YouSaid · the spoken record

Raman Malik

lines on the record: 82
first: 2024-11-15
most recent: 2024-11-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm a huge fan of products or features that are built that can drive viral sharing with users. I think like Spotify wrapped, right? It was like the first one to just like, oh my God, this is going everyone sharing this. And I think that strategy is now adopted by so many AI startups, whether it's image generation, whatever it is, but create something that is very, very shareable or very unique and people want to put out into the world. And now everyone knows who you are. It is the fastest way to grow by letting your users do it for you.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perplexities, his first big swing at a company. And so there's a lot of intuition that he's picking up on the fly. And it's awesome to see how quickly he is to pick up on whether it's growth intuition, whether it's partnerships, whatever it is. But he's learning on the fly because he is a first-time founder.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He can go from a very high level company strategy of what direction do we need to go very quickly two seconds later down into incredibly specific weeds of like what a user funnel should be. He can jump at these layers like no one I've ever seen. And this is all in one meeting.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I mean, it's crazy that eight, nine months ago, that was a big question. It wasn't clear where there would be value. And today we're getting a little more insight into people who crush at the application layer, who go really, really specific on high TAM areas can make a lot of money.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I joined perplexity and was writing out my pro con list, I think the one that was like up there was like, can the application layer capture and monetize value? Or is it all just one big pass-through cost? And now fast forward not that long, I love being at the application layer. Like this is awesome. I think that's really changed by I think the application layer is an amazing place to be. I think that's where so much of the value is going to emerge”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just clarity of what the hell it is. You put 10 growth people in a room, and everyone has a slightly different answer of what we're working on, but it's growth product and growth marketing. And I think the more people that understand that, the better.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah. And it's tough in AI right now because the world is changing every second. But it's critical to be honest with yourself of what is the true TAM of this? Are we still seeing unbelievable growth in product iteration?”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We overestimated how much better we could make the ride sharing product. Like when you look at ride sharing four or five years ago versus today, how much has the product changed? Not that much. So if you believe that you can keep making the product better and better and better, and that's going to unlock new markets, well, that's one thing. But if you're wrong about that, well, then you should be pivoting to meal delivery and stuff like that because you've hit your diminishing returns. And I think we underestimated how quickly we hit the ride-sharing diminishing returns on the product side.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obsess about every single number in the dashboard. Get your hands on as much data as possible. You know, when I started at Lyft, I was literally like entry level, nobody role. But like one thing is like, I'm just going to know the numbers better than everyone else. And like you start to learn how the machine works when you see how all these numbers start to correlate with each other. And then when you start knowing the numbers better than everyone else, you get pulled into all these incredible meetings because you're just the numbers guy. We have to have them in the meeting because he knows these numbers better than anyone. And I think that is the ultimate way to just build intuition of how your growth machine works, where the friction points in it. And that is what's going to help you make the better decisions in terms of what you should be working on.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think especially with all the latest Apple changes, I don't know how anyone is going to make Instagram or Facebook ads efficiently work at scale as like a core growth channel. It's a very classic answer.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assuming the user's pain points when they're just straight up faults, really, really not understanding what does someone actually need to learn in that first session. It's the most common, you end up running up the wrong wall.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I care a lot about team. People say that they quit the manager, not the company. I think people quit the team. And if you have an incredible team that is just like well old machine, mutual respect and everyone loves working with each other. It's really hard to quit that. You're just having too much fun. And that's what I want to try and create. I want everyone at the company to be like, man, I wish I could work on the growth team for a couple months. Like that's the thing to like, that's the goal to have. And to find someone that can fit into that that I believe is going to jump right into this and play an amazing part and have the mutual respect of everyone and be a great teammate. It's hard to find. And you can overthink it sometimes. So I'm trying to be a little bit quicker to the punch on evaluating and taking risks with hires.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, I got my laptop on Friday and was going to start on Monday. I was in every single dashboard we have. And part of it was just pure excitement. You wanted someone that is just like obsessing about the problem at day one.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think fairly quickly. My rule of thumb is if they truly need an onboarding dock, we're in trouble. Because if they need me to say, here are the 20 things that you're going to do over the next 30 days and like, this is your checklist. I want someone who can come in, turn over stones, and build their own onboarding dock very quickly. I am very high trust in the amount of rope I want to give someone to go in here and start working on the area of ownership that you have and go make it really, really great. I'm going to have perspectives on how we should be implementing it or what we should be working on. But I want to see them come in and very quickly be able to figure out and have the motivation or the drive to say this is what we need to work on and here's why.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's fine. That's a fair argument. In the end, we give him a hypothetical about perplexity. We're considering launching X. Now walk us through your thinking of how you would approach this launch or something like that. So it's not something that we have done. We're all in the room brainstorming together. And you can kind of get a sense and feel of like, what is it like to jam with this person and brainstorm with them when it's that hypothetical but still related to perplexity? How quickly are they going to ramp up and fit in”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We give different scenarios, usually two or three different scenarios. They're all fairly open-ended. So you can go into as much depth. But the goal is to walk us through your thinking of how you would approach it and all the different areas that you need to consider along the way. It is really hard.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because it's almost a personality trait, and you're trying to evaluate that personality trait because that's something they probably had early on.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I loved trade war stories, especially for people with a little bit more experience of, okay, you were at Lyft. Tell me, like, tell me about the war stories around when times are really hard, what didn't work. Tell me about your biggest, you know, just total flop. And let's go laugh about this flop together.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it comes down to what are the questions they are asking that shows the depth at which they are thinking, right? I mean, I'm a pretty open book when I'm interviewing about what our challenges are. And we kind of just jam on them. And you can tell very quickly how deep someone is thinking about your challenges and their experience with it that, okay, they're asking the right questions. They're trying to reverse engineer how to make this good very, very efficiently.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, tastes the ability to understand what good looks like. I'm convinced that I don't, I'm not actually that good at anything, but what I can do is go look at what's happening in the world, understand what good looks like, and then try and reverse engineer it. So that's the game.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think you have to let him cook. I mean, you want to give him enough band. If you hired them and you trust them and they can execute, get out of their way. Let them go experiment, right? I mean, you don't want to put guardrails over their ability to experiment and try. Okay, how do we go bigger? And that's the kind of culture you want to create.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a lot of founders here. And I think the best part about hiring founders is that they are much more comfortable at taking very big swings and being willing to fail. It is by nature if you're going down the founder path. You have to be a little bit more comfortable in that world than the average. And the average person is not willing to fail. They're not willing to go stand up in front of the company and be like, we're going to try this out. And it might not work. And so the more people you can get like that, you know, Mike Maples at Floodgate has this incredible analogy that early SARA teams need to be like a jazz band, right? Like throw out the sheet music. This is not what it's about. It's like, no, you are here to just riff off of each other and make it work. And that's where founders, I think, are great. It can go sour, I guess, as things scale and you start to need that sheet music. You start to need a lot more coordination as the company grows. And some founders just don't want to, they miss the jazz band and they're going to.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends what you need. Do you want a marketer that can juice the top of the funnel but can still get in the weeds, run experiments, think about onboarding flows? Or do you want a product person that can run marketing campaigns? I obviously fall into more of the latter, right? I want to spend time in the data. I want to be turning over stones. I want to be holding on to that data. It depends on the makeup of the current team and the founders. If you're feeling good from a top-of-funnel perspective and you have a complex funnel that is cross-device, go for the product person that has built these funnels before.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an in product one. I don't think sharing is inherent to the perplexity user journey or user flow. Like I don't think that we have an inherent viral loop where someone does some research and then shares a thread or screenshot to another person. But there's a lot of sharing happening on perplexity right now. Take an answer and put it on Twitter or send it to Harry. Whatever it is, we see a lot of traffic come in through sharing. The more I really, really want to get my hands on that experience and just drive sharing and find creative ways to promote sharing of this knowledge that you are curating as a user.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you don't learn anything from that. Like, I would rather try and entertain and come up short because, okay, like that one didn't work. But if we're just trying to go in the middle and say, here's perplexity, like that's not never going to work.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, luckily for us, we aren't on many channels. We are still so organic growth-driven partnerships driven. I do want to really, really try and figure out how we can unlock creators and tastemakers in a more efficient way. And that, again, is building relationships with fewer of them and working with them, not where we're just throwing a sponsorship placement on their newsletter or in their podcast, but like finding really creative ways to bring it to life.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both, I mean, I think search is a massive market. And so if there's somewhere we want to live, it's going up against a big guy.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's take students. There are students using perplexity and getting tons and tons of value, but we under index an awareness with students relative to ChatGPT. So then the question is, well, how do we take our best students and give them everything they need, marketing budget, swag, whatever they want so that they can go beyond the ground on these campuses and drive growth for perplexity and build density on that campus? Let's arm our troops, our power users with everything they need to grow for us. It's an incredible strategy because they're on the campus and these are not big campuses. You can build density very, very quickly. And as soon as you have that initial density, then you see word of mouth start to come alive.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A controversial one. I think community and how you can unlock your power users to share the value of your product to their own miniature communities is incredibly powerful.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's no middle ground. So everyone in growth is looking for alpha, right? Find the untapped channel, beat everyone to it, right? Dropbox with the referral program, Groupon, an email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo, and just like a totally unhinged social media, right? All of them were kind of first to this concept. And it really, really worked. And so as a growth person, you're constantly looking for where is this opportunity? What are the channels right now that are kind of greenfield? Now, The problem right now is like channels are a little bit quiet right now. Facebook and Instagram are really expensive. Apple updates have made paid hard. Organic social really, really hard. Notifications are so crowded. Everything feels really crowded right now. There's no middle ground if you're not first. It literally just means you're only other option is to just be a lot better than everyone else. And that's like where we need to hold ourselves too.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, growth is a game of intuition. All we have to do is just keep learning to figure out the right direction and then just work on cadence to just keep driving in that specific direction as we learn.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so many different channels to test. I don't want to lose my focus spending on channels where I'm not going to learn much. And I think I got burned. Like a good example of another area I got burned was newsletter sponsorships. It's like, okay, like there's some interesting audiences here. I want to try this out. But it's really hard unless you have a really crisp product that you can put into a really simple ad placement that is like two sentences of text and that's it, right? Newsletter placements are really hard. And so like, again, that's another one where we came up flattened. I don't know how many learnings I walked away with there. So I kind of just spun my wheels for no reason.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And especially when you're hitting net new audiences. So we ran a TV ad with Jim Harbaugh. Great football coach, American football in the US. And the commercial goes live and we have tons of influencers, reporters, in sports retweeting it, commenting on it. And this is a new audience, right? For all the sports fans sitting at a bar watching the game who have all their”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get a lot of these emails. You know, I mean, we're doing a lot. What's cool about Perplex is we don't have a marketing department. So we're doing so many cool things. And all of these are just someone on the team had a passionate, was really passionate about an idea that we believe has viral potential. If so, like go execute and make it happen. And the metric that matters in brand marketing for me is there's an expected number of impressions that anyone will tell you you're going to see if you go run a TV campaign or sponsor a jersey. And what really matters is what is the incremental impressions you're getting from that? Can that moment go viral where, okay, we may be paid for X amount of impressions, but we're getting a lot more on top of it because people are reposting about it, because it has gone viral across social. That is where brand marketing can be really interesting.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need someone to hear about your product three to seven times before they're going to give it an honest trial. I really do believe in that. And I think it's incredibly hard to measure the value of it. And just because we can't measure it does not mean that it's useless.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10k a week, and the amount we can learn is pretty great in terms of what messaging is working, what messaging is not working, or what use cases really, really resonate with people, whether it's travel planning, studying, solving something at work. There are a lot of different things we can test because we're so horizontal.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversion is pretty good. We're still very early in testing this. Conversion is solid, like top of funnel campaigns do well. I'm still waiting for some of this retention to bake.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And it worked really well early on, right? It was kind of like a magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat of like, look at this magic. But now it's...”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The algorithm is so different than how we think about traditional algorithms where it's built for virality. So if you're trying to do organic TikToks, you're comfortable with 10 failing, but one hitting 7 million views. And that's almost like, it's such a crazy power law. On the TikTok ad side, I think we are learning a lot around how AI companies need to be positioning themselves with new audiences that don't care about AI. Like you can't walk up and be like, well, we're an AI search engine. And people are going to be like, oh my God, that's what I've been waiting for my entire life. You need abstract a way this whole AI piece and just go straight to the value prop of get answers immediately backed by sources.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's flip that lift scenario so then you have the passenger side not incremental at all, the supply side, it's really hard to get drivers in a ride-sharing network. And guess what? You're a marketplace. You need to balance supply and demand. You need to acquire the drivers. And so I think this is where we did run a lot of paid at Lyft to acquire the supply side. And part of that is, well, if we acquire the supply side, we can balance the marketplace, balance marketplace is going to be much more efficient. Lyft will grow because of it. And that spend will pay back much faster. So I think it makes sense as like a very intense balancing lever for marketplaces. And then if your unit economics support it, I do think there are advantages to using paid acquisition to go after audiences that you're under indexed in. So right now, like the only paid acquisition we've ever touched, and it's so lightweight, are some just like simple TikTok ads.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organic traffic. None of it was incremental. So maybe it pulled those users forward by a few weeks. But overall, it was just Lyft had enough organic word-of-mouth traction where once you factored in the incrementality of the channel, it just wasn't efficient. It made no sense.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We barely touch. Paid acquisition is a total drug. It makes everyone feel good because top of funnel numbers move up. And once you see those weekly activation rates, well, no one wants to see that go down. But it's going to underperform on retention. And maybe most importantly, it's most likely not going to be incremental. I basically started my career on the paid acquisition team at Lyft, right? Spending millions and millions of dollars on these channels. And I'll never forget this. Our head of growth at the time was basically just like, go turn off every single paid channel for new passengers. And like, we're spending, like, paid acquisition was driving a good amount of passenger acquisition. And so the growth marketing team turns off every single paid channel and installs and signups barely move. They go down by like maybe 5, 10. I don't remember what it was. What did go down? It was all low quality. Every marketing dollar that was being spent to acquire these new passengers was just cannibal.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it depends on stage, right? Do they have, are they at the scaling period where it is now turn on these channels and drive growth because we feel really good about where we are in terms of retention or any incremental work we're going to do on trying to move activation or move early retention is hitting diminishing returns? Then it's okay, let's now go move our focus to attacking these channels and maximizing the efficiency of them, maximizing these CACTL TV ratios. That's when I think, okay, we're seeing diminishing returns on retention. Now it's time to move to Cacked LTV optimization.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could add more gates. We could add more usage gates where you run into, okay, I really want to use ProSearch or File Upload more often. And well, as a free user, you only have three per day, but we know you love this. So why don't you consider upgrading to our pro plan where you get basically unlimited of both. Those are the optimizations where we can tinker with the limits. We can tinker with how we are showing you upsells in that moment”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's happening a little bit now. Like you look at perplexity, it is completely unoptimized for driving subscriptions.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple pieces here. One is like should we even be focusing on monetization? Do we want to think about paid acquisition as a lever that needs to bring in users? And then we see that payback happen immediately? And my answer early on was no. I think we just need to go focus on top of funnel, new user growth, and getting incredible sticky retention. And if we do that, guess what? We're going to be able to figure out how to monetize these users, whether it's through a consumer subscription, whether it's through ads, whatever it is. We're going to be able to figure out that monetization. So let's put down Cactale TV for now and let's, the only metric I'm going to just yell about all day is our activation rate and our retention rate and hold me to moving that.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think where we're moving to is really simple language around ask anything or what do you want to know and search like never before? I think it's really important to get across that perplexity has live search. We are searching the internet in real time. We're giving you up-to-date answers. And that is really critical to make sure everyone understands.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where knowledge begins. Yeah, that's the fine balance. How much information do we need to slap in your face? How functional should it be? How brand oriented should it be? This is where we spend all of our time tinkering in terms of what does someone need to hear to understand how perplexity can help them and what are the key differentiation points for us that we need to highlight.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is something we're going to never stop banging our head against. But how we tinker with the messaging as soon as you land on perplexity, it's critical for us that people understand that perplexity has up-to-date data, that we show sources. And that is the inherent value. And so you're going to see a lot of experimentation on how can we drive the messaging so people understand what they landed on and can figure out how it can drive value for them.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There have been a couple. We've worked on a lot of different things. One is can you makeshift audience? So we've done a lot of audience targeting around specific high quality cohorts. Two is can you makeshift platform? I don't want you just on the web app or I don't want you just on the mobile app. Can I get you across multiple devices and that cross device conversion is really, really strong for retention because now you're using it on weekends. You're using it during the day. We're everywhere. We're integrating into your life. Those are the two really big ones. And then you never can just underestimate driving product improvements is always going to drive retention.”
2024-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source