YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Schutz

lines on the record: 41
first: 2022-01-19
most recent: 2022-01-19
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

“There was a campaign that calm ran that I really, really liked back in 2020. It was the 2020 election. They were the sponsor of CNN's coverage for election night results. It was like election 2020 brought to you by Calm. And it was like hilarious because people are like, of course I'm freaking out mentally. It blew up on social and I know they got like so much value out of that. They've started thinking about what are other ways they can expand into sponsoring life's most stressful moments.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think more acknowledgement around growth as a team sport. That's something I've been talking more about. But creative product, insights, engineering, everyone has to band together to actually make growth work.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's an opportunity for failure if you don't have your tooling and attribution in a place where you can actually understand what's happening. The channels are only as good as you can track against them. And so having a good enough grip on what's happening and where your spend is efficient is pretty key for any growth team to show success.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Channel diversification. We talked a little bit about before, but this kind of misnomer that right out of the gate you need to be completely diversified from a channel perspective versus early days, find something that works. Diversification is a rich person's series A type of problem.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Email is still an incredibly important channel. People have been talking about the decline of email for as long as I've been doing marketing. And well, maybe it's less efficient than it was 10 years ago. Still a really important part of the mix. So don't sleep on email.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if we have time on the podcast, Harry. I don't know if we have enough time for all of these. There's plenty of things. I think one thing that has not worked out as well, I would say, is, you know, we launched as Roman specifically focused on men's sexual health. The second product and condition we launched was actually called zero for smoking cessation. It actually made a ton of sense. 14% of men that came onto the platform for ED were heavy smokers and it played a large role in why they were experiencing issues with sexual intimacy. But we learned people don't like paying to stop something that while they know it is bad, they enjoy it and they've been doing it for a long time. And so it's this interesting dance where people know that they should stop smoking. They know it's not healthy, but they're not really willing to pay someone in order to help them stop something that's maybe like one of the things they enjoy the most during the course of the day. So we've learned a lot about how we launch new conditions and how we think about evaluating patient needs. That's one example for you.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. Not really. I think that I've become very comfortable with taking swings, no pun intended. Trying some of these things. And like, if you don't try anything, you're not going to learn anything. And sometimes the swings need to be bigger. And for me, coming from Bark and into row, like we very early on decided to take some swings. We knew we wanted to build a big business. We knew we wanted to help a lot of people. Felt like pretty natural swing. Could have ended differently. And certainly there have been things we have learned more quickly, have not worked out.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Media opportunities when you think about reputation and legitimacy. We followed our gut on and has been really, really powerful and continues to be something we invest in. And MLB has been a great partner.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as growth marketers, we like to think all of our decisions are grounded in data, of course, but I think that there are plenty of times where it requires going out on a limb if you want to win or try something new. The example I'll give you is our relationship with Major League Baseball. So Roman is a proud partner of Major League Baseball, and we have been for several years. But that started back in 2018 when we had some initial reads that there could be a good demo overlap, right? The average age on Roman is 46 years old. The average baseball viewer is in his early 50s. So he said, there's something here. We'll try running some ads and seeing how it goes. And it was good. It was pretty good. But then we went in, we had conversations. Do we want to become an official partner of Major League Baseball? Like, what is the value we get out of that? It's really, really hard to quantify. We didn't have that hard and fast data that said Roman, logo, plus major league baseball logo equals 15% increase in conversion. You'd love to have that, but you kind of need to make a leap. So we did, we said, let's do this. We think there's a lot of benefits outside of even just”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's an expectation sometimes that a growth team can land the plane perfectly every time, if that makes sense, right? We got to hit this new member number. We have to hit this CAC and retention has to look like that. Those are all very hard to do. And so I think communicating that is very important. But then understanding that there might be reasons why one or several of those metrics get a little bit muddled is really important. And understanding the context behind why allows a CEO to more adequately explain some of these deviations from maybe what I anticipated plan works like. For example, everyone's going through a lot of the same struggles right now with the changes to iOS 14 and paid social. That is a universal thing that is happening. That should be something that growth team and the CEO are working on really closely to understand what is happening. And here are the three bullets of our plan to try and overcome that. Really making sure that there's constant discussions and there's kind of constant understanding and alignment around”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's somewhat of a dependency around how the org is set up, right? If that's reporting to the CEO, if it's reporting to the growth office,”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I think that comes back to again having common goals, right? There should be new member goals that the design team is thinking about and new member goals that engineering is thinking about that unite everyone working towards this common larger company goal. Yes, it is a team sport. It is not somebody goes off in a corner and rips Google search campaigns and everyone's job is done. Those days are kind of gone where you could just plug into a channel and you're all set. But I think more than ever requires everyone being aligned around common goals than making sure you're catching up and you're tracking against those goals and understanding, hey, we need to make some changes across these different areas if we want to go ahead and hit this okay. Having folks aligned, I think is the number one thing you can do there.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I found more and more is human people like interacting with other human people in a lot of cases. And if you can do that in a way where you're also grounding the conversation around common goals and you're bringing in the right types of people who are motivated by that, that has a way of just working itself out.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that starts with having a common North Star. Like, there's a lot you can do to get people working together in meetings and social events and donuts through Slack and all of these things. But the reality is, if your incentives are not aligned and you're not working towards a common set of goals, there is always going to be inherent friction. For example, selfishly I will bring things back to Row, but that's why I'm here. We'd set OKRs on per six-month basis. We do that at a company level. Here are the metrics we are running towards. Here are the quality and safety metrics we are aligned on. Then from there, each of the teams will build their sub oKrs against that. And those all need to ladder back into the company goals. And so whether it's engineering or product or design or growth, everyone should be laddering up into similar metrics across the board. And that's a really important foundational piece because then from there, right, now let's have coffee. Let's force a coffee between like a new hire or a new team member or a new acquisition. Let's set up one-on-ones and get people talking.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that there's a phrase we use at Roe. It's called the startup stomach. This person has startup stomach. How are they dealing with maybe some of the ambiguity that comes along with a startup? I think folks listening probably would agree that early stage, of course you want things to be set up in a perfect way, but that's not the reality of an early stage company. It can be a little bit more chaotic than that at times. Is this person at your early stage company in a position to be able to thrive in that environment? You might see and you might hire an amazing person from a bigger company who's done a lot on paper and maybe they have done a lot and they're very smart, but they might come in and they say like, what's our plan for implementing multi-touch attribution? You're like, we're just trying to figure out Facebook ads work. Like what team runs customer insights, right? Where do I pull the MRI data from? Where they might just be used to a bigger company with different sets of resources versus like, I need someone who can come in, they can deal with the ambiguity. They know that things will get better over time, but like, here's where.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would love a rundown of the folks they've met across the teams, their impressions, and kind of the relationships they've started to build. I think I would also love a high level understanding of, have you taken a look at the data and the reporting and the tooling? Like, are we set up in a way that we think we will be able to measure things appropriately? Is something working? Is something not working? And then maybe just a high-level thought on just existing channels. Like what do we think is looking good? What do we think is looking bad? I don't expect or even want at that point. Here's my action plan. You know, we do a pretty clear 30, 60, 90 where we say here are the expectations coming on board. The end of 30 days is like, have you met people? Do you have a lay of the land? Have you met your direct reports or your manager, whatever it might be? And now you're ready to take off a bigger bite going into your next 30 days. I'm just that big believer in like one building and cross-functional relationships and then a high level audit of kind of like what is going on. Do you know what is going on in this function?”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I actually think that if it's growth or other roles, like the first two, three weeks are really, really critical. I try to encourage folks to give these new hires as much space as possible to truly onboard. You never get that time back. After week three, you'll have plenty on your plate. You don't need to rush into week two immediately trying to jump into things. So letting folks get context for the business, right? Meet lots of people. Leaders build cross-functional relationships early on. Get comfortable with existing tools and get comfortable with the channels, but there isn't the pressure and I don't think there should be the pressure over the first couple weeks to come in and make massive changes. That's where you build context and you build relationships. Once folks are up and running, of course, there's going to be time to dive into all these different areas, but you never get that time back. You get so busy, you're never going to be able to go around and, you know, meet the head of customer care and have coffee together for 45 minutes in a way that”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Look, I know I alluded to it before, and I'm sure as your listeners know, that are trying to hire senior folks. It's a competitive market out there. It is a competitive market for senior growth folks. And I think the first call or two sometimes is very much selling, getting them excited about the opportunity and making sure they want it. I will even from some of our more recent hires who've been incredible, like I still do a lot of sourcing personally. And I'll take the first call. And I think as a founder, you have to be willing to throw yourself into these things. Hiring across the board is tough. This is a role that's probably one of the tougher ones. And so making sure that's actually a part of your job, that you're taking seriously, you're building lists, you're tapping investors.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we do postmortems per regular, both for things that went great and things that did not go great. We call them our blameless autopsies. Sometimes things that did not go according to plan or things that outperformed expectations. And there's a lot of different ways to run those. The way that I have run them in the past with my teams is essentially we use a tool where people can submit what worked really well, what could we do better next time. And then you do that asynchronously. And then when you all get together, you basically bucket them together. What are some of the themes that have come out of this? What are the two or three themes? And let's commit to a process point forward that incorporates some of the themes that have come out of it.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if it doesn't work, great because now we won't spend more time on it, and we're not going to have this feeling in the back of our head that if we had just done a little bit better, it would work. No, you say, I'm going to revisit that in two years when the world is completely different. Seems to be very different every two years. But you just want to avoid that trap of we kind of tried, but we don't really learn anything from it. We really approach those as paying for education.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it comes back to that concept of paying for education. I'm a big believer in you've only got so much peanut butter. You don't want to spread it so thin that at the end of the exercise, you don't even know what you got. Metaphor didn't carry all the way through. Something about a peanut butter sandwich, though. You know, I think that I look back to when I launch TV many years ago as my first channel, I tried to do it just like dipping my toe in the water. Let's spend 50K a month, right? How do we test? Because it's a lot of money. It's a high ante to get in TV. The reality is we did 50K a month for price six months and then we still didn't know if it was a good channel or not. We hadn't really put resources into it. Then you have this graveyard of channels that you've kind of tested, but in the back of your mind know if I put more money and time into it, maybe it could work. That's the worst position to be in. I would much rather people align on here are two, three tests we're going to make for the quarter. Let's go deep on it. Let's put budget against it. Let's test it. And if it works, great.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love to ask people about their failures. I love to say, tell me about a project that completely blew up, that looking back, like you are not proud of. And sometimes people, they don't have anything. Everything is pretty great. And that's just not one probably accurate. Two, you want someone with a level of both humility and then I would say on the business side who's pushed enough and tested enough that they're comfortable with failure. That is a big part of growth. I've gotten very comfortable. Our teams are very comfortable with trying things that do not work. And so I want people who come in with that mentality. We talk about things that don't work as more of paying for education. It's not failure. It's actually like getting to an understanding of where you should spend time and where you should not spend time more quickly. And that's a really important quality for folks joining the team.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit of time with them and make sure that they've got a passion for the space, for healthcare and a culture ad, which is important.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for a more junior role, it starts with a screening conversation, understand their background, types of budgets they work with, their experience in the space, and what they're potentially looking for in the next role. Understanding why they are even taking the call or why they're looking is really important for step to understanding if you like this person, how do you want to position the role to them to bring them on board? I'd say next, it's probably a series of conversations with folks they'd work with closely. Mostly, I would say around growth. Like if they're, let's say they're going to come in and help run search for care vertical. You'd have them talk with other folks that are running search, the person that is running search that would be managing them, spend some real time with them, and then maybe a cross-functional partner, someone on creative that might help them with landing pages. And then from there, folks are feeling really good. Provide time for a practical, like let's get into it. Let's understand the metrics, how you deal with conflict, how you can work cross-functionally. And then from there, we'll usually, we still have a founder interview everyone that joins the company. So the founder in this case would be me and review the practical.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, some of it is spending time with those folks and understanding how they interact, how open they are to new ideas. I like to test people by pushing back on something that they've presented and like actually disagreeing with it and see how they react to that. Are they going to be collaborative partner? Are they going to stick to their guns? Like, do they have an ego? Are they pretty egoists when it comes to strong opinions, loosely held? That's really a philosophy that we take. Like strong opinions loosely held all the way through. You need to test and suss that out a little bit, even through the interview process to understand, is this person going to be good to work with? Are they going to be like kind to work with? And are you going to be able to get along and get through the inevitable ups and downs that come with building a company?”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go into a cave and crank up search. It's very collaborative. You need to be able to work with product. You need to be able to work with design and engineering and finance. Those are more and more the folks that you spend your day to day with as you become more of a senior leader.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an acknowledgement of trade offs in a lot of cases. Do they understand that there's different levers that you can pull across? You take a look at a campaign, you say, hey, look through rates, look great on this campaign, but the CAC is really high. Why is that the case? Oh, conversion rate is low. Conversion rate is low. Let's talk about three different ways we could improve conversion rate. Walk me through that. An understanding of ability to identify different parts of conversion funnel and have ideas that they would want to implement to improve those metrics. So I think those are relatively standard types of questions for folks that are good and comfortable with like growth level data. And you can suss that down. You can run folks through pull looker report, pull a Google Analytics report, like walk me through it. You can pretty quickly get a sense if they know their way around those areas. I do think the piece that as you get more senior becomes more and more important. And again, as I think about growth leaders I've interacted with and hired, I think that level of understanding that growth is a team sport at this point is really, really important, right? It's not just like...”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just get one 110X growth person, one 10x engineer. That's really all you need, right Yeah, look, I think depends again on the type of role you're hiring for. If you're hiring for a channel manager or someone that's going to run affiliate or paid search day in, day out, I think those are actually potentially easier.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insights kind of the who are we speaking to and what are we saying and so those folks are separate but equal and they work together in lockstep every day. I have both of those functions reporting up into me so I can be the leader that helps make sure there's good collaboration connective tissue. But I think it depends on what type of leaders you have in place and honestly a lot of these are opportunistic hires at this point. If you can find someone that's amazing you can give them a little bit more responsibility than might need to elsewhere. But if you have conviction around them and feel good about their leadership capabilities, I think there's a hundred different permutations of where these folks can sit.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, again, I think it's really dependent on the types of leaders you have in place and their areas where they index and under index. You know, for us, for example, I came in with a growth background. It was easy to understand where that fit into the overall ecosystem. I think that if you have someone on board, for example, who is more senior that you want to build around, and maybe they come from more of like a traditional marketing background, it's okay to plug growth in there if it makes sense. And you have conviction around these people. Early on, it's really about the people that you have. So if you have great people, you want to build teams around them. And at Row, we have many examples of maybe people that were not super senior and wouldn't be hired as super senior outside, but they proved themselves in day in, day out. We built teams around them. We gave them more responsibility. I think for us, you know, we have kind of two separate but equal functions. We have growth, which is more of the performance marketing. They spend the media dollars. Then we have marketing, which owns creative, which owns messaging.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how hard some of those more senior growth hires are, you want to be able to be opportunistic and find the right person versus like, I'm going to plug this person in because we got to go, go, go. That's always my advice is like, if you can start out by validating product market fit with an agency or with a freelancer to kind of get at least a sense of is this working or not and what channels are working, that can guide you as to what comes next and lets you to be a bit more opportunistic when it comes to those senior hires.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that early on it depends on if you have some of that traction already. If you are working with, let's say you at a founder level and you're not a growth president, but you know enough to be a little dangerous and you can hire a freelancer, you can hire an agency, once you get a sense of what's kind of working, that's a pretty good indicator of what direction to go in. You know, for example, a BARC paid search was not a thing. It did not work for us. People were not searching for like monthly box of treats and toys for dogs. But at Rogue, people are looking for all sorts of cation or treatments for different conditions that they are experiencing. So it's highly intent-based. So we knew very early on search is a channel, paid searches a channel. So went out and hired folks that were good at paid search. Then we saw that paid social was a channel. We went and hired people who were good at paid social. And once you kind of have that engine running, it does allow you to release a little of the pressure of like, we need this white knight ahead of growth that's going to come in and figure everything out because things are already starting to move. And given where the market is right now,”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about product features, and we'll get there on the channel side, but very rarely will entering a new channel or new types of creative fix underlying issues with the overall business or the value proposition. So that's actually the one piece that I think is newer in the growth world. I've lived through some of this more recently where the inclination cannot be, let's just go launch TV, or we got to do podcasts, or we got to go diversify our channel mix to add out of home. If you don't have product market fit or even product channel fit, that's not going to work for you. It's actually just going to exacerbate the problem. Now you're just burning money more quickly. It falls on everyone to kind of make those calls, but I think the last resort is like the growth person before we're going out and spending another hundred K, 200K, million dollars, whatever it is, raising their hand saying like, do we feel like we want to do this based on where the business is today? Are people retaining at a good enough pace? Are we seeing repeat purchases come back in a way where this is positive? And that alignment between growth.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that healthy growth, I would say, really comes back to finding ways where with product market fit, you can bring more people onto your platform. I think that there are a lot of ways, as you mentioned, you can allow money into channels and get people to come to your website or your app and to sign up for things. But unless there's actually retentive properties in there, unless people are willing to come back and vote with their wallet and say the value you're providing, I want more of it. That's not true growth in my mind. There has to be product market fit. And so I think that actually even as you get into thinking about how to hire from the first part of your question, I think it's a really important part that has now been added to the list of requirements as you think about a growth leader. Some of it can understand is what is necessary to dump more fuel on the fire is about channel diversification. We go do TV? Or is it actually saying like raising your hand saying, I don't think we're there yet on the fit side? Let's go back. Let's retool. Let's think about messaging.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you have to do it in a smart way. And again, as you become larger and more mature, you don't want to have your entire business reliant on a change to iOS 14. That's a terrible position to be in. I say that more so for early stage founders. Take it if it's there, and then you earned the right to get to diversify over the course of time. But I think there's plenty of things you can do at a foundational level that set you up for ways to diversify regardless of what you're channel mix is, right? Like everyone should build card abandon out as probably one of the first things they do. Everyone should build an email list. How'd you hear about us surveys that can help with attribution? You should figure these foundational things out. So regardless of where traffic is coming from, your squeezing as much possible value out of a user that's come to your site as you can. And then over the course of time, you will begin to monetize those other channels, those social communities, et cetera, in a way that lets you diversify pretty naturally.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, it could be a wicked googly, as they say. I think a lot of it comes back to where you are at stage of business. Sometimes be a misconception that you have to diversify right out of the gate. You need like a really strong organic strategy and really strong pain strategy. And you mix them together and you've got something that's good. I think that is true. And as you become more mature, it becomes more and more necessary. But it's actually one piece of advice I give to early stage founders, which is like, don't worry about diversifying. Like this is maybe controversial in this day and age. If Facebook is working for you and your LTV to CAC is good and your payback is good, crank it. Do it as much as you can. That might not be available to you next week or next quarter. Things are changing so quickly right now. God forbid you find something that works. Lean into it all of your time and attention and resources into making something that works work even better for you. And over time, of course, you will need to diversify. Of course, you will need to add these other types of channels. But don't get cute early on that you think like everything needs to be done.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aggressive paid channel work with free and cheap channels, so your blended CAC is really effective, right? The importance of creative, the importance of testing and optimization. I think, well, it may not seem as natural going from one type of business like a bark to a row. There's a lot of parallels that carry through as you're building out a growth org.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, my experience at BARC was pretty fantastic. I still find five years later I'm still using dog puns in day-to-day conversation. It's a hard habit to break. But BARC, I got an opportunity to come in. There was no team there. Got to launch new channels and like learn the nuts and bolts of like, how do I run search? How do I run paid social? You know, there's a lot of parallels into some of what we've done on the row side, but I still even think back to like some of the channels that require sweat. I remember at Bark, we found a way to hack Instagram's popular page back when that was a thing. Like if you posted a funny dog picture at 515 during the week, we would get every time on the popular page and we just have explosive growth sort of like charted and what was the reaction and the engagement, the type of picture. And we were able to like just grow that account by putting sweat into it. And so always looking for those opportunities where you can outhustle people by being really obsessed with a specific platform. And I think you've been able to parlay a lot of those early experiences at BARC into what we're doing with Row. Like, how do you supplement?”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And was lucky enough to join, I was employee seven there. Really the first person to come in and think about how do we grow this as a business. And so one of my first successes was actually launching Facebook news feed ads, brand new at the time. So I was very lucky to get into that early. But from there, I got that opportunity to learn and grow and build out a team and spend some money and figure out how this kind of combination performance and data and creative and analytics all work together.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did that over the course of years. We were able to build up a list of tens of thousands of people who were like in the area. They were looking to try bars and restaurants. And it was a way for us to build that out while having no money and honestly not knowing how to do any performance marketing at the time. It was a good way. We had other partnerships. We were able to build out this list and slowly started to learn about email marketing and search, right, and partnerships. And once daily deals got really hot, once Groupon filed for an IPO, I sold the business. I did not really know what I was doing. Didn't know how to raise money. I didn't know I was going to hire people and expand. It felt good to just kind of get out. And that was really my indoctrination there. I had very little money, but learning how to start to use these free channels to get more people onto your platform was really helpful. And then I was lucky enough through a career fair actually to meet the team at BarkBox, sold them on my intense growth chops.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My indoctrination into growth really started, I'd say, in 2000 when I left healthcare consulting, I started daily deals website with a friend back when those were a thing. It was really interesting. I started without really knowing anything about growth tactics or marketing or e-commerce. We didn't really have money. We raised VC from Bank of Mom and Dad. Really had to figure out how to grow that business without any money and relying on super cheap or free ways to kind of build a list. So there's nothing like being thrown into the fire to figure out how to make it work. So that was a time where in the deal space there were a lot of big companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars and we had many less of hundreds of millions of dollars and we just had to figure out how to be scrappy and some of that through partnership and kind of figuring out ways to just build an email list. One of those was actually we would throw a free happy hour every week on a Tuesday or Wednesday. It was the slowest night of the week for bars. We'd say like give us a keg. We'll bring 100 people. You just have to give a free drink. And the ticket to entry was you have to join our email list.”
2022-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source