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

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

“Yeah, because you're getting more information from the user around what they're looking for, which means we can provide better responses. We can reformulate that query to give you broader search results and then use that to drive our answer. The more information we have in that query, the better of a result we can provide.”
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
“Well, you see a lot of trial users that are coming in from curiosity traffic, like the weekenders that are putting in how many times does someone fart in a day, that's a little bit lower retention. If I'm here to solve a knowledge gap, like I'm using perplexity for work specifically, or I'm a student using perplexity to find sources for a paper, that is really, really sticky retention because we are solving knowledge gaps for you. It's not just curiosity that we're bringing 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
“So there are finite ways to move retention. One, you are setting up your milestone metrics. What correlates with deeper retention earlier in the funnel? So that three queries in your first session. And now how am I really trying to move that? But at a higher level, you're constantly playing with makeshift, right? So one, you can optimize channel distribution. So organic in referrals is always going to have higher retention than paid acquisition and partnerships. That's because of so much of our growth is word of mouth and partnerships led. Like we don't have much channel distribution optimization to make. Two is you can target different audiences. Perplexity is incredibly horizontal. My grandmother uses it. My doctor uses it. Everyone uses it. So can I find different segments, different audience segments that have really high retention? And then can I specifically go after them? So I'm changing the makeshift of new cohorts to that new audience, which increases that retention for those cohorts.”
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
“Consumers are hard, man. Consumer is really hard. And so what you want to see is that retention curve stabilize, I think it was like by month six, you want 45% is really, really, really good. That's the target, right? That's where we want to push to. Especially when you're not a social product that has more of like that smile retention curve. You really need to figure out how can we drive retained value and increase frequency to get to that 45 plus percent.”
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
“Very, very dependent on the company. So keep in mind, perplexity, you don't have to sign up to start using it. That's amazing, right? It gives us the opportunity to have quick trials. People can just put in a question and immediately see the value of it. But that logged out visitor to logged in activation rate is tricky to navigate. And so like from that logged out experience, I'd love to push that into like the 30% of users are hitting my milestone metrics and we're converting them to signed-in users.”
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
“So, look, you come in, you turn over all the stones, you're trying to get a sense of through this end to end funnel from acquisition down to monetization, like where should I spend my time? Where is the biggest opportunity to drive growth? And we had Dimitri and the business team running these big partnerships. We had tons of traffic coming in from the top of the funnel. My eyes went straight to that early activation rate week one, week two retention. None of it was bad. It was actually like pretty healthy consumer retention, but that was where if we can move that number early on at the top of the funnel, we're increasing the water level of all activated users and weekly actives. That's where I need to hang out. That's where I need to spend.”
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 if we're not making mistakes for not learning fast enough. I think I came in really interested in influencer marketing and in really wanting to test this channel. Creators, how do we work with creators to share perplexity? And I totally underestimated the amount of effort it is to work individually with creators on specific content and making sure they get the right messaging. And perplexity is not a simple concept to explain like me saying AI search engine means nothing. And so to manage a bunch of these creators creating content, long tail creators, it ended up A, falling flat and B, taking up a ton of time, ton of time. And so I think we're moving very quickly is we'd rather work with fewer creators and just develop a really good relationship with 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
“I'd think about more audiences. So, what audiences do I want to reach and what partnerships can we get to there? So I think a lot about the student audience. And so there's some partnerships in that student world that I really want to break into to help drive distribution within students at scale.”
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 certain extent, but that's acquisition cost. We're willing to trade off a month of Pro because if you don't use Pro, it's pretty variable, right? If you're not using Pro, we're not losing money. But if you are using it, well, now we're capturing you as a user. You're really starting to understand why perplexity is magical. And then the game becomes, can we convert you to that paying user after?”
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
“They are incredibly effective at driving distribution. We can go out and scream from the mountaintops about perplexity, but it is a lot better when someone else is telling you to use it or it is being bundled into an existing product of yours. That's going to drive a lot more trial. We have a phenomenal partnerships team. They are absolute sharks”
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
“Word of mouth, yeah, about 80%. It's going to depend on priority countries or international. We do a lot of big partnerships to drive distribution.”
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. AI companies have a ton of curiosity traffic, which is awesome. Anyone who launches something that shows a little bit of magic or has a magical demo, they are going to get traffic. They're going to get quick usage. All of our growth, most of our growth has been organic word of mouth. Two years in, and we're still riding this incredible wave of organic traffic. That's the best channel you can ever have. So the question for us is how do we keep nurturing that? How do we keep this organic magic still happening?”
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
“Or you had so much great value early on that you're not rabbit holing into perplexity. Harry, you mentioned a query you and your family were putting in last night. What if that can lead to a bunch of follow up questions? That's awesome. You're now deep in the perplexity experience learning and exploring. And that's great for us.”
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
“One is monitoring. Does this still correlate down the road once we're done with gaming it? Once we're done with tinkering with it? And if we're seeing it, that correlation start to break, well, okay, I'm not being honest with myself around if we're actually helping retention here. The other thing is to take a rounded approach, you can't just stare down one metric. I need to stare down number of queries, but also time in for a session. Did that first session timing hit that 10 minute period and not just...”
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 call these milestone metrics. So can we go take anyone who's retaining at 30, 60 days and then look back into their first couple sessions and say, okay, what did they do differently? What is unique about their experience? From 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
“60 days and then come back and tell the team, okay, we finally made a decision, you kind of have to make a decision right there or figure out how to optimize and like protect that downside.”
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 lot of times you see A tests with mixed results. And those are the trickiest ones to navigate. So let's say we're working on, okay, I want to get a user to hit their fifth query in the session. Then I'm going to show them a sign-in opportunity. Well, I'm showing an assign-in opportunity. I'm now juicing activations. Great. But a lot of people saw that sign-in gate and they hated it. They were like, screw this, I'm out of here. And now I'm hurting query volume. I'm hurting searches happening in perplexity. So now I have two different metrics to hold on to. How do I value those two things down the road? That is where it gets really, really fun for some of us where it's like, okay, well, how do we value this? Will that activated user retain? And over time, those retained metrics, if I think about this on a 30-day timeframe or a 60-day timeframe, will make up for that initial loss in query volume. I'm not going to go run that AB test for.”
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 think your goal as a PM is to optimize direction. Are we working on the right thing? Are we poking at the right part of this product that can drive impact? And A-B tests give you a quick response to it. And I think that is like core to understanding, are we working on the right thing? Are we moving fast enough? Are we really moving the needle on this? That being said, you should go into an A-B test with a pretty strong confidence of what's going to happen. And this is where like intuition comes in, of like, we're running this and here's what I think is going to happen. I think we're really going to move this metric, but we might see that other metric go down a bit. And that's what we need to watch out for. If you don't have that intuition, then you're just flying blind.”
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 a good and bad, and ugly. The good is we are using A b test to understand impact, to understand how every metric changes. Are we accidentally bringing down certain metrics? Do we really understand what is incremental and what is not incremental? That is like a well-scoped A-B test teaches you what you should work on next. It adjusts your direction. It adjusts your cadence. A bad A-B test is poorly scoped. You're not going to get any information out of it. It's a messy thing with a low minimum detectable effect and you're going to run it and you're not going to get anything out of it. You just wasted a week of your time. And then the ugly, the ugly is I'm running an A-B test so that I can put something in my performance review about a number I moved or I can like say something to my manager. And you see that as companies get bigger, right? We're running A-B tests just to like be able to say, oh, I increased activations by 12%.”
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'd say 25% would be pretty great on these big swings, maybe like once a year, we have just a banger campaign or banger new feature that is now really driving growth or really opened up a new audience for us. That is huge.”
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
“Microoptimizations have diminishing returns. At some point, I'm not going to be able to squeeze out an incremental 10, 15% without a lot of wasted experimentation time. And that's why my rule of thumb is once a quarter, we have to be taking at least a couple massive swings, right? A big new feature, a big marketing campaign. It has to be high risk. It has to be high reward. I have to be able to stand in front of the company and say, I'm going to do something and be willing to fail.”
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
“Yep, I think microoptimizations are seriously underrated. I think anyone that has like built a growth model for their company, imagine you, you open up an Excel sheet, you have new users, you've retained users, you have resurrections, and you've churned users, right? New users plus retained users plus resurrections, minus churned users. That's your weekly actives or monthly actives, right? And then if you assume like a new user growth rate or a retention curve, you can now play around with, well, if I increase retention by 10%, what happens to my weekly actives? What happens to my monthly actives? That 10% small change in retention or in new user activation, you see the entire water level of your active user base just increase. That small micro-optimization just raised the entire water level of the company. And so that's huge. Like I'm going to go after that if the opportunity is there to hedge that though.”
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's a very flat organization. So there was nothing built out, but there were resources to pull from, right? There are engineers that are ready to jump in on, okay, let's go hack onboarding or let's go really iterate on deeper retention or anything like that. And it depends on when you are starting. But a lot of times it's, well, what even exists today? And your first few weeks stepping into growth is you're just turning over stones. You're trying to build the map of the world. Okay, what's happening in acquisition? What's happening in engagement? What's happening in monetization? And usually when you ask those questions, you don't get any answers and you just get a hundred more questions that you have to now go figure out. So then your job becomes, let me build the right infrastructure so we can actually measure and understand the world. And that's where you start getting into engineering logging, attribution. Do we have first party cookies? All of 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
“Yeah, but I mean, I think as soon as you say that you have early signs in retention, like we're seeing like, you know, if you see 30% retention in month three or four, you have the kindling in your fire where it is now worth it to go put gasoline on it, go make that investment. And it doesn't have to be, we're going to go turn on marketing channels and spend a bunch of money. It could just be, okay, can we get that 30% retention to go to 40%? Can we make it really easy for to convert all these users through the funnel?”
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
“Growth marketing, your goal is the exact same as the growth product team, right? Drive that user funnel from acquisition down to monetization. But your tools are just different. You're not approaching it from a engineering design or data science angle. Your tools are marketing channels. They're lifecycle communications. It's community. It's marketing campaigns. All these things need to live closely together, right? I can't work on an onboarding experience without a product team iterating on every flow and without the marketing team thinking about copy, thinking about email drip campaigns. Everything comes in as one cohesive unit to bring this funnel 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
“I see growth as independent function that bridges product and marketing. So there's growth product and there's growth marketing. Growth product, let's start there, is a product team engineering, design, data science all working together, put your core product, the product you're obsessing over, is the user funnel. So acquisition, activation, retention, monetization. So growth is not just about, let me fill the top of the funnel with new users. It's about getting those users to become retained, to develop into power users so that you can eventually monetize them. So you just obsess over that journey, that facilitates that user lifecycle. That's growth problem.”
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
“Things and I get to steer the ship, but now you're hyper focused on okay, I'm here to drive growth. I am de-scoping myself just to go do an excellent job at this. And that's an adjustment as well.”
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, you know, I go to business school. I go take a swing for three years and just grinding up against startup life. And there's nothing easy about it, right? Like when you're a founder that month after month, pivot after pivot, nothing is moving, there is nothing more demoralizing than those moments. You know when it came down to the final straw, we end up shutting down from chatting with different companies and chatting with Arvin, Dennis, Johnny, Dimitri, everyone. It became very clear like this is a company that is moving crazy fast, is having so much fun. I'm going to go do that. But it's different going from the founder's seat, right? You know, one, you are now well aware of how freaking hard startups are. Your ego is bruised, right? You just got your ass kicked. So it's a total adjustment in terms of framing. And then you're basically descoping yourself. I'm brought on to just drive growth. So founders enjoy the variety of I got to go work on a hundred.”
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 NBAs make a lot of sense for people who are trying to break into a specific industry. If you are trying to break into private equity or you want to be a PM at Amazon or go into McKinsey, then NBAs have like your preset path and you just follow your guidelines. You have a community to work with and prep for. And you'll hopefully get in. So it's a very expensive bridge to breaking into one of those fields. But for many people, that's an incredibly valuable, valuable journey.”
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, NBAs have such an interesting reputation in tech. Most people just absolutely hate them. I personally, even though I left a year early in the NBA, I had a great experience. I got there. I came to tinker with ideas. I never took an interview. Started playing around with all my different ideas. You can get funding from the school. So it's essentially like a preseed. And you're just tinkering full time. And investors start conversations start flowing and it became very clear like I'm going to learn a lot more. I'm going to have such a better experience if I just go full steam ahead on this idea. And that was it. I mean, it was amazing”
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 have no clue. I have no clue. I had a great family that really pushed all of us to get out of Alabama, to go do cool stuff and here I am in San Francisco working at a really, really fun company.”
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. If I can get a user on perplexity specifically to three queries in that first session, now I know I'm really on to something. 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.”
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