how do we enhance and differentiate ourselves and really scale it and reach? So when you go as a marketeer in an organization like that, your step one is not brand building. Your step one has to be rooted in data because that's the language the rest of the organization knows.”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my favorite topics because when people talk about marketing and growth, we talk about as a monolithic craft and it's not. There's so many variations. And the best way to answer that is let me talk about one which is a total opposite, a seepage, a traditional CPG, you know, that is not direct to consumer, where the only Goth engine that exists is marketing. That's why marketing in traditional CPG calls the shots. They are not just marketers, they're brand managers. They own the P&L. That's the traditional world. So when we talk about marketing and a product-led growth marketer is comparing themselves or hearing stories from a CPG CMO or chief growth officer, don't do that. You're going to put yourself in a box and get really anxious because the levers they have and the authority they have will never exist in a product like company. That's the only lever a CPG company has. Now let's look at what happens in a product-led organization where they got to a billion dollars without”
2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source